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

[Damion Schubert]

On 3/16/07, Michael Hartman <mlist at thresholdrpg.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.


I'm actually a frequent defender of 'the grind', as I think there are a lot
of
misconceptions about why MMOs tend to gravitate towards it.  That being
said, I wholly agree with your sentiment here.  CoX has two problems
that fight against the grind that's in place:

1) An abundance of humanoid enemies (necessitated by the superhero
mythos) means that players are constantly fighting the same enemy,
at least in terms of animations and silhouette.  Say what you will
about giant rats, spiders and orcs, but at least they're all different
from each other.
2) A truly marvelous Unique Selling Proposition, that is all about the
best Character Creation system in the genre.  If there was ever a
game that wanted its customers to have dozens of alts, it's this one!

CoX should have had a relatively gentle grind.  Instead, based on evidence
I've seen, it doesn't.  Here are some graphs to compare:

   http://www.thejoelzone.com/coh/coh.bmp
   http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=362

The comparison most designers balance by is kills-to-level (i.e. how
many enemies at your level do you kill before you advance).  According
to this chart, in WoW, it takes 617 kills to go from 59 to 60.  By
comparison, it takes 4050 kills to go from 49 to 50 in CoH.  Your
first 600 kill level in CoH is way back at 18!

Of course, this is loaded with caveats.  You kill enemies much faster
in CoX in general (they are based on the 'kill hordes of minions' strategy),
and the charts completely ignore the number and exp contribution of
quests (which is generous in WoW, but I can't speak to its impact
in CoX).

--d