Faux F2P

I’ve played a fair few free to play MMORPGs by now, everything from oddball action fantasy games like Dragon’s Nest to traditional conversions like Lord of the Rings Online.  I’ve played games where the cash shop really isn’t necessary, and others where not using items from the cash shop makes playing the game more an adventure in walking on broken glass than a fun, relaxing hobby (my apologies to all you broken-glass-walkers out there, I don’t mean to malign your hobby).  I find I am less irritated by games that make cash shop items necessary when the game itself is completely free – no box price, no startup cost, no subscription, just the cash shop.  I find I am very irritated by games that make cash shop items necessary when the game itself costs money up front – since most F2P games that started as F2P never charge for the client, I am of course mostly referring to games that have converted from subscription to F2P, or some hybrid thereof.

My City of Heroes account recently converted from VIP to Free, and overall I have to say I am not happy, at all, with the way things have worked out.  When Paragon Studios first announced the free to play change (City of Heroes: Freedom) I thought it sounded like a good idea.  They made a big deal of the fact that past subscribers would have “premium” accounts rather than just free accounts.  In their defense I don’t think they ever detailed what that meant, but nevertheless they implied it was a big deal.  My subscription time for City of Heroes clocks in around 40 months.  I beta tested the game, I paid full retail at release, I beta tested City of Villains, and bought that at full price too, and picked up Going Rogue the moment it came out.  In short, I’ve invested a LOT of money in the game over the years, and that apparently set my expectations a bit high.

The first thing that happened upon converting to a free account was that all my character slots locked.  I have characters on three servers – Pinnacle, Virtue, and Freedom.  Logging into Virtue I had 2 server slots and 3 global slots available.  Checking Pinnacle I had 2 server slots and 3 global slots available.  Checking Freedom I had 0 server slots and 0 global slots available – I couldn’t unlock a single character on that server without spending money.  Not one.  Ooo . . . kay . . . not exactly fair, but I wasn’t that invested in my villain characters anyway.

So I went back to Virtue and unlocked the two characters I’ve mostly been playing lately, my level 50 tanker and my level 28 corrupter.  I logged in my tanker to see how he was affected and discovered he’d lost access to all his Incarnate abilities.  Not only are free players barred from participating in Incarnate Trials, anything you earn while a VIP is lost the moment you stop subscribing.  That would be like raiding in Lord of the Rings Online and getting your epics stripped away if you stop paying.  There’s also no way to access the Incarnate system without paying a monthly subscription – you can’t unlock the content in the cash shop, it’s subscribe or go home.  It left a bit of a dirty taste in my mouth, and I certainly haven’t logged my level 50 in since as he has nothing to do.

Then I unlocked my corrupter . . . or rather I tried to.  He has the Time Manipulation power set, something he’s been using for the past few months.  It turns out the Time Manipulation power set is VIP only so that character was now unplayable . . . unless I cared to jaunt over to the cash shop and plunk down about $10 for the damned thing.  I didn’t care to, but I did want to keep playing this character, so I bought some points and finished unlocking him.  In my opinion my subscription should have paid for the right to use that powerset, but clearly Paragon Studios doesn’t agree. 

I logged my corrupter in, and immediately noticed that my salvage and auction house storage inventory had shrunk considerably.  I was now over my inventory limits and had to sell off a bunch of stuff.  The salvage inventory was especially tight, and made working with the invention system pretty painful.

I then went to a trainer to adjust the colors of my corrupter’s powers and discovered I couldn’t – free players are denied that feature, which really felt like an unnecessary cosmetic handicap.  I tried to access First Ward, a zone I’d been running missions in, only to discover that it was VIP only and I’d have to buy access to it if I wanted to keep going.  I did, so I did (using up the last of my Paragon Points).

By this point I was getting pretty disgusted.  As a veteran player who’s sunk hundreds of dollars into CoH I expected I’d be able to go longer than five minutes without getting a ham-handed reminder of the fact that I wasn’t a VIP any more, but that expectation was thoroughly crushed.  Everywhere I turned there seemed to be a barrier to entry, and this was with just a few minutes of play!  I have to compare that to Lord of the Rings Online, where my existing characters were essentially untouched, and only had to deal with content walls once they’d leveled up enough.  Lord of the Rings didn’t strip anything away from my characters when they converted to free, it just demanded payment to access additional content down the line.  CoH on the other hand, seems determined to make my characters feel second rate while VIP players enjoy the “real” game.

It turns out that all the “premium” status on that free account means is that you get to keep most (but not all) of the things you’ve actually paid for in the past.  So if you bought an expansion, you get to keep access to it.  If you bought extra character slots, you get to keep them.  If you purchased costume packs, you get to keep those costumes.  Wow, I get to keep things I paid for!  What a deal!

I can only imagine how severely limiting it must feel to play as a new free player.  Almost all the additional systems in the game are blocked.  You can’t use the auction house, you can’t use inventions, you can’t access the Architect system, you can only use some of the archetypes and some of the powers, you can’t use a lot of the costume options, etc.  They’re not free players, they’re trial accounts.

If I was a new player and tried to play CoH, I’d quickly lose interest and stop.  I think that’s probably contributed to why the player population of CoH didn’t spike much with the release of Freedom.  Server populations seem roughly the same now as they did before.  I’m sure there’s been an uptick, but pretty small compared to the huge boost games like Lord of the Rings Online and DC Universe Online have seen.

The City of Heroes free to play conversion seems very similar to that of Champions Online.  To the best of my knowledge Champions hasn’t exactly boomed as a result of the conversion either, and maybe there’s a good reason for that – the Turbine method for converting a subscription game seems to work, the crippled-game-unless-you-pay-through-6000-paygates method does not.

At this point I don’t feel much desire to play CoH as a free game, it’s just annoying.  I also don’t feel much desire to subscribe with SWTOR just around the corner.  So I suppose I’ll play it just enough to get something out of the money I spent on my corrupter, and that will be that.  I think in the end, I wish it had simply stayed a regular subscription game instead of jerking me around with false free to play promises.

Languishing at 50

One thing I definitely have to admit about Star Wars: The Old Republic – their release date is going to be well timed for me.  In both of the games I’m currently playing (Rift and City of Heroes) I have max level characters, and in both games they’re sort of running out of things to do.  Or to be more accurate, they’re running out of things I’m interested in doing.

My City of Heroes tanker is sitting happy at level 50 with all five of the current incarnate slots unlocked, with a power slotted in each that’s been upgraded to at least tier 2 or 3 (of 4).  I have a little bit more I’d like to do with him, but otherwise he’s good until they release more endgame content, and that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon.  I have some alts that I like, but one of the odd downsides of the Incarnate system is that my level 50 has become very fun to play, so much so that when playing low level characters I find myself wishing I was playing my 50.  But my 50 doesn’t really have much to do, so my interest in playing City of Heroes any further is rapidly waning.

To be fair, it’s not really Paragon Studios’ fault, exactly.  I’m in the, perhaps unusual, demographic of people who want to see the endgame content and make some progress, but not repeat it endlessly to get all the best stuff.  So I’m a bit more invested than a true casual, but not as invested as a hardcore player.  There’s a literal crap-ton of stuff for level 50 Incarnates to unlock in CoH as each slot has multiple powers that can be earned (anywhere from 4 to 20ish) plus multiple levels of each power.  A completionist truly has their work cut out for them, but I’m not a completionist.  I have exactly one power unlocked for each Incarnate slot, and that’s good enough for me.

Rift is facing a similar problem, in that I have my level 50 rogue, and he’s seen all the dungeons, earned a few epic items, maxed out a crafting skill, done a crafting rift, done some daily raid rifts, etc.  Rift has more diversity of endgame content than WoW does, but I’m not interested in grinding content for shiny purple pixels.  I played it, it was fun, now what?  I still haven’t gotten to do the Chronicles instances as I haven’t been able to find a partner to do them with me, and I lack the skill/gear/uber build to do the 2-man instances solo with my rogue.

My primary alt is a level 28 cleric, and while I enjoy playing him, I don’t feel much incentive to keep playing.  My rogue already did the same content, and while the cleric plays very differently from a rogue, that alone isn’t enough to keep me going.  SWTOR claims to have a unique questline for every class from the start to the level cap.  If true, that’ll be a big deal for me, as new content will keep me coming back for more with alts.

The end result is that my time in CoH and Rift is winding down just in time for SWTOR to release next month.  I wouldn’t ask for anything different – that timing works great for me.

City of Heroes - Incarnation

Over the weekend I finally got to experience some of the Incarnate Trials – City of Heroes answer to endgame raiding.  It took a little bit of effort to get there, and for anyone else coming back for City of Heroes Freedom I’ll give you my hard-learned tip: don’t use the LFG tool.  It suspiciously looks like it’s intended to help you look for Trial groups, and maybe that was the developer’s intention.  The players have, as they so often do, subverted the original purpose into something else.  The LFG tool doesn’t help you find groups, it just teleports your existing group into the Trial.  So the way to find an Incarnate Trial group is to travel to the Rikti War Zone and spam in broadcast that you’re looking for a trial group.  Eventually you’ll get invited to a team that’s forming up to run trials.  So far, it’s been hassle free.  Nobody has said “OMG noob, you don’t have all purples and haven’t run this 1127 times before?!”  If you’re level 50 and capable of activating at least one of your powers, they’ll take you.  Why?  Because the more people who participate, the better the rewards are for EVERYONE.  Eventually, the League (a league is the CoH equivalent of a raid group, consisting of multiple “normal” groups) will be full, or close enough, and the leader will use the LFG tool to launch the selected trial.

I’ve now experienced three of the four Incarnate Trials – Behavioral Adjustment Facility, Lambda Sector, and The Underground.  I have been fortunate to mostly be teamed with experienced players who know what they’re doing and leaders who could keep things moving, knew the best way to do things, and had no problems with explaining things to helpless newbs.  That’s a good thing too, because unlike typical raid content in a lot of games where you can just keep battering at it until you win, Incarnate Trials can be failed, and once you fail it’s game over for that attempt.  The Behavioral Adjustment Facility (BAF, I won’t even tell you what that does to my DAoC honed acronym sense) and Lambda sector both fell fairly easily with strong groups and an experienced leader.  The Underground was much, much, harder, and the League I was with that time probably ended up wishing they had fewer players who could only activate one power.  We wiped on the second boss for over 20 minutes until time ran out and the trial failed.

Despite The Underground being a dismal failure, it ended up being one of the most productive trials I participated in and unlocked both my Judgement and Interface Incarnate slots.  That’s what the trials are for, earning “Incarnate” xp to unlock your special Incarnate slots, and collecting the special components needed to create the special abilities that you place in your Incarnate slots.  Incarnate Abilities are the only real method of progressing your character once you reach level 50, short of investing huge amounts of time into creating the best enhancements (gear) possible.  The bonuses provided by this alternate advancement are not insignificant either – a fully invested Incarnate level 50 is vastly more powerful than a fresh level 50, just like the difference between a new max level character in WoW and one that’s fully decked out in the most powerful raid gear available.  Well, maybe not quite that pronounced, but distinct, all the same.

Case in point, the Judgement slot.  The Judgement slot allows you to add a new superpower to your arsenal, an extreme damage area-of-effect attack with a long cooldown.  The “long” cooldown was considerably less than I expected, only 90 seconds.  The “extreme” damage though, no argument against that.  Every 90 seconds my Tank can now incinerate a lucky target and up to 23 of his friends with a blast that will one-shot minions, severely hurt lieutenants, and seriously dent bosses.  It’s a game changer.  All by itself it trivializes a lot of non-Incarnate content.  You know what though?  I think that’s great, that’s how it should be.  A level 50 has no real reason to do “normal” content, so why shouldn’t it be trivialized?  It’s relatively meaningless to the character after all.  Much like raiding, the main point of accruing Incarnate abilities is to make running the current trials easier, and the harder trials possible.

As to the trials themselves?  Well, as a melee character I can’t say they were a blast.  Interesting perhaps, rewarding definitely.  Fun?  Maybe.  The game ends up battling itself here, as melee characters have to be right up front with the hordes of enemies, but that requirement means you can see very little aside from a wall of mobs and players surrounded by constantly flashing special effects, and you can’t move freely since City of Heroes uses collision detection.  I think they’d be more fun as a ranged class where you can see what you’re doing.  However, I did enjoy the content, appreciated the rewards, and intend to do more when time allows.

The biggest issue at this point is they need to release more trials.  There are only four so far, of which one at least is very hard (The Underground).  It takes multiple runs of the trials to unlock each Incarnate ability slot (I have now unlocked 3 of the 5 currently released) and get the materials for a basic ability, plus many, many more runs to upgrade those slots with more advanced versions of the abilities.  Four trials do not provide enough variety.  I’m sure they’ll release more, presumably when they release new slots for unlocking, but the sooner the better.  I sincerely hope they don’t limit the Incarnate content by making it paid.  The last thing you want to do is limit the players available to participate in content that demands large groups.

Still, my overall feeling is that it’s not a bad endgame.  Is it great?  No.  Is it too grindy?  Yes.  Is it a model other games should aspire to?  Well, maybe.  It’s certainly accessible.  I couldn’t (currently) hop into WoW and hope to raid with the ease I can in CoH.  It’s not something I’d want to do every day for six months though.  Rather it feels like a nice way to top off a character and go “now I’m done”, far more so than simply going from level 49 to 50.

  

City of Heroes . . . wait, what?!

Didn’t I quit that game?  Forever?  Wasn’t I all “been there, done that, pfft, whatever”?  Said my goodbyes and everything?  Yeah, I remember that too.  I also mentioned something about it taking a major revamp of the game for me to bother ever looking at it again.

So, City of Heroes: Freedom.  A major revamp of the game.  Conversion to a F2P model.  Reworking of low level content and power accrual.  More stuff to do at max level.  New shinies. 

S@#$!!

I may not be interested in subscribing to CoH ever again . . . but for free?  I have all those characters . . . all that history.  And, you know, free.  Like any good American I can’t resist a bargain, and “free” is the best price you can find on anything, ever.

So of course I re-subbed for one month of VIP access, which I will let lapse and try the F2P version when F2P is turned on.  Currently the CoH:Freedom content is on the live servers, but F2P access hasn’t been turned on yet.  There are some significant perks for VIP players during the “head start” period, such as discounts on items in the store (and VIPs earn points every month they’re subscribed), one of which was 90% off a 6-pack of server transfers.

Despite my ennui when I tried Going Rogue (I’ve still never gotten a character all the way through Praetoria) and my inability to even log in during “free” weekends, CoH:Freedom has done something I didn’t think was possible—it’s made CoH fun again.  The low level game in CoH is the best it’s ever been, and I love making alts.  I have dozens.  Making those alts fun to play instead of a tedious chore of leveling to “the good part” is huge for me.  Granted my view is a little skewed because any new characters I make come into play with a slew of veteran perks, but still.

Travel powers are now possible at level 4 and have no pre-requisite, and getting to level 4 hardly takes any time at all.  No more low level trudging around the city.  This is how it should have always been (and indeed, in beta you could get your first travel power at level 6) and I can’t believe it’s taken them this long to make the change.  There are also several purchasable powers from the store that aren’t as good as the “true” travel powers, but are quite serviceable and don’t cost you a power choice.  They unlock for every character on your account, so buy one and never worry about travel powers again if you like.

They also added a few new powersets, which combined with the continued proliferation of powersets between Archetypes means that your Archetype choice is really about playstyle, and not access to a particular flavor of power.  Once upon a time if you wanted to sheath yourself in fire and slash things with a flame sword you had no choice but to be a Tanker.  Now you can do that multiple ways, and can choose the playstyle you want to go along with it.  Power proliferation has been going on for years, but I think it’s reached the point now where almost everything that makes sense is available to each Archetype.

You can now make any of the 10 core Archetypes (Tanker, Defender, Blaster, Scrapper, Controller, Brute, Stalker, Mastermind, Dominator, Corrupter) as either a Hero or a Villain, right from the start.  If you want to play a heroic Corrupter, you just do it.  You don’t have to level to 20 in Praetoria.  You don’t have to start on one side and use the morale system to switch sides.  You can still do both those things if you want to, but you no longer HAVE to.  I’m always in favor of having choices.  Limiting player choice limits player fun.

Galaxy City as a starting zone no longer exists.  All new characters go through a new tutorial that is short, to the point, and much better than the tedious slog of the original tutorial.  During the tutorial you choose if you want to be a Hero or Villain, and get dumped into the starting zone for the appropriate side.  For Heroes, that means good old Atlas Park . . . except this isn’t the Atlas Park veterans will remember.  Instead of going to an Origin specific contact who gives you origin specific missions against a particular enemy group (all science origins used to fight Vahzilok, etc.) you get sent to a new contact who gives you story based missions that incorporate the mission mechanics added with Going Rogue, and have you doing more than just going into an instance and clearing mobs until you’re done.  It’s hardly revolutionary, but it’s well done, and keeps things moving well for the first few levels.  You unlock more missions in the new arc every 5 levels (I presume, I unlocked the next set at level 10).

I made a heroic Corrupter with the new Beam Rifle and Time Manipulation powersets, and have really been enjoying the game.  Much to my surprise.  Beam Rifle is the ranged powerset I’ve always wanted.  Energy Blast should have been it, but the mix of smashing/energy damage, the bubbly graphics, and the irritating sound effects kept me away.  Beam Rifle is, well, energy damage done right.  I wish it wasn’t a weapon power, but otherwise it feels right and satisfying.  Time Manipulation isn’t as fun as I’d hoped, but it’s still interesting.  Both powersets have internal synergy.  Beam Rifle has Disintegrate, which places a damage-over-time effect on the target.  Other Beam Rifle powers have additional effects when hitting targets affected by Disintegrate, and can also spread Disintegrate to additional targets.  Time Manipulation debuffs can cause other Time Manipulation debuffs to work better if the target has both on them at the same time, a synergistic stacking effect.  These sorts of synergies make the powersets much more interesting than the simpler powersets that shipped with the original game.

We’ll see how long the game can hold my interest, but it’ll be F2P shortly, which kind of takes the pressure off.  If I get bored I wander off for a while and lose nothing.  I think the F2P conversion has the potential to really increase the content that gets added to the game, especially when it comes to hard to design things like powersets.  They rarely added powersets in the quarterly updates because of the development time involved.  If they can sell new powersets on the market for $8 each though, that gives a clear return on that development time.  We’ll see.  Maybe they’ll finally be able to work on more epic Archetypes too.  I’d gladly pay for that.

Overall, I’d say City of Heroes is in the best shape it’s ever been, and I’ve been following the game since early Beta.  Many games can’t really claim to be more fun than they were at launch *coughWoWcough* but I think City of Heroes can.  Hats off to Paragon Studios for doing a good job, and really giving the impression of working hard to balance player desires with the company’s need to make money.  After all, in the long run, the best way to make money is to make your customers happy to spend it.  Just, no $25 sparkle ponies, please?

City of Heroes - Goodnight Sweet Prince

I've been a fan of City of Heroes for a very long time.  I was amongst the first people to sign up on the official forums, and got into wave 2 of the closed beta.  I posted on the beta forums frequently (for me) and often argued with the notorious Macallen.  I even wrote an article for a community I was part of back then, Gamers with Jobs, under the handle Paladin.  I was about as big a fanboy for City of Heroes as I've ever been for any game.

I subscribed to the game for a very long time too.  I have nearly 4 years worth of veteran rewards, which is far longer than I've subscribed to any other MMO.  The next closest contender is WoW at just shy of 3 years, and after that are probably EQ and DAoC at a little under 2 each.  I'm a bit of an MMO nomad, but I'd always come back to City of Heroes to check out new updates that sounded interesting.  This is not to say I think it's the best MMO out there.  It's not.  But I loved the freedom of the character creator and had dozens of alts.  I loved the ability to mix and match powersets, and was always on the hunt for the "ultimate" combination (never found one, a pox on balance!).  It was also a nice change from all the fantasy stuff out there, which to this day I am really quite tired of.  Give me some more genres, please!

Magma Force, signing off

City of Heroes is currently doing a free activation week, where any past subscribers in good standing can log in and play.  They had a major update not that long ago, so there's bound to be new stuff to see but . . . I found I have no desire to play the game at all.  Apparently, I am finally "done" with City of Heroes.

Is it me, or is it the game?  I think it's a little of both.  The most damning issue is that City of Heroes has failed to substantially evolve with the times.  Fundamental gameplay is exactly the same now as it was in 2004.  If I log in, I know exactly what I'll be doing -- running door missions.  Over and over and over.  They've added new ways to do door missions over the years, but they're still door missions.  The player created content was a great idea, but in the end, still door missions.  The new missions they added in the Going Rogue expansion were a step up, but they only existed in the level 1-20 game.  The structure of the Going Rogue expansion itself was a problem, as the segregation of expansion 1-20 characters from the rest of the game was so limiting that after an initial rush people stopped going there.  The game is best played in groups, so soloing through Going Rogue content wasn't much fun.

So, sorry City of Heroes, I think I'm finally done.  I don't have any regrets, it was great, and I'll always remember you fondly, but I doubt we'll meet again.