Category: City of Heroes/Villains

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City of Skirmishes

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

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

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

Updating Best Practices

Comments on the other post reminded me of how patching can be done well: City of Heroes, yet again leading the industry from five years ago. Patches pre-load, with this being an automatic option when you log off in the week before a major patch. This does not help much if you are returning to see the new stuff, but current players have it pre-loaded. (Again, yay for Steam for doing that on upcoming releases.) That frees up bandwidth for those returning players.

Note two different parts: automatically updating without more clicks, and it does this as an option when you log off. It does not keep you from playing right now, which is what we all want. I believe the PlayNC updater will do something similar to what I like with Steam’s automatic updates, but I do not keep it running because I rarely have multiple NCSoft games active at once.

: Zubon

Good Web Site

On another “best practices” note, flip through the Game Info section on the City of Heroes website. That is really good. It does not have everything the wiki does, and it really should not, but I could actually point someone to the official site to learn about the game. I could ask for a bit more about the archetypes, but it goes through the various types of rewards/loot, you have lore on the setting and the enemy groups, there is a lengthy section on the Mission Architect, and it is all well organized. This is a useful official site that is easily navigated. It even includes the recommendation to pick a power pool by level 12 so you can get your travel power ASAP. Whoever put this site together did good work.

I know, they have had five years to put a good site together, but so many games fail to use the site as much more than a promotional tool.

: Zubon

Selling Powers

Returning to last week’s big theme of item shops, City of Heroes shipped Super Booster IV: Martial Arts last week (discussion thread). In addition to emotes and costume pieces, it includes a power (like the other Boosters):

Ninja Run power:
Dash through the city with the agility of a ninja! The Ninja Run power is a travel power enabled through the purchase of Super Booster IV: Martial Arts and is available for use at level 4. Use Ninja Run to strike fear in the hearts of your enemies as you increase your run speed and leaping abilities, and the best part? It doesn’t use one of your power selections!

The previous powers were different. The first was a self-destruct: amusing, but of limited use, especially when it sends you to the hospital (no rez). The second gave you an other-only buff: rather useful, but not something that made you more powerful. It is hard to get angry about paying for the ability to help others, but let’s not doubt that nerd rage is out there. The third did not have a power as such. This time, though, it is a power, and a desirable one, and they are advertising it as such. Travel skills are not exactly game-breaking, and this one is slower than the others, but you get it earlier and (as they say) with no power slot consumed, meaning that you can use that slot for something else. Because there is no prerequisite power (you can pay for that another way: subscribe for 5 years to be able to pick travel powers at level 6), that frees up another slot if you were only taking Combat Jumping to get Super Leap. The most important effect is not selling a permanent, slightly sub-par travel power; it is effectively selling an extra power slot or two for all your characters.

Come to think of it, that is a heck of a deal for $10, especially since it applies to all your characters. Other games are selling you a mount or decorative pet for $10. Here, they will top that and give it to every character you have.

: Zubon

How to Write Patch Notes

Reading the latest League of Legends patch notes, I noticed this format:

  • Tantrum Damage modified from 115/130/145/160/175 to 100/120/140/160/180
  • Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced from 3 to 2.5

Notice the “from” and “to” with exact numbers. It does not say, “Tantrum Damage modified. Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced.” This is especially important for test notes, as you want people to test if the numbers actually come out that way, especially since some of the notes are correcting ability numbers or text so that they match (ditto for graphic effect and area of effect).

While we are talking about doing things right, I may have attacked the City of Heroes patch notes before, but one thing they do well is pointing to themes. Some of that is the advertising copy for, “Come try our new stuff! It’s awesome!” but the valuable part is expressing the developer intent in the patch notes. “We observed that players were able to reach unintended levels of defense through stacking buffs and abilities, so we are adjusting this through the following changes…” Even when there is no theme, that is helpful: “We are making a variety of balance tweaks to powers across all classes, correcting a variety of issues that have accumulated over time. There may be some unexpected effects from making so many changes at once, so we would appreciate it if you would pay attention to X while testing.” For test notes, explain what you want tested. For live notes, explain your intent before you need to explain it in each of twenty forum threads.

: Zubon

Champions Zone-Servers

Most MMOs make it difficult to play with your friends. Levels are a common culprit, as are character- (not account-) specific friends lists, but servers are today’s topic (and City of Heroes solved both those problems anyway). My friends play World of Warcraft on however many servers, and I can pick one on which to spend two months leveling to catch up. We have never been able to get everyone together on the same server for any game but EVE, except when we had so few people playing that we could not field a full group anyway. Whatever else you may say against the Champions model, it avoids this. There may be fifteen copies of that zone you are in, but you and your friend can meet in the same one no matter where you started.

It is a hard thing to make someone choose which 99% of the population to wall himself off from before making his first character.

Another virtue is the inherent scaling. Games have this problem across their lifecycle: how can you accommodate both early crowding and the later population shift? You do not want The Shire clogged with 500 hobbits at once, but you want new hobbits to be able to play once the horde is level 50, and then you want the level 50 experience to remain fun after the horde that sat there for nine months moves on. What about that group content?

In the early days of City of Heroes, you might have seen a dozen copies of each low-level zone as additional instances spawned. Champions Online takes the next step by eliminating the top-level server. Each zone has a lower population cap, so it is easier to have the “right” number active in it, and more instances appear as the incoming population expands.

There may not be a shared world, but you always have the right number of shared playgrounds.

: Zubon

Towards a Perpetual Stream of Events

I like festival time in Middle-earth. There is a festival for each season, and each runs about a month, so either it is festival time now, or it was last month, or it will be next month. World of Warcraft has something similar with its seasonal events. About half of each month is a festival.

As games age and have more events, they should repeat and accumulate rather than cycling out. All seasonal and holiday content can be re-used for future years. (I gladly exempt Kingdom of Loathing‘s Crimbo season from this rule, as I always look forward to the next winter solstice’s insanity. They do recycle all the other holidays, however, and they appear whenever either the real-world or in-game calendar would have them.) Just keep adding a few more each year until the game world is always having some kind of festival. If you run out of seasonal and holiday events, re-invigorate some little-used town with a local event. Have competing local events on the same theme. Come to think of it, having competing potato queens as event quest NPCs would be awesome.

City of Heroes has a slightly different take on this. Instead of adding new holidays each year, they add new events to existing holidays. The previous content still exists, but each year makes it bigger. Halloween features trick or treating and the great pumpkin and costumes and a haunted giant and zombie attacks and the apocalypse and oh my goodness.

: Zubon

Improving Achievements

Unheralded in City of Heroes Issue 16, some of the more insane badge grinds were toned down. Some were cut in half, some had a 0 lopped off the end, and a couple added more enemies that count towards earning them. This is a good thing: do not encourage your players to leave the computer on overnight in a low-damage perma-mez situation, for several nights, to earn a badge. That would be aberrant gameplay. Which I have done on a few characters…

I approve of making badges/achievements/deeds/trophies/accomplishments more about exploring and doing a variety of things, less of making them about grinding.

: Zubon