You've Got To Curse At ALL The Players!

Meh.

Not really a fan of the pathetic oversimplification of the process and the painting of all involved as buffoons.

What I know about language filters and gaming is that sometimes companies need to have a filter to keep their rating and continue to market to kids. So I see the bug and stupidity of filtering NPC text but that people found (even trivial) ways to circumvent the filter? Not so much.

Being brutally honest the games industry isn’t doing a very good job policing itself. IMO this does involve chat filters but also things like intentionally designing gameplay to be addictive. At some point the policing will be done externally. A chat filter is not a substitute for public channel moderation. Yet companies like blizzard do not even try.

The players are only submitting 1200 bugs a day? Must have a ratio of players who bother to fill out bug reports of something like 1:1000.

Anywho, I do know that Champions Online is in deep trouble, but I don’t think they’re quite to the “relegated to the role of red-headed stepchild” phase. It’s their one and only cash cow until when/if Star Trek Online comes out, so they’d have to be stupid to put it to slaughter.

I know that the silly profanity filter is something I complained quite a few times about. They aught to )@#(! better one in. I have also noticed that, even in beta, quite a few tickets I submitted were misinterpreted in a manner suggesting a significant portion of their ticket handlers might not be native English speakers.

We (the players of Champions Online) still got the same CSR talking on the forums now that we did before release (Daeke) so this idea that they swapped out CSR team a week after release is silly. I’m inclined to believe the ElderGames guy is just blowing a lot of smoke in Cryptic’s bonnet hoping they’d get out of their stupor and fix their game faster.

Broken dev process. How does QA know what is broken when there is no documentation to describe what should happen?

Double-bad on PM’s for being idiots.
Single-bad on dev and QA for not knowing obvious broken process.
1/2-bad on Scott for taking easy joke on broken process.

CO is on its last leg. Recently at 9pm on a Thursday night, I did a count of all the zones in CO:

Canada: 739
Desert: 529
Millenium City: 883
Monster Island: 178
Lemuria: 71

That’s a total of 2,400.

Keep in mind, CO doesn’t have servers. That’s the ENTIRE game population.

There are MUDs that hit a peak of 500+ users.

And today they release that full respecs cost $13 RL dollars.

ROFL. Bill Roper strikes again.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m having lot’s of fun with Champions Online and my other game is Darkfall. You can call me a Hardcare Corebearz.
I am almost reaching 40 with one character and am really looking forward to do it all again with my alts. The game is fun and the same quest with completely different power sets is almost something completely different.

For me, the biggest problem with the game is the lack of a proper LFG tool and more importantly the lack of incentive for the average player to group. I know that this is a worn old discussion but do people really like MMO’s? For me, playing in a group wihout any morons is a reward in itself. If said group is also polite and interesting than it’s MMO heaven. Today you have games where LFG is a quest in itself that can take 2 to 3 hours to complete or is so loose that you don’t even realize you are in a group.

Is there any material you can point me at that discusses this issue?

Hel, that will teach me to go to the oficial forums (geldonyetich url).
I thought I was having fun and that the game was good. Turns out I’m not having fun and the game is crap.
Seriously though, it seems that nowadays it’s like “hey, i’m not having fun for 5 minutes now. time to unsub.” If money isn’t a problem at least give yourself a months notice before leaving. You may discover that the things you hate are about to get fixed.

CO is on its last leg. Recently at 9pm on a Thursday night, I did a count of all the zones in CO:

Canada: 739
Desert: 529
Millenium City: 883
Monster Island: 178
Lemuria: 71

That’s a total of 2,400.

Keep in mind, CO doesn’t have servers. That’s the ENTIRE game population.

Oh, so that was you.

Well, I’m not so sure, really. First off, you’re not looking at those who might be in the character generation (a major feature of the game – rerolling was where a lot of the appeal of CoX is too), instances (‘help a citizen’, nemesis, UNITY, crisis zones), or simply offline on a Thursday.

I don’t know – most MMORPGs don’t break half a dozen servers, most of the zones are nearly empty most of the time, Champions Online load-balances things quite a bit – it seems that those numbers are fairly decent. The overwhelming number of players are casual, you can expect them to be online less than 2 hours a day, so one sample out of a 24 hour period isn’t that great.

“…naming a zone Canada doesn’t exactly convey excitement, eh?”

Bingo. For excitement it should’ve been Toronto. For a gritty noir feel, Monteal. If they really wanted boring and bucolic they should’ve gone with Ottawa.

You think these things would be something standard across all MMORPGS. Basics like a decent language filter. Seems like a lot of trouble is re-inventing the ‘wheel’ for each project. Surprised there isn’t a middleware solution providers for this stuff.

All games should be like D2.

No filter no limits.

@Stabs

“Care to explain how that went live if they are not buffoons?”

Sure.

Let’s be clear about the priority and severity of the bug we are talking about. NPC flavor text being filtered is probably a mid to low severity bug. It doesn’t break any gameplay, it isn’t a crash bug, a dupe bug, or anything even remotely severe. The only weight it has is because it is broad scope.. likely if you play the game you will see it. Even so this is not at all severe.

Priority I cannot say because I don’t know what else is on their plate. However I can say for certain that this isn’t the highest priority bug they have or if the same bug would manifest in whatever MMO you choose to pick it wouldn’t be the highest priority bug it has either. The entire chat filter itself may be a low priority feature. I doubt that they have any interest in making it bullet-proof and the article author is naive for even mentioning that the kiddies worked around it quickly.

So.. all the employees who work on an entire product are buffoons including all of the QA department who may or may not have even ever looked at the feature before it went in. The devs, test, pm, designers, who never touched this are all buffoons. Sorry, but that is such an ignorant viewpoint. The net it casts would certainly include everyone professionally involved with every MMO ever created.

Actually, in that forum post you made someone corrected your calculation with what seemed to be far more realistic numbers. On top of that, as I said, those calculations don’t really go because CO has less of a specific peak. The whole world plays on the same server so it doesn’t have the sharp population drop region based products have…

I wouldn’t mind playing with 2400 players only if the game would be good. Didn’t play CO (yet?), so I don’t know, but I am not sure what you’re arguing about.

Obviously the fail-type launches with 750k-1m sold boxes are over now, after getting shafted with both Age of Conan and Warhammer, potential buyers are (should be) more cautious today.

Huh, I thought Champs was doing pretty well. A shame, but I’m not sure if it’s different enough for me either way :I

Paying for respecs sounds pretty stupid though, much like most microtransactions. $25 for a single WoW server transfer, man.

Nobody posted a correction. The numbers are 100% accurate and completely factual. Sure, people draw different conclusions, but that’s inevitable.

The numbers that you pulled from looking at the various zone lists are 100% accurate and completely factual.

However, the part where you said there might be another 25% in instances, character generation, ect, and where you figure that there might be 10x the numbers you saw that represents the whole userbase, that is pure conjecture that even the most experienced people in the business would not attempt to eyeball for the obvious inability of humankind to take that kind of measurement. I’m not sure your “general rule in MMOs” exists anywhere but in your own theorycrafting based on very subjective experience.

Another rather important skewing factor was that, at about the time you were running this test, many players were over on the test server preparing for the upcoming Bloodmoon event. There had been another one just a few days prior where the players had been introduced to the test server and discovered that here was a level-up NPC they could play with there.

I do expect quite a few less players than immediate following a release because this is standard for MMORPGs. For most players, an MMORPG is like any other game: they see the box and buy it, play it for a bit, get bored of it, and stop playing it. It’s only those who like what they see that tend to hang around. The retention rate right at release, when hype meets reality, is perhaps the worst retention rate of an MMORPG’s life cycle.

I’m opposed to $12 for a full respec because of conflict of interest. The game designer suddenly has a financial incentive to nerf my current configuration to force me to respec, or to lead me down a garden path that forces a respec later.

Like most conflicts of interest, it matters not if game developers are professional people that won’t let a measily $12 influence their decisions. Perception is everything.

I think the only sane course for respecs is to make them completely free with a real world cool down timer to reduce flip-flopping. The usual counter argument is that everyone will then just clone the same build, but I say:
1) So what? They can also declone to different builds.
2) Is it better to lock people into crappy builds they don’t like just so that the designer can pat themselves on the back and say “Everything is balanced cause there are many different builds!”

I’m opposed to $12 for a full respec because of conflict of interest. The game designer suddenly has a financial incentive to nerf my current configuration to force me to respec, or to lead me down a garden path that forces a respec later.

Like most conflicts of interest, it matters not if game developers are professional people that won’t let a measily $12 influence their decisions. Perception is everything.

Part of me agrees. Another part of me sees that they’re offering full retcons at all as potentially sabotaging their ability to fleece profit out of the players.

In City of Heroes, a respec meant you’re choosing the order and which powers you take, but you’re still pretty much locked into the same primary/secondary power set.

In Champions Online, a full retcon means completely rebuilding your character from scratch. It’s essentially rerolling a new character but keeping your level, equipment, and quest progression, name (which can be changed via another kind of token) and nemeses.

It’s unprecedented. It means that once you hit level 40 with one character, if you want to take another character to level 40 you now have two choices: grind for the pre-requisite number of hours to pull that off, or spend $12.50 to full retcon your existing level 40 character into a new character.

That this choice is even offered is exceedingly generous. It might take a casual player several months to hit 40, at $15/mo, but now they don’t have to: they can get and become bored of their new level 40 character in mere hours.

First, they didn’t put an space filter in their word checker. No offense, but that’s basic coding 101. Damn, they must have been overworked. Second, retcons and skill systems are…at odds. But, they are a must if the skill points are limited. And it’s fine if max-level players can’t go to the flavor of the month so easily, but new players can’t get screwed in a game that hopes to last.

geldonyetich: And here I thought you didn’t like grinding?

If the only thing keeping players in your game is the need to grind up their 6th alt to level 40 to see content variety #4, your game is already a failure.

I really hate the complete lack of faith that game developers have in the stickiness of their game. Or perhaps it is a complete misunderstanding in *what* makes MMORPGs sticky? People *should* be bored of the level 40 character. They shouldn’t be playing because the character excites them. They should be playing because they enjoy hanging out with the cool fellow people and regularly challenging themselves to the in-game “games” of monster bashing.

It’s not content that keeps people. It’s people.

It would be entirely reasonable and correct for an MMORPG to present a level 40 player a cut scene that says: “You won. There is no more leveling. You can quit now if you wish.” Maybe even present a /cancel button right there? If the player is treating it as a single player game, you *want* them to quit when they are done. That way they aren’t burned out, have a good feeling of your game, will re-up with the expansion pack, etc.

Just to clarify, I am somewhat a “games are art” freak, and so I’m not really in favor of the almighty dollar corrupting a work. Rather, I am very aware that it will.

It would be awesome of Champions Online went F2P and was completely supported by Micropayments. It wouldn’t be the first MMORPG to do this. It may even be a sign of the times that this si how MMORPGs have to be now that the industry is so glutted (Smedley certainly seems to think so, and Free Realms would seem to confirm it). However, until that day, Cryptic is more or less stuck trying to keep players subscribed as long as they can. They’re probably fairly locked into it thanks to the Lifetime subscription offer at release.

It’s interesting to contrast Champions Online with City of Heroes. City of Heroes is also a subscription based game with these micropayment options for respecs, rename tokens, server moves (inapplicable to CO), costumes, ect. However, Champions Online differs because they bring it to the forefront – City of Heroes sort of hides it in the background.

@Guy
Spot on, I’d say.

My only quibble would be whether or not people would be right to find the “job” context appropriate. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re still enjoying yourself, it’s not a grind – the accumulation mechanic itself is not at fault. If you’re not enjoying yourself, if you feel you’re involvement in a game is a second job you’ll never get paid for, that’s a problem.

Quotin Brask Mumei : “It’s not content that keeps people. It’s people.”

I am baffled that some people still believe this nonsense in 2009…

Do you have any idea how many peoples spend their entire MMORPG career soloing and could not care less about any kind of socializing.

In 2009, you really want to put you blinders and keep thinking socialization is the end all be all of player retention ; really ?

I have no doubt SOME people play MMORPG for the social interaction, but for me and quite some others, other peoples are at best scenery and at worst an annoyance.

I’d say solo vs group is a problem of extremes. Right now, a lot of people are actually saying their primary complaint about Champions Online is that it’s actually very hard to group. Many quests aren’t sharable, and there’s very little incentive to hang around with a group who doesn’t have your quests because xp for just killing stiff is negligible. There’s some fixes coming for this in Blood Moon.

So, while forced grouping is rightly frowned upon, so also is forced soloing. You do need to provide some reason for players to play along together, or you are undermining an important foundation of being an MMORPG to begin with.

In fact, in many of these failed MMORPGs that the market is so SATURATED with, you will discover their solo content is not lacking. Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault – soloing was practically all you did in this games, there was zero incentive to group. Earth and Beyond… well, I think E&B’s problem was trying to do EverQuest in space when the average Sci-Fi is looking for something else.

If people want to pass time like this, OK, but I’ve seen people do this and I’m not entirely sure they’re actually having fun. They’re getting something, though, so… fine.

It’s tough to say what’s really going on in their head. It could be they’re getting something… or it could be that they’ve yet to realize they’re being played. I think it’s that sudden realization that, “hey, why the hell am I wasting my time doing this” that burns people out from MMORPGs.

And you’re probably in agreement here.

I do believe that in the long run, people get sick of this too. Hence the mass burnout on WoW, and rapidfire jumping ship to multiple other games.