Teaming: Why City of Heroes beats Tabula Rasa

In the past 9 months there has been two MMOGs I have been playing regularly - City of Heroes/Villains and Tabula Rasa. The points I wanted to bring up here are applicable for other games also, but I have taken the two games I played much recently as the examples.

The short summary is that teaming in City of Heroes/Villains (CoH/CoV) makes a good job of avoiding obstacles to set up a team and have a bit of fun. Tabula Rasa (TR) has still some way to go here.

1. Team-oriented content:
In CoH/CoV everything and nothing is teamoriented. Almost all content can be played solo, but the same content is scaled up depending on team size and difficulty setting for the mission owner. More enemies and more difficult enemies is the result for larger teams. This is for instances only, but since almost all content is instance-based that could be said to be the general state.

In TR a lot of the content is on outdoor area, with some instances accesible through each outdoor area basically. The instances are designed for small teams primarily, but have some ability to scale, although this is more subtle than CoH/CoV. Also the control points in the outdoor areas are also places that benefits from having teams. Although it is stirctly not necessary to form teams, it generally requires multiple players - unless the player level is (sometimes substantially) higher than the enemies. If you get into the higher levels, the requirement to team even in the outdoor areas also becomes a bit more common.

Both have lots of content for teams, although CoH/CoV has the edge here with allowing everything to be team-oriented, while TR is almost forcing teams for some content.

2. Team requirements:
Both games are quite good in that they do generally not require a certain team set-up, e.g. “the holy trinity”. This makes it easier to find characters/players that fit and they are both better than many other MMOGs in that area.
Still, CoH/COV has the edge with the sidekick/exemplar functionality. While the actual level span that works for a team is quite small in the game the sidekick/exemplar functionality more than makes up for that limitation. This makes it possible to transform another players effective level to be quite close (same or 1 level below) to a player character they pair up with in the team.
Which means that almost anyone can be invited to a team. There is a split where heroes and villains cannot team together in most places of the game though.

In TR the usable level range is quite forgiving for team compared to some other games, so everyone does not have to be very close in level. However, without any sidekick/exemplar-like functionality there is still a shorter level span in practice for teaming.

3. Team content experience:
In CoH/CoV most instanced areas are built with with a few common building blocks and players become all too familiar with those. Some of the story content is quite good, but requires reading a number of text “clues”, which may be received at times when there is not much opportunity to read them.
In TR the instanced areas are much more varied and the environment itself a quite enjoyable experience and quite good-looking in comparision. The story is also more accessible and visible in TR. There are also text here to enhance the story experience, but this is generally associated with the missions taken.
Both games can take advantage of some scripted encounters and added allies in the missions.
In this are TR is the overall winner.

4. Mission re-play and co-play:
So bundling up a number of people to take on some team content missions, how does that work with what everyone in the team has done before or not?
In CoH/CoV everyone can participate in the mission content, regardless of whether they actually have the mission or not, or whether they have done it before or not. It is automatically shared with all in the team, including progess, objectives and rewards. Which means in practice that whether people have the same missions or are at the same step in a series of missions does not matter so much.
In TR, missions are more traditional. Most missions can only be played through once. If you join to play in an instance where you have already been, you do not get to participate in the story progress other than what you may see as an outside observer. This dimishes the experience unless you are all at the same page. Missions can be shared, but only if those mission could have been picked up directly anyway from the mission giver.
And what maybe is worse, many instances seem to get into “bug infestation mode” if your team has members that have partially completed the missions available while some others haven’t. The game logic seems to have trouble handling that, often resulting in some frustraing experiences trying to work around the limitations in some way.
Also, if people get disconnected from the game and have to log back in, the state if the instance and the mission may not be synchronized and they only way to be able to complete it is to reset the instance and start over again.
It requires everyone to be on the same page mission wise and also to potentially have some spare time and good relations between people if disconnects starts to happen. These are the most frustrating aspects of TR teaming in my opinion.

5. Looking for teams:
CoH/CoV has a pretty good search tool to find team members, which makes it easy to look for potential members and to “announce” if you are interested in teaming.
TR has an LFG chat channel, by default in a separat chat tab. There is a new LFG tool on its way in a future release, but right now CoH/CoV is simply much better in this area.

This past week has been a double XP week for teaming in Tabula Rasa - you get twice the normal XP in teams, which was already better than solo. Obviously this is to encourage people to team up more. Personally I do not care much for the exact amount of XP,but rather the other points mentioned here. Less obstacles and inconveniences will make for better and more enjoyable teaming, not more XP.

Age of Conan prices - rip-off or rebate?

I recently read a blog entry by Tobold on the European price for Age of Conan and I am must say that I was a bit surprised by Tobold’s comment and by some of the commenters.

The European monthly fee for Age of Conan was 12.99 Euro if one paid one month at a time. This was basically called a rip-off because with the current exchange rate between Euro and US dollars, this is substantially less than the US monthly fee of $14.99.

This is just silly. The fees are basically the same as all major subscription-based MMOGs , be it in Europe or in North America. It is not a market where the companies compete with price, but at the same time it is a bit price sensitive - at least no company is willing to try to get a much higher fee than the rest, too much risk.

Since the fees actually pay for operations and continued development of the game, what becomes interesting is where do the companies have those costs?

In the case of Funcom - originally a Norwegian company, but at least on paper it is registered in Netherlands and has a headquarter in Switzerland. There are probably some tax reasons for this. They are listed on the Olso stock exchange. They also have offices in Norway, USA and China.

There is little doubt that the majority of the development work is done in Norway though. The main expense there is salaries; that is typical for a software-focused IT company. The salaries do nto change with exchange rates. So how many Norwegian crowns (the currency - NOK) would they get for a monthly fee today (May 9th 2008)? How would they have received a year ago (May 9th 2007)?

Today a North American subscriber gives them

$14.99 = 14.99 * 5.1307 NOK ~ 76.91 NOK

Today a European subscriber gives them

€12.99 = 12.99 *7.8815 NOk = 102.38 NOK

Looking back a year ago, the corresponding numbers are

$14.99 = 14.99 * 5.9893 NOK ~ 89.78 NOK

€12.99 = 12.99 * 8.1317 NOK ~ 105.63 NOK

(Source: FXhistory@oanda.com)

Note: I did not include any taxes here . That will affect what a customer will pay in the end, but that is not money that is going to the game companies, that is picked up the the governments. So it is not relevant in terms of whether a game company would rip someone off or not, since they do not get that money.

In both cases Funcom are “loosing” compared to if the game would have been released a year ago. If the exchange rates change they might of course “gain” some later, or “loose” again.

Roughly, the fees from 3 Europeans pay for the same amount of work that 4 North Americans do. If the value of the US dollar drops more, then more North Americans are needed to pay for the same amount of work, since they keep the prices the same. The same is the case for those paying in EUro as well.

Now, everything is of course not handled in NOK most likely. US servers and operations are likely handled in the US and with US costs. European servers and oprerations are likely handled here in Europe, perhaps in Norway or Switzerland.

The costs there would very likely be in the local currencies and differences in exchange rate would not matter that much.

Now, if there were any “rip-offs” that would more be from the companies with have the bulk of their development in the US, e.g. Blizzard, SOE, Turbine, NCSoft (for Western games).

Or aren’t all Westerns getting ripped off, since prices in China is likely even lower for any games that are available there? Let’s encourage all these companies to relocate and put all of their development work and all of their servers and operations in China instead. That would surely cut the costs and they can lower the fees for us all and not rip us off.

Is polish fun? Is innovation fun? The curse of meaningful play

Polish. Innovation. Two quite overused words when it comes to MMORPG discussions and which seem to become some general blunt weaponry to smack around with either to defend or attack some game in the genre.

Polish entered the stage with World of Warcraft and while at that point seemed to describe games whose properties were few annoying bugs and a number of game mechanics which did not completely suck and worked fairly well together. Which was a bit rare at that point, at least at the release of an MMORPG.

Now it seems to generally be used for the initial use, but with some added mesarement on how good the user of the word thinks a game is. E.g. World of Warcraft is more polished than insert-any-game-here.

How do you measure polish? What are the units? Is this polish measurement all that matters? If game a has 10 polish and game B has 12 polish, will players pick game B then? How much more polish matters?

If the game from a technical perspective works generally well and game mechanics are mostly positive experiences, then the game is “polished” enough to me. There is no “more polished” and even if there were, it does not really matter. Lack of “polish” can get int he way of the fun of the game, but more “polish” does not make the game more fun or better.

And innovation - people must have listened too much to Bill Gates and his crew who used the innovate word for way too many things in my opinion. And it is used as it is the only way to salvation for the MMORPG games. And when people are talking about innovation they are asking for things they think is more fun than what they are currently used to, once they see it and like it. Which is a quite different thing.

It seems every time a new game is released in the past few years a discussion with “Innovation” (or lack thereof), “clone” and similar words pop up. Age of Conan gets a bit of that now, Tabula Rasa and Pirates of the Burning Sea had that a few months ago and Warhammer Online and Chronicles of Spellborn will surely have that as well.

People are talking about “WoW clones” or “WoW killers”, perhaps saying that it is too much of the first and too little of the latter. Which is a bit #2 from the cow’s husband. What some people here, in particular many WoW players, are looking for is a “better WoW than WoW” referring to them as “WoW killers”, projecting some lack of complete satifaction with their game of choice, but without wanting to give up that unless it feels meaningful to do so. And it becomes meaningful if “everyone else” would jump on this killer game and it it would feel like a better WoW than WoW.

This is not just for WoW of course, but due to its market size there are more people in that situation and it may also accentuate the feeling of playing the “winner”, which also makes it more meaningful than other games for some.

While I think these are quite understandable and human reactions I think it may hurt the game market - they do not only have to be fun and functionally working properly (for the most part), but also have to fight a legacy with gaming hours spent in a meaningful way.

Is this the Age of Funcom? Conan open beta impressions

As many others I picked up a key from Fileplanet for the open beta. I had not planned to play anything here until perhaps after the game was released. But some friends mentioned they were going to play the game, so I decided to take a brief look at it.

First of all, I am not a Conan aficionado. I have read a comic book once I think and I have seen one of the movies with Arnold, all many years ago. I have not followed the game other than seeing some blurbs and news that are hard to avoid. So I have not really any idea of how it is “supposed” to be.

It seems pretty much apparent to me that this Fileplanet open beta event is very much separate from their regular beta, which is still closed. The servers are separate, installer indicates that this is the “IGN Open beta event” and there is a separate login before the actual login to get patches, welcome message is specific for the IGN beta etc.

Which means that this may have taken some time and effort to set up and coordinate and thus likely also an older build of the game. My guess is that marketing at Funcom are not entirely happy with the situation, but likely some business decision a long time ago that they could not change at this stage.

Why do I say that? Well, there have been some technical issues. Not a lot of them and the game has not crashed on me entirely - the only crashes for me have been when exiting the game actually. Other comments I have seen from people in the real beta indicates that it is in a better stage there. And some issues are things they likely want to try out and test with a large scale beta run such as this. So let’s not dwell on that - whatever I say here may or may not be valid at release, so better wait with that until it is actually released.

The game has a pretty neat intro for the character creation where it zooms in on a slave on a ship - you. From there a couple of origins (all human) can be picked and there are 12 different classes to pick from, from 4 major groups (soldier, priest, rogue and mage). Not all origins can pick all classes, as the background information indicates.

There is not a whole lot to customize on the character in terms of looks - but given that the character is a slave the outfit options should probably not be that high. And thankfully none of these slider things to detail the face and body, but rather a few select choices which all seem to look ok.

After that one is washed ashore on a beach and a story arc starts. The very first task is to rescue a fair lady captured by some bad guys (yay, no kill 10 rats as a first quest) and escort her to the nearby town/village (Tortage) - after applying some vengeance on the bad guys of course.

From there a number of quests can be obtained to do various deeds in the neighbourhood evolving around the dire situation for Tortage, being in the hand of a less friendly group called the Red Hand (which seemed to have a Red Head as their marker… Perhaps it sounded similar in the local langauge)

The combat interface seems to be pretty similar to many other MMORPGs, press a button to do something. Thankfully no auto-attack, instead 3 keys (1,2,3) are used to strike at the enemies from various angles, at least assuming it is a melee fight. There is also an option to parry and have shields in different positions to protect from corresponding blows at you.

I have not tried any shields yet (my character can’t use them), but the the rest of the combat mechnics are simple enough to work well. At first it was a bit of just mashing the buttons, but felt better after a while. And then I also discovered that there was “combo moves” and that you should press some of the directional buttons after activating it to make best use of the move.

It seems to work fairly well, so I’ll give that a thumbs up. Although I think it will need more pratice to make better use of, which is good - easy enough to work reasonably well at start, but with option to improve on it later.

The game interface do need a bit improvement I think, hopefully that will be there for release. The ingame minimap is a bit confusing and seems to show quests that are both eligeble and those that may be elieble later int he same way. I did not see any icons for system options and settings, exiting the game etc, only through key commands - which I could only find when I logged back in later and saw a hint on how to get the options view.

The story and setting is pretty nice and the environment looks nice, even on a medium setting - but perhaps not spectacular. Some of the quests are played in single player mode, advancing the major story arc (Destiny quests I think it was called) for the area.
There is one story that does not seem to be covered or dealt with though, which is the inbreeding in Tortage. When talking to the various NPCs with the dialog view that pops this is an apparent problem. But probably too sensitive to talk about for the local populace.

For one that has been generally a bit tired of fantasy MMORPG titles, Age of Conan feels different enough that it may be worth getting back into fantasy a bit - there are no elves, orcs or dwarves with beards or anyone called Legolass running around. Hopefully it stays that way later also.

It has a bit of down-to-earth-with-darkness-looming feeling, although some quests are still pretty standard type fight-X-of-this, collect-Y-of-that.

Over the sessions I played with the games so far my opinions have varied from Great! to This Sucks! and seems to end up at some opinion equilibrium somewhere in the middle.

It has made a good enough impression that I will probably end up buying it to try it out more properly, hoping that some technical issues are less of a concern at release.

Hopefully it will also be a game that does not require a lot of time investment, since I will still be blasting aliens in Tabula Rasa and putting on my spandex suits in City of Villains/Heroes.

Completing the pet dings

Today I completed a goal I had set up for my self a long time ago; now all my dominators have obtained their pets. And since I have dominators for all currently available powersets, that means 4 types of pets, plus mind’s mass confusion (which mind dominators get instead of a pet).

The latest addition to the menagerie was the fire imps. Three small critters that jumps around like Rikti monkeys and just beat on everything in their path. That extra damage is a welcome complement to the psi assault powers that my character uses.

After the soon-to-be-released Issue 12 there will be more powersets added, which means that I will play another dominator also if I want to keep the pet collection complete.

But5 for now I will just enjoy my new fire imps

4 years of spandex, player created deeds of Destinty

City of Heroes is turning 4 years old and lead designer Matt “Positron” Miller provides some comments on the state of the game. One intersting item he mentions is an upcoming feature; player created missions!

It seems that they will in some way expose the current toolset to create missions for the game; I assume it is about instanced missions. Most of the game is instanced anyway. Providing the ability to create missions for the player should probably fit better in City of Heroes/Villains than many other games. It will be intersting to see how much of the current mission mechanics will be made available.

E.g. can any villain/hero group be used, can players create their own named villains/heroes? Add pets and helpers, spawn patrols and ambushes? Change costumes/disguises, add temporary powers?

This sounds quite exciting and will be really interesting to see it in practice!

Positrons article also mentioned some statistics of the game; one was that 32 million characters had been created in the game! I think the current number of active players is around 150K. Even if the total number of players that have played the game at any given time is a lot more that is a staggering amount of characters. Even if the total number of players were 10 times as much, that would still be 24 characters on average… Clearly City of Heroes/Villains has been a good place for harboring altoholics like myself, or quite a lot of people have played the game at some point.

Happy Anniversary, City of Heroes!

(Soon at 2 years in the game myself)

Good stories hurt the longevity of an MMORPG?

For many people, inlcuding myself, a good background story and story content is an important aspect of an MMORPG. So why the headline?

Let me qualify “good story” a bit; that is that a game company developed story is a prominent feature of the game and with some thought to hold various elements in the world toghether by the story. You have to put in an effort to compltely avoid the story, if you wanted.
Tabula Rasa is a recent example, Earth & Beyond was another game with some serious story telling ambitions. LOTRO is another one in the fantasy genre.

The story experience if often considered weaker in MMORPGs though compared to single player games. In single player games, the player is the big hero or center of attention - this is not the case in MMORPGs.
The story telling is however not much different from single player games. At any given moment a single player can experience the story by himself/herself. He/she may need help at certain stages to overcome certain difficulties but in essence much of the story telling is just directed to a single player - no element of the story changes regardless of the number of players involved, only the amount and diifculty of some enemies in the path of the story.

Thus I think the story telling currently works better to support solo play experience, sometimes spiced up with some added support by other players. It does not support a core multiplayer experience, at least not well.

And for longevity of a player experience in an MMORPG, the multiplayer part needs to work. This can of course be accomplished by other means, but the story as it is now does not do that much to contibute to it. Rather it makes the solo experience better/good/more bearable. With a too strong story element in comparision to other features of the game, the game is going to hurt. To some extent like in single player games, players are going to feel some kind of completion when a story is followed through. And that may make the game feel “empty” and people may end up quitting.

Compare the games above to games like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains and Everquest 2, to take a few. The latter 3 all have a strong background story element, but the story element is a bit more hidden and a less prominent part of the player experience. I think this provides for a better foundation for longevity of the game as it is now.

And then there is EVE Online of course. Not much story at all provided by CCP, but very much so by the players themselves and very much a multiplayer story telling. And for those who get into EVE it seems to last quite well.

So how can the story telling be improved? Does it have to be player created content only, like in EVE? Or can game companies create story telling on a multiplayer scale and will that keep players playing longer due to the story?

Villain Epic archetypes - teaser video

NCSoft has released a teaser video showing some information about the villain epic archetypes scheduled for the soon-to-be-released Issue 12.

There are two different archetypes, Spiders and Widows. Those who choose the spider path start as Wolf Spiders. Skills and powers are of type machine guns, grenades and melee skills. At level 24 a career choice can be made to select between either Bane Spiders or Crab Spiders, adding different types of weaponry and skills for each type, including calling in tarantula reinforcements.

The widow archetype starts with Blood Widows, which are mainly martial arts specialists. At level 24 a career choice can be made between Night Widows or Fortunatas. Night Widows get psychic assult powers added to the martial arts skills, while Fortunatas weakens in martial arts, but on the other hand gets a wider array of psychic abilities than the widows.

While Spiders have been male and Widows have been female among NPCs so far it seems that both sexes will be available in each case.

Personally I am a bit more interested in the 2 Widow paths, although I will most certainly try out the Spiders as well.

NCSoft introduces microtransactions

I na press release NCSoft announces the introduction of their microtransactions system for in-game items, NCCoin. The first game to get this is the mech game Exteel, but the press release indicates that other future games as well as existing games may also get into NCCoin at a later stage.

Which other existing games will get NCCoin? With this model being more accepted in Asia my guess is that the Lineage games might get it. Neither Tabula Rasa nor City of Heroes/Villains are particularly item centric games, so they do not seem very likely targets. Getting enough in-game currency to buy stuff one may need is not a big problem in either game either, although City of Heroes/Villains have started to get plagued by rare item farming activities, so perhaps there are some opportunities to squeeze some cach out from farming players there.

I’m not sure about the viability in Guild Wards for this; it was too long ago since I played it and I never got very far in that game anyway.

NCSoft Europe podcast #2

NCSoft Europe has released their second podcast, talking about the player event at Omega Sector in Birmingham (”The Ultimate Heroic Weekend”), an interview with City of Heroes/Villains designer Melissa War Witch” Bianco and, as well as some talk about the Lineage 2 collector’s edition.

I really liked the interview with Melissa, who is a quite infectuously enthusiastic person. They talk about the player event @ Omega Sector, Issue 12 and the transition from Cryptic to NCSoft. Rockjaw, who is the podcaster is doing a pretty good job, although I think it goes a bit fast a times. A nice touch is that there is a transcript of the podcast available also.

It seems to me that NCSoft Europe has stepped up their activities a bit, which is a good thing.
It was a bit over a month since they released the first podcast, so I guess the next one will be some time in mid to late May if the trend continues. (As much of a trend you can have with 2 podcasts…)