City of Heroes' new Mission Architect system can be *gasp* used exploitively for powerleveling. It's also piling up a lot of junk content. Neither of these are much of a surprise and both Syp and PvD are laughing at Paragon Studio's reactionary response. I'm chuckling a bit here too.

So here's my chance to show I'm better than everyone else at Design 101. Nah, not really. I'm just stating some obvious stuff and there's bound to be a bunch of other methods as well. There are plenty of lessons available from established so-called Web 2.0 apps, ala Wikipedia etc..

How to do Player-Generated Content right in an MMORPG:

Three Easy Steps

Step One: Scale Rewards

Come up with a formula where players are rewarded by time & effort that isn't so easily exploitable. The simple mob killing = exp isn't going to cut it when you're giving players control over their own content. Cap the rewards if necessary. This would be a lot easier for a game designed from the ground-up for player-derived content. As it is, CoH may be a bit hardwired.

Step Two: Peer Review

Elevate some players to status for reviewing content. Either let them all review (that's likely a mess), or create a filter team to get rid of the junk content. Perhaps make content compete, with a sort of ladder / tournament system that keeps players along for the ride watching which content climbs its way to the top.

Step Three: Limit New Content

Put limits on new content. Time limit it. Limit it to friends-only. Maybe even limit how many times it can be played through. Then reduce the limits as it climbs up the review scale. Delete content (after a week or so?) that hasn't been favourably reviewed.

. . .

Paragon Studios has their work cut out for them trying to kludge in any new controls and/or filters now that they have a mountain of content to deal with. Hopefully it doesn't bog down an otherwise great game / content platform. The plus side is that future projects can do it better.

I naturally outlevel my casual friends just from more /played time. I'm trying my best to slow down on my Lore-Master in LOTRO, but even my attempt to shift to crafting results in a fair bit of exp while I farm Wargs for leather. I've even passed Nelgdorf and Nazrin by several levels.

Being able to play compelling content together with my friends has been an issue in almost every MMORPG I've played, either because of myself pulling ahead or someone else.

City of Heroes has several tools to get around the problem, including the Sidekick system (which I adore) and now the Leveling Pact (which divides exp between two players, even while one is logged out). CoH's advances have been embraced by EQ2's Mentoring and Final Fantasy XI's Level Sync, but other games haven't adopted the ideas.

There are three reasons why I assume level disparity between friends is accepted (and even preferred) in MMORPG design:

• As Pacing for storyline, leveling is a good game mechanic, but it may be so finely tuned that it just doesn't allow for adjustments like syncing.
• Leveling independently is often considered as a rite of passage to 'know your class'. In other words, it's pacing for character growth. Any perceived boost may be seen by the playerbase as unfair gains: This was an issue in Age of Conan, where many players balked at the mentoring system until it was nerfed past usefulness.
• Level disparity feeds The Vision, which dictates that you should find and group with new acquaintances while you level up so you'll have sticky in-game-only friends at Endgame to make it emotionally difficult to leave the game.

Simpler and more apt for my current situation:

I wish LOTRO had something akin to Vanguard's Reduced XP Gain spell. Basically, some way to lock my level and not gain any exp until my friends catch up. I think nearly every MMORPG could benefit from a Level Lock feature (The Vision be damned).

Imagine players who would like to experience the old pre-expansion raiding content by locking their levels at the old Endgame. Or roleplayers who don't wish to grow up past Hobbiton. Granted, most would probably still prefer to be competitive at the very top of the scale, but what a natural way for developers to stretch content further, via player choice.

And it would as easy as candy to implement too.

I've requested a Level Lock feature via a post on Turbine's suggestions forum. I hope they're listening. =)

I'm a little late with it, but here's my personal recap of 2008 gaming to pile onto the bonfire. It was a busy year:

WoW: I started the year fresh from quitting WoW. After 3 years I had burned out. I piled on the criticism pretty thick for awhile, especially regardingly Blizzard's metagaming trickery, their tendency to stretch everything into a grind, and how their main storyline is reserved for raids.

Overall though, I still recommend WoW as the best MMORPG for any new player to try. The leveling, open world and dungeons are all superb.

My best days in WoW are in the past and it'd take more than one expansion to get me back. My lack of playing won't hurt Blizzard in any way, they'll keep on wearing money hats.

  ·  ·  ·

AoC: If you read some of my early posts about Age of Conan, you might think it was fantastic. I did too, there were parts that were amazing, the combat and character animations in particular. But the devs at Funcom spent too much time tinkering with their combat system and working on features where they had no clue (like PvP sieges, ouch). If they had focused on their strengths (PvE questing and immersion), who knows how much better it could have been.

Who's going to trust Funcom now? Oddly, I still think The Secret World could be promising. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the storytelling stuff (it is Cthulhu-esque), but I'm probably in the minority.

In the end I realized AoC was fun played as a solo / single-player game, but as an MMO it was a mess.

  ·  ·  ·

WAR: I didn't have as high expectations of Warhammer, but at release I was surprised with how good it seemed. WAR's world appeared to be complete with significant content. They sure fooled me, even for the first few weeks of launch. The storefront was full of shiny toys, but inside it turned out to be an illusion.

The Public Quests? One of those illusions I mentioned. The first few were great, but past those the scripting was lame, the mob AI even worse and the influence grind via repeating "kill 150 mobs" was just nasty. This is from the designers who criticized other games for kill X mob quests!

PvP-wise, WAR is the best there is for current MMOs. That's WAR's saving grace, but it's also something I criticize deeply, because it still has a long way to go before being great even in this one category alone. My experience in RvR wasn't really PvP at all, it was zerg-style raiding on Keep Lords. I hate zerging, so I'm surprised I stuck with WAR as long as I did.

Bottom-Line: I think WAR will do well as the PvP niche MMO. The classes are well balanced for the core PvP. There are enough people that crave that so much, they'll look past Mythic's failures and even declare it great, because they lack any other good MMO choices for PvP.

  ·  ·  ·

CoH: I wandered back into City of Heroes briefly, but I found the changes minimal and what was truly different I didn't like. The 'crafting' feels wedged in and out of place, plus it spoils much of the game's original balance.

  ·  ·  ·

Vanguard: I purchased Vanguard this year after rumours that it had recovered from its failings. That was a dumb move. Ugly, ugly, ugly game.

  ·  ·  ·

Left 4 Dead: One of the few non-MMO games this year that had a strong effect on me. It has the best elements that many MMOs are missing: Cooperative gameplay that's satisfying as both PvE and PvP. It's fantastic. This will be a LAN favourite between myself and my gamer-nerd friends for a long, long time.

Valve really has me on board with Steam at this point. Now I wish every game (new and old) was available via Steam.

  ·  ·  ·

EVE Online: Speaking of Steam, that's how I finally gave EVE Online a spin. It's involved. Really involved. The geek in me could get totally absorbed, but I prefer to play these games with my less geeky friends, not leave them behind in a stats obsession.

  ·  ·  ·

LOTRO: I'm still in the honeymoon stage with Lord of the Rings Online, so I have few complaints at this point. Everything has been great so far, I love the leveling pace and the attention to detail in everything from graphics, mob AI, lore, quest logs... even down to the facial and emote animations on the characters. This is the style of MMORPG I prefer, one with a lush rich world and a ton of side distractions so I can immerse myself into everything. Nelg, Lurch, Michelle and I have been playing non-stop. We'll be wrangling more friends in to join us soon.

I'll probably be in Middle Earth for awhile.

  ·  ·  ·

Next up, my expectations for 2009...

I don't subscribe to the theory that gamers are anti-social nerds who hide in their basements and have no real friends. Too many MMORPGs seem designed around that cliché, that we're loners who need new introductions in order to play a social game.

Leveling systems are used as motivation for players to push through content. But players of disparate levels don't mesh well together, so grouping with your existing friends is usually tossed aside in favour of constantly finding new ones. Grouping and guild tools operate as a social introduction system, trying to integrate you with others at the same level.

It was understandable a decade ago. Back when Everquest was released, it was unlikely that your real-life friends would be playing an online subscription game, so you needed mechanics that helped you group with strangers. But now this genre is mainstream and even if players aren't together with their local buddies, they're bound to have strong bonds from other games as they migrate to the newer MMOs. Cross-game guilds are becoming commonplace.

Some games even require a large diverse population for the content to work correctly. WAR is the biggest example so far: if players aren't active and working together in any given area, the content just doesn't work. Players are sorted into level tiers, realms and racial pairings, so new bonds are needed between players even more, if only temporarily for the task at hand. This is supposed to be 'epic'.

But I already have friends.

I'm okay with adding a few new friends now and then, but I don't need a pool of hundreds of them. I'd rather concentrate my time with a few close friends that I can relate to. The 'epic' crowds are more of a sideline interest, I like them there, but not at the expense of my primary enjoyment of simply playing together with my friends. Most of the group and guild tools aren't helping that.

The number one reason I enjoy Endgame is because eventually I end up on even strength as my friends and only then can we enjoy challenging game content together. Unfortunately, most Endgame content then shifts to even larger groups (raiding, warband sieges, etc.), presumably to reinforce the need for yet more new friends.

When Cryptic created their Sidekick / Mentoring system to allow players to pair up and balance their level differences, I thought it would be a paradigm shift for all MMORPGs. I was shocked that Blizzard didn't implement the feature for World of Warcraft's release. I was also disappointed that Age of Conan gave barely more than lip-service to mentoring, it was poorly implemented and quickly nerfed because it didn't match their content. WAR has similar features automated within tiers for Scenarios and RvR, but again it's a limited and half-assed implementation that doesn't come anywhere close to resolving the essential problem while leveling.

I have friends. I'd like to play with my friends, not just chat with my friends while I play.

No wonder Left 4 Dead has had phenomenal pre-order sales, it's a game focused on small groups of players cooperating together. Friends. It's a a shame the MMORPG genre hasn't learned from the popularity of small-team coop games.

MMORPGs should focus on content that allows players to get together in small groups of their own choosing.

Please give me more tools and content to play with my existing small group of friends.

Both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online feature collision detection as a standard feature. In layman's terms, that means players won't be able to walk through one another, they'll push up against each other instead.

It's not new for an MMORPG, but I'm hoping that both games will be able to match their rhetoric in how this can be a useful game mechanic.

How NOT to do it:

In City of Heroes, at the lowest levels any player is able to "tank" mobs by literally holding them back, especially through doorways. That was great, but I guess Cryptic decided it was too easy, so at higher levels virtually every mob was given the ability to either fly or shoot past the tank. The end result was the same tanking via taunt-like abilities that we're used to in most of these games.

Collision detection in CoH was reduced to nothing more than an immersion tool and a way for players to annoy each other.

Let us mess with it:

When I first heard AoC would have collision detection, the scenario I imagined was one of a wall of tanks, with casters behind them building up spell weaving momentum. I'm imagining this could work in PvP too, letting the numerous barbarians and assassins smash up against that wall of tanks.

That may just be dreaming of course, the standard zerg tactics would probably give way, but even just the occasional attempt is worth it. We need this kind of new avenue for combat strategy. I hope Funcom doesn't fall in with the easy balance solutions, they should let it go ahead and be messy for a bit so they can observe and learn to innovate. It should be sandbox time.

WAR's method of collision detection has an interesting twist, it only happens between enemies. Friendly targets can still walk through each other. This sounds like it may favour collision-aware strategies, because teammate placement won't be as difficult. Your team won't have to be a well-oiled Spartan machine, but that may be a downside too, it may be too easy to defend from an invading army.

The MMO that was two-games in one universe is now one. City of Villains was a natural followup to the excellent City of Heroes, but it wasn't really an expansion, nor a sequel either. It left the game in an Us vs Them situation, not just in the intended gameplay of the factions, but with which product you actually purchased. Well now they've merged.

Whether you purchased the City of Heroes box or City of Villains, it doesn't matter anymore, you'll have access to both sides.

The merge is part of the player perks NCsoft is promoting to ease any fears with their full acquisition of the game from Cryptic Studios, announced yesterday (press release).

I've met most of my current friends online, in one form or another (some as far back as the BBS days), so I think the cliché of the anti-social geek is a lie. In fact, the primary usage of any network is exactly that: networking. Socially, business and otherwise.

But the social value of different networks is not equal. For instance, I don't lend much credit to the so-called "social network" websites: The MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Facebook, Orkut, etc.-- perhaps because there are too many of them, making it easy to be a tourist or transient. When the temporary visitors far outnumber the core citizens, social value can get drowned in a sea of nonsense. It all depends on how well the network handles the different kinds of traffic. Regardless, it's a place to interact and that's the core.

The same is true for online games.

Games are a more specific interest that can strengthen social value. When I recommended to my girlfriend that we start playing City of Heroes rather than just chat on MSN, she was wary. Soon enough though, she developed connections with my other friends that were playing, plus now she agrees that chatting while fighting evil villains is more fun than just chatting.

On the other hand, game activity as community has limitations, similar to the way Flickr brings together Photographers but is not likely to be used for other purposes. It works if most of your friends are Photogaphers / Gamers.

Social value also may not be the prime directive for a game developer, which can lead to conflicting results. We've been playing World of Warcraft for almost 3 years now and some social implications have become evident.

The downsides with WoW.

The first, most obvious social problem with WoW is how impossible it is for players of disparate levels to spend quality time together within the game. If I'm level 40 and my friend is level 65, the only way we can quest together is if he "powerlevels" in level 40 areas with me, making my quests trivial with his ease of completing them.

Even once the "Endgame" is reached at max level, WoW's content divides like a pyramid to the top tier of players. Content is restricted based on achieving goals of faction-reputations, quality of gear, attunements, etc.. Finally, the highest tier content is WoW's raiding system, which requires almost military-like adherence to schedules that just aren't realistic for many people.

Getting the most from WoW, then migrating.

Personally, I've tried very hard to make my social circle work within WoW's limitations. I've held back to let others catch up, helping where I can. Our group of guild leaders have attempted to stick to the Endgame content which keeps most of us at an even pace, but that also has the side effect that some players may feel like they are held back. Most of us have also given up on raiding content which we could enjoy if it were more reasonable to play with friends.

In the long run though, we've had friends (some which had played with us across many other games) leave WoW because of these exact problems. The core of our group has decided it's soon time to migrate to another MMO more likely to strengthen our social bonds again. City of Heroes had a "Sidekick" feature that made leveling characters much more positive as a group and that was a very big difference, but it had a lack of great content overall. Age of Conan reportedly has a similar feature (called Master / Apprentice), but that's just one reason we're looking at that game, it seems full of community-building features.

It's important to me that I'm able to keep up with my friends. Not just the hardcore gamer ones either, but the ones I see occasionally. I like to bump into them in real life, but it's even more likely that if we have a common online "home" we'll see each there too. And when we do, let's fight a few baddies.

. . .
(PS: Our guild has launched a new forums site to assist in our little migration from WoW to Age of Conan @ path.gameslate.com.)