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A Mild-Mannered Reporter: How City of Heroes almost died
If it hasn't become clear over the past two and a half years, I really enjoy speculation. I like crazy theories, I like exploring possibilities, I like thought exercises, and so forth. There's some speculation that I find particularly ill-informed or lacking in some fundamental point of logic, but that doesn't mean I don't learn about them first. Why am I making a point out of this? Because I've developed a theory about the state of City of Heroes, and I want to make it clear before I launch into this somewhat grim theory that I'm basing this entirely on outside observations. I want it to be clear that I could, in fact, be totally wrong, and when I say that City of Heroes nearly committed unintentional suicide a couple of years ago, I don't want that to be seen as some grand behind-the-scenes revelation. And if it weren't obvious from that line, yes, that's where I'm going. I think Going Rogue nearly gutted City of Heroes and burned the whole game to the ground. And I think everything the game has done since can be directly traced back to that expansion.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Choose your side or don't
Do you remember Going Rogue? Of course you do, even if it's had some of its thunder retroactively stolen by City of Heroes Freedom. And of course you remember that one of its big selling points -- its only selling point at launch for existing characters, arguably -- was that you could swap between the alignments of the game. Villains could become Heroes, go back to being Villains, hang out as a Rogue for a while, and so on. It seemed like the sort of thing that would be a real game changer. Well, it's been more than a year since we first started seeing the groups swap sides, and surprisingly enough -- or not -- the much bigger change was in the business model alteration and the ensuing changes to the game environment. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but it brings to mind a question: Has there really been any long-term effect of the alignment system? If you aren't roleplaying the swap, does being one faction or the other even matter in the long run?
