SlickRiptide

You deliberately point out Everquest and then conclude that a game the age of City of Heroes is doomed? I think you might need to run a diagnostic of your logic circuits.

SOE doesn't keep EQ around because they're so sentimental about it that they're willing to subsidize it off of the profits of their other games. They keep it around because it still turns a profit. They've been more than willing to shut down unprofitable games in the past.

City of Heroes is profitable. In "the current video game climate" that's a pretty damn good reason to keep it open. It's also the biggest reason why there should not be a "CoH 2". Everquest 2 didn't bring in much new business. (Though the recent freemium version is finally doing that.) What it did very effectively, though, was fracture the player base of Everquest. EQ had 500k subscribers at the time so they could handle it to some degree, but when WoW arrived, both games were negatively affected.

Given that there are several superhero games out there now (CoH, Champions, DCUO, Superhero Squad) and that CoH is still the acknowledged leader in that niche, I'm puzzled what the basis is for a prophecy of doom unless they replace it with something new and shiny?

I would be enthused by having a reason to care about Numina but this move doesn't have me brimming over with enthusiasm. It just smacks of attempting to put yet more TV-sitcom-style sexual tension into an environment where it didn't previously exist and it doesn't actually add anything to the world.

It's enough that there's one high-profile couple in the Freedom Phalanx already. (Two if you count the Positron-Synapse bromance.) Maybe we'll find out that Statesman is secretly dating all of the available young women in the Vindicators when the next new task force requires rescuing Swan, Mynx, Luminary, Aurora, and Valkyrie from their Praetorian admirers.

So, you're saying that Samuraiko SHOULD 86 her story?

I'm not saying you're wrong about accuracy. Only that a fanfic involving a signature character is unavoidably inaccurate. You can hand-wave almost anything if you really, really, really want to do it. The question is not whether you should or should not. The question is whether you should let the hand-waving take over the plot and undermine the story as a result.

To take the Galaxy Girl story I mentioned as an example - I finally concluded that the best way to handle the conflict that Sean's news created was to decide that the REASON Robbie's crush went unrequited was that Kelly's feelings for him were maternal and not romantic. Hand's waved. Problem solved. Get on with the story.

On the rare occasion that I've been inspired enough to set words to a fanfic idea, I always observe a primal rule - Game mechanics are not canon.

Ms. Liberty does not, in fact, spend day after day standing for hours in Atlas Square, nor does she need a robot/hologram/dimensional double/doppelganger/impersonator/evil twin to take over and stand there for her when she needs to hit the "head".

Azuria does not, in fact, lose crap out of the MAGI vault on a daily basis. The Clockwork King is not, in fact, arrested on a daily basis.

Resurrections are not a daily affair and healing is not a get out of jail free card unless either of those are good for the story. People do not have endurance bars, nor are "inspirations" actual objects that heroes apply to themselves.

Arrest teleporters do not exist. The medical teleporter network does not cover the entire planet - In fact, it doesn't cover the entire city and for that matter it can be ignored entirely if that's what's good for the story.

Etc..., etc..., etc...

Blatant GAME mechanics are not automatically STORY mechanics. You wouldn't write a story where heroes stand on the sidewalk and citizens walk up and shove them out into the street in front of passing cars, oblivious to their presence, other than to say "I heard that Chase Arcanum is cleaning up the streets!", right?

In any case, none of those magic deus ex machinas existed before 2004, so if you can set your story before the Rikti War, you solve all of the problems they cause.

And yes, sometimes you just have to deal with lore that either doesn't fit or that changes along the way. I have a Galaxy Girl story that I've been puttering with for years at this point. In asking Sean Fish for a few details during one of his "Hey, ask me lore questions!" phases, he answered my question about Dauntless' given name by mentioning that Robbie Prescott had an unrequited love for Kelly Graham that he never got to tell her about. (Yes, there IS a lot of that sort of thing in Paragon City, apparently. Perhaps Dr. Science should commission a psychological study of life in a City of Heroes...)

That little tidbit of unexpected info totally cocked up my picture of the relationship between Galaxy Girl and Dauntless and it completely changed the impact of very vital scene in the story. If Robbie was in love with Kelly, there was just no way for it to work the way I had imagined it or wanted it to work.

After putting it aside for a long time, I finally took a good long look at it and said "To smeg with it. It simply ain't so."

In my world, my story, it just wasn't that way. Being canon is great and all, but here's the thing - As soon as you start putting words into the mouth of a signature character, you're already off the reservation. There's no point in getting bogged down in splitting hairs over what just how far off you're allowed to go. You might as well just write the story that you want to read and to smeg with the fact that it isn't something modular with respect to game mechanics and literal game lore.

Getting back to your non-signature character story - it's no different with game mechanics. Details are subservient to plot. If a mediport network messes with your drama then go ahead and write as if it doesn't exist. Don't make a big deal about questioning it. Just go with it.

When the movie "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" was being cast, the top choice for Malcolm's daughter (as you know if you saw the film) was a black girl. In the special features, they talk about how the writers went round and about on how to explain a black girl with a white father. (It was a bigger deal then than it is now.) Finally, someone asked "WHY do we have to explain it at all ?" So, they didn't explain it. They just cast her and didn't worry about it and it worked.

If you don't like what a mediporter does to your story, then just don't have a mediporter. If people demand answers afterward, then you can deal with that or not. If YOU really need to feel comfortable knowing that those details are out of the way, then set the story in any other city on earth than Paragon City. Problem solved. Story > game mechanics.

Of course, there's the corrolary: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."

I have exactly one level 50 after nearly seven years of playing CoH, so I'm not too concerned about the planetary Jack Chalkeresque reality regulating computer or the Divine Essence or whatever the "Well" is supposed to actually be. I'd have been perfectly happy to have Incarnates be just what they were billed to be - a mortal becoming the avatar of an immortal.

I don't really know just what they're supposed to be at the moment, but since I'll probably never achieve any incarnate slots, I can safely ignore the Well.

Then I can say that you ought to find any of the freemium MMORPG's that I currently play to be "acceptable". I have this feeling that you are attacking straw men here to a certain extent. It isn't at all clear to me what it is that you think is going to happen to CoX if it turns into a freemium game.

The publisher of high fantasy games mentioned a couple of posts prior to this one took an interesting approach that would solve your dilemma - they created a new server for the freemium version of the game and left the existing subscribers in their own "universe" away from the freemium people.

What has happened over time is this - Many people in the subscriber-only universe have slowly been transferring over to the freemium service. They see that the new server is full of new, enthusiastic players and they want a piece of that action. Meanwhile, they see that the new players are either becoming "gold members" (a close equivalent of the subscriber in the "old world") or are content to wield less power than the oldtimers, making the oldtimers the hot shots, at least for now.

Meanwhile, the game publisher is introducing many low-cost cash store upgrades that give the freemium players enough of the "gold member" benefits themselves that they feel like they are making a sound investment by continuing to play the game instead of leaving when the choice becomes "either become a subscriber or fail at the end game". One of the things said publisher has had to acknowledge as a result of its experiment is that, by and large, freemium players do not want to become subscribers. They prefer to make microtransactions and exercise freedom of choice over their gameplay. If they feel forced into choosing to subscribe or quit, they quit.

With the upcoming merger of the EU and US CoX servers into one server farm, it could be entirely feasible for NCSoft to create a second server farm that holds the freemium CoX game while letting the "CoX Classic" crowd continue to subscribe and play as they always have.

If NCSoft took that approach, then I can't see that anyone would have anything to complain about. At least, not until the freemium game started generating more revenue than the Classic game and started getting the lion's share of developer attention.

Okay, I can sympathize with that concern, but painting ALL freemium games with that brush is simply wrong. I participate in several freemium games and only one is potentially the sort that gives the kind of bonuses described.

As it stands though - I'm not sure I see the problem with those kinds of bonuses. I mean - you level up 25% faster. Yeah, so what? How is this a problem for anybody else? The LOTRO case sounds a bit on the manipulative side if ordinary potions became scarce, but I seem to recall that my LOTRO character from way back when was an alchemist. That sort of implies that there ARE potions available, even if they don't come from loot drops. Is that the case?

I DO play a freemium game that is a resource development and battle game, (I mentioned it earlier, but I've already courted IBTL way more than I ought to have done) where you can buy development boosts both permanent and temporary. So far, the players have not complained about it so much as proclaimed their happiness about having the option. Those bonuses are small and reasonably priced, but that just helps push the idea you mention that most everyone will actually pay that price and the game balance really has to assume that everyone is balanced around that inflated (from a non-paying player's standpoint) resource availability.

In the MMORPG's I've so far played that have freemium attributes, the bonuses from making microtransactions have all been geared towards putting the freemium players at just under par in comparison to the subscribers, and so encouraging the freemium players to become subscribers. I have not seen a case where a MMORPG was selling dominance in the game to whoever paid the most money.

Truthfully, if you're in a game for the long haul, then freemium is a superior payment method from a player's standpoint. You own what you buy. Subscribers rent their game, and lose everything as soon as they discontinue paying for it. The freemium player is free to come and go as she wishes and to simply buy the parts that she uses and leave the rest. If a subscriber pays for a year, and a freemium player spends the same amount of money over the course of a year, then after a year the freemium player will "own" the game while the subscriber will own nothing. The freemium player can stop paying another dime and still play at whatever her current investment level happens to be. The subscriber will be unable to play at all except for the basic newbie level freemium game if he stops paying.

That right there is a good enough reason for me to choose never to pay a subscription again for a MMORPG. Why rent when I can own? It's a measure of the esteem in which I hold CoH that I subscribe to it now, but once I have my Vanguard Pack, I can't say how long I might keep doing that if my interest is piqued elsewhere that doesn't charge me a rental fee in order to play it.

Dare I ask HOW it's exploitive and unfair? People who pay get one thing (or several things, depending on how the payment system is setup; tiered, or flat and/or cash shop, etc...) and people who don't pay get another.

How is that different from a subscription where people who pay get one thing and people who don't pay get nothing at all? You can't get much more "premium rewards" or "unfair" than that...