The other "shiny thing" I kept myself distracted with, for about a week on either side of my newspaper and TV journalism fast, is the other big deal in MMO news lately: City of Heroes, Architect Edition, aka "issue 14," aka "Mission Architect" or "MA." Capsule summary: surprisingly less fun than I thought it would be, not worth the industry hype ... yet, anyway.

Those of you who've followed my journal for years know that City of Heroes is the MMO that I keep going back to. In a nutshell, it's because it is hands-down, no-comparison the least aggravating Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in the history of the industry. No grinding for loot; no grinding, period. No item loss or item decay. Temporary jetpacks get you from level 6ish to level 14, at which point you can pick your permanent travel power at any time, flying at up to 45 miles per hour, super-leaping at around 55 miles per hour, or superspeeding or teleporting at up to about 80 miles per hour, which lets them have game zones as big as or bigger than any other MMO but without the tiresome drag of traveling for half an hour each way to your mission. Almost all combat is instanced and scales automatically to your level when you take the mission, and to your team size when you enter it. All character classes, even support classes, can solo, even from low levels. And best of all, the character creation tools are nothing less than mind-blowing: you really can look like, and roleplay your character, as just about anything you can imagine. Unlike almost every other MMO on the planet, your gear doesn't dictate what you look like, you don't have to look like every other level (your level) (your class) in the entire game world. Oh, and the team-finding, team member finding features are only just barely second to Warhammer Online's.

Counting only paid time, though, I've been playing City of Heroes for 39 months. (I know, I just got my 39-month veteran reward, unlocking boxing sports uniforms as costume pieces.) There is basically no content in City of Heroes that I haven't played at least once; all but the worst content, I've played so often I have it memorized. So I go away to other MMOs from time to time, but then I put up with "sprint" costing you all of your endurance in order to "run" at City of Heroes' slowest walking speed for 30 seconds, having to fight every trash mob between here and the mission 25 minutes to 30 minutes away from the contact, then having to fight my way back through every trash mob for half an hour just to tag the contact and continue. In reward, I get a piece of armor or a weapon that I have to wear, no matter whether it fits in with the looks of the rest of the gear I've got, because I need the stats on it. And obsessively track down an item-repair NPC every 2nd or 3rd mission, or risk having my equipment evaporate on me for lack of maintenance. All this so I can solo the one or maybe two character classes per game that can be soloed, because the only way to level any other character class is to stand around for longer than I spend in any MMO on average per session yelling "LFT!" A couple of months of that, and I'm back in City of Heroes, no matter how bored I am.

It turns out that there's a really good reason why it was taking the City of Heroes development team four to six months to crank out 10 or 12 missions' worth of new story arcs, though: their internal development tools stank on ice. For the first three years of the game, they had to hand-code mission parameters into a text file and feed the text files into a compiler before they could test them, then pop out of the game and edit the text file if they'd made any syntax errors or typos in the constants. Along about two years ago, they made a "giant leap forward" when someone designed an Excel spreadsheet that would let them do 75% of the work in Excel and use macros to export the basic outline of a mission. Eventually, they hired a guy who couldn't stand that, so in his spare time he started working on a set of Visual Basic scripts that would replace that Excel spreadsheet, including pull down menus and check boxes and so forth for the things that the Excel spreadsheet couldn't do. And as soon as he showed it off, someone asked: hey, do you think we could turn this over to players and let them write content, too? Well, not in the form it was. But one of the first things they did when NCsoft started investing more money into the franchise was hire a small programming team to rewrite that VB hack from scratch and embed it into the City of Heroes in-game user interface itself. It took them a year and half to get it to where it is, and about two weeks ago, they took the servers down and new buildings magically appeared in every major zone in the game: an entertainment and superhero-training virtual reality franchise called Architect Entertainment. You walk in, walk up to a terminal, and either start editing your own missions, or browse the list of missions other players have published.

On first blush, it's a fantastic system. Over the course of eight or nine years (counting pre-release development time) of building missions, they'd extended the code to allow a dizzying variety of "plot coupons" that can be embedded in missions: patrolling enemies (or allies) with their own dialog, allies to rescue who'll fight alongside you, ambushes, boss mobs, defendable objects, destructible objects, clickable collections of objects, hostages to capture, hostages to rescue, and MA handles nearly all of it. I say "nearly" because there are bugs, not just in the MA system but in the game engine itself and quite a few of the instance maps, that make it impossible to predict entirely reliably what'll happen when you use certain types of plot coupons on certain types of instance maps. But the system is easy to learn, it's highly iterative to test, and even once you learn what its limitations are, it's amazingly flexible. When I first got my hands on it, I found that I was excited about writing (what are, in effect) game modules for other players for the first time since my famous Mage: The Ascension campaign of the mid to late 1990s. I spotted two places in the villain game where the existing content just isn't that good, and where, even more importantly, there are some great plot points and story lines over on the hero side that never get explained or wrapped up for villain-only players. So over the course of about a month (counting open beta on the issue), I knocked out two story arcs that I'm quite proud of:

• #4427: "Fish and Cut Bait in Port Oakes," villain level 10-14. Even though (by now) you've noticed that there's a civil war going on within the mafia for control over the Port Oakes smuggling operations, the lower level lieutenants still have to protect the merchandise and get it onto the boats, so they're hiring freelancers, including a mafia-connected street gang from Paragon City, and including you. Includes foreshadowing for the Coralax story arcs in the late level 20 range that's really missing, even though you see Coralax on the streets of Port Oakes, and the missing chunks of "The Bonefire Plot" level 10-14 story arc from City of Heroes. So far, other players have rated it 4 stars out of five, and it's my most-played arc. And ...
  
• #32801: "Sharkhead Isle and the Circle of Banished Warriors," villain level 20-29. Sure, the villain-run government of the Rogue Isles lets people smuggle contraband in and out ... as long as they pay taxes, which an artifact-smuggling street gang from Paragon City, the Warriors, aren't. What starts out as a routine tax investigation, though, gets weird fast because you show up just as all of the mystical gangs of Paragon City are going to war for control over three in-game canonical weapons, any one of which could destroy the world. Fills in the missing Circle of Thorns and Banished Pantheon plotlines in a way I'm rather proud of, it's my one consistently-rated 5-star arc.

So, yeah, lots of fun ... until I tried playing other people's content. And found out that Ted Sturgeon's famous second law, "90% of everything is crap," was optimistic.

See, here's the problem, and it's such a crippling problem that it ruins the whole feature set for me: the only way you have to tell if you're going to enjoy somebody else's arc is an average rating, from those who bothered to vote, of 1 to 5 stars. Only about 3% to 5% of the arcs are getting 5 star ratings, call it around 1000 five-star arcs so far. (Yes, there are already many thousands of player-created story arcs up on the servers.) But of those, I'd say that maybe 1 in 20 actually deserve their 5 stars. The level of game background knowledge, the level of the writing and plotting, and even more annoyingly just the low quality of the debugging of these arcs before they were published, even at the supposedly 5-star level, is just intolerable to me. Maybe 1 in 20 of the supposedly 5-star arcs is even as good as the average canonical story arc. Half of them aren't just bad, they're really, really obnoxiously bad. And that's before you even jump into the sludge pile of stuff that's not rated, or rated 1 to 4 stars.

And I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

If you stand in any open city zone, nowadays, all you hear in broadcast chat is exploiters and farmers and power-levelers recruiting for teams. It turns out that Paragon Studios also did a pretty mediocre job of balancing risk-versus-reward in Mission Architect content, too, which leaves the game masters playing cat and mouse, all day long, with the exploiters designing custom villain groups that give maximum reward for minimum effort. For the first time since the famous "Winter Lord" debacle of 2003, we once again have players who just joined the game, have a level 50 character that has no equipment and that they have no idea how to play, who figure out within the week that there is no culture of level-50 PvP or level-50 raiding like there is in other games, so they quit, having decided that there's "nothing to do" -- since they deliberately cheated to power-level their way past all of the stuff that's vaguely interesting to do in City of Heroes.

Anybody who wanted to use Mission Architect the way it was meant to be used? The vast majority of them, like me, gave up at least a week ago. (Which is why I've had so much time to fiddle around with Free Realms.)

They're rushing out another major software release soon, they say, issue 15, that will include substantial improvements to Mission Architect. Maybe then I'll go back to it. Or I may get bored or frustrated with the pace of bug fixing in Free Realms and go back anyway, and just run new characters with new combinations of powers through the same missions I can do in my sleep in City of Heroes. But I'm just plain done, after scant weeks, with what was supposed to be the biggest, most important new feature to be added to City of Heroes in the last five years, at least until they heavily revamp it. And that's just not what I was hoping for, and I'm absolutely sure it's not what they were hoping for, either.

---

By the way, a quick poll: of the three books I read last week, one of them was disappointingly really awfully bad, way didn't live up to its hype. The other was even better than I'd been hoping, was way better than even the widespread hype has been claiming. I could make a case for reviewing them in either order: be cranky about the one that so many people liked that I truly hated, then sing you out on a happy note the next day? or show that there are some things that I really do like, before ripping a popular author a new orifice for how absolutely repugnant his best-seller really is? Which order would you rather see the book reviews in?
Poll #1395105 Good Review and Bad Review
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Which one do you want to see first?

Allow me to present an excerpt from the official City of Heroes forums, in a thread about the first rumor to leak out of Comic Con about upcoming features. Dramatis personae: Castle, developer in charge of superpowers. Koschej, a forum moderator. Texas_Justice, player character superhero. InfamousBrad, player character supervillain (moi). Not seen: Back Alley Brawler (BAB), animator; pohsyb, systems programmer; Lighthouse, senior forum moderator.

Texas_Justice, 7/24/08 9:56 pm: "Maybe as a temporary solution ask one of the following, politely of course, to please comment in the thread to get it into the Dev Digest so it can be seen. Castle, BAB, pohsyb, ..."

Castle, 7/24/08 10:13 pm: "As you wish!"

InfamousBrad, 7/25/08 03:38 am: "And then, one day, Texas_Justice realized that when Castle was saying, 'As you wish,' what he really meant was, 'I love you.' ..."

Koschej, 7/25/08 03:43 am:

Koschej: I promise I will not mod you until you reach the end of the thread.
InfamousBrad: That's VERY comforting, but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.
Koschej: I hate waiting. I could give you my word as a Moderator.
InfamousBrad: No good. I've known too many Moderators.
Koschej: Isn't there any way you trust me?
InfamousBrad: Nothing comes to mind.
Koschej: I swear on the soul of my manager, Lightingo Housetoya, you will reach the end unmodded.
InfamousBrad: Throw me the scroll bar.

Ok, back on topic now please.

Too little sleep two nights in a row, cleverness a might thin upon the ground. So instead, I leave you with something that I wasn't song virused on ... until yesterday. Specifically, the Discovery Channel "Boom De Ah Dah!" channel promo, which I could take or leave. Until I saw it redone as an even better City of Heroes and City of Villains machinima:



Because nothing says "Boom De Yada" to me like a tier-9 Area Effect extreme damage attack.

P.S. Double XP Weekend: 10am Friday July 18th to 8am Monday July 21st, Central Daylight Time.

I hardly ever log into any City of Heroes/City of Villains (usually abbreviated CoX, for "City of x," pronounced "sea oh ex") server except for Virtue, the semi-officially designated "roleplaying server." I get my 33 month veteran badge a week from Monday, and in those 33 months, I can count on the fingers of one hand all of the times I've seen actual role playing, like you'd do in an ordinary tabletop role playing game or live action role playing game, in my favorite "massively multiplayer online role playing game" (MMORPG, pronounced "muh-MORE-puh-guh" or "em em oh").

There are some game mechanical reasons for this. Hardly anybody can type as fast as they talk, and CoX doesn't support voice chat yet. (We're assuming the feature is coming at some point, the parent company licensed the tech a few months ago.) Nor do very many people want to stop playing the actual game long enough to stand around typing at each other. If nothing else, the 1/3rd or more of us who are achievement-oriented want to keep pushing on, on, on along the experience-point treadmill, without wasting time chatting, and they easily pull the rest of us along. But during some angst over this in the most popular cross-faction "out of character" channel, Virtue United (join "VU2008"), this evening someone explained that roleplaying sucks, since it consists of (in his words, as best as I can recall them) nothing but a bunch of people standing around a bar reading their character biographies to each other. It was an unfair cut, but it did raise an interesting and fundamental question that applies to attempts to roleplay in all MMOs: what do our characters have to talk about?

Well, let's say that you go to a happy hour in a bar on an "industry night," one where most of the people in the bar are in the same industry you are, but you only know one or two of them from Adam's off ox. What do you talk about? "Hi, what do you do?" Well, that's a problem. Because let's say that you're a superhero or a supervillain in CoX and you describe the last crime you committed or the last crime you foiled? The problem is that when you claim to have been the one to do it, you've created a roleplaying problem for everybody else, because roughly 1/3rd of them who are at or above your level have done it, too. So let's say you try to strike up a conversation with some people at the bar in Pocket D, or in the lobby of Wentworth's Fine Consignments. Somebody asks you what you've been up to lately, and you say, "Well, we just tracked down Frostfire, the leader of the Outcasts, and busted him. It was amazing what he'd done to his hideout with his mutant powers. Kind of cool, actually." Well, that's one of the most popular missions in the game, half the people there have busted Frostfire, too. What are they going to say, "Oh, yeah, we did that last week"? Kind of a put-down. Sure, it could be worked around. But then you have the other problem: not everybody in the bar is the same level. Some of the people there are a lot farther along in level than you. The last thing you want to hear is that from their perspective, Frostfire made bail months ago, that they've tracked down where he was getting the occult talismans his gang were selling to the Hellions, and oh, yeah, that's actually part of a sinister conspiracy by ... well, spoilers enough, you get the idea. And that's assuming that the people around you can even stay in character, and not say things like, "oh, yeah, I remember that one, cool mission."

Now we may get an alternative to this, at least somewhat, maybe in December. They've dropped a hint that there's a major announcement coming this summer about a planned (for later) upcoming feature: player-created content. It'll be your chance to be the game master to however many players find and play your hand-created story in the City of x universe. As best as we can tell from the few hints that have leaked, they hope to offer us the ability to create our own custom instance maps and upload them to the server, but even if they don't, by my estimate, the game already has about 600 or 700 custom instance maps to choose from. You then specify which faction occupies the map, name the end boss, write the beginning and end of mission briefing texts, and see if you can write content as compelling as, say, their stories "The Mysterious General Z," "Ubelmann the Unknown," "The Revenant Hero Project," or "Project: World Wide Red" on the hero side or "Oh Wretched Man," "The Aeon Conspiracy/Echo Down the Aeons," "The Cult of the Shaper," or "The TV Report/Video Killed the Radio/The TV Invasion" on the villain side. Anyway, these may at least offer the chance that you and your team might have something to brag about that nobody else in the bar has heard of. If, in fact, any of the players writing the missions are at all good at writing roleplaying missions, themselves.

But let's say that you're not going to talk about your own adventures, or express (or feign) interest in other people's adventures; Eris knows, there's nothing more boring than listening to someone narrate a gaming campaign you didn't play in. What else is there to talk about? Well, what else do you talk about at parties, with casual acquaintances? The weather? There is no weather in City of x. (So far, the development team is sticking to their belief that weather that did affect game play would be a pain in the backside, and weather that doesn't affect game play is a waste of development resources.)

Sports? In the City of x universe, the number one sport everybody follows is Superhero Arena League competition; that's why so many of the people you walk by on the street are so oddly familiar with your exploits, you're an actual or potential sports star. And the player-run Player versus Player Events Committee (PvPEC) does run a series of roughly bi-weekly, cross-server, ranked, rated tournament competitions on the "Training Room" test server, which people can copy their regular characters over to at any time. But those matches are not televised, not even on the web, let alone in-game where people could sit around and watch them in the bar later, nor does the technology to offer this exist. (It could be done. The tech is in-game for the referees to record matches as they watch them; all that would be necessary would be to build in the tech to convert that to streaming video and multi-cast stream it to certain textured spots in game. It'd be nice if it happened. I'm not holding my breath.) So what that leaves for in-character "sports" conversation, as far as Arena League is concerned, is for people to discuss whatever little they've heard about other people's arena-league fights on the web: sparse content, kind of boring. Other sporting events? Nobody has ever mentioned any other sport in the in-game canonical text. If Paragon City has a sports stadium for any other sport than Arena League superfights, we haven't seen it yet, unless you want to count a few neighborhood basketball courts, and we've never seen or heard of anybody playing on them. We have seen pretty much all of the Etoile Islands, and the Rogue Islanders don't even have so much as a single soccer pitch or a single basketball hoop.

Movies? TV? We know that people in-game watch TV; as I alluded to above, there's a great set of homages to television shows in a set of villain-side story arcs where your character (or team leader) has been brainwashed by Television into doing Television's bidding. The non-player characters mostly even seem to be watching the same TV shows we see in our world -- mostly. They do not, obviously, seem to watch the same superhero TV shows and superhero movies that we do. So while I guess it would be in-character to discuss what was on TV the night before, and what your character would have thought of it, you would run into a couple of problems: other than the superhero shows, what TV shows and movies can you assume the people you're hanging out with in City of x might have actually seen? Still, it's at least workable; I suppose I should remember to use that next time a lull in the conversation comes up in game. (God's miserable wooden dentures, am I going to have to start watching American Idol as roleplaying research? Gaaaagcccch.)

Politics? It drives me insane to point this out over and over again, but in the four and a half years the game has existed, Paragon City, Rhode Island hasn't seen a single election. We don't even know the name of the current mayor, governor, or President. And we've asked; apparently, it's not even in the official top-secret developer-eyes-only story bible. Celebrity news and gossip? We meet a few celebrities in missions, rescuing or kidnapping them. They are not the same celebrities as in our world, or even recognizable parodies mostly; we're never told what they're famous for, or anything that they've done lately. If we were, it would be a one-time thing built into the mission text that still won't have changed five years later, so unless it's a brand new mission in the last update, what players would still be talking about it? Books? Same problem as talking politics: something tells me that a world that's been dealing with real magic using villains openly and in public since 1930 doesn't have a Harry Potter series for the rest of you to talk about in-character, we're not told what the actual game-world best sellers are, and most of the rest of what I read, at least, is about history and politics and current events that are specific to our world's history, not the game world's.

But honestly, what the game needs is a developer-provided regular in-character newspaper. Because one thing that players do spend a lot of time discussing is "what's going to happen to the game world next?" A tiny amount of this information is provided in-game, and in-character. But the bulk of it is in out-of-character rumors by the development team on the official forums. And unsurprisingly, since they tend to have the preliminary features list locked down by about a week after each of the every-four-months major content releases comes out, there is someone at NCsoft Northern California who knows, already, what the story line for the next issue is going to be. They don't know every line of dialog, and they may end up dropping story arcs at deadline to put them off until later (the way that ancient Rome was dropped from the first time travel feature and implemented in the next major release). But they do know enough that if they were good game masters, they could take a couple of hours off every week from scanning the forums to write a couple of paragraphs' news story, giving hints and rumors of what might happen. That, plus the clues that people discover inside the new missions from the previous release, would give people stuff to speculate about in-character, especially if that newspaper was readable in game. (There is an in-game newspaper. But only on the villain side. It's called the Rogue Isles Protector, it shows up under your Contacts list or with the /newspaper command, and it shows you three randomly-generated crime stories related to the Rogue Isles zone you're in. They're missions. No two people will ever see the same newspaper at the same time. So much for that giving people something to talk about.) They used to at least post a single monthly newspaper story about recently released or about to be released content to their website, under the name The Paragon Times. But even then, it was only visible to people who read the forums or regularly checked the website. And even it hasn't been updated since September of last year, when the developer who had been doing it changed jobs. Bring it back, please? And pad it out with Arena League scores and sporting reports about the matches, and made-up book and TV and movie reviews and celebrity gossip from your world, please? And give us a command to bring it up inside the game, so we can refer to it while we're chatting with other players?

Seriously, my word to not just NC NorCal but to the whole industry is this: There are at least hundreds, probably thousands of us in every online role playing game (remember, you do advertise these as role playing games) would would love to keep paying our monthly fees to spend some time in non-combat spaces role playing, if we only had something to role play about. And seriously, we're not even talking about one person's full time job; aren't there enough of us as actual role players who play your game, aren't there enough customers who stopped paying the $15 a month for the lack of this, to pay one writer to work on it one day a week? For crying out loud, please find some way to spend a little bit of the money we're sending in to give us, as the lady sang, something to talk about!

I mentioned yesterday that there are enough overall improvements in the design, implementation, and user interface of City of Heroes in "Issue 12" to almost qualify for the name "City of Heroes 2." But what actual content did they add to the game? And in a sense, issue 12 comes up just a little light, compared to most issues, and one of the two biggest features is one that was actually intended for issue 11. In a recent interview, the lead writer finally gave away why in the time-traveling steampunk fortress airship called Ouroboros, there are five contacts, but only four of them give story arcs -- and why, given that they claim to be able to send you forward or back as much as 5,760 years, none of the missions they offer you send you back any further than 1964, and most of them only as far back as 2003. It turns out they originally intended that to include a truly epic time-travel story, one that would send you all the way back to the fall of the Roman Empire, but they ran out of time and money to get it done. So they put it off for this issue, and found another excuse to use it: the Midnight Club.

( Warning: Contains spoilers. And boring stuff about a game, specifically the Midnight Club and Ancient Cimerora story arcs in City of Heroes/Villains issue 12. )

But here, let me show you some of it, via a fan-created YouTube video trailer: Samuraiko, "Midnight's Secrets." It's worth watching this one; it's awesome video. If Samuraiko can't get you fired up to play the game, nobody can. I can't stop watching this video over and over again, it's that good.



( Game geeking and spoilers continue: Villain Epic Archetypes. )

OK, I'm done geeking out, for now. I'll go back to other subjects, ones I know that more of you care about, now. I just had to get this all off of my chest, because I think it's fascinating. And if you're at all tempted to join or to come back, please connect with me (at global ID @InfamousBrad) on the Virtue server, because I'm about to try really hard to relaunch the (still fully equipped) Aeon University Faculty Club and Aeon University Student Union, and I need some of my old guild-members back, and new guild members, too, please!

This just in, from community manager "Lighthouse:" "Just in time to try out all the new features included in Issue 12: Midnight Hour, it’s a free Reactivation Weekend! From Thursday, May 22nd starting at 11 AM Pacific (1 PM Eastern) and continuing through Sunday, May 25th at 8:59 PM Pacific (11:59 PM Eastern) all inactive accounts in good standing have free access to City of Heroes and/or City of Villains!"

I doubt this applies to old trial accounts, but it's worth trying. For the rest of you, if you ever subscribed to City of Heroes or City of Villains, starting after the twice-weekly server maintenance Friday morning, it's free for you for most of Memorial Day weekend.

Issue 12, the next big software release of City of Heroes (and Villains) came out this week, arguably ahead of schedule. (Also, arguably, a little more buggy than I'd like, but there were some features here that were so hotly demanded that they were under a lot of pressure from players to ship it and deal with the minor annoyances after it went live. Users are like that.)

With this issue, we're beginning to see the important differences that came with getting the game away from half-control by the original company that wrote it, Cryptic Studios, and 100% under the control of one team, a "new" development company called NCsoft Northern California, abbreviated NC Squared or NC Norcal depending on who you ask. It's all the old team minus the boss, plus about a half dozen or so new hires. And I'll tell you what -- odds are, if there was some reason you left the game or didn't pick it up in the first place, it's turning out because they needed to get rid of that boss and they needed the new hires. You wouldn't believe how much of a difference it's made.

See, here's an open secret of the MMO industry, not exactly something they advertise to customers but something that everybody eventually admits under pressure: It takes about 50 to 100 people to develop a new MMO. That counts all the user interface designers, 3-D modelers, level designers, mission writers, game mechanics designers, animators, computer programmers and so forth who put everything on the screen, plus the managers to coordinate that crowd. It does not count the people who build-out the server farm and run it, the sales staff who will sell it, the billing department that collects the monthly subscription fees, or the customer service people who answer customer questions in-game and out; they work for the publisher, usually. But here's the deal: no publisher in history, no company in history, has kept that whole mob of 50 to 100 people on the payroll after the game has shipped. That's more of a scandal for the industry than you'd think, because no MMO has even shipped with all of the announced, advertised features complete, let alone bug-free. Every company promises players that it's okay if the game is only half done, that the programmers will finish it "soon." And then, quietly and without announcement, they lay off 50% to 75% of the development staff in the first month, whether it's done or not, and lean on the remainder to stay in "crunch mode" for their entire time at the company, asking 15 to 25 people to do the work of 50 to 100 without letting anybody know that the other 35 to 75 people aren't there any more. (Not that customers don't figure this out, eventually.)

And so it was for NCsoft and Cryptic Studios: NCsoft, who was putting up the money, slashed the budget of City of Heroes at about the 3 or 4 month mark, making them lay off 45 of the 60 people in the company. The remainder, whom players (now clued in to just how deep the cuts were, because the survivors are no longer under NDA) call the Freem Fifteen (for in-joke reasons), did a heroic job trying to finish, then continue to upgrade, the game. And they did amazing work, no more than they had to work with. But there was only so much they could do, they were burning out and turning less ambitious, and it was getting harder and harder to hide from the players that the game was getting stale. And that showed up in the subscriber numbers; while EVE Online has steadily continued to climb, CoH membership peaked shortly after the layoffs and has declined slowly since. But now? Now I think the game is actually well-positioned to potentially become a million-subscriber game, and the reasons have to do with something rather more important than the extra money NCsoft is willing to invest now (especially with their previous Great White Hope, Tabula Rasa, circling the drain), even more important than the rejuvenation of the superhero genre from Marvel having set up their own film studio and making the superhero movie a popular genre again. No, the biggest reason you should think about trying this game, or trying it again if you dropped out before, is cultural: the developers are taking time to play the game again.

You'd think that'd be the norm, but it wasn't, and it was beginning to show (at the very least) in the increasing difficulty we were having getting the developers to understand some of the problems we were having, some of the opportunities we were describing that they were passing over. Cryptic Studios had originally "strongly suggested" that their employees play the game in their off time, but then kept them on such long hours that they didn't have any time off to play it in, or hardly any. Now, it's official that they get one hour a day during the day, paid time, when practically the whole company puts down what they're working on, logs on together in teams and solo under secret anonymous character names, and plays the game. And in a recent interview, the new lead designer and the person in charge of game balance and powers design admitted something sheepishly. After almost every hour they spent online under the new policy, they'd drop by the office of the game's user interface designer and say, well, some of the same things we'd been trying to get them to do for years now: "Can you get it to do <x>?" And almost every time, he'd say, "Sure, gimme 15 minutes" or "gimme an hour." The result? Such an incredibly long list of Quality of Life features that the new user interface, chat system, and other minor tweaks to the new user experience are almost enough to qualify this as City of Heros 2.

There is, also, another demonstration we got of what was wrong with the old boss. Don't get me wrong about this part, because one thing I've always admired about Jack Emmert was that if he wasn't convinced that a change would be good for the game, it didn't matter worth a rat's hindquarters how many highly vocal complainers demanded it on the game's official forums. He would say, "sorry, not convinced," and that was that. That sounds pig-headed, and he took a lot of flack for it, but let me tell you what: I've played a game whose publisher was completely spineless about giving people on the official forums everything they whined for en masse, and they wrecked that game beyond all repair, because frankly, a lot of the time the customer just plain isn't right. But sometimes, Jack Emmert was wrong, too, and we learned to recognize when it was going to be when he would answer our requests by saying that there was no good reason, economic or game-balance, not to give us what we wanted, but it didn't "fit his vision of the game."

Well, "Jack Emmert's vision" no longer controls the game; he stayed behind at Cryptic to head-up Champions Online. (Don't get too excited; it's the same game Microsoft walked away from as a probable failure, Marvel Universe Online, repackaged with the classic Champions game setting but without the Hero System rules.) And in one formerly obnoxious area, we're seeing the wonderful results of the new regime: Powerset Proliferation, Round One. If you wanted to play a psychic before but didn't want to be a defender, you were out of luck. If you wanted to be a storm summoner but didn't want to be a hero, tough luck. If you wanted to be a brute but wanted to use weapons instead of bare hands, tough luck. If you wanted to be a fiery melee user but wanted to be a scrapper, not a tank, tough luck. And so forth, and so on; people like me came up with a list of around 100 sets of superpowers already implemented in the game that could be copied from one character class to another without changing the balance of the game, and without creating any substantial expense for the development team, that would have the benefit of tremendously increasing the number of sub-classes people can play. Jack Emmert didn't want it; he wanted the "flavor" of the powers in each character class to be "unique."

Well, the new lead designer and the new game balance manager said "screw that." At least every other issue from now on, they're going to open up tens or hundreds of new subclasses. This one, every main character class (but one) got at least two new powersets to combine with the new or existing powersets for their character class; the net effect was to add about 120 new character classes to the game, things like psi blast/mental domination blasters, battle axe/super reflexes brutes, dark aura/dark melee tankers, ninjas/storm summoning masterminds, plant control/thermal radiation controllers, ice/storm or electric/storm corruptors, earth control/electric assault dominators, and over a hundred more. (The new-user areas are completely over-run with veterans who'd been lusting after some of these combinations for up to four years.)

There's more to the new issue than that, and I will (probably) write about the other big changes to the game tomorrow, or soon at least. But what I think is fascinating about the above is that this time, boy, changing the guy at the top of the company really did make a huge difference, so much of a difference that it really is a whole new game, almost, certainly a much better game, over at City of Heroes.

(And yes, I have 14-day trial codes to hand out, if anybody wants. Just email me a request.)