SlickRiptide

You are correct, Suh!

The main points of the thread have been made multiple times now, so I feel comfortable with a threadjack.

EQ was the epitome of repetitive content, and it served as the model upon which, for a few years, the entire industry was based, due to its (at the time) incredible success.

The massive irony of the situation is that the players themselves were responsible for it. When faced with a continent full of places to explore and things to fight, the players would sit their butts down at the nearest monster spawn point and "camp" it for hours. The lowbie areas even had names and waiting lists where people leveling up alts would sit around and just kill the same damn mobs over and over and over and over while a perfectly good dungeon one zone over went almost completely unused because it was too dangerous or just less convenient.

"Healer for Orc 3" was a typical cry in the Eastern Commonlands. Translation - "Cleric or Druid wanted at Orc Camp 3". It was the players that assigned and agreed upon the numbers, a grass-roots convention that became fact by virtue of everyone using it.

In a lot of ways, the lingering residue of repetitive content in every MMO out there can be blamed directly on the early players of Everquest who taught game developers that "repetitive gameplay makes people happy".

In reality, the lesson was that "High reward, low risk content makes people willing to play repetitively" but not everyone actually caught onto that particular lesson. Even when the developers understood it they still didn't want to take the risk of alienating the players who had grown up playing that way and who now believed that such gameplay was the "right" way to play.

Despite the many innovations of the early City of Heroes, Boomtown, Perez Park, the original Faultline and the original Rikti Crash Site all owe their existence to the belief by Jack and his team that mob camping was what players wanted and they needed to provide it. That's even why missions were originally given hardly any rewards. It was initially viewed by the devs and also many of the players as a kind of "cheating" to play missions and get rewarded for it. Killing stuff is how you get rewarded, and you do your killing out on the streets and in the hazard zones. It took a certain amount of time to change that perception as well as the perception that street-sweeping was somehow higher risk, a "fact" that was patently untrue for many, maybe most archetypes when the game launched.

About the "preparing to play" observation - A lot of us old farts still have mixed feelings about how easy it is to travel around nowadays in pretty much every game. Going back to the Everquest example, travel time meant that the world FELT like a world. It was DANGEROUS to go from one place to another, at least initially. One of the great "coming of age" moments in Everquest was the day your level 10 or 15 character decided to relocate from one coast of Antonica to the other and you did it by walking/running/sneaking/praying your way through seven zones, at least one dungeon, and a hostile countryside full of critters all just waiting to eat you when you made a mistake. It was an ADVENTURE. Spending three hours getting the whole guild to a remote place for a raid was different adventure and a social exercise as well. It was a team-building experience and a lot more guild social bonds were formed in the "preparing to play" time than were forged in the relatively short "accomplish what we came here for" time.

City of Heroes has never really had any content with requirements that replicated that down-time bonding and team-building. The Hamidon comes close, but it's not really the same. Travel, already reasonably easy in this game, has only gotten easier so that it's perfectly feasible for a new player to join a supergroup and use teleporters to get everywhere and, perforce, never actually learn how the zones connect to each other, let alone feel a need to pass the knowledge on to some other new player as a bonding experience.

Would I go back to Everquest? Lord, no! Every time I do, I leave within an hour. (They have their own versions of free weekends.) Despite that, I still see the value in a lot of the legacy that Everquest created in its heyday.

(See previous posting)

It's probably more amusing if you read the entire blog entry...

Oy, I'm becoming very sorry I used that word. I was light-heartedly describing an imaginary person (which I thought I made clear) and not any particular real person so I thought it would be alright.

Live and learn.

Anyway, I sort of get this perception that a lot of people are jumping to the conclusion that you aren't really twittering if you're not publishing your own life online. Creating a twitter account does not ipso facto commit you to telling people "I'm sitting on the patio" (Yeah, I think that Verizon commercial is funny).

The way I use it is not much different than an RSS feed. It's just more immediate and more tightly focused and there's the option to reply that a RSS feed doesn't provide.

I'm afraid that the three(!) people following me, who are pretty much all forumites who recognized the name of a fellow forumite and "subscribed" for that reason, must all be pretty disappointed that my life is so boring that I don't even post when I'm grilling a hamburger. *heh*

As for the value of the signal/noise that Twitter provides, that's in the eye of the beholder. If you don't see the value, that's fine. You can acknowledge that it DOES provide value to some people and be fine with that. I don't really get the emotional reaction that it triggers in some folks, whether for or against, but it's par for the course for any new technology.

We've wandered pretty far afield from the original post. The bottom line for anyone with Desmodus' concern is that you don't need Twitter to have a line to the red-names; in fact, Twitter does not really give you any special line to the red-names. Not unless your primary interest is their personal lives as opposed to game-related information.

Not to mention that War Witch feels like she's suddenly been stuck on a slide and put under a microscope. ha ha ha!

Oh, well. We love you Melissa. Tweet about anything that you feel like. Despite how it looks, we're really not all hanging on your every thought and sneering in disappointment when that thought is about something related to your life and not to your job.

So, yeah. Twitter or don't. In the greater scheme of things, it's not going to make an iota of difference to anyone but you, anyway. Just, maybe, before you condemn something (Twitter or otherwise) as worthless, you look at your fellows who ARE finding value in it and consider acknowledging that maybe that's evidence that it has some kind of value even if the value is in places that don't hold any attraction for you.

Ideally, Twitter isn't supposed to be a conversation. It sort of turns into that pretty easily because there really is this "feeling" of being personally connected to the person doing the tweeting and the ease of making a response to someone else's tweet.

In fact, I've been pretty surprised by just HOW compelling that feeling is, even when the tweeter in question is a celebrity who doesn't know me from Adam and I know this fact intellectually. The gut feeling that "He sent this to ME!" is, I think, where a lot of the attraction of the whole thing comes from.

Whether it's your thing or not is your business. "You" being the general you, not any particular poster in this thread. I have a mild objection to the characterization of the entirety of Twitter as mindless attention-grabbing and pandering to attention-grabbers, because that characterizes ME as one of those doing the pandering and I know that it's not true. Still, I can remember that it wasn't very long ago that playing an MMO made me a person who was wasting time on frivolous and unproductive activities, and before that, playing CCG's or playing PnP RPGS's, so I'm not going to get my feelings hurt by the characterization.

And, honestly, it wasn't that long ago that I might have been one of the people who was saying "Twitter? Bah, nothing but attention-grabbers and needy people feeding the attention-grabbers." When I gave it a fair shake, I changed my mind. It's like P_P says (maybe not always diplomatically, but still true) that like every other online social experience, Twitter is whatever you make of it.You can go ahead and sign up for mindless garbage, but you'll only get that if you actively seek it out. In that case, who's to blame but yourself?

This last is primarily interesting in that anyone who is having similar problems has some assurance that the community people are aware of it and, presumably, working to deal with it.

I think you missed my point (that point being that a single example of signal in Twitter disproves the hypothesis, and many such examples exist) but as I said, I'm not out to convert anyone. I just think that you might be surprised at what you'd find if you took an unbiased look at the available information stream.

As for Twitter being a source of news, I certainly would NOT ever claim it was somehow superior to other sources. It's basically the world's biggest gossip network. The only question is "who's gossip are you listening to?"

It can be more immediate than some other sources. I knew that Paula Abdul was leaving American Idol before you did, because she told me PERSONALLY. Well, me and 500,000 of her closest friends...

Yes, that is a semi-facetious example so let's not get bogged down in the frivolity of it. I get tweets from our devs here, from musical artists whose activities interest me, from comedians whose work I find amusing and from sources like the "Richard Castle" feed I mentioned earlier in the thread that are doing interesting things with Twitter itself. First and foremost, Twitter is entertainment.

I have also examined the tweet streams of interesting people who, as it turned out, spent their time making boring and inane tweets of just the sort that you're complaining about. It's true that a huge part of Twitter is, in fact, inane and meaningless glory-hounding. Anyone is free to use that fact to condemn the entire thing as useless, but doing so is ignoring the signal that exists amongst the noise.

I'm not really interested in defending Twitter. You either see the value or you don't. What I'll say is that this statement is painting with a VERY broad brush. One that could be applied just as easily to Facebook or any other "social networking site" or even this very forum.

I could give you a list of my "twitter feeds" that would disprove the statement I quoted above. Would it make a difference to you or would you just say "That makes you an exception?" or "Okay, MOST of Twitter is..."

In any information stream, there's signal and noise. The fact that there's a ton of noise is not an indication that there is no signal to pick up. Instead of condemning Twitter (or facebook or any other "social networking") as mindless attention-grabbing, you could ask "where's the signal?" and possibly find out that it's possible to ignore the noise and actually improve your daily information and/or entertainment quotient.

Do you watch the TV show Castle? Positron got me hooked last week on Richard Castle's Tweetstream. Funny stuff. Near as I can tell Nathan Fillion is the one doing the tweeting.

As if I don't have too many fanfic ideas and too little time to develop the ones I've already started, I'd gotten this notion of something consisting entirely of tweets. I think these efforts at "twitter fiction" like Othar and Castle are an interesting new direction for story telling. To make it work you have to be very compact with your text, and you are NOT expected to delve deeply into the subject they way you might be in conventional fiction. Instead, it's idea-driven. There are a lot of people with ideas who lack the creative experience to develop them in an interesting manner in a story. This might be a kind of shortcut for telling a story when you primarily have a skeleton and not a fully fleshed out body.

Actually, no, it's not. That's kind of the point. The initial barrage was just the "bootup sequence". In any case, the thread was born due to an actual concern by some players that they were missing out on information, not as a post-padding method. I've been here since beta wave three. If I wanted to pad my post count, I'd have been in the forum cartel years ago; trust me.

Anywho -- Here's proof that our devs have a sense of humor, or at irony anyway:

Positron_CoH wrote:

The point of the retweet thread and the reason it rarely is updated is that we don't need to "get the Devs back". They never left. The strictly game-related tweets are few and far between. War Witch, for instance, tweets several times a day but so far I haven't reposted any of them because NONE of them are about City of Heroes.

That aside, this sort of attitude can be generalized to "No dev should ever do an interview with any other website or provide information to another website that he or she hasn't already provided to me here at this website." That's just silliness. Devs and others at NCSoft/Paragon Studios release information to both comment on the game AND TO PROMOTE IT. If a player insists on being a stick in the mud and never follows any other media outlets because of some kind of principle that "it ain't right to make me look at multiple sources of information, even those I normally would ignore" then that person has only himself to blame if he gets some information after everyone else or misses it entirely.

Fortunately for our theoretical "information Luddite", pretty much all of that outside information gets reposted to the forums in one fashion or another.

You ever been out in the agricultural areas like the plains or Eastern Washington or Eastern Oregon and seen dust devils? They're basically naturally occuring miniature tornadoes, though without all of the storm effects of an actual tornado. You've pretty much described how they get formed.

So, if you wanted to say that your gizmo does the same thing but causes actual cloud formations on a miniature scale, then go for it.

It's possible that you just made Blue_Wave's point for him...