Category: City of Heroes/Villains

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Extra Slots Implementation: For Your Discussion

As previously contemplated and announced, City of Heroes is selling extra character slots. The official implementation is here. (2 free for current subscribers, 1 free per year that you are subscribed, one time fee of $6/$10/$20 for 1/2/5 slots, add up to 24 per server) I open this for your comments, as I am curious about what you think of the option, pricing, likely staff time needed, the limits placed, other options that could be viable, etc.

Kicking it off, I note that you are buying one slot for one server, not one slot per server. Also, if you want your cap of 36 slots on a server, that will cost ~$100, or $80 if you are a two-year subscriber who puts all the free slots there.

I predict many people returning for at least one month for Issue 12: two free slots for being a current subscriber, plus new archetypes and power sets to play with. Lots of new characters will be made to play with those, so it is a good time to start too. Great marketing item, definitely worth e-mailing to former players with the “$10 value!” note. Of course, that is still at least a month away, so keep your powder dry. I am on-break from CoX until then.

: Zubon

More Selling Fluff

I have long pondered the notion of self-funding staff via microcontent. For example, hire more graphics artists for City of Heroes costume designs and then sell their output for a few dollars as an account upgrade. If they sell enough, they stay on. If the model works really well, you can open it up to independent contractors who could make and sell costume pieces, and otherwise replicate a bit of what goes on in Second Life with user-generated content. With the host company taking a percentage. See Julian on fluff for other thoughts.

Yes, I know there are issues there. I liked the idea of putting together Dungeons and Dragons Online dungeons that way, but you would very quickly run into balance issues where dungeons were intentionally too easy or rewarding, because people would buy them for easy xp/loot. See power creep in all the existing D&D books. (After all, why buy the new book if it does not have a prestige class you want to use, and why use one that is weaker than existing ones?) (Yes, I know.)

City of Heroes has kind of pulled this off. Lead developer Positron comments:

Well, the Villain Epic ATs were originally planned for I13, but the brisk sales of the Wedding Pack enabled us to fast track these by getting them budgeted to be done earlier. Every time you see a new tux or wedding dress you can send a thanks to that player for getting everyone VEATs an issue early.

I may be misinterpreting, but it sounds like CoX bought itself more staff time via microcontent. That is the opposite order, but it works as a potential model. Most of my CoX friends bought the microcontent for the jump pack and the Pocket D teleporter.

: Zubon

Incomplete Evil

I have been waiting to whine about when we will hear about City of Heroes Issue 12, largely because I expect info to be posted the day that I whine. My powder is just barely dry, so I am going for it. Last issue was on the test server for a month, so it is already two weeks behind where they want to be to keep a pace of one issue every four months.

Almost two years ago, I whined about Issue 7, also late. The gap between 6 and 7 ran from October 27 to June 6, about 7.5 months. At the time, I was bothered for the heroes: 6 and 7 were the villain issues, and Issue 8 was about 15 months after Issue 5. Heroes’ major addition over the course of a year was the PvP zones.

Now I’m concerned about the villains. Issue 8 was a hero issue, 9 was inventions, 10 was cooperative, and 11 was the flashback system. So in the last 21 months, the big content addition for villains was a chance to team with heroes and save the world. There were gameplay additions, like the new power sets and the invention system, but those were shared and mostly changed the way you went through existing content. As Statesman pointed out, most of the villain content is hero content with different flavor text, fighting villain groups. We are low on evil.

I have no idea what Issue 12 will bring, or when it will happen. There was a decent gameplay addition between issues, which is something, although again that is affecting (the rewards for) existing content. On our server, and on many others if the Black Market prices are to be believed, the villain side is mostly dead. My hero side SG is not far from it either, since the big addition since the Rikti re-invasion was to let us replay old content more easily.

: Zubon

(See all those City of Heroes updates on the wiki: Game Updates).

Update: Issue 12 teaser posted. Teaser, not on test. I remind you of Issue 7, which ran teasers for so long that they began showing off wall textures. Lighthouse has already implied that there will be more teasers, so be prepared to wait a bit. Still, look at the stuff in that teaser, woo!

Update 2: link 1 and link 2 stating:

We still have a bit before closed beta, and then several weeks of that till open beta. So, the info is getting strung out over that time. We pretty much have something for you every week.

So about a month from the first teaser to the test server, estimate another month from there. Roughly five months between issues, with 11.5 in-between. Barring major issues or good fortune.

Jack Emmert on City of Heroes

“The people who remain, you can’t get rid of them… it’s absolutely impossible to do it because they’re so used to the pain and agony of the gameplay that they love it.”

Someone who was there, was this (1) played straight; (2) a humorously exaggerated line being unfairly taken out of context; (3) a fake humorously exaggerated line intended as a shot at what is now the competition. The Onion explains that last one.

: Zubon

Quote from Gamasutra, with a hat tip to Broken Toys.

Contemplating Champions

As you may have heard, Cryptic is making Champions into an MMO. Cryptic, in case you don’t know, made City of Heroes, now owned and run by NCSoft. They also were making the Marvel MMO before it was cancelled. I presume that most of the code was recycled into Champions, which will get content and appear in 2009ish. For me, this is exciting, because Champions is basically what I wanted City of Heroes to be. I still love my big blue book, although I could see how a player might want a computer to do all the math for the game. Viola, MMOs solve that problem.

To explain the appeal of Champions, it is a generic system (Hero Games). It recognizes that damage is damage, and whether it is a club or a fireball is just a special effect. It becomes a fireball because you declare it to be fire damage, you bought an AE effect, and maybe you also bought a small DoT or having the enemies blinded by the flash. It simplifies so much of the game when the crunch and fluff are explicitly severable. Haktar has a flamethrower, Dul’kash is a fire-breathing demon, and Torchy McTorcherson is a mutant, but you don’t need three sets of rules for energy blast (8d6, cone, special effect: fire). Champions is also (character) skill-based rather than class based, so I pictured its in-game character sheets being something like Asheron’s Call or EVE, where you assign points to whatever categories you want.

I usually describe City of Villains as what City of Heroes would have been if they had another year to develop it. Really, publishing CoH one year later would not have yielded CoV, because it also shows confidence in getting away from the standard MMO holy trinity. I expect Champions Online to be what City of Heroes would look like starting from scratch with the experience of having made City of Heroes. Which is pretty much what happened. Big things like moving away from classes (though I am told they will still exist; I have yet to research much myself), smaller things like letting you have purple fireballs. Of course, if you prefer the direction that CoX has taken under the new lead developer, you might not want to see the Vision made flesh. But my sparse Champions reading does show things from the original CoH plan that were missing from the published game; perhaps Champions’ class system will be like the original origin plan.

In a way, this is a sequel. To a game they sold to what will be a competitor. I expect many similarities between the two games, and it feels odd to me. If it were an explicit sequel, no worries, lift as much as you like. Since NCSoft now has City of Heroes, it feels kind of like plagiarism to re-use chunks. Wait, no, that’s stupid, every MMO looks a lot like other MMOs, so it does not matter that WoW and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ have rather similar character creation screens. But that costume designer in CoH is a big selling point… but how can you rip off the game that you made? I have many buts here. Toss in your thoughts. We have a long time to discuss.

: Zubon

Lest we forget, “The Orcs [in Middle Earth] were obviously stolen from PC game maker Blizzard and its Warcraft series. Too bad Blizzard is apparently too scared to sue New Line over it.” Let’s not even get into how AE Mythic is ripping off Blizzard.

Down on the Farm

My friend Charlie has one of the best farming/powerleveling characters in City of Heroes. I say that with no hyperbole; it may be mathematically impossible to beat his build. He has the standard Fire/Kinetics/Fire Controller farmer, and he has every purple ultra-rare enhancement that he needs. To translate for players of other games, he has the best possible equipment, and there is an endlessly repeatable group quest that his class can solo with ease.

His girlfriend Nicole complements this with a character that could otherwise be suboptimal. Archery Blasters are not that popular, but they do come with the perfect nuke for farming: Rain of Arrows. I do not know her slotting (she must have her own set of purples by now), but between her powers and his buffs, her recharge on Rain of Arrows is twenty seconds at the most. Because of his Fulcrum Shift, she can live at the damage cap. While he is crushing one group, she takes out the next one in two attacks. Re-Fulcrum Shift off his next group and continue.

My latest character (Sonic/Sonic Defender) makes this even faster. When you are at the damage cap, enemy resistance debuffs are the only way to increase your damage further. Negative resistance becomes a damage multiplier. Disruption Field on the Controller, Howl at the enemies, and they are at -50% resistance. Add another nuke, plus some shields to deal with return fire.

Farming can be exceedingly dull and repetitive, but it hardly has time to when it goes that fast.

: Zubon

A Reminder About Requests

[tell] cn i jon ur team 42 def

If you cannot be bothered to type a complete request, you must not care that much about the team. Really, if you are going to ask anyone for anything, at least go through the motions of using real words. Also, I am not trusting that guy to heal me.

Sadly, some of the best players I know type this way, so it does not work as a heuristic, but at least I don’t have to try to read that for an hour with no guarantee that this is not another idiot.

: Zubon

Double XP Catass

  • Sonic Resonance/Sonic Attacks Defender: 24 to 41
  • Storm Summoning/Energy Blast Defender: 2 to 7
  • Mercenaries/Poison Mastermind: 29 to 33
  • Gravity Control/Psionic Assault Dominator: 9 to 15
  • Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper: 1 to 6
  • No divorce.

The lower-level characters were to reserve the name “Zubon,” so I cannot lose it if I unsubscribe for more than 90 days. I have that set on almost every server.

: Zubon

Double XP Overcrowding

Freedom is full, and Virtue is in the red. All the other servers are under yellow load. They upgraded hardware specifically for this event, and players are still overloading it. The game may not have had this many concurrent players at release. I don’t know where all these people are coming from. The villain events on Freedom must be going well, except when someone disconnects and cannot return for a few minutes.

: Zubon

Odds of a great many (currently trial) accounts for sale next week?