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.No other subscription-based MMORPG that I am aware of has ever added 4 new careers to its game as part of a regular update/addon/free expansion.
– Mark Jacobs
City of Heroes came out in 2004. They added four new archetypes to the game before Warhammer released. They also never cut them during beta.
: Zubon
Hat tip to The Common Sense Gamer for the quote.
Can we make an MMO of this? I like it more than the previous edition.
I need City of Heroes to have a chat variable equal to your current accuracy, so I can use Kimiko’s line in real time with my attacks. Add it and I will re-subscribe just to make an Empirimancer. I already have an Osteomancer.
(There may be no lulz there if you do not know philosophy. Sorry. l2hume noob)
: Zubon
As human beings, we are rather good at detecting relationships and rather poor at estimating absolutes. There are plenty of optical illusions that play on how you perceive size, brightness, and color based on surroundings. The author of Mindless Eating found that people eat more snacks if you offer them in two large bowls than in four medium bowls. Not only do people take more, but they do not notice that they have taken more, nor do they feel like they have eaten more, nor are they more satisfied.
Does “a good deal” even have an objective meaning? Probably not, but you can tell when one offer is better than another. Presentation and context still matter here. City of Heroes got good press for engaging in microtransactions: it was presented as an extra employee (not taking away from the existing staff), and the profits were linked directly to hiring more staff and getting more stuff in the next update. Players liked having the opportunity to pay more. Blizzard, on the other hand, got immediate flak for planning to sell Starcraft 2 in three pieces. The first impression was of trying to sell the same game three times or demanding $150 for the full set of units. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, however, did more or less the same thing, and I did not see a backlash.
Note that this is more than cynical manipulation. You can improve the game experience this way. Indeed, that is the point of half the content: hide the fact that you are fighting the essentially the same monster by giving it a different model and slightly different stats. The people eating from smaller bowls felt no less full: they were satisfied with fewer calories. If I can make you happier just by presenting my game in a better way, I am adding value practically for free.
Most restaurants tried this with the size of their fries, drinks, and combos. One day, they were called, “large,” “mondo,” and “colossal.” Wow, a large is that cheap? And I ate the whole thing by myself, I must be full. Nothing was called a “small,” and there might have been a “medium” on the “value menu.” That was a poor manipulation that did not last, and everyone was irritated by trying to remember whether a “king” was bigger than a “biggie,” what they were called at this restaurant, and guessing what you would get if you ordered a medium or a large. I just got back from Burger King, where they changed their sizes to “small,” “medium,” and “large” (with a “value” size on the value menu). Holy crap, realism? This works on several levels. First, I suddenly like Burger King more because they made this change. It implies that they do not think I am an idiot. Second level? We are still conditioned to think of sizes the way every other restaurant lists them. When you order a Whopper combo, they ask if you want that in small, medium, or large. No one buys a small! You might not have ordered the colossal combo, but you order larges all the time. This is a great way to increase sales while manipulating people into thinking you have stopped manipulating them.
: Zubon
NCsoft surely has people better trained in marketing than I, but I feel obliged to suggest that they wait a week or three after releasing a new City of Heroes update before sending out the “welcome back weekend” invitations.
I also feel obliged to note that the elemental shields look great.
: Zubon
City of Heroes is having a welcome-back weekend to celebrate the release of Issue 13. Even if you are not now interested in playing, if you think you might be in the future, it is worthwhile to log on and shuffle your characters about. Having your characters logged off in many areas can earn you badges, and those badges come with bonuses and powers. Walk your characters to a hospital, train station, or such, and you are golden.
If you happened to have logged at one of those spots, you get retroactive credit for however long you have been logged off. All the characters on my main server were at one … except my main, who was five steps away. Oh well.
Bonus fun: head to Ms. Liberty and time how long it takes you to see Captain America! (Shields are a new power set.)
: Zubon
Back Alley Brawler, City of Heroes animations developer, combines awesome with oops:
When we were testing the invasions on the training room, I logged into Galaxy City while an invasion was going on, flagged the BABs trainer as invisible, stepped into his spot and made myself visible, and then joined in the fight against the Rikti.
After it was all over I went back to the trainer to make him visible again, but being invisible…I couldn’t find him to target him. He was completely invisible, even to me.
A couple of days later we got a bug report through QA about the Invasion causing trainers to disappear.
: Zubon
I always characterize City of Villains as what City of Heroes would have been with another year to work on it. But we aren’t playing it as much at City of Heroes, or at least we don’t seem to be. Why is that?
Have you seen Zero Punctuation for this week? I think it would have been even better without the GTA4 negativity — the Saints Row 2 positivity was great. Plan for the day: mayhem, destruction, violence, whimsy. Yes, that sounds like what many of us are here for.
Happy day in City of Villains: going into a Mayhem Mission with a Fire/Fire Brute. Nothing says “flaming maniac” quite like having boxes explode because you walked by them. I need to level that character someday so I can do the same to cars.
: Zubon
The City of Heroes/Villains Halloween event is on. As usual, previous years’ content returns (with changes: go door-to-door rather than camping one, and Spirits are not spawning as often as intended — sorry badge hunters). This year’s new thing is the Zombie Apocalypse, patterned after the Rikti Invasion. Sadly, the two zone events cannot happen at once, even with the LGTF, but that would be awesome, especially if they fought each other.
After Halloween, zombies will return as an occasional event, again like the Rikti (although presumably with no non-event trigger like the LGTF, although again: awesome). This leads me to again wonder: why would you live in Paragon City? Even after you get used to walking past werewolves, rock monsters, and alien invaders on your way to the corner store, the apocalypse is a recurring event. Welcome to Sunnydale?
: Zubon
I was reminded recently about exit surveys. When you cancel a subscription, some game companies will ask you why, what was missing, etc. This makes sense to me, although it needs to be in the format “Your account has been canceled. Would you please tell us why you are going?” rather than making it seem like the exit survey is a requirement of the process (or worse, actually making it required).
I was surprised that Warhammer had no such survey, but then…
City of Heroes has a survey that was good but has become particularly inapt over time. There is a section asking if various things would help lure you back. About half the list has been implemented, but the question set remains the same. Nothing says “your feedback is important” quite like a survey that is more than a year out of date.
: Zubon
Are you worried that the upcoming Marvel game will distract Cryptic’s attention from City of Heroes? Yes / No / Undecided (Not an actual question.)