GW2: Morale and The Psychology of Losing

This Sunday, the strongest stand out memories are the two hour breaks of -not- playing Guild Wars 2, in order to get away from the hidden dangers of WvW to a newbie dipping one’s toes into a competitive format.

You see, I started getting an inkling something was wrong when I developed a headache. An honest to goodness -real- headache from playing a computer game.

The last 12 hours or so have been pretty bad. No doubt, some of this is due to sleep deprivation as I’ve been up at weird hours looking in on this week’s match, catching both NA and Oceanics in action. (I do crazy shit like this from time to time.)

I had an incredible morale high this morning (NA night time) as combined arms and lots of siege broke open a keep, along with an incredible continuous reinforcement rush (died three times easily) to hold one successfully even as a horde was knocking on the keep lord.

Then plunged to an abyssal low during the afternoon and night (NA wee morning hours and Sunday morning) as it grew obvious that the bulk of whoever was on during this time was not organized, failed to grasp strategy or spend siege to take or defend places, and worse of all, did not pay attention to the team/map chat.

A trebuchet knocked down a tower’s wall. Around 30-40 were outside zerging the place. 10-15 defenders. Guesses on how many people looked up from AoEing what was in front of them, read the chat, went left and into the tower. You are correct if you surmised less than the number of fingers on one hand. After dying horribly inside, I looked about at the 4-5 corpses inside and sighed.

A keep was lost when no one communicated clearly until it was nigh unto too late to do anything, and the frantic panicked screaming of “THEIR INSIDE KEEP” “INNER GATE” failed to move the said zerg that were still obsessed with failing to take above tower.

Yet another keep was lost as a significant bulk of people failed to read the chat and come to the rescue of those fighting off invaders at the keep lord, preferring instead to continue zerg duking it out on the bridge on the courtyard between outer and inner keep walls, failing to realize that they would be wiped out the moment the keep changed hands, with the walls locking in place around them and the happy victors emerging to scour the grounds.

Stuff like that does terrible things to one’s morale.

I’m only human, alas.

And yes, it gets frustrating and aggravating when things happen beyond your control, and despite your best efforts, the situation still seems helplessly uncontrollable and doomed to fail.

—

After quickly withdrawing to variously take a nap, go for a swim, have some tea, plan the next blog post (and reading up on the functions of morale in combat, the psychology of losing and how sportsmen and competitive gamers handle defeat well, badly or otherwise) and hovering between attempting to calm down and gritting one’s teeth from the pain of the headache, it was rather obvious that the tension and stress and pent up frustration were getting to me.

I especially have a personal problem with this since if you recall, I straddle two divides:

1) The primarily PvE player dipping toes into PvP and/or competitive formats

PvE players are used to having easy fun. That is, we want to win 85-100% of the time, as long as we play passably well.

Logically, this does not and cannot happen in PvP. There is always a winner and a loser to a match.

In a balanced game, that means even the best will be winning 50% of the time at most, as they eventually get matched against people just as good.

The slightest misbalance due to the other guy’s skill and strategy, your personal lack of it or emotional composure or circumstances otherwise beyond your control, and guess what, you’ll be losing a majority of the time, rather than just 50%.

Hell, in WvW format, there are always two losers to one winner, if you want to look at it in that light. So as some guy in a forums mentioned, 2/3 of the people are “losing” at any point in time.

2) Having a tendency to be obsessively hardcore and fixate upon success / winning / a goal

Normal (casual playing) people don’t frequent game forums twice a day or more, don’t write blogs dissecting games, and spend their time alternatively brooding on the moment-to-moment point scoring in a week-long match and reading up obsessively on potential strategies and ways to improve one’s play.

Nor do they sit around looking and reading up all manner of articles on a particular topic of interest wondering how other people deal with the problem they are having.

It’s just a small subset of the population that is blessed/plagued with such a personality, and I happen to be one of those individuals.

Been there, done that, don’t like how it made me.

I don’t want to be constantly tense and angry, I don’t want to blow up on people or insult or abuse them, I don’t want all my self-worth to be predicated on being number 1 and being so scared and ego-driven to maintain it.

Worse, taken to an extreme, we get folks who even go past the controversial edge of Sirlin’s Play to Win philosophy and start cheating, hacking and exploiting for the sake of a) a number on a scoreboard or b) to make other people angry (their new ‘win’ condition.)

That’s a definitive line for me. Much to my misfortune, I have too much bloody integrity to ever consider doing shit like that.

Besides, I already get in enough trouble emotionally and physically (I’m getting too old for sleep deprivation and alarm-clock gaming, dammit) before I go past that line.

—

When looked at objectively in this fashion, it becomes clear that if we want to continue playing around with PvP and competitive formats, we need to get used to “losing” and get out of the mindset of playing to win being all important.

This is not a new concept. It’s as old as competition and sports.

Just idly flipping through stuff people have written, I’ve found such disparate things as a discussion thread about losing Starcraft 2 matches and how different players deal with the blow to one’s morale, an advice article on a wiki about Starcraft 2 anxiety playing ladder games that run the risk of doing horrible things to one’s ranking with a loss (or so I gather, I don’t own SC2 yet,) a Warhammer article about the impact of losing on player morale and how it impacts one’s judgement and decision-making while tabletop gaming, and even a general sports article on emotional mastery and how various athletes may react in a competition.

I’m especially amused by the last one, because it gives one of those cheesy classifications that group people into different styles. He differentiates between the seether, the rager, the brooder and the Zen Master.

Watch any sports competition and there’s a pretty hefty grain of truth in the simplistic classification. Everyone can tell the explosive ragers, who wear their frustration on their sleeves, have little self-control and will no doubt be voted ‘most likely to break their wrists punching a wall.’ The seethers also steadily become obvious if the match doesn’t go their way, and you can see them gradually lose it and their play deteriorating.

I identify most strongly with a brooder, alas. My impulse is to think bad thoughts, look upon a situation helplessly and then become avoidant and sneak off without a word or quit silently, because it’s just as pointless to scream and yell at idiots or the just plain ignorant.

The Zen Master, naturally, is the ideal goal to strive toward. Being unaffected by emotions, being focused and playing consistently, win or lose.

I’m thinking I need to make something like that my new goal, rather than obsess about winning or the scoreboard. I believe competition has some very important life lessons to teach – about teamwork, about handling loss, about self-improvement, maturity and so on.

And Guild Wars 2 is a nice format to do it in, because of the whole server togetherness thing. By design, it doesn’t make you feel alone (as one would be if playing a 1 vs 1 competition match) or in a completely hostile world with anyone ready to backstab you at any time (see other open world PvP formats.)

It straddles the line of organized groups being decisively more effective, which is a little personally disappointing to me as I’m reluctant to invest that sort of commitment, but I’ll respect that others really enjoy that playstyle, and it’s beautiful to watch in action.

And I really like that the design encourages organized guilds to pay attention to the lonely souls like me – any warm body can be a help at times.

And while we sometimes cannot expect much of a pug zerg and want to chew nails in frustration trying to herd cats and teach people who don’t even seem to read chat or understand English, let alone talk back and communicate, successfully respecting and teaching/training the average pug to become an effective militia seems to have been one of the factors why Henge of Denravi is in the top position it is.

It’s just going to take time, a lot of patience and kindness and teaching towards both the self and others.

—

From a calmer, objective perspective though, I find it both alternatively great and fascinating that WvWvW is capable of replicating such ‘combat’ situations in miniature.

I’ve always found that MMOs are a great way to learn about real life in microcosm. In 4-5 years of playing an MMO, you can learn a lot of life lessons that would normally take folks 40 years to work through in real time.

Any student of war and history knows the importance of morale to overall success in an engagement. In this monograph by a Major Cox from the School of Advanced Military Studies, he states:

Morale and unit cohesion are a reality of warfare. They are as much a factor of war as wounds and death. The commander that fails to recognize the importance of these factors is the commander who will fail in combat.

These two components of war are segments of the undeniably human influence in warfare. This human influence is the element of warfare that is unpredictable and as Michael Howard states, contributes to the ‘fog of war.’

Anyone who has been within various kinds of WvW zergs can no doubt recognize the truth within those words. Some groups are full of confidence and plow right on through any opposition. (See any successful orb running zerg for a good example, folks tend to throw themselves at the enemy in order to protect the orb runner, and conversely, people hellbent on destroying the orb runner may also fling themselves into certain death without worrying about the cost.)  Some are hesitant and full of individuals bent on self-preservation, rather than the achievement of a goal, and quickly break apart in all directions, fleeing with shattered morale in the face of more confident seeming opposition.

The real question, of course, is how to make the latter group more like the former.

A lot seems to hinge on good leadership. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is always a fun read, as he talks about the importance of always having a strategic plan of attack and all warfare being based on a deception. It’s painfully obvious that Isle of Janthir is still lacking such a focus at times as the point score gets run away with, now and then, but well, since I’m not prepared to sacrifice my time or life to be commander-ing anything, I will shut up armchair general-ing and just wait patiently for such leaders to emerge.

(We have some, we’re not completely bereft, but apparently the more definitely hardcore servers are arranging crazy shit like scheduling commanders at all hours of a day. That may be a bit too crazy for IoJ to ever contemplate, in which case, we will have to settle with being where we are and come to accept that we choose to balance our WvW game time with other things of import.)

But morale is also contingent on good communication and the teamwork/trust bond between individuals until they feel like part of something greater than themselves.

In this, I think every individual has a part they can play if they so choose. We can practice reporting sightings of enemy servers by how many there are (roughly), which server and what location. We can learn the locations that are being referenced. We can learn the maps, all the nooks and crannies. We can work on improving our play, our gear/stats/skills/traits.

And we can teach. Or just talk out loud and mention obvious things like “remember to take supply” even though we sound like a broken record, because it may not be obvious at all to someone just joining WvW for the first time. Given the number of casual players playing GW2 and just hitting the mid and high levels that may make them feel brave enough to step into WvW, they may still be figuring things out.

It’s not easy, certainly. I don’t really like to say anything aloud if there’s no plan. Take supply for what, if we’re not going to siege anywhere? And there’s the fear of rejection aka wild n00b l33tspeak attack frenzy, but maybe others feel less inhibited.

I do tells and whispers fine though. Perhaps I can work on that.

I sent a tell once to a random person who was looking for the entrance to the jumping puzzle, he had trouble finding it and I took him there. He was grateful and it made me feel warm and fuzzy. Then I sent a tell offering to sight for another person who seemed to having trouble aiming a treb and it was like speaking into a black hole. A simple “no” would have sufficed, but maybe the person didn’t even know how to reply. *sighs*

I also sent a tell to a guy operating a ballista who was blowing up trebs that I couldn’t seem to target for the life of me, and asked how the heck he was doing it. He was nice enough to tell me to click the bottom of the treb to target it, and while it still seemed ridiculously far and impossible to target (were my graphics settings the problem?), I’ll be working on improving that part of my game the next time. So this stuff goes both ways.

We have to eventually create an atmosphere where it’s okay to talk to each other and ask stupid questions and teach each other. It’s really hard when we’re working uphill against the solo in an MMO – WoW Barrens chat abuse impulse, but if we don’t work on it, then it will be no one’s fault but ours that we’re standing alone. Time will tell, I guess.

If there’s a good lesson to be learnt from WvW and PvP, it’s how to be patient, persistent and pick oneself up when one falls down. Keep trying. Keep fighting the good fight.

(And no, that does not mean look straight ahead and target nearest enemy. You get flanked that way. Please pick up some situational awareness. Please…)

I’m referring to a social fight, an organization fight, a strategic fight, a community fight.

GW2: Underwater Done Right

I could spend the better part of my days in GW2 submerged under the sea. It’s like a dream come true for me.

A little historical background to help you understand where I’m coming from. That MUD I used to play, the equivalent of first MMO ever?

It had a fairly unique fantasy race for player characters, the sea-elves.

Call it chance, fate, destiny, whatever, the character I ended up using to make a big name for myself on the MUD was a female sea-elven cleric. She ended up leading the Guild of Clerics for a time, and was heavily involved with roleplaying with a bunch of other sea-elves in a certain golden age.

Along with several other players, we co-created a lot of sea-elven lore and history and even language, based a little off D&D, but putting our unique spin on things (since in D&D, sea-elves tended to be primitive naked warriors, and our MUD allowed for sea-elven clerics and mages, so presumably, our race was a lot more sophisticated than that.)

I also co-built a racial hometown with a fellow sea-elven player, which in those days, involved a lot of text to describe each “room.”

Suffice to say, I spent a lot of time thinking about being underwater, looking at undersea and ocean pictures of both the real and fantastical variety, and trying to put that into words.

It’s a little ironic that now I’m making the cat spend so much time underwater. But he’s a weird cat that uses magic and likes rats, so I guess it’s par for the course for him.

One of the things that always struck me was how different each undersea landscape could look, and how sea-elves would doubtless use varied things as landmarks and have their own subtle set of descriptors to describe in detail things that we generalize together and call it coral, or seaweed.

More than a decade later, Guild Wars 2 has brought that aesthetic into a fully realized 3D world. You have no idea how deliriously happy I am.

(I’ve spent so long reading every scrap of underwater fantasy resource I could get my hands on, most of them D&D based. It’s a world that deserves so much exploration. And in the real world, it’s like our last unexplored frontier, so there’s so much fantastic potential to be imagined up there. It’s like the Moon and Mars before people really got there to see it was just a lot of rocks.)

Again, words fail me. I could say awesome, spectacular, fantastic and keep repeating it, but it’s probably easier to just show you what I mean.

Ok, I cheated, this is a end of beta weekend pic. Everyone turned into Branded, and if you went underwater, you became a Branded fish. Focus on the shallow water, dirt and sand, if you can.

I’m sure we’ve all seen the lake and river bottoms by now. They’re fairly normal, what we expect from going underwater, that sort of thing (if underwater had that many barracudas and drakes and sharks, that is.)

I’m a big fan of the seagrass. The oh so pretty seagrass.

The sea bottoms are deeper and sandy and full of crabs and that kind of stuff. So far, so good, it’s a bit like what Rift did, if I recall correctly. Possibly WoW too.

Then you plunge into the arctic ocean of Frostgorge Sound and your breath is taken away by how DEEP it gets.

No doubt, it doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing, but it’s the comparative effect. Divinity’s Reach is not as big as a real city, but for an MMO, it’s certainly huge on that relative scale. And the ocean floor is quite a ways away. You have to actually swim downwards a bit and feel the light quality changing and you hit the dimmer rocky bottom to see undersea wurms making their home there. Ick.

I love the depth. It makes it feel so real, that there’s a underwater world on par with the land one, full of mountains and gorges that you can swim through.

The most cavernous dark depths seem to be reserved for the krait-infested waters, full of decaying ship wrecks.

The verticality is very thrilling.

Light at the top and dark below, and closed in on both sides. Awesome underwater canyon effect.

And guess what, because everyone and their mother hates going underwater, and never attacks yellow mobs that don’t aggro on them, this is what you can reap from an arctic jellyfish (with an xp booster I threw on for the hell out of it, it came out of one of those chests the personal story key unlocked.)

Me, I love underwater combat. I like the three dimensions fighting, it makes it feel different from the usual landlocked combat we’ve always had in MMOs. I’m already used to flight and fighting aerial stuff in City of Heroes, so underwater is pretty much a slower version of that in a liquid-feeling medium. Perhaps some don’t like that slowness, but I’m ok with it, I’ve spent too long a time imagining how sea-elves fought, and it adds a bit of strategy to the positioning.

(There’s an underwater boss at the end of the Font of Rhand mini-dungeon, and pretty much the moment he throws a fireball at you, you have to be swimming out of the way, so that you don’t regret it 3 seconds later when the water boils around you. It’s a little too late then to think “ouch” and -start- swimming away.)

Then there’s the people who think underwater combat is slow in the sense that it takes a long time to down mobs and the bosses. Yeah, because everyone is using a RANGED option.

Guild Wars 2 is truly revolutionary in the sense that they made melee combat higher damage over ranged combat (in general.) Typical MMOs allow the cloth wearing spellcasters to sit comfortably at the far end of the room raining down death, while the plate armored warriors just spend their time plinking away doing nothing significant in terms of damage, but all in terms of keeping the mob facing away from the clothies.

It makes a lot more sense that melee combat involves higher risk – you’re going near a mob that can whack you back – and thus, higher reward in terms of damage dealt. Bursty close combat. Meanwhile those sitting at comparatively more safety far away can do sustained moderate dps. Control and support abilities are everybody’s responsibility.

Underwater combat works in the same way. As a Guardian, I have an option of a spear and a trident.

The trident is a long ranged weapon that fires a chain of light that bounces off mobs and allies, damaging mobs and healing allies. It doesn’t do terribly fantastic damage, it does some, but it’s primarily a long ranged support weapon. I use it when I want to remain at range, when I see allies meleeing near an underwater mob (so that it’ll bounce off the mob and heal them some) and ironically, I use it up close for myself when I want to out-tank a mob and dps it down uber slowly. (The light bounces off the mob and into me, healing me, so I sit there facetanking it for a while. Ordinary mob, mind you, not bosses, those are un-tankable. It’s my secondary killing option when using a spear does too much damage to me.)

The spear is the close range option. It’s pretty much the equivalent of melee, except they were kind enough to give some range on the thing so it’s not too aggravating fighting in three dimensions and trying to position just right. I’m a Guild Wars 1 paragon player, so I’m very used to spear chucking at mid range. It’s what to use to deal loads of damage fast. I use it for most normal underwater mobs, and the odd boss or two if I see the opportunity to get up close without getting whacked too hard. It actually has a retreat option (spear wall) that I don’t use often enough, so there’s still a long way to go on mastering this weapon.

I haven’t looked at the other classes (or Professions, if you’re a stickler for nomenclature) much, but it strikes me that most of them have a spear as the close range high damage option. The only two exceptions are the engineer and the elementalist, and as far as I understand it, an engie with grenades and bombs underwater is a beast, and elementalists have high damage ranged spells as an option all the time anyway.

If everyone chooses to use their long range support or control weapons to nickle and dime an underwater boss beastie down, then yeah, it’ll go slower than usual. But on the other hand, it’ll also go a lot safer and more supported/controlled and it’ll still go down in the end. Being used to tanks and outlasting a mob by carving away at it really slowly, I can’t see anything wrong with that strategy either. Want it to go faster cos you’re impatient? Then take some risks and get up close.

And some days, the mob comes close to you. (My beta weekend lowbie engineer with a harpoon gun who would much rather it didn’t.)

Back in my MUD days, we made ourselves Five Kingdoms of the sea-elves – Coral, Pearl, Gold, Obsidian and Ice. From what I remember, the Coral Kingdom was the ruling political entity with a Queen on the throne and the cosmopolitan one, Pearl was a secondary shadow of Coral, a farming region and noted for its pearl products, and Gold was a kingdom of merchants and wealth-obsessed folk.

Obsidian and Ice were the most unique. The Obsidian Kingdom was a city of spellcasters, who raised up towers by causing undersea lava vents to erupt and cool in the ocean to form spires of black volcanic glass. The Ice Kingdom was the most seemingly primitive of the lot, known for warriors and hunters up in the arctic regions, but maintained a culture of ice shapers and city crafters who carved their homes and beautiful architecture right out of glacial ice.

I always used to imagine at least one city carved right out of an iceberg, both below and above sea-level, and sea-elves being able to enter from both directions.

Kodan sanctuaries come pretty close. Not entirely, of course. There’s a lot more man-made architecture (that looks flavored by an eastern Factions vibe) and sails on these kodan city vessels, and there’s obviously less of an elven aesthetic. But the general idea is pretty thrilling enough.

And here’s a super-mini-version of what I imagine the Obsidian Kingdom must look like. Lava and black rock.

Then there are the kelp forests. The beautiful towering kelp forests.

And the bioluminescent lights.

Finally, one of my favorite poems is Edgar Allan Poe’s The City in the Sea.

All I can say is, wait until you get to Orr. I won’t spoil it for you here.

COH/GW2: End of an Era, Start of a New

This post is going to annoy folks who are still in pain and angry about City of Heroes’ closing down, and would much prefer everyone to boycott NCsoft and all its products.

I’m really sorry for stomping all over your hope – I too would much prefer if CoH always remained around as an Ol’ Reliable backup for me to return back to – but let’s face it, if rescue efforts fail, people will be dispersing to the four winds.

Some will be hurt too much to ever attempt playing an MMO again and will fall out of the MMO player pool. Some will make their way to Champions Online or DCUO, because the superhero setting or an intricate character creator (in CO’s case) is what they most prioritize. Some will drift to The Secret World by virtue of its modern day setting and nonaffliation with anything Cryptic or NCsoft (Just be careful, Funcom also has its own notoriety. *wry grin*) Some may go to SWTOR for the stories, cutscenes or familiar Star Wars setting, a Jedi is pretty much like a superhero, isn’t it? Some may find themselves visiting panda country and returning to or trying out WoW for the first time as the big gorilla on the block revs up to launch their latest expansion (by Nov 30, it should already be in place.)

And some will be headed to the next big thing, the at-present still newest MMO launch, MMO version 3.0 or whatever you call it, Guild Wars 2.

Yes, even if it’s still being published by NCsoft.

We all very know NCsoft’s reputation by now. Can you name all the games in their stable NCsoft has cut? I see Tabula Rasa mentioned frequently, Auto-Assault an afterthought on most sites. I’ll tell you that I also gave Exteel and Dungeon Runners a try in their times too.

To be honest, I expect Guild Wars 1 to wind down in a year or two, assuming GW2 continues to thrive, possibly with a big marketing push to say, “Last chance to get your HoM rewards!”

There is no way GW1 can end just yet, when GW2 is making news headlines and there’s still the prequel/sequel continuity there, so unfortunately, CoH had to bite the dust. (If I’m not mistaken, they also televise GW1 PvP tournament matches in Korea, so they have to wait until all the e-sports teams migrate over to GW2 and find it solid and balanced enough to compete on.) I bet they’re waiting to see if GW2 interest will get a few more box buyers of GW1, curious to see how it all began. If sales pick up, it may last a little longer. If it doesn’t, well, NCsoft is really good at wielding an axe.

With all fairness to them, they’re good businessmen, exceedingly ruthless, but focused on the bottom line. None of the games they cut were exceedingly good. I still think Auto Assault had potential to be a fair and middling game if they weren’t so fixated on a sub model, but in all honesty, when you got out of that car and walked around the town a bit, it was the most horrific thing in the world. The only bit I liked of Tabula Rasa was fighting for control points and getting kill streaks, which was ripped right out of any standard FPS. The rest was a carbon copy WoW quest clone. Exteel was a tiny robot FPS-y game with very little reason to spend NCsoft coin on, and Dungeon Runners, while funny, was a Diablo clone that would be completely overshadowed by Torchlight and Diablo 3 by now, if not cut.

(City of Heroes though, -was- exceedingly good. Stress on the past tense, alas. There is a reason while the game lasted so long, and even why NCsoft stepped in to -save- the game from Cryptic when Champions Online came out. Never forget, it could have been gone much sooner. NCsoft pumped enough money into the team to build up Paragon Studios, give them a chance to work on Going Rogue and Freedom. Presumably it was a gamble, and it presumably they were looking for a decent payoff that never really came. GR was not as successful as hoped, Freedom kept the game running, just about, but an objective observer uncolored by nostalgic memories of CoH would have to predict that entropy was going to catch up with this MMO sooner, rather than later.

The news, of course, dropped like a bombshell and it’s awful, but we all did get 3 month’s notice of the studio’s eventual closing. It’s not like everyone went to work, got kicked out on the curb the same day and the servers just got turned off in 24 hours. It could have been handled a little better, PR-wise, SWG closed with 5-6 month’s notice and had a solid plan and schedule on how subscribers would be treated, closing day events, etc, if I’m not mistaken, I didn’t pay attention to the news much then.)

The trick is, as Aardwulf suggests, not to get too attached.

To any one game. Which, as you can see from the variety I cover in my sidebar, I explore a great many of them, so I have a backup or two or three standing by to break the fall.

And I take plenty of screenshots, and try to document my stories and fun experiences,  knowing that nothing will last forever.

If it’s your first, it’s going to hurt, and hurt bad. I know. My first ever MUD took me ages to get over, I had a good 3-4 year run with it, and I clung to it for a good 4-5 years more than I should have, to the detriment of my happiness and mental health. I ended up attaching to City of Heroes to get over the MUD and ultimately realized the era of text gaming was moving past the general Zeitgeist, so to speak. There are still holdouts for text MUDs, and some good communities of a couple hundred or so in various places, I wish them well and hope they’ll keep the banner flying proud and high for a while more yet, but y’know, numbers, 100,000-200,000 is on the shaky side of what a small triple A MMO needs to operate with in contrast.

When an era ends, it may just be in one’s best interest to move on and try something new. It might just open your eyes that there’s a really big wide world of gaming out there.

I too am more than a little dismayed that the hammer of judgement has come down on City of Heroes and said its time is up.

But objectively, if we look at the game as is, free from any nostalgia or memories that color it, it’s a game that has brushed up against the limits of its technology and its engine more than once.

That the devs at Paragon Studios have managed to hack into it, pretty much rewriting stuff from scratch, and give us things like choosing difficulty scaling, power customization with all colors of the rainbow, a build-your-own superhero base creator, a mission architect editor, a graphic engine upgrade that gave us the likes of the zones in Going Rogue, First and Night Wards (and OMG, real-looking trees) is a credit to their passion and dedication and hard work.

Statue of Atlas, 2004

Atlas Park carpark, 2004 (Have fun contrasting with the featured image in 2012 at the top of the post)

But today, as I logged in to screenshot all my characters from the character creation screen, I bumped into an issue that I realized meant that I would never again quite be able to fully enjoy playing City of Heroes, even if the servers were left on to the end of time.

—

It’s a long meandering story, so sit tight (or skim read at will):

Y’see, I dropped to Premium membership sometime back in July after the Summer Event and I’d gotten all the mileage out of Incarnate raids I wanted. Before the bitter ones scream at me for not supporting the game with a constant subscription, I’ll dangle a six year veteran badge (I lost a year or two protesting the stupid raids), a 33 reward token badge and I think my actual reward token count is 39 because I bought some points and managed to get some of the Celestial, Fire and Ice and Mecha armor pieces I wanted.

I’ve paid my dues, thank you.

Because of where I sit in the reward tier, I lost very little privileges dropping down to Premium when not actively playing the game, though of course, I appreciated being able to log in any character I wanted, the signature story arcs and morality missions and new zones open to me when I did pay a month’s sub to actively play the game.

I’m under the impression that subs have been deactivated for the time being, but I didn’t bother trying to see. I can log in two characters per server, and about 9 on my main server on Virtue (a couple free slots and I bought a few slots, I think), and that’s plenty for me for now.

What I did check was the Paragon Store, to see that I had 830 points left over still.

Gee, those better not go to waste.

It’s enough to buy a powerset with, and after some deliberation, I picked up Street Justice. It’s melee, and I like melee. Despite the new and shiny of Nature Affinity and Water Blast and all that, I was a lot more curious to sample the set that was made more punch-y and less kick-y than Martial Arts.

I also realized that despite unlocking all three components of Mecha Armor with reward tokens, I never got around to actually making a Mecha Armored character, so that had to be rectified.

And I greatly enjoyed the I22 stalker changes, so a stalker he would be. And Elec Armor seemed a good bet for being decent out of the box and just in SOs (since I certainly am not wasting time fooling around with Invention builds any more, sheesh. Funny how an impending game’s end changes your priorities around to focus on what you really enjoy and away from what you’re just putting up with in the hope that things will get better later, eh?)

Then I decided that since the game was ending, and my goal was to get up to at least 35 or so to try out all of the powers, screw morality and taking my time, let’s abuse the hell out of what the game provides.

Like many CoH players, I’ve sneered at those who keep repeating the trial Death From Below ad nauseam in order to level quickly, as it doesn’t show new players the much richer aspects of the game and storyline. Using ‘lfg dfb’ to level all the way to 50 may help you rush to max level quickly, but is entirely missing the point. Of the whole game. It may even help you burn out faster.

Well, like that’s a concern to me now. The game’s flame is flickering off, whether I like it or not. Maybe it’ll even help me move on from the game by over-dosing on xp. And I really don’t have much time to spend on playing CoH per se, I would much rather spend more time later flying around, screenshot zones and work on demoediting for posterity.

So I decided I’d see how far and fast I could get with just Looking For Trial, dfb all the way baby, at least until I hit Drowning In Blood level range, which is a trial I actually haven’t done.

There’s really nothing difficult about the lowbie trial DFB. Throw 8 players at it, assuming you have one brave fool to absorb the alpha which may or may not kill them at such low levels, and the rest of the team’s damage will very quickly eliminate the entire spawn.

However, I did notice that I was having a couple problems fighting. A lot more of the team were killing more than me and I found myself standing around like a fool, more often not, or finally managing to queue up an attack to have someone else’s ranged blast wipe up the mob before I could fire mine.

WTF was going on?

Some observation and analysis of what I was doing later suggested the couple points:

• I was trying to start attacks a little too far from the mob and standing out of melee range. So, absolutely nothing was happening.

Guild Wars 2 has gotten its hooks into me. Sword range is 150, and greatsword range is 130, scepter range is 600 iirc. I’m no longer used to approaching so close to the mob that I could kiss it in order to trigger an attack.

And it took me a while to figure out that nothing was happening because the combat offers no feedback. In GW2, your sword attacks still go off, you just don’t hit the mob if you’re out of range. In theory, CoH is supposed to fire off an ‘out of range’ message when this happens, but it wasn’t. I’m not sure why, maybe too many players’ attacks going off at once.

• Having to press 2-3 times to begin winding up a hidden Assassin’s Strike was a pain.

This is a classic CoH issue, when you want to AS something, you can’t just stand in range, hit the AS button once and wait for it to go off. Sometimes the first button press doesn’t work. Why? I don’t know why, it just is. So after a while, all stalkers get used to spamming the AS button in quick succession when you really want to AS something and one of those presses will eventually send the message across and start your AS animation. Except I’m out of the habit and it was a minor annoyance to return to doing that.

• Even after doing everything perfectly and your attack fires and you go through the animation, you may miss.

Because all combat is based on a dice roll. Because lowbie accuracy sucks, in the standard vein of MMOs that give you all the skills of a peasant janitor at the beginning of the game so that you can “work” your way to achieving unbelievable cosmic power by the endgame. Because you need to slot accuracies, preferably DOs or SOs in order to start approaching reliable hit rates, and when you’re running a trial repeatedly with no time to break and slot the stuff, you don’t have ‘em. (Nor do real lowbies have the money for this stuff unless they play the auction house, most are alts fueled by the first sugar daddy main to reach the wealthy levels. I would get around to mailing myself the cash later.)

You know what? It’s bloody frustrating to see the animation wind up, and the “miss” floating on top of the mob’s head. Followed by someone’s else blast (that didn’t miss, thanks to the vagaries of the RNG) knocking them into a bloody heap before you even got a chance to hit them. Some hero I feel like.

• Every single attack that you fire roots you while the animation finishes playing.

I just came from one of the most mobile, stress-on-positioning games ever. It was beyond aggravating to keep pressing the A and D keys and realizing that they wouldn’t work and you were stuck in that position until you finished hitting something (that maybe wouldn’t hit, see above.)

Despite the beautiful animations of punching and winding up to hit things, overall combat felt extremely stilted and interspersed with a lot of start/stop pauses. I’ve never felt this way in CoH before. I’ve tried WoW, whose combat I readily admitted was smoother and more polished than CoH or LOTRO, but I adapted equally well to all their combat quirks and didn’t find it a problem moving from game to game. It only goes to demonstrate how incredibly fluid and polished GW2 combat must be, that by comparison, I’m now finding CoH combat (something I used to always like for being fast, furious and full of fire and fury and VFX) lacking.

Either that, or there’s something severely wrong with the Street Justice powerset. Or Titan Weapons where I also ran into a bit of this problem (but I always assumed TW was meant to be slow and clunky.) I’ll try out my smoothest level 50 dual blades incarnated stalker later and see.

• I was a lot faster noticing and getting out of the green stuff.

Despite CoH’s best efforts to keep me rooted in one place, when fighting the two Hydra Heads, I noticed that I was much more observant of dangerous green effects forming around me, or at my feet, and would quickly stop attacking and haul booty elsewhere. GW2 training in effect, no doubt. I must actually be looking at my character more and what’s happening on screen around him.

• The UI? It stinks.

Okay, part of this is obviously my fault, since I arranged the CoH UI around, moved trays here and there to suit me, etc. And much of it is still a holdover from when I needed all this overlay of information, especially while doing Incarnate raids.

But wow, how badly is my view of the actual world blocked?

I need five power trays open to hold all the powers I’m likely to end up collecting – three for the main powers and most commonly fired veteran/temp powers, two for the teleports, periodic buffs, bonus things like clear the fog of war from a map, self-revive, etc.

I need inspiration trays open so that I can quickly eat a consumable in an emergency. I need a minimap open to tell where my teammates went in a mission. I need a chat window open to see my teammates talking and communicating. I need the enhancement bar open so that I can see what drops mid mission and delete unnecessary ones to free up slots.

Strictly speaking, I don’t need the big wide global chat tab at the bottom of the screen, but I used to have it there when I was deep into playing and needed access to five global chat channels at once to overhear general server chat and catch up on badge calls, giant monster calls, TF calls, etc. And in theory, I can probably shrink the chat window and teammate bars more – except I’ll have problems reading the text and the buff icons – I can compress the buff icons and/or ignore them, yes, but I’m used to having them there so that I can read the situation better – knowing who is buffed and by what lets one have an idea of who is likely to lead into a spawn  (and still survive), who still needs buffing, etc.

And I don’t even have the combat monitor on, which I’d be more inclined to turn on for mid to high level characters where I need to monitor the exact level of their defenses and resistances, regeneration or recharge rates at any given moment.

This is a beta weekend screenshot, where my UI is already pretty stretched, max sized minimap, obscured background chat window (on Live, I’ve made both smaller). Alas, I forgot to take any partied up shots in a dungeon, so I don’t have the party/team UI, but it goes in a vertical row on the left.

Welp, what can I say?

Both UIs serve their purpose, and fulfill their function, so neither is broken per se, but one blocks the view and is a lot more obtrusive than the other. One has a much better aesthetic than the other.

—

Four DFBs later, I was at level 14, the group broke up and it was way past time for me to make my way to a DO store to slot up or whiff and miss even more while doing little to no damage whatsoever.

I got there, having a little bit of fun street sweeping by myself along the way (I still love doing that, no one snatching the mobs from me or anything) and faced with the necessity of logging out, switching characters, typing in a mail to send influence to myself, logging out again, switching characters, picking up the influence and figuring out what to buy and slot, and maybe burn a veteran respec because I was sure I made cruddy choices in the haste of rushing through a DFB…

I just logged out instead.

And logged into GW2.