Killed in a Smiling Accident.

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.

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>

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.