Category: City of Heroes/Villains

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Of Community Norms

Of course, I am the one with the problem. Community norms differ, and if you arrive with different norms, failure to meet your expectations is your problem, not theirs. “Impolite” is a culture-relative term.

If most lower-level instance runs have been “level 80 plus 1-4 alts” for the past year, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that someone is going to do it for you. The group leader might be amiss in putting together anything else without warning people. If you receive a tell with two to four characters and a question mark, your interlocutor might reasonably expect you to recognize that as an invitation to a specific instance, zone, or quest line.

I find it annoying and rude that people use the trade channel for guild recruitment when there is also a dedicated guild recruitment channel. I am obviously at odds with the norm, because I have never seen a single message on that channel. Realistically, one channel will absorb almost all the discourse no matter what it is labeled. In City of Heroes, it was our badges channel; in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, global looking for fellowship. Whichever channel has the most people will have the most chatter and attention-seekers, so it should not be surprising to see a trade channel filled with discussion about who sucks.

Announcing what items you just put on the AH, though, you’re obviously a screwball.

: Zubon

The Tyranny Of Levels

WoW has reinforced for me, in ways I had nearly forgotten, the way that levels swamp all considerations of skill or even sanity. This is especially striking coming off a long binge of Team Fortress 2, where a good headshot kills anything.

Level-related modifiers stack to make it pointless to play outside a narrow range. It would be enough to have the numbers get larger with every level, as they do, so good luck using that 50 damage attack against the 200,000hp enemy. Most games add a modifier based on level differences: it is not just that you get higher stats and better accuracy as you level, but also that you have a bonus to hit lower-level targets, with a corresponding penalty against bigger targets. You also face reduced damage against them, above and beyond their improved defenses, while they get those benefits against you, the lower-level target.

Let’s linger there a moment. Long long ago, City of Heroes had its “purple patch,” which imposed level modifiers. Your 50 damage attack against the 200,000hp enemy would only do 20 damage, and that was before applying the enemy’s defenses. Even if you could take down higher level enemies, it was not worth it for the time involved. (And, just in case you found a time-efficient way to do it, much higher level enemies yielded less or no experience.) WoW feels similar. Asheron’s Call assigns levels to enemies but intends them as rough guides to how powerful they are, with modifiers to experience gains but not relative effectiveness.

This makes fighting an even-con elite easier than a higher-level normal foe. Sure, it may have three times as many hit points, but I do not have an arbitrary accuracy penalty, so I can hit the thing. I can kill a caster six levels higher than me, but it takes a few minutes, and I could get the same reward from killing two lower-level foes in half the time.

: Zubon

I am open to the notion that WoW looks this way due to the way weapon skills work, rather than some additional penalty. A level-based hard cap on weapon skills creates the same effect.

City of Too Many Heroes

Superheros are exciting and cool because they are special, relatively rare, and interesting in a meaningful way. An MMO where everyone can be a superhero completely destroys each of those points: superheros become plentiful, mundane, and end up performing repetitive tasks.

Andrew has an entirely valid point. This is, however, a sub-genre of superhero stories. You do not see them often, and far less often well thought through, but you do see Astro City and others that take the notion of having a city of superheroes. I wish I could remember more, but my reading of comic book deconstructions is way behind. There have been comics about the equivalent of superhero internal affairs and the clean-up crews that deal with all these heroes. Other comics occasionally toy with the idea, like Silver Age stories where there are entire cities of Supermen or JLA Rock of Ages.

I will cite this last for how it is hard to do well, because while Rock of Ages was a great story arc, the DC universe then politely ignored the social implications of literal angels appearing on Earth or temporarily granting the entire planet superpowers. Or even what happened in those hours of ubiquitous demipowers.

: Zubon

Further Frontiers in Quality of Life

Why it’s City of Heroes, of course, Issue 16.

Super-sidekicking: “Each player in the group’s level is set to the level of the owner of the active team task. If no team task is selected, everyone in the group’s level will be set to the level of the team leader.” You earn xp while exemplared, so everyone can always team with everyone.

They used to let you change your game difficulty with a simple 1 to 5 slider. That is now two sliders and two toggles. Max difficulty lets you solo against level [your level +4] enemies spawned for a group of eight. Minimum difficulty lets you solo against level [your level -1] enemies, with bosses changed to lieutenants and archvillains changed to elite bosses.

Want to change your look? Change your powers’ colors or animations, individually or collectively, including new weapons for the weapon-wielders and animations for the “I hit things” powers. Preview all those animations and enjoy the newly tabbed costume creator. If that is not enough variety, you can set these separately for each of your costumes. Are we still limited to 5 costumes per character and 36 characters per server? I might eventually run out of things to decorate. Oh, and every class got at least one new power set, although only one is completely new, the rest being proliferated from other classes.

Masterminds got Thermal Radiation at the same time that they got power customization. Want to bet on how many ninjas covered in black fire are currently rampaging across the Rogue Isles? I do not see any new missions or task forces, but the graphics overhaul probably took two-thirds of forever. There are developer diaries.

Airlocks

Continuing through classic WoW, the zones have great diversity between them but little within. You notice that each zone has its own palette, although it may take some reflection to notice how thoroughly and well that is done. I will get back to within-zone sameness another day, but let’s discuss for a moment how you execute the palette swap.

The problem is non-trivial. The seasons change as you cross onto a new map, but few comment on the walk from the perpetual winter of Dun Morogh to the perpetual spring of Loch Modan. You must have noticed at some point, but did you notice when the transition happened?

Some of this is gamer suspension of disbelief: we are used to having everything change when we get to a new level of the game, and moving to a new zone is the MMO equivalent. The game environment also facilitates this the same way it keeps you on the theme park quest path: channelization. How many zones have wide-open borders that you can traverse, rather than walls of impassable mountains with narrow openings?

Those openings can become rather like tunnels for about a draw distance, so that you see big rocks covering the transition point. The transitions to and from Loch Modan really are tunnels, enclosing you so that you cannot see the set being swapped, like taking an elevator in Portal. In other zones, see bridges and rivers serving a similar purpose. You may note this as a problem at the border of Westfall: river and bridges, yes, but it is brief enough for you to see the transition. On the way in, there are quest-givers to distract you, but Duskwood makes it look like the world ends across the river.

Touring through some other games of my acquaintance: City of Heroes does the same thing, complete with loading screens. Asheron’s Call never does, since you can run everywhere from anywhere, and there are large areas over which you can watch the land change. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume One: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ is mostly open, with channelization into the lategame zones and the ones added post-release. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ channels everything, but it is set in caverns anyway. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates has separate islands, with boats as loading screens (WoW does the same at points). A Tale in the Desert takes the same approach as Asheron’s Call, with some really impressive geography reflecting years of effort from volunteer world-builders.

: Zubon

Impassable hills are also good for hiding the Potemkin village nature of most of the landmass. Cataclysm needs to re-do the whole landmass anyway so flying mounts cannot show that there is nothing behind the backdrops.

eAsk

World of Warcraft seems perfect for scratching that Achiever itch. This may just be part of the newb experience, but there are more flying numbers, color splashes, and dinging bells than I have seen anywhere else.

When I fight, my chat box gets blue text telling me how my weapon skills and defense are increasing, and I can switch between weapons to get even more blue numbers. After the fight, numbers fly over my head, indicating experience. A purple bar keeps me updated constantly on that. I click the body to receive cash and loot. I may be able to skin the enemy, and if not, walking around is probably rewarding as I find other things to gather. I have two trade professions and three secondaries, with a fourth coming next year. Back to the enemies, they may relate to a quest, so I get more numbers for each kill, plus maybe more numbers when I check the body. The quest numbers update on the right side of my screen, and if I have Quest Helper, they even change colors. I have various factions that like me more with each quest. I have pages of achievements, most of which come naturally as I do other things to get numbers and colors above my head. There are clarions and splashes of color for everything. All of these things let me buy new skills, ranks, and other things that will add a number or line, with the accompanying animation and sound.

On the Explorer side, I do not see much. I mean, I can wander around and look at things, but I do not think of touring through Disney World as exploring. It is funny that The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ out-theme parks WoW in the early game, but it feels like one for Explorers. Continue reading eAsk

Dreams Undreamt

A Casualties member mentioned Crimecraft last night. Ah, a gang-based online thing. “I’ve never dreamed of being in a gang, so not really interested.” Then I thought back through some previous games. I never dreamed of being a dwarf that set people on fire by writing on a rock, of making charcoal and growing flax, of summoning headless ice monsters that rained frosty death upon my foes, of being a buffing psychic cyborg, of…

: Zubon

The Controller

I haven’t mentioned Melmoth enough, which is a shame, because Melmoth is pretty awesome. Also, I still need to read Melmoth the Wanderer, but that’s a different issue. Anyway…

“We could be heroes” is his meditation on crowd control, something City of Heroes does with the usual crazy awesomeness that comes from embracing AE gameplay. He shares my usual lament of tank-and-spank MMO heroism, usually based around fighting one thing at a time. Because the hero’s journey goes from one pig to one slightly larger pig.

In City of Heroes, if you can still see your character under the pile of mobs that you’re fighting ‘you’re undertaking the task in an incorrect fashion’, as I believe the cool kids say down on the MMO street. … crowd control in PvE is a viable and interesting game-play alternative to the soft “Yo mamma!” control that the average MMO tank possesses. The controller could be the enabler to huge battles in other MMOs, without having to unbalance the player characters such that they must always face an entire battalion of enemies at a time in order to feel any challenge, and where any lone mobs would therefore simply implode the moment a hero arrived in their zone. Controlling a battle can be tremendously rewarding as a player, watching the ebb and flow of the various enemy groups and locking down those that might otherwise overwhelm your party, judging when to use AoE powers that will inevitably draw massive amounts of ire from the mobs when they eventually break free, and when to simply neutralise the more potent individuals of a wave of mobs – the healers for example … and unlike healing it would be very hard to reduce it down to a bunch of bars that you simply play whack-a-mez on.

City of Heroes crowd control was toned down years ago, on the theory that fighting a bunch of statues is no fun, but it is still head and shoulders above what any other game will let you do. And admit it, you want a confuse spell for the enemy healer/debuffer, to make him work for your team until your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

: Zubon

League of Legends: Free

You know how rarely I link to game companies’ press releases. This is an interesting announcement: League of Legends (DotA: the next generation) will be free.

RMT shop? Yes, of course. The stated intent is that the paid-for options will be cosmetic, convenience, or quicker access. You pay for options to be unlocked that you would otherwise need to earn. This could be done perfectly properly. This could also be done by making the non-pay option a ridiculous grind. City of Heroes intended the paid-for packs to be mostly cosmetic; each has included a very nice but not overly devastating power, and you mostly pay for costume pieces and travel convenience there. I reserve judgment until we have details (some to come Friday).

The most important developer quote:

Yes, the person who plays a lot and pays us $0 will have everything that the guy who pays us money but plays a moderate amount does except:
1) He will be missing some champion SKINS (not champions, but goth annie, black minotaur, plus more to come).
2) He may be missing a few minor convenience features.

What they will have in common at that point is:
1) Access to all champions
2) Access to all runes (the hardcore guy who pays $0 may have access to more realistically)
3) Max level summoners
4) Access to the new maps, matchmaking modes, etc as they come available.

: Zubon

The Dangers of Self-Insertion

Quite a few writers and artists have abused the fourth wall by putting themselves in their works. By sheer mass, the majority must be fanfic writers. Some use veiled substitutes for themselves or idealized versions (see Atlas Shrugged and Twilight), but others go right ahead and dive in. The wisest have done so in works under their exclusive control.

There is no way that Statesman “is” Jack Emmert in this sense. That was his handle and a role he played occasionally, and it can be unfortunate to put something you think of as your character under someone else’s control, but few people think they are killing Jack Emmert by proxy in the Lord Recluse Strike Force. Are Guards Black and Moor closer to the (now) 38 Studios employees? I really don’t know that they have any background, just a reference someone mentioned to me.

I mention this because Chris Sims, your friend and mine, points out the odd case of Grant Morrison. He wrote himself into an Animal Man comic, which means that he is an official, in-continuity DC character. (One can argue about whether DC can claim copyright on his person or likeness, make action figures, etc. This is not my point today.) Another writer took advantage of this and used Grant Morrison as a villain in his comic, killing him off quickly.

: Zubon

As of now, Kill Ten Rats is the only place on record in the entire universe (well, Google) as using the phrase “see Atlas Shrugged or Twilight.” It takes a rare sagacity to put those words together.