DON’T screw over former paid members when you do go free-to-play.
As somebody who purchased the City of Villains Collectors Edition at full retail price back in the day, the transition to free-to-play left me less than impressed. My main character, a Mastermind class with a sweet personal army of ninja, was locked out to me… because I hadn’t purchased the ability to have Mastermind characters. Yet my (many) alts were available to ‘unlock’ simply because they were non-paid classes.

Without wishing to cause any offence, Paragon, this is really dumb. I’d be fine if you stopped me from making a new character from an archetype available only to Premium players, but locking me out from my already existing level 50, that I’ve poured hundreds of hours and dollars into just because I haven’t spent any money under the “new” system? This is just… no. No, it’s dumb. Don’t do that.

Did you assign all your Paragon Points? Once you filled up Tier 4 of the Paragon rewards Masterminds and all the other special classes should’ve become unlocked (since you mentioned having spent hundreds of dollars on the game I find it hard to believe you wouldn’t have enough points to get to Tier 4 =/ ).

nekosan: I miss actually TRAVELING through a world, when you restrict a game to ground mounts then you force people to be a part of the world, and IMO that’s a good thing.

I think this is mostly just a problem because games are rarely designed with flight in mind. CoX did this to some extent and had some amazing vertical areas to enjoy, but it did still fall flat in this area a bit.

If a game was actually designed around verticality, it’d be not an issue at all.

auld: Playing in Firefall beta atm, have to agree Jetpacks are kickass. Verical worlds that are open to explore are still a novelty and shouldnt be.

Perhaps, worlds would have to be VERY well designed though. I noticed in WoW that the instant everyone had a flying mount, the area design ceased to matter, the game became all about skipping as much as you could using flight and I think the majority of people stopped experiencing the world as it was meant to be.

The problem is that either immersion is ruined or the fast travel just becomes a part of it all and it isn’t special. I miss actually TRAVELING through a world, when you restrict a game to ground mounts then you force people to be a part of the world, and IMO that’s a good thing.

also super strength upper cuts with all KB/KU buffs on. Man I loved the physics in that game. Made me hate every MMO since if they lacked that.

PS: you forgot to mention the sidekick/lackey system – EVERY game that lets you level up and team with friends should have this.

fatherxmas: Some of your don’t examples have been wrong for years.

First tutorials.They were made skippable in Issue 2, end of August 2004.This was before CoV came out.Badge collectors still did them to get the badge that’s only available in them.When the F2P version was released, the old tutorials were dropped in favor of a new common tutorial for CoH/CoV but the Going Rogue expansion still had it’s own tutorial.

Skippable in 2004? They were still mandatory in 2005 when I first jumped in, I wasn’t offered the choice to skip them until literally years later, maybe in 2009?

fatherxmas: As for quest lines, I grant you that in the beginning CoV had only a single quest line.CoV suffered from swinging the pendulum to far the other way from CoH (blue side) which had an abundance of zones and quest lines and contacts beyond the first few missions which were based on your character’s “origin” (mutant, tech, science, natural, magic).In CoH you could unlock 5 contacts, one tied to each origin, every 5 levels who would provide you with missions.There was so much content in the blue side that the developers finally listen to players who wanted to experience all the content and introduced a means to shut off XP.

Yeah, CoH always seemed to get much more love than CoV. This is true.

fatherxmas: Travel.Yes for the longest time you really didn’t experience the joy of flying, super jumping or other “travel” powers until level 14.They did however have a special class of missions where the reward for completing them were a flight pack and super jump pack which you could get as early as level 6 for flight and level 10 for jump.As mrminotaur said, they later added a subscriber reward of unlocking the travel powers at level 6 (if you had subscribed for 5 years) and F2P unlocked them at level 4 for everyone.

I do mention the jet packs (well, flight packs) in the article! But yes, as I said above, I never made any new alts in Freedom so I never experienced this. It is good to know!

fatherxmas: But there is a downside to having these powers early in my opinion and that is it makes a lot of the flavor of the various zones moot since you are simply above it all.All the various street gangs causing mischief become pointless.You miss out on the various touches the developers did to make each zone unique, you lose the feel that you are in a city.

I sort of agree, it’s true. But the overall feel it adds to the game is totally worth it.

fatherxmas: But the one thing the travel powers did do that so many MMOs don’t have is the feeling of speed.I could spend 5 minutes jogging across a zone or 30 seconds to fly, super speed, teleport or super jump across it.Even the “jog” of a level 2 character in CoH was faster than the run in WoW.That’s the one thing which will drive me crazy in whatever MMO I go to next.

Yeah, absolutely. Every other MMO I’ve played since then has felt tame and slow by comparison. It’s really frustrating.

fatherxmas: No Capes!

Screw capes!

mrminotaur:
Nice article, but some of your info is out of date or a little harsh. How much you got when you went F2P depended on how much paid time you had on the account, and you didn’t need that much paid time to unlock masterminds for free (less than 3 years). If you were just short, buying a few points could also fix that.

Saying “You only needed less than 3 years of paid time to unlock x” is still super dumb! I’d poured probably 200 hours into that character and the fact I had to pay to unlock it despite my past history of payment is really silly.

mrminotaur: The unlock of major travel powers came down to level 6 for long time subscribers then level 4 (not sure if this was for everybody or just long time subscribers).

That’s good to know! I haven’t actually made any new characters since Freedom so I wasn’t aware of this :)

mrminotaur: It’s not just the costumes, the ability to make a 1000 character biog for it also created a lot of immersion. This meant you understood why other characters were as they were and created a lot of RP opportunities.

Absolutely agreed, love reading people’s backstories and blogs. The best times.

First tutorials. They were made skippable in Issue 2, end of August 2004. This was before CoV came out. Badge collectors still did them to get the badge that’s only available in them. When the F2P version was released, the old tutorials were dropped in favor of a new common tutorial for CoH/CoV but the Going Rogue expansion still had it’s own tutorial.

As for quest lines, I grant you that in the beginning CoV had only a single quest line. CoV suffered from swinging the pendulum to far the other way from CoH (blue side) which had an abundance of zones and quest lines and contacts beyond the first few missions which were based on your character’s “origin” (mutant, tech, science, natural, magic). In CoH you could unlock 5 contacts, one tied to each origin, every 5 levels who would provide you with missions. There was so much content in the blue side that the developers finally listen to players who wanted to experience all the content and introduced a means to shut off XP.

Travel. Yes for the longest time you really didn’t experience the joy of flying, super jumping or other “travel” powers until level 14. They did however have a special class of missions where the reward for completing them were a flight pack and super jump pack which you could get as early as level 6 for flight and level 10 for jump. As mrminotaur said, they later added a subscriber reward of unlocking the travel powers at level 6 (if you had subscribed for 5 years) and F2P unlocked them at level 4 for everyone.

But there is a downside to having these powers early in my opinion and that is it makes a lot of the flavor of the various zones moot since you are simply above it all. All the various street gangs causing mischief become pointless. You miss out on the various touches the developers did to make each zone unique, you lose the feel that you are in a city.

But the one thing the travel powers did do that so many MMOs don’t have is the feeling of speed. I could spend 5 minutes jogging across a zone or 30 seconds to fly, super speed, teleport or super jump across it. Even the “jog” of a level 2 character in CoH was faster than the run in WoW. That’s the one thing which will drive me crazy in whatever MMO I go to next.

The move to F2P wasn’t a smooth one. On one hand they wanted to reward older players for their loyalty, unlocking Masterminds and Controlers for example if you had subscribed for 39 months under the old system. On the other hand if you allow returning players who subscribed for only a brief time full access to all their older characters and look (the locking of IO enhancements was another sore point for returning players who simply wanted to play for free) isn’t a sustainable business model. You could unlock Masterminds for a relatively small one time fee ($15) or buy proxy currency or simply subscribe until you earn enough “tokens” to unlock the reward level where you get them for free even as a F2P player. The system wasn’t perfect and it might have been a problem for Paragon/NCSoft with long time players who, because their longevity had unlocked all the rewards, could stop subscribing and still enjoy the vast majority of the game.

And a point that’s often missed, this was a game about heroes (and villains) not just superheroes. Just like the comics everyone wasn’t a bunch of spandex clad, cape wearing (No Capes!) perfect specimens of the human form. You could have a pirate, ninja, robot, time traveler, werecritter, alien, soldier, 30′s noir (aka The Shadow), cyborg, elf, dwarf, fairy, knight, angle, demon, well you get the idea. Lets see if you can make a mutant cyborg in your generic fantasy MMO or a magic using pixie with butterfly wings in your space MMO. Here all were welcome. You weren’t pigeonholed into a fixed genre. You were only limited by your imagination and the parts in the character creator.

theoriginaldaniel:
Let’s take GTA4′s multiplayer as an example, new hybrid engine with physics driven by NaturalMotions euphoria.
Now because physics is client side not server side that means Your local PC is doing physics calculations for obvious reasons but the more advanced you get the more randomized ragdolls etc will be.
Quote from their site: “every result is unique and interactive”
Think about that, if it’s unique and your local machine is doing the work how the hell could someone online get the exact same result? .. Simple: They don’t.

Host client does the calculations for major physics event locations(body placement, clipable objects), client side does all the no-clip and minor things like shells, limb placement etc (which amount to the overwhelming majority of physics effects). It wouldn’t really be particularly hard, the developers just need to consider it worth their time.

Much of what you’re saying is impossible could be solved by simple object location calculations happening serverside (which is what happens without the ragdoll anyway). Of course it’s not going to be viable for a server running 5000 people in an open world… but how often do we actually see that?

Adding physics to a game doesn’t just involve something like an explosion tossing 50 bodies in random directions, even low level physics can make a game extremely charming. I don’t think anyone is arguing that single player quality physics is necessary, but SOMETHING better than what we had in MMO’s more than a decade ago would be nice.

Of course all Tims wishes are at the bottom of my list, I don’t care about graphics, music, voice acting, physics, dynamic events and questlines or any of the “marvels” that the latest batch of MMO’s tout as their shining glory…. I’d settle for a game that has a working chat function, some staggered end game progression, working LFG tool and doesn’t treat me like a moron… AT LAUNCH!!

Course that hasn’t happened in a single title for…. well… EVER, MMO’s have been adding more features as a selling point since Everquest was released and you know what? They all keep failing because the simple criteria I listed are absent in favor of stupid shit.

So yeah, excuse me if I’m not overly enthusiastic about ragdoll physics.

The unlock of major travel powers came down to level 6 for long time subscribers then level 4 (not sure if this was for everybody or just long time subscribers).

It’s not just the costumes, the ability to make a 1000 character biog for it also created a lot of immersion. This meant you understood why other characters were as they were and created a lot of RP opportunities.

I don’t think folks realize how insanely difficult physics engines are in the multiplayer world.

Let’s take GTA4′s multiplayer as an example, new hybrid engine with physics driven by NaturalMotions euphoria.
Now because physics is client side not server side that means Your local PC is doing physics calculations for obvious reasons but the more advanced you get the more randomized ragdolls etc will be.
Quote from their site: “every result is unique and interactive”
Think about that, if it’s unique and your local machine is doing the work how the hell could someone online get the exact same result? .. Simple: They don’t.

how about Red Dead: Redemption, You might of noticed that sometimes an angry player kills you and starts filling your corpse with bullets but on your screen he’s 5 feet away from you shooting at the ground as if he where trying to dig to china with bullets.
Same deal with the havok physics engine and that’s why commonly MMO’s have death animations.

Long story short: putting physics into a game = difficult, getting every single player to sync to the same physics so that they all see where dead bodys lie = over 9000 difficulty, Imagine if you killed a guy in PVP you run over to loot his body but a 2nd player sees his body 5feet away from where you see it and runs to loot it but gets there first even though he was further away from the body on your screen.. You can see how that would fuck things over.

In nearly every game that mission design has been a feature, it has absolutely sucked, the reason being that most users are terrible at video game design (its a specialised job for a reason – its hard to do). Spore for example became beyond pitiful when user missions were introduced.

Design your own missions is in a completely different category to design scenery etc, and definitely shouldnt be lumped together. They definitely shouldnt be a free-for-all.

Also, the photocopiers were my doing. Credit where credit is due.