Category: City of Heroes/Villains

[City of Heroes] Last night was reroll night. We all logged into the game and started chatting some. My brother (scrapper) did not like the choices he made and wanted to start over since we were still rather low level. Inhibit and I thought that the two of us (controller and defender) did not make a very good duo for the times when my brother was not playing. So we all rerolled.

I now have a fire/fire tanker, my brother went with a ma/regen scrapper and Inhibit has an empathy/radiation defender. So far it seems like a much more solid group.

Still, three nights in a row we all managed to log in. That must be some kind of record.

[City of Heroes] Our static group has completed day two of the grand plan. We spent about 2 hours each night for the last two nights. Day one left us at level 4 and day two left us at level 6. Actually, my brother is level 7 because he did some solo crime fighting before I got online.

Mostly there is no plan during fights as we are still trying to get comfortable with our powers and when to use them. Nobody has died yet but we came close a few times in the Hollows last night when we took on groups of 10 or 12 bad guys at once. Having the defender heals has helped a lot as well as my group heal to fill in the gaps.

Only problem so far is that when I hit level 6 I took the wrong power. I made two templates for my character; one solo and one group. I looked at the solo sheet last night instead of the group sheet. So now I need to change the order of my level 8 and 10 powers to get back on track. I will be back to where I should be by level 10 so it was not too big of a mistake.

One of the largest problems I have had to deal with when playing MMORPGs is that I do not have a lot of free time to play. This causes the people I know and prefer to group with to out-level me pretty soon and then it becomes game over soon after. Truth be told, if I can’t group with them, I’d rather go solo.

When we start a new game it is fun, we play together, everything is great. Two weeks later my brother is double or triple my level and my friends are usually twice my level. Hello solo city.

I have tried, with not much success, to encourage them to make a 2nd character that they would play only when I am online. A static group of sorts. Sounds good at first but before I know it everyone is doing a quest that takes 3 hours and they are 30 minutes into it. Sorry bro, maybe we can hook up tomorrow night.

Well, last night I tried this once again, this time in City of Heroes. Inhibit is cool about it as he solos most of the time anyway so it is easy to leave a mission. He rolled up a second character to participate in this project.

My brother is attempting to toss a wrench into the works by professing a need to only play one character. He figures that he will just get exemplared down to one of us so we can still do this. I figure he will be 30 minutes into a 3 hour task force mission soon enough. If not that, the exemplar process may not work as we think it will.

So, I am expecting this to be just a duo team most of the time with just me and Inhibit. If so, I will be quite happy as we have been doing this over the last week and it was going well. If my brother is available, we will add him in somehow. If nobody else is on, I will play my solo character.

I hope it lasts for a while as last night’s session was a lot of fun.

Our group consists of an empathy/dark defender (Inhibit’s character), a dark/dark scrapper (my brother’s character) and an illusion/kenetics controller (mine). We’ll see how it goes.

The last time I played City of Heroes, I remembered doing a mission where I had to rescue some people taken hostage at a “Rave”. In reality, it was just a warehouse with people running around inside it.

The first mission I got the other day was this exact one. The loading screen when I entered the warehouse showed a picture of booze bottles and party lights. I laughed, remembering the former reality.

Upon entering, I knew they had changed it. I could hear music thumping away in the background and the lighting was quite different. Eventually I got to the party area. Laser light show, loud music, and even the booze bottles. The changed it so it actually looked like a rave! I was tempted to hang out and dance after arresting all the bad guys.

One other thing, what is up with all the badges? I don’t recall this so it must be new. I was awarded a badge shortly after the tutorial. Also, several people in the tutorial were looking for people to team up for “the badge”. Anyone want to fill me in on why I should care about them?

I rolled up a Martial Arts/Regen Scrapper in City of Heroes. I’m level 3 now, woohoo. Only had 3 crashes to the desktop in about one hour. Is it me? Is it them? Ugh. It seemed stable for the last 45 minutes or so.

I have no idea what I am doing so I hope I can’t make too many mistakes with my choices available.

After watching “The Incredibles” for the third time recently (my kids can’t get enough of it) I am having some urges to reactivate my City of Heroes account. Well, it’s not a lot of money, perhaps I will give it another month just for the heck of it. I never was able to get a travel power (like flight) so I would like to try to get to that point at least. Heck, getting a Yalm in Anarchy Online did wonders for the enjoyment level of that game for me.

Now if only I knew someone currently playing CoH.

But then again, I *have* been waiting for Pirates! to come out and I hear that is a lot of fun too. Hmm.

In yet another boneheaded move, the clueless suits over at Marvel have decided to sue City of Heroes.

In its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, Marvel argues that the game’s character creation engine easily allows players to design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros, including “The Incredible Hulk.”

The company singles out a game feature for creating “a gigantic, green, ‘science-based tanker’-type hero that moves and behaves nearly identically” to the “Hulk.” Players can also create a “mutant-based” hero powers and a costume nearly identical to Marvel’s “Wolverine,” according to the suit.

The New York-based company also took issue with the ability of players to go so far as to name their superhero creations after Marvel comic book characters.

So a bunch of fans of the Incredible Hulk, who like him so much they decided to try to make a character similar to him, will now be slapped in the face. And this is all Cryptic‘s fault? It’s my understanding that Cryptic requested a list of trademarked names from all the major comic book companies, and they banned the use of all the names on those lists. So that makes their point about names moot in my opinion.

When will companies learn that it is possible to protect your trademarks without being an asshole? What’s next, suing the makers of Sharpie markers because someone drew a picture of Wonder Woman with one?

I found this quote from one of the City of Heroes devs to be very interesting:

GG: What have you done to prevent cheating online?

CoH: I’m not really sure what “cheating” means, to be honest. I’ll assume the question refers to “exploiting” — which means that a player is obtaining experience points or other rewards in a manner that the designer did not foresee and doesn’t want. I actually don’t mind that at all. If a player can “trick” our game, more power to him. What I focus on, however, is those tricks that incentivize “unfun” behavior. If doing something incredibly monotonous and boring nets more reward than doing something fun and risky, then I’ve done something wrong as a designer. So I need to dis-incentivize the boring activity to steer the player back towards the fun stuff.