Salami Slicing the Group?

A salami slicing exploit is a computer crime technique premised on stealing lots of little bits of value (e.g. rounding down in financial transactions) that is hard to detect. Clay Shirkey once argued this to be a false analogy when used to justify micropayment systems (September 2003, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content). Those "salami slices" don't turn out to be as thin as they would first appear. His argument revolved around

what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price.

For example, Clay suggested, that the mental transaction costs may actually rise as the cost of each slice of salami decreases, e.g.:

It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper... Would you pay 25 cents to view a VR panorama of the Matterhorn? Are Powerpoint slides on "Ten reasons why now is a great time to start a company?" worth a dime? (and if so, would each individual reason be worth a penny?)

The specific aim of Clay's essay is mostly off-topic here. It was directed at a specific system (BitPass) and hence became easily controversial. However, the core argument feels relevant: slice things too narrowly and people begin to ponder the thickness of those slices and it gets in the way.

Skip forward to this year: City of Heroes (CoH) appears to be on adrenalin, e.g. nearing (if not surpassing) 200k subscribers in a few short months. CoH feels like an important milestone in a trend in the MMORPG space towards "lighter play" directed towards casual gamers. E.g. it features a streamlined design that can get players quickly into teams and doing "short and sharp" missions: quick fun sandwiched between the kids and Jay Leno.

On the one hand, this view of casual play empowers the individual to be able to more finely control their time involvement. Yet perhaps streamlining play come at the expense of the group. By whittling away at those inefficient but social transactions (travel somewhere, advertise, getting organized, managing loot distribution/negotiation, "OMG! you can't leave now, we just got here!", etc) are we salami slicing socialization from the team? How much is a social gesture worth - and will its absence impact the group experience in ways far greater than its tiny moment?

Comments

[Tobold]

1.

I am member of a multi-games guild, The Echelon, and played several MMORPG with them. And none of those games made playing with my friends so easy as City of Heroes does. So CoH definitely feels MORE social to me, not less.

In other games the situation often was: You log on, ask in the guild channel if there are any groups, and then find out why you can't join. The group is of a different level than you are, they only have room for a healer and not a tank, they are more than 1 hour of travel away from you. In City of Heroes, travel never takes more than 10 minutes; group makeup doesn't matter all that much and you can add any class; and if you are of the wrong level, you can be sidekicked.

Yes, pickup groups in CoH tend to be a shorter common experience than in other games, people come and leave. But that just means you meet more different people. "Travel somewhere, advertise, getting organized, managing loot distribution/negotiation" still exists, it just doesn't take hours any more.

By making grouping easier, a larger part of the playtime of the average CoH player is spent in a group. Compared to a game like Final Fantasy XI, where grouping is highly complicated, CoH adds to the social experience of online games.

[Alan Stern]

2.

I strongly agree with Tobold. Back when I was playing DAOC, grouping was the most frustrating aspect of trying to level. A lot of it was in finding a group or finding a "good" group (i.e. one that wouldn't get me killed, thus costing me exp). Some of the annoyance was in joining a partially-formed group that needed a certain class to proceed (e.g. healer, mana-regen, tank, etc.). Then, once you had a group, if you went hunting for the tough mobs, the ones that would help you level from 40 to 50, and the group died, chances were slim that there would be a rezzer around to save y'all. And as mentioned above, g-d forbid a key player should want to leave the group and no replacement was lined up. No, any game that reduces this hassle and makes it easier for groups to form and prosper is alright in my book.

Perhaps by "shaving the surfaces and edges" CoH has merely taken a ponderous experience and, in fact, streamlined it into an easier, more pleasurable facet of the game. I would say the shavings are well worth the apparent "cost." Is there some way that other MMORPGs can learn from this example and use an improved grouping design to achieve similar results?

[XP]

3.

I'm wondering at your definition of socialization. How is downtime for travel a social activity for example ?

You also seem to imply that streamlining gameplay to minimize frustrations, time loss and conflicts has a negative impact on socialization.

Are you truely meaning that ? Or are you in fact regretting the lack of the usual boredom = merit equation ?

For my part, I think a game has to be fun and a game foremost. The Virtual World tag is too often an excuse for annoying game mechanics.

[Nathan Combs]

4.

I'm wondering at your definition of socialization. How is downtime for travel a social activity for example ?

A broad brush. I meant it in terms of its "social contract" implications. Travel may not be socialization per se. However, that your team traveled 3/4 hour to assemble somewhere seems to impact a team's churn rate.

Churn may not be bad (perhaps leads to better gameplay, ala the "lite" time commitment), but to my view it alters the social dynamics of the group with its own impact on the player experience.

[weasel]

5.

There was a similar discussion over at Graffe.com recently. In a nutshell, World of Warcraft also has a more casual level of accessibility, and some people were waxing philosophic about the potential impacts on socialization.

There are a couple posts by 'Draxyn' on page 3 that sum up my thoughts fairly well.

All the downtime in an EQ-style design doesn't increase community. It makes being part of the community a requirement, thereby removing everyone from the game that isn't in the community. A game like CoH looks like it has less community, because it can appeal to people who just want to play the game, and don't feel like being forced into a virtual community.

Game-like worlds are games first and foremost. The community is portable, and the potential 'value' that socializing during downtime might add is lost the moment that downtime gets in the way of the game.

[XP]

6.

In my experience, travelin 3/4 of an hour means that if something goes wrong, the team dissolves and you've lost your evening. Same goes when one critical member has to log. Of course, people are often angry or disheartened afterwards.

It also means what weasel points out : You get a "social contract" indeed : You have to give up large continuous chunks of your time to play past a point. And yes, you owe that to the other members of the group, since they also have to sacrifice much of their time.

Is that what you seem to regret ? And why ?

[Mark Asher]

7.

CoH is kind of odd in that there's not much chatting going on. EQ may have been frustrating, but when you're sitting down for 90 seconds to med it's very easy to chat -- there's nothing else to do, really!

I think the core of CoH is very well done (though the game is thin on content), but it is missing some of the socialization that goes on in other MMOs. I have no idea if this will hurt it in the long run.

I think hardcore MMO players no longer treat new MMOs as games in which to establish long-term communities. A lot of the communities are already established and are portable via guilds moving from game to game.

[Andres Ferraro (ex: DivineShadow)]

8.

Nathan,

The salami slicing problem is very real - part of the reason micropayment systems are not popular. But a common part of their problem is that you pay a directly-proportional cost for an ever decreasing slice of the whole - In the end you pay the same in terms of monetary cost (The newspaper still cost you $0.50), but pay more in terms of mental energy (you had to think about it before reading each article).

In this case I don't see *more* slices (elements that need to be stacked to make the "Salami of Friendship") as it seems to be implied, all I see is a lower price per slice, and without in-depth knowledge of COH I'll say there are the same amount of slices where there may likely be less, but doubtfully more. To a gamer, measuring the productive output (fun) of their time/energy input is very straightforward when they can stack the salami in no time and consume it quickly... Instant gratification and a much more digestible salami.

[Hellinar]

9.

Weasel> Game-like worlds are games first and foremost.

For me, the game the world supports is a rather minor interest. Given the high costs of producing online worlds, it currently does need to support a engaging game to succeed. But I am more interested in an Adventure world, rather than a game world. And for me Adventure needs some sense of travel. It ties back to the Hero's Journey so often mentioned in these pages. The Hero logging in for ten minutes to take down the Minoator is very different experience from the Hero after a long journey inching through the Maze, paying out thread, to finally meet and slay the Minoator. CoH deserves success for providing a easily accessible, fun experience. But its relationship to Adventure is rather like the difference between flying into a desert resort, and hitchhiking across the Sahara. One is pure entertainment. The other is more of an Adventure, and includes an element of struggle.

In that context, shaving off the rough edges does lose something. One apparently minor diversion in the journey can be what really stands out in long term memory. But then, I’m someone who now and then buys nuts in the shell. A nut you have had to work at extracting is somehow more tasty. Judging by the sales of pre-shelled nuts though, CoH should continue to do very well.

[weasel]

10.

Hellinar>But its relationship to Adventure is rather like the difference between flying into a desert resort, and hitchhiking across the Sahara. One is pure entertainment. The other is more of an Adventure, and includes an element of struggle.

CoH may not have an adventurous 'feel', but that's not mutually exclusive of accessible design. In general, the things CoH has left out: steep death penalties, required organizational downtime, camping, group/guild requirements -- these are wholly unnecessary barriers to the Adventure as well as the fun.

Forced downtime, sitting still between doing interesting things, does not imo represent desirable 'struggle' in the dramatic sense.

How does forced downtime serve the adventure?

Travel in particular is one bit of downtime that, imo, is worthwhile to keep; mainly because it is largely an optional downtime, and serves an important purpose.

There's nothing about accessible design that says you can't choose to make the minotaur 'adventure' take 90 minutes of play. What accessible design recommends, is that a would-be hero should have a reasonable expectation of actually doing that adventure in 90 minutes. They should not have to wait 20 minutes (or longer based on playtime) for a group. They should not have to pick and choose through groupmates for 'required' skill sets. Downtime experienced during the Journey should be in-context.

The designers of CoH may have opted to not make discrete adventures any longer than the bite-sized -- but adding ponderous quantities of sitting around wouldn't make what they do have any more Adventurous.

[Tobold]

11.

Note that IF you want to do a Hero's Journey in CoH, you can always do a task force. Those are deliberately designed to take several hours with the same group, and no new members can be added after starting.

I'm siding with Weasel here, in that I find the game aspect more important than the world aspect. Because if I was more interested in the world part, I could always go back to this one.

I do not really see the attraction of a game adding unnecessary downtime, just to force people to chat with each other. If they WANT to chat, nobody is stopping them. And I'm all for games having better chat channels, the kind that is independant of your group, guild, or location, but can be freely set up by subject. That way you can have social interaction between experienced players and new players in the "newbie questions" channel. Otherwise it is likely that they never group, due to level differences, and the new players are left feeling a bit left alone in a game with a steep lerning curve.

[XP]

12.

I agree with you on broad terms but not in the particulars. That MMOs lack an adventure and journey feeling, I definitely agree.

There's no sense of flow or closure for one. An adventure has a flow from challenging event to challenging event, each with its own closure and building to a climax.

But equating downtime with challenge, like MMOs do, I disagree with.
It boils down to saying you're heroic because you struggle with boredom and frustration. You struggle with the artificial limitations of the system and their impact on RL, not in-game.

[Mark Asher]

13.

"The designers of CoH may have opted to not make discrete adventures any longer than the bite-sized -- but adding ponderous quantities of sitting around wouldn't make what they do have any more Adventurous."

I agree, but that still doesn't mean that the absence of chat isn't a potential problem. In CoH players don't chat nearly as much, and if chatting is one of the sticky elements in these games, then CoH doesn't have it. I've played in groups where players don't say anything for long stretches of time.

I did find it relatively easy to group in CoH, but it was a strangely unsocial experience. Just being in a group inside a game can be just as unsocial as sitting on a crowded bus amid strangers if you don't make an effort to chat. CoH makes it hard to socialize because it's go go go all the time.

[Andres Ferraro (ex: DivineShadow)]

14.

"CoH makes it hard to socialize because it's go go go all the time."

Would you say the amount of interaction required to participate in a group in CoH is at the level where an AI could pass for a live player?

[Nathan Combs]

15.

In that context, shaving off the rough edges does lose something.

Yes, but to echo Andres: is it "salami slicing"?

The case for "salami-slicing" (beyond mere streamlining) would seem to (loosely speaking) hinge on whether the lost bits (1.) have a disproportionate impact (in some sense), and (2.) whether those impacts remain large for diminishing gains ("smaller slices").

Changes in the game-play that impact the social bonding of groups seem ripe. Given the dynamics of groups -remove a few of the social lubricants, even modest ones (e.g. "loot order" discussions ;-), and group norms may change radically, so goes the salami-sandwich theory.

[Mark Asher]

16.

Would you say the amount of interaction required to participate in a group in CoH is at the level where an AI could pass for a live player?

I think you could fake a live player. Players can already target another player's foe by clicking on that player, and attacks are automatically directed at the foe then. There's a follow command that would aid movement. It boils down more to archetypes. A good controller would be hard to fake but a good tank probably would be easier to fake.

Players would figure it out soon enough, but I think they could be fooled for a fight or two at least.

[Bruce Boston]

17.

weasel> Forced downtime, sitting still between doing interesting things, does not imo represent desirable 'struggle' in the dramatic sense.

Not to mention, that this sometimes has the opposite effect, in that it encourages ppl to leave the game for this period. People are often doing this time AFK, or watching TV, or searching other websites while they are waiting for the boat to arrive.

weasel> The designers of CoH may have opted to not make discrete adventures any longer than the bite-sized -- but adding ponderous quantities of sitting around wouldn't make what they do have any more Adventurous.

A task force mission can takes a minimum of 3-4 hours to do, and the whole goal is to get the chance to kill an Arch-villain, or high level monster. They even allow players to log-off and log back in or do a mission over a series of days. My guess is that we will see a number of missions that take much longer, up to several weeks in some cases. The key difference is that I think they have taken the player/player, player/environment friction out by making these instanced missions. It's now all about hero/villain friction which helps to really focus the play.

So, I'm not so sure they are dumbing it all down, but rather just aligning a larger part of the product with a larger market.

-bruce

[Tobold]

18.

City of Heroes is very interesting in that it is very much about the question of what traditional features you can slice off a MMORPG, without it becoming something else. Not just groups, but also things like an inventory, or "phat l00t". It reminds me very much of the old question of whether Diablo is a RPG or not, and I don't think that one has ever been answered.

What if City of Heroes did not plan to have the sort of social interaction leading to it being "sticky"? Monthly fees are not the only possible way to finance a MMORPG. Sell 200,000 copies at $50 each, and you get $10m, which should pay your development cost. If every player just stays for 3 months, thats another $10m. Maybe players of CoH crash and burn through the game a lot faster than players of EQ, but would NCSoft really care? Two players, each playing for 3 months end up bringing more profit than one player staying for 6 months. And next year you sell them the City of Villains expansion.

There is a lot more choice in the MMORPG market now than it was 5 years ago. It is only natural that people stay less long in each individual game. Everybody knows that EQ2 and WoW will come out this year, and will cause huge player migrations. Under that circumstances, a game that is instant fun, like CoH, might be the better business plan. If you are just interested in the theoretical aspects of virtual worlds, that is a loss. But both financially and in terms of "game", CoH is a winner.

[Mark Asher]

19.

What if City of Heroes did not plan to have the sort of social interaction leading to it being "sticky"?

That's an interesting premise. I think if that's the case with CoH, it wasn't intended. If they wanted a fast-playing game they would have made the leveling faster. It's got a steep leveling curve and the death penalty can get rather harsh. Everything about the level curve suggests that the game is designed to take the players months to hit the level cap and that goal is supposed to drive retention. Leveling up is really main bulk of the content in the game. There isn't much else.

[magicback]

20.

Nathan Combs> Yes, but to echo Andres: is it "salami slicing"?

I argue that it is a better and leaner salami. CoH is based on social-bonding via fun instead of social-bonding via pain.

Impressions and memories saved will be about "how we beat that villain" and then recall who comprised of "we" later. Current games give me the experience of a band-of-brother struggle through MMO-hell to get at the fun content and then to get a "I survive MMO-hell" during a fan faire.

Bruce Boston> A task force mission can takes a minimum of 3-4 hours to do, and the whole goal is to get the chance to kill an Arch-villain, or high level monster.

Directing this at everyone: If CoH creates a super-taskforce mission that requires 10-15 sessions of 3-4 hours each as their solution to their perceived lack-of-depth problem, would it be a greater challenge or a longer grind? Also, given the gameplay, if the game was a standalone single-player game with the computer controlling your teammates, would the game be different?

I am using these two questions to help me analyze CoH's gameplay. I don't have a firm answer yet.

On another note: is online worlds like SL and There so MMORPG-lite that they left out the RPG? Oh, wait.... are current MMORPG truely RPGs?

[Andres Ferraro (ex: DivineShadow)]

21.

"I argue that it is a better and leaner salami. CoH is based on social-bonding via fun instead of social-bonding via pain.
Impressions and memories saved will be about "how we beat that villain" and then recall who comprised of "we" later"

Agreed. The whole 'bonding in misery' as I've called it might create tighter bonds than the 'bonding in bonanza'. And that is good from a game/community perspective. But as a player standing on the edge of the mataverse, with the power of a credit card in hand to teleport you to the universe you select, what is your choice? It begs the question: Is masochism mainstream?

[Mark Asher]

22.

Directing this at everyone: If CoH creates a super-taskforce mission that requires 10-15 sessions of 3-4 hours each as their solution to their perceived lack-of-depth problem, would it be a greater challenge or a longer grind? Also, given the gameplay, if the game was a standalone single-player game with the computer controlling your teammates, would the game be different?

I'll sidestep the question a bit and say that any quest or mission that requires the players to be together for 3-4 hours is a bit problematic. EQ pulls it off with it's strong guild structure, but even then it's content limited to players in active guilds.

Extending the 3-4 hour sessions over more than one night is just about unworkable unless you're all in a very active guild.

[Luca Girardo]

23.

Extending the 3-4 hour sessions over more than one night is just about unworkable unless you're all in a very active guild

--------------------%<-------------------------

I was wondering what is the ideal length for a online game session (may it be a mission, an event or what else). As the user is required to be onoine and active during the game session (and assuming also multiple participants), what is the best length?
It is necessary to keep a narrative tension during the whole session so like in a movie (ok dynamic or static missions are still far away from such an immersive narration) you have to fuel the interest of participant. And I doubt you can do it for more then 2 hours (normal 1-2 hours, extreme 3 hours).

[magicback]

24.

I vote for 90min as optimal session period. AFK to go to the loo breaks immersion :)

[Alan Stern]

25.

I agree, around 90-120 min. is the ideal session length. After that, I start noticing time passing, I get hungry/thirsty/antsy and have to use the facilities (e.g. "the loo").

One thing to remember is that all quests are based off of an investment/reward consideration by the players. If the investment in fulfilling the mission or quest is worth the reward received for completion, then most players will probably undertake the mission. This can exclusively entice players into longer session times and greater investment in the game.

In DAOC, I participated in high level groups and played for much longer than I normally would have (we're talking entire days on the weekends) because the group was hard to get into, was killing the right mobs and I was earning tons of exp. I undertook difficult quests or dungeon crawls that took the group(s) a few hours (say 3-5) to complete. The rewards (or potential rewards) from those endeavors directed how much time I was willing to expend on them. Funny thing was that the latter of those, the group quests and dungeon crawls, were some of the most fun I had in the game.

[Alan Stern]

26.

One additional thought about magicback's earlier question:

If CoH creates a super-taskforce mission that requires 10-15 sessions of 3-4 hours each as their solution to their perceived lack-of-depth problem, would it be a greater challenge or a longer grind?

Compare this with the grind currently required to obtain a Force-Sensitive char slot in SWG. Granted, that grind actually requires *more* time commitment and investment but it's not terribly unlike your scenario. And the scariest part is that there are some people who are working on becoming a Jedi. Even so, there are a lot of people who (like myself) will not become a Jedi. Though the reward is amazingly high, the investment is even greater.

So I would say longer grind instead of greater challenge.

[XP]

27.

A greater challenge, I think, would mean a more challenging gameplay. Which is not easy to do.

A "twitch" based gameplay is rather rare in MMOs duie to the technical limitations of the things (lag..)
Tactical decisions might be a better challenge, but then you would need NPCs able to do the same or a reasonable approximation of it. Which means better AI, that the server might not be able to supply.
Then you get riddles, like Mythic's ToA. But static riddles tend to only work once in an online game.

In the end, you don't really get greater challenges. Only longer grinds. Simply put, gameplay generally lacks depth due to technical constraints. (I guess)

[weasel]

28.

Frank>Directing this at everyone: If CoH creates a super-taskforce mission that requires 10-15 sessions of 3-4 hours each as their solution to their perceived lack-of-depth problem, would it be a greater challenge or a longer grind?

Firstly, as was pointed out upthread, 3-4 hours per session is problematic. IMO, content should be broken up into different 'types': that which can be experienced at will, and 'chunks' of content which have a reasonable ETA for completion, but require uninterrupted play (with an upper-limit of ~2 hours).

Now, if those discrete chunks of the super-taskforce mission were reasonably self-contained and fun -- I think you could stretch them on for as long as you could keep the story and the play fun. The trick is in making each chunk fun, and self-contained. That means, you couldn't require a player to do all chunks with the same groupmates; that'd go back to EQ-style exclusionary design.

Similarly, the player should be able to do some tangential fun between 'chunks' if they so desire (side quest, help a friend, restock gear, etc). Arranged this way, the super-taskforce mission is basically just like any epic quest line in any other RPG. It can be as challenging or nauseating as any other story.

The 'lack of depth' problem I think is a misnomer. What, after all, does Everquest (wildly successful) provide that CoH (very successful and climbing) does not? As far as I can see, just the mudflated loot economy. As things stand now, Everquest has alternate advancement and the guild-raid end-game - but that took them years to implement, and the market didn't much punish them for taking their time.

Certainly CoH's design has room to add other systems (economy, housing, pvp, raiding, etc) -- but is it a problem, particularly now?

[Luca Girardo]

29.

A "twitch" based gameplay is rather rare in MMOs duie to the technical limitations of the things (lag..)

------------%<-----------------

It looks like future and current MMOGs are moving towards a FPS game style. The tech is already here as Planetside showed, JLS will show.
Traditional FPS (like NovaLogic's Joint Operations) can already support 160 players in a single game on a single server. It is just a question of time.

[Mark Asher]

30.

The 'lack of depth' problem I think is a misnomer. What, after all, does Everquest (wildly successful) provide that CoH (very successful and climbing) does not? As far as I can see, just the mudflated loot economy. As things stand now, Everquest has alternate advancement and the guild-raid end-game - but that took them years to implement, and the market didn't much punish them for taking their time.

Certainly CoH's design has room to add other systems (economy, housing, pvp, raiding, etc) -- but is it a problem, particularly now?

The market for MMOs is different now than it was back when EQ launched. EQ had that first mover advantage. There was UO and EQ and then the hard-to-look at AC and that was it. CoH is competing in a much stronger market.

There's really no comparison between EQ and CoH today in terms of depth. EQ has the alternate advancement stuff, raids, crafting, PvP, loot, mob variety, zone variety, more class types, etc. There's just a lot more variety in EQ than in CoH.

I'm really curious to see how CoH does. I loved it at first but after about 6-8 weeks in beta I got tired of it almost overnight. I tried playing again after it launched and got tired of it even quicker. For me the game has a deadly combination of a pretty steep leveling curve and a lack of variety, so I felt I was grinding early on, and when I feel like I'm grinding in these games I want to quit.

[Matt Mihaly]

31.

Weasal>The 'lack of depth' problem I think is a misnomer. What, after all, does Everquest (wildly successful) provide that CoH (very successful and climbing) does not? As far as I can see, just the mudflated loot economy. As things stand now, Everquest has alternate advancement and the guild-raid end-game - but that took them years to implement, and the market didn't much punish them for taking their time.

I feel bad for anyone that looks at Everquest and thinks "depth."

--matt

[CherryBomb]

32.

Apropos of nothing, really. Just wanted to admit I'm old enought to remember the grandaddy of all computer skims. While I was supposedly studying in Pasadena, a programmer for Security Pacific Bank programmed its computers to re-direct the fractional cents accrued on savings accounts into his own account. Some anal-retentive customer actually noticed this, and brough the scheme to a halt.

[weasel]

33.

Matt>I feel bad for anyone that looks at Everquest and thinks "depth."

;)
I was merely referring to the game that economic data shows had and still has 'enough' in its design to be fabulously successful.

Mark>The market for MMOs is different now than it was back when EQ launched. EQ had that first mover advantage.

I contend that CoH still does, perhaps moreso. Where else are you going to take your persistent world superhero urges?

While EQ does have many other things going for it now than it did at release, people at release weren't saying it had a lack of depth. If fact, IIRC, at EQ's depth many critics were pointing to UO's depth, and saying all that stuff was totally unnecessary.

EQ has certainly grown from what it was, and conventional wisdom suggests the market will demand new persistent worlds to compete with the breadth and depth of existing persistent worlds. But perhaps CoH is proving that wrong?

[Andres Ferraro (ex: DivineShadow)]

34.

"EQ has certainly grown from what it was, and conventional wisdom suggests the market will demand new persistent worlds to compete with the breadth and depth of existing persistent worlds. But perhaps CoH is proving that wrong?"

The 'common wisdom' I have doesn't say you open shop with 50 product lines; or in this case as many features and as deep as the market leader (EQ). It says only the market leader can afford to do that. The rest focus on beating the leader at one line (or feature), establish dominance there and then expand.

[Abel]

35.

I find that part of the grind in most games comes from the need to provide a sense of achievement to the people who put in time to level. When maxing out your level is easy, a high level means a lot less than when the leveling curve is steep.

At any rate, leveling can be a grind or it can be a wonderful social experience on either ends of the scale, and I think part of it also comes from making an effort to socialize. When a leveling session comes down to 'go go go', it can indeed be very difficult to socialize, although I believe there are people who can still make things happen.

I don't play CoH, but in my experience with FFXI, most parties last for about 2 hours, sometimes even longer. Towards the higher levels, missions can take up to 4 hours, sometimes even the whole day in organizing, travelling and the boss. Nobody I've met seems to have any problems with the time span.

Interestingly, the difference between missions and ordinary leveling however is that most people who look for parties look for leveling parties. Rarely do people look for mission/quest parties even though these groups often require significantly more people than the usual leveling parties, partly because these missions confer less tangible benefits in the form of experience points than leveling parties and take much longer, forcing players to set a date/time for these events. As such, these groups are usually formed within the guild, perhaps with a few outsiders to fill in key roles or boost numbers. As a result, in order to access the 'depth' content, some degree of socialization is necessary to gather enough people to start it off.

In a sense, the 'lite' version provides players with a means of leveling without the hassle of looking for a group, but does not entirely give them access to the full "hero's journey". IMHO, that still requires a fair bit of social interaction.

[Hellinar]

36.

I'd be careful to distinguish between obstacles and downtime. To go back to my nuts in shell analogy, I’d say the shells are an “obstacle” to getting to the nut. Giving someone a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker, then telling them they have to put the nutcracker down for five minutes between cracking each nut, would be ‘enforced downtime’. The shells are a natural obstacle to getting at the nut. And like most natural obstacles, they are unpredictable but consistent. Unpredictable in that one nut can crush easily to reveal the perfect nut, the next is a bear to crack and the result a bit of a mess. But they are consistent, in that the result derives from minor variations in the growth of each nut. Enforced downtime, on the other hand, is just arbitrary, and usually simplistic.

I think many of the "obstacles" in current MMOG's lack this unpredictable consistency. Simply putting a large amount of nothing between two destinations does not a journey make. But imagine a Norrath (EQ) with scenery and weather that had that had realistic, predictable effects on a character. There could be dozens of optimum routes between Freeport and Qeynos depending on the time of year, makeup of your party etc. In such a world a journey would be part of an Adventure. But such a world requires a much deeper dynamism that the current worlds. Despite some of the pessimism expressed in the Muse of Fire thread, I think we are not too far from that.

Why have Obstacles at all? To my mind they are pretty essential for an Adventure. Leaping straight to the final conflict, as in CoH, can be a lot of fun. But such instant gratification lacks some satisfaction that a journey imparts. The obstacles on the journey though do need to be challenging and interesting of themselves, and consistent with the structure of the world. They also need to be unpredictable for each Adventurer. We are a good way from that yet.

[DashZero]

37.

I think socializing in CoH is a bit hidden, and slightly crippled by the interface and implementation.

My experience with CoH is that the chat system is a bit hard to master. Sending another player a tell requires a comma after the character name. (/tell Big Lug, Nice costume!) This was non-intuitive. Instantly replying to a tell sent your way can be done via 'backspace', again non-intuitive for me. There are 6 chat channels and no easy way to cycle through them. Almost all of the other elements have almost no learning curve at al in CoH, but I think chat is at least slightly difficult to master.

Visual cues that any social activities (like players talking) are occuring is somewhat minimized. Even though your team will see your thought bubbles when you speak on the tean channel, others in the area will not. Only the Local channel allows everyone near by to see what you are saying in a thought bubble. So, at least 2 of the 6 channels (Team and SuperGroup) hide the fact that your character is chatting from most other characters. This makes it appear that few people are doing anything social.

Last element: email. While a fully functional system seems to exist, it is wholly ignored as far as I can tell. The problem is that there is no visual cue that you have received an email. So no one checks their email. If you ever look at it on a whim you may find a week old message saying "lets team up tonight". A simple fix (an indicator that email has been received) would add another communication tool to the mix.

My conclusion is that much of the normal MMOG social scene exists in CoH. But use of the communication tools is complex enough that some players may just avoid them rather than master them.

[Dee Lacey]

38.

Socializing in City of Heroes: I socialize just as much in COH as I do in EQ, per played hour.

I have done *more* roleplaying in COH than I have in EQ, per played hour.

I have yet to level up past 15 in COH. In the early levels, to me it feels unlike a grind. In fact, it's hard to cram in all the content I want to do before I outlevel it (and there's no going downward in level in COH). I want to do the level 10-15 task force with my character who is level 15 (next highest character is 12, but I have probably 6 characters between 9-11). Her supergroup (kind of like a guild) has successfully completed one of those but it took them 11 hours to do it. Finding even 6 hours straight to play COH (with my husband still rather playing EQ, and wanting me to join him there, and a young school-age child, and a full time job, etc) is nearly impossible - I just finished a week off work and only found time to attempt it once. So I'm trying *not* to level her up. Now the level 12 character has started my first "storyline" series of missions and I want to finish that before *she* outlevels it.

The missions are often set in places that have bad guys around them that are beyond your character or a small group of characters your level to take on. You have to sneak past them or hurry past them into the building. This does take care of the sense of a journey without taking too much time.

Maybe City of Heroes breaks down in this content past level 20 (I hear it does get less fun from some, and the reverse from others). Like Everquest, and unlike any of the other MMO's I've tried out, COH lets you create 8 characters per server on every server they have. This lets you try out all the combinations you want. I find that's a real draw for me - I like trying out lots of different characters.

My best roleplaying experience in City of Heroes was when, while playing a fairly low level character (I think level 5) I saw a higher level character (20 or so) asking if anyone had seen someone who looked out of place. Standing next to him (blue suit, typical superhero appearance) was a fellow in medieval style armor. They discussed how he had arrived in Paragon City from Camelot, and where the rest of his adventuring party might be - had they come along with him here? Soon the other members showed up, two more knights and a necromancer. I slipped into the role of a citizen of the city and new hero who could tell them about the modern world and be their guide in this new place. It was fun and natural roleplay, not to mention screamingly funny. I would've loved to do it again but uh, I was so in character I didn't get enough information to meet up with them again :(

The gameplay in COH is simpler and yet less monotonous than Everquest, because rather than every character of the same class having the same abilities, they vary by what the particular player chose at each level.

The complaints about the chat are well taken. I had no problem figuring out the comma in tells (to me it seems more natural to have it than not to) or the backspace to reply (on every character I make I go straight to the options screen and change the key binds immediately to ones I'm more used to, and I make R my reply keystroke, but the defaults are there plainly to see). What I have a problem with is the font is large and I can't figure out how to shrink it, and every time someone talks the whole window returns to bottom (even if it was scrolled up) so you can't keep it scrolled up to read what you missed, and things arbitrarily go to the bottom or top half of the window (e.g.: Team chat goes to the bottom, unless it was said while zoning, in which case it goes to the top. If that isn't arbitrary, tell me what is!)

I still think all MMOGs that want to enable roleplay need to put a roleplay flag on their chat interfaces. So that you can easily toggle a flag that says what you are saying is IN CHARACTER. This will let everyone know what you're doing when you're roleplaying vs when you are speaking as the real life player. I'm waiting for the game that will implement that simple thing. Not an OOC or IC channel - a flag that will let messages sent via any channel be marked as IC (with the default assumed to be OOC, but the user can change it in a settings menu so it defaults to IC if they want).