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.
Now, there are certainly players who are going to rush through the levels at breakneck speed, batten the hatches and go for the gusto. But even taking time to hang back and sniff the metaphorical roses, you can find yourself flying through lower levels much faster than you intend to. So either the levels are going to be vastly slowed down for the purposes of the expansion, or veterans are going to find themselves past Praetoria very quickly.
Do I have a problem with this? Not precisely. I think it's a more than fair shot at gussying up the low-level game, which is what players first see coming in -- and it's currently the ugliest part of the whole game, so more power to them. It does mean that if you roll a new character and expect to be awash in new content, you might be a bit disappointed. We don't yet know how robust the tip missions will be, but Praetoria will only last so long, no matter how you try to keep it running.Dashel asked:
"I'll get the 72-month veteran reward next month. There are no vet rewards listed after that one. Will the program continue?"
Yes, but I'd be willing to wager we won't see any more major additions to the game that way. The way the current reward tiers work is pretty well-developed: every three months, there's another little prize to inspire you to keep subscribing. I mean, you might be on a low pulse for the game, but with three more months you'll get a nice new costume set. Said rewards start to drop off a bit after the 36-month mark, though, and for good cause.
Astute mathematicians (or those who passed basic elementary math) will realize that 36 months out means a new subscriber needs to stick with the game for three straight years. That's a bit of a stretch, especially compared to the trenchcoat carrot on a three-month stick. While I'm no Jamie Madigan, I'd be willing to bet that the urge to stay subscribed goes up with reachable goals, and yet it goes down as the goals become more and more unattainable.
People like feeling the game is complete, that they have a full suite of options available to them at all times. This is the same basis that makes people cranky about microtransaction costume sets, since it feels like you've only got part of the game until you drop another batch of cash. If you feel like you can't get full access to the game unless you play for an insanely long stretch of time... well, you can fill in the remainder of that sentence.
Expect more free respecs and little additions, but don't expect anything major. And congratulations on six years -- I'm at 39 months, myself.
Superfan asked:
"Are the devs planning to revamp other task forces like they did with Positron?"
It's not a question of "if" but "when."
One of the interesting parts of sitting down and talking with Melissa Bianco during PAX East (way back in the day) was discovering that out of the game's problems, the developers are aware of pretty much every one. What keeps them from focusing on all of those issues is the sheer magnitude of several problems, much of which isn't evident from the player side.
Take power customization, for example. Players were of the mind the whole time that it couldn't be that difficult to just add a tint to the flames shooting out of your hands -- even when the developers spent several threads explaining at length that no, it would require a pretty big rewrite of the game's basic code. (I'll admit to not being much of a programmer myself, but I know it had something to do with a reasonable shortcut that made sense in development but stymied customization down the road.) When it finally was released, the players were very happy with --Oh, wait. No, they weren't. People were very unhappy with the fact that Issue 16 was nothing except for changing the color of your flames. It was a lot of work behind the scenes, requiring what amounted to a gigantic rewrite of the game's code to get it working almost identically to before. Or put in architectural terms, they had to tear down most of the building, rebuild it with a better set of supports, and put it back together without any external evidence.
Almost everything that players want overhauled in system terms requires this amount of work. Task forces are less of an issue, but still require a huge amount of work to gussy up content that several players might consider nothing but a remake and be unhappy about. At least new content is a universally visible sign of what the team is working on.
So, yes, there are plans to revise many of the old task forces. But they have to balance that with a lot of other tasks, and it's hard to be sure where that's going to end up on the priority list.
Those are our questions for this week. Next week, it's time to take a nose dive into the big question that faction switching calls to mind -- and I promise, it has nothing to do with morality. (I've done my dance with that.) Comments, questions, and enraged responses to that last link may be left in comments, or mailed along to eliot@massively.com.
