They called it "Going Rogue"...so I did.
Well, like Becca mentioned on her LJ, we’ve left City of Heroes for once and for all. We’ve been getting into the fun that has been Champions Online (and convinced a couple of others to join us there as well). But now that I’ve put some distancing time between my characters on COX and their recreations on CO, I’d like to detail some of my reasons of why I feel we wasted over $100 going back to a game that is no longer what it once was.
First off, they added content without fixing what was broken first and in the process broke new stuff; when we were playing the first time I remember a lot of stuff that worked that simply did not anymore. Yes, Praetoria looks great, and like a real city (more so than Paragon City, the supposed mainstay of the game). But the problem is, Yellowside (as it’s being called) is yet another 1-20 entry point for a game with zero endgame (but more on that later). The graphics on Yellowside push the engine (an overburdened and outdated engine, I must add) to its limits, but it does nothing for Blueside (COH) or Redside COV)? Paragon looks like a mishmash of textures - why is the dingy theatre texture used in the run-down slums of Kings Row and Brickstown also used amongst the shiny urban textures of Talos Island?) Meanwhile, the changes made to the other two sides are cosmetic at best and embarrassing at worst…when the water is the most realistic looking thing in a “realistic” (i.e., non-fantasy) looking game, that doesn’t say much. I could also go on and on about other graphic/UI botches (why do the cars still drive erratically, and in some bizarre predetermined paths?) but I won’t go there.
We were promised a persistent, changing world where your actions were supposed to change the course of the city. Well, here we are, nearly seven years from the start of the game, and with the exception of one major change (Faultline is partially changed back to Overbrook) and one minor change (Rikti Crash Site is now the Rikti War Zone), nothing has changed at all. Why is it that after all this time, Perez Park has yet to be cleaned up? Or the hazard zones (excepting Faultline/Overbrook) haven’t been overhauled? Paragon City is a major city in the US (in its universe), yet there’s no Union Station or Airport…but there’s a suburb, Croatoa, where you can go fight baddies. Redside isn’t much better, being limited to a small chain of islands (of which players were promised there would be more areas forthcoming) and occasional incursions into Paragon City. So other than alternate dimensions (nearly all of which are alternate versions of Paragon City, except for the Shadow Shard and Yellowside), you’re really going nowhere. Apparently heroes don’t feel the need to save Washington DC from being conquered by the villains who have no interest in taking it over. And for new players coming in, the Oroborous missions were supposed to be able to let them go back in time to the way things were so they could experience it. Now, it’s the most unused portion of the game, because it involves places you can already get to.
And since I mentioned Yellowside, let me elucidate on that. Yes, Praetoria’s an alternate version of the COX Earth but at least it takes place somewhere else (it’s hinted that it was established somewhere in Central or South America). But even then, it still pales. Only three sections? What, does every paid expansion need to grow smaller and smaller? And even then, it’s only a gateway to Blueside or Redside, thus making the “poignant” (hint: not really) adventures through those zones in Paragon City or the Rogue Islands needless. The time and effort spent on that could have been used to retool and improve the earlier game areas and make that persistent world a reality.
But the bigger problem with Yellowside is that it has no place in the COX lore. As it was, they had to retool much of the Praetorian storyline just to accommodate this (though I will admit one retcon, namely the “serves in all capacities” error, was a valid retooling). Some people might say that the retcon of Yellowside makes it more realistic. I say that it makes it feel like a guerilla war MMO based on the COX engine and with the COX intellectual property pasted on yay. The story arcs in it aren’t very heroic at all, and even the most heroic players in Yellowside still see a great many things that are very morally questionable (Heroic Resistance will feed people to zombies just to “teach them a lesson”, while Heroic Loyalists will allow their foes to commit suicide by gun-to-the-head in the name of “honor”). All of this stuff is fascinating and great storytelling, no argument - but it’s for a game about a guerilla war, not something meant for the COX lore.
Another major problem with the game - enough so that even the developers, Paragon Studios themselves, admit this - is the lack of endgame. Made level 50? Congratulations - roll another alt. In other games, they plan your growth and you keep climbing higher. In COX, however, just roll another alt, choose another powerset and go back to the grind. It’s embarrassing to think that after all these years endgame has still not been a thought to the developers. At one time, it was: they created the Epic Archetypes. However, during the time we’d taken a hiatus, the devs decided to kowtow to the whims of beta buzzards and power levelers and now those archetypes are available at level 20. To say this was stupid was an understatement: not only did this remove the game of what little endgame there was, it also reinforced a belief that the unofficial level cap was 20 and that anything beyond was a mindless grind for no reason. Even with the supposed upcoming endgame content that’s coming sometime in the near future (endgame that was supposed to be released with GR but was pushed back), it’s still another form of…you guessed it. Roll another alt. Now I love me my alternate characters, but there’s a reason why COX has the most free (and paid) character slots of any game out there.
One thing they did add for endgame - if you can call it that - is the number of badges; they were nearly doubled before the institution of GR, which is yet more badges. This means that they’ve added a lazy method of content addition. Badges are a cute gimme but are functionally useless, thus adding almost no real value to the game. What they did add to the game that adds value, and in a very ironic function, I must add, is the Day Job system, a system that builds XP and adds bonuses to your character while you’re logged off. That’s right - they reward you for not playing the game. How much sense does this make?
One issue that I’m surprised hasn’t driven everyone off, is the string of broken promises by the devs, and I’m not just talking the persistent world or endgame content ones. No, I’m talking about ones fundamental to being a hero, ones we were told would be added to the game but never were. For example, travel powers. They promised everything from rope swinging to ice sliding, riding motorcycles to teleportation. What do we have? A beyond subpar teleport, uncontrollable superspeed, a superjump that was originally great to control but has been broken, flight that is slow and tedious and a range of jetpacks and rocketboots that were once bonus content but now have to be paid for. Furthermore, many of the powers and customizations promised are now becoming casualties of the “you have to pay for it” syndrome. I’m not saying everything should be free, as this is a subscription game and free-to-play games cost more in the long run, but when you promise something free and then offer to sell it after you’ve made it, that’s a promise broken and what some would call extortion. And the biggest broken promise of all: the Cathedral of Pain, something that was in the game for a week, with promises that once it got fixed, it would be back the following week. That following week turned into about 156 of them. Yup, three years to update something that “was only a minor balancing issue.” (more on balancing issues later.)
One thing they did follow through on their promises, however, was the Architect Missions, the result of which has made many before me wish that it had never been implemented. I’m talking, of course, about the Architect Missions. On the surface, it was an amazing idea: user-created game content, a storyline you get to create! Believe me, as a writer and an avid comic book fan, this has my attention. Except…it didn’t work out as well as it could have. While you could create your own custom baddies and contacts, it was functionally no different than the rest of COX. The missions were limited and not suitable for creating epic story arcs, people abused it for powerleveling (until that was nixed), and now the architect missions can be used to level all the way to 50 without even having to play the rest of the game. I’m sure that goes over real well with the designers.
And now for the aforementioned balance issues. To quote Becca, “Balance issues. Dear Lord in heaven, balance issues. Once upon a time before things like badges and enhancement crafting, all powers and archetypes were created equal, or so we thought. There were of course issues, but it seemed as if those would be tweaked and fixed as the game matured.” As she adds later, that never happened. There are now certain powers - whole ranges of them - that will never be more than niche use because they’re of no real practical use. Scores of Trials and Raids have been missed because controllers are mostly useless thanks to their nerfed powersets and it seems that balancing powers in COX is a good thing only when its in favor of the game. Thus, certain skills can be used to solo monsters by themselves, while certain sets result in getting one’s butt stomped by a triple-gray. The only ones complaining about this are the ones who powerlevel or are die-hard PVP players with specialized builds, so the devs listen mostly to them and not the everyday player, which results in getting pounded into the floor by…
…villain factions that are gratuitously overpowered, to say the least. Whether this was to counter the powerlevelers or to add to the “challenge” (hint: making things extremely harder is not a challenge, it’s pointlessly adding to the game curve). Characters that were easy to deal with, such as the Skulls, are now capable of taking down someone three ranks higher than they, and the ones that were a true challenge to begin with - such as Malta or the Blades of Artemis - have now become a Sisyphean undertaking. You cannot expect to fight your utmost against the highest-powered of foes when the minions have become capable of downing you before you know it.
Six years on, there are still some of the bugs that have been in from day one. Character skeleton meshes poke out from clothing overmeshes at certain angles. Collision detection is still an issue in certain places, especially in capes and jacket tails. Pixel traps galore, though thankfully since I returned I hadn’t seen wholesale holes in the maps that prevented you from falling completely out of the gameplay area - and necessitated the devs to create a “/stuck” command to get you out. Enemies pixel trapped, but still able to attack you, without allowing you any recourse, or looking for the last mission object, only to find it is unreachable because it’s in one of those pixel trapped areas you can’t reach. Timed missions where the time suddenly runs out at random, for no reason - I’ve heard the screams of frustration when you’re about to finish the 60 minute mission with 45 minutes left, suddenly to lose it because you ran out of time a couple of seconds later. With that lackadaisical level of caring towards bugs, it makes you wonder how the game manages to keep its fans.
But the next two actions I consider to be metaphorically criminal. First off, they’ve excoriated their fanbase. If you know nothing else about COX, know that it had the hugest and most fervent fanbase of its time (yes, I know World of Warcraft is magnitudes larger, but bear in mind I’m talking pre-WOW). People wrote fanfics, drew fanart, and felt a sense of community. That community is gone now, largely wiped away by NCSoft shortly after the sale of the IP by Cryptic. In its place, instead of fanfics and fanart, are a “monthly” newsletter that hasn’t been updated in two years, A dwindling off-site fan community and on the forums themselves, a legion of kool-aid (Cole-aid?) drinkers who would rather die (or worse, play Ragnarok Online) before they admitted there was something amiss with the beloved COX. Some game companies would love to have that level of zombified phandom. But what do you expect from a company that has purged any level of dissent, Praetoria-like, from its message boards?
But the most damning is how little NCSoft cares about its customer service, or lack thereof. Widely known as having the worst in the industry (a fact I didn’t know until we returned), they are doing themselves no favors by having impotent GMs on the two busiest servers (Protector and Freedom) and nothing else on the others, causing an interminable wait for any sort of support whatsoever. I remember when the game was in its initial years, 45 minutes was considered to be an “unexcusable wait” by the in-game GMs. This past week, during a game session, I had an issue that required a GM. After putting in the support ticket, I waited for three hours, for no one to show up. It took nearly a day later to get an email requesting more information than what I’d given. I sent it, and it took four more days for them to say they were working on the issue, but “hey, if you found a bug, thanks for letting us know!” They never addressed my issue, just considered me an unpaid QA tester (worse, paying to be one).
That was the final straw. In two weeks they managed to destroy absolutely any love I had for the game. This was a game I had to leave reluctantly the first time and was looking forward to returning to when I had the chance. I sank over $100 into getting the newest version, paid accounts and some of those update packs (which should have been free, in retrospect) for me and Becca. But in the end, it shows what NCSoft has turned their most valuable asset into: a funding channel for their properties back in Korea. I’ve read excuses about how they’ve cut back here and there because of the failure of Tabula Rasa, a game that was destined to fail the moment they changed everything about it (and there’s a sordid history regarding that game as well). Despite this failure, instead of sinking more money into the most profitable property they have, they instead launched four new games in Korea while announcing the termination of another one of their American-made games. I’m not going to claim racism or cultural elitism, but I am going to say that it’s clear that NCSoft has no idea of how to handle their non-Asian markets and instead have chosen to go the corporate robber baron route. Other Asian companies (Gravity, Sega, ERA, and Ten Winds, to name a few) have failed to recognize this and have fallen as a result. What makes NCSoft think they’re any different?
First off, they added content without fixing what was broken first and in the process broke new stuff; when we were playing the first time I remember a lot of stuff that worked that simply did not anymore. Yes, Praetoria looks great, and like a real city (more so than Paragon City, the supposed mainstay of the game). But the problem is, Yellowside (as it’s being called) is yet another 1-20 entry point for a game with zero endgame (but more on that later). The graphics on Yellowside push the engine (an overburdened and outdated engine, I must add) to its limits, but it does nothing for Blueside (COH) or Redside COV)? Paragon looks like a mishmash of textures - why is the dingy theatre texture used in the run-down slums of Kings Row and Brickstown also used amongst the shiny urban textures of Talos Island?) Meanwhile, the changes made to the other two sides are cosmetic at best and embarrassing at worst…when the water is the most realistic looking thing in a “realistic” (i.e., non-fantasy) looking game, that doesn’t say much. I could also go on and on about other graphic/UI botches (why do the cars still drive erratically, and in some bizarre predetermined paths?) but I won’t go there.
We were promised a persistent, changing world where your actions were supposed to change the course of the city. Well, here we are, nearly seven years from the start of the game, and with the exception of one major change (Faultline is partially changed back to Overbrook) and one minor change (Rikti Crash Site is now the Rikti War Zone), nothing has changed at all. Why is it that after all this time, Perez Park has yet to be cleaned up? Or the hazard zones (excepting Faultline/Overbrook) haven’t been overhauled? Paragon City is a major city in the US (in its universe), yet there’s no Union Station or Airport…but there’s a suburb, Croatoa, where you can go fight baddies. Redside isn’t much better, being limited to a small chain of islands (of which players were promised there would be more areas forthcoming) and occasional incursions into Paragon City. So other than alternate dimensions (nearly all of which are alternate versions of Paragon City, except for the Shadow Shard and Yellowside), you’re really going nowhere. Apparently heroes don’t feel the need to save Washington DC from being conquered by the villains who have no interest in taking it over. And for new players coming in, the Oroborous missions were supposed to be able to let them go back in time to the way things were so they could experience it. Now, it’s the most unused portion of the game, because it involves places you can already get to.
And since I mentioned Yellowside, let me elucidate on that. Yes, Praetoria’s an alternate version of the COX Earth but at least it takes place somewhere else (it’s hinted that it was established somewhere in Central or South America). But even then, it still pales. Only three sections? What, does every paid expansion need to grow smaller and smaller? And even then, it’s only a gateway to Blueside or Redside, thus making the “poignant” (hint: not really) adventures through those zones in Paragon City or the Rogue Islands needless. The time and effort spent on that could have been used to retool and improve the earlier game areas and make that persistent world a reality.
But the bigger problem with Yellowside is that it has no place in the COX lore. As it was, they had to retool much of the Praetorian storyline just to accommodate this (though I will admit one retcon, namely the “serves in all capacities” error, was a valid retooling). Some people might say that the retcon of Yellowside makes it more realistic. I say that it makes it feel like a guerilla war MMO based on the COX engine and with the COX intellectual property pasted on yay. The story arcs in it aren’t very heroic at all, and even the most heroic players in Yellowside still see a great many things that are very morally questionable (Heroic Resistance will feed people to zombies just to “teach them a lesson”, while Heroic Loyalists will allow their foes to commit suicide by gun-to-the-head in the name of “honor”). All of this stuff is fascinating and great storytelling, no argument - but it’s for a game about a guerilla war, not something meant for the COX lore.
Another major problem with the game - enough so that even the developers, Paragon Studios themselves, admit this - is the lack of endgame. Made level 50? Congratulations - roll another alt. In other games, they plan your growth and you keep climbing higher. In COX, however, just roll another alt, choose another powerset and go back to the grind. It’s embarrassing to think that after all these years endgame has still not been a thought to the developers. At one time, it was: they created the Epic Archetypes. However, during the time we’d taken a hiatus, the devs decided to kowtow to the whims of beta buzzards and power levelers and now those archetypes are available at level 20. To say this was stupid was an understatement: not only did this remove the game of what little endgame there was, it also reinforced a belief that the unofficial level cap was 20 and that anything beyond was a mindless grind for no reason. Even with the supposed upcoming endgame content that’s coming sometime in the near future (endgame that was supposed to be released with GR but was pushed back), it’s still another form of…you guessed it. Roll another alt. Now I love me my alternate characters, but there’s a reason why COX has the most free (and paid) character slots of any game out there.
One thing they did add for endgame - if you can call it that - is the number of badges; they were nearly doubled before the institution of GR, which is yet more badges. This means that they’ve added a lazy method of content addition. Badges are a cute gimme but are functionally useless, thus adding almost no real value to the game. What they did add to the game that adds value, and in a very ironic function, I must add, is the Day Job system, a system that builds XP and adds bonuses to your character while you’re logged off. That’s right - they reward you for not playing the game. How much sense does this make?
One issue that I’m surprised hasn’t driven everyone off, is the string of broken promises by the devs, and I’m not just talking the persistent world or endgame content ones. No, I’m talking about ones fundamental to being a hero, ones we were told would be added to the game but never were. For example, travel powers. They promised everything from rope swinging to ice sliding, riding motorcycles to teleportation. What do we have? A beyond subpar teleport, uncontrollable superspeed, a superjump that was originally great to control but has been broken, flight that is slow and tedious and a range of jetpacks and rocketboots that were once bonus content but now have to be paid for. Furthermore, many of the powers and customizations promised are now becoming casualties of the “you have to pay for it” syndrome. I’m not saying everything should be free, as this is a subscription game and free-to-play games cost more in the long run, but when you promise something free and then offer to sell it after you’ve made it, that’s a promise broken and what some would call extortion. And the biggest broken promise of all: the Cathedral of Pain, something that was in the game for a week, with promises that once it got fixed, it would be back the following week. That following week turned into about 156 of them. Yup, three years to update something that “was only a minor balancing issue.” (more on balancing issues later.)
One thing they did follow through on their promises, however, was the Architect Missions, the result of which has made many before me wish that it had never been implemented. I’m talking, of course, about the Architect Missions. On the surface, it was an amazing idea: user-created game content, a storyline you get to create! Believe me, as a writer and an avid comic book fan, this has my attention. Except…it didn’t work out as well as it could have. While you could create your own custom baddies and contacts, it was functionally no different than the rest of COX. The missions were limited and not suitable for creating epic story arcs, people abused it for powerleveling (until that was nixed), and now the architect missions can be used to level all the way to 50 without even having to play the rest of the game. I’m sure that goes over real well with the designers.
And now for the aforementioned balance issues. To quote Becca, “Balance issues. Dear Lord in heaven, balance issues. Once upon a time before things like badges and enhancement crafting, all powers and archetypes were created equal, or so we thought. There were of course issues, but it seemed as if those would be tweaked and fixed as the game matured.” As she adds later, that never happened. There are now certain powers - whole ranges of them - that will never be more than niche use because they’re of no real practical use. Scores of Trials and Raids have been missed because controllers are mostly useless thanks to their nerfed powersets and it seems that balancing powers in COX is a good thing only when its in favor of the game. Thus, certain skills can be used to solo monsters by themselves, while certain sets result in getting one’s butt stomped by a triple-gray. The only ones complaining about this are the ones who powerlevel or are die-hard PVP players with specialized builds, so the devs listen mostly to them and not the everyday player, which results in getting pounded into the floor by…
…villain factions that are gratuitously overpowered, to say the least. Whether this was to counter the powerlevelers or to add to the “challenge” (hint: making things extremely harder is not a challenge, it’s pointlessly adding to the game curve). Characters that were easy to deal with, such as the Skulls, are now capable of taking down someone three ranks higher than they, and the ones that were a true challenge to begin with - such as Malta or the Blades of Artemis - have now become a Sisyphean undertaking. You cannot expect to fight your utmost against the highest-powered of foes when the minions have become capable of downing you before you know it.
Six years on, there are still some of the bugs that have been in from day one. Character skeleton meshes poke out from clothing overmeshes at certain angles. Collision detection is still an issue in certain places, especially in capes and jacket tails. Pixel traps galore, though thankfully since I returned I hadn’t seen wholesale holes in the maps that prevented you from falling completely out of the gameplay area - and necessitated the devs to create a “/stuck” command to get you out. Enemies pixel trapped, but still able to attack you, without allowing you any recourse, or looking for the last mission object, only to find it is unreachable because it’s in one of those pixel trapped areas you can’t reach. Timed missions where the time suddenly runs out at random, for no reason - I’ve heard the screams of frustration when you’re about to finish the 60 minute mission with 45 minutes left, suddenly to lose it because you ran out of time a couple of seconds later. With that lackadaisical level of caring towards bugs, it makes you wonder how the game manages to keep its fans.
But the next two actions I consider to be metaphorically criminal. First off, they’ve excoriated their fanbase. If you know nothing else about COX, know that it had the hugest and most fervent fanbase of its time (yes, I know World of Warcraft is magnitudes larger, but bear in mind I’m talking pre-WOW). People wrote fanfics, drew fanart, and felt a sense of community. That community is gone now, largely wiped away by NCSoft shortly after the sale of the IP by Cryptic. In its place, instead of fanfics and fanart, are a “monthly” newsletter that hasn’t been updated in two years, A dwindling off-site fan community and on the forums themselves, a legion of kool-aid (Cole-aid?) drinkers who would rather die (or worse, play Ragnarok Online) before they admitted there was something amiss with the beloved COX. Some game companies would love to have that level of zombified phandom. But what do you expect from a company that has purged any level of dissent, Praetoria-like, from its message boards?
But the most damning is how little NCSoft cares about its customer service, or lack thereof. Widely known as having the worst in the industry (a fact I didn’t know until we returned), they are doing themselves no favors by having impotent GMs on the two busiest servers (Protector and Freedom) and nothing else on the others, causing an interminable wait for any sort of support whatsoever. I remember when the game was in its initial years, 45 minutes was considered to be an “unexcusable wait” by the in-game GMs. This past week, during a game session, I had an issue that required a GM. After putting in the support ticket, I waited for three hours, for no one to show up. It took nearly a day later to get an email requesting more information than what I’d given. I sent it, and it took four more days for them to say they were working on the issue, but “hey, if you found a bug, thanks for letting us know!” They never addressed my issue, just considered me an unpaid QA tester (worse, paying to be one).
That was the final straw. In two weeks they managed to destroy absolutely any love I had for the game. This was a game I had to leave reluctantly the first time and was looking forward to returning to when I had the chance. I sank over $100 into getting the newest version, paid accounts and some of those update packs (which should have been free, in retrospect) for me and Becca. But in the end, it shows what NCSoft has turned their most valuable asset into: a funding channel for their properties back in Korea. I’ve read excuses about how they’ve cut back here and there because of the failure of Tabula Rasa, a game that was destined to fail the moment they changed everything about it (and there’s a sordid history regarding that game as well). Despite this failure, instead of sinking more money into the most profitable property they have, they instead launched four new games in Korea while announcing the termination of another one of their American-made games. I’m not going to claim racism or cultural elitism, but I am going to say that it’s clear that NCSoft has no idea of how to handle their non-Asian markets and instead have chosen to go the corporate robber baron route. Other Asian companies (Gravity, Sega, ERA, and Ten Winds, to name a few) have failed to recognize this and have fallen as a result. What makes NCSoft think they’re any different?