I Knew an MMO that...

[Solarblaze4]

Just something from around the great shutdown of Paragon City, that I wanted to re-re-post just for the public. Would be great to get this pinned somewhere on the forums (and note that I was NOT the original poster of this info):

 

 

 

A while back I had posted a list of characteristics that made City of Heroes different from some, if not all, other MMOs. The list was phrased in such a way that it was sufficiently generic, but could be understood by players of other MMOs, so as to disguise its identity. The coworkers I showed it to were actually surprised and intrigued by some of these characteristics, even more so that they could all be found in one game.

 

I thought it might be time to revisit this idea, if not as a checklist of features of games any of us might consider playing in the future, then simply for nostalgia's sake. So here's the newly updated list, with tenses changed to past.

 

-----------------------

 

I knew an MMO that...

· Had over eight years worth of content and updates

· Was the first, and still the most popular, MMO of its genre

· Didn’t limit you to only playing one realm per server

· Never went through a server merge

· * Had 14 different classes from which to choose

· * Gave you access to 192 characters slots out of the box, with the option to quadruple that amount

· * Had over 1200 different ability set combinations for each of those 768 potential character slots at character creation, with nearly 3 billion total different combinations available

· Allowed each character to have three different builds, enabling even more customization of ability sets

· Let you customize the visual effects of your abilities, with no reduction in their effectiveness

· Let you preview your abilities during character creation and costume modification

· Didn’t boost your character’s abilities by simply wearing clothes that often didn’t match

· Decoupled your character's appearance from its abilities, providing complete freedom during the costume creation process

· * Had literally trillions of costume combinations available right out of the box, with hundreds more costume pieces you could earn, unlock, craft, or purchase, making over 4.5 quindecillion (4.5 x 10^48) total combinations per costume

· * Allowed each character to have up to 10 different costumes/appearances that you could switch to at any time

· Allowed you to write publicly-viewable bios/backgrounds for your characters

· Allowed you to create an actual evil character rather than one that was simply opposed to another in-game faction/alignment/race

· Didn’t base your character’s advancement on gear that could break, get lost, need repairing, or be stolen

· Didn’t involve politics or endless need/greed rolls for loot distribution – all drops were 100% random for every member of your team and dropped instantly directly to your character

· * Had a cross-server marketplace with complete anonymity between buyers and sellers, and opacity of selling and asking prices

· * Allowed you to obtain any drop you wanted or needed through the market or through regular play within a reasonable amount of time

· Allowed you to convert unwanted drops into something useable for your character

· Allowed you to save up in-game rewards to be able to purchase specific drops without having to use the market system at all

· Didn’t require membership in a guild to participate in content

· * Allowed you to build massive guildhouses with medical, crafting, storage, and transportation facilities

· * Had 20 different methods of transiting between game zones, including across realms, resulting in some of the fastest play and travel times of any MMO

· Didn't use pointless backtracking along explicitly-defined paths as a time sink for traveling between quests and contacts

· Gave you the ability to call contacts directly rather than having to return to them for your next quest

· Gave you your own travel abilities instead of using super-expensive mounts – or one cheaply at level 1 if you didn’t want to take an ability

· Was the first MMO to allow your character to be capable of fully unrestricted and untimed flight, without gliding or using mounts

· Allowed your character to fall from any height without dieing or swim in any water without drowning

· Didn't place silly restrictions on your character's movement around game zones - "You want to climb that hill over there that you'd be able to in real life? Sure, go ahead!"

· Didn’t have XP loss or make you run back to your body when you died

· Left your character with all their stuff when you logged back in – nothing decayed

· Didn’t require spawn camping for specific kills/objectives – quests were your own private instances for you and your team

· Didn't automatically force you to team with other people simply because of where you were or what you were doing

· Didn't require you to "gather ten of those plants to make a good soup" or "kill five of those predators to protect my herd" - 99% of quests were combat-oriented "go punch somebody in the face"

· Used actual opening and closing doors for quest instances, providing better immersion in the game world

· * Had a crafting system that anyone could use without grinding raids

· Didn’t penalize your character’s advancement or participation in content for not using that crafting system

· Always gave you entirely new abilities when you leveled up, rather than just more powerful versions of old ones

· Scaled your abilities' effectiveness as you leveled up, making them just as useful at max level as at level one

· Allowed you to enhance different characteristics of your abilities, either with or without using the crafting system

· Provided multiple opportunities to respecify your character's abilities and enhancements, without spending any real money

· Had complete transparency of your abilities’ stats and costs so you could see exactly what they did and what you wanted to enhance as you leveled up

· Didn’t require your character’s build to be min/maxed to be effective, though you could do it to your heart’s content if you chose

· * Had over 140 levels of content across three different realms that could be soloed at will by anyone willing to do so

· Enabled players to find level-appropriate content with a single click, thus eliminating XP "dead zones"

· * Gave players the option to travel to other realms to experience content on a non-PvP basis

· Had PvP but didn’t require you to participate in it to advance your character

· Had compelling stories and quests to encourage players to enjoy the journey to the level cap – the game didn’t "Start at Level X"

· Allowed you to go back and play lower-level content you might have missed, with full XP credit

· Didn’t have an ever-increasing level cap that invalidated or made obsolete lower level characters, content, and equipment

· Allowed you to create 8-person teams, or up to 48-person leagues for larger group content

· Allowed you to team with anyone for most content, regardless of their level, and still earn XP credit

· Didn’t require the "Holy Trinity" (Tank/Healer/DPS) for group composition – any combination of characters was viable for virtually all content

· Used Buffing and Debuffing characters as "force multipliers," making your team much more powerful than you would have been without them

· Allowed you to customize quests to be easier for the solo player, or as difficult as being on a full team

· Let you call fighting 10-on-1 a fair fight, where you were the 1

· Had a power-to-level-difference ratio such that your character couldn't still be defeated by an enemy mob five levels below you

· Automatically scaled enemy quantities and ranks based on team size so quests weren't pointlessly easy or insanely hard

· Had a Pet/Summoning class which could have buffs, debuffs, healing, and damage all rolled into one fully-controllable "Army of Seven"

· Had multiple tiers of consumable buffs/potions (obtainable as drops or purchased from contacts or the market) that increased your health, endurance/mana, accuracy, damage output, damage resistance, defense, or protection from status effects, or rezzed your character from defeat

· Allowed you to combine unwanted consumables into a specific one you needed

· Consumables didn't have cooldown timers for re-use

· Allowed stacking use of consumables (either the same ones or different ones) that could turn your character into a nigh-indestructible damage-dealing god for a short time

· Would auto-rez your character if you leveled up while defeated on the battlefield, while also applying all top-tier consumable buffs simultaneously

· * Had a quest creator that allowed any player to make their own quests of whatever difficulty they wanted

· * Had tens of thousands of solo-friendly quests made by other players up and available to play

· * Had an end-game system that could be used by solo players

· Allowed you to pause multi-quest "dungeons" to finish later at your convenience

· * Had nearly 1400 in-game achievements you could earn, the earliest of which pre-dated the Xbox Live Achievement system by over a year

· * Had over 450 chat line commands that allowed you to do things such as interact with other players, change the UI, or activate powers

· Allowed you to combine those chat line commands into powerful keybinds or one-click macros, providing an unparalleled system for customizing your game experience

· * Had over 250 emotes your character could perform, including when switching costumes/appearance

· Had a demo recording and playback function that allowed you to record in-game activities, or edited to create your own machinima productions

· Allowed you to save/load costumes, preferences, and UI customizations for use on other characters

· * Had global chat abilities that allowed you to talk to other players on other servers, regardless of the character names or realms on which they were playing

· Had both local server and global friends lists, as well as a global ignore list for spammers or offensive players

· Had multiple levels of publicly hiding yourself from other players, allowing your gameplay to be as social or as private as you chose

· Had a development team that actually played the game, and would occasionally log in as critical lore-based NPCs and roleplay them on the live servers

· Would frequently have features added to the game that were specifically requested by players and implemented by the development team

· Let you fight time-traveling alien Nazis with giant robots in Ancient Rome (yes, really)

· Had one of the friendliest, most mature, and most helpful communities of any MMO yet to exist on the market

Sound too good to be true for all of these features to be in a single game? It wasn't. I played it for years.

 

* Feature required MTX purchase and/or active subscription to fully access.

 

----------------------

 

Some notes on the information:

· Transit methods include direct (e.g. Atlas Park to Steel Canyon), train, ferry, helicopter, TUNNEL, Ouroboros, Pocket D, Midnighter Club, Vanguard base, smuggler ship, Portal Industries portal, Hortha vine, Submariner Janus, auction house TP, mission TP, base TP, long range TP, lighted path TP, DA portals, and Mistress Eva/Carter Mordesen portals

· Ability set combinations include Primary, Secondary, Pool, Epic, and Incarnate sets, but NOT individual combinations of powers within those sets. I'm not even sure how one could accurately calculate individual power combinations.

· Costume piece total includes every piece that was available to unlock on both live and beta servers, excluding weapon customizations.

 

 

 

AND LASTLY...

It came back to life after almost a decade of sleeping.

[TfStormcry]

Let you fight time-traveling alien Nazis with giant robots in Ancient Rome (yes, really)

 

This alone would make any MMO worth playing!

[RussHood]

To be fair half of those features took a while to be introduced into the game, but the fact they are there, and so starkly contrast the modern gaming 'model' of carving up content to sell to you as PrEmIuM sErViCeS, is glorious. I am actually kind of glad NCSoft dropped the game. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain"

[arcanaville]

I knew an MMO where the players were completely batsh*t bonkers.

 

 

Me: I think the largest amount of unbugged damage you could generate in the game would be if you spawned the Kronos Titan in Steel Canyon and pulled him to a burning building and let it explode.  The game uses an odd sequence of damage to ensure the blast kills every player in range, and it should generate about forty million points of damage against the Kronos Titan.

 

Protector server: Hold my beer.

[ChzBoi]

 

 

 

I really missed this game...what joy!

[arcanaville]

I knew an MMO that tried to kill you with invisible robots.

 

 

 

 

Where you could dribble a boss-level enemy to death:

 

 

 

 

Where you could kill the game's strongest enemy with a clone of itself:

 

 

 

 

Where both physics and biology were just casual suggestions:

 

 

 

 

Where this is the squishy archetype:

 

 

[Healix]

OMG...I laughed way too hard at that green ink man!

[Judasace]

Not sure all these things are really positives.

 

Personally I'd like it if falling damage could kill you and you could drown, it would make the environment more meaningful and therefore the powers more exciting, IMO.

[Jaguaratron]

Not sure all these things are really positives.

 

Personally I'd like it if falling damage could kill you and you could drown, it would make the environment more meaningful and therefore the powers more exciting, IMO.

 

It did, and asshats would teleport newbies high in the sky so they would fall to the deaths. Reasons exist.

[JnEricsonx]

:::cue the Orson Welles clapping gif:::::

[BelleSorciere]

Not sure all these things are really positives.

 

Personally I'd like it if falling damage could kill you and you could drown, it would make the environment more meaningful and therefore the powers more exciting, IMO.

 

Not really. It adds concerns that really shouldn't be all that relevant.

[Judasace]

Not sure all these things are really positives.

 

Personally I'd like it if falling damage could kill you and you could drown, it would make the environment more meaningful and therefore the powers more exciting, IMO.

 

It did, and asshats would teleport newbies high in the sky so they would fall to the deaths. Reasons exist.

 

They'd have to be new enough to turn off the TP warning, or agree to the TP. And finding people willing enough to go convince someone to turn it off for a some griefing cuts down on the pool of culprits by imposin some effort  on them. Then you have logs to use as evidence tehy deliberately griefed someone, if it warrants action or the person is a chronic problem. And if it's something that happens occasionally, people will learn from the experience.

 

Unfortunately this will mainly come down to philosophical debate about people whether safety from all forms of bad things happening to people are worth forcing everyone to wear crash helmets all of the time. I fall on the side of learning not to take random teleports from strangers and then banning those that do this over and over.

 

As for the other response about that these things shouldn'r be something we're worrying about. Well, that's just like, your opinion man. 

 

It should at least be an option for people to turn these things on for themselves. I'd like the immersion, others wouldn't.

[jack_nomind]

I knew an MMO where Taxibots used part of their paid subscription time to act as ferries to other players.

 

I knew an MMO where I'd get and send tells just to tell people how great they look.

 

I knew an MMO desolate for a long time because of a player-created content system... which was resolved not by removing or even heavily undercutting that system, but by hiring the players who were best at creating for it to make the entire game more fun.

 

And if it's something that happens occasionally, people will learn from the experience.

 

Indeed we did.  The current system is the result.  CoH has always tended towards 'carebearing,' and there have always been players claiming this ruins their experience.  I'd say a substantial minority of such players mean it ruins the experience of ruining other peoples' experiences.

 

Griefers persisted -- for example, by teleporting low level players high above an enemy spawn or the like -- but it became unreliable, particularly when changes were made to auto-accept settings.  The "no death by falling damage" rule was kept anyway for lore reasons.

 

In comic books, nobody but Gwen Stacy ever dies from falling.

[Sniktch]

Not sure all these things are really positives.

 

Personally I'd like it if falling damage could kill you and you could drown, it would make the environment more meaningful and therefore the powers more exciting, IMO.

 

It did, and asshats would teleport newbies high in the sky so they would fall to the deaths. Reasons exist.

 

They'd have to be new enough to turn off the TP warning, or agree to the TP. And finding people willing enough to go convince someone to turn it off for a some griefing cuts down on the pool of culprits by imposin some effort  on them. Then you have logs to use as evidence tehy deliberately griefed someone, if it warrants action or the person is a chronic problem. And if it's something that happens occasionally, people will learn from the experience.

 

Unfortunately this will mainly come down to philosophical debate about people whether safety from all forms of bad things happening to people are worth forcing everyone to wear crash helmets all of the time. I fall on the side of learning not to take random teleports from strangers and then banning those that do this over and over.

 

As for the other response about that these things shouldn'r be something we're worrying about. Well, that's just like, your opinion man. 

 

It should at least be an option for people to turn these things on for themselves. I'd like the immersion, others wouldn't.

 

TP jerkery was the reason A: fall damage became nonlethal, to prevent straight-up jackass kills via TP, and B: when people instead started dropping folks into mobs so they'd be insta-killed after being dropped to 1 HP, they put in the accept prompt.

 

So your "immersion" was ALREADY done, and it was enough of a problem to require being pulled out in two different ways.

[Clave Dark 5]

I knew an MMO that swallowed a fly...

[justicebeliever]

I knew an MMO that swallowed a fly...

 

Did it wriggle and wriggle and wriggle inside it?  No wait, that's the spider...

 

I knew an MMO that swallowed an Arachnos.  It swallowed the Arachnos to catch the fly

[Judasace]

Not sure all these things are really positives.

 

Personally I'd like it if falling damage could kill you and you could drown, it would make the environment more meaningful and therefore the powers more exciting, IMO.

 

It did, and asshats would teleport newbies high in the sky so they would fall to the deaths. Reasons exist.

 

They'd have to be new enough to turn off the TP warning, or agree to the TP. And finding people willing enough to go convince someone to turn it off for a some griefing cuts down on the pool of culprits by imposin some effort  on them. Then you have logs to use as evidence tehy deliberately griefed someone, if it warrants action or the person is a chronic problem. And if it's something that happens occasionally, people will learn from the experience.

 

Unfortunately this will mainly come down to philosophical debate about people whether safety from all forms of bad things happening to people are worth forcing everyone to wear crash helmets all of the time. I fall on the side of learning not to take random teleports from strangers and then banning those that do this over and over.

 

As for the other response about that these things shouldn'r be something we're worrying about. Well, that's just like, your opinion man. 

 

It should at least be an option for people to turn these things on for themselves. I'd like the immersion, others wouldn't.

 

TP jerkery was the reason A: fall damage became nonlethal, to prevent straight-up jackass kills via TP, and B: when people instead started dropping folks into mobs so they'd be insta-killed after being dropped to 1 HP, they put in the accept prompt.

 

So your "immersion" was ALREADY done, and it was enough of a problem to require being pulled out in two different ways.

 

Relax, you don't need to start putting random words in caps. I would still prefer things the other way. Hell, at this point I'd love it if the devs here could make a hardcorre server with lethal falling/drwning damage and real death penalties.

 

I wonder if permadeath is possible...

[Williwaw]

There's also no way to put in "realistic" drowning damage considering all the possible character concepts.  Why would a robot or undead drown?  Why can't my power armor that lets me breathe in space have an underwater option?

 

In actual comics, Pre-Crisis Superman was literally unable to drown, Green Lantern can create an air-filled forcefield, even mostly-normal-human Batman has scuba gear in his costume, etc.

 

For those reasons and many more, "fall in water" = "automatically start drowning" would be the opposite of immersion for most players.

[Twisted Toon]

 

I wonder if permadeath is possible...

 

There is. It's called delete your character after you're defeated the first time. Of course, that relies heavily on the players honesty and what not.

[Blackbird71]

I wonder if permadeath is possible...

 

I don't think permadeath is even possible in superhero comic books.  Everyone comes back somehow; either they didn't actually die, were saved by technology/magic/other power, return as an evil twin or doppelganger from another universe/dimension, etc.

 

Really, the only superheroes who face permadeath are the ones whose comics sell so poorly that they get cancelled, and even then it's not guaranteed that they won't be back in a revival or show up as part of a group serial or something.

[justicebeliever]

I wonder if permadeath is possible...

 

I don't think permadeath is even possible in superhero comic books.  Everyone comes back somehow; either they didn't actually die, were saved by technology/magic/other power, return as an evil twin or doppelganger from another universe/dimension, etc.

 

Really, the only superheroes who face permadeath are the ones whose comics sell so poorly that they get cancelled, and even then it's not guaranteed that they won't be back in a revival or show up as part of a group serial or something.

 

Now come on, that's not fair.  Some characters stay dead...Like Bucky...if you are Bucky-dead, you are really, really dead.  I mean even in the coldest Winter, you'd never Soldier back to the land of the living.

 

And Barry Allen, he died a massive heroic death in Crisis...and Hal Jordan - didn't even he go to the great unknown never to be seen again.  Sometimes, in comics, dead is dead  :P

[Charistoph]

I knew an MMO that swallowed a fly...

 

Did it wriggle and wriggle and wriggle inside it?  No wait, that's the spider...

 

I knew an MMO that swallowed an Arachnos.  It swallowed the Arachnos to catch the fly

 

Then it became the fly.

 

I wonder if permadeath is possible...

 

I don't think permadeath is even possible in superhero comic books.  Everyone comes back somehow; either they didn't actually die, were saved by technology/magic/other power, return as an evil twin or doppelganger from another universe/dimension, etc.

 

Really, the only superheroes who face permadeath are the ones whose comics sell so poorly that they get cancelled, and even then it's not guaranteed that they won't be back in a revival or show up as part of a group serial or something.

 

Now come on, that's not fair.  Some characters stay dead...Like Bucky...if you are Bucky-dead, you are really, really dead.  I mean even in the coldest Winter, you'd never Soldier back to the land of the living.

 

And Barry Allen, he died a massive heroic death in Crisis...and Hal Jordan - didn't even he go to the great unknown never to be seen again.  Sometimes, in comics, dead is dead  :P

 

Even Gwen Stacy didn't stay dead, if cloning a person is the same as resurrecting him.  Of course, I think Uncle Ben has stayed dead, despite other universes having not killed him in the first place.

[arcanaville]

Unfortunately this will mainly come down to philosophical debate about people whether safety from all forms of bad things happening to people are worth forcing everyone to wear crash helmets all of the time. I fall on the side of learning not to take random teleports from strangers and then banning those that do this over and over.

 

Actually, there's a separate discussion involving design landmines.  Which is to say, it is very easy to say that the only hazard to this kind of feature is stupid people accepting random teleports, so it isn't really a problem, so lets do it.  Unfortunately, it is generally the case that when something is said to have only one hazard, it is probably because all the others are less obvious.

 

In a game like City of Heroes, and any MMO really, when you decide to push the envelope in any direction you have to decide to accept not only the immediate obvious side effects of doing so, but also all unforeseen ones as well - because you can't just keep jerking the design away from hot surfaces constantly, you'll be constantly having to decide whether an unforeseen bad side effect is bad enough to do something about or is something everyone will just have to live with.  And eventually you get the other downstream effect where this causes a chilling effect on future design changes, all of which have to account for potential interactions with these hidden problems.

 

Everything has side effects, and it is extremely difficult to control side effects you can't easily predict, and so you have to consider the long term cost of every change you make in terms of the likelihood if it impacting other things.  Falling damage is one of those things that was constantly debated in City of Heroes, but the immersive benefits associated with it were seen as not worth all the potential collateral design damage accommodating it would require.

 

One rule of City of Heroes' design was to minimize to the greatest extent possible the ability for players to hurt other players outside of direct PvP.  This is why Pain Domination went through several tweaks, this is why confuse was very carefully controlled as an effect, this is why there's no such thing as "flagging for PvP."  A lot of people think this limits the game, and it does, but it gives something back for it: players don't have to learn all the ins and outs of how to keep themselves safe from other players.

 

There's a secondary, and possibly even bigger design win.  This design decision self-selects for players that want to cooperate, and it tends to discourage players who want more "realism" in how they interact with other players in the game.  This means the players who want to play City of Heroes skew towards players who don't want that added component to the game, and that acts to make the playerbase slightly more friendly towards each other in-game.

 

Generally speaking, when there was a conflict between "realism" even the watered down realism of the game, and undesirable player conflict, the game chose to remove undesirable player conflict.  That's why, for example, it is much harder to do things like block other players from objectives in CoH than in many other MMOs.

[Sailboat]

Just last night I was playing a much newer,  more "modern" game with old friends.

 

• One of is was the wrong level for the content and...nothing could be done about it.
   
  
• Five of us wanted to play together,  but team size is capped at 4.
   
  
  • None of us was playing the build we wanted to play because you can't even get the equipment for it until you hit the level cap.
     
    
  • We walked everywhere.
     
    
    • We did the same content over and over,  basically just farming xp and drops.
       
      
    • Everyone was one of the same 7 classes.
       
      
    • We were dressed like random murderhobos, because our appearance was tied to the random items we wore for their stat bonuses.
      

     

    Such is modern gaming.  All I could think about was CoH/V, but they were reluctant to try it.

   

  Edit:  also such is formatting bullet points on a mobile device.

[TfStormcry]

Just last night I was playing a much newer,  more "modern" game with old friends.

 

• One of is was the wrong level for the content and...nothing could be done about it.
   
  
• Five of us wanted to play together,  but team size is capped at 4.
   
  
  • None of us was playing the build we wanted to play because you can't even get the equipment for it until you hit the level cap.
     
    
  • We walked everywhere.
     
    
    • We did the same content over and over,  basically just farming xp and drops.
       
      
    • Everyone was one of the same 7 classes.
       
      
    • We were dressed like random murderhobos, because our appearance was tied to the random items we wore for their stat bonuses.
      

     

    Such is modern gaming.  All I could think about was CoH/V, but they were reluctant to try it.

   

  Edit:  also such is formatting bullet points on a mobile device.

To paraphrase/bastardize/remix a song

 

We can play if we want to

We can leave your friends behind

Cause your friends don't play

And if they don't play

Well they're no friends of mine

Say, we can go where we want to

A place where they will never find

And we can act like we come from out of this world

Because you're one far behind