Category: General

1. Favorite Zone: For rockin’ times, I must go with Perez Park. It was a horror when you got the “Defeat 10 Circle of Thorns in Perez Park” back in the day, but the Park is a great place for low-level group fun. Get four to eight friends together and rampage, hitting Blood Brothers and Skulls in the street or, at later levels, all the slime monsters in the lake. Great smashing fun, plus the occasional Giant Monster to play with.
2. Favorite Origin: Race doesn’t mean much in CoH, does it? I used to make everyone a mutant, because there were the most mutant-origin enemies in game, so you had a better chance of getting free enhancements. Then they re-arranged those one fine day. Technology gets the nod: it gives you a damage bonus on the Nemesis Staff, and its level 1 bonus power has a chance to hold, which lets low-level Controllers start using Containment early.
3. Favorite Archetype: Defender. On paper, I like Controllers more (full control + 80% of support beats full support + 80% of damage), but revealed preferences (3 level-capped Defenders) suggest that I am a Defender at heart. I thought I would like Corruptors more, but I seem to have a preference for playing blue-side, where there are more support powers in play.
4. Favorite Feature: The costume designer. No one does it better. Good luck to Cryptic in topping it in their next games. Second place: scaling instances, which adjust the number of difficulty of opponents based on how many people you bring. The same mission is solo, small group, and full group content. Third place: sidekicks and exemplars, which let you play with your friends even if your levels are very different. Wow, CoH has a lot of great features that too many games have failed to copy, even though the game is more than four years old.
5. Favorite Power: Fulcrum Shift. It is an area-effect damage debuff, and every enemy that is debuffed gives off an area-effect damage buff, and the caster gives off an area-affect double damage buff. If people are not spread out, it means that everyone is at the power cap. It stacks with itself, in case everyone is spread out. The debuff stacks, so if you have any other sort of damage debuff (and Kinetics comes with one), you can keep an archvillain at the damage floor.
6. Favorite Task Force/Story Arc: “The MegaMech Cometh,” Ernesto Hess’s task force. A little of the logic was broken with the release of CoV, but its gameplay is top-tier. It caps a set of story arcs that led you across the zone, starting at the docks with the task force completing in the mouth of a volcano. It is usually around two hours, so a good evening’s activity that does not drag. It has some very fast missions, one-room big fights, and it actually has a reason why you do not start with the contact’s phone number. The Council is a fun villain group with variety in its members. You can see the end coming as you fight in the Council base, with windows facing inside the volcano where the final fight happens. And then you have the last scene, fighting your way up scaffolding inside a volcano to keep the pilot from entering a mech. Second place: Lady Grey, with the added bonus of being able to team with your villainous friends.
7. Favorite Issue: I feel boring going with Issue 3, since I picked its Task Force as my favorite, but it had a lot of good stuff. Striga was the first themed zone that walked you through it via contacts; the TF is awesome; the story arc provides interesting temporary powers; oh wait, there is a second Task Force, one that starts with caves full of vampires and werewolves; we missed the Fifth Column, but the even that ushered them out was a lot of fun, as well as the first time enemies actually fought each other instead of pantomiming; Kheldian and epic power pools; and the short-lived Calvin Scott Task Force (3!), which was enjoyable. Some of the other Issues brought more important features, but I could not pick one that finished what was missing at release (adding levels 40-50 (twice!), giving heroes the villain content, maybe revamping zones).

: Zubon

A quick idea to throw to the masses.  My wife and I watch all our shows on the internet.  We get to watch our favorite shows for about 1-3 minutes of ad watching for an hour long show.  Could this be brought to MMOs?

Obviously MMOs have tried in game advertising.  Planetside had in-game advertising while players waited for transportation between battles.  Matrix Online had them strewn throughout the MegaCity as well.  I believe Anarchy Online was the first big MMO to implement in game advertising.  I think the problem was two-fold: (1) it impinged on player’s feel of immersion.  Seeing Fanta ads in Planetside breaks the feeling that the developers were trying to create through lore, props, etc.  (2) the advertisers could not be sure how well their ads were doing.  I know I barely look at the developer created wall-hangings and stained glass windows depicting actual lore.  In a world where my mind automatically parses out ads on countless web pages, why would anything be different in an active game?

But, what if just prior to a play session a gamer could watch a few ads?  The player logs in, the system checks to see how much ad-time is “owed” based on past play time, and then it starts streaming a few ads to the player.  A player who is “hardcore” with “no time for this $%#&” could pay the monthly subscription fee and get no ads.

This allows advertising without breaking the game immersion, gives players more options to pay for the game, and gives advertisers a way to gain access to an audience they may not normally get.  If I can generate enough money for a big TV studio to keep LOST afloat through minimal ad-watching, shouldn’t there be a way I can pay for a $15 subscription by doing the same?

–Ravious
tuned to a dead station

I have been hating on PR lately, but what sort of PR do you use to snow people who believe their own PR? The Arnell Group figured it out. I could leave the commentary to Bruce Webster, but I, like Language Log before me, feel the need to highlight. They have covered the text (“Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.”) well, so let me outline the visual explanations.

• Page 3 explains how the new Pepsi logo was developed by sending DNA into the future and then backtracking a bit.
• Page 5 relates the logo to 5000-year-old Hindu traditions and the Mona Lisa.
• There are nine pages of loops that have a tenuous relationship to anything in the world, but claim proprietary geometry to Pepsi, so don’t you go using circles and ovals.
• Page 21 claims a relationship to the Earth’s core, its magnetic field, and … no, that’s completely incoherent.
• Two pages of molested happy faces follow. Show me on the Pepsi can where the bad man touched you.
• Page 26 shows how a sufficient quantity of Pepsi (3) will create a relativistic gravitational pull, sucking the shopper through the wall of the aisle and into a spherical Pepsi aisle. This may relate to page 24, which shows how 2D figures can transform into 3D figures. Mario simply failed to move correctly.
• It concludes with the creation of the universe, in which units of distance are equal to units of velocity. There is an exponentially expanding 8 light year Pepsi universe.

: Zubon

I was not aware that Kill Ten Rats appeared in a couple of developer podcasts recently. Granted, Kingdom of Loathing developer podcasts, but I like the game, and it is probably more popular than any MMO you have made. For most of you, at any rate; if you have a link to the right under “MMORPGs,” okay, most of those out-sell Kingdom of Loathing. Not all.

Anyway, 120 Minutes with Jick and Mr. Skullhead on January 29 and February 5 continued discussion from the The Price is Right post and Ultimatum follow-up. Which means this has now spilled into three KTR posts and two KOL podcasts. For your convenience, xSmootx made this video mocking everyone involved. Huggles! He then connects it to professional wrestling.

For reference, the “scathing criticism” was why I get burned out on KoL periodically. We exchanged a couple of e-mails. I may not have mentioned then that I binge heavily when I play KoL, like MMO player heavily, two hardcore characters while speed ascending on another. I am not entirely healthy, but I have a dancing badger pet, so life is good.

: Zubon

I hate the MMO you play.  It must have been developed by baboons!  For all I know you have the IQ of a dead baboon for choosing that game.  Learn about you and your MMO after the break.

Continue reading I Hate Your MMO

There is a lot of buzz in forums and the blogosphere about the recent layoffs from Mythic (and later THQ).  The extremes can be found at Broken Toys (sympathetic view from the inside) and Tobold’s MMORPG Blog (harsh view from the outside).  What I want to comment on comes from the statement from Mark Jacobs (top boss of Mythic) concerning the layoffs at Mythic after the launch of Warhammer Online.

With respect to customer service, quality assurance and play testing, prior to the launch of WAR, we hired additional people to deal with the rush of demand associated with an MMO launch and to insure the best possible experience for our players.

This seems to be commonplace with the development of MMO’s these days.  Age of Conan had to have layoffs from their pre-launch bloat as well.  Is the MMO development culture now one filled with migrant developers?

Continue reading Migrant Developers