So, my previous post might have seemed like a mere light hearted skit, spoof or humorous vignette, but actually it’s a deep treatise that works on two levels. *At least* two levels. Probably three or four. Maybe ten. Ahh!

It’s a parable, see, like the Vineyard Owner, only in this case illustrating that us bloggers may opine away and come up with all sorts of amazing ideas that we’re convinced will transform the entire MMOG genre, but would actually be pretty tedious in practise. Ahh! OK, that’s hardly a revelation, but still. Always worth bearing in mind.

The third level it works at (“Ahh!”, “No, not ‘ahh‘, stop saying ‘ahh‘“) is that there *might* be the nub of a not-entirely-insane idea somewhere in there for some sort of player-based transportation system. EVE is the main inspiration (“inspiration” in the sense of “it already does exactly that so I’m just ripping the idea off them really”); unless I’m more vastly mistaken than a man who thinks Hillaire Belloc is still alive, it doesn’t have a “mailbox”. You’re a miner, digging away, extracting ore from asteroids, and you want to take that ore to your corporation’s manufacturing base so they can turn it into ships and guns and socks and sugar n’ stuff… no popping it in the post, you have to physically take it there. Out in high security space that might be easy enough, set the autopilot and put your feet up for a while, but in the wild and lawless regions of 0.0, your big ol‘ freighter is a sitting duck. You’ll want a convoy, with escorts, and there’s wolfpacks out there… (Note: I’m extrapolating here from a brief dalliance with EVE’s free trial and watching Das Boot and The Cruel Sea several times, it might be nothing like that). It’s not a great leap to a fantasy setting; player characters getting hired to work as caravan guards is a good old staple of the genre. Course, you couldn’t just tack transport of raw materials straight on to an existing game, or you’d just add extra tedium and difficulty in an area that already needs some improvement, but if you could somehow work it in to an overhaul of that…

And if it’s a really stupid idea, then obviously I don’t mean it literally. It’s a metaphor. Ahhhhhhhh!

Melmoth’s Standing Procedure, and Elf’s comment on adding more realism to NPCs, got me thinking. Mailboxes are a bit small, aren’t they? The ones dotted around Ironforge and Bree? Sure, you could fit a small package in there, with a ring or amulet in it, but a giant two-handed sword? No way. Unless perhaps the blade has some sort of ingenious telescoping mechanism. Or it’s in kit form. Maybe with a magazine, you know, “NEW! Build Your Own Two Handed Sword Magazine! Free pommel and hilt with Issue 1! Each week you get fascinating two handed sword articles, like ‘bits of your enemy you should try and poke with your two handed sword’, ‘celebrity two handed sword wielders’ and ‘other fun things to do with a two handed sword (part 1: roasting a lot of really big marshmallows)’, and the included blade segments slot together to form a handsome Zweihänder with the complete collection. Order now!”

Anyway, clearly tiny mailboxes are an unrealistic way of sending and receiving large, bulky objects. What you need is a courier service. If only there was some sort of precedent… So I’ve come up with a new and revolutionary idea: when you sell a large item at auction, you receive a quest to deliver that item to the buyer. Imagine the larks! You could have a little cap and tabard, and the address you’d have would be the buyer’s hearthstone inn, so you’d toddle along there, and they’d probably be out questing, so you’d have to write out one of those little “Sorry! We tried to deliver this parcel, but you weren’t in” cards, and then the buyer would contact you and quote the reference number, and you’d arrange another delivery, only you wouldn’t be able to specify morning or afternoon, and then you’d get lost on the way, or stuck in heavy raid-traffic…

If this idea took off, I reckon you could even expand it. After all, it would be a shame to only be able to perform such exciting tasks after selling certain items at auction, so certain NPCs could have objects too bulky, or perhaps too valuable, to send by mail, that they could ask you to deliver instead. It’s a sure fire winner, the players are going to love it!

Yet another quiet weekend, gaming-wise. I’m beginning to spot a trend here… Friday, I finished off running my Guild Wars Assassin from the Factions campaign back to the beginning of the Prophecies campaign, so I’m ready for our posse to make a start on that. I can’t actually pick up quests myself at the moment, but hopefully there won’t be a problem tagging along with the others on theirs, giving them a chance to catch up with all the XP I unavoidably picked up on my wildlife-slaughtering journey.

Saturday and Sunday were Double XP Weekend in City of Heroes, but I didn’t get too much of a chance to play. Made a few levels on the recently rolled Scrapper, but much time was taken up with quiz nights, cinema visits, and hooking up a DVD recorder (side note: I’d like to thank the genius who designed our TV cabinet for putting great big slabs of wood in randomly stupid places, so that in order to connect two things on adjacent shelves you have to run cables out one side, round somewhere else, over another bit, then back in the other side. Really appreciate that. I didn’t swear at all in trying to get everything hooked up without going and buying three metre cables or drilling holes in something. Well, not much. Maybe once or twice. Every sentence. And they were quite short sentences.)

In my continued flitting from MMO to MMO like a magpie distracted by shiny objects, I dug out Guild Wars again this week. I picked it up a while back, sometime in 2005 between a first stint in WoW and City of Villains, but didn’t play it too much back then. Apart from anything else, it had the worst capes *ever*. For the most part, the graphics were beautiful; the character models were great, not a huge range of customisation choices but some interesting armour, particularly the Mesmer’s dandy highwayman (who you’re too scared to mention) look. And then you hooked up with a guild, and got… a commemorative tea towel. Which the guildmaster sellotaped to your back, and wouldn’t let you take off. You were stuck with this stupid tea towel; a realistically modelled, flapping-in-the-breeze tea towel (as opposed to the much-easier-to-model cloak-shaped bits of cardboard used in a lot of other games), but a tea towel nonetheless.

Anyway! You can turn off cape display these days, so that’s the most important thing sorted out. OK, maybe not quite the *most* important, but you know me and my character customisation obsession. I decided to roll up a new character, and after deciding support classes aren’t for me, thought I’d get back to my DPS-ways. The Assassin class introduced in the Factions campaign, looked rather fun, so a swift visit to the online store added that to my account (I’m a sucker for the instant gratification of direct download online purchases). I’m planning to head back as soon as possible to meet up with a couple of friends in post-Searing Ascalon and play through the original Prophecies campaign, which might be a disastrously foolish plan. I’m turning down all side-quests to get to the point that I can sail back over to Tyria as soon as possible, which I think is leaving me rather under-levelled for the unavoidable story missions on the way there but still higher level than a post-Searing Prophecies character, but hey, we’ll see how it goes.

Combat in Guild Wars is a pretty frenetic business, especially with your posse of AI henchmen. In World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, I’m totally in control, I know exactly what I’m doing, who I’m targeting, what powers I’m using (well, mostly. I mean there’s the whole “which button is sap again?” business that makes the whole party roar with laughter, second only to my other party piece of sneaking around forgetting the minor point that I’m not in stealth… and then there’s jumping into the middle of a pile of mobs, hitting the button for a devastating PBAoE inferno, and only then realising it hasn’t recharged… but y’know, apart from that). Guild Wars so far is more… “AAAAHHH! MOBS! Press buttons! Activate powers! What did I just do? Shadow what? With a what? No target? Oh, he’s dead… but… where’s the other one? No, that’s my henchman… Him! Hit him! Hit him with a stick! Hit him with a bucket! Ruffle his hair up, they hate that. AAAAAHHH!”

I’m not quite sure if it’s me, or the game (or a bit of both). I’ve played WoW and CoH far more than anything else, and was probably randomly mashing buttons just as much in those when I started out. Like fighting games; you’re flailing around mushing whatever buttons come to hand, and someone says “look, you just block the punch like that, and then counter like this, and then left-left-down-kick-jump-punch activates Super Robert Smith Punch”, and you go “huh?” and try and push every button on the controller at the same time using the palm of one hand while frantically rotating the analogue stick at high speed with the other. After a while, though, things fall into place; I could probably still pull off most of the scrap and destruction attacks of a Jaguar from One Must Fall: 2097 (Up up down down punch! Best PC fighting game ever… Well, the only PC fighting game, really. At least, the only one that wasn’t rubbish, and was shareware back when I couldn’t afford that many games…) If I can stick with Guild Wars for more than ten minutes without getting distracted by a beta for another game, or Pirates of the Burning Seas, or a gleaming bottle top or bit of silver foil, I’m sure things will click there. I sincerely hope so, at least, for my prospective comrades’ sakes, otherwise it could be a long campaign… “Run, Charlie, run! Hit him with a broom, Kev, hit him with a broom!”

I’ve been tinkering around with bases in City of Heroes this weekend. Bases are supergroup (CoH guild) “houses”; if you’re of sufficient rank within a supergroup, you can wander up to an NPC and say “I’d like a base, please!”, then Base Portals, placed in all the main city zones, will teleport you into a little 4×4 entrance lobby with an exit teleporter and not much else. From there, with the Edit Base option, you get to play architect and/or makeover show host, adding new rooms to your base and furnishing them.

Bases have been in City of Heroes since the release of City of Villains in 2005, but never really worked out quite as the designers intended. The basic problem was that bases were incredibly expensive. You needed a large amount of Prestige to build even a basic functional base (Prestige is a supergroup currency; when playing, you have to choose between earning Influence, personal currency for improving your character, or Presitge, supergroup currency for improving the group base), then you have to pay monthly rent on it, which means you really needed to be in a big supergroup. Being in a big supergroup, though, meant either base layout anarchy, or a few people as base architects with the appropriate permissions to edit a base.

That didn’t bother me too much; I had a play around on the test server (where new supergroups were automatically given a vast stack of Prestige to test bases), built a functional base to see how the base editor worked, and left it at that. The base editor is as flexible as my beloved costume editor, you can place all sorts of furniture, gadgets and gizmos (both functional and purely decorative), tweak the lighting, raise and lower floors and ceilings, generally make everything from a gleaming-walled hi-tech lab to an office with conference table, whiteboards and desks to a dank stone-walled crypt with arcane symbols everywhere. The test server being the test server, though, I didn’t put too much effort into personalising the place as I wouldn’t be spending any time there, the most striking feature I added being what I called “the room of photocopiers”, a room filled with (you’ll never guess…) photocopiers. I like to think of it as an art installation. Actually, with a spare empty gallery, a sackful of cash from the Arts Council and an office supplies store, I reckon I could do it in First Life and have a decent shot at the Turner Prize. But I digress…

Over on the live servers, our Supergroup built up nice hero and villain bases, with teleporters to various parts of the city, storage areas and similar, and prepared for the Item of Power trial. The Item of Power trial was to be the first supergroup raid in CoH; up to 24 members of the group would head off to an epic battle with Rularuu, and if you win, your group receives an Item of Power in the base, granting a small supergroup-wide buff. The Item of Power was also intended to introduce more PvP; owning one would open your base up to being raided by other groups, who’d steal the Item of Power if they overcame your defences. Unfortunately, Items of Power have never gone live. They’ve tried the system a few times on the test server, we’ve had a few practise base invasions over there (which are pretty fun), but for some reason it’s never quite worked out, which is a shame. Maybe next issue, for the 2 year anniversary of City of Villains…

As Jack “Statesman” Emmert said in a Serious Games Summit Keynote: “We spent more time developing [bases] than any other feature in City of Heroes or City of Villains,” he says. Although bases are built by a team, Emmert and his team viewed them as being “incredibly, incredibly individual” because each piece of the base is designed and added by individuals.

“What happened was players hated it. It’s the most underused facet of the game. It received almost no coverage in the press. And there’s nothing like it in any other MMP.” Emmert’s hypothesis is that “people don’t like contributing money to a group to express individuality. … At its heart, these MMPs are individual game experiences in front of a computer terminal.”

I think “hated” is a bit of a strong term, it was more ambivalence, really. The base was just… there, a handy shortcut sometimes, a bit of storage space, and not very much else.

Coming back to CoH in the last couple of weeks, there’ve been considerable improvements in bases for small groups while I was away. Where originally you needed a (very expensive) power room and control room, and expensive generators and computers to put in those rooms to power and control the rest of the base, and that was before you could even think about adding workshops or teleport chambers or other useful bits, they’ve introduced smaller, and much more affordable rooms such that a two-person supergroup can actually get a functional base up and running, so that’s what I’ve done. That’s given me much more of an incentive to actually tinker with design; with a large, temporary base and virtually infinite prestige on the test server, decoration was a case of rapidly scanning through the myriad available options, and slapping the largest and strangest looking items around the place at random (plus, of course, filling a room with photocopiers). Having a few rooms and a limited amount of prestige focuses my attention, in a good way. We’ll still need a photocopier, though…