City of Zeroes?

[ninjarat]

I have been playing City of Heroes for a few months now and I have generally enjoyed it. Now, however, some of my friends who have been playing for about as long as I have are thinking of canceling their accounts. After what happened this evening I am about >< close to that point myself. Statesman, Cryptic's lead developer for City of Heroes, has said since Day One that the game can be played solo, which is one of the things that drew me into it in the first place -- a game that I can play when I want, however I want when I feel like it.

I started a new character this evening, because I like creating new characters and trying out the various powers available. Everything is fine until I get these two missions from my two available contacts. The first is against Lost, which Grey Mage is not quite up to handling on his own. The other is Hellions, which would otherwise be no problem at all except for the fact that the "random" mission placer put it in the southeast corner of The Hollows, the most dangerous location in the most dangerous zone that a level 5 character can enter.

Yes, I filed a bug report. Yes, I petitioned for help. That was almost 30 minutes ago after Grey Mage had been killed for the second time just trying to get to the mission. My idle session just timed out, with no response from a GM. I am not a happy camper.

The game can be played solo? Not if we can't get to our missions.

Edit:
This is the GM's response that I finally received. The ticket is marked "Solved", which means it is locked, which means that I cannot let GM Bayla know of my displeasure:

Response (GM Bayla)
12/09/2004 10:35 PM

Hello,

Thank you for contacting the City of Heroes support team regarding your feedback of the recent Update. We always appreciate hearing from our players. The City of Heroes development team is continually making changes to improve the game, and looks at your feedback very closely to make this happen.

You may find some aspects of the game more challenging than before. However, you may also notice that some of the new changes also offer greater rewards, like the ability to “respec” your Hero. This mission location is diffiucult to reach, however it can be done. You may want to hit the tab key periodically as you travel to lsee where the nearest mobs are, that way you will be able to stay out of their path.

Please note that in addition to writing us, you should always feel free to post your constructive opinions/feedback/suggestions on the City of Heroes message board (http://boards.cityofheroes.com) where your fellow players and the dev team will be able to view them first hand. Thanks again!

My response would have been:

You MUST be joking. A group of level 8 (+3) mobs including a Madness Mage (boss) spawned less than three feet away from my character. My character was slept before I could do anything, not that there was anything I could do: few (if any) characters can take on a +3 boss with no preparation regardless of level.

Any opinions, feedback or suggestions I have right now have already been opined, feed back, suggested, requested, demanded and begged-for on the boards already by many, many others to no avail. The difficulty in the 1-20 range remains unbalanced.

I no longer need an answer to this question because it is clear that no answer is forthcoming. You clearly have a canned response that you must provide for issues of unplayable -- and unfun -- difficulty, and that you may not take any action to rectify the situation.


Edit:
Call me impetuous, but I just deactivated my CoH account and deleted my billing info. I'm out. The (apparently) mandatory canned response and automatic marking of the ticket closed without my okay did it.

Comments

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the same issue that z_gryphon had the other day: that Cryptic seems to be following Bungie's example when it comes to difficulty level and controlling access to content. :p

[ardaniel]

I'd argue that in Cryptic's case, their sin scales upward compared to Bungie's. Bungie just wants you to play their damn game through a few times as they intended it to be played.

Cryptic isn't just dishing out a closed-ended user experience; they're running a roleplaying game, or at least running some manner of interactive experience, whether a player's in it for combat, for badges, for plot, for RP with other players, or whatever. For that experience, you're paying out per month, on top of your initial expense for the game itself (and any hardware you bought because you dug on the concept and needed an upgrade to play the game properly, etc.). For that experience, Cryptic should be at least *trying* to accomodate everyone and meet their needs.

They have no responsibility to do so, mind. It's their universe. They may not give a shit about solo players, because it's hardcore power-leveling team players that have paid out in advance for a year or whatever and are going to keep coming back. But no one likes hanging out with the GM who puts a tarrasque in every 10' x 10' room, after a while.

Bungie isn't GMing shit, and isn't trying to maintain a consensual reality 24/7, and thus doesn't really even *have* to hit the service level Cryptic should be aiming for. ;)

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

A problem with CoH has been balance and that is because the powers were put together like a comic book: lots of neat things, some designed by Statesman, some by Positron (the lead developers), but with little or no mathematical analysis of what powergamers would do with them. This is okay by me. Let the powergamers (which sometimes includes me) make optimal boss-defeating monstrosities. Let the rest of us (which sometimes includes me) have fun with our less-than-optimal, interesting, *different* characters. They did not leave well enough -- less than perfect as it was -- alone. While some powers have been improved, others have been "nerfed" (made substantially less useful than many had come to rely upon), missions have been made more difficult and will be still more difficult when issue 3 comes out later this month.... Most every major fix has really been an overcompensation that screws someone. Things have reached a point where the only viable characters are cookie-cutters duplicates: you have to have these powers by such and such level and have them socketed a particular way or you just won't be able to progress.

[kviri.livejournal.com]

I sent this to Gryph, Meph, and Rat already, but if anyone else wants to hear what Statesman had to say when I raised my concerns via Private Messages (since no responses were forthcoming on the forums), here it is. (My first message could have been more eloquent, but I was really tired and more than a little ticked off.)

Barring an absolute miracle in the next week or two, I think I'll be following Rat's lead.

[ardaniel]

Yup. This is a big problem with my crack of choice, Diablo 2, which is arguably far less of an RPG (it's Nethack with a GUI, I'm OK with that, you don't see me twitching and slapping my arm, oh no).

They nerfed down Ice Sorceresses in D2 so far that my L74 ice sorc couldn't cope with Hell difficulty. I got sick of seeing the answer to power-gaming on Battle.net always be "the next patch, we'll be reducing damage on these ice spells and increasing spell delay [the amount of time you have to wait between repeat castings of the same spell]. Oh, and more monsters will be cold resistant or immune."

And, well, after three months of throwing my ass up against Duriel in Hell difficulty and getting dead within 30 seconds every time, I gave up. I still dust off the character and run every so often for the heck of it, but I'm not making progress, so I don't care as much.

I don't like people enough to play computer games with them because I absolutely have to to make any progress. I liked Puzzle Pirates for the fact that I didn't have to give a crap about any other pirate on the island or in the entire ocean if I didn't want to. I could sit in the hold on a job ship and fuck around bilging or doing carpentry and still make money and still have goals and still chat people up. And AFAIK from reports from current players, that hasn't changed all that much in PP.

Sigh...

[mechaman.livejournal.com]

The problem is, States is right, in the sense that people do (and have in the majority) go for the least resistance in a hurry. I've watched it happen too many times and it lead to some of the design choices I did agree with. Unfortunately, the problem becomes trying to please the majority, and Cryptic does have a habit of overcompensating.

Now, on the tech support issue, I hate to say it, but it's not Cryptic's fault directly. They don't have input on the CS. NCSoft runs that show and it's better than it was, but NCSoft still has a right mess there. They're actually loads better (in general) than most MMORPG GM support, but no I don't mean that's a sterling accolade.

Re: Sigh...

[ardaniel]

I was pointing out to Wedge that actually being able to have as much of a conversation as Truss had with Statesman is *not* the norm in MMORPG support.

Likewise, I know folks who play CoH who have had good interactions with a lot of the development team in the course of the game, playing alongside and assisting in debug and such.

Puzzle Pirates, again, at least when I was in the beta, had that as well-- I swapped email quite a few times with Daniel Handler, the lead developer, and it was always friendly and chatty.

Hell, in SW Galaxies, don't you get teleported into orbit for daring to question the developers and GMs? It's not like EQ exactly has sterling support either, and I shudder to think about RO and Lineage and other games coming out of some of the East Asian development houses where English might not be a strong suit.

Re: Sigh...

[mechaman.livejournal.com]

I was pointing out to Wedge that actually being able to have as much of a conversation as Truss had with Statesman is *not* the norm in MMORPG support.

Yup, far from it. Accessibility is something they've strived for even when it kicked them in the teeth. Sometimes, honestly, they have as much resistance to peer pressure as a high school stereotype.

Likewise, I know folks who play CoH who have had good interactions with a lot of the development team in the course of the game, playing alongside and assisting in debug and such.

Been there in beta. There were a lot of instances where the boards were _alight_ in ways even Issue 1 and 2's launch days seem tame, and I1's launch brought things like the complete breakage of Kinetics due to some errant code.

But most of the times, they fessed up, rolled things back and tried to do right. It's why I do have a better feeling for most of these guys.

Hell, in SW Galaxies, don't you get teleported into orbit for daring to question the developers and GMs? It's not like EQ exactly has sterling support either, and I shudder to think about RO and Lineage and other games coming out of some of the East Asian development houses where English might not be a strong suit.

This is actually a lot of the problem, CS-wise. NCSoft has american offices, but the tech support is global. And yes, that means a good number of GMs at a time are not English-as-primary. There was a non trivial time when devs were HORRIFIED as they finally decoded some board posts and realized the petition/bug system was not passing through some very specific bugs that they were misinterpreting in the posts.

Re: Sigh...

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

So what? If people take the easy path then they should get comensurate rewards for it. I have been unable to play my favorite character in two months -- since issue 2 -- because less-than-absolutely-optimal controllers cannot defeat +1 bosses. We complained about it; we were told to bug it. We bugged it; we were told it would be fixed with the difficulty slider.

Now we are told that no, not only will it not be fixed, it was never their intention to fix it because of path of least resistence. Well, I'll tell you: Statesman is dead wrong on that. All he has to do is lookt at the power leveling guides on his own boards: AoE blasters and scrappers are told to hunt large packs of blues and later whites while single target blasters and scrappers are told to hunt yellow through red minions. Path of least resistence my left testicle. Fast levellers and power gamers -- the ones that the increased difficulty of issue 2 and 3 are supposed to address -- go for the path of most resistence in actual play.

The grand irony is that they are loving it. Increased difficulty means increased rewards which means even faster levelling -- to the point where many of us have deliberately gotten repeatedly killed just to try to avoid outlevelling our contacts. Meanwhile, our less-than-utterly-optimized cookie-cutter cutouts can't play the game.

Re: Sigh...

[mechaman.livejournal.com]

Not totally disagreeing with that. In honesty, I actually PM'd with that same concern. I don't really expect much out of it, but it hit. I do think he's right about the rewards bit, but the thing is, there are and always will be stupid tricks. I guess part of things now is that those tricks are getting disproportionate attention.

Defender II syndrome at its finest, I wish would be fixed.

Re: Sigh...

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

The players that Statesman is talking about when he says that "everyone played at the easy level" are on Cryptic's internal servers. The early slider was apparantly never put on Test, never exposed to the general public, never made available to the paying customers like me. Stargate Syndrome was the result of one isolated player skewing the limited tests. It was an accident. CoH Syndrome is no accident; Cryptic is consciously ignoring its players.

Re: Sigh...

[mechaman.livejournal.com]

*Rereads the exchange*

That's not what he was saying, I'm thinking. More because I think he's talking more during the mythical Alpha. And if so, sadly, there's a lot more that occludes there. The alpha in question never made it in any real form to even beta, as that version was much much more in a Champs style format and the min/max excesses got even worse. I may be wrong.

As for ignoring the community... I honestly don't know any other game where I get a response from the lead in three hours. I don't think it's conscious as much as you do, but that may well be because I've seen the screwups often too, sometimes from something as simple as not quite having the discrete CVS they thought they did.

Stargate Syndrome was done by isolation, but it's also done by looking at what stats seem to happen. And powergamers do help mask that, especially since alt-ing does expand how it can be done. This problem they still have in spades, as the current froofaw with Regen proved. They tested against the breakers, not realizing some other factors (damage res cap) had already changed part of the equation.

They do have a bad habit of looking at things top-down a bit too much. No arguement there. (I'm having one there with States currently, actually.) But they at least respond and react. It's probably not enough for you, and I can understand that.

Re: Sigh...

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

So what if the lead dev responds in 3 hours? It means nothing if his response is without meaning or merit, or is contradicted by the actions of he and his team. To wit, the statements that the game can be played solo contradicted by suggestions to team up against bosses, missions that require 2 or more teammates to simultaneously open/unlock/disarm objects, overall increased difficulty in issue 3 (mobs have more health in general), and the only-make-things-even-harder difficulty slider. There is hearing and there is listening. Read Truss's dialog (I use the term loosely) with Statesman for a wonderful example of hearing but not listening.

We were *promised* a fix for the too-difficult missions for low-damage ATs like controllers and some defender and tanker ATs. What issue 3 promises is the total opposite: increased difficulty across the board, lower defense and resistance cap for all ATs except tankers and no increase in controller throw-weight. Where I come from we call that a bait-and-switch -- or lying.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

So.

It has been about 12 hours since I closed my CoH and PlayNC accounts. I have slept on it.

I still have no intentions of reactivating those accounts. I think this is telling because CoH is one of a very few games that have been able to hold my attention both in play session duration (upwards of 12 hours at times) and long-term play (4 months). A game that can suck me in like that should not be so easilly abandoned, and yet there it is, dropped like a hot potato.

[ardaniel]

I can't help but think that between your experience and Truss's, especially if it keeps coming up on the boards, that Gabe and Tycho might like to hear about it. ;)