Jack Emmert Smack Talking City Of Heroes

[Peregrine Falcon]

In an interview published earlier today, Jack Emmert was talking about Neverwinter and free-to-play. As he often does in these interviews he went on to throw one of his previous products under the bus. This time it was City of Heroes.

"I was a subscription die-hard who had choice words for F2P, but the methodology behind quality free gaming design totally converted me. I see what it's done to Star Trek Online and, believe it or not, 'that game is much bigger than City of Heroes ever was at its peak! And that's due entirely to how we approach free-to-play gaming -- how we commit to providing an option for players who don't want to pay, period."

I saw him disparage Star Trek Online in an interview some years back when he was talking about Neverwinter. It just makes me wonder if he loses interest in the old games and then likes to smack talk them, as so many people seem to like doing, or if he just throws these one-liners out without thinking about what he's saying.

[eabrace]

It just makes me wonder if he loses interest in the old games and then likes to smack talk them, as so many people seem to like doing, or if he just throws these one-liners out without thinking about what he's saying.

Probably a little of A, a little of B...

[Nightmarer]

Well, I can understand why is he bitter with CoH since the game improved very much after he left, then he made an attempt to beat CoH with another Super Hero MMO and failed miserably, heck, he couldn't even make it with such a massive IP as Star Trek so no wonder he's resentful, heck I even bet he had a different "vision"  .-

[Knightslayer]

Well, I can understand why is he bitter with CoH since the game improved very much after he left, then he made an attempt to beat CoH with another Super Hero MMO and failed miserably, heck, he couldn't even make it with such a massive IP as Star Trek so no wonder he's resentful, heck I even bet he had a different "vision"  .-

With the exception that his company is still thriving (even picking up some of the former Paragon devs) while CoH is gathering dust... =/
All in all I could see how he'd get a little smug.
That being said, I don't think he was really "smack talking" it, and rather saying that he has surpassed something that he once considered to be quite the achievement.

[Mysterious J]

I'm not sure saying that you can get more players with free to play than subs is "talking smack" about City of Heroes.  City went F2P as well, after all.  What made CoX good wasn't its revenue model.

[Knightslayer]

I'm not sure saying that you can get more players with free to play than subs is "talking smack" about City of Heroes.  City went F2P as well, after all.  What made CoX good wasn't it's revenue model.

I thought he was talking about the size of the game world and the amount of content.

[Lothic]

That being said, I don't think he was really "smack talking" it, and rather saying that he has surpassed something that he once considered to be quite the achievement.

I believe Jack sort of meant well here, but as per usual managed to express his ideas in his typical foot-in-mouth way.

I tend to think most game designers like Jack have been completely surprised with how well the F2P model has worked for them in the last few years.  I suspect they assumed the old subscription paradigm was the "smart business" move and didn't trust they could actually succeed with F2P.  So when he mentions CoH here I think it's in the context of saying its original subscription model was a profit-making limitation compared to the relatively newer F2P concepts.

Sadly when trying to explain that point it comes off like Jack's trashing CoH as a game in general.  He's simply using the several games he's actually worked on as examples here - if he had worked on a different subscription-based game back in 2004 he probably would have used that as an example instead of CoH.

[dwturducken]

[...] quality free gaming design [...]

Interesting choice of words, since most of his stuff is quality-free until he stops working on it. *rimshot*

[Colette]

Well, I don't see what he said as insulting to the quality of City. Revenues are quantifiable, and facts are facts.

[JaguarX]

Well, I don't see what he said as insulting to the quality of City. Revenues are quantifiable, and facts are facts.

hear hear

[Ashen Fury]

Its Jack. Just seems like this is how he always talks.

[Megajoule]

as I said else-board:

That's great, Jack. For what it's worth, those of us who stuck with CoH until the end - and saw it become, IMO, a much better game after you moved on - don't miss you either.

[Arcana]

I honestly do not see the quoted passage as remotely derogatory to City of Heroes.  Not even microscopically.

The most neutrally objective interpretation of what Jack said is that he considers City of Heroes to be the exemplar of his prior work with subscription-based MMOs in terms of subscriber and revenue base, and its therefore the standard to compare to the current incarnation of STO as an F2P game.  It is true that City was a subscription game for the entire time of Jack's involvement with it, and its also objectively true that in terms of subscriber base City's maximum size occurred while it was still a subscription game.

The interesting thing is that Jack did not compare STO to Champions Online, but to City of Heroes.  There are probably Champions Online players with a more justified gripe than we ought to have.  But the reason for that is also obvious: CO transitioned to F2P prior to STO under Cryptic.  From the perspective of Jack and Cryptic, the evolution of their thinking goes from the pure subscription based CoH (which it was while it was under Cryptic) to the first F2P transition attempt with CO to the current F2P transition with STO to the all F2P Neverwinter.

Honestly, if I was the design lead at Cryptic, I would be describing Cryptic's model evolution in similar ways, with CoH at the beginning of the timeline and NWN at the current end of the timeline.  CoH would always be the baseline by which Cryptic's methodology would be referenced.

[Nightmarer]

I honestly do not see the quoted passage as remotely derogatory to City of Heroes.  Not even microscopically.

The most neutrally objective interpretation of what Jack said is that he considers City of Heroes to be the exemplar of his prior work with subscription-based MMOs in terms of subscriber and revenue base, and its therefore the standard to compare to the current incarnation of STO as an F2P game.  It is true that City was a subscription game for the entire time of Jack's involvement with it, and its also objectively true that in terms of subscriber base City's maximum size occurred while it was still a subscription game.

The interesting thing is that Jack did not compare STO to Champions Online, but to City of Heroes.  There are probably Champions Online players with a more justified gripe than we ought to have.  But the reason for that is also obvious: CO transitioned to F2P prior to STO under Cryptic.  From the perspective of Jack and Cryptic, the evolution of their thinking goes from the pure subscription based CoH (which it was while it was under Cryptic) to the first F2P transition attempt with CO to the current F2P transition with STO to the all F2P Neverwinter.

Honestly, if I was the design lead at Cryptic, I would be describing Cryptic's model evolution in similar ways, with CoH at the beginning of the timeline and NWN at the current end of the timeline.  CoH would always be the baseline by which Cryptic's methodology would be referenced.

We all knew that already, we were just testing if you knew...

[Arcana]

We all knew that already, we were just testing if you knew...

Man, I hate it when that happens.

[Primantis]

Not so surprised.

The guy talked a lot of smack about CoH when CO was in development. Some of it was quite harsh iirc.


That being said, I don't see the quote as being too degrading to CoH, the man is just stating a fact.

Making more money =/= a better game. In fact, in my experience, the opposite is quite often true.

[Peregrine Falcon]

You're probably right.

Considering all of the times I've seen Jack smack-talk both CoH and STO in various interviews over the last few years I guess his statement just felt to me as if he was doing it yet again.

[Arcana]

The guy talked a lot of smack about CoH when CO was in development. Some of it was quite harsh iirc.

I'm unaware of Jack Emmert saying very much about CoH while CO was in development one way or the other.  Both he and the dev team often spoke the standard rhetoric about taking what was learned from one project and doing better in the next project, but that's normal.  Jack was hammered for making comments about CoH while STO was in development that some found unflattering, but at the time I didn't think they were all that noteworthy.

Honestly, I've said worse things about CoH than Jack has overall.  It was I who once (twice, three times...) said CoH appeared to be designed by a random number generator, the animation system looked like a Rube Goldbergian wet dream, and if Cryptic was a person I wouldn't let him balance my checkbook.  The fact is that everything I say was seen through the prism of being a long-time player and supporter of the game - and someone who would smite you with the dictionary for fun - while everything Jack ever said was seen through the prism of being someone who first was perceived as being the heavy that wouldn't let the game evolve in the direction the players wanted and then as someone who abandoned the game entirely.

The truth is that by the time momentum had really built to portray Jack as being the thing holding CoH back he had already mostly checked out and was involved primarily with MUO.  In my opinion, Jack has always been someone that enjoyed conceptualizing games far more than implementing and supporting them.  It was I that first came up with the "Johnny Appleseed" theory of Jack's direction for Cryptic.  The reason why so many people, I believe, think Jack is callous is that he really simply isn't all that interested in the nitty gritty details that people simply assume he must think about constantly and must be the context of everything he says.  Jack was often blamed for having bad ideas about subjects he literally had no specific knowledge of.  Or incorrect knowledge of.  The story of Defiance 1.0 comes to mind.

We should cut Jack some slack.  First, all evidence suggests that when Cryptic was first creating City of Heroes, the dev team was overreaching beyond their abilities farther than a kindergarten class trying to start a space program.  If Jack hadn't come along with the vision he was so reviled for after launch, odds are we would have never had a game at all.  Second, so much of what we blame Jack for in terms of holding back from the players are things the dev team couldn't have delivered on either way.  Who outside Cryptic even knows all the things Jack said we shouldn't have that in fact he knew we couldn't have, because Cryptic couldn't deliver it. 

He's just a guy who wants to work on the creative side of making MMOs.  And we just happened to be his first.  That's all.  He's long moved on, and its long past the time we should let go of his shadow.

[Ad_Astra]

I'm unaware of Jack Emmert saying very much about CoH while CO was in development one way or the other.  Both he and the dev team often spoke the standard rhetoric about taking what was learned from one project and doing better in the next project, but that's normal.  Jack was hammered for making comments about CoH while STO was in development that some found unflattering, but at the time I didn't think they were all that noteworthy.

Honestly, I've said worse things about CoH than Jack has overall.  It was I who once (twice, three times...) said CoH appeared to be designed by a random number generator, the animation system looked like a Rube Goldbergian wet dream, and if Cryptic was a person I wouldn't let him balance my checkbook.  The fact is that everything I say was seen through the prism of being a long-time player and supporter of the game - and someone who would smite you with the dictionary for fun - while everything Jack ever said was seen through the prism of being someone who first was perceived as being the heavy that wouldn't let the game evolve in the direction the players wanted and then as someone who abandoned the game entirely.

The truth is that by the time momentum had really built to portray Jack as being the thing holding CoH back he had already mostly checked out and was involved primarily with MUO.  In my opinion, Jack has always been someone that enjoyed conceptualizing games far more than implementing and supporting them.  It was I that first came up with the "Johnny Appleseed" theory of Jack's direction for Cryptic.  The reason why so many people, I believe, think Jack is callous is that he really simply isn't all that interested in the nitty gritty details that people simply assume he must think about constantly and must be the context of everything he says.  Jack was often blamed for having bad ideas about subjects he literally had no specific knowledge of.  Or incorrect knowledge of.  The story of Defiance 1.0 comes to mind.

We should cut Jack some slack.  First, all evidence suggests that when Cryptic was first creating City of Heroes, the dev team was overreaching beyond their abilities farther than a kindergarten class trying to start a space program.  If Jack hadn't come along with the vision he was so reviled for after launch, odds are we would have never had a game at all.  Second, so much of what we blame Jack for in terms of holding back from the players are things the dev team couldn't have delivered on either way.  Who outside Cryptic even knows all the things Jack said we shouldn't have that in fact he knew we couldn't have, because Cryptic couldn't deliver it. 

He's just a guy who wants to work on the creative side of making MMOs.  And we just happened to be his first.  That's all.  He's long moved on, and its long past the time we should let go of his shadow.

Hear, hear!

Too many people in the community want to see dark motivations to anything Jack does or ever did - but that's really crediting him with way too much power.

He's just a guy who thinks up cool games, does some of the early work on them, then turns them over to those who implement the "vision". He doesn't seem to be a nuts and bolts kinda guy, and I would certainly never put him in charge of any PR for anything, since at times he suffers from terminal "foot in mouth" disease. But he isn't EVIL INCARNATE", for cripe's sake.

And in this case, I think some are taking offense too easily and attributing insult where none was even remotely intended.

[Ironwolf]

Jack Emmert is the mouthpeice, he is not the guy who knows how the game even works - at least not at the level of an elite player. When he said his famous tanking example - he showed how absolutely ignorant he was of gameplay.

He said:

You take your tank and if you are weak against a carnie who has Psi damage instead you ignore that character and taunt something that has more smashing and lethal damage. So exactly who on a team can absorb more damage than the tank? His idea was let the others fend for themselves. Let the team eat the alpha and you just worry about the things you can handle.

In the real world the tank/melee tries to take as much of the alpha as possible and in fact I wrote guides on tanking that showed how you can hold aggro on almost everything even with an aggro cap. Leaping into the BACK of the group and taunting so the cones don't hit your team, fighting and using punchvoke to keep moving left to right to keep the cones on you and still hold aggro on almost the entire group/groups. Other tricks that you use because as a tank you have the most ability to withstand the damage that would face plant many on a team. Defiance 1.0 where if the team lets you nearly die you do more damage. Adding fear to burn, so very many silly things.