Jack Emmert Smack Talking City Of Heroes

[Arcana]

They could have implemented the IO's changes at the same time as the ED nerf and it would have been a far better solution.

Theoretically yes.  Practically, no.  That was not possible.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I would be one of the ones who believe ED killed the game.

It wasn't just the change that was the issue - it was making the change and saying well you didn't lose anything and if you did - tough go ahead and leave because people always come and go in MMO's. They could have implemented the IO's changes at the same time as the ED nerf and it would have been a far better solution. You took something away from people and then said - we don't care if you like it or not.

It was more the asshattery of Jack Emmert than the actual changes that made people extremely angry. I had a full (at the time) SG of 52 players and within 2 months we had 7 left. It really, really hurt and some people never came back after that.

i don't agree that ED killed the game, especially considering how much longer it was around after than ED than before ED. Admittedly the way ED was introduced and how the reactions to its introduction were addressed were handled badly, but ED itself (even without IOs) didn't make the average character unplayable or even significantly more difficult to play in standard conditions. Well, maybe Blasters had it harder, but that was more to do with the problems with the AT's design than ED itself. (IMHO, YMMV, TBDI, ATSBBR)

[JaguarX]

I'm not sure what precisely you mean by "brushing off" but there's a difference between being understanding about a shutdown, and nevertheless realistic as to the financial reasons compelling that shutdown.

burshing off-Apathy, not caring, not showing the same emotional support and understand we damand for this game's closing.

Really there wasnt much "understanding" about the other games closing and the other groups losing their home and having their heart and investment ripped from them.

Even what is considered a realistic reason, even financially, is relative. It has even been stated here and in many times in old forum that some see why COX died. Some even said it was because it was merely collateral damage. In the last days, not too many here was keen to that viewpoint and called those people just about everything under the sun. Yet, when it came to the other games closing, it seemed it was easy to see the logical reason why even though logical reason varies by definition. Some say there was no logical reason outside spite that NCSOft closed down Tabula Rasa, yet many here say there wasa reason but will get offended if someone say there wasa logical reason that NCSoft closed down COX.

Now I agree I dont see the ogistics of COX closing, but I'm on the inside of COX. Just as the rest of us so I can understand it's hard to imagine the others that had inside view point of their respective games and how they probably didnt want to hear it was jus business, or there wasa good reason, etc. anymore than we want to hear those statements about closing of COX. There are people that think NCSoft had perfecty good reason to shutdown COX. I bet if they strolled right now in here and said that they probably would get the same response they got in the past. Not a good one. Hell, I seen here about people that agree with NCSoft decision must be paid employees out to undermine our efforts. Maybe, maybe not, but they might just see it in a different way that make logical sense for them to close just as we view there was logical reason for the other games closing without giving a second thought that they also lost their home, their investment, their characters, their work, their hobby, their therapy. For some I think there have been given more thought about it now, but prior to the closing, it was as no one gave a crap. It was just another game closing from a business decision. Yet, it seems like deadly sin to treat this situation as such as we (Asa whole) treated other game closing. Do I agree with that way of thinking? Nope. Just curious of why is apathy appropriate for those other 5 games closig and there is always an easy explaination and reason behind the decision but there is no way possible in the entire world in a logical mind that someone could see this closing as equally logical, even though the sititation is not exactly the same as the rest, and if they do they must be a paid NCSoft employee?

[srmalloy]

i don't agree that ED killed the game, especially considering how much longer it was around after than ED than before ED. Admittedly the way ED was introduced and how the reactions to its introduction were addressed were handled badly, but ED itself (even without IOs) didn't make the average character unplayable or even significantly more difficult to play in standard conditions. Well, maybe Blasters had it harder, but that was more to do with the problems with the AT's design than ED itself.

It was severely game-changing for a particular type of build -- if you picked the proper Ancillary pool to get Focused Accuracy, and slotted it to make the End cost bearable, you could rely on Focused Accuracy to provide the to-hit bonus to get a good accuracy against mobs, which would let you six-slot your attacks for damage, accepting the fact that getting stunned meant that you had one more toggle to light off again before you were combat-effective afterward as a tradeoff for doing significantly more damage. ED made this build pessimal by making half of the slotting in each attack virtually pointless and cutting the potential damage output of the character by a third. Between ED and the "small tweaks" to Regeneration that changed it from a mostly toggle-and-forget powerset to one of the more click-dependent powersets, I sidelined and eventually deleted a level 50 Katana/Regen scrapper. Although I always thought that the big problem with Regeneration was that Instant Healing was built wrong. Instead of a power that made you heal a lot faster, healing each hit again and again until it was all gone, IH should have been designed so that it took each hit and made it act like Spectral Wounds -- you take all the damage, then after a short delay, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' healed. By making it work once on each damage effect, rather than over and over again as many times as it took to heal it away, it would have been balanceable against the effects of Defense and Resistance, while making it truer to the name of the power. But that's water under the bridge now.

[Arcana]

It was severely game-changing for a particular type of build

That could be said for lots of powers-related changes.  Most of them, in fact.

If ED "killed" the game, it was an extremely time-delayed fuse.  There were lots of anecdotes about large groups of players leaving after ED, but the fact is that such pockets of people leaving occurred continuously from launch to shutdown.  No more of them occurred to my knowledge in the months after ED than at any other time.

The fact is that because ED occurred at the same time as the launch of City of Villains, anecdotes about the population of the game around that time are extremely unreliable.  I can say that overall server populations did not materially drop around that time.  Because it was a point of debate even before ED launched, it was something I collected statistics on.  If there was a drop in overall player population in the six months after Issue 6 launched relative to before Issue 6, it was immeasurable (populations spiked *upward* after Issue 6 launched because of an influx of players playing red side for the first time; that spike eventually dropped downward to near pre-I6 levels over time).

[Septipheran]

I guess I'm not banned here anymore! That's cool. I see Arcanaville is sticking up for Jack. That's neat- maybe she's now in Cryptic's pocket.The using three syllable words to prove a point approach might still be working, so I won't try too hard to poke holes in it.

As far as I know though, Jack is currently CEO of Cryptic. His company is freaking terrible. Champions Online gets no development whatsoever. If Champions got a third of the development that COH got, it would be a freaking miracle. Remember those random, bonus holiday missions that we got for a day or two in COH? In Champions Online, those are the new content. In COH, if you missed one of those, you missed out on a badge. You still got 2 new end game raids, a few new zones and a ton of new power sets every few months.

 Champions doesn't even have an end game. Jack and co. will sell you a super pack with an airplane looking costume change emote and then call it new content. Cryptic will fix a bug and then the community will erupt in more joy than COH fans would over a new issue being released.

The dude is shady as hell. But don't worry!! Cryptic has a STAR TREK GAME~! WOO! I BET NO ONE'S EVER MADE A STAR TREK GAME BEFORE!!!

Look it up. Star Trek online. It reports to its Korean overlords with lockbox sales, and it's still a third of the game that Eve Online is. It might be some percentage of WoW, but it's too small to calculate.

DON'T WORRY THOUGH!!!

CRYPTIC IS COMING OUT WITH A BRAND SPANKIN' NEW SWORDZ AND DRAGONZ AND DUNGEONZ N' MAGIC MMO!!!!!

NO 1 HAZ EVER DONE DIS B4!!!! GOOD IDEA JACK!!!

OMG. Awesome.

Meanwhile, never fear, super hero fans! We continue to strive and put effort into our projects!

Eventually, Champions Online might offer TWO LOCKBOXES AT A TIME!!!!!

Trust Jack. This guy, I tell ya, he knows how to run a business.


-TwoHeadedBoy

-Gofreakyerself,fgt

[Knightslayer]

I guess I'm not banned here anymore! That's cool. I see Arcanaville is sticking up for Jack. That's neat- maybe she's now in Cryptic's pocket.The using three syllable words to prove a point approach might still be working, so I won't try too hard to poke holes in it.

With such constructive posts I can't possibly fathom how that ever happened. 
Also, PWI is originally Chinese, not Korean.

[Knightslayer]

The thing is, though, that purely free players do nothing but cost money, and add lag and queues, without giving anything in return.  The *real* question here is, "Which one rakes/raked in more money at its peak?"

They also add (much needed) activity.
One of the most common complaints before Freedom was how hard it was to get a team sometimes (whether you thought it was a valid complaint or not, it was still one that popped up all the time).

[Ironwolf]

I believe ED killed the game in the long run.

It wasn't a BOOM and they are gone nuke - it was DoT that slowly whittled it down. Many people I tried to encourage trying the game again said flatout the Devs are clueless with the constant nerfs and rebalancing. Once you tick off your playerbase and they walk away it really is an uphill battle to get them to trust you again.

[Arcana]

I believe ED killed the game in the long run.

It wasn't a BOOM and they are gone nuke - it was DoT that slowly whittled it down. Many people I tried to encourage trying the game again said flatout the Devs are clueless with the constant nerfs and rebalancing. Once you tick off your playerbase and they walk away it really is an uphill battle to get them to trust you again.

"The players" say that about every dev team, including the WoW team.  Except in my experience, most of the players that complained about ED complained about lots of other problems in the game that didn't even exist, which made it difficult to consider any possibility of making them happy.

[JaguarX]

They also add (much needed) activity.
One of the most common complaints before Freedom was how hard it was to get a team sometimes (whether you thought it was a valid complaint or not, it was still one that popped up all the time).

Yeah on low pop servers especially outside the ever changing "peak hours" forming a full team got challenging. It got to a point where I rarely seen non-SG member full team outside freedom and virtue. Many occasions on other servers spent more time trying to get the required members than doing the actual TF. Many times just had to resort to trying to find even temporary fillers or dual multiple account people just to start. That IS my experience.

[Artillerie]

There can be compensating factors on being on a lower population server. Union was probably considered one of those but it had a real community feel as over time you got to know a good chunk of the playerbase. This actually helped team forming - it was quite easy to put together full teams at reasonable times of the day.

[Hyperstrike]

Champions doesn't even have an end game.

Champions barely has a game.
They have, essentially, one storyline leveling path and then Alerts (a pickup mission grinding path).

Teaming in CO bites.  You're hobbled by your lowest level teammates.  They essentially dictate what you can and cannot do and where you can and cannot go.  All content in the game is mono-level.  A level 15 mission is a level 15 mission.  There's no level "range" at all.  And the "difficulty" modifier simply steps up from "cakewalk" to "alpha strike kills you, beta strike kills the next guy, etc" and is only really suitable for heavily kitted out toons at max level.

Worse, the sidekicking is almost entirely manual.  Like the bad-old-days before super-sidekicking.  Only worse.  Because you have to put YOURSELF back into sidekick mode.
And if the person falling out of sidekick mode is higher level than the team leader, everyone stops earning XP, resulting in people screaming at teammates to get back in SK.

And if you just want to grind alerts (like doing radios in CoH), most lowbies don't have the durability or damage output to complete them successfully.  So you get a small smattering of kill XP, and no end of mission rewards...

And don't get me started on the byzantine, utility obfuscating piece of shit it has for a UI.

And the latest?

Their new event, being run like an alert.  Limited time.
Problems with the giant monster at the end being unaffected and untargetable because it's so big that it's target point is beyond player range for melee and many AoE.
And now, they've essentially exemplared everyone in the event to level 30.  This can cut damage output and durability of level 40 players by 50% or more.  Making them WEAKER than more or less equivalent L30 players.

I think at this point, CO is some pavlovian experiment to see how much pain they can inflict on players before said players say "fuck it" and leave.

[JaguarX]

Yeah this cycle of half done super hero MMOs have to be stopped. A fairly relatively compared ot the other mmo super hero mmo get murked, the other two seems half finished and no attention to it in sight. I bet if CO wasa fantasy MMO, they would have a budgte with more money and people than they would know what to do with.

I think which ever plan Z plan comes to fruitation, I hope they do it proper and treat the game with some actual attention, and avoid the pitfalls of the other MMOs which is treated like side projects while the fantasy ones get all the attention. Advertising, get the word out, do not depend on pure word of mouth. Bugs, if there bugs, fix them. Dont add new content that is buggy on top of bugs on top of bugs and leave it. Personnel, have enough personnel to ensure health of the game one to 3 guys cant do it especially a large game, and do not forget allowing creative minds with customizable stuff. Get those basics straight you can build a monster. The three superhero games had and have the potential to be beasts of a game in their own right but it seems that no one is willing to give super hero MMO a fair development fighting chance to be great. They build it half done and then say "oh aint a market for it." Of course not if half done bs and no development nor attention no advertising is ever done. there will never be a true market for it and it will stay niche. If they put even 1/4 half as much effort into a superhero mmo as they do those fantasy games, then a super hero game can rise and fill the market gap that is wide open and untapped at this moment while every flock to build another fantasy mmo among thousands of fantasy mmos that is like the rest of the fantasy mmos that is just a WoW rip off.

Am I the only one seeign the gold mine in the super hero MMO sector? Even in a gold mine, you still have to work to get the gold out. Cant arrive with a feather to dig the gold out and except must results. You might get a few dust bits and few lose rocks but the majority of the potential wont be realized until they get in and put effort into it.

[Arcana]

I have not followed Champions Online post-launch as much as I did during the beta, but I will say that in spite of the fact that I think there are many small things they got right that City of Heroes got wrong (and in many cases never fixed) the pieces of Champions Online never meshed together into a good game like City of Heroes did.

My honest opinion is that Cryptic got incredibly lucky with City of Heroes; luck that the Paragon team built upon.  They did not get lucky with Champions Online.  STO seems to me to be a better, if more superficial, game than CO.  A part of me wonders if STO is a better game *because* its more superficial, and therefore has less opportunity to make critical mistakes.

An objective comparison of CoH and CO - and a lesson the Plan Z developers should spend some time thinking about - is that a collection of good ideas does not make a good game: they are not synonymous.  And critically, a good game can house many bad ideas, but a bad game cannot be saved by any amount of good ideas. 

Unintended consequences are so potentially dangerous that no good game design should have any of them - good or bad.  CO is full of them.  You let people take any ranged or melee attacks they want, and the unintended consequence is that melee attacks become basically worthless.  You let everyone take the same defenses, and you make a mainstay of comic book heroes - scrappers and bricks - basically crippled.  You make a crafting system that is moderated in its effects so you do not need to apply something like ED to them, and you make them have lots of different options so you can craft many different kinds of things, and the combination of wide options and limited benefit makes them almost completely pointless (I'm speaking of the old system: I haven't even been able to gather enough attention span to carefully investigate the new system).

Of course, in one critical area CO was doomed from the start.  When Cryptic was making City of Heroes, they literally had no idea what they were doing numbers-wise, so they made lots of mistakes.  But they literally had no ability to put too many overly broken numerical frameworks into place because they couldn't construct them at all.  The Cryptic team that made CO *had* the ability to make strong numerical frameworks but *lacked* the ability to correctly balance them, and that made COs numbers in many ways worse than CoH's.  CoH's were practically random, and subject to intuitive negotiation.  COs were created by bad formulas, and as a result every potential fix was itself broken.  The fact that they refused (at least while I was there a lot) to reverse the Block/PFF decision was a priori proof to me that their numbers were built on really bad math with no escape hatch to negotiate around it.

The City of Heroes developers were *always* open to negotiation, because ironically they had a healthy distrust of their own numerical systems.  At least while I was a frequent player of CO, and throughout the beta process, Cryptic seemed to have a much stronger level of trust in their calculation prowess.  Which  is a very bad thing to have when your calculation prowess is often wrong.


Here's the thing.  I like playing STO for a few minutes or hours at a time.  Its very approachable in my opinion, you can just jump right in.  But I get bored quickly.  CoH is also very approachable in my opinion: you can just jump right in.  And its involving, so I enjoy playing it for stretches of time without getting bored.  CO is not approachable in my opinion.  Its not as easy to just jump into playing it, particularly after a significant break.  *And* it gets boring after a while.  A game that makes you want to take breaks from it and then is difficult to jump back into is a recipe for suicide in an MMO.  And no amount of otherwise good technology can overcome that (for example, in my opinion  the block/bigattack/mez system in CO is I think a brilliant gameplay component: it would have made CoH-style blasters far more viable for the average player if critters had to signal their intent to use particularly devastating attacks or mezzes, forcing blasters essentially to lower offense to temporarily boost defense, while melee archetypes could choose to dive in and challenge those critters during those attacks - perhaps even interrupt them).

[Arcana]

I think which ever plan Z plan comes to fruitation, I hope they do it proper and treat the game with some actual attention, and avoid the pitfalls of the other MMOs which is treated like side projects while the fantasy ones get all the attention.

I believe I've said this before, but it bears repeating.  I don't think the greatest contribution to the City of Heroes community that the Plan Z teams can make is to deliver a game to us.  In many ways, that's incidental.  The greatest contribution to our community they can make is to create a self-sustaining community-based development structure that can support a game indefinitely.  No one is going to want to build City of Heroes forever.  No one is going to have that kind of focus forever.  Most people won't even want to *play* City of Heroes forever.  But a community of players and developers that can collectively keep the game alive and evolving even as individuals leave would be something truly great.

The Plan Z teams may choose at least initially to use a conventional model to create their games: a development house that writes code and develops content to its playerbase.  But in the long run, if they deliver games that cannot be shut down so long as players want to play it, that would be, if not revolutionary, then at least uncommonly amazing.

The Plan Z teams are currently attempting to do what Cryptic and NCSoft already managed to do: create a game we want to play.  Where NCSoft failed was in how it handled walking away from that game.  Where the Plan Z teams can surpass NCSoft is in addressing that problem so it cannot strike us again.  That would be what they can do better than NCSoft can, better than any other publishing house probably can.

[JaguarX]

I believe I've said this before, but it bears repeating.  I don't think the greatest contribution to the City of Heroes community that the Plan Z teams can make is to deliver a game to us.  In many ways, that's incidental.  The greatest contribution to our community they can make is to create a self-sustaining community-based development structure that can support a game indefinitely.  No one is going to want to build City of Heroes forever.  No one is going to have that kind of focus forever.  Most people won't even want to *play* City of Heroes forever.  But a community of players and developers that can collectively keep the game alive and evolving even as individuals leave would be something truly great.

The Plan Z teams may choose at least initially to use a conventional model to create their games: a development house that writes code and develops content to its playerbase.  But in the long run, if they deliver games that cannot be shut down so long as players want to play it, that would be, if not revolutionary, then at least uncommonly amazing.

The Plan Z teams are currently attempting to do what Cryptic and NCSoft already managed to do: create a game we want to play.  Where NCSoft failed was in how it handled walking away from that game.  Where the Plan Z teams can surpass NCSoft is in addressing that problem so it cannot strike us again.  That would be what they can do better than NCSoft can, better than any other publishing house probably can.

I see.


Well it would be nice to have a super hero game that actually aims to be great and mainstream.

Maybe one day someone will see there is killer money to be made there is a serious effort is put into it that can appeal to a broader fan base than the small pocket of people we have here and scattered in the other two relatively small super mmos. If a fantasy game got the same effort that is considered a great effort for a super hero mmo then people would say that the publishing company basically sabatoged that game yet it's considered good enough effort for a super hero mmo standard, yet no where near good enough for fantasy mmo standard

[chasearcanum]

Its probably no surprise that I agree with Arcanaville's posts in this thread,  but I'll go further and even question the OP's claim that this was smack talk.  I don't see Jack "talking smack" in this interview at all. at all.  By comparing the game (STO) with the business model he once disparaged with his visible "high water mark" of his most visible product, he's making a comparison on what he's learned over the years and how that has impacted him.   

Some people put every post where Jack mentions CoH as if he has a vendetta against it, which doesn't reflect what I've heard about Jack at all.  I talked to Jack personally only once, but it was clear at that time that he saw CoH as one of his crowning achievements.  It was his baby, and even when it broke away on its own and actually was in competition with one of his other babies, he took pride in what it accomplished.  I've seen him speak since then and while we didn't have a chance to talk directly, it still becomes apparent that he is proud of his first great creation and proud of what became of it.  That said, it WAS his first title and there WAS a lot of winging it, a lot of learning moments, and a LOT of "if I could do it over" moments.  He's an academic at heart and does try to be open where he can be open.   He tries to be frank and sometimes his observations are incorrect or but they've never been malicious.   Combine all that with an ego not unlike many academics- and the tendency to use one common ego-massaging trick is to re-brand "I was wrong" into "I've learned a lot since then." 

• I always thought Free to Play models were bad, so when I did my first MMO (City of Heroes) we stuck to subscription
• We then switched to Free to Play in Star Trek Online at a very early stage in its lifecycle.
• Under Free to Play, STO has his play levels that far exceeded the userbase than CoH did.

See? He could have said "I was talking through my ass back then and totally missed a way to drive user adoption and bypass the 'first payment' barrier."  Instead he turned the "I was wrong" shame into a "I've learned so much!" proud moment.   Another trick in this is you tie your "failure" to something that turned out rather well (one reason he probably didn't use CO as his counterexample):

"Yeah, I was wrong to doubt the F2P model and it hampered my first game's adoption, so that first game only was able to make tens of millions annually, be widely received within the gaming media, and gave us the revenue to launch the studio's efforts in several other games.  What a screwup, eh?"

If that's the worst screwup you have, you don't look too bad, do you?*

Additionally, keep in mind the context of these posts.  Jack's out there building hype for a new game.  He's making the circuit.  When you do this you try to broadcast your resume, and slip them in where you can.  You want people to say "Hey, he made City of Heroes and Star Trek Online.  I liked those.  I wonder what the next one will be like?"    The fact that he mentioned COH- a recently SHUT DOWN game, means that he doesn't see anything to be shameful of in the game's rich lifespan.  Its one that he's still proud of, otherwise he wouldn't  hitch his wagon to it while peddling his next big thing.




*You see that in job applicant interviews all the time: Q: "what is your biggest weakness?" A:"Oh, I tend to take on too much work myself and end up having to stay late and work weekends to make the deadline.  I've got to get better at that before I ride myself ragged...."  ...so... your worst quality  is that you accept too much work and put in voluntary overtime to make sure deadlines are met?  Yeah, no employer's gonna like that..