Posts Tagged ‘city of heroes’

City of Heroes users generate more content in one day than devs did in 5 years

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Building upon our previous post last week about City of Heroes new Architect system, eurogamer.net points out that lead designer Matt Miller is “astounded” with the community response to the new mechanism.

Miller writes on the official COH website, “We are simply astounded at the response we’ve gotten for it (the architect system).”

“I feel like everything we have worked on has really been worth it when I see that within 60 minutes we had 360 entire Mission Arcs (each containing up to 5 missions) available for other people to play. By midnight on day one we had over 2600 arcs, and exactly 24 hours after launch we were already at 3800 arcs.

“We did some data mining of our own,” he adds, “and 3800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.”

Miller also speaks to the fact that 70% of the user generated mission arcs include customized enemies, thereby overcoming the stagnation problem of users becoming tired of the same set of bad guys to face.  COH residents now no longer need to wait for developers to refresh bad guy content; users are doing it themselves.

After just one week of going live with the new creation tools, the Mission Server had more than 20k playable mission arcs.  6259 of them are heroic-themed, 112 time travel-themed, 134 feature statesmen, and 794 mission arcs feature use of the 5th column.  Users seem to be truly appreciating and eating up others’ creations, as 2860 of the 6259 have 5 star ratings, and only a (relative) handful, 582 to be exact, have received a 1 star rating.

“All in all,” adds Miller, “the actual launch of Issue 14 has exceeded any expectation we have set for it. We aimed very high with this Issue, but even the most Pollyanna dev on the team never expected the feature to take off this fast, with this amount of awesome buzz behind it.

“Players and the press have been calling this revolutionary, and I think we at Paragon Studios are just bringing our heads up to see exactly how revolutionary it actually is.”

If the user generated mission arcs feature continues at it’s current success rate, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see more and more titles beginning to offer similar options.  Game developers certainly do a boatload of research and listening to their communities about what they want included in future updates to the game, but are limited by their amount of available resources.  By turning over the power of creation to the community itself (within a structured environment), COH has crossed the line between producer to facilitator.  This new and exciting concept and game creation and play can only get better from here, possibly opening other doors to user generated content that we’ve not even explored yet.  Hats off to Matt Miller and the entire COH team!

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NCSoft’s City of Heroes hands the power of creation over to users

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Late last week NCSoft announced that they’ve now thrown the doors wide open on City of Heroes’ Mission Architect system.  The free to subscriber’s update, or Issue 14 as it’s officially titled, marks the first time in MMO history that allows players to create and share their own custom missions and story lines.  In doing so, NCSoft has presented players with an unprecedented and virtually limitless amount of user-generated content for the City of Heroes community.

city-of-heroes“We are very excited for City of Heroes to be the first-ever MMO to offer this revolutionary new system to our players,” said Brian Clayton, general manager and executive producer of the franchise. “Within two weeks of opening the beta version of Mission Architect to our community, players published an astounding 5,000 custom stories, representing up to 25,000 user-created missions. Such a steady in-flux of fresh content offers the capacity for endless adventures to City of Heroes subscribers.”

Not only will players now be able to utilize thousands of previously existing game assets but also be able to use Mission Architect to personalize their stories by creating their own characters and enemies within the City of Heroes’ Character Creator system.  And this isn’t a ‘one time and it’s over’ format, as players can create and save up to three different story arcs.  These arcs can contain up to five missions, which in turn may contain up to twenty-five individual mission objectives.  Got all that math?  3 arcs + 5 missions + 25 objectives = 375 potential actions.

These stories will then be displayed to all other players across all servers in the Mission Architect system.  The Mission Architect system will then allow players to play and rate each other’s creations.  Highest rated story arcs will then be featured, earning creators in-game rewards for creating excellent content.  Not wanting to be left out of the fun, City of Heroes game devs will also be playing users’ creations and hand selecting the best of the best and given an esteemed “Dev Choice” award.  This award then grants the creator of this story arch with an additional slot to create even more custom stories.

While I’m quite sure the technology and development work behind something like this is quite intense, but let me just throw this out there – what if something like this existed in a free-to-play title?  Secondary Market (peer-to-peer) trading is already something more and more free-to-play producers are starting to take a look at, and something like this could only further secondary market offerings.  Imagine users being able to create their own missions or quest chains, and then offer them up on the secondary market.  In this situation, I’m guessing that quality missions would spread like wildfire through viral praise, and therefore appropriately reward the creator of this quest line.

Oh, and did anyone happen to notice how NCSoft casually slipped a recruitment tool into City of Heroes?  If there are a few designers that rise to the top, wouldn’t it be a wise idea for NCSoft to contact these players directly?  If not for a job, at least a cup of coffee and a ‘Hey…ever considered storyline design as a career?’

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Fail: Worlds.com – Patents FTW!

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

In what may very well go down as the WTF of 2009, Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin has put the entire Virtual Worlds industry on notice.  He claims that his company patented and owns the IP rights to scalable virtual worlds.  Let’s let that soak in for a moment. ….and we’re back.  In essence, what Kidrin and Worlds.com are doing is threatening the livelihood of an entire industry.  And yes, this lawsuit and IP infringement applies to the big boys as well, including Second Life and World of Warcraft.

It's a Whole New Worlds - of LawsuitsAnd while I thought Atari and Codmasters legal assault on gamers was pretty up there on the ‘say what now?’ scale, Kidrin and Co. may have just taken the number one spot.  Worlds.com is already taking action against NCSoft, creators of City of Heroes and Guild Wars, filing in East Texas, an area know for it’s plaintiff friendly rulings in intellectual property cases.

Speaking to Eric Krangel from The Business Insider, Kidrin said that he “absolutely” intends to pursue follow up suits against Second Life and WoW.

But let’s take a step back and find out where all of this is coming from.  Back in December ’08, the then relatively unknown Worlds.com claimed to be holding a patent on virtual worlds ideas from 1997.  This patent originated from a developers work on a Steven Spielberg backed ‘Starbright World’, a part of the Starlight Starbright Foundation’s work with seriously ill children.  Wanting to protect the privacy and relative closed network feature of the virtual world, the Starbright folks, rightfully so, kept the project quiet.

Fast forward 10+ years, and a number of Starbright’s patents pass from the original creators to Worlds.com.  And while these patents do not cover ‘Virtual Worlds’ per se, and how we view them today, they do cover an architecture for enabling thousands of simultaneous users in a 3D virtual space.  Lawyers from General Patent Corporation pointed at this patent to the Worlds.com management, and encouraged them to pursue licensing deals.

Kindrin asserts that he’s not out to take any companies down and put them out of business, it’s just that he wants to get paid for what he and the Worlds.com management see as their lawful intellectual property.  Ummm, right.

Given the amount prior art available, chances are that this patent lawsuit is already moot.  As WoW Insider deftly points out, the same case could be made around the term ‘Cyberspace’.

However, let’s take a look at the definition of Cyberspace. It was first used in William Gibson‘s 1982 story “Burning Chrome” and again used in a few of his books, with “Neuromancer” being the most popular. Gibson’s definition for Cyberspace reads:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.”

Now there are a few interesting parts there, in that the Gibson created a fictional representation of a world that was shared graphically with billions of legitimate operators. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what WoW is: a graphical world shared by millions of legitimate operators, abstract data that is unthinkably complex, arranging lines of light in the nonspace of the mind, and teaching children mathematical concepts (ie: threat, gear statistics, etc…)

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City of Heroes adds Micro Transactions for Respec

Friday, August 1st, 2008

NC Soft’s popular title City of Heroes will now have a micro transaction system built into the game.  The micro transaction model will be made available for character respecs.

While available for purchase services are not new to the game, the ability to purchase a respec is.  While creating a character and leveling it through the City of Heroes world, a player has a multitude of powers they may choose from.  Respeccing the character allows this player to re-select their powers from their chosen primary and secondary powers, including any other pools of powers they may be able to use.  The respec does NOT however allow a player to reselect primary or secondary powers.  This feature will function exactly like the existing respec currently available in the game.

This micro transaction respec may be purchased at the in game store found at the character select screen for USD$9.99.

While there are a number of in game methods for respeccing a character, NC Soft sited that a growing number of users had requested the feature.  Players spoke, and City of Heroes developers listened.  Now, if the player so desires, a respec is available for a small fee.

Once a player has respecced the character, they must visit a Respec Contact in game in order to use it, just like the current respec process requires.  Respec Contacts includer Jack Wolf in Galaxy City and Arbiter Lupin in Nerva.

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