SlickRiptide

Avast, ye scalawags!

Which o' the sarvers be the one whar the Buccaneers and Privateers be a gatherin'?

Okay, first realize that Hero Con is a fan convention for a MMO. It's going to be relatively small as these things go. That's one of the attractions, really. A certain amount of "intimacy" in comparison to attending Pax, GenCon, or San Diego Comic Con with 10,000 of your closest friends. It'll be fun and there'll be plenty of people around, but it won't be an "overwhelm your senses" affair that one of the bigger cons would be.

If you plan to spend six(!) days riding Greyhound, I hope you're going because you live and breathe City of Heroes. Otherwise, I'd save the money and the travel preparations for one of the major cons.

If you prefer ground transport, have you considered Amtrak?

Whatever money you think you'll need, add half that much again. There will be something you'll forget and there will be expenses you didn't anticipate. As a for instance, if you're hanging with a group of people and someone has a car and suggests "Let's go to X for dinner", you'll have to say no if you're on a shoestring budget.

Make sure you have transportation to the hotel arranged or at least figured out.

Budget for meals. If this is the same hotel as last year (I haven't really checked, as I'm not attending) there is NO cheap fast food in the area. You'll be eating hotel restaurant or room service food and paying their prices. Whatever you think you'll need to spend, assume you'll need more and be happy if you don't.

Six days worth of entertainment. A laptop to blog about your trip. A cell phone. An open mind. A friendly attitude. Patience. A cautious demeanor.

Some Axe deodorant and/or cologne. The 800 number to call for rescue when all of the women at the con start chasing you around the hotel thanks to the Axe Effect.

Primarily, clothes, toiletries, and money. Preferably in credit card form in case you lose it or it's stolen. Travel is all about being prepared for the contingencies and then relaxing when you never have to exercise any of those contingencies. Make sure that you know the customer service phone number of said credit card and that your Mother has copies of your itinerary and also the card number/phone numbers for your bank/card issuer.

Remember that meals include tips and that it's good form to tip your cab driver if he gives you good service. 15% is the standard tip nowadays and really 20% is becoming the norm for "excellent service".

Accept that you'll probably get homesick and depressed by the third day. It'll pass. A phone call home and good night's sleep is a great curative for that.

For most attendees, Hero Con will be the culmination of their trip. For you, it will only be the half-way point. Plan accordingly.

Looking to games like Free Realms, Puzzle Pirates, and even EQ2 (the crafting mini-game, where crafting was akin to combat in many ways) as examples, I'd be interested in seeing a few activities added where the point is to play the mini-game in order to achieve a goal or reward in the main game.

Investigation, where the activity has to do with finding, organizing, and interpreting clues, would be a prime sort of activity to build something like that around.

Some kind of resource management game, involving your supergroup base or mob family.

Positron's original design for "crafting" an Arch-enemy (though I suspect that Cryptic probably owns that design now).

Activities involving rebuilding portions of Baumton and Eastgate, especially if a leaderboard tracked the results and the zones actually changed as a result of player activity.

Any excuse at all for scientific or magical "experimentation".

Occasionally, as a gamer, you just want to kill some time or pursue an activity outside of your normal pursuit of justice and/or personal power.

What mini-games would you find interesting if they were offered as part of the CoX game environment?

By "mini-games", I don't necessarily mean actual self-contained games (though I don't mean to exclude such an idea either). From a certain viewpoint, crafting, playing the market, and arena PvP are all mini-games. The Architect is a pretty major "mini-game" all its own. They're all activities that proceed naturally from the game environment but that offer a change-up from the primary activity of preventing or enacting crime while exploring the story of the game.

I've been playing a lot of Mafia Wars on Facebook and it got me thinking that it would be interesting to have some kind of semi-abstract crime family management game in CoX. Something that could be managed in chunks of ten to fifteen minutes, and that garnered some kind of status as a reward. Story-wise, you could be functioning as a member of "The Family" under Sebastian Frost or as independently running your own "family" with advantages and disadvantages for either position. The flip side would be hero participation in an Organized Crime Task Force or some such.

The most important thing being that it would be a kind of low-maintenance (from a player perspective) side game that offers an alternative to the normal game, but that still feels connected to the normal game via game lore and mechanics.

What other sorts of activities would lend themselves to embodiment as a mini-game attached to the main game?

Positron_CoH wrote:

In an ideal world that's a great idea, Sam.

In the real world, what you're proposing is that the devs spend hours/weeks designing, building, and coding an environment that will be experienced and enjoyed by some extremely small percentage of your player-base.

That's the long and short of why you don't see a whole lot of game environments that exist solely to be "wilderness" areas. The major portion of players don't like the wilderness unless they have a reason to be there, and if they feel FORCED to be there, then they hate it doubly.

You can spend your time, money, and resources on something that 5% of the player-base will enjoy or you can spend it on something else that 90% of the player-base will enjoy.

One of the inherent contradictions of the experience is that if it WAS so popular that 90% of the players were out there trekking around in it, that it would be so crowded that it wouldn't feel like wilderness any more. I daresay that your own experience in the sewers would have been different if you had found a "sewer team" battling around every other corner all the way to Steel Canyon.

Add to that the fact that everyone experiences things differently. My real first experience with "urban wilderness" was being sent to the Jacaranda Vista map, which is the one you called "flooded Boomtown". There was something haunting about that place. It felt so quiet, dead, and far away from the main city that I could almost hear the wind shooshing quietly through the empty streets. I spent a good two hours exploring that map and just hanging around, wondering what hero's statue it was standing sentinel over the place, and just what had happened to cause this horrible disaster in the first place. For that period of time, I really WAS out in the "wilderness" and the feel of walking the dead streets of a dead city was very real.

For most others, I expect that it was just another map full of Fifth/Council to defeat on the way to finishing a story arc.

The question from a game design viewpoint is not "How do we create a wilderness environment?" That's an easy question to answer, and the early reports of the "Canada" and "Desert" environments in CO illustrate what happens when you implement the easy answer - You get boredom and a certain amount of ridicule because eventually people realize that the environment has no reason to exist except as an illusion of there being a greater world.

The wilderness experience requires the player to make a choice to BE isolated and even surrounded by danger. Not the sort of danger that comes from a gangster robbing a bank. It's the sort that comes from bedding down in the dark and hearing noises that you can't explain, or worse, that you know are the sounds of a distant predator. Whether the "wilderness" is a maze of King's Row back alleys, a maze of sewer tunnels, the burnt-out shell of a part of the city that will never be rebuilt, or an actual wild forest, the key ingredient is the willful isolation of the player from her normal environment and resources. The attraction of the wilderness is the chance to prove your self-sufficiency and battle against your environment and come out on top, while SEEING that environment from a perspective different from your normal perspective.

Conversely, it can also be about becoming one with the environment and feeling as if you and the environment together are part of a greater whole. THAT experience is incredibly difficult to program for.

In any case, the payoff of a true "wilderness experience", as opposed to just endless tracts of empty space populated with things to kill, is an expensive one, given that most players are playing in order to be in the "urban" environment with all of the stories, resources, teammates, and conveniences that go along with that environment.

As with everything else that requires a development team to create it, the question ultimately comes down to "how do we justify the expense of creating this experience in comparison to creating that other experience?"

Well, glad to see that so many showed up and that a good time was had. Looks like it was fun. The spousal unit came down all sick and combined with the sell-out of Pax (which turned out to be less than a sell-out after all, grrrr!) I wasn't able to make it.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll win the lottery and make it to Hero Con.

CoH_OCR wrote:

CoH_OCR wrote:

CoH_OCR wrote:

Positron_COH wrote:

PAX tweets by Online Community Relations

CoH_OCR wrote:

Pax Tweets from Positron

Postron_COH wrote:

I'm going to try and show up for the Meet and Greet. Like many, I figured on buying a Pax ticket on Saturday and got a rude awakening. Doh!

One question for the Community Reps - How is this going to work? From what I hear, the Billiards Room is a pretty small venue, and you've apparently got it booked for the whole night. If the M&G runs from 6-1, what do you have planned for seven hours? What happens if 200 people all show up at 6pm?

The problem, Sam, is that the experience you're talking about is a deeply personal one that's difficult to design for. I've grown to despise the Bartle Scale over the years, but there's a reason that Explorer is always the smallest percentage on it. The people who enjoy that experience are few in number and those who enjoy REPEATING the experience even fewer. In fact, it's one of those "sovereign experience" kind of things, where you CAN'T really experience it more than once with the same level of enjoyment.

The much maligned Star Wars Galaxies designed the entire game around this type of thing in the beginning. Fast travel existed, but the usage of it was limited to X times per hour. The shuttle arrived every ten minutes and different shuttles were on different schedules. If your goal was to get from point A to point B then, like as not, setting out cross-country was going to be the least boring usage of your time, and while you traveled you'd fight things, sample for resources, see the sights, and experience the greater world.

That was the idea, anyway. In reality, people are so goal-oriented and so danger-averse (which made some sense in SWG where many PC's had jobs like Dancer or Chef and were deliberately designed to be non-combatants) that the most of the players just sat twiddling their thumbs at the shuttles and complaining about the wait times.

It's unfortunate from a game design standpoint that the greatest value of the "wilderness" comes from that moment where a player is standing at the edge of his normal routine and she decides out of the blue, "I'm going to do something different today."

The value of the experience is in the novelty of it. It's really difficult to design that into an encounter on purpose, especially since you know up-front that it's a one-off experience.

The value of your trip through the sewers was that you set out into the unknown, relatively speaking, made a deliberate decision to extend your stay there, and then made it a goal to complete the trip in spite of the fact that it became progressively more challenging as you went along AND you could have left at any time by using a teleporter or the mediporter.

Essentially, you made up your own mission and then saw it through, even if it didn't really seem like that's what you were doing at the time.

To replicate that experience, a game designer would need to do more than simply start you at point A, direct you to point B, and supress all of your travel powers on the slog in between. That's because it WOULD be a slog, due to the fact that your motivations would be impersonal (completing the task for XP/etc...) as opposed to personal (testing your endurance, seeing new things, finishing a challenge that you assigned to yourself).

If you could figure out how to motivate players to repeatedly "make up their own missions" in this fashion and feel both satisfied and rewarded by it, then you would have hit the Holy Grail of game design - a system where ALL content is "player designed" by dint of being driven entirely by the player motivations instead of being "canned" adventures created by the game's developers.

When so many players, maybe the majority, are driven by simple Pavlovian needs/desires, that's a big goal to try and reach. It's not even guaranteed that it would change the game that much, given that a lot of people LIKE killing ten rats to get 100 XP and 5 gold pieces and doing it over and over and over, slot-machine style.

Is Pepcat still around? Somebody needs to tell her to come back because she can make real peppermint-powered attacks now...

Without prioritizing particularly, I'll be going through all of my characters and setting their powers to be color-coordinated with their uniforms. I was surprised in the beta test by just how satisfying that ability really is. I'd gone in with the attitude that "Yeah, new colors but same old powers. Novelty value, five minutes."

Instead, I found a new level of satisfaction in the fact that my character's powers were now an expression of the character. If we ever got to pick and choose the animations as well, the way they've done for Martial Arts and Super Strength(?), I think I'd just about be ready to say the game was perfect.

I cannot express just how wonderful it is that my two-fisted brawler hero actually gets to fight with her fists now.

In fact, I guess that's the answer to the question of the thread. The very FIRST change I'll make is to change my MA hero from kicks to punches and then probably even do a respec to pick up some of the MA powers that I had deliberately avoided in favor of power pools that used punching animations.

[Repost from City Life]

I was thinking about safeguard mission badges, and super-sidekicking that's upcoming with Issue 16. It occurred to me that it would be really useful to be able to just set my security level to the right level for the mission and not have to deal with finding another player of the correct level and a similar interest in repeatedly banging out safeguards for badging purposes.

That's when it struck me that that next logical step after super-sidekicking, from an exemplar standpoint, is to eliminate the exemplar entirely and just let a higher-level player masquerade as a low level player if she wants to do that. It even makes some sense given how fast the low levels blow through now and Issue 16 looks to be speeding that up even further.

Sure, you get to level 50 but one day you have a hankering to go mano-a-mano with Doc Vahzilok because you leveled way past him before you even got the contacts for the mission. Why not be able to do that?

The game would supply some mechanism similar to the difficulty slider that let a player set their security level to any arbitary number smaller than their actual security level. Call it "under cover" if you want to and pretend that the hero is actually acting in some kind of under cover capacity if you want an in-game rationale to explain the game mechanic. Make Crimson and Indigo or their associates the contacts for the "undercover" job and you've got a built-in milestone for determining who can or cannot have access to the ability (though I'd just let anyone at all have the capability to self-exemplar).

The advantage over normal exemplar is that the player would have control over what level he sets himself to and he wouldn't depend on another player's generosity if, for instance, he wanted to run a whole bunch of Atlas Park safeguards to earn side mission badges. The advantage over Ouroboros is that the player would not be on a "task force". She would be free to run missions from any contact in the correct level range and she could join teams or form teams freely.

Otherwise, the normal rules of exemplaring would apply to the "self-exemplar".

I was thinking about safeguard mission badges, and super-sidekicking that's upcoming with Issue 16. It occurred to me that it would be really useful to be able to just set my security level to the right level for the mission and not have to deal with finding another player of the correct level and a similar interest in repeatedly banging out safeguards for badging purposes.

That's when it struck me that that next logical step after super-sidekicking, from an exemplar standpoint, is to eliminate the exemplar entirely and just let a higher-level player masquerade as a low level player if she wants to do that. It even makes some sense given how fast the low levels blow through now and Issue 16 looks to be speeding that up even further.

Sure, you get to level 50 but one day you have a hankering to go mano-a-mano with Doc Vahzilok because you leveled way past him before you even got the contacts for the mission. Why not be able to do that?

I realize this belongs in Suggestions, but I posted it here primarily to get a feel for whether this is really an ability that people would find interesting or if it's just my own little quirk that I might find it more interesting to fight a bunch of bone-daddies at their own level than spend an hour wiping out greys in order to get the badge for it.

If the game supplied a way for you to voluntarily "exemplar" yourself to a lower security level of your choice, with all of the attendant restrictions that normally accompany an exemplar, but that you'd otherwise be free to join or leave teams or receive missions from your past contacts in the exemplared level range, would you use it?

What Aggelakis said. WoW essentially copied the badge/accolade game mechanic from this game when they did one of their big content updates last year. One of those "badges" is earned by clicking on all of the lore books in the game. Just as with the history plaques and badges in this game, players are free to ignore the actual text associated with them and NOT actually learn something about the game if they so choose. The important thing is that WoW has had the lore accessible in the game from the beginning, and as of the launch of achievements, they even give the players a reward for exposing themselves to it.

As for how little the initial player surge knew the Warcraft lore, I'd say you're underestimating just how well read that original foundation of Warcraft players was and how well-known and regarded the lore still is by the core players. The initial draw that pulled in all of those Warcraft players was the opportunity to play in the world they loved and knew inside out.

In their next big expansion, Blizzard is remaking the entire Old World. Imagine the Faultline or RWZ revamp on a game-wide scale. As part of that expansion, they're copying another trope from us and doing what amounts to Power Proliferation.

If you think WoW players don't know or care about their lore, then I'd recommend getting involved in some of the discussions over there about things like the rationalizations for Tauren Paladins and Night Elf Mages and where and how those concepts break the lore.

I daresay that most of the players of CoH know only as much about the lore as they learn by doing missions, and some never learn anything at all about the history of Paragon City and its heroes. That fact of life doesn't excuse the devs from keeping the lore deep, consistent and, most of all, accessible for those who DO want to learn it. There's no excuse at all for allowing parts of the lore to vanish entirely.

It feels sometimes like the devs have this attitude that "We have this big Story Bible and WE know the history so you guys don't actually need to know it."

One of the most important initial effects of the whole badge/plaque system was that it gave the players a connection to the history of the world. It gave the world depth.

Where is that depth now? We get it doled out in dribs and drabs whenever one of the rednames feels like answering a question and because of that many of those answers have been lost like the Paragon Times; deleted in forum prunings and vanished into the bit bucket as fansites have come and gone with the players running them.

The comic is dead. The novels are dead. There's no periodic fiction. There's no Paragon Times. The CCG died. The RPG was still-born. The official website backgrounders haven't been updated in forever. Occasionally, a new page is added to the player info section of the official website, primarily when a new issue comes out and then it's generally done without much fanfare and with vital information HIDDEN in it instead of it being a vehicle for conveying that information. (e.g., the business with Requiem locking himself behind walls of Impervium. The implication being that, looking back, we can now see that they were hinting at the rise of the Reichsman.)

Lore isn't supposed to be hidden and hoarded like a pile of gold coins. It's not supposed to be a game where you're solving a puzzle that you don't even know the goal or rules for what you're solving. It's supposed to be the background that makes a player say "Hey, this is cool stuff, I want to be involved with this stuff."

Anyway, enough threadjacking. None of this negativity is helping the OP with his idea of a player-made sourcebook. As to the question of whether such a thing is neccessary when we have Paragonwiki, I'd recommend considering the question that goes along with any wiki - Namely, how do you look for something in the repository when you don't know what you're looking for in the first place? The biggest failing of any wiki is that it's hard to just browse for information like you can browse through a book.

A sourcebook or "Handbook of the Paragon City Universe" would have its own uses as an additional resource in conjunction with Paragonwiki and Vidiotmaps and Red Tomax and the rest.