I know this is out of left field, but you are the lore lead, and you're a major component of a spiritual successor to City of Heroes; and when some time comes up soon (hopefully) that I'll be able to invest significant ideas and feedback--and emotional investment--to either or both projects, I'm going to want to have some assurances. I doubt that I'm alone in this.
So, specifically, how much time did you spend playing City of Heroes? How many years were you with the game, and how many characters (and character concepts) and how many arcs did you explore? (Some of this is subjective, so details are welcome--for instance, I only created 27 characters during my time there, but someone with over 100 characters once told me that I had put more story development into each of my characters than they had into all of theirs combined.) How far did you get in levels and in general through the game's various overarching story lines (i.e. Blueside, Redside, Praetoria, Incarnate content, etc)?
Were you close to the role-playing community? How versatile were you in your play-styles (archetypes, alignments, character concepts, PvE and PvP, etc)?
Are you a comic book fan? If so, do you gravitate toward a specific era or eras? And did you get the "gist" of the team's approach to the genre? I.E. a world in which comic book super heroes are real, rather than JUST a game full of comic book cliches, spoofs and puns? Did you mesh with the [often] serious ambiance through which Paragon Studios attempted to distill the world of Primal Earth, its storied history, and surrounding dimensions?
How much did you love the game? How many criticisms did you have for its designs and story elements?
Edit: Did you explore the newer arcs throughout the game, such as the beginning AP arcs and those for KR on the beta server, the Signature Story Arcs, Dark Astoria and so on--and how did you like the direction the stories were headed in?
It's not exactly out of left field. In fact, they're pretty reasonable questions to direct at the person in charge of Lore, and the team second for Story.
I started playing City of Heroes near the end of Issue 3, and had to take an extended break from the game about six months after the release of the Sonic powersets due to them causing instant migraines. All told, I had 4 years paid subscription, plus time spent as a Premium player. When I returned after Power Customization had been added, I explored nearly all of the new content on the live servers with new characters. I had at least five characters with T4 Incarnate powers, and over 30 characters total. Each of those characters had a very detailed background, some more than others, and many evolved during the course of play - two of them changed enough for me to reroll the character at level 30+ multiple times. I did not play through the I-23 Incarnate trials, but I did play through all of Praetoria multiple times, as well as both red and blue side. I dare say that I've played almost every story arc in the game.
As far as characters and roleplaying goes, I didn't do a time-played check on my characters before the end of the game. But at one point I had over a gigabyte of roleplaying logs. Some of those were sadly lost in a hard drive crash, but I was very much a roleplayer. I spent quite a bit of time in Gemini Park, and far more time roleplaying with members of our supergroup, coalition, and general people I ran into on the street. I have everything from true-blue Super Hero of the Golden Age to an ice demon whose daughter was kidnapped by humans to a villain whose only motivation was gaining sufficient power to return home and conquer his people. Although I prefer Defenders and Corruptors, I have a great love for Scrapper and Brutes as well. I've played every single AT up to level 20 at least. I have some fairly high-level PVP badges on my two main Defenders, an Empath and a Kineticist, and spent a great deal of time in the PVP zones before I13. (Did you know that a Mind/FF controller could fight a Spines/Regen scrapper to a draw? THAT was an interesting challenge!)
I must admit that I'm not a comic book reader. Most of what I know about comics I've picked up on the fly while playing COH, or while watching various cartoons. (I love the Bruce Timm Justice League, by the way.) However, I'm wise enough to recognize that I am not a comic expert, though I'm relatively well-versed in the overall worlds of both Marvel and DC, and find people for my Lore team who are walking encyclopedias of comic book knowledge. I certainly feel that a world full of nothing but corny puns and such would be extremely boring. This needs to be a deeply developed world, with a strong history of heroes, and one where superheroes and villains are both part of every-day life *and* taken seriously. (With, of course, room for humor along the way. The occasional pun is a good thing - It makes the player laugh. A constant diet of spoofs? That gets irritating very fast.) The world needs to stand by itself as a believable world...even when we're using Comic Book Physics and wearing spandex. And it must have a flexible enough history that virtually any PC from any background can enter, feel at home, and be comfortable roleplaying within that world.
My strongest criticisms of City of Heroes were that the world itself, beautiful as it was, was so often missed because so many missions were instanced, and those that weren't were largely "go kill X of Y" missions. This was a gorgeous place...and the technology when it was built didn't allow for the concept of dynamic world events or phasing based on player actions. It also, eventually, did become repetitive. There's only so many times you can do the same content after you've done all of it, after all, and at the time I took my extended break, Incarnate content wasn't even on the horizon. The idea of flexible missions based on player choice wasn't even considered either, though they introduced those as soon as they could. Aside from Hamidon Raids, and I ran MANY of those as Agent Storm on Virtue, there wasn't much for a level 50 to do except exemplar down, roleplay, or hang out. Again, they made some improvements on the end game, but only in the form of raids. That's rather difficult when you haven't got time to spend an hour or three raiding - Dark Astoria was an excellent story, but it was not well designed for the solo or small team player to increase their Incarnate power.
It was my favorite MMORPG to date, and possibly always will be. Story-wise, the earlier content paled beside the later content quite a bit. (I always did hate the 30-40 desert of really interesting content, especially after the new Talos Island and Sharkhead based 20-30 content.) I really liked Praetoria because it was much more of a choice-driven environment, and the stories branched based on player choices. I was not a fan of the latter half of SSA 1. I felt that it was poorly written, and that Sister Psyche's death was avoidable and trite. And you'd think that after almost a hundred years, Statesman would know not to enter a ritual circle! (Yes, my husband said that ICly when we did it.) I also felt that it did NOT port over to the villain side very well - The first half definitely did, but the second half was very much a let-down villain side. I didn't play through SSA2, because by the time I was able to play it, the shutdown had already been announced. It would have just made me angrier to know that I'd never find out the ending of the arc.
I found the new arcs and the revamped zones to be largely well-written after I-20. Faultline was very interesting, but again, there's only so many times you can do the same story arc. My goal is to have multiple branching story arcs of all types, so that you can literally play the game through 20 times and still not have seen EVERY arc in the game. That's an awful lot of writing I'm putting on the Lore and the Story teams - Lore has to have enough material in the game for that many story arcs and branches, and Story has to be able to actually write that many branches. (For reference, the Story lead for The Phoenix Project and I work together extremely well. He's much more of a comic book reader than I am, while I have more experience with MMOs in general. It's a very good pairing for this project.) It's very ambitious, and I hope that we're able to achieve it.
As far as writing experience goes, I'm very well-versed in world-building and setting materials. I spent several years directing the overall setting and feel of a very large-scale LARP, which is even more chaotic and changeable than a sandbox style MMO. I had over a hundred people reporting to me, and my job was to make sense of those reports, issue them direction, and design plotlines and story around ongoing events within the game. If you're at all familiar with LARP, you'll understand how interesting doing that for an international game with more than 4,000 players in it can be. Players will ALWAYS pull something out of their hats that will catch you off guard, and you need to be able to write flexibly enough to have a good response to that.
Now, we had a world already built for us, but it had been changed significantly by the players - and we had to keep track of all of those changes and make sure that the storytellers on the ground had easy access to that information. This was, I might add, before the days of Wikipedia.
I'm also wise enough to know when to ask for suggestions, and have several friends who've been doing this sort of thing for years. Communication and delegation are really very key to being able to do this - I'm overseeing the greater setting, history, and world, but I'm hardly going to write it all by myself! I also believe that, generally, you shouldn't simply say "No, this won't work." - You should say "This doesn't work right. Why don't we try this, this, or that instead?". Sometimes, I'll have to say "No, this isn't going to work." and scrap something - but we'll have put some effort into it, and learned something from it, before I say that. Even something that doesn't work out can be learned from, and you never know if an idea that you've scrapped will be picked up by another team member with a new idea and turn into something great.
