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Disappointment


Tuscarora

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Re: Disappointment

 

I'm sorry. I forgot that it's not okay to have your own opinions and expectations from a product. I forgot that it's not okay to be disappointed with a product. I really wanted to like CO, but I guess when it comes to Champions/HERO, I'm too much of a "fan-boy".

 

I don't understand why making aspects of the game resemble the PnP is a "bad business decision", or why it's a good idea to alienate the people who actually recognize the IP for it's origins.

 

You're right. I probably wanted way too much from this title. My expectations were way too high. They would have been considerably lower if this were Marvel Universe Online. But they named it "CHAMPIONS", and that's what raised the bar.

 

I'm tired of having circular arguments. You all think CO is great, so I'm happy for you.

 

Have fun. :thumbup:

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Re: Disappointment

 

I'm sorry. I forgot that it's not okay to have your own opinions and expectations from a product. I forgot that it's not okay to be disappointed with a product. I really wanted to like CO, but I guess when it comes to Champions/HERO, I'm too much of a "fan-boy".

 

 

Apparently you've forgotten that when you post on a public forum, people may respond with you, and may not agree with that opinion, and they are free to voice that disagreement and point out particular concers with the foundations of certain statements you are making. I'm glad this experience has provided you an essential reminder.

 

I don't understand why making aspects of the game resemble the PnP is a "bad business decision",

 

And thats crucial to the entire basis behind your unrealistic expectations of an MMO.

 

You're right. I probably wanted way too much from this title. My expectations were way too high.

 

They weren't too high,---your expectations defied logic. You were expecting a seven course gourmet meal from a retail fast food franchise.

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Re: Disappointment

 

They weren't too high,---your expectations defied logic. You were expecting a seven course gourmet meal from a retail fast food franchise.

 

 

And that sums up why I don't care for MMOs but do like some of the IMO higher quality single player computer RPGs

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Re: Disappointment

 

Apparently you've forgotten that when you post on a public forum' date=' people may respond with you, and may not agree with that opinion, and they are free to voice that disagreement and point out particular concers with the foundations of certain statements you are making. I'm glad this experience has provided you an essential reminder.[/quote']

 

I've forgotten nothing of the sort. What I actually forgot is that sometimes people have nothing better to do that make statements in order to get a rise out of other people. My bad. I'm touchy, so I make that mistake far too often. I also don't troll forums as often as others.

 

And thats crucial to the entire basis behind your unrealistic expectations of an MMO.
Nobody has explained WHY using an RPG system as the basis for an MMORPG system is bad. As a general rule, that is. I understand that the folks at Cryptic had been working on MUO and didn't want to flush the entire system down the drain. I don't think that makes it right that they all but completely ignored the HERO system, but I do understand it. Please, explain to me, from a business savvy position, why utilizing a system that has been used and refined over the past 20+ years is a "bad business model". Seriously. I don't understand.

 

They weren't too high,---your expectations defied logic. You were expecting a seven course gourmet meal from a retail fast food franchise.
Maybe I just wanted fries with that. ;) Instead, the cook wiped his butt with my burger, and the guy at the window urinated in my drink. But they were nice enough to wrap it up all pretty, and put it in a shiny new bag. :rolleyes:

 

Seriously, if people think THOSE expectations are high, their brains would go into meltdown if they heard what all would be included in my IDEAL MMORPG. Talk about yer lofty goals. I have this wild imagination, and for some reason I keep thinking we might possess the technology and programming capacity capable of executing it.

 

Fact is, I'm bored with gaming in general. Very few people are doing anything new or exciting. 'Star Wars - The Old Republic' is looking pretty good, and Bioware has done me no wrong yet, so I'm hopeful. I had hoped that Champions was going to be a little more bold than they were. Cryptic took a baby step in the right direction, but not much beyond that. It's free-form character design in it's most basic, idiot-proof incarnation. Ahem, digressing.

 

I have no issues with the way action and combat work in CO. My beef is with the (as I see it) rigidly limited character design and progression system, and a complete lack of any sort of non-combat oriented crime-fighting functions (crapting doesn't count). They even scrapped the secret identity system, whatever that was intended to be. There were rumors of an investigation system, but then didn't see fruition, either. Anything that could have made CO even remotely interesting got scrapped or pushed aside indefinitely.

 

Here's what I was hoping to see from a "HERO-like" system. Some kind of point-build mechanic. Stats that perform functions similar to their HERO counterparts. Non-combat skills, talents and perks. A flexible, powers system which would allow access to all core powers, and let the player define the details, modifiers, and how powerful their own powers were (based on hard-coded minimums and maximums). A handful of optional character disadvantages. And health, damage and endurance systems that more closely resembled a traditional RPG, as opposed to the mega-damage systems that have become the norm in MMORPGs. Having a bazillion health just isn't that interesting (to me). DDO is the only mainstream title that didn't hop on board the mega-damage train.

 

"You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

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Re: Disappointment

 

Stats that perform functions similar to their HERO counterparts. Non-combat skills' date=' talents and perks. [/quote']

 

As someone that knows the Hero System very well I found myself often wishing that they would avoid Hero System terminology completely. I didn't play beyond Beta so I don't know if its changed (I'm told it hasn't) but whenever you ran across something that sounded Hero-System-y it never behaved the way you might expect. Which created an annoyance that wouldn't have been there if they had called it something else entirely.

 

As for non-combat stuff, being familiar with the developers from CoH and knowing that Emmertt once pronounced that comics are basically all about combat I never expected there to be any non-combat activities :( To be fair to them that kind of activity is much harder to produce and automate, especially if you want to do it in a way that isn't invalidated by someone with access to Google.

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Re: Disappointment

 

@Jagged: I also am quite familiar with HERO, and I can concur regarding stats. To a degree, the introduction of stats in the latter end of Beta actually made things worse. Not because stats are bad, but because they went to the effort (or lack thereof) of using the very familiar stat block found in HERO (or at least aspects that can be associated with HERO, such as EGO and PRE), but failed to represent them in a familiar manner. Instead, they took these stat TERMS and associated them with different elements of combat. It would have been better if they had AVOIDED the HERO terminology, and simply called the "stats" something more appropriate to what they represented, which were things like "critical hit severity" and such. My feeling on the subject is: if you're going to go to the effort of using rules-system tie-ins, those associations should at least resemble their RPG counterparts. Otherwise, avoid them entirely.

 

As to the combat/non-combat stuff... I guess I got my hopes up. Just because a reasonable part of most superhero comic books emphasize the combat elements, that doesn't mean they all do, nor that that is what they're all about. Not being a programmer, I don't know how much more difficult the non-combat stuff is, but that's the stuff that could have made it stand out from most other titles of the medium. It's not that I wanted any of that stuff to be forced on the players, I wanted it as an optional alternative to the pure combat approach. If a player doesn't want to participate in investigatory missions, espionage-based info gathering, interrogations, criminology, or other less brutish tactics, nothing should force them to. I like options, and I like people to be able to play however they prefer.

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Re: Disappointment

 

Nobody has explained WHY using an RPG system as the basis for an MMORPG system is bad.

Typically because RPG systems are dependent on GM interaction to actually work, and MMOs lack a GM. In the case of the Hero system, one of the essential roles of the GM is to weed out horribly broken builds.

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Re: Disappointment

 

Nobody has explained WHY using an RPG system as the basis for an MMORPG system is bad. As a general rule' date=' that is. I understand that the folks at Cryptic had been working on MUO and didn't want to flush the entire system down the drain. I don't think that makes it right that they all but completely ignored the HERO system, but I do understand it. Please, explain to me, from a business savvy position, why utilizing a system that has been used and refined over the past 20+ years is a "bad business model". Seriously. I don't understand.[/quote']

 

I've already explained it to you. It comes down to money.

 

In software development, building Cadillac features like the ones you seem to demand costs a lot of developer time and money. Products that have tried to introduce features similar to the ones you want have met with at most limited success in the past. As such, the perceived (and very likely real) ROI on such investments of developer time and money is low in comparison to other activities the developers could be performing -- especially for initial release.

 

Large software projects are expensive and often risky to develop, and the more complex it is the more expensive and risky it becomes. It takes a very brave and/or foolish investor to pump money into an unnecessarily complex project, so developers prefer the KISS principle where possible. There is a reason 'ship, then patch' is a way of life in 90+% of the software world -- developers need to recoup costs and get some money flowing in for continued development. So it's very rare to see the kinds of Cadillac features for an MMO you are asking for in an initial release of a major title.

 

The best way to see those sorts of features actually come about is to change the nature of what you're talking about. Something that would be extremely difficult to do well in an MMO is not necessarily nearly as challenging for a single player RPG, in part because balancing a single player game is much more straightforward, and in part because consumers of single-player RPGs have different expectations and tolerances for what they will accept in a game.

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Re: Disappointment

 

Well I think you have just discovered what having a budget and a deadline can do to a game. ie like Zed-F said it all comes down to money (and time... but time = money in dev costs) {BTW sorry Zed, I would rep you but I must spread more rep around before I can give you more. Well said!}

 

When most production companies start a game. They tend to brainstorm about features they would like to have. Usually early in the dev process, someone talks to some gaming publication and spills the beans on some of the "hoped for" features. The person talking probably doesn't even know if all of the features are going to make it into the game.

 

Later in the development process, deadlines are looming and the team has to make determinations of what will and won't get into the game. So they look over the wishlist of features and determine what will and won't make it into the game. They look at things like: What HAS to be in the game to make it sell (ie PvP, Crafting), What low priority features are nearly finished and ready to deploy, What features aren't technically feasable, What features are feasable, but would take a long time to implement. What stuff sounded cool on paper, but weren't fun during internal testing. etc.

 

BTW there are a ton of things that a dev team might implement in a game, that will not make it to outside testers. So outside Beta Testers don't get to try everything, just the stuff that the internal testers/dev team liked.

 

As for why PnP systems don't make good Computer game systems. Wow that's a large subject. TSR and later WotC have tried time and time again to make dev's use the D&D system. For CRPG's it has worked out ok (ie Knights of the Old Republic, Balder's gate etc), but they tend to either cut out huge sections of the rules (ie Neverwinter Knights), or the game play feels more like a turn based game (ie Knights of the Old Republic).

 

If you used all of the combat maneuvers that are possible in the system could lead to that turn based feel (not good for a MMO which needs live updating). I guess you could choose some maneuvers to turn into abilities, but you have to pick and choose as players only have so many buttons on a kdb.

 

Also some things are hard to model with a MMO. Speed is one of those things. I guess it can equate to swing speed between attacks, but the danger in a MMO is that everyone will eventually figure out that SPD is a really easy way to increase DPS and then all of the PCs will have SPD 12 as soon as the game allows them.

 

Then you get to the sheer complexity of making characters based on the hero system. Hell, the rules are over 100pgs for 6e. of course some of that can be cut, but then other pages would have to be added to talk about stuff like not making a gimped character. I guess you could get around that by giving everyone a "base" character and allowing them to buy prepackaged powers. The positive bit about prepackaged powers is that it allows your art team to have concrete powers that they can add animations to. Also prepackaged powers allows all of the clients to have the same power list. Which cuts down on the amount of info that has to be sent to the client(s). In any network game, but esp an MMO minimising the amount of stuff that has to be sent down that narrow pipe is essential to good game play.

 

Also how to deal with skills. Some skills can be turned into passives (ie Charm being used to automatically increase how much NPC's like the PCs), Others can be used for crafting (ie Mechanics, Electronics, Comp Prog etc). Also, quest lines that Require players to have certain Powers and Skills are a no-go. Putting up brick walls that players can't pass just frustrate them or makes them build characters to bypass said brick wall. Not a "fun" way of going about things. I guess you could make quests that are easier if you have certain skills of a certain level.

 

Basically no game system survives changing mediums without being changed a lot. Insisting that a CRPG or a MMORPG resemble the PnP rules has a danger of turning that game into the Dungeons and Dragon Movie. Somewhat faithful to the rules, but groan worthy because of doing just that.

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Re: Disappointment

 

The best way to see those sorts of features actually come about is to change the nature of what you're talking about. Something that would be extremely difficult to do well in an MMO is not necessarily nearly as challenging for a single player RPG, in part because balancing a single player game is much more straightforward, and in part because consumers of single-player RPGs have different expectations and tolerances for what they will accept in a game.

 

Basically it's ok in CRPG to have one class be super powerful and others to be mediocre or gimped. The CRPG player will just play the class that's easier to play and assume that the other classes are there for group play or to make the game more of a challenge.

 

In a MMO having one class that is much more powerful than the others is really bad. MMO's are games that rely on players grouping up to face certain content. If certain "Classes" cannot contribute enough to the group then that class will not be played much and players that like said class will be unhappy when they cannot find people to play with. Now this is talking about PvE balance, which is much easier than PvP balancing.

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