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A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Places to go, questions to answer
It's hard to believe that in just two weeks, all of the debates about whether or not Going Rogue will revitalize City of Heroes will be out of the land of theory and into the realm of practice. And while we've still got another week in the land of theory, right now we're taking a trip... well, still into the land of theory, but into the land of theories you asked for. Which is different, in a way! I have a hard time writing these introductions. Haggs asked: "...now that you're getting new lower-level content, why would you want to go through it as fast as you're going through the old content?" It's not always a question of "want." Levels 1-20 in City of Heroes are not nearly as slow as the later levels -- they don't start to really feel long until you reach the 30s, but it's much faster to go from 1-20 than from 20-30 even if you're just playing casually. The flow of leveling appears to be tuned so that players will be able to hit a level of moderate competence fairly quickly, spend a bit of time fleshing out their powers, and then spend quite some time filing off any rough edges via the 40+ powers.
Breakfast Topic: How much of your played time is really played?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. If you have been around WoW for a while, you probably have gotten the urge to type in the dreaded /played command. For any who still don't know, that command will show you the amount of time you have played on that particular character. For a player like me who has been around since launch, that number can be significant. But it did get me to thinking, how much of that time was actually spent playing? Scenario: It is a Tuesday night (last Tuesday, as a matter of fact). My guild is off for the night, since we don't raid on Tuesdays. After a nice dinner and a bit of quality time with the wife, I make my way down to the man-cave to log in and see what's doing. I recently leveled jewelcrafting, so I am collecting the daily tokens for the cuts my main will need. That is reason enough to bring me online on non-raid nights. While I am there, I pick up the fishing and cooking daily. Since both are in Dalaran (love me some Disarmed! and Cheese for Glowergold), I grab them as well. A few conversations with guildies, three daily quests, one Flame Leviathan weekly run and a few TV sitcoms later, I look up and see it is bed time. I have been logged in for somewhere between two to three hours, and all I have really accomplished are a couple of dailies. My biggest victory of the night was convincing a guild mate that Treme, while not as good as The Wire, is still worth catching if she has On Demand. Hardly what even the most casual player would consider dedicated playtime. Still, it all goes against the total.
Community backlash leads to Global Agenda review score being pulled
GameSpot was not so nice to Global Agenda -- a 5.5 out of 10 was fired against the game earlier by the gaming website. However, that didn't stop the Global Agenda community from doing some digging and turning up the reviewer's in-game character. A character that only had six hours of play time attached to it, no alliance, and no agency for conquest matches. The resulting evidence was provided by Global Agenda's player statistics system -- a pretty robust system that allows anyone to pull up a character's statistics simply by typing in their character name. Once this evidence came to light, the community began to send e-mails to both the reviewer and GameSpot's Justin Calvert, who has since removed the review. Calvert has apologized (post confirmed by Hi-Rez Studio's Michal Adam) to the Global Agenda community and Hi-Rez Studios, and has reassigned the review to a new writer. GameSpot's internal policy is to spend 30 hours on an MMO before publishing a review. [Thanks to Antilogic for the tip!]
How much do guilds matter?
Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya runs down some interesting and illuminating statistics about players and guilds, and just how they fit in to the macrocosm of MMOs. A long time ago, in a fantasy world far far away, I wrangled guilds as part of my job. At first, I wrangled them because it was terribly efficient for one person struggling with a beta. Why deal with thousands of individuals when I could deal with fifty, and put them in charge of their own groups? Guild leaders will always be more informed, more tuned in, and better suited to herding their own cats than a studio representative could ever be.But what started as expediency turned in to more.As a community weenie, I had my dearly beloved "frequent flyers" – people who sent in feedback, usually through email no matter how many systems I built for them to use, with a regularity previously reserved for clocks, robots, and dripping faucets. If it was 3 PM on a Thursday, it was time to get mail from him, him, her, and what I was pretty sure was a him but hadn't ever asked.
