Chase_Arcanum

Now, I'm biased because I met the guy and found most peoples' negative attitudes based more on misreading or taking offense at one phrase/action instead of putting it in context, but here's my thoughts.


"That Guy" LOVES this game. It was his baby. It was a huge career leap for him and he poured his blood, sweat, and tears into it for over half a decade. It means more to him than it ever could to you or to me. Always did and always will.

He took a LOT of the flack from the players as the lead dev- and he assumed all that blame --the "buck stops here" for design decisions that were far from his alone. Many of the devs we have here today would have had design on some of the more reviled systems, but they were insulated from the hate and blame. That was OK with him, because both the change AND him taking the heat was good for the game.

Letting go of CoH to help fund other projects wasn't a decision made lightly-- and he's likely suffered more than a few moments akin to "empty nest syndrome" out of it. Ultimately, though, if Cryptic's other interests were going to make it, he had to let his first one leave home... but I'm positive he still keeps an eye on how it's doing, celebrates its victories, mourns its losses, and sometimes, like any parent, wonders WTF they're thinking with some decisions they make.

But, unlike parenting (more or less) Jack's gotta also look at what he's done and take lessons from it. What worked? What didn't? What were the strengths of the system? What were the barriers? WHAT WOULD I DO DIFFERENTLY IF I HAD TO DO IT AGAIN? He's an academic, as well, so sharing these questions and answers is part of the thought-forming process. This sometimes appears in an interview as trash talk to the uninitiated.

It isn't.

Most of Jack's wording is structured to stress that difference, but it's often ignored- the "root" message is taken out and framed in the context of a bitter rivalry that isn't there. He's saying that there are things that he'd do differently and barriers he need not worry about-- that there are market environment changes that mean that things have to change to succeed-- and he hopes his next project will be an improvement based on these lessons. That doesn't mean he doesn't love what he previously accomplished any less.





....But players tend to gather into little tribes and define each other as rivals whose hate and anger exceed extreme political rivalries. They read veiled insults where there was only meant respectful disagreement and see business changes as treasonous hatred. They assume that their devs are just as committed to the hostilities as they are, and not that they might maintain some sort of professional respect and perhaps even sometimes-strained friendship with people that they shared so much creative effort with. No matter what they say to clarify the issue, someone over at the CO boards will be cheerleading on the 'attacks' and piling on more of his own less veiled criticism... and over here in CoH-land, there will be people mired in bitterness over his betrayal.

I have different conflicting opinions of the whole name system:

1) It is often much easier to get old players to come back to try new content than it is to coax new players to risk a game they took a pass on previously. City of Heroes is VERY friendly to the interrupted-player compared to most other MMO's I've sampled. It is very VERY easy to come back to without a feeling of being left behind. Anything that raises the spectre of a barrier for returning players will have some sort of negative impact on the game. This has to be weighed against the potential benefits of any purging.

2) It has not been proven that any kind of name purge will free up any of the names that people are seeking. It is known that previous purges had VERY little impact- both from dev statements and anecdotal evidence. Even among those names freed, we don't know how many are DESIRABLE names and how many of these long-departed players were stuck using alphanumeric substitution and 1337 speak to get what they want. Either way, if you "raise the threshold" to increase the # of desirable names freed, then you also raise the barrier mentioned in #1.

3) Heck, we don't even know if other player behavior (name squatting) may have a bigger effect than old-account names when it comes to "desirable" names.

4) There have been several million characters made in City of Heroes and unlike fantasy games, these names are often real-world words or phrases. Names can be as defining to a character as the costume and powerset, and sometimes, when names carry dual meaning, using synonyms or appending adjectives to the original word will dilute that value. Thus, having to compromise on the "ideal" name can be as crippling to a character concept, if not more crippling, than a costume appearance or the lack of a powerset combo that you'd use. This can make good character concepts flounder or be discarded, and frustrate the player.

I know I've abandoned more than a few concepts because the name/appearance/story couldn't mesh together as I intended.

5) Name handles have historically (until recently) been unique in muds/mmo's and were often the principal identifier. Changing this in EXISTING games, where the standard is well-defined, is risky behavior that will lead to confusion and frustration as peoples' assumptions are challenged.

6) There is no "RIGHT" to exclusive access to a name. Plain and simple. The dev's game structure creates a situation where squatter's rights and "firsts" apply, but they could easily structure it any other way, changing it as they see the market needs change, as is their right in the EULA. I generally believe it is bad to make such changes to an already-launched game unless there are CRITICAL issues.

One can argue that unique names make sense in the genre-- generally, due to product trademarks, there's only one hero for each name. We have a superhero registry, so there's an in-game reason for enforcing individual names.

But would a VILLAIN succumb to the to the rules of a hero / villain registry?
Is such a registry international? or National? If there's a "grey fox" in the US registry, does he have name rights for "Grey Fox" internationally? If one of those international versions travels to Paragon, does he have to change his name and register locally or is there some international treaty? What about the German translation of "Grey Fox"?

The simple hero registry system works fine as a cursory explanation but doesn't hold up to hard examination... or when it does, it opens up the possibility of identical names.

7) Duplicate names are less of an issue than people assume. Just like real-life, most of us have someone out there with a name identical to ours. I've worked in an office with seven 'Daves' and we naturally adapted- with aliases, proximity, and context easily clarifying which we're talking about.

In any given game, users are logged on for only a limited time, and that time is spread among many of their alts. The population of any one zone or chat channel is limited to an even smaller segment of the population. For all but the most common hero names, the odds of two characters with identical names being in the same region or chat channel at any given time. When that happens, most (non-mmo) chat will append a subscript number to each user to distinguish them. Thus CO's 'character@global' default chat handle isn't necessarily the only way to handle it. A similar 'character@shard' could similarly be hidden most of the time.

CO's 'character@global' probably should have defaulted to the chat option of "global hidden, but available on mouseover" as this would have been less glaring and intrusive, but they likely assumed that duplicate-name confusion would be great enough that they needed the clarity. Interestingly, though, I tried CO- a single server system that had at launch hundreds of instances of zones and subscribed to several popular "global" channels. There were very few UNINTENTIONAL duplicate names... despite NOT being divided by server or zone, and despite the fact that these specialty global channels often cause clustering of people with common interests (and thus slightly increase the likelihood of common names).

The challenge of duplicate names comes with PERSISTENT IDENTITY- is the "Yu Ying" I spoke to last night the same as the one that I'm speaking to today? This is where globals become more valuable-- we're an alt-heavy community and we already frequently use globals to keep track of friends across alts, so why not use it for keeping track of persistence among characters of the same name?

(To answer my last question, and wrap this up... I don't like CoH using globals for this on principle. CoH initially introduced the global system with assurances of privacy and the understanding that it would be shared/known only to those you wished to share it with. This was obviously blown by a few design oversights and then a more recent issue pretty much stripped even that thin veneer away. I still, though, adhere to the original ideal, and prefer that it only be abandoned to address a critical game issue. I don't think that the naming system has reached that threshold yet, so I don't support any of those changes.

I'll only count my characters that have passed level 10 (40), since the others number too many to count and are too low-level to make use of an alternate build:

Of those, ONE uses the second build (and I was investigating options for one more).

So, that's 2 out of 40.

According to Mid's, "Swift" unslotted amounts to only a 35% increase to run speed-- not enough to really be considered thematically-breaking in any way, in my opinion.

Our characters already run faster and jump higher than any sporting professional out there, so a little more hardly breaks anything. Besides, we also have walk for the truly casual movement behavior.

One of the great strengths of instanced-play is that those instances scale to meet the challenge of your team... but as you said, the downside can be the repetitive tilesets. They throw a few unique variations out there- the garage done like an auto shop, the carnie warehouse, etc... but they're very few & far between.

I'd encourage checking out the Architect Entertainment missions- the player-creations seem to make more use of the custom maps & outdoor instances than the dev content. Helps keep things feel more varied.

Also, I'm told you'll see more custom maps in Task Forces.. I haven't done any, but I'm told, so consider checking them out if things seem too dull.

Heck, although the police-scanner missions can be on the common repeatable tiles, you can milk a good 20-40 minutes of gameplay on the safeguard maps, with their city blocks and separate indoor areas.

Finally, if you like street sweeping, don't wait for a contact. End-of-mission rewards are nice, but you can do pretty good with the sheer steamrolling effect you can get in a good Hazard zone like Dark Astoria. Imagine up your own reason to go there and just tear the foe apart... then move on to the ruins of Eden or the industrial waste of Crey's Folly. It really does help break up the pattern a bit.