NCSoft/Paragon Studios has announced a second expansion for City of Heroes. Entitled "Going Rogue", the expansion will examine the gray areas between good and evil and allow characters to change their morality through special missions. Through the morality system hero characters will be able to access areas formerly only available to villains, and vice versa.
The timing of this announcement seems a bit odd, considering that the
CoH player base is in turmoil at the moment over the newly released Architect System in the game. To summarize what happened, a system was released in the game that allows players to create their own missions (quests) and release them to the public. When the system hit the live servers players attacked it like a fat kid attacks a cake and proceeded to create hordes of missions that exploited various bugs to create a power leveler's farming paradise. The normal game basically came to a stand still and the only thing available to do was run bugged farming missions with names such as "Meow Mixxx 9.0".
I was personally playing CoH at the time and had to cancel my account over the whole thing. It neatly demonstrated that today's multiplayer gamer will actively exploit any flaw in any game system to get ahead in any way possible. I mean, the game went from a laid back casual friendly atmosphere to an EXTREME HARDCORE FARMING BUILDS ONLY! grind fest literally overnight. It felt like I had logged on to a completely different game.
So, what makes the timing of the press release funny to me is that it is an obvious attempt to sweep their little blunder under the rug and show their players the next shiny new thing that they get to keep paying their money for. A Lead Designer from Paragon Studios event admits that there is "
(admittedly) very little information we've released at this time" regarding the details of the actual expansion.
I'm glad that the developers learned from their mistakes here and are doing the right thing by banning exploiting players. I hope that other MMO developers are keeping an eye on this, because if they give an inch in their system their players will have no problem taking a mile from them.
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so, you know you can embed videos on your Destructoid C-blog, right?
Because that's the only thing that isn't here. The video.
Please, introduce yourself to the community. Because it feels like you're *ONLY* posting here for hits on your main site.
Exploitation goes better when you buy us a drink first.
I'd add a comment about the article...but I don't think you're listening....
Damn, the Dtoid audience is ridiculously hard :)
Edit: Deleted the last line.
@tubby
Oh , c'mon , give the kid a break , he didin't link his site in the article and the text was pretty well made , and not everbody needs a introduction ...
@Washedupgamer
We're not hard, we just expect you not to farm for hits to your personal site.
Thanks for the quick edit by the way. It's always good when people listen to suggestions!
I personally think that the competitive nature of MMORPGs makes them a prime target for player exploitation. I can't personally blame them, because if I payed a monthly fee I'd certainly want to be able to level as quickly as possible.
What steps would you take, other than banning, to reduce the desire to "bend the rules"?
"Were not hard"
I'm kinda hard right now.
What steps would you take, other than banning, to reduce the desire to "bend the rules"?
There isn't much that can be done. If there is a flaw in a system it will be attacked ruthlessly.
If you look at competitive gaming across several different genres you see the same type of thing occurring. RTS and Fighting games especially. You basically have to latch on to one overpowered strategy and perfect it to the point where you are better at exploiting that one tactic then everyone else. Look at the Warthog rushes in Halo Wars as a recent example.
Developers just have to keep on top of these things if they want fair and balanced games. These problems exist in all genres but in MMOs you are faced with the problem of having to take back what was done. The only answers for that are ban hammers or massive character rollbacks. I've seen both of these done in the past.
Oh Snap! There's a person at the controls! HI!
I hadn't heard that this cool creation idea had gone so horribly sour. I figured there'd by some powerleveling, but I thought the CoH community at large was... ok naively ... "above" doing that on a widescale.
Your solution sounds a lot like Blizzard and WoW (someone had to mention them in an MMO discussion right?). They tweak that game CONSTANTLY and I think there's good tenuous balance in that game, so far as PvE group usefulness.
The other part as a developer is getting the community to believe you when you say things are balanced, or better when you don't exploit.
Its tricky and fascinating.
also welcome to Dtoid!
Fuck. I shouldn't get back into it because I can't afford it, but I can't help myself. I just love these games too much.