Dismantling a Naysayer

This is the Naysayer.

Certain of my Twitter friends advise taking the high road, ignoring the troll, believing that commenting on stupidity dignifies and elevates it.

Those of you familiar with my forum career will realize the futility of appealing to my better nature with such rarefied philosophizing- I've always found open contempt and mockery to be vastly more effective at stopping the spread of epidemic ignorance than silence, however high minded and well intentioned.

And so, on to the Naysayer:

 I consider myself to be a moderate and realist.

Well, sure, doesn't everyone?
Nobody sees themselves as anything other than the reasonable, rational center of the universe.

And yet, how often reality differs from that rose-colored viewpoint.

It is also interesting to me how this echoes the self image of the forum posse that was super invested in dictating how other players ought to react to the shutdown announcement- they also were "realists", "adults" who understood the situation better than those silly people who had allowed themselves to become emotionally attached to a video game and who insisted on carrying on in such an unseemly fashion.

I have the same opinion of this fellow as I had of them- there is a word for the sort of person who hangs around funerals inflating their self-worth by denigrating the mourners.....but "realist" ain't it.

But by being that, if one is faced with a huge load of unjustified optimism, idealism, and illusions of grandeur, one always ends up looking like a terrible cynic.

Terrible certainly applies, but nope, "cynic" isn't the right word either.

Also, point of order: one cannot engage in "unjustified" optimism or idealism.
I understand some folks like to sprinkle 'big words' more or less randomly into their writing in an effort to sound more erudite and intelligent, sort of like witnesses on those judge shows who try and bolster their credibility by using fifteen words when three would do.

Alas, such efforts inevitably generate the opposite of the intended effect.

I don't dislike City of Heroes.

No?

So you go out of your way to slag off the efforts of people fighting for something they love out of habit?

Huh.
Y'know, you'd look like much less of that thing you don't want to call yourself if you did dislike CoH.

But if I read that the huge "Save City of Heroes" campaign managed to get a whopping 19,000 online signature on their petition, I can't help but snortle. 

Well of course you can't, because you're such a giant a.......oh wait, we're not supposed to notice that because you think you're such a moderate realist, right?
Okay, okay, I'll keep playing along.

In a market where a game with 200,000 actual *subscribers* is regarded as a failure, how is any company going to be impressed by 20,000 non-committal online signatures?

Well, putting aside the truly gargantuan straw man you've erected, a company that casually axes a profitable game the way NCsoft has obviously doesn't give two squirts what its players think.  I'll grant that being deaf to the dulcet clarion call of sweet, sweet greenbacks they're unlikely to take notice of a petition.

But that petition is just one aspect of, for want of a better term, The Resistance.

And if we are engaging in the digital equivalent of facing an advancing armored column with little more than swords, spears & ritual facepaint....

What of it?

Following your sterling example and collapsing on our butts the better to mock the un-serious dummies who care enough to keep fighting would guarantee failure.

If each of these 20,000 people would have sent $100 to NCSoft, that wouldn't have been enough to save City of Heroes.

As noted this was not an economic decision- the game remains profitable.  The Free to Play model was successful enough to finance an avalanche of content unlike any previously seen.
You managed another factually accurate statement, if not the one you thought you were making- congratulations!

So...why keep fighting, in the face of an indifferent corporate bureaucracy with a history of MMO genocide?

I'm glad you asked!

And what, precisely, does that make you, fella?

Yeah....that's what I thought.

Unfair Comparisons

I probably should have led my series of posts r/e Champions Online with this disclaimer, but oh well!  Better late than never, I guess.

So, I really REALLY like City of Heroes.
It's the only MMO I've unabashedly enjoyed, ever.  Yeah, I played an arms DPS orc to the cap in WoW, but that was basically an excuse to hang out with my pals on Ventrilo & get caught up.  I didn't dislike it, but once we all got to the cap we couldn't find a compelling reason to stick around.  I've tried a few others over the years, all doomed to the grim fate of uninstallation after a few scant hours of play.

So when I harsh on CO for this or that failing, keep my perspective in mind.  While I do try for objectivity, there exists in my mind a shining ideal of what an MMO should be, and only one game fits that template.


And speaking of CO, it just failed a pretty big personal test.

Last night circumstances conspired to bequeath unto me a fair chunk of unscheduled time- my son was asleep at the same time my wife was out having drinks with friends.  At the point where they were both out in their respective fashions, I confronted the question of what to do with myself.  The answer, when I'm in the throes of playing a new game I really like is obvious- PLAY A GAME.  It's an activity that can't exist in the context of family life, unless I'm doing it with my son on my lap (which, while it does provide peerless entertainment, rarely results in measurable progress through the content).

So when my brain answered "hey, you can finish that book you've been reading!" it was a hard blow to CO's future hopes.  When I thought it over I realized that I haven't once felt inspired to play CO-  it's just something I've been doing because playing the game I love seems to painful & emotionally fraught.

I've been playing CO like someone kicking cigarettes chews gum- not because chewing gum is itself a pleasurable act, but because it manages in some small way to take your mind off the overriding preoccupation of your addiction.

An inexact metaphor, as CoH is in many ways an anti-cigarette: a compulsive behavior that enriches your life and provides community rather than undermining it and creating social isolation.
But a rough analogy is the best I could come up with.  

Also, as welcoming as the CO community has been (and why not, when the diaspora of 50k-odd CoH will presumably shore up their own somewhat precarious bottom line) the fact is they could have been playing CoH and actually preferred the pale comforts of CO.

Which, you know, different strokes and everything.  And yet...
It's not an environment I can see myself getting comfortable in.  It'd be like a ST:TNG fan trying to get comfortable at a Babylon 5 convention.  Yeah, they're both space operas, but.....

Even in my brief dabblings on their forums (which are overrun every weekend like clockwork by spammers advertising college and NFL football streams) are more aggravating than anything else.  I'm trying to be a good guest, but it's hard (when you're me, at least) not to call our gibbering delusion when you run across it.  As when someone tries to defend CO's execrable faces by claiming CoH's selection lacked variety and character, and was in fact one reason he left the game.

And I'm afraid I'm going to be approaching future gaming communities with caution.
This is my first experience confronting the threat of having a game I love detonated out from under me.
All the others I moved on from organically...and actually, thinking about it, they all still exist.  One benefit to having previously restricted my gaming affections to user-made mods instead of big subscription based commercial offerings.

Anyway, I don't see CO working out for me.
Whatever happens, I will stay in touch with my fellow CoH refugees- maybe I'll join an expatriate SG, or get  involved in the Titan Network's budding efforts to create a nonprofit successor.

In the meantime, I have to force myself back in-game to finish cataloging all my characters- my VIP runs out sometime in mid-October and I'd hate to have them locked up.  So watch this space for screenshots and character bios...

My Lore Apologia

Or, Samuel Tow, I'm Sorry!

Another consequence of bopping around Millennium rather than Paragon City is a fresh appreciation for something CoH has in abundance, even back at launch when it didn't have much else- a strong, unique underlying story.

One of my earliest criticisms of CO, back when it was announced and the forums erupted with the de rigueur wailing about how it was going to be the "CoH Killer" (joining the tail end of a long conga line composed of every other high profile MMO release of the past decade, with WoW itself leading the charge.....turns out the true CoH Killer was inside the house the whole time!) was that while Champions as a rules system was a terrific playground for superheroic exploits, Champions as a game world was little more than a dim reflection of  Silver Age Marvel mythos.

Hydra?
VIPER!

Shield?
UNTIL!

Dr. Doom?
DR. DESTROYER!

etc etc etc.

Whatever your opinion of CoH, its story was its own, fueled more by the primary sources of classical mythology itself than a Jack Kirby interpretation that same material.

As I said, while everyone I knew used the Champions rules, NOBODY used the Champions setting. And there's just no way to translate those wonderfully flexible yet ridiculously unbalanced Champions rules to a videogame.  Balance is inconsequential in a pen and paper setting where the human GM always has the trump card.  In an MMO, anything abusable WILL be abused, mercilessly and perpetually until a developer fixes it, and balance in some form must drive the design if a game wants to succeed.

So if in my pen and paper Champions campaign a player wanted something ridiculous, say a 10d6 No Normal Defense attack, as the GM I can just say "No way in hell. How about 3d6 or come up with another power."

But if you let the equivalent of a 10d6 No Normal Defense into an MMO, you're looking at a ravening horde composed of most of your playerbase running amok with it until you make some code adjustments.

So, if not the rules what exactly was Cryptic buying when they licensed Champions for their MMO?

The mythos.
Or in forum terms, the lore, that foundational collection of ephemera all games possess and of which I've been so dismissive over the years.

Which is likely all we'll have left of CoH once NC turns the servers off.
Turns out the lore of a game is its spirit, the bit that  survives the 'death' of the physical infrastructure.  It existed before there was a gameworld, and will persist after the game world powers down.

So while I will continue to insist that lore concerns take a back seat to good game design once a game is up and running, in the sense that lore is a much more malleable, flexible thing than the gargantuan slab of code supporting a modern MMO, I was wrong to downplay its central importance in creating the gameplay experience.

Because in spite of my 'skim over the story' style of play I find myself noticing the derivative, threadbare nature of CO's lore even as I'm playing.

In CoH I didn't necessarily pay close attention to the storylines but looking back its simple existence had a powerful influence on my perception of the game world.  It was like an iceberg, 9/10ths submerged.  While I was generally happy to zip across the surface in pursuit of my next hit of shiny, when I did pause to dig the game extended as far down as I cared to excavate.  Knowing that everything you 'saw' in game was backed up with this impressive depth of story made it more real, even when you didn't feel like plumbing those depths.

By comparison in CO such bouts of occasional curiosity lead to the discovery that behind the velvet curtain lies......an unfinished, splintered plywood wall, studded with nails that bent halfway in and were hammered flat & covered with spray painted construction graffiti.

CO lore is a Potemkin Village,  a glossy facade of civilization fronting barren fields reaching to the horizon.

All of which is a longwinded way of saying Samuel Tow, you were right and I was wrong.
While it can't do the job of solid game mechanics, lore is indeed the lifeblood of any MMO.

Considering Champions Online

first in a comparative series

Despite my best intentions and the encroaching virtual apocalypse I find myself unwilling to log in to Paragon City.

The whole situation pisses me off and depresses me in nearly equal measure, which renders me inert- I sit and stare at the monitor, unable to escape the knowledge that notwithstanding a miracle, every one and everything I see will cease to exist in a matter of weeks.

I realize that as a response this makes zero sense, roughly equivalent to greeting an onrushing cement truck by sitting down in the middle of the highway.  But there it is.


And I'm also put off the official forums, having reached my limit with the "mature", "rational" assholes who make it their mission to fingerwag and hector those who dare to have an un-approved response to impending dissolution, 'un approved' being any reaction other than awaiting the guillotine with head politely bowed, perhaps while discussing what an awesome game Guild Wars 2 is.

So I've been messing around with CO in a desultory way.
It's not by any measure a good game, but it's better than DCUO and in the rarified world of superhero MMOs that makes it the default runner-up.

As a game, it is cursed by its origins.
It began life in hot pursuit of two demographics - console gamers & WoW refugees. Trying to build a great MMO on such a foundation is like running a marathon with a ten pound weight on each ankle.
Just getting to the finish line is an incredible achievement, but forget medaling.


So you have a superhero game set in a contemporary city environment with currency straight out of Generic Fantasy World Number Eight Thousand- gold, silver & copper, with little colored icons just like WoW.  And you have an superhero MMO with a combat system heavily reliant on gamepad-style mechanisms like blocking and tapping.  But lacking the more involved mechanics of a true fighting game, so combat basically boils down to save up endurance then mash your best attack endlessly, then save up more endurance so you can start mashing your best attack again.

Etc etc etc.

It's that old saw about serving two masters rendered into...well, not flesh exactly- more like plasticky looking 3d models of superheroes.  It apes WoW without capturing any of that games deeper enjoyments, it conformed to the technical and interface limitations of consoles without, in the end, receiving the financial benefit of their participation.  Both are self-limiting behaviors and resulted in a game largely devoid of a compelling identity.

But right now it has two major recommendations- it isn't shutting down, and it isn't DCUO.

In the interest of seeing the glass as half full, here are couple of things I feel it does better than CoH:

1:  Handling Mez.

Its console genesis actually pays off here, as they made escaping from mez an active thing that everyone can do- if you get held or whatever, just bang away on your Z key until you erase the purple bar.

Voila!
You're free!

2:  The ALERT! system

An automated queue of mini-missions anyone can join any time.  The missions themselves are supremely basic, but I like them for the reason I liked DFB and DIB- you can use them to easily level a team-centric character without having to go through the bother of actually finding a team.  And unlike the CoH queue system, this one actually works- pick a mission, join the queue (or join several!) and in a few seconds or at most minutes you'll be getting some nice rewards.

3: .....uh......

Well, I guess that's it.

No wait, PVP!  That's it, PVP.
Not that I've done any, or have any interest in it, but I see people dualling all over the place, and pretty much every time my son wants to check out the little arena environments they have in the Powerhouse someone pops in and actually wants to fight, which is so different from CoH it actually took me a few seconds to parse what was happening.


They seem to have put a huge amount of effort into the character building side of things, which is unfortunate for me as I'd rather do ANYTHING ELSE than worry about building the perfect character.  Which is  odd since back in the day I spent countless hours poring over my Champs rulebooks in search of the ideal balance of powers and disadvantages.  Building the characters that populated my pen and paper campaign  took longer than the gaming sessions they fueled.

But in the virtual realm, I find I much prefer the initial simplicity of CoH's archetype system. On the CO forums one of the big motivations to sub up is access to a 'freeform' slot which lets you min-max to your hearts delight, cherry picking powers from any AT in the game.  A prospect with all the appeal of a head-on collision between a van full of nuns and a semi truck loaded with incontinent hogs.


It isn't terrible, but its problems are systemic rather than cosmetic.
They could work on CO until the end of time, but absent a complete re-roll it'll still be the bastard offspring of WoW & and Xbox.

On Community

There's a big rally in Atlas Park on Virtue today to save the game- I'm working, but I popped in early and there were already three instances of Atlas Park.  With four hours until the official start time, Samuraiko reports  four full instances.

This morning was the first time in a few days I'd logged in.
I was taking archival screenshots but seeing my characters, knowing they were all doomed, made me feel so bad I had to go lie down for a while.  The forums make me sad, but there I'm in the same boat with thousands of other people.  Being in-game should create that same sense of community, but that's not what happens.  It's like the difference between being in your living room with those close to you talking about your sick friend, or actually being that sick friend lying in a hospital bed.  There is some level of incarnation (and not the game system) with logging in and becoming a character that you've spent hundreds or thousands of hours playing.  When I'm in-game I feel the threat much more powerfully than otherwise.

Logged out, I'm able to think more analytically.
I can feel pride in the work folks like the Titan Network are doing in promoting efforts to save the game and in the creation of an amazing tool like the Sentinel + Character Extractor, which creates an archival snapshot of whoever you're logged in as.  I can scroll through Ultimus' RL picture thread Time for one last reveal and be amazed and inspired by the tremendous variety of people who share my passion for the game.  I can be amused by TopDoc's How Can Marketeers Profit From the End of the Game? thread.

I mean, I'm still risking bursting into tears at any moment running across particularly heartfelt, poignant posts, but I can get by.

In game, it's a different story.
I need to figure a way around or through it though, because I have many, many characters to archive in the next few months.
I'll give it a bit and see if I feel any different.

A Laughing Matter

shout out to Forbin Project, who's sig line on the forums made me *really* laugh for the first time today.
I'll recreate the text as best I can:

Dear NCSoft,

Sincerely,
A Former Loyal Customer

musical elegy: Death Letter Blues (Ode to St. Martial)

On the angrier, less elegiac tip, the White Stripes tearing the ass out of this cover of Son House's greatest tune.

I see Scab Factory going on a street-sweeping rampage through the zone to this one before rolling up in that swampy area where the Circle always hang out for his final log out.

OPP (Other People's Pain)

Here is a lengthy, engaging and heartfelt farewell to the game we love, replete with numerous excellent character screenshots and descriptions.

I’ve been playing the game, albeit off-and-on, for a long time now. I’ve made a lot of memories in the game. It sounds strange to say that about a video game — I still tend to think of video games as being like Pac-Man, static unchanging things — but City of Heroes had a lot of room for player creativity, it had fun stories to partake in, and it fostered a great community of players. Memories is the word. I have a lot of fondness for the game and always will. Come November 30, the game will go where all memories go, in the past. Even if I find a new game that I enjoy as much, I will only be able form similar memories; it won’t be the same. So the nostalgia I’m feeling for the game has as much bitter as sweet in it; though I have had tremendous fun with it, there’s the knowledge that many of the things I loved about it I may never experience again.

It's a good read, check out the whole thing.

Musical Elegy: Blue Horizon (ode to Steel Canyon)

 One of the most mournful songs ever put to wax and the chosen soundtrack of my last flight through the heart of Steel Canyon: 

For my money the greatest clarinet performance in this history of recorded music and one of the greatest instrumental performances period.

Accompanied by that terminal drawn out note I'll float to a landing between Positron and Valkyrie, then log out that character for the final time.

Okay, this is eerie

I had a notion earlier, which was to fill up every character slot I have on every server with every cockamamie character idea I've ever had- to meet the apocalypse with an epic alt-binge.  I figured I'd start on Virtue, which has one lone slot unused.

And I noticed that the last character I'd created before the hammer fell was this guy:

Uncomfortably prophetic.  =(

On The Archiving

Logged in tonight to start taking screenshots.

Way harder than I thought.

Looking at all the junk in my market slots, all those now pointless schemes, brought me down like a web grenade.  

Stacks of crappy recipes that were going to be good once I24 hit, crummy purples I was going to craft and sock away waiting for converters to pile up and prices to rebound, set recipes I was collecting for builds, salvage I was flipping...marketeering is all about looking down the road, taking the long view, sussing out future trends.  

And there isn't a future any more and now all my junk really is junk.

Fussed around with interfaces and binds and stuff and got snapshots of Nethergoat, Big Payback and Smelly Angry Bum before I got too depressed and had to log off.  There's a ton of new stuff in the Options menu I'd like to have had time to mess around with.  

I check the forums like a lab money yanking a food lever in its cage- even though all the lever does now is deliver electric shocks I can't make myself stop.

Anyway.

Here's the oldest surviving screenshot I have, dated 10-11-2004.

Not sure what happened to the earlier ones.

This one is one of my first characters, Doctor Love, emp/elec defender, and my pal's dm/regen scrapper Horseboi going up against some rikti (click to em-biggen).

and here's my ar/dev Big Payback, in his OG costume, apparently trying the respec trial. Also from October 2004. I don't even remember doing it with him, but that hallway is unmistakable.  That looks like my buddy's inv/energy tank TheShield.  It was based on a character from our pen and paper Champions campaign so the name was key.  

It was great when we finally got to 15 and could choose a title- he became Startling TheSheild

Weird to think *that* version of Big Payback was the most powerful he was ever going to be.  I had high hopes of I24 making him fun to play again- even though right now he has a range defense capped uber IO build (thanks Plainguy!) and is by any measure a "good" character, he's still never felt quite right to me after ED.

I'll mess around with tonight's screens and try and get at least the Goat's archive entry posted tomorrow.

 

Returning Player Diary, 03-26-2012

This is the first post of my diary thread.
It honestly feels like I just wrote it last week, but the date says otherwise.

___________________________

It strikes me it might be useful/interesting (for me, if no one else) to keep an informal log of my return to CoH as a 'free' player, albeit one with 'tier 9' access. I suspect I'll transition to VIP fairly soon as I'm already chafing under certain restrictions placed on free accounts, so best to start this now.

First a little background, for those unfamiliar with my previous forum tenure:

I started playing at release and kept my account up until about a year ago, when IRL decided it was time to feed all my discretionary time to my small son. When he was tiny I was able to log on fairly regularly, if not for any great length of time, but when he hit 2 playing didn't really work any more so I let my account lapse. I was still playing a bit, but not nearly enough to justify a subscription.

Cut to last week, when the advent of preschool caused a shift in his sleep schedule that left me with a little slice of time to myself in the evening. I thought I'd check out 'that other' Superhero game, which had gone 'free to play' almost immediately following its release. I'd tried the previous 'CoH killer' and found it wanting- this experience was similar, although I soured almost instantly on the weird gameplay contortions imposed by console development.

Just before I left the first rumors of CoH adding a 'free to play' option were floating around and I'd seen an article about it when they finally rolled it out, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

There's enough new stuff around that I figured I'd roll an alt to check it out, which brought me up against my second discontent with 'free to play' (after being locked out of most of the forums)- VERY FEW server slots.
Like, nearly none.

As someone with several servers full of beloved, oft played characters this came as an unpleasant, if not unexpected, shock.
Where to put this new alt?

The answer, after checking several servers I was sure would be empty only to find rosters of alts as far as the eye could see, was Infinity.

So LIZARDROID was born- part lizard, part droid, all electric/electric scrapper!

The makeover they gave the character creator is AMAZING.
Vastly improved, esp, compared to my attempt to create a unique hero in 'some other game'. I like that the few costume bits I don't have show up anyway- good salesmanship for the store, sure, but also lets me fiddle around with them- a couple of Imperium pieces would've fit right in with the Liz, I'll probably end up getting the set one way or another.

The tutorial is a bit of a mixed bag. The length is nice, it gets the point across without a lot of pointless running around (hallelujah!), its interactive in the modern style and I liked the look of the new Shivans.

When the great big shivan crawled up out of a pit I was excited- cool, fresh out of costuming and already taking on a gargantuan beast!

But....uh, wait a sec....it seems to me I'm not really doing anything other than marking time between bombing runs. I wonder what will happen if I just run up this hill and hang on on this wrecked car?

Oh, hey, look, Longbow bombers took care of it for me, and I didn't even have to keep dodging meteors.

A bit lackluster. Not that I'd expect to take it down myself at this stage, but it'd be nice to be able to do *something*.

Okay, off to chat with BAB and 'buy' my first item from the PARAGON STORE.

Neat interface, smooth transaction....if it works this nicely for 'real' purchases as for this badge color me impressed. I remember the endless struggles some folks had with paying for booster packs-this seems like a massive upgrade.

And.....off to Atlas!
Redundant as it was, I kinda miss the option to take Galaxy. I'm glad they wrote it off in the storyline instead of just lopping it off.

Woah, WTH! What happened to Atlas!
Really weird, seeing the building I looked at for 4 years get a facelift.
In game for about 60 seconds and I get an invite to a "DFB team"- is DFB the new Sewer team?
I won't be on for long so I politely decline and head for my contact.
The new waypoints are nice.

And my first missions is...bashing hellions. Good to know at least SOME stuff hasn't changed!

A little street sweeping makes me feel right at home, and then it's time to log off and clean the kitchen before bed. I head into City Hall, on the off chance that Day Jobs still exist- yep, there's the recruiter! Whew.


So far, so good.
I'll update as I get the chance to play, watch this space.

Farewell, City of Heroes

A few days ago NC Soft announced they were canceling City of Heroes, my online gaming home for most of the past decade (minus a year hiatus due to the rigors of childrearing).  Its a strange feeling, like being evicted from a really amazing apartment building in a fantastic neighborhood where you lived for years, where you were friends with most of your neighbors, who'd also lived there for years, where a very special, insular community had come together away from the eyes of the outside world.

And then one day some creep in a suit knocks on your door and says "Hey, you gotta clear out, we're knocking this whole place down in a couplea weeks.  Sure, you can stay until then.  But you can't take anything with you.  Huh?  I dunno, I think it's gonna be a parking lot or car dealership or something."


This will be the repository of my history of the game and the characters I played, updated periodically.
I'll see if I can figure out how automagically send updates through my twitter, @n3therg0at.
If not, bookmark away, or I think there's some way to follow the blog if you have a gmail/blogger account.