Archive for the 'City of Heroes/Villains' Category

Early, Middle, Late

Posted by Zubon on March 19, 2010 in A Tale in the Desert, Age of Conan, Asheron's Call, Champions Online, Chronicles of Spellborn, City of Heroes/Villains, Dark Age of Camelot, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, General, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Warhammer Online, Wizard101 and World of Warcraft. 2 Comments

For a game that depends on a stream of income from subscribers or RMT shoppers, the first hour of play must be the top development priority. This is where you hook players. After that, the endgame is important because that is where your players will be spending time indefinitely and where your game’s chatter will come from in the long run. Next is the early game, when you build momentum. The mid-game has already fallen this far down the list, as you have certainly seen in a lot of MMOs, and frankly few care much how good the late-game is because they are already fully committed and racing for the end-game.

I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us. Continue reading ‘Early, Middle, Late’

Oz’s Trail of Trials, Part 1 – Friday Night Tights

Posted by Oz on March 8, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains. 6 Comments

While it’s safe to say I’m an avid LoTRO player, I’ve found myself at a loss for things to do lately, even after a major patch (which took me under 4 hours to complete all solo/group content). So to keep myself from fatal burnout, I decided to take advantage of the City of Heroes/Villains free welcome-back weekend we just had. I’ve previously talked about CoX more than a few times, but I was more than willing to give it a run again. So I grabbed a frosty beverage, a bag of chips, and sat down to put on the ol’ cape once again.
Continue reading ‘Oz’s Trail of Trials, Part 1 – Friday Night Tights’

Start Your CoX Update

Posted by Zubon on March 1, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains. 2 Comments

This weekend is double-xp and welcome back in City of Heroes/Villains. Issue 17 is not live yet. The free time starts Thursday, but get your download done in advance because waiting on updates is not fun.

: Zubon

For shame

Posted by Julian on February 11, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains. 2 Comments

Nothing about CoX’s latest news? For shame, I say.

Issue 17 is coming. Do check the link. The skinny: Graphical update coming. Yes, the ‘Ultra Mode’ which was to be a part of the “Going Rogue” expansion this July will be included for free in Issue 17, along with Epic Archetypes available at level 20, and the usual host of classic CoX delicatessen. Namely, badges.

There’s talk of pre-orders starting in early March as well, but I haven’t read anything official myself.

Oh and yes, I’m still alive.

Names I Miss

Posted by Zubon on January 15, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains. 13 Comments

One thing I miss from City of Heroes is that absurd names made sense. Back in generic fantasy world, the characters theoretically have the names their parents gave them. You might be able to justify Goblinslaya as a self-given name/title, but people like Roflcopter or Moocow are wandering immersion-breakers, implying either that we accept Theme Park YAFMMORPG as a game rather than a world or that this one idiot does not while the rest of us are pretending to take the setting seriously. WoW seems more conducive to silly names than The Lord of the Rings Online™, but I maintain my persecution of names like Analfist or xXxShadowAssassinxXx.

Actually, I’d still hate those people in City of Heroes or Team Fortress 2. Seriously, “Analfist”? It’s not like I’m making up any of these names.

In City of Heroes, the names are intended to be self-given titles. Comic book characters get funky names; it is part of the genre. King Waffles is a perfectly cromulent hero name. Statyk Shok? Hey, I’ve seen worse alternate-spelling names in real comic books. People who use upper-case Is to look like lower-case Ls? Okay, they need to die.

: Zubon

DPS Population Imbalance

Posted by Zubon on January 8, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft. 12 Comments

Step back from what you know about how popular certain classes are and reconsider the acclaimed LFG tool. The slots are for one healer, one tank, and three DPS. From a naive perspective, the non-DPS classes are getting screwed here. It looks especially absurd coming from City of Heroes, where support stacks nicely and groups are often more than half support classes, or The Lord of the Rings Online™, where an ideal six includes an off-tank, secondary healer, and/or controller/debuffer. Cap the group at one, while the DPS classes get three slots? It would seem like you’d have a much easier time finding a group as DPS.

But no, the population is so absurdly slanted towards DPS that they are waiting. Tanks and healers queue and instantly get groups. This is still true even now that people know they can skip the queue by switching talent trees, and few groups are going to kick you for having lousy tank or healer gear. Granted, if you are a Mage or Rogue, you are stuck as DPS, but that Paladin could spec and queue as any.

A system that explicitly favors a preponderence of DPS is de facto the largest buff to tanks and healers ever. This mostly comes down to what I said about static groups: anything that makes grouping easier makes group-friendly classes and builds more viable. As the population has time to react, group-friendly classes and builds will become more popular.

The upcoming Star Wars has a different approach: the Jedi/Sith classes are the tanks and healers. If you want a shiny lightsaber, you don’t get to play DPS. Yeah, right, I say that, but you can already hear the forum wars mockery of all the Jedi/Sith that focus on damage. “DPS Sith lol. Can we get a tank that can tank?” Or, as DK tanks currently say, “But Blood Stance heals me!”

: Zubon

In the Future, We Will All Be Hybrid DPS Classes

Posted by Zubon on January 6, 2010 in Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villains, DC Universe Online, General, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft. 19 Comments

One positive incremental change in the MMO world is the introduction of different character modes. That is, you can hit a button and switch the focus of your character. You can fulfill multiple roles, but not all at once, with a way to switch between them. Examples include Champions Online and DC Universe (no classes, just modes), dual talent specs and Druids in World of Warcraft, and the Minstrel and Rune-keeper in The Lord of the Rings Online™. If you have the skill points and cash, you can also switch ships in EVE Online easily enough, which would be like hopping classes in another game.

These vary in their ease or extent of switching between modes. The two main LotRO healing classes need about 10 seconds to switch modes fully mid-combat. My WoW Paladin lost all her mana when switching. Other games might require you to go back to town to switch, which is still nice although certainly not the one-click, mid-adventure thing I am talking about. The effectiveness of doing so depends on how flexible other aspects of your character are. In LotRO, you must visit town to change your traits, and I know how I hate it when our healer is traited for damage. In WoW (late game), you would want to be carrying a second set of gear if you switch from Retribution to Holy.

Another way to implement modes is to switch focus within a role. A Lord of the Rings Online™ Hunter has solo and group DPS modes, the former with higher threat and mana costs, the latter decreasing them but losing bonus damage. (Solo mode: good for pulling targets off the healer, not worth much else post-Siege of Mirkwood™.) Switching your Warcraft Mage from ice to fire is probably a less dramatic change.

While I love my alts, I am in favor of anything that will let you stick with one character. Let me stack all my options on one guy and switch which option I use, rather than switching between Zubon, Zuba, Zoobown, and Zupwn. While that will make hotkey management interesting, it saves me from having separate friends lists, guild rankings, vaults, key bindings… (You could also implement saved (and importable) or account-wide friends list, guild affiliation, shared vaults, key bindings…)

: Zubon

[Update: I see that Tobold just hit this theme from the POV of a DPS class in the post-LFG WoW world. Yeah, dual-spec does not seem like a huge boon for them. Having played ranged DPS in quite a few games, while I cannot address how WoW is this week, we are generally doing fine and soloing brilliantly, even if we are over-competing for group slots. I feel more for my healers, like my poor CoH Controller who fought bosses by putting his damaging hold ("stun" for WoW folk) on auto-repeat while I went AFK and waited for the pitiful DPS.]

City of Skirmishes

Posted by Zubon on December 4, 2009 in City of Heroes/Villains and Lord of the Rings Online. 12 Comments

I know that I see everything through the prism of City of Heroes lately, but can you look at the new LotRO skirmishes and NOT see City of Heroes missions? City of Heroes was not the first to make the randomized, instanced content on a standard template, but I think they did it most whole-heartedly, and I am going with this because it is the one I know best.

Skirmishes are instanced quests that have a standard template with some randomized elements. They are a series of encounters that you could think of as fight units. One unit of combat for a solo character is two normal enemies or one normal and two swarm-class. Scale that up for larger groups as you add signatures, elites, and more of them. You select these enemies from a standard menu, say a dozen groups and a few enemy variations in each group, attaching a prefix to designate how tough each one is. So your first fight is against one hale wolf and two weak wolves, then two hale bandit captains, then one hale bandit captain and one hale bandit archer, etc. The skirmish sends random fight units against you until it reaches the appropriate number of them for that fight, then sends the boss.

Continue reading ‘City of Skirmishes’

Super-Sidekicking

Posted by Zubon on December 3, 2009 in City of Heroes/Villains. 28 Comments

Phedre reminded me that City of Heroes continues to be far more awesome than whatever it is the rest of us are playing, not only having five years of experience with features that too few games are stealing, but also continuing to create solutions to problems in the basic MMO model that work.

Issue 16 added “Super-Sidekicking.” You are probably familiar with City of Heroes as the trend-setter that has driven other games to implement some version of side-kicking: let one player function as if he were the same level as his friend, keeping his current suite of abilities but with level-appropriate numbers attached. City of Heroes has taken this to the next level: everyone on the team is now always the same level. Levels are no longer any barrier to playing with your friends. Join up, pick a mission, and you are all the right level for that mission. This also solves the old problem of power-leveling, because you cannot soak up experience at the minimum level: you are now the same level as everyone else, so might as well pitch in. Your level 2 character still has just the few powers with no enhancements, but your base numbers are just as good as the big boys, or you can get them to all visit your level for some newbie missions.

The particulars of this solution are tied to CoH’s heavily instanced structure, which makes this function more easily. Still, very few MMOs have no instancing these days, and there must be something more your game could be doing to bring you closer to where your friends are playing. The next step for Turbine’s new skirmishes?

: Zubon

Static Grouping

Posted by Zubon on December 2, 2009 in City of Heroes/Villains, General and Lord of the Rings Online. 12 Comments

For those of you who do not use the term, a “static group” is a way of approaching MMOs and similar games where you and your group of friends each have a character set aside strictly for playing together, all of you. For pen-and-paper players, this is just how you did it: you had your group, and you played together. You did not solo and you did not PUG. The Casualties of War have static groups for several games, and I joined the LotRO group once I found out it was on Landroval. Wednesday, 8pm Central, we all log on and run through a quest hub or two, maybe half an epic book.

Over time, you will lose members. It can be hard to fit someone new in except when you switch zones, because they will not be at the same quest point that everyone else is. Active recruiting can be done, and you may want alts who can be moved into the appropriate level range. I am on my third character joining our static group: our first was just who happened to be available and in the level range when Ethic needed another body, the second was my Loremaster, and then I moved to our back-up healer (Rune-Keeper) for when our Minstrel was unavailable. A few others have switched characters as well, as we caught up to old mains or as they decided to play the static group characters more than the once-per-week.

The most critical thing, I think, to keeping this going is also surprisingly easy: double up on key group roles. You want at least two healers and two tanks. If your game has hybrid classes that could fill several roles, great. This is essential because many times someone will be missing, and other times someone will drop out. If you have one healer, and s/he leaves, you no longer have a group. I switched to my Rune-Keeper when we needed that second healer, and I have been the primary healer for twenty or thirty levels now. I say this is surprisingly easy because people lean towards group-friendly classes if they know they will never PUG or solo. We have had a Hunter and a Champion in the group at times, but we have also gone without any primary DPS classes for months. Lots of support, lots of CC: all those roles you might want to play but could be painful to solo. We also lean towards group-friendly specs, and I wonder if I am the only Rune-Keeper leveling up with almost entirely healing traits slotted.

City of Heroes will eventually have its perfect version of this with multi-member leveling pacts. You will be able to bind a group together so that all experience is shared. Even if Bob misses a night, he has the exact same xp total as everyone else. City of Heroes also makes less strict static grouping easier, as all missions are shared instances that everyone gets a bonus for completing. The most flexible version, however, came in City of Heroes/Villains superteams. Someone designs a class template that works well with itself, say have everyone be a Radiation/* Defender or */Radiation Controller. Then your team is whatever 8 people are online at the time. You all have group-friendly builds because you never expect to solo, including all those Leadership toggles that are weak alone but stack nicely. I was fond of Brutal Speed, a villain group with all AE damage Brutes and Kinetics Corruptors. No one took the Fitness pool because triple-Speed Boost makes it irrelevant; everyone took the Leadership pool. Take 5 from group A and 3 from group B, and watch the wrecking ball fly. Superteams add flexibility by making everyone replaceable, so they can keep going long after half the people get bored and wander off.

Lifetime subscription games add one other bonus: if I had a monthly fee, I would not pay to play 2 hours per week. Even if I am bored with LotRO, I can still be interested enough to play 2 hours per week. The lifetime accounts keep people around for the static group that needs more than a year to reach the level cap.

: Zubon