Chase_Arcanum

Right, I'm not concerned about doing EVERY contact- I enjoy it that I have the variety. I'm more concerned with two things that happen all-too-frequently before level 15:

1) I level so fast that I outlevel a contact before I complete its arc... and am stuck facing lower-level goons that are no challenge.

You can't eliminate this entirely, but you do anticipate a reasonable naturally-paced progression range. A contact should be introduced in a way that has a reasonable likelihood that the contact is still relevant to the player and has arcs that can be completed before they lose relevance. Right now, before level 15, you get second-tier zone contacts that often have nothing to say to you... or if you bother to start their stories, you outlevel them before completing them. That is bad pacing.... and a waste of resources.

They aren't even an alternate story path for another character- i won't get them on THAT character either without the same thing happening... unless I really REALLY play the system.

2) I'm barely in a zone before I move on. Again, it isn't like my alt is going to uncover more of the zone, because she'll likely breeze through just as quickly. That's a waste of good resources- and unnecessary.

If you made all the contacts available for selection at the first tier, you'd have some more variety (particularly heroside).

If you expanded the level range of a map a bit, like taking Kings Row up to level 15, then perhaps people will get to a second-tier contact, making the 'dry spell' of missing missions in higher levels less notable.

And... maybe by spending more time in places like Kings' Row... they'll eventually spend less in one of the places they've grown bored of at the higher levels.

Dunno... how much of CO's apparent December-Jan "losses" were merely lifetime subscribers that were too busy in the closed beta to log in? Doesn't cost CO anything to have paid-up, but less-active players and the single-server design means that they don't have the problem with many low-population servers...

I believe Ed Castranova was one of the economists. He's often interviewed on MMO economics by the news, has written on the topic, and IIRC even testified to congress related to it. He originally made headlines waaay back by estimating the GDP of everquest based on the then-ebay RMT value of game gold, the average gold-drop-per-player-hour, and the number of players. He also writes on the academic-ish virtual world blog Terra Nova along with a bunch of others... often a good read for talk on the social, legal, and economic issues of MMO's.

From what I recall, there were several issues that really sent things cartwheeling out of control:

1) The "item wear" costs didn't anticipate the extremely easy farming that was possible when uberloot became available. You could farm well-paying quests (Rancor hunts were popular for this) with little risk, very little wear to your gear, and very nice payout.

The devs actually were surprised that the players had min/maxed out crafting items so thoroughly. Crafted gear was based on the quality of the ingredients, and that quality available for harvest varied over time. They'd designed things so the quality of the resources spawning at any one time wouldn't net out armor with more than 40% resists.... and if they did, the 'armor penalty' (better armor subtracted from available action stats) would make wearing that armor counterproductive.

They didn't account for players saving the best resources for several months until they could craft things at whopping 80% to 90% resist... and doctor buffs that multiplied your stats so much that the armor penalty became nothing... and weapons that were similarly allowing dps a good 200% over the best crafted values seen in beta. Since the QUALITY of an item wasn't really tied to the COST of production (factories were flat-rate rent and power costs, regardless of what they were producing) these uberloot items were made relatively cheap (as far as 'drain' was concerned) but produced (often-gamebreaking) performance increases that made the faucet turn into Niagra Falls.

2) There was a currency dupe bug. It produced trillions of credits that got widely distributed VERY quickly. They banned some 270 accounts, then found most of these seemed to be innocent recipients of generous donors. In all, they managed to retrieve something like 70% of the duped currency before it got too circulated to be killed fairly (if you used it to buy my armor, and then the devs took it back from me, should I get the armor back? What if YOU got it from selling something else already?) That still left hundreds of billions of currency dumped into the economy without a planned balancing 'sink' at a time when hundreds of billions of credits actually seemed like a lot.

3) They realized that much of what was a true "hard" mudflation-resistant system wasn't fun for the players, who were used to growing in wealth substantially faster in other games, so they gradually added more "faucets" and lessened the "sinks."

This was probably because they miscounted the "sinks. See, if you cancelled the game, but left a house or factory up, that item still had a rent cost, and that rent cost came out of your character's bank. So, even though your bank money was essentially "out of circulation" anyway, you got counted in the "sink" count. So... four months after you and thousands of others have left, never planning to return, the system compares the 'faucet' of money entering the economy that month with the inflated 'drain' and miscalculates the true monthly faucet:drain ratio. That made the devs believe that mudflation was more controlled than it actually was, and probably made them more confident in tweaking things.

Yep.

Read alot about it several years back- was reading alot of MMO design stuff as a tangent to a development project my employer was proposing. The talk on economics and the inflation issue goes back quite a ways. One game currency got SO ridiculously broken that players abandoned it and started using a particular loot drop as its' own form of currency instead.

Back then, many economist-gamers had ideas on how to develop a "real" economic model with perfect faucet-drain mechanics. SWG even employed economists as consultants, hoping to get it straight.

After a few hard lessons, it seems that many have changed their tune from aspiring to "make a viable, controlled, sustainable economy" to "what's most important is fun... and the ones players find fun are also essentially broken, so our goal is now to make the most enjoyable broken system possible."

Agreed.

Also, these "new currencies" also have the tendency of making old currencies less relevant, so that those at the top of the pile don't have too much... err... influence... over those closer to the bottom... They can't dominate certain sales.


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Other people in the thread have mentioned "optional" money sinks.... these things rarely work well as intended because the people MOST prone to abuse the currency system just opt out of these sinks.

A good example of a bad sink was the Everquest 2 "player homes."

They cost rent, and the bigger/better homes cost even more to rent. And they cost to decorate (both player-crafted and game-crafted) and they cost to upgrade the walls... and someone could spend a WHOLE LOT OF TIME decorating them and playing them... all the while NOT EARNING A DIME.

So, it seemed like a good money-sink. People dumped money down the drain and while they were doing it, didn't earn a damn thing.

THE PROBLEM:
Not everybody did it.

The people that REALLY liked the homes were sinking all their money into them... and earning money at a lower "play rate" than people that were out adventuring all the time and ignoring the home (time decorating and playing IN the houses earned little to no 'faucet' money). In the meantime, things like armor-repair and other "sinks" that were unpopular but affected people actually adventuring and 'drinking from the fauced" were removed or reduced substantially. THOSE people were earning, but not sinking it away.

The devs had hoped that the high-achievers would also upgrade to the more-expensive homes, but achiever-centrics just looked at the rent prices and went "meh... not worth it" while the people that WANTED such social spaces were being bled dry trying to afford them. One of the notes on SOE's RMT experiments was that MANY socializers engaged in RMT to subsidize their playstyle- they paid more to dump the money into their housing rent because they'd rather spend their time doing things that didn't earn them rent money.

And the devs were in a bind as mudflation crept up. If they'd kept adventure-related expenses as they were (the unpopular 'repair' costs), they could have nudged them upward to affect the people that were gulping fastest from the "faucet." As it was, they were draining mostly from those with the least-abusive play practices.

OOPs.

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MUDFlation isn't going to go away anytime soon. It's been so deeply-ingrained into player expectations (not just MUDS and MMO's though... people often see ever-increasing money rewards in single-player games as a kind of "score" that they're reluctant to see go up or stay neutral, too) that the best we can really expect is "well, it's grossly out of control, but it's still kinda fun."

I think that's where the CoH economy usually is.

Won't happen, though. Even though it's in-game currency, the anti-online-gambling laws were rewritten in a way that would cause NCSoft a great deal of grief. ((Essentially lawmakers anticipated many gambling sites offereing tradeable "in-game" currency, claiming they didn't actually have any real money exchanges... and then made dummy companies that offered RMT services that did exactly that. The laws take that into account in a way that could target MMO's that added "casino-like" games))

I was answering Faultline specifically, and how slapping a few arcs in there are all it would take.

The other zones, particularly the starter zones (atlas, galaxy, kings, mercy, oakes) might do with a facelift or not, but their broader issues are graphics, but other systemic problems that would best be addressed first.... like the leveling overprogression I mentioned. That doesn't mean a complete overhaul, but it DOES mean making changes NOW that would otherwise affect the story you tell there.

I've been stressing the starter zones because it's most apparent there. Too many stories outleveled before you complete them. Too many contacts you visit just to be given another contact name. Too much waste.

Before adding MORE to the zone, you should be defining things better- do the level ranges of particular baddies need expanded? Should, for example, everything in KR go from level 7 through 14 instead of 6 through 9? What's the estimated reward from the arc and where does that put the player in the zone progression? Is it going to be like faultline, where you have to leave between contacts because you don't level fast enough to take the story all in one solid sweep?

CLEAN THAT UP. Make those underlying changes that are necessary, and until then, focus the content development on the expansion, so the new praetorian zones can be full of fresh, solid content that'll attract new and old players to give an old game another chance.

Otherwise, you'll just be revising all that new content again when you finally DO get around to the systemic issues.

The only bot that should be permitted in any game is the Autocamp 2000 or one of its many successors. The City of Heroes version is currently in beta testing.

The blind/deaf villainess "Helen Killer" is already in use on several servers.

*hides something behind his back*

Well... um... uh.... some of us can predict explosions better than others?

As others have suggested, you appear to grossly underestimate the effort it takes to produce new content. The AE tools aren't the tools the devs had available to them, nor were they as refined until the AE tools were developed.


Right... so what IS your design for dumping new content into a zone that already has the old content... and already has starter contacts that spoon-feed you that old content... and already has you leveling past existing content too often...without actually removing that old content?

Give a new contact and make the other one... what? Unlockable? Buried? Removed? You either make it functionally inaccessible (and therefore might as well remove it) or you make the new user experience potentially divided between them...

Yes. Or more specifically, other things were more important.

The issue WAS worse before, then was "fixed" as well as they could with the tools they had. Some contacts were missed because, as I've said, you've grossly underestimated the ease of such changes and errors are made. Some may have been missed because something in the arc's design would have required redesign for it to work.

And you would have failed miserably. The problem with faultline, as well-explained by the dev notes of its release, was inherent in the whole zone design. people would've avoided the zone- and your precious 3-6 arcs- just like they do with the shadow shard.

It was inconvenient to play in... and that'd have been a thoroughly wasted 3-6 arcs.

As for how long it can take? More than you probably think. I've heard "industry estimates" from 60 to 300 hours of dev time per hour of player time, depending on various factors, including the quality of the tools involved. Given that I worked in generating online flash-based training for soldiers where the estimate was normally 300+ hours of dev time for 1 hour of learning time while taking advantage of rather "canned" code, I can believe that.

If you want to use AE as an example, remember that AE tools were better and more robust than anything and everything that started before. Then remember that, unlike a fan that "starts development" when he opens the editor, there's a whole range of Conceptualizing... of meetings to get approval for the concept... of scripting it out... of getting peer review and sign-off on the script.. of putting it in... of peer review... and revisions all along the way.

Then keep in mind that the time also includes the ideas that are tried, but end up on the cutting room floor when things just don't pan out at some review point along the way.

It happens... A LOT.

That's my thinking: and there are other second-tier contacts like that in Atlas, Galaxy (grossly underused zone there) . Port Oakes, and Kings' Row. Before writing new ones, they should be redefining these to be first-tier contacts, then perhaps look at the quality of the stories & tweak what we see. That might be the simplest way to increase variety for altaholics in the time-being.

Of course, that also increases the number of choices a player must make at the start, and contrary to what players say they want, new users are often very skittish about making the WRONG decision. Players faced with too many choices too early on are more likely to quit after their 30 days' trial.... as contrary as that may sound to some of us.

Sadly, when people look at the WoW numbers and the WoW mechanics, it seems that putting new carrots out for the achievers is where the money is.... as much as I enjoy playing just for playings' sake.

That's where I'm leaning, too. The easiest solution would be to just offer all the names & not worry about it.

I do disagree that the morality associated to the name is subjective- back when CoV was introduced, the devs gave some insight into their thought process when it came to the name and expressing the right characterization of villain sets. They saw value in making the distinction back then... but those really WERE new archetypes... not just renamed archetypes, risking confusion for purely aesthetic reasons....

...just was doing a kinda weak devil's advocate to suggest that we don't KNOW with absolute certainty that they went that direction... just that it's probably the most likely path to take.

Well, as a thought..

We've heard some talk about a new starting area in praetoria... something where you're neither hero nor villain... but your decisions there may reveal the path you choose. Do you thus start with a hero or villain archetype? The names kinda characterize these as rather "good" or "evil"... do you confuse the playerbase by renaming ALL of these into something more neutral? OR do you start as some strange pseudo-archetype that evolves into a hero or villain archetype based on the decisions you make? Is this the origin of the rumored "spy" archetype: a character that is neither hero nor villain archetype but can assume the identity of either based on events in-game?

1)Adding new content missions to the same old zones. If you were going to add new content with new tech that's easy for people to find, do you put it in a fresh area that also hilights emerging tech, art styles, and advancing storylines, where someone will find ONLY new stuff, or mix it in with the older stories, so someone has to sift through or play trial-and-error to find the new "good stuff?

That's one reason why (we've been told) there will be an entirely NEW starting area in GR. One that focuses on the new tech and the new options available to players.

2) Contact "display phone number" early in the arc... If I'm not mistaken, the phone number used to be given at the SECOND relationship point but at around the time of CoV's release (which made you get them earlier) this was changed to the FIRST contact point, so they've already streamlined that once as a QOL issue.

It also wasn't entirely flawless. CoH had some arcs where they EXPECTED a travel to the contact (for an ambush point) so they didn't actually give a delivery mission to that contact to go with the ambush. The earlier phone number borked that. Some contacts also had CUSTOM text in certain points that referred to phone numbers you'd already seen for some time.

None of these were game-breaking, but it illustrates some of the issues with just 'changing a flag'


3) I'm not entirely a naysayer to revising old content, I just think there are systemic issues that should be addressed- and that will probably be addressed BEST by a zone re-imagining (like Faultline) than wasting time tweaking existing arcs very much or slapping new arcs into the same aging instance. Heck, some of these issues are side effects of other game improvements that have changed some of the core assumptions that went into the zone design.

a) We level too fast. (the improvement) Really. It's gotten to the point that it really has started to diminish the new-user-experience because the introductory zones' range of contacts are out of sync with true leveling progress.

Really.

We come into Atlas, Galaxy, or Mercy at level 2 and can find ourselves sent elsewhere (Kings, Hollows, and Oakes) as early as level 6... and Kings and Oakes only go to level 9, really.

We barely touch those zones. With the repeatedly revised leveling curve (I'll exclude patrol XP from the equation for those that don't "create and park" a hero for a while) we barely complete a SINGLE arc in those areas before being sent off to another... despite there being MULTIPLE contacts to visit there... (IIRC, some are second-tier contacts that are VERY underused here... but not sure. last time I bothered with a SECOND contact in Kings' row, I was fighting foes that were going blue/green/gray before I was finished... so I just move on now).

New users that don't "know better" easily outlevel the first safeguard/mayhem and miss one of the better rewards. Heaven forbid they actually think about fighting bad guys they encounter on their way to contacts or mission doors- they'll outlevel the mission they're going to.... or be fighting grays in a story arc they've flown past.

Add more content to those zones? Maybe after we clean up the expected path-of-progress, but let's not make things more jumbled up yet.

Heck, Villainside I usually try to make a point of getting the atlas and Kings' Row mayhem missions for the two travel powers. I level so quick, though, that I have to skip out on the second Mercy Island contacts (Mongoose or that Mad Scientist) just because if I did THEM and then the 3 'newspaper' missions, I usually leveled past 10 and missed the offer for the Atlas park heist. Don't even get me started on the "Unlockable" contact in Port Oakes. If you don't discover her early and focus on unlocking her first, you'll outlevel her before you ever get a chance to take the arc.

b) We travel too easily. Again, I'm serious. I LOVE IT, don't get me wrong, but the world wasn't originally designed with the idea that we'd run door to door, ignoring every spawn in between because we so easily could. That creates an imbalance... and one that we've only made worse over time.

Once upon a time, the devs were concerned that people did nothing but random "street hunts-" so they upped the mission rewards. Since then, we've had our own "Architect" issues come and go and come again, as people realized new and improved paths to maximize XPPS, but I want to rewind to the street hunts.

See... the zones themselves have become virtually irrelevant. Most groups fly past the baddies, running door-to-door because they really aren't worth the time to stop and fight. Or we run past foes that con so much lower than us that they're irrelevant. Half the time we get a "defeat X baddies" we usually just find low-level foes that aren't worth any challenge or effort (or spend more time than should be necessary trying to FIND a challenging spawn). Even zone events like the "Troll Rave" are usually visited by badgers well after everything there cons grey.

c) We have multiple starting zones, but many players have shown a determination to run the same pattern over and over again. They'd rather roll a new player through another Sewers powerleveling session than try new arc x or y. They're oblivious to changes that were done to other arcs because they've already mapped the "optimal" reward path (or, as I confessed earlier, see some things like mayhem/safeguard travel powers as "essential" and skip over other content to make sure they get it). Will new parallel content in a zone mean more options taken, or just mean another single path people take (and complain about) as the rest go underused?

Anyone here remember back to when the devs tried their experiment with things like needing to click bombs simultaneously to succeed? Or when they added timed missions, but didn't add warnings until well afterward. In both instances, even when they made changes, players were stumbling upon ones that the devs missed because the devs' tools lacked what was necessary to adequately search, identify and fix these. Their toolset, like most MMO's under development, was kludgy and usable by professionals under VERY controlled conditions.

A little bit after that, there was an offhand dev comment that one of the problems with editing older content ("original content") is that the editors used for those were rather... raw... and the editors that have evolved since then were essentially not compatible with the old stuff. I'm not surprised- I've heard as much from other developers elsewhere, too. For games developed in that area, and constantly changing, you often get to a point where the old stuff just becomes too sketchy to touch with the updated tools. You just hold your breath and hope the next few patches don't break anything legacy TOO much...

And it's not just the old content compatibility in new tools- it can be about- finding the old art assets as well. Look at this game's age. Source management software adoption was in it's infancy... and the game industry was notoriously poor at adopting it as most of their source was for a single game... maybe one sequel, but even that was frequently on another box with different specs and entirely new models.

My point: "Revising" old content may not be much more of a time-savings than producing all-new content. You might not be able to say "you can do two revisions in half the time of a new arc" or any other kind of estimate. And since some of them aren't notably "bad" - they've just been "run too often" - you hate to remove that content entirely from the game when newer players may not have tried it. Why add 20 hours of play but remove 10 old usable hours' worth rather than just add 20?

And why, if you've got the compelling new moral-decision and branching tech do you really want to create content that follows the same old story as before... why not change the story to use the new tech? And why put moral decision content in a zone that's accessible to ONLY the good guys... or bad guys... why deal with the segregation-of-content issue again? And for that matter, why mix them in hodgepodge with the older content, where people have to dig through the old and the new to find what they want?

You could replace everything, but that's an expansion-level project. Maybe that's what's in store for the expansion AFTER GR?

Happy Belated Birthday, young'un, from another Holiday B-day'er with 3 years, 3 days on ya.

Honestly, Nobody would touch it on discrimination issues.

Antidiscrimination laws apply to discrimination against specific conditons. Discriminating on conditions not covered in that law (like country of residence) isn't an issue. In fact, beyond the narrow confines for those laws, a business is free to decide who they do business with and how. You can't, for example, refuse to sell a car to someone based on race, but you can negotiate different prices for the same car with different people... or even refuse to sell the car to someone.

Also, most of the "virtul properly" court decisions you mention are absolutely unrelated to this. Taking all the collective international court decisions together, the most they've started to say is:

1) Even if "ownership" of a virtual good is only really a "revokable license to access digital assets owned by a third party under certain terms and conditions in the course of access other third-party property" that license still has monetary value outside the "magic circle" of the game, so that "License" is property.
2) When there is property, there will be ownership disputes. These can include theft (when transcending outside the rules of the game), divorce asset division, and unlawful revocation of license (breach of contract).

There's nothing there to make the leap you're suggesting.

I think he's implying that it'll be one that was chosen back when the devs were apparently very active in playing the arcs and selecting the first batch of "dev's choice" selections back then..

EDIT: I don't endorse that cynical perspective, though.

I'm thrilled to see the event take place. I've found it incredibly hard to make anything in architect myself (the dialogue system works great for one-liners, but my limited jokes are more setup-and-deliver that isn't translating well. I've scrapped dozens of ideas) but I'm always stunned by the great material I've found in there.

It'll be good to see some of these people get recognition.

Ah, atioglxx.dll in the error message?

Had that problem on my old offsite PC. Damn thing killed any chance of a I16 comic. The uninstall crapped out & the system's now only stable in safe mode. It'd have been faster to wipe the whole damn box.

When I finally retire that box, the video card is going to be taken out, left on the driveway, and run over a few dozen times. Might even rent a mini-steamroller for the event. It'd be worth it.

Here we disagree. There are things you can do that are so beyond the norm in dev-created space, that any rational person would recognize as well beyond the scope of the game. These things, I'd have no problem with action regardless of the lack of definition.

You may not recognize them... but you may not be rational (j/k friendly ribbing :P)

I'd also support the broad generalized warning, provided it accounted for one specific element: between the "underperforming compared to the dev game" and "obvious exploit" is a VAST gray area, thanks to that overly-general description. These need a warning before action is taken, just so abuser and enforcer understand where in the spectrum the action falls.

An ambiguous-margin system only really works effectively if there's such a "warning shot" letting people know that they're approaching a dangerous zone. Ambiguous and hard-lined enforcement is where the biggest failures lie.

Hate to quote myself, but its the only way, it seems, to reply to the dolt having reading comprehension issues, but feeling upset enough about it to send anonymous hate over it.

1) read the quote: "...one example of players flocking to content that [B]under-rewarded?["/B]

I don't hate badges. Badges are a hidden shiny that you really can't put value on. The time invested in that firefighting, with very little XP or loot drop reward in that time, is significant- and you can easily spend that time earning XP, Reward, and OTHER BADGE content elsewhere.

Yet... people still do it, even though it isn't optimal.... and even AFTER they earn the badge.

I wasn't criticizing that, or demeaning badge-gathering. People do things that aren't "optimally-rewarded" ... maybe because we like them anyway... maybe because we don't need a ******* carrot on a stick to have fun... exactly the opposite of what your sub-kindergarten-reading-comprehension seems to have gotten from the post.