City of Heroes 5th Anniversary – European forum backlash

Yesterday was the start of the 5th anniversary events for City of Heroes/Villains. What the CHAOS promised consuisted of seemed to be basically triggering all sorts of events and special characters that had been in place in the game for the past 5 years. A pretty neat thing I think. I was not logged on for long yesterday due to other committments, but I found the parts I participated in to be quite enjoyable – however, it seemed to be quite a bit of “downtime” between some of the event triggering.

There was an anniversary address by developer Positron in the evening US time and at least in the European forums there seemed to be quite some hype and expectation built up for that address. Then came the anniversary address. This seemed to have created quite some negative and sometime harsh comments among some European forum dwellers and triggered some “I am leaving this game” type of posts.

This was followed by new threads and a bunch of “I am staying” posts also. Overall, there has been a fair amoint of negativity and frustration expressed in the forums. I do not read the US forums, but from what I have read there is no such backslah on that side of the pond.

I cannot say I am disappointed with the news about Issue 15 that was included in the address – I had really no expectations on what should be there, so how could I? But I must agree with people saying that the address itself was perhaps a bit dry and underwhelming. In that regard, the post from War Witch regarding the 5 year anniversary was more along the lines what I think an anniversary address should contain. 

I find it a bit interesting to see that some people are asking for some substantial upgrades in terms of assets and game mechnics for the game and that it will be necessary to compete with Champions Online and DC Universe Online. And those people are also complaining that this has not happened already. Now, if Paragon Studios are doing such revamps I would expect that to take much longer than a year to get ready. Such changes are quite substantial and may involve rewrites of large pieces of software and recreation of lots of assets.

If it might take 4-5 years to make a new MMO with perhaps more people than the 50-something at Paragon Studios, why would big revamp changes be possible within a year?   Frankly I think many of the people hired would just be to fill the spots necessary because the team was not part of Cryptic anymore. 

Paragon Studios released Mission Architect and for me that is a big, bold and perhaps innovative step to be taken by an MMO developer. I do applaud them for doing that and I hope they will continue to try and refine that experience.

Without City of Heroes/Villains, I think the MMO market would have been a more boring space to watch and participate in.