[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity)

[Michael Hartman]

Jean, Yannick wrote:
> Michael Hartman wrote:
> <mlist at thresholdrpg.com> said:
>>I venture the opinion that it would have sold at least 10-100 times as
>>many copies, and made more money in the process, as a non-subscription
>>based game that simply sold periodic expansions (at nearly the rate that
>>they release their "issues"). As an added bonus, by doing it that way
>>they could avoid the silly time sinks and let people focus on making
>>tens if not hundreds of different characters (which is the best part of
>>the game anyway) instead of the MMO-standard hundreds of hours of
>>grinding.
>
> On the other side, the veteran gamers craving for depth and strategy,
> will quickly get bored at the lack of depth and leave for other, more
> "hardcore", games.
>
> Bottom line, choosing to give your player a game experience without much
> "depth" may very well be a valid decision, just make sure you understand
> the pros and the cons of it.

Actually, if you re-read my quoted paragraph above yours, that is not my
argument at all. When I look at City of Heroes (known now by the acronym
CoX), I try to take its complete and total lack of depth, gameplay
options, and variety as a given. Then I wonder how they could have done
a better job of marketing and pricing their product.

The thing is, there is one area where they actually DO have depth and
variety: character creation and design. But the thing is, they do not
even play to this strength, because you still have to go through an
MMO-typical, timesink filled grind to level up a character to max and
fully realize its potential (and see all of its powers).

It has long been my belief that their product would be superior, and
make a lot more money, if they dumped the grind, massively accelerated
the levelling rate, and made their money through the sale of expansions
(what they call "issues") instead of subscriptions.

The presence of a levelling grind badly exposes the lack of variety in
gameplay in CoX. Grinding out your 400th warehouse mission in a row is a
lot more glaring of a problem when it is what you have to do in order to
make that next level. Pursuit of badges and completion of task
forces/strike forces would be a more rewarding element of the game if
you didn't have to worry about grinding xp.

Other MMOs try to keep you grinding by giving you a wide variety of
zones to grind in, and a wide variety of loot to keep you moving forward
to that next little piece of candy. City of Heroes has no loot and
virtually zero zone variety. Thus, they shouldn't rub your nose in it by
making you do the same warehouse mission (or office mission, or
whatever) endlessly.

I enjoyed CoX, and renewed my account a couple of times. But it never
really lasts long because I can't tolerate the coexistence of a grind
with no variety. If they encouraged you to make tons of characters
(through an advancement system that would be at least 10 times faster),
I'd probably keep my subscription indefinitely and be on my 100th alt by
now.