Category Archives: coh

If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

The strange case of Professor Myers and the Curious City may cause an observer unfamiliar with City of Heroes to initially exclaim, quite naturally, “Oh the horror, forcing people to PvP in a PvP zone! Whatever next?” Why did people get so cross with Twixt doing nothing more than playing the game properly?

PvP has always been problematic in City of Heroes. Though the developers doubtless had plans for eventually adding villains, and thus naturally PvP, City of Heroes launched in 2004 as a purely PvE game, with the mechanics very much geared in that direction. For the first year or so there was no PvP whatsoever until arenas were added in Issue 4, areas for hero vs hero PvP that you had to very specifically sign up for, and the problems became rather apparent.

You know how one of the most frustrating things for a close-combat character in PvP can be having to get into melee range, especially against opponents who can kite you with superior speed, or powers that slow and entangle you? Imagine how much more fun it is as a melee character when your opponent can *fly*, or leap tall buildings in a single stride, or teleport. Then there’s control; one archetype, the Controller, is largely based around… well, controlling, the clue’s in the name there. Their primary powersets are focused on freezing opponents in blocks of ice, or trapping them within burning rings of flame, or the very earth itself, or using the crushing force of massively increased gravity, or putting opponents to sleep; generally “mezzing” in MMO parlance. In PvP, if these powers work effectively there are howls of protest from the people who end up frozen in the block of ice totally unable to do anything, whereas if they don’t work effectively the Controller is equally frustrated that their primary powerset is rendered useless. Those were just two facets of the combat system, and thus began the Sisyphean task for the developers of trying to achieve “balance” (OK, so as with all MMOs the quest for balance had been going on from the beginning, but chucking PvP into the mix made the boulder a whole lot heavier). Combine MMO players love of change, where every minor tweak to any power is greeted with excitement and shrieks of joy, with the friendship and bonhomie that always exists between PvE and PvP focused players with their jocular cries of “griefer!” and “carebear!”, and you get a forum full of fun.

The arenas were a precursor, a way for the developers to try and get their PvP house in order for the main event: the late 2005 release of City of Villains that brought with it the villain “faction”, and several PvP zones for less structured fighting between heroes and villains. I think it’s pretty clear the developers wanted to get faction-based PvP going, but, from my perspective at least, it never really got traction (no faction action traction), for several reasons.

Despite tweaks since the introduction of the arena, tweaks that would go on for several years (and are probably still ongoing), PvP was never very balanced; some archetypes, powersets and builds worked very well, others really didn’t, and though a significant minority of players dedicated themselves to PvP and got incredibly good at it, that just exacerbated the problem when random casual players bounced into them and got annihilated.

Knowing that PvP zones wouldn’t be much good without players in them, and that many players are reward driven, City of Villains brought incentives to go into the PvP zones. Temporary powers could be acquired in them, and missions in the zones offered an XP bonus; players tended to hop into the zones, grab the missions or powers, and hop out again, offering at best fleeting targets of opportunity for actual PvPers. Then there were badges to be had in the PvP zones.

Badges are City of Heroes achievements, awarded for defeating 50 enemies of a certain type, visiting a certain location, completing a certain mission, that sort of thing, and CoH has many dedicated badge hunters, set on collecting as many as possible (especially as it’s one of the few things to do at the level cap). Some badge hunters are keen PvPers, but it’s a pretty small intersection on the Venn diagram, and many’s the forum thread started after somebody goes into a PvP zone, announces in broadcast chat “hey, I’m just after the badges, don’t attack me please!”, and utterly unpredictable events follow, like someone attacking them. Badge hunters condemn “griefers” who prevent them getting badges, PvPers condemn “griefers” who prevent, or don’t participate in, PvP in a zone designed for it, hilarity ensues.

PvP also works best when players consider themselves part of a “team”, and there’s a clear enemy to fight. City of Heroes never had much in the way of a specific “end game”, especially in its original incarnation; no PvP, no raiding (Hamidon excepted, a deliberately absurdly powerful blob-monster-thing for players to throw themselves against), no gear grind. After hitting the level cap people would often roll alts; indeed people would often roll alts well before the level cap. Even players like me, who in other MMOs tend to focus on developing a single character, would have a bunch of alts, and alt-o-holics like Melmoth could fill all the available character slots on a server in the blink of an eye, then re-roll the lot of them with new powersets and costumes before breakfast. If, at launch, players had the option of rolling a hero or villain there might have been more of a sense of two opposing sides, but with the release of CoV the overwhelming majority of supergroups (CoH guilds) just pitched up a villain version of the group on the other side of the game. The primary sense of identification remained with server, supergroup or player, rather than faction, with villains simply being another set of alts for a player. That’s not to say that nobody played either heroes or villains exclusively, for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t a situation like Horde vs Alliance in WoW or Order vs Destruction in WAR. A few groups tried to make a real go of it; I recall one guild in particular who turned up on the Victory server after City of Villains with a “proper” PvP approach. They played villains and villains only, no hero alts on pain of being kicked, and they were out to win. They issued proclamations and challenges, all heroes would fear their name! They got bored, and faded away, the most brutal encounters as far as I could make out being restricted to the forums; when the most terrifying fate you can inflict on the other side is that they might not be able to get a temporary ability quite so easily if you happen to be in the same zone, it’s not a very heady sense of absolute power. Of course factions don’t have to be defined by the developers, they could be formed by players if the mechanics are there to support it, and there was the possibility of supergroup vs supergroup conflict. A group could build themselves a base, and with a sufficiently powerful base mount a PvE raid to claim an Item of Power. Any group with an Item of Power could then be raided by another supergroup, but though the system was tested, and even (I believe) went live for a short time, it proved too troublesome. Bases remain, but no items of power, and raiding can only be done for fun by mutual agreement. There’s rampant forum speculation as to just why that might be, but the lack of appetite for serious PvP must play a part.

Without a strong sense of antipathy between the sides, with such an entrenched PvE playerbase, PvP has remained a sideshow, underlined by the further development of the game. A single additional PvP zone was added after the release of City of Villains (and that was really only because the Villain level cap was raised from 40 to 50, in line with Heroes, at the same time), while further issues actually introduced co-operative content that allowed Heroes and Villains to work together in PvE against alien invaders or ancient Romans.

Thus where Twixt’s issues (being denounced for a “win at all costs” attitude and dedication to fighting the enemy faction that seems to be in line with the developers intentions) have echoes in similar debates in any number of other games (compare, for example, with players who’d insist on actually fighting the enemy in Alterac Valley when the vogue was to rush straight for the enemy general, and the opprobrium they’d draw), his almost universal vilification isn’t quite so surprising considering the heavily PvE focused nature of the majority of the player base and lack of faction identification, in spite of any developer attempts to nudge them towards hero vs villain PvP.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

I was listening to Limited Edition Issue 10, and there’s a rather funny moment towards the end on a levelling pact in City of Heroes breaking up. Obviously one of the problems with the system is that it doesn’t work so well if one member doesn’t play their character so much. If, say, they’re something of an alt-oholic. Entirely hypothetically, perhaps you’d roll up a Corruptor, and join into a levelling pact with their Brute. Only next time you’re online they’re playing a Dominator, then later a Corruptor, then a Brute again (but a different one, the first was Stone/Dark, this one’s Dark/Stone), then another Brute (back to Stone/Dark, but with a different costume and power selection to the first one).

Then I thought… what about if you could get into a levelling pact with yourself? Sign up a few alts, and any XP you earn on one is distributed between all of them. During the earlier levels of most MMOs, the natural habitat of the alt, experience tends to rack up so quickly that spreading it out over a few characters couldn’t hurt. Possibly flawed later on, as many games seem to have a bit of a “doldrums” range where the levels slow down, and you wouldn’t want to multiply that by 2 (3, 4…), still, worth exploring maybe.

Time to move out of the city?

Windows popped up a little message the other day, as it’s wont to do, tutting at the state of my desktop: “how can you live like this, it’s such a mess, look at all these icons, what’s this? A demo of ‘Boarding Now’, when was the last time you played that, you can’t need all this stuff…” OK, so I dramatise for comic effect, it was just the usual clear off old icons thing that turns up now and again, and things were getting a bit cluttered. After deleting assorted demos and utilities that presumptuously put themselves on the desktop, I ran down the column of MMOs: Hellgate, don’t really need that now; Guild Wars, always an option; WoW, you never know, might resubscribe sometime; City of Heroes…

Oh, City of Heroes. My first MMOG, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned enough times before, that I’ve been subscribed to since 2004, a fantastic game. A costume creator still without peer (maybe Champions or APB this year could finally rival it?), some of the best grouping options around for easily getting together with friends and fighting appropriately scaled opponents, so much good stuff, and yet… I’ve barely logged in this year. OK, not surprising, that’s only about a week so far, but hardly last year either. I’d almost forgotten it until happening across the icon, at which point I had a sudden wave of happiness, and nostalgia, almost yearning, but… I didn’t fire it up and log in. I hovered the mouse over the icon, and thought… What would I do? Roll a new character, do the tutorial again, pick up an existing character and run some missions? Didn’t really appeal. There are a few of the newer zones I haven’t done to death, but by and large it’s pretty much the same content.

If I’m not playing, why subscribe? It’s not like it would take more than a couple of minutes to reactivate the account if I wanted to at some point in the future. Playing on the US servers, and paying in dollars, the price has effectively gone up too as the exchange rate has fallen, and I really thought about cancelling the subscription, more seriously than ever. It ought to be a no-brainer, but thinking about pressing that “cancel” button makes me come over all maudlin, like finally saying “goodbye” to an old friend you haven’t seen for a while.

One option would be to cancel the US subscription and take out an EU one instead; there’s a splendid bunch of people playing there, it would give much more of an incentive to log on and play with them, but after giving it a go a while back, something nagged at me. Mechanically it’s exactly the same game, but without my old characters and their accumulated levels and badges and associated gubbins, like veteran rewards (both useful, such as extra weapons that round out attack chains at lower levels before you pick up all your powers, and “fluff” like costume parts (I keep working bits on Samurai armour into costumes, even for cyborgs)), something just didn’t *quite* feel right. There’s somehow more to the game than mechanics, a weight of history if you will (if that doesn’t sound too pretentious, which it does, but never mind).

So there’s a suggestion for anyone looking to make a healthy profit from an MMO, simply target irrationally sentimental people who’ll keep giving you money without even logging in and consuming server resources. I dunno; maybe it’s because nothing’s *really* succeeded it in terms of superhero MMOGs, and when (if?) Champions or DCUO come along I’ll be able to make a clean break, but until then, seems like I’ll stay subscribed to CoH.

No, no I won’t, it’s crazy, I’m unsubscribing. Canc…

… nope, still can’t bring myself to do it.

A real job is a job you hate.

So here’s the latest problem that I discovered when I had a quick dip into City of Heroes just the other day; they’ve gone to all this effort to put day jobs into the game, and then I go and roll a new character who already has one:

Well, I had to give the new Shield powerset a quick test run, didn’t I?

What’s that? Excuse for making another alt you say? Noooooooooo. Honest independent journalistic research, that’s what it was.

<cough>

I level you long time.

For clan Melmoth this past weekend was spent away visiting with relatives, so very little WAR happened, unless you take into consideration Melmoth facing off against his two younger brothers as to who gets the last sugared doughnut to go with their coffee at breakfast, in which case World War 3 happened. All in a loving siblingy way, you understand; although I’m still picking bits of doughnut out of my ear even as I write this.

It brought to mind (the ‘not being able to play WAR this weekend’, that is, not the ‘doughnut in the ear’), however, an element of the forthcoming Issue 13 of City of Spandex. I’m now using “City of Spandex”, because I’m tired of writing “City of Heroes and, possibly or, Villains. Maybe one, or the other, or both”. Here’s what they have to say in the pre-release notes:

Levelling Pact
A new innovation to MMOs, this system allows you and a friend to create new characters and have your XP permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your friend plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like ‘Extreme Sidekicking.’

It’s a great idea on first examination because it would have been perfect for the situation that occurred this weekend, with myself away and therefore not playing at all, Zoso could have continued levelling away in Warhammer Online like a mad thing and at the same time my character would have kept up, such that when I came back late on Sunday evening I would have found myself a level or two higher, but importantly still within range of Zoso’s character in order to carry on questing together.

However, on closer inspection it might not be all that it’s cracked up to be; don’t get me wrong, I think it will work fantastically well for City of Spandex, but that’s because the game is well established and lends itself to this sort of system. With respect to having this system in another game such as WAR or WoW, there are a couple of issues that I can see from a first glance:

  • Missed content: This can be a big or small issue depending on a few of the player’s circumstances. If it’s the player’s first character, and if the game is very much about the journey rather than the destination, then having a friend increase your character’s level multiple times while you are away from the game would force you to miss out on the joy of questing and exploring the content. In WoW, for example, you could potentially miss out on a whole zone if your friend was a bit of a levelling machine. You could leave your character one evening somewhere in Westfall and come back a few days later to find yourself ready to start questing in Lakeshire, and hence missing out on all the fantastic quests in and around Duskwood (one of my favourite locations in WoW). Having said that, if we wished to look on the bright side, you could log out one evening in Booty Bay, and come back a few weeks later to find that your friend has levelled you past all the content in Stranglethorn Vale, although if you did that on purpose you’d probably find yourself less one friend at the end of it too.
  • Services: Probably the biggest downside to the whole thing, this would effectively enable a ‘no holds barred’ service industry around the power-levelling of characters if ported to a game such as World of Warcraft. Such services already exist of course, but the Levelling Pact would essentially streamline the system, removing a lot of the risk of giving some strange fellow half way across the world the username and password to your game account. Unlike City of Spandex, there is a very strong end-game culture to World of Warcraft, and a lot of the levelling is now seen as an obstacle to getting there. In City of Spandex, the game seems to be much more about creating characters and levelling them with friends, and therefore abuse of a buddy system such as the one that is to be introduced in issue thirteen will, in all likelihood, be fairly limited. And delight of delights, as with the selling of gold, to get your service into the collective consciousness of the player base you have to advertise, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is through the medium of spam, more power-levelling services mean more spam. Spam, spam and spam. Spam, eggs, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam.

It’s a shame because as a concept it’s brilliant, it would have solved the problem that I had this weekend perfectly, but it opens itself perhaps a little too much to abuse, unless the chaps at NCSoft have come up with some particularly genius way to prevent such abuse, rather than simply relying on the fact that the player base in City of Spandex is now suitably mature (as in ‘length of time played’, not as in ‘has forums free from trolls and frothing, ranting elitist gits’) and therefore dedicated enough that any abuse is not going to affect NCSoft’s bottom line. This is, incidentally, probably the best bottom line of all MMOs due to it being covered in figure-hugging spandex.

All of the above is, alas, hypothetical, because I am actually still in the insidious grip of altitus with respect to Warhammer Online, and nowhere near Zoso’s character in level at the moment. I think actually, for me, MMOs are about rolling alts rather than actually playing the game. Every player has something that they get out of an MMO, for the Power-levellers it’s all about getting to the level cap faster than anyone else; for the Completionistas it’s about fleshing out their character to the fullest by getting every unlock and award that they possibly can; the Socialisers just want to spend time adventuring with other people, making new friends and experiencing new communities; the Explorers want to find everything the virtual world has to offer, no matter how far out of the way they have to travel. And then there’re those people who roll new characters after getting half way to the level cap because beard option A actually looks so much better than beard option B. We shall call them the Idiots, because although I say ‘them’ it is, in all probability, the singleton subset of MMO players whose sole element is me.

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses

After pontificating on guilds last week, and the difficulty of grouping up in some games, this week managed to present itself as a case study.

I’d been trying to go cold turkey from MMOs for a bit, after a minor breakdown when I stopped seeing blonde, brunette, redhead, bandit leader, and just saw the ones and zeroes. It was generally going fairly well, occasional WAR-lapse aside, but after a while, with my immune system at its weakest, a virulent bout of City of Heroes resubscription swept through Twitter, against which I was helpless (scientists found traces of yellow spandex at the site of the outbreak). My main account is on the US servers, and the League of Evil are on the EU servers, so, reluctant to shell out on another parallel subscription, a bit of digging around turned up some trial codes which looked ideal. Ten days would nearly last until the Warhammer open beta, after all, so I now have four City of Heroes accounts: my original US account (still running), an EU trial account (expired, from Van Hemlock’s Operation Cheapseats last year), a second US account (trial only, created using a code I thought might be for an EU trial, but it wasn’t) and a second EU account (finally, success with an EU trial code!)

I’d seen a bit of a chat on the official forums about trial account restrictions that had been put in place since the last Cheapseats freebie, but hadn’t paid an awful lot of attention. Actually getting into the game, though, crikey; you can only talk in Local, Help and Team. It’s like going from mobile phones to cocoa tins connected with bits of string. Only somebody cut the string. About the only way of getting in touch with somebody was to add them as a Global Friend (as they get a confirmation option for that), then hope they figure out your silence indicates you’re on a trial account (no whispers or tells allowed, even as replies) and they invite you to a team. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with existing global friends, remove and add them again maybe… I believe the restrictions were put in place to stop players being bombarded with spam, but they seem a touch harsh; if trial accounts could at least reply to whispers it would be something, but I guess the chat system doesn’t work like that. Another possible explanation is that creating alts is so much fun in CoH that, without those restrictions, some players could quite happily bounce from trial to trial to trial, creating a new alt every ten days. Anyway, it took all of two minutes to decide that really wouldn’t work for socialising with people (plus I’d created an Assault Rifle Corruptor, but forgot to pick a different gun instead of the stupid default super-soaker, so had to re-roll in any case), so after all that I went back and upgraded the original EU trail account to the full game. What the hell, it’s only money… Just to really drive home the problems with separation in MMOs, the existing character from that account was useless as it was a hero, and everyone else was playing villains, *and* it was on the other UK server. It’s a good job creating characters and running the low level content is fun, and thank heavens for the sidekick system, if not for those the whole exercise would’ve been entirely futile, but once non-trial-account-ed and supergrouped up it’s been great to run around the Rogue Islands with new people, and smash up bus stops and parking meters.

As if that wasn’t quite enough of a case study of The Annoying Thing About Continental And Server Splits In Games, the CoH resubscription virus was followed through Twitter by a dose of WAR-fever, only this time I’ve got the EU Collector’s Edition pre-ordered (and am somewhat reticent about playing on US servers again, for the very reason demonstrated with the CoH business), and others are buying the US version of the game to hook up with GAX peoples. You have to laugh, really; the only thing needed to complete the “Whoops, vicar, there go my trousers!”-like farce would be for one of us to be a vicar. And for somebody’s trousers to go missing. Still, every cloud has a silver lining and all that, and some poking around the Warhammer Alliance forums and other blogs turned up Insult to Injury, a casual, older, Order guild for WAR who seem like a really fantastic bunch, so I think I’m all set for launch now. Just need to try a couple of classes during the open beta to finalise that decision.

As a counterexample to the difficulties of getting together theme, I finally had a free Tuesday evening yesterday (there’d been much vital real-life stuff happening on Tuesdays previously, like Bonekickers) so I hopped on to Guild Wars so say “hi” to the Tuesday N00b Club. I’d just planned to say hello, perhaps get an invite to hang around the guild chat, then wander off and set fire to some monsters in a continuing bid to (a) get to level 20, and (a) figure out what I’m doing in the game. No resubscription, no finding out what continent’s servers I need to be on, pow! In a couple of clicks, I was wandering around the rather plush guild hall. It turned out to be PvP night:
“Have you done much PvP?”
“Have you got a free slot for a PvP character?”
“No (the sum total of my PvP experience up to that point being a couple of years back in the tutorial mission from the original campaign, where you get dumped into a 2v2 encounter whether you like it or not), and maybe” said I. In for a penny, in for a pound, and all that; when I posted last week that levels aren’t vitally important in Guild Wars, I’d entirely forgotten that when you create a character it’s either at level 1 (a “Roleplaying” character, for running around PvE content) or level 20 (a PvP character). Off I toddled, and was soon back with a level 20 Elementalist, ready to do battle. Well, not quite ready to do battle, someone had to explain about creating PvP items, and I hadn’t even looked at the skill bar, so while the rest of the N00bs headed off for a skirmish I got myself set. My usual Elementalist tactics (up to the mighty level 7 I’d achieved as such) were to set fire to stuff, then set fire to stuff some more until it stopped moving, but the default PvP build had most of the stat points put into Air Magic and a few lightning-based skills on the bar as a starter, so I figured I’d stick with that. Looking for something to pad out the rest of the bar, I noticed a few skills mentioned “knock down”, so hoping that was as annoying in GW as in every other game, I stuck ’em in. The actual skirmishes after that are a bit of a blur, I genuinely had no idea what was going on (something to do with flags and towers, it seemed) but following the basic tenets of (i) follow somebody (anybody) on my team, and (ii) USE ABILITIES TO DO DAMAGE, I think I managed to get a few shots in. It was rather fun, and certainly piqued my interest for RvR in WAR, and future Guild War-ing, though I’ll really need to do a bit more reading for the latter so that the titular N00bishness of the Club is slightly more ironic than literally true in my case.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Apparently NCSoft is adding day jobs for heroes and villains in update 13 for the City of Heroes/Villains franchise.

Is it just me that pictures a bunch of hideously over-muscled heroes crouched over tiny desks like Mr Incredible in The Incredibles, all tapping away at keyboards, writing blog posts, browsing their super group forums and pondering over spreadsheets showing their latest character build? Because that seems to be the day job of many MMO players, from what I’ve seen of the united federation of MMO bloggers.

And as for villains with a day job? By day Dr. World-Eater arranges flowers in his small boutique on Pleasant Boulevard, The Beastmaster owns a small pet hotel and Croznar the Slayer of Innocents works at the till in a fast food restaurant.

Ill deeds are doubled with extra XP

There was a double XP event in City of Heroes, so I spent much of the weekend dressed in spandex and fighting crime. And also playing City of Heroes, ahh! (I confounded your expectations there, and from thence the humour arose…)

Double XP is a good chance to zap through the early hero levels, which can otherwise involve quite a lot of running around, even with the temporary travel powers on offer from early Safeguard missions. I was strongly tempted to roll another Blaster, using the recently added Psionic/Mental powersets, but already having three Blasters I figured I should branch out a bit, and went with a Tanker. Costume choice, as usual, took a while, I settled on a shovel-wielding eight foot giant in formal evening wear (complete with top hat, monocle etc.) I decided his assignment was to infiltrate the street gangs of Paragon City, and thus gave him a disguise to blend in: a tiny eye mask. Even though it’s purely cosmetic, there’s just something utterly joyful about running around in teams of wildly disparate characters, chain-wrapped denizens of darkness next to orange-skirted cheerleaders with dragon wings, sombre funeral directors with zombie minions alongside a katana toting techno-samurai in neon armour.

As well as getting the new tanker up to level 14 for a travel power, I flitted around a bunch of other characters, doing a bit of Blasting and Scrapping, and also some nefarious villainy, continuing my plans to create human slaves in an insect nation. At level 24 my Arachnos Solider had a choice of becoming a Bane Spider (bonking people over the head with an energy-mace-thing) or Crab Spider (strapping on a multi-armed energy-beam-shooting backpack). No contest, really, hand over the extra arms! Hooking up at various points with some other ne’er-do-wells, much ne’er-do-welling ensued, not just knocking on doorways and running away but also sending packages with insufficient postage stamps, and on one occasion knocking a policeman’s helmet off. Oh, and a couple of occasions where we massacred countless innocents who’d done nothing but stand near a bank we decided to rob, but at least we didn’t download any knock-off films, so that’s OK. Melmoth had been playing a Dominator for a while, with a measured approach where more threatening foes would be detained or fixed in blocks of stone and their fellows picked off one by one, but switched to one of his assortment of Brutes for the weekend. Rendered nigh-invulnerable by assorted forcefields and auras over the top of already decent Brute defences, this caused ever such a slight shift to a somewhat more SMASH!-oriented approach, wherein the Brute steams into anything that moves to keep his Fury bar filled, and everyone else does their best to keep up with the Brute. SMASH!tastic!

Outside the City, I went back to Guitar Hero for a while, several of the Aerosmith songs are growing on me. Also caught up with some of the Guitar Hero: World Tour news coming out of E3, and it’s looking rather awesome, as I believe the correct vernacular to be (I’m extending my index and little fingers at the same time, if that has any bearing on it). Despite my other ravings over customisation, it’s not so much the “create a rocker” feature; the game could display a stick person (with optional hat) cavorting away in the background for all I’d notice, being fixated on the coloured notes scrolling their way up the screen. Not that it’ll stop me spending hours adjusting the exact tint of my nostril hair, should such options be available on the Wii. All fingers, toes and assorted other dactylates crossed that Wikipedia’s suggested EU release date of October 28th isn’t entirely made up (though as it’s not a Friday, I rather suspect it is) and we don’t have to wait for six months (or more) after the US release, as with certain other guitar-drum-and-vocal based rhythm games. I don’t care about global supply and demand issues, I just want to rock (once again, extended index and little fingers there).

Nice post. Tideyman’s?

Killed in a smiling accident is brought to you in association with Tideyman’s Carpets. Remember, nothing soaks in to a Tideyman’s!

Advertising. Its creeping, insidious presence is getting everywhere, it seems. Rest assured, though, this blog will always be a haven of product-placement-free tranquillity, and will return after these messages from our sponsor…

Tideyman’s Carpets: nobody walks all over us. Except people who buy Tideyman’s Carpets! And then walk all over them.

Last week, there was an NCSoft announcement introducing in-game advertising for City of Heroes. Needless to say, this prompted a brief, polite discussion on the forum for a couple of days before everyone returned to deconstructing Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. No, hang on, I’m thinking of something else there… It naturally prompted a wide ranging and frequently heated debate ranging over advertising, product placement, privacy concerns, the ultimate meaning of life, and whether one can, in fact, haz cheezburger.

I’m somewhat ambivalent myself. I can certainly see the point of the anti-advertising lobby (especially when articulated by the great Bill Hicks), but on the basis that the genie won’t go back in the bottle, I can generally live with product placement and adverts so long as they aren’t too intrusive; I don’t really mind what kind of watch James Bond wears, but pointing it out in dialogue is a bit clunky (the recent version of Casino Royale: “Rolex?” “Omega” “CHA-CHING”!) There’s a post about adverts in Brothers In Arms, a bit of a puff piece, but at least it shows they try and blend things into the environment; I can even buy the argument that they’re doing players a favour in making things more realistic. The City of Heroes adverts should be fairly similar, placed on billboards that already exist in-game. Sounds fairly reasonable, and there’ll be an option to turn them off if they turn out to be particularly garish.

Potentially more insidious than the mere presence of adverts in an online game is the possibility of associated data gathering. Now, in general, I like the idea of targeted advertising, so long as it’s based on information I volunteer myself and I know what I’m letting myself in for. If I search for hatstands on Google, it’s sometimes helpful when it pops up a sponsored “BUY HATSTANDS HERE!” link (as an option, if I want to look there). I think Amazon’s “My Store” is pretty nifty, suggesting things I might like based on what I’ve bought/rated, though it shows a distinct lack of imagination (“After buying a Radiohead album, you reckon I might like… every other Radiohead album? Steady on there, Amazon, let’s not go too crazy!”) It’s not a huge leap from there, though, to the looming shadow of the Panopticon, where the insurance company can check your online shopping from the supermarket and raise health insurance premiums because of all the high fat food you’re buying, and you lose out on a job because the employer found some embarrassing photos of you on Facebook. The recent revelations about Phorm in the UK (today’s exciting instalment) show it’s not exactly tin-foil helmet stuff, the amount you need to worry depending on how far you believe Phorm’s assurances about anonymity (general conclusion would seem to be: not very). Again, though, there doesn’t seem to be too much to worry about that in City of Heroes, I don’t believe it has any interaction with the rest of your ‘net use, so won’t run into the dangers Penny Arcade warn of…

I’ll give the adverts in CoH a go, if it means more money for NCSoft to invest in the game, so much the better, but I hope it’s not the start of a slippery slope, there’s nothing worse than terrible, blatant advertising, so don’t forget: when you think carpets, think Tideyman’s, the deep shag that really satisfies.