Jack 'Jack Emmert is definitely qualified to speak about iterative game design, as the City of Heroes design process featured no small number of clinkers that were identified as such by the player base, despite looking good at the design stage. Jack's self-deprecatingly frank about his early mistakes, and explains how he's learned from them: 'We assumed a player would get the mission, go into the instance, realize that he was facing a "boss," leave the mission, find a friend, and then tackle the "boss" together. I was pretty darn naïve back then.' Jack's willingness to engage with the player base had the unfortunate secondary effect of giving dissatisfied players an articulate target for their frustration. Even now, Jack is still remembered in some quarters as a sort of uber-bogeyman armed with a colossal nerf bat.
The primary reason for this demonization is unquestionably E.D., the infamous Enhancement Diversification change. This meant that powers could no longer be boosted to extreme levels in one attribute - for example, you could no longer effectively use all of an energy blast's enhancement slots to boost damage, as there would be a greatly diminished return. Despite being an arguably necessary step in the creation of balanced new challenges for the players, E.D. proved a bitter pill, and the game lost subscribers over it. Again, Jack's frank about this, explaining that CoX 'lost a couple thousand people' over it.
With the clean slate of Champions Online before him (and CoX entering a renaissance under the direction of Matt 'Positron' Miller), Jack's now in a position to design a completely new system from the ground up. We're keen to see how his prior experience informs his new design decisions.
