SlickRiptide

I don't care what it says in the "story bible". "Perilous Penelope" is not depicted in a manner consistent with an 18-year-old college freshman.

I also have two kids, one being a daughter who just turned 21. There's a big difference between "bubbly" and childish.

It certainly doesn't help matter that Jim Temblor also refers to her as if she's a child, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Nor does it help that the writers tap into childish stereotypes like "Golly-gee can I be your sidekick?" and references to specifically "atmospheric" activities like riding around on her bike making deliveries and ringing her bike bell. That's 10-year-old stuff, not fifteen-year-old stuff. It's not that it's impossible for Penny to have been 14-15 when she was making those deliveries. It's that the image taps into a cultural stereotype that is much younger than that, and with no further information to go on, that's what the brain uses to assign her a general age.

Whatever. At this point it's ingrained into my head that she's 14 in Faultline and I'm going to treat the new information as a retcon, even if it's technically not a retcon from the dev's point of view. If the writers weren't so stingy with even the least significant bits of backstory on the characters in the game, then this sort of problem wouldn't occur.

I have to say that another truly annoying thing is that it's STILL the Manticore and Friends show.

Sean Fish must get some satisfaction from the fact that his own Mary Sue character not only continues to be the star of the show, but he also continues to blatantly break the law and outright murder people and/or attempt to murder them while receiving no punishment or come-uppance for it at all.

But then, he's Justin Sinclair and he has the best lawyers in the world working for him, apparently. The Countess could learn a few pointers from him.

Whatever. I'm still waiting for whatever virtue this story is supposed to have that makes it worth spending $35 on it.

tl;dr summary: My spending at other games tends to be about enhancing existing characters, where my spending in CoH tends to be about investing in new characters.

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A thought had been percolating around in my forebrain for a while and it finally made its way up to the surface where I could make some sense out of it. It led met a realization that the nature of my purchases in the Paragon Market are fundamentally different than the nature of my purchases at most other F2P markets I've patronized. It's a difference that's significant enough to warrant some examination as to whether it speaks in some way to the motivations of the general population.

Generally speaking, when I buy things in other games, I typically have one or two characters that are my "mains". When I buy something in the market, I usually intend for it to be targeted for the use of one of my main characters. Even when the item is some kind of account-wide item or is transferable to other characters via a shared bank or email, the ability to share in that fashion is typically a secondary consideration. If I could not share, the odds are that I would still make the purchase because my motivation is to use it with my mains.

By contrast, my purchases in the Paragon Market are almost always driven by a desire to enhance my overall account. There are exceptions. I bought the wolf pet at its premium price because I wanted the wolf pet. It was nice that it's available for all of my characters, but I would have been pretty strongly compelled to buy it regardless if it was a single-character purchase (though I'd have expected a lower price in that case).

Overall, though, my purchases in the market tend to be powersets, costume bundles, and the special travel powers like the rocket board that I know will enhance characters with certain concepts. I have not purchased any consumables or enhancements in the market (though I have purchased super packs recently and acquired some of those things as a result).

The thing about these purchases is that, for the most part, I don't intend them to be used by pre-existing characters. It's true that a couple of sets have been used to fine-tune a pre-existing concept, but by and large none of my existing characters have made use of the new costumes. New powersets are not even useful to existing characters. The only reason at all to purchase a powerset is that you intend to create a new character using that powerset (or replace an existing character, which amounts to the same thing).

In other words, my spending at other markets is to enhance one or more existing characters while my spending in the Paragon Market is nearly always intended to enhance some character that doesn't actually exist yet. It's designed to expand my options in regards to my account as a whole rather than expand the capabilities of any particular character that currently exists on the account.

When the motivation for purchasing expansion content is viewed in this light, it makes me wonder whether this is just a personal holdover for me , behaving like a subscriber even though I am not a VIP, or if it's something that is general to some measurable part of the player base.

If it can be generally quantified as a motivation behind spending, then it says something about what the focus of the market should be. It might also say something about the value of character slots. I'm not sure there. I've not purchased any, because I still have slots from my veteran's allotment that I have yet to use up. I don't really have any feelings yet about the value of character slots at whatever price they are currently set to have.

It does make me wonder how the recent sale on character slots went off and how profitable it was.

It also makes me wonder just what sort of content the market ought to be carrying. If the best selling content consists of items that enhance the overall account, then what sorts of items are there that can do that, aside from the obvious selections of costume bundles and powersets?

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that I was able to qualify my Paragon Market experience as being so markedly different from the other games I play. I'd be interested to hear if other people feel similarly about their own experiences or if it's just my personal thing.

If you've ever wanted a glimpse into the job of a MMO designer, then here is an interesting glimpse into what one designer at a rival MMO does with his time. The page is public so you should not need a facebook account to read it despite it being a facebook page.


Similarly, on the chance that interested parties might have missed seeing it, Matt Miller aka Positron has a game design blog that is often enlightening.

(Note that the first link is the personal page of the designer in question and the rival MMO is never explicitly named, so I believe this should squeak by the mod gods, but I may report the thread myself just to get a judgment on that early.)

There's a certain charm in turning an entire office wall into a whiteboard...

I think that arguing the semantics of gambling versus non-gambling is sort of beside the point. If I buy a pack of baseball cards, I'm technically gambling, but I doubt anyone is going to close down the local sports card shop. A parent might come in and complain about the money his kid is spending on the attempt to get an autographed foil of the current big-name athlete and ask why he can't just buy a factory set. The dealer will, of course, tell him that factory sets suck and sell poorly compared to boxes of packs with random assortments in them.

This happens to be true. Packs are fun. Factory sets are boring, even if you do have a complete collection after you buy one. In fact, factory sets completely short circuit the whole business and point of the collecting. That's why completists may like the option but collectors who enjoy the activity of collecting really don't get much satisfaction from them.

The super packs are identical to baseball cards except that they are generated by a dice roll at the point of purchase instead of being pre-generated, or so I presume from the descriptions.

Yes, there's random chance involved. It's even fun to anticipate what you might get. Is it gambling? If gambling means any activity governed by random chance where you put up an ante and get a payout of some kind, then I suppose it is gambling. Is it bad? *shrug*

In the end, vote with your wallet. There are plenty of "factory sets" in the market already. This just gives players a different way to acquire game stuff. A mini-game, if you will.

Another non-superhero game I play just wrapped up a promotion they called "Packapalooza". They put all of their "super packs" (conceptually, packs of 7 cards with commons, uncommons and rares that occasionally would be ultra-rares) on sale. The newest packs were at a very minor discount of like 5% while the oldest pack was discounted a full 50%. They even brought back a seasonal pack that had been rotated out; the equivalent of opening the Chalet in the summer.

I mention this because it's reasonable to expect a similar marketing tactic in CoH. They're marketing the super packs like baseball cards or CCG cards. That necessarily means that they'll likely follow the sort of sales curve that trading cards have. A big spike at release, followed by a downward slope into almost nothing once most everyone has the stuff they want from it.

If the cards offer you too little value for the money at 80pp (am I the only person who always reads that as "plat"?) then wait 3-6 months for the popularity to decline and it's almost certain that they'll be available at a sale price when some marketing schlub decides to inject some life into them.

CoH is neither the first MMO nor the first Superhero MMO to try the "trading card pack" approach to selling gear. It's a proven virtual currency sink, so I'd expect to see more Super Packs in the future rather than fewer.

So far, the reports I'm seeing are that compiling a complete costume costs somewhere in the ballpark of what a similar costume bundle would cost in the market, so I can't see that it's some kind of awful gouge by Paragon Studios. If you feel a need to chase a wolf pet, well, just be aware that you're chasing a prestige item and that prestige items cost a lot of points.

Frankly, considering the way that similar packs work in some other games I know of, I'd say that these are pretty consumer friendly. Of course, it helps that our costumes are divorced from our character stats, so we don't have the added complication of paying for gear and then out-leveling it.

I'd be more interested in the packs if they featured more temp powers, though I suppose there's something to be said for ability to effectively buy merits. A casual player could get a lot of benefit from that, actually.

The article in question deliberately sets out to paint a scary picture of free-to-play, and succeeds at it since it considers only potential negatives and several extreme examples of those negatives.

I'm not sure what else to say about it. It has an agenda and it achieves it. It's only going to be alarming to anyone who can't see that it's fulfilling an agenda. Maybe it will make some people be more selective about their "free" MMO's.

I'm not really sure why the article was written, frankly, other than to fill space. It doesn't offer any sort of objective analysis or advice. It's 100% FUD for no particular reason other than to scare MMO newbies and/or parents of MMO newbies.

"It's 10pm. Do you know what YOUR MMO is doing?"

And here I thought this was going to be a "I'm waaaaasssssddddddddddddd" story.

Thanks for the update and for going with combining bits of all of the concepts.

I'm also going with "they didn't care" because I find it marginally preferable to "they didn't know".

So, New_Dark_Age -- Just being honest here but you're full of carp. Your personal opinions are just that: your opinions, not some inarguable rules of life that every right-thinking person agrees with.

I hate to break it to you but most of us write bios for our own amusement and figure that if someone else is amused also then that's gravy.

Unless you have some evidence that the rest of the game community actually believes in your personal opinion and selected you to educate the world on what they will and will not read, I recommend that you stick to expressing just your opinion on what you will not read.

Just being honest.

Putting aside the concerns about "Who Will Die?", I have to think that just deciding Willy-Nilly to revive someone is a decision that could have consequences greater than you might be expecting.

I was never a big Buffy fan, but one of the most powerful bits ever in that show (for me, anyway) was during the "singing" episode. Buffy is still coming to terms with being revivified and she sings "Heaven... I think I was in Heaven..."

The looks on her friends' faces as that sinks in and they begin to realize the enormity of what they've done to her by resurrecting her is a moment that every hero group ought to witness before they decide that they know best about whether life or death is a preferable state of being for another person.

Dear Ms. Arcanus;

Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.

You bring the Crowley Particles. I'll bring the "charm".

Let's conduct some experiments.

Love, Ray

(P.S. Steve made me say that. Please don't be mad!)