He's not scamming people and isn't violating the rules to do his stuff. If people don't want to risk being camped they can play on a PvE server.
If he were doing things like running instances and rolling need on everything or running instances and intentionally getting people in his party killed over and over and over, or scamming people in some way, that would be one thing. But camping someone is perhaps a bit unsportsmanlike, but perfectly within the rules.
If people are rude to you, be assertive: "I appreciate that you have a frustrating technical problem, but being rude to me isn't going to help fix it. Let's try to be constructive here." And then work on the problem.
If people are demanding complex tasks be completed immediately, be assertive: "I'm sure it is a priority, but what you're asking for is pretty complicated and it's going to take some time to get it done properly." If they don't understand that, you might try to explain it in terms of their job - "If a client asked you to put together a massive marketing campaign and have it completely ready to launch in 10 minutes, you'd tell them it's not possible, right? This is the same thing." Most people won't push it past that, and if they do, you can just be blunt: "It's not happening. It's not something that's open to discussion, it's just not possible."
Also look to your own behavior and see if there's something there that's irritating people or making them think of you as an outsider - like, do you roll your eyes or something when a person complains that their computer won't work when it's unplugged? Do you condescend when offering explanations? Do you frequently tell people you'll have something done in an hour when it winds up taking 2? Do you leave people hanging when they ask for help? Do you interact at all with your coworkers outside of immediate task-at-hand stuff (smalltalk, having lunch, etc)? Are you a fat, smelly nerd (serious question) who comes off like a parody of an IT guy?
He's either lying, or he's leaving out that the source of the free tutoring is likely a student organization, not from the university itself (meaning that if male students wanted free tutoring they could have formed an organization to offer it themselves).
Actually, that's not all you can do. You can help people in those environments learn skills that will help them process (healthfully) the shit they have to deal with. Interestingly, if you do this with enough individuals in those environments, it tends to have an overall positive effect in making that environment less toxic.
In this case, I would say that one of the differential diagnostic issues would be significant subjective distress before it would be diagnosed. What this means is that you'd have to be bothered enough by it to go and seek help.
An example of another diagnosis with that same kind of differential would be sexual dysfunction. Some people can't get it up and they don't care. No diagnosable condition. Some people can't get it up and it upsets them greatly. Voila, diagnosable condition.
Part of the reason for trying to turn certain things into diagnosable conditions is insurance issues. Insurance refuses to pay for therapy for people who aren't "sick" - even though talking about problems with a professional can help stop problems from becoming severe enough to justify a diagnosis (and cost a LOT more money down the road). People saying it's just about making money are generally not correct - while there are some clinicians who make their living basically having chats with the worried well, most would rather spend their time working with clients who actually can benefit from help. For the most part, the bullshit diagnoses are there to help people who would benefit from preventative treatment, before something becomes severe. We treat people for elevated (but not really high) blood pressure, pre-emptively, why not also help save someone years of misery by helping them develop better coping skills before relatively tame problems they face balloon into huge ones?
Finally, when talking about this, remember, we're not just talking about people who are kind of cynical and sour - we're talking about people who are finding that they are experiencing substantial distress and impaired functioning in many areas of their lives. If you experienced significant pain in your knees that was preventing you from walking without excruciating pain, which was in turn causing you not to exercise, making you miss days at work (or even losing your job), forcing you to stay at home because getting up to go out hurt too much, would anyone say that you going to see a doctor is unreasonable? Same thing here - it's just that because we cannot see the actual cause of the problem people are much more willing to dismiss it.
But that is no different than the core content in the game itself. I can walk through paper missions on the highest difficulty with my Brute. I have walked through standard Arcs with ease and never run into a problem. To claim that this element of AE is broke is to say that the game is broke in general.
I'm not saying that is broken, *Paragon* is saying that's broken - because they locked my slot over it. I agree - some archetypes have an easy time with everything in the core content, but Paragon is saying that if a player makes a mission like that, suddenly it's bad, wrong, busted, etc. Obviously, there is something wrong there.
I don't disagree with you that their time should be better spent on improving things - the fact that they have to spend so much time fixing bugs instead of improving things is also a big glowing sign saying 'Warning, this system is broken!' They're caught between two choices: spend a lot of time fixing the gaping holes they knowingly left in the system and that allow players to go from level 1 to level 50 in under 4 hours (and there are many, many such holes still in the game), or spend time polishing things while their players completely exploit the game. My entire point is that if they'd designed the system well in the first place, they wouldn't be facing this mess.
Again, let me state: A system that has countless loopholes and exploits, that punishes people for doing things that are no different from other things that should be considered as exemplars of the right way to do things, and that is virtually impossible to fix is, by definition, a bad system. Not "a system that needs a little work" - a *bad* system. A broken one.
Don't get me wrong - obviously I must enjoy CoX since I spent 40 months on and off subscribed to the game. And I really, REALLY want player generated content (as a concept and in CoX in particular) to succeed. I just think Paragon did a very, very poor job of implementing it, and the proof is that they have a system with arbitrary rewards and punishments, with too many loopholes to ever fix, and that prevents them from spending their time making the game better. A broken system. Forget that they're handling the PR about this in a bad way; the system itself is busted. Even if they said "Hey, please don't do this stuff, but we're not going to spend time stopping it and instead will put in more cool features," people would *still* exploit the system and largely ignore those "cool new features" just as they have been doing.
If they make it so that no matter how huge the exploit is it still cannot give you more than playing the game as intended would, people will play as intended (because that's a hell of a lot more fun) rather than beating up the same foes over and over and over and over and over.
That's the problem with the system though - they need to *constantly* fix bugs because farmers are *constantly* finding ways to game the system because the system was designed in such a way that there is room for an almost endless parade of exploits. The specific issues that players are finding to exploit can be fixed individually, but a *good* system would remove the ability to exploit, or at least reduce the ease with which new exploits are developed/the damage those exploits can cause.
The system that they created (as you point out) is one where players can't tell if something is an exploit or not, because the system is so poorly implemented. I made one mission that was populated by spawns of "boss" level mobs, and they all had powersets that were ones that gave my main character lots of difficulty - I must have died 20 times going through that mission *once* - so obviously that isn't an exploit, right? Wrong! See, a character with a different powerset was able to rip through those mobs in virtually no time - I wound up getting one of my slots locked because I made an exploitative mission, even though it was designed to be as challenging as possible to me. If they don't want us making missions with all one type of enemy, why would they make it possible to make missions with one type of enemy? If they don't want us making missions where one type of character will have a ridiculously impossible time and another type of character will find it to be a joke, why design a system that allows exactly that?
Their intent was to give their players the ability to make or run through missions and have an interesting experience, while not breaking the rest of the game by giving rewards too quickly for too little effort. They absolutely failed to do this - that's more than a bug, that's a systemic flaw.
What they should have done is say "Okay, we know players will try everything they can to get as much xp/loot from the system as possible - what is the *maximum* allowable rate we feel comfortable with players earning xp/loot?" and then designed the system to not let players exceed that rate. This way, no matter how many exploits the players found, the only thing they'd do is hit their cap over a time-period more quickly and not get any more rewards until the timer reset.
WoW handled this kind of thing by saying players could only enter 5 dungeons in an hour. CoX could have handled it by saying that players could only earn a certain number of levels (or fractions of a level) per hour, depending on their level. A level 1 player could maybe get to level 10 in an hour, but a level 49 person should maybe be able to get 20% of a level in an hour, if that. If it turns out that the caps are too draconian (like, a substantial portion of the player-base is hitting the cap in 30 minutes vs. an hour), then you can tweak it, and that *should* be a pretty easy adjustment compared to trying to stay one step ahead of people who are hellbent on exploiting bugs when there are thousands (or more) of things that can be exploited. Further, this system would remove the incentive for people to exploit in the first place - if normal play can hit their cap in an hour (or half hour, or whatever the cap timer is), why would they bother fighting the same enemies over and over and over when they could instead experience new content with varied foes for the same rewards?
Paragon's system places no limits on the potential of exploits to be abused, nor does it offer any incentive to avoid exploits, nor does it make it easy for the developers to fix loopholes that are found - I'd say that, by definition, is a very broken system.
I never said not to offer a reward. I said that the reward system in the Mission Architect set-up was completely broken.
The badge rewards for creating mission are broken because the system is so easily (and obviously) gamed. The experience/loot rewards for running missions are broken because you could make missions in which players were facing absolutely no risk and getting exp/loot at rates hundreds of times faster than normal gameplay.
There is a huge difference between "no rewards at all" and "let people get a character from creation to maximum level in less than 5 hours, getting massive amounts of good loot in the process."
User-generated content systems for MMOs aren't a dead end. But *shitty* user generated content systems that are poorly implemented and left wide open for abuse are.
The Mission Architect system has some good points and some very, very, VERY bad ones:
Good: Players were able to make more missions in 48 hours than the development staff had made in the history of the game
Some of that content is interesting and well executed
Gives players with a creative side something to play with/get under the hood/tell stories
Bad: The system for earning rewards for designing missions is so obviously and easily exploitable that it's ludicrous. Cartels of players were simply modding up/down missions to help people get badges regardless of the quality of the missions, or to grief people who've made missions.
The tools allow for ridiculous and obvious exploits. For example, you can make completely invulnerable friendly NPCs who will fly around after you and continually use powers on you that will make you virtually immune from damage. For example, some enemy groups provide much more xp than others, but not all members of those enemy groups are actually a challenge - so you could select individual enemies from groups that were incredibly easy to kill but gave huge rewards. Oh, and you can put giant bombs in the middle of enemy spawns that would literally kill everything around them and give the player experience.
The way the missions were integrated into the game - they're all "virtual reality" as far as the storyline goes, so it isn't as if any of it actually matters, for people who actually care about content/lore/storylines. So the people with the most incentive to play missions in this thing are people who just want to get massive amounts of experience without difficulty.
The problem here isn't user generated content. It's the way the system was implemented. I beta'd the MA system and submitted notes on obvious exploits - the exact same exploits that caused this problem! - and they put it live with those flaws which were well known in it anyway. I think they kinda lost the right to bitch that their system was abused when they put it live without fixing the obvious flaws.
There are good systems for allowing user generated content - Paragon simply chose one of the worst ones and implemented it poorly.
Always a bigger fish (Episode 1) Ice Planet Hoth (Empire) Magical old dude saves young protagonist from certain death, reveals his destiny and lies to him (Star Wars)
There were lots of little things like that in the movie. Heck, the choice of "Sabotage" as the soundtrack for the car scene was a poke at Shatner's not being able to say the word correctly, and I counted several other little in-joke-ish kind of things.
That whole scene was kind of an homage to Star Wars - EP1 (bigger fish) combined with Hoth combined with old dude in a cave who enlightens the young protagonist. It was intentional.
There were also several other easter eggs - the choice of The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" (because Shatner, famously, can't say that word "correctly") and so on.
Can you provide examples from those "plenty of games" that have good RP reward systems? In my post I asked for examples, saying that I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Instead, you just bitch and moan rather than provide an example of a good system.
I gave examples of systems that don't work and explained why they don't work. All you've done is shake your fist and insist that there really are good systems out there, yet you've refused to give any exemplars or descriptions of systems that work. Put up or shut up.
You're missing the point. The point that was made in my first sentence: Good RP is it's own reward.
Why? Because "good RP" is incredibly subjective and impossible to score in a fair, unbiased and reasonable manner. What is a rewardable outcome of "good RP" behavior? What is the metric for determining whether or not someone is a "good RPer"? Is the system for judging RP quality automatic or does it require human intervention? What kind of RP related rewards are appropriate?
So what's the metric? Is the guy who flawlessly portrays a stock character type a "better" RPer than the gal who tries to come up with an original concept for her character and her execution needs polish? Is the player who's background is entirely based on, and fits perfectly with, the lore of the game a "better" RPer than the player who comes up with a (to some other person) more interesting, but not-quite-100%-true-to-lore background?
Assuming we can find a metric that works, then we need to address how it is applied. If the system requires human intervention (as I imagine it would have to because computers aren't very good at judging things like role-play quality), how do you have a human (or team of humans) assess every single RP interaction to see if it's reward worthy? What happens if someone does a phenomenal job with their roleplay, but, because no judge was around, it goes unnoticed, but someone that does a merely mediocre job (in front of the right audience) gets recognized? If the system is automatic, is it based on player feedback? If so, how do you keep cartels of players from gaming the system to help or hinder people? How do you make a system that is fair?
As to rewards, they should be appropriate to the means used to achieve them. If one earns an RP reward, what form should it take? Clothing or other items that have absolutely no effect on PvE or PvP mechanics? A title of some sort? Whatever it is, it would need to be entirely RP related, and not have an impact on other aspects of the game. Just as rewards from PvP should benefit PvP gameplay and PvE rewards should benefit PvE gameplay, RP rewards need to benefit RP gameplay. How many people who otherwise wouldn't RP but are now motivated by the reward would actually be motivated by something like that?
Finally, it's a game. In a game, players should be encouraged to play how they want, rather than have artificial inducements used to encourage them to do things that are contrary to their normal inclinations. Rewards are inducements to change behavior or engage in behaviors that otherwise are not found rewarding. If a player won't engage in certain behaviors without a reward, that means they don't find those behaviors pleasurable in the first place - and that seems like a very, very poor game indeed.
Because of all these factors, RPing for rewards would require the player to essentially meta-game the RP system in order to get those rewards, which is completely the opposite of what RP is about. Exactly like rewarding PvP players for avoiding PvP. Just because you weren't able to think things through doesn't mean the analogy is a bad one.
I have seen rewards for RP in games, and universally they've been won by people who were in the right place at the right time and were, by and large, mediocre role-players at best. For an excellent example of this, check out the "Developer's Choice" missions in the City of Heroes/Villains Mission Architect system. They are all rather bland offerings that are essentially clones of missions that already exist in the game, with virtually no originality at all. The ranking systems are incredibly prone to player abuse, with cartels forming to vote up or down various missions without regard to merit. Players who go out of their way to promote (read: spam) their mission IDs get more attention than players who simply make good stuff and don't feel the need to broadcast it over and over.
The only time that rewards for RP work is when the player base is small enough that the people or person judging rewards are abl
Good RP is the reward for good RP. People who don't fundamentally enjoy role-playing should probably just stick to the stuff they do enjoy.
Offering in-game rewards for RP would be like offering in-game rewards for people on PvP servers negotiating a peace treaty - completely off the point.
I spend maybe an hour a day preparing my food, and I eat very healthfully - it doesn't take much time if you do it right. I'm also insanely busy - full time job, full time grad student, social life, 2 very needy dogs, semi-relationship-sort-of-thing, and side projects to keep me from getting overwhelmed with work and school. There are 2 things I credit with letting me do this without getting worn out: exercise and eating well. (You probably thought I was going to say "coke and meth":p)
2x a week I have a "big cooking" night (it often doubles as a "have friends over and chatter with 'em while we cook" night) - I'll chop a lot of veggies, cook a lot of noodles and beans/lentils make a lot of basic stuff that I use in almost every meal.
2x a week I'll do a crock pot of a whole chicken (good for mixing with pretty much everything, or making sandwiches, etc) and it'll let me eat well for days.
The only preparing I do every day is mixing up the veggies, maybe tossing some fish onto the broiler, cooking up a side or whatever (been doing a lot of potatoes and corn on the cob lately).
Lunch I usually have leftovers, I'll kind of stagger them a little bit so I'm not having the same thing for lunch that I had for dinner the night before.
Breakfast is often a smoothie or oatmeal with fruit and stuff like that.
I make my own bread (not so much because it's cheaper or easier, but because it smells REALLY good and I can have some fun with it) but that's pretty much an automated process of mixing stuff up and letting the bread maker deal with it. I also get a monthly delivery from a community supported agriculture group in my area, and it actually works out to be a little cheaper than grocery shopping for 'em. I use Peapod for staple stuff. Maybe 1x a month I'll need to go to a grocery store, but that's mainly because I want to bake something with my friends on one of the big prep nights, and I want to get something unusual to add to whatever we make.
Making good stuff is really easy and not that time consuming if you just plan it out a little bit. For a 2 person household it should be quite easy if both of 'em are sharing the load, and it can be a great time to hang with your partner or your friends and unwind from the day.
That is a really good point. But, I think the solution is hinted at by what's in the game already: Mission Architect. One of the CoX devs said that within 48 hours of the MA going live, players had created more missions than the dev team had in the 5ish years the game's been live. Granted, 99.99% of it would be really craptacular, but some of it is good stuff that could be ready for inclusion in the main game with a little polish.
So what if the devs released a basic level/zone design tool, specs for textures and the like, and let players submit zones as part of a contest? Let them be accessible to players on a test server in the same way that the Mission Architect works (go to a central place, pick an entry from the list, and zone in). Let the players judge the zones for the first rounds, then have the dev team and testers take a look at the best ones and polish 'em as necessary. I imagine a lot of people would be happy to try to make some solid stuff in exchange for, say, a year of free game time and some unique costume pieces or something.
Even with that, however, I think the lifespan of the CoX engine is not going to be that much longer - there are some real limitations that can't be addressed short of starting over, according to the devs. For example, maximum travel speeds are limited by the engine because of rendering and loading issues; avatars are limited to upright or prone travel only (as in, a character with super-speed can't run up walls, a flyer can't do barrel rolls without relying on a stock animation, etc); more open-world zone stuff can't really be done because of the way zone-to-zone movement is handled - and that's just really basic stuff. I give the game, maybe, 2 more years (7 years is a good run!) before it becomes a very marginalized player even in the super-hero genre - something maybe similar to how Anarchy Online. I guess overall I just feel like CoX is really, really dated, and releasing expansion packs that don't offer REALLY cool stuff (and the one announced here so far doesn't sound like it's got anything really interesting that justifies it being an expansion instead of either a free issue or just a booster pack) isn't going to be enough to rekindle interest in the game to where it can compete with the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.
There's a difference between being a signature character and having an impact on the world, and there are a lot of things that can be done to let the players feel like they're having an impact on the game world. I don't accept that MMO worlds need to remain more or less static - I actually think that's largely a relic of the initial constraints on the genre coupled with a lack of effort on developing non-static game worlds; there have been several games that actually do let players change things fairly dramatically.
WoW did it by having "phases" in various zones. You go into a zone and there's a big undead war going on. You complete a few quests and the way you see the zone is a bit different - maybe the undead are being pushed back (or advancing). You complete a few more quests, or maybe the big quest in that zone, and now you have an area that's been completely remade. This is pretty basic - the player doesn't get to choose what happens, but their actions have an effect that is permanent and noticeable to them.
Star Wars: Galaxies did it by having the entire economy be player driven and allowing player cities to be created. None of my characters became as iconic as Luke or Leia, but I became very well known as an armorsmith and merchant, and at one point had a veritable army of players working for/with me to help me provide wares for half my server.
MU*S did it by letting players create areas and zones once they'd "beaten" the game by hitting the maximum level. Players could make new zones and submit them for inclusion in the main game on many MU*S. Some setups made it so that the player could create stuff from the very beginning. Granted, the much smaller playerbase made it feasible to do this, but I don't think it's an intractable problem. Second Life does this, reasonably well, though there are some problems there, too, as is well known by anyone familiar with the game.
Those earlier games have shown that it's possible to do it (kinda, sorta) - I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the future evolution of the genre will have opportunities for players to be able to actually have an impact on the game world.
As to the size of the CoX world, the problem is partly massively fast travel speeds, yes, but also that it's just so bland. The art direction of the zones in these games is less than inspired. I understand that people are in a city, but really - there are ways to make the city look interesting. I live in Chicago and have for the last 30+ years of my life, and yet I continually find interesting buildings and structures - I refuse to believe that a super-hero city has to be as dull as CoX's world has become. I don't care how big the game world is if it's nothing but the same uninspired looking office buildings, warehouses and really poorly rendered "parks."
Fanpeople aside, the challenge for CoX is going to be that they've got a 5 year old game engine (that is very, very limited, but very solid for the few things it does) that they're charging people $15 a month to play going against 2 brand-new game engines that at the least look a lot better and most likely will have fewer limitations and will also cost $15 a month to play.
I don't know that just letting people change alignments is going to be sufficient to keep people on the old system paying the same price when there are 2 new systems that look better and may play better, at the same price. Are the people currently playing CoX really that attached to the game itself? Are they playing it because it's the only one in that niche? I'm going to guess that it's more the latter than the former, but I certainly could be wrong.
If Champions lets people have more customization (which, from what I understand, with powers it certainly does, and it supposedly has more character customization options than CoX had at launch - including animations and such), gives them the shiny, gives as good or better gameplay, and more stuff to do, I can see this hurting CoX's numbers a lot, because it will no longer be the only (or best) player in that niche. The only advantage CoX will have over Champions is that you can be a villain in CoX (though personally it doesn't feel very villainous) and the fact that some people have played it for 5 years. I dunno if that will be enough, hence my initial post.
Before Enhancement Diversification and the various reductions in the effects of Area of Effect attacks, players could very easily take down literally hundreds of opponents single-handedly. Back when I first played, my scrapper (Dark Melee/Regeneration) would pay people to join my teams and then sit by the doors of missions so that I could maximize the spawns for fighting. Even on the highest level of difficulty with the largest possible spawn sizes, I pretty much couldn't be killed. I used to solo multiple giant monsters simultaneously on Monster Island in Peregrine Island, and Arch Villains were trivial. Before knockback was changed, I could run up to a random low-level thug on the street and punch him hard enough to knock him more than a block away. I daresay the best possible build in the game now would pale in comparison to ye olden days when CoH first launched.
Changes to the fundamental working of the game aside, even though a really great build in the game now can perform very well, the feel of things is still trivial. The world of the game is tiny. The missions we are sent on are trivial - not just difficulty wise, but in scope and purpose. The opponents we face are absurd - I have 2 characters that, even with the system as it is now, I can easily take on any particular foe in the game, yet I'm still basically a lackey for NPCs who, in several cases, I've actually beaten up in various missions and generally outclass.
Epic in this case means larger than life, larger than the game is now. I can fly - so let me fly into space. Heck, just let me fly to another city, even! Let my character try to form her own army of minions and overthrow Recluse (actually, that would be a fantastic kind of PVP system - players engage in strategic and tactical PVP that gives them access to groups, lets them take control of things, etc.) Heck, just let me pick up a car/trash-can/dumpster and throw it if I'm super-strong. With the Mission Architect, let my player create not just a mission or 3, but actually let me create my own pocket dimension where I can tweak things like the gravity or whatever.
You know, epic. Not mundane. Not "I'm super strong, and yet 3 thugs with baseball bats just kicked my butt because even though I've punched 'em about half a dozen times with my SUPER STRENGTH they're still somehow totally fine!" Not "I have the ability to channel the very force of gravity itself, I can create a black hole, I can even create a rift in space and time itself and yank objects from other dimensions, but oh, hey, I can't budge that trash can over there." Not "I have the intelligence to create an army of robots (but only 6 at maximum, despite having over a billion of what passes for currency) and the obvious drive and skills to be a leader and start my own gang, but rather than try to actually take over some of the criminal elements in the world, I'd much rather read news papers and go beat people up when they talk trash about me, and occasionally try to kidnap some slow-moving idiot who supposedly has some VITAL INTELLIGENCE that will CHANGE EVERYTHING (but of course nothing changes.)"
When City of Heroes(Villains) (CoX) was first launched, it was absolutely the only super-hero MMO out there, and as such filled a niche that wasn't being satisfied by anything else at the time. It was a good game in that it worked fairly well, was fun to play and had some interesting storylines to play through. However, in my opinion, there isn't any real depth to the game unless you're *really* into the stories and want to experience every single last one of them, despite many of them being essentially the same with just different enemy groups inserted into the various spots. City of Villains is more or less just "City of slightly naughty superbeings who have more sinister looking zones (because reds and blacks and gray skies = evil, while bright colors and blue skies = good!) but ultimately do exactly the same stuff that heroes do."
Now there is the DC Universe MMO coming out as well as Champions Online set to launch in a couple of months - will simply allowing players to switch the zones they play in really be enough to handle competition from new games that have better technology and (in the DC case at least) iconic characters?
The general consensus among people I know who play is that the ability to switch alignments should have been something that was the focus of a free "issue" rather than an expansion, and the next expansion should have been something along the lines of a massive graphics engine update and "World of Heroes" that would allow for "epic" (vastly more powerful) characters.
I played CoH since launch until somewhere after CoV was launched, and still do play from time to time - it's not a bad game, I just don't know that letting people switch alignment is going to be enough to keep people playing in the face of the new shiny, ESPECIALLY if the new shiny is even halfway decent.
Actually, Japan's laws in re: sex are neither more nor less harsh than those in the US, simply different. Over there it's illegal to show genitalia, but their child porn laws are often rather laxly enforced (if at all); over here we show giant gaping orifices no problem, but if someone is even accused of possibly having ever thought about maybe considering looking at a slightly lascivious photo of a possibly under-age person, they're pretty much fucked for life.
Also, Fable II (a rather beautifully rendered 3d game) allows you to have sex (albeit in the Fallout 2 black screen with commentary way) with any number or gender of partners. It's not the 3d.
As I said in another post, I think a large portion of the reason you don't see more relationships in games - and I don't just mean sex - is that it's really damn hard to portray a realistic relationship in a gaming format and allow the players to have any kind of meaningful choices to make about the relationships. Sure, in a game that is played on rails the designers can tell you a story with some gameplay elements in it that are based on the idea that the player's character is forming a relationship, but it's completely close ended (or at best there will be 2-3 different endings, but they're all scripted). In games where you have open-ended/sandbox play, how exactly do you make an NPC relationship compelling for a player without human-level AI?
Currently, in most open ended games the relationships are handled by basically a series of mini-games. Buy the object of your desire a present (but you have to figure out the right present) or do something for them that they need done, or any number of activities that don't engage the emotions of the player at all - that don't get the player invested - it's just dumb. In almost all of those kinds of games I go out of my way to do absurd shit that is a complete bastardization of the intended experience. For example, in Fable 2, my goal was to have my character seduce as many straight women as possible to make them switch teams. Then, when I managed to do it, and we got married and had a baby (sperm donor is assumed, I guess?) and she started demanding a bigger/better house, I killed her with a fireball and had my child taken away by the guards. Oh, I paid a fine of 1000 gold or so and they let me off the hook for killing her. After that, I amassed a large fortune (something like 10-20 million gold) and then proceeded to serially marry and then murder every single NPC I could find, and simply paid a fine each time. Funny, I guess, but not remotely satisfying as a game element, not in the way that things like having to make moral choices in some games can be. I'd rather the designers spend their time making the parts of the games they are good at, rather than giving me some incredibly lame attempt at a relationship sim.
Besides, if I want a relationship, I can get a boyfriend. If I want to set off a nuke killing a bunch of innocent townspeople in exchange for an apartment in the wasteland, I have to play Fallout. Or, I guess, find a boyfriend who's got really neat toys.
In Fallout 2 you could hire hookers (gay and straight) and get married (gay and straight) and star in a porn film (or be a fluffer if you weren't attractive enough). In many games these days, you can have multiple spouses - Fable 2 actually lets you have group sex! - gay, straight or in-between. Bully gave players the option to be gay. Fallout 3 addresses pedophilia (albeit without actually saying it blatantly).
Except, in Fallout 2 the relationships were a total joke portion (shotgun marriage or selling your spouse into slavery). In Fable 2 the "relationship" is limited to clicking on a radial menu and occasionally getting bitched at to move to a better house (insert obligatory "but that's real life" joke here, I guess). Bully was I think just a flirt option, though I can't remember well.
So I don't think it's a culture thing as much as a complexity thing. Modeling relationships in games that the player will care about is *hard*. Making them not completely laughable is even harder - most relationship aspects in games that I've seen tend to be incredibly juvenile or played simply for laughs, and as such just detract from the game experience. I'm actually glad Fallout 3 stayed away from relationships rather than putting in something that would almost certainly not be as interesting or well done as the other story components.
If you tell the story of the relationship on rails (Final Fantasy), it can be well told but you don't really have options - it's someone else's idea of what a relationship should be. If you let it be a sandbox mode, well, we don't have real AI and so by necessity it'll be less than complex. Far better to spend the time it'd take to develop those aspects on things we can do well.
The problem here is that they had a LOT of stuff to do in this movie just to (re)establish the universe the movie is set in. There's rather a large difference between having a single 2 hour movie in which to get things going vs. having 13-14 hour-long episodes already in the can in which to set things up. Audiences going into a movie expect to have a complete story told to them in one sitting, while audiences of a new television series expect to have things unfold over the course of at least one season.
Ideally, they'll have this movie do well, then make a new series with the new cast/rebooted universe in which we get the philosophy, with movies coming out periodically that have the "big" events happen.
The difference between Trek and Wolverine is that fanboys were excited about seeing Wolverine while fanboys were enraged at the idea of a Trek reboot (thus the bigger opening weekend).
Except Wolverine was horrible. Really, really bad. For people who were fans of the characters, the movie completely got the characterizations wrong. For people who just wanted to see a good movie, the writing was atrocious and the story was just weak.
And Trek was really quite good - ESPECIALLY for a Trek film. There was enough there that new audiences could get into it and enjoy it as a film, and it was well done enough that fanboys have to grudgingly admit it was not the worst. movie. ever.
One opens strong and then tanks once people realize just how bad it is, the other opens a little less strong and I imagine it'll keep going strong for awhile.
According to that definition, when I was given a free Nintendo DS and 10 games because I won a raffle, I stole it - "to take, get or win [...] by chance"
For completely not-creepy reasons, the local teen center turned me into a criminal!
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He's not scamming people and isn't violating the rules to do his stuff. If people don't want to risk being camped they can play on a PvE server.
If he were doing things like running instances and rolling need on everything or running instances and intentionally getting people in his party killed over and over and over, or scamming people in some way, that would be one thing. But camping someone is perhaps a bit unsportsmanlike, but perfectly within the rules.
... not being a doormat.
If people are rude to you, be assertive: "I appreciate that you have a frustrating technical problem, but being rude to me isn't going to help fix it. Let's try to be constructive here." And then work on the problem.
If people are demanding complex tasks be completed immediately, be assertive: "I'm sure it is a priority, but what you're asking for is pretty complicated and it's going to take some time to get it done properly." If they don't understand that, you might try to explain it in terms of their job - "If a client asked you to put together a massive marketing campaign and have it completely ready to launch in 10 minutes, you'd tell them it's not possible, right? This is the same thing." Most people won't push it past that, and if they do, you can just be blunt: "It's not happening. It's not something that's open to discussion, it's just not possible."
Also look to your own behavior and see if there's something there that's irritating people or making them think of you as an outsider - like, do you roll your eyes or something when a person complains that their computer won't work when it's unplugged? Do you condescend when offering explanations? Do you frequently tell people you'll have something done in an hour when it winds up taking 2? Do you leave people hanging when they ask for help? Do you interact at all with your coworkers outside of immediate task-at-hand stuff (smalltalk, having lunch, etc)? Are you a fat, smelly nerd (serious question) who comes off like a parody of an IT guy?
He's either lying, or he's leaving out that the source of the free tutoring is likely a student organization, not from the university itself (meaning that if male students wanted free tutoring they could have formed an organization to offer it themselves).
Actually, that's not all you can do. You can help people in those environments learn skills that will help them process (healthfully) the shit they have to deal with. Interestingly, if you do this with enough individuals in those environments, it tends to have an overall positive effect in making that environment less toxic.
In this case, I would say that one of the differential diagnostic issues would be significant subjective distress before it would be diagnosed. What this means is that you'd have to be bothered enough by it to go and seek help.
An example of another diagnosis with that same kind of differential would be sexual dysfunction. Some people can't get it up and they don't care. No diagnosable condition. Some people can't get it up and it upsets them greatly. Voila, diagnosable condition.
Part of the reason for trying to turn certain things into diagnosable conditions is insurance issues. Insurance refuses to pay for therapy for people who aren't "sick" - even though talking about problems with a professional can help stop problems from becoming severe enough to justify a diagnosis (and cost a LOT more money down the road). People saying it's just about making money are generally not correct - while there are some clinicians who make their living basically having chats with the worried well, most would rather spend their time working with clients who actually can benefit from help. For the most part, the bullshit diagnoses are there to help people who would benefit from preventative treatment, before something becomes severe. We treat people for elevated (but not really high) blood pressure, pre-emptively, why not also help save someone years of misery by helping them develop better coping skills before relatively tame problems they face balloon into huge ones?
Finally, when talking about this, remember, we're not just talking about people who are kind of cynical and sour - we're talking about people who are finding that they are experiencing substantial distress and impaired functioning in many areas of their lives. If you experienced significant pain in your knees that was preventing you from walking without excruciating pain, which was in turn causing you not to exercise, making you miss days at work (or even losing your job), forcing you to stay at home because getting up to go out hurt too much, would anyone say that you going to see a doctor is unreasonable? Same thing here - it's just that because we cannot see the actual cause of the problem people are much more willing to dismiss it.
But that is no different than the core content in the game itself. I can walk through paper missions on the highest difficulty with my Brute. I have walked through standard Arcs with ease and never run into a problem. To claim that this element of AE is broke is to say that the game is broke in general.
I'm not saying that is broken, *Paragon* is saying that's broken - because they locked my slot over it. I agree - some archetypes have an easy time with everything in the core content, but Paragon is saying that if a player makes a mission like that, suddenly it's bad, wrong, busted, etc. Obviously, there is something wrong there.
I don't disagree with you that their time should be better spent on improving things - the fact that they have to spend so much time fixing bugs instead of improving things is also a big glowing sign saying 'Warning, this system is broken!' They're caught between two choices: spend a lot of time fixing the gaping holes they knowingly left in the system and that allow players to go from level 1 to level 50 in under 4 hours (and there are many, many such holes still in the game), or spend time polishing things while their players completely exploit the game. My entire point is that if they'd designed the system well in the first place, they wouldn't be facing this mess.
Again, let me state: A system that has countless loopholes and exploits, that punishes people for doing things that are no different from other things that should be considered as exemplars of the right way to do things, and that is virtually impossible to fix is, by definition, a bad system. Not "a system that needs a little work" - a *bad* system. A broken one.
Don't get me wrong - obviously I must enjoy CoX since I spent 40 months on and off subscribed to the game. And I really, REALLY want player generated content (as a concept and in CoX in particular) to succeed. I just think Paragon did a very, very poor job of implementing it, and the proof is that they have a system with arbitrary rewards and punishments, with too many loopholes to ever fix, and that prevents them from spending their time making the game better. A broken system. Forget that they're handling the PR about this in a bad way; the system itself is busted. Even if they said "Hey, please don't do this stuff, but we're not going to spend time stopping it and instead will put in more cool features," people would *still* exploit the system and largely ignore those "cool new features" just as they have been doing.
If they make it so that no matter how huge the exploit is it still cannot give you more than playing the game as intended would, people will play as intended (because that's a hell of a lot more fun) rather than beating up the same foes over and over and over and over and over.
That's the problem with the system though - they need to *constantly* fix bugs because farmers are *constantly* finding ways to game the system because the system was designed in such a way that there is room for an almost endless parade of exploits. The specific issues that players are finding to exploit can be fixed individually, but a *good* system would remove the ability to exploit, or at least reduce the ease with which new exploits are developed/the damage those exploits can cause.
The system that they created (as you point out) is one where players can't tell if something is an exploit or not, because the system is so poorly implemented. I made one mission that was populated by spawns of "boss" level mobs, and they all had powersets that were ones that gave my main character lots of difficulty - I must have died 20 times going through that mission *once* - so obviously that isn't an exploit, right? Wrong! See, a character with a different powerset was able to rip through those mobs in virtually no time - I wound up getting one of my slots locked because I made an exploitative mission, even though it was designed to be as challenging as possible to me. If they don't want us making missions with all one type of enemy, why would they make it possible to make missions with one type of enemy? If they don't want us making missions where one type of character will have a ridiculously impossible time and another type of character will find it to be a joke, why design a system that allows exactly that?
Their intent was to give their players the ability to make or run through missions and have an interesting experience, while not breaking the rest of the game by giving rewards too quickly for too little effort. They absolutely failed to do this - that's more than a bug, that's a systemic flaw.
What they should have done is say "Okay, we know players will try everything they can to get as much xp/loot from the system as possible - what is the *maximum* allowable rate we feel comfortable with players earning xp/loot?" and then designed the system to not let players exceed that rate. This way, no matter how many exploits the players found, the only thing they'd do is hit their cap over a time-period more quickly and not get any more rewards until the timer reset.
WoW handled this kind of thing by saying players could only enter 5 dungeons in an hour. CoX could have handled it by saying that players could only earn a certain number of levels (or fractions of a level) per hour, depending on their level. A level 1 player could maybe get to level 10 in an hour, but a level 49 person should maybe be able to get 20% of a level in an hour, if that. If it turns out that the caps are too draconian (like, a substantial portion of the player-base is hitting the cap in 30 minutes vs. an hour), then you can tweak it, and that *should* be a pretty easy adjustment compared to trying to stay one step ahead of people who are hellbent on exploiting bugs when there are thousands (or more) of things that can be exploited. Further, this system would remove the incentive for people to exploit in the first place - if normal play can hit their cap in an hour (or half hour, or whatever the cap timer is), why would they bother fighting the same enemies over and over and over when they could instead experience new content with varied foes for the same rewards?
Paragon's system places no limits on the potential of exploits to be abused, nor does it offer any incentive to avoid exploits, nor does it make it easy for the developers to fix loopholes that are found - I'd say that, by definition, is a very broken system.
I never said not to offer a reward. I said that the reward system in the Mission Architect set-up was completely broken.
The badge rewards for creating mission are broken because the system is so easily (and obviously) gamed.
The experience/loot rewards for running missions are broken because you could make missions in which players were facing absolutely no risk and getting exp/loot at rates hundreds of times faster than normal gameplay.
There is a huge difference between "no rewards at all" and "let people get a character from creation to maximum level in less than 5 hours, getting massive amounts of good loot in the process."
User-generated content systems for MMOs aren't a dead end. But *shitty* user generated content systems that are poorly implemented and left wide open for abuse are.
The Mission Architect system has some good points and some very, very, VERY bad ones:
Good:
Players were able to make more missions in 48 hours than the development staff had made in the history of the game
Some of that content is interesting and well executed
Gives players with a creative side something to play with/get under the hood/tell stories
Bad:
The system for earning rewards for designing missions is so obviously and easily exploitable that it's ludicrous. Cartels of players were simply modding up/down missions to help people get badges regardless of the quality of the missions, or to grief people who've made missions.
The tools allow for ridiculous and obvious exploits. For example, you can make completely invulnerable friendly NPCs who will fly around after you and continually use powers on you that will make you virtually immune from damage. For example, some enemy groups provide much more xp than others, but not all members of those enemy groups are actually a challenge - so you could select individual enemies from groups that were incredibly easy to kill but gave huge rewards. Oh, and you can put giant bombs in the middle of enemy spawns that would literally kill everything around them and give the player experience.
The way the missions were integrated into the game - they're all "virtual reality" as far as the storyline goes, so it isn't as if any of it actually matters, for people who actually care about content/lore/storylines. So the people with the most incentive to play missions in this thing are people who just want to get massive amounts of experience without difficulty.
The problem here isn't user generated content. It's the way the system was implemented. I beta'd the MA system and submitted notes on obvious exploits - the exact same exploits that caused this problem! - and they put it live with those flaws which were well known in it anyway. I think they kinda lost the right to bitch that their system was abused when they put it live without fixing the obvious flaws.
There are good systems for allowing user generated content - Paragon simply chose one of the worst ones and implemented it poorly.
The ice planet scene was an homage to Star Wars:
Always a bigger fish (Episode 1)
Ice Planet Hoth (Empire)
Magical old dude saves young protagonist from certain death, reveals his destiny and lies to him (Star Wars)
There were lots of little things like that in the movie. Heck, the choice of "Sabotage" as the soundtrack for the car scene was a poke at Shatner's not being able to say the word correctly, and I counted several other little in-joke-ish kind of things.
That whole scene was kind of an homage to Star Wars - EP1 (bigger fish) combined with Hoth combined with old dude in a cave who enlightens the young protagonist. It was intentional.
There were also several other easter eggs - the choice of The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" (because Shatner, famously, can't say that word "correctly") and so on.
Can you provide examples from those "plenty of games" that have good RP reward systems? In my post I asked for examples, saying that I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Instead, you just bitch and moan rather than provide an example of a good system.
I gave examples of systems that don't work and explained why they don't work. All you've done is shake your fist and insist that there really are good systems out there, yet you've refused to give any exemplars or descriptions of systems that work. Put up or shut up.
You're missing the point. The point that was made in my first sentence: Good RP is it's own reward.
Why? Because "good RP" is incredibly subjective and impossible to score in a fair, unbiased and reasonable manner. What is a rewardable outcome of "good RP" behavior? What is the metric for determining whether or not someone is a "good RPer"? Is the system for judging RP quality automatic or does it require human intervention? What kind of RP related rewards are appropriate?
So what's the metric? Is the guy who flawlessly portrays a stock character type a "better" RPer than the gal who tries to come up with an original concept for her character and her execution needs polish? Is the player who's background is entirely based on, and fits perfectly with, the lore of the game a "better" RPer than the player who comes up with a (to some other person) more interesting, but not-quite-100%-true-to-lore background?
Assuming we can find a metric that works, then we need to address how it is applied. If the system requires human intervention (as I imagine it would have to because computers aren't very good at judging things like role-play quality), how do you have a human (or team of humans) assess every single RP interaction to see if it's reward worthy? What happens if someone does a phenomenal job with their roleplay, but, because no judge was around, it goes unnoticed, but someone that does a merely mediocre job (in front of the right audience) gets recognized? If the system is automatic, is it based on player feedback? If so, how do you keep cartels of players from gaming the system to help or hinder people? How do you make a system that is fair?
As to rewards, they should be appropriate to the means used to achieve them. If one earns an RP reward, what form should it take? Clothing or other items that have absolutely no effect on PvE or PvP mechanics? A title of some sort? Whatever it is, it would need to be entirely RP related, and not have an impact on other aspects of the game. Just as rewards from PvP should benefit PvP gameplay and PvE rewards should benefit PvE gameplay, RP rewards need to benefit RP gameplay. How many people who otherwise wouldn't RP but are now motivated by the reward would actually be motivated by something like that?
Finally, it's a game. In a game, players should be encouraged to play how they want, rather than have artificial inducements used to encourage them to do things that are contrary to their normal inclinations. Rewards are inducements to change behavior or engage in behaviors that otherwise are not found rewarding. If a player won't engage in certain behaviors without a reward, that means they don't find those behaviors pleasurable in the first place - and that seems like a very, very poor game indeed.
Because of all these factors, RPing for rewards would require the player to essentially meta-game the RP system in order to get those rewards, which is completely the opposite of what RP is about. Exactly like rewarding PvP players for avoiding PvP. Just because you weren't able to think things through doesn't mean the analogy is a bad one.
I have seen rewards for RP in games, and universally they've been won by people who were in the right place at the right time and were, by and large, mediocre role-players at best. For an excellent example of this, check out the "Developer's Choice" missions in the City of Heroes/Villains Mission Architect system. They are all rather bland offerings that are essentially clones of missions that already exist in the game, with virtually no originality at all. The ranking systems are incredibly prone to player abuse, with cartels forming to vote up or down various missions without regard to merit. Players who go out of their way to promote (read: spam) their mission IDs get more attention than players who simply make good stuff and don't feel the need to broadcast it over and over.
The only time that rewards for RP work is when the player base is small enough that the people or person judging rewards are abl
Good RP is the reward for good RP. People who don't fundamentally enjoy role-playing should probably just stick to the stuff they do enjoy.
Offering in-game rewards for RP would be like offering in-game rewards for people on PvP servers negotiating a peace treaty - completely off the point.
I spend maybe an hour a day preparing my food, and I eat very healthfully - it doesn't take much time if you do it right. I'm also insanely busy - full time job, full time grad student, social life, 2 very needy dogs, semi-relationship-sort-of-thing, and side projects to keep me from getting overwhelmed with work and school. There are 2 things I credit with letting me do this without getting worn out: exercise and eating well. (You probably thought I was going to say "coke and meth" :p)
2x a week I have a "big cooking" night (it often doubles as a "have friends over and chatter with 'em while we cook" night) - I'll chop a lot of veggies, cook a lot of noodles and beans/lentils make a lot of basic stuff that I use in almost every meal.
2x a week I'll do a crock pot of a whole chicken (good for mixing with pretty much everything, or making sandwiches, etc) and it'll let me eat well for days.
The only preparing I do every day is mixing up the veggies, maybe tossing some fish onto the broiler, cooking up a side or whatever (been doing a lot of potatoes and corn on the cob lately).
Lunch I usually have leftovers, I'll kind of stagger them a little bit so I'm not having the same thing for lunch that I had for dinner the night before.
Breakfast is often a smoothie or oatmeal with fruit and stuff like that.
I make my own bread (not so much because it's cheaper or easier, but because it smells REALLY good and I can have some fun with it) but that's pretty much an automated process of mixing stuff up and letting the bread maker deal with it. I also get a monthly delivery from a community supported agriculture group in my area, and it actually works out to be a little cheaper than grocery shopping for 'em. I use Peapod for staple stuff. Maybe 1x a month I'll need to go to a grocery store, but that's mainly because I want to bake something with my friends on one of the big prep nights, and I want to get something unusual to add to whatever we make.
Making good stuff is really easy and not that time consuming if you just plan it out a little bit. For a 2 person household it should be quite easy if both of 'em are sharing the load, and it can be a great time to hang with your partner or your friends and unwind from the day.
That is a really good point. But, I think the solution is hinted at by what's in the game already: Mission Architect. One of the CoX devs said that within 48 hours of the MA going live, players had created more missions than the dev team had in the 5ish years the game's been live. Granted, 99.99% of it would be really craptacular, but some of it is good stuff that could be ready for inclusion in the main game with a little polish.
So what if the devs released a basic level/zone design tool, specs for textures and the like, and let players submit zones as part of a contest? Let them be accessible to players on a test server in the same way that the Mission Architect works (go to a central place, pick an entry from the list, and zone in). Let the players judge the zones for the first rounds, then have the dev team and testers take a look at the best ones and polish 'em as necessary. I imagine a lot of people would be happy to try to make some solid stuff in exchange for, say, a year of free game time and some unique costume pieces or something.
Even with that, however, I think the lifespan of the CoX engine is not going to be that much longer - there are some real limitations that can't be addressed short of starting over, according to the devs. For example, maximum travel speeds are limited by the engine because of rendering and loading issues; avatars are limited to upright or prone travel only (as in, a character with super-speed can't run up walls, a flyer can't do barrel rolls without relying on a stock animation, etc); more open-world zone stuff can't really be done because of the way zone-to-zone movement is handled - and that's just really basic stuff. I give the game, maybe, 2 more years (7 years is a good run!) before it becomes a very marginalized player even in the super-hero genre - something maybe similar to how Anarchy Online. I guess overall I just feel like CoX is really, really dated, and releasing expansion packs that don't offer REALLY cool stuff (and the one announced here so far doesn't sound like it's got anything really interesting that justifies it being an expansion instead of either a free issue or just a booster pack) isn't going to be enough to rekindle interest in the game to where it can compete with the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.
There's a difference between being a signature character and having an impact on the world, and there are a lot of things that can be done to let the players feel like they're having an impact on the game world. I don't accept that MMO worlds need to remain more or less static - I actually think that's largely a relic of the initial constraints on the genre coupled with a lack of effort on developing non-static game worlds; there have been several games that actually do let players change things fairly dramatically.
WoW did it by having "phases" in various zones. You go into a zone and there's a big undead war going on. You complete a few quests and the way you see the zone is a bit different - maybe the undead are being pushed back (or advancing). You complete a few more quests, or maybe the big quest in that zone, and now you have an area that's been completely remade. This is pretty basic - the player doesn't get to choose what happens, but their actions have an effect that is permanent and noticeable to them.
Star Wars: Galaxies did it by having the entire economy be player driven and allowing player cities to be created. None of my characters became as iconic as Luke or Leia, but I became very well known as an armorsmith and merchant, and at one point had a veritable army of players working for/with me to help me provide wares for half my server.
MU*S did it by letting players create areas and zones once they'd "beaten" the game by hitting the maximum level. Players could make new zones and submit them for inclusion in the main game on many MU*S. Some setups made it so that the player could create stuff from the very beginning. Granted, the much smaller playerbase made it feasible to do this, but I don't think it's an intractable problem. Second Life does this, reasonably well, though there are some problems there, too, as is well known by anyone familiar with the game.
Those earlier games have shown that it's possible to do it (kinda, sorta) - I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the future evolution of the genre will have opportunities for players to be able to actually have an impact on the game world.
As to the size of the CoX world, the problem is partly massively fast travel speeds, yes, but also that it's just so bland. The art direction of the zones in these games is less than inspired. I understand that people are in a city, but really - there are ways to make the city look interesting. I live in Chicago and have for the last 30+ years of my life, and yet I continually find interesting buildings and structures - I refuse to believe that a super-hero city has to be as dull as CoX's world has become. I don't care how big the game world is if it's nothing but the same uninspired looking office buildings, warehouses and really poorly rendered "parks."
Fanpeople aside, the challenge for CoX is going to be that they've got a 5 year old game engine (that is very, very limited, but very solid for the few things it does) that they're charging people $15 a month to play going against 2 brand-new game engines that at the least look a lot better and most likely will have fewer limitations and will also cost $15 a month to play.
I don't know that just letting people change alignments is going to be sufficient to keep people on the old system paying the same price when there are 2 new systems that look better and may play better, at the same price. Are the people currently playing CoX really that attached to the game itself? Are they playing it because it's the only one in that niche? I'm going to guess that it's more the latter than the former, but I certainly could be wrong.
If Champions lets people have more customization (which, from what I understand, with powers it certainly does, and it supposedly has more character customization options than CoX had at launch - including animations and such), gives them the shiny, gives as good or better gameplay, and more stuff to do, I can see this hurting CoX's numbers a lot, because it will no longer be the only (or best) player in that niche. The only advantage CoX will have over Champions is that you can be a villain in CoX (though personally it doesn't feel very villainous) and the fact that some people have played it for 5 years. I dunno if that will be enough, hence my initial post.
Before Enhancement Diversification and the various reductions in the effects of Area of Effect attacks, players could very easily take down literally hundreds of opponents single-handedly. Back when I first played, my scrapper (Dark Melee/Regeneration) would pay people to join my teams and then sit by the doors of missions so that I could maximize the spawns for fighting. Even on the highest level of difficulty with the largest possible spawn sizes, I pretty much couldn't be killed. I used to solo multiple giant monsters simultaneously on Monster Island in Peregrine Island, and Arch Villains were trivial. Before knockback was changed, I could run up to a random low-level thug on the street and punch him hard enough to knock him more than a block away. I daresay the best possible build in the game now would pale in comparison to ye olden days when CoH first launched.
Changes to the fundamental working of the game aside, even though a really great build in the game now can perform very well, the feel of things is still trivial. The world of the game is tiny. The missions we are sent on are trivial - not just difficulty wise, but in scope and purpose. The opponents we face are absurd - I have 2 characters that, even with the system as it is now, I can easily take on any particular foe in the game, yet I'm still basically a lackey for NPCs who, in several cases, I've actually beaten up in various missions and generally outclass.
Epic in this case means larger than life, larger than the game is now. I can fly - so let me fly into space. Heck, just let me fly to another city, even! Let my character try to form her own army of minions and overthrow Recluse (actually, that would be a fantastic kind of PVP system - players engage in strategic and tactical PVP that gives them access to groups, lets them take control of things, etc.) Heck, just let me pick up a car/trash-can/dumpster and throw it if I'm super-strong. With the Mission Architect, let my player create not just a mission or 3, but actually let me create my own pocket dimension where I can tweak things like the gravity or whatever.
You know, epic. Not mundane. Not "I'm super strong, and yet 3 thugs with baseball bats just kicked my butt because even though I've punched 'em about half a dozen times with my SUPER STRENGTH they're still somehow totally fine!" Not "I have the ability to channel the very force of gravity itself, I can create a black hole, I can even create a rift in space and time itself and yank objects from other dimensions, but oh, hey, I can't budge that trash can over there." Not "I have the intelligence to create an army of robots (but only 6 at maximum, despite having over a billion of what passes for currency) and the obvious drive and skills to be a leader and start my own gang, but rather than try to actually take over some of the criminal elements in the world, I'd much rather read news papers and go beat people up when they talk trash about me, and occasionally try to kidnap some slow-moving idiot who supposedly has some VITAL INTELLIGENCE that will CHANGE EVERYTHING (but of course nothing changes.)"
When City of Heroes(Villains) (CoX) was first launched, it was absolutely the only super-hero MMO out there, and as such filled a niche that wasn't being satisfied by anything else at the time. It was a good game in that it worked fairly well, was fun to play and had some interesting storylines to play through. However, in my opinion, there isn't any real depth to the game unless you're *really* into the stories and want to experience every single last one of them, despite many of them being essentially the same with just different enemy groups inserted into the various spots. City of Villains is more or less just "City of slightly naughty superbeings who have more sinister looking zones (because reds and blacks and gray skies = evil, while bright colors and blue skies = good!) but ultimately do exactly the same stuff that heroes do."
Now there is the DC Universe MMO coming out as well as Champions Online set to launch in a couple of months - will simply allowing players to switch the zones they play in really be enough to handle competition from new games that have better technology and (in the DC case at least) iconic characters?
The general consensus among people I know who play is that the ability to switch alignments should have been something that was the focus of a free "issue" rather than an expansion, and the next expansion should have been something along the lines of a massive graphics engine update and "World of Heroes" that would allow for "epic" (vastly more powerful) characters.
I played CoH since launch until somewhere after CoV was launched, and still do play from time to time - it's not a bad game, I just don't know that letting people switch alignment is going to be enough to keep people playing in the face of the new shiny, ESPECIALLY if the new shiny is even halfway decent.
Actually, Japan's laws in re: sex are neither more nor less harsh than those in the US, simply different. Over there it's illegal to show genitalia, but their child porn laws are often rather laxly enforced (if at all); over here we show giant gaping orifices no problem, but if someone is even accused of possibly having ever thought about maybe considering looking at a slightly lascivious photo of a possibly under-age person, they're pretty much fucked for life.
Also, Fable II (a rather beautifully rendered 3d game) allows you to have sex (albeit in the Fallout 2 black screen with commentary way) with any number or gender of partners. It's not the 3d.
As I said in another post, I think a large portion of the reason you don't see more relationships in games - and I don't just mean sex - is that it's really damn hard to portray a realistic relationship in a gaming format and allow the players to have any kind of meaningful choices to make about the relationships. Sure, in a game that is played on rails the designers can tell you a story with some gameplay elements in it that are based on the idea that the player's character is forming a relationship, but it's completely close ended (or at best there will be 2-3 different endings, but they're all scripted). In games where you have open-ended/sandbox play, how exactly do you make an NPC relationship compelling for a player without human-level AI?
Currently, in most open ended games the relationships are handled by basically a series of mini-games. Buy the object of your desire a present (but you have to figure out the right present) or do something for them that they need done, or any number of activities that don't engage the emotions of the player at all - that don't get the player invested - it's just dumb. In almost all of those kinds of games I go out of my way to do absurd shit that is a complete bastardization of the intended experience. For example, in Fable 2, my goal was to have my character seduce as many straight women as possible to make them switch teams. Then, when I managed to do it, and we got married and had a baby (sperm donor is assumed, I guess?) and she started demanding a bigger/better house, I killed her with a fireball and had my child taken away by the guards. Oh, I paid a fine of 1000 gold or so and they let me off the hook for killing her. After that, I amassed a large fortune (something like 10-20 million gold) and then proceeded to serially marry and then murder every single NPC I could find, and simply paid a fine each time. Funny, I guess, but not remotely satisfying as a game element, not in the way that things like having to make moral choices in some games can be. I'd rather the designers spend their time making the parts of the games they are good at, rather than giving me some incredibly lame attempt at a relationship sim.
Besides, if I want a relationship, I can get a boyfriend. If I want to set off a nuke killing a bunch of innocent townspeople in exchange for an apartment in the wasteland, I have to play Fallout. Or, I guess, find a boyfriend who's got really neat toys.
In Fallout 2 you could hire hookers (gay and straight) and get married (gay and straight) and star in a porn film (or be a fluffer if you weren't attractive enough). In many games these days, you can have multiple spouses - Fable 2 actually lets you have group sex! - gay, straight or in-between. Bully gave players the option to be gay. Fallout 3 addresses pedophilia (albeit without actually saying it blatantly).
Except, in Fallout 2 the relationships were a total joke portion (shotgun marriage or selling your spouse into slavery). In Fable 2 the "relationship" is limited to clicking on a radial menu and occasionally getting bitched at to move to a better house (insert obligatory "but that's real life" joke here, I guess). Bully was I think just a flirt option, though I can't remember well.
So I don't think it's a culture thing as much as a complexity thing. Modeling relationships in games that the player will care about is *hard*. Making them not completely laughable is even harder - most relationship aspects in games that I've seen tend to be incredibly juvenile or played simply for laughs, and as such just detract from the game experience. I'm actually glad Fallout 3 stayed away from relationships rather than putting in something that would almost certainly not be as interesting or well done as the other story components.
If you tell the story of the relationship on rails (Final Fantasy), it can be well told but you don't really have options - it's someone else's idea of what a relationship should be. If you let it be a sandbox mode, well, we don't have real AI and so by necessity it'll be less than complex. Far better to spend the time it'd take to develop those aspects on things we can do well.
The problem here is that they had a LOT of stuff to do in this movie just to (re)establish the universe the movie is set in. There's rather a large difference between having a single 2 hour movie in which to get things going vs. having 13-14 hour-long episodes already in the can in which to set things up. Audiences going into a movie expect to have a complete story told to them in one sitting, while audiences of a new television series expect to have things unfold over the course of at least one season.
Ideally, they'll have this movie do well, then make a new series with the new cast/rebooted universe in which we get the philosophy, with movies coming out periodically that have the "big" events happen.
The difference between Trek and Wolverine is that fanboys were excited about seeing Wolverine while fanboys were enraged at the idea of a Trek reboot (thus the bigger opening weekend).
Except Wolverine was horrible. Really, really bad. For people who were fans of the characters, the movie completely got the characterizations wrong. For people who just wanted to see a good movie, the writing was atrocious and the story was just weak.
And Trek was really quite good - ESPECIALLY for a Trek film. There was enough there that new audiences could get into it and enjoy it as a film, and it was well done enough that fanboys have to grudgingly admit it was not the worst. movie. ever.
One opens strong and then tanks once people realize just how bad it is, the other opens a little less strong and I imagine it'll keep going strong for awhile.
According to that definition, when I was given a free Nintendo DS and 10 games because I won a raffle, I stole it - "to take, get or win [...] by chance"
For completely not-creepy reasons, the local teen center turned me into a criminal!