An Open Letter to NCSoft and Cryptic Studios News

A disgruntled City of Heroes fan today sent TVG an open letter making clear their opinions on the future direction of NCsoft and Cryptic Studios superhero themed MMO.

Where is the fantastic update I was promised with the release of Issue #7?

When City of Heroes launched, people were instantly attracted to it. Not just any people - comic book fans. City of Heroes capitalized on and enabled those die hard fans to easily create a hero, a story, and take him brawling Hellions to defeating powerful villains. Like all classic and well-loved comic heroes, heroes in CoH start out small and grow into amazingly powerful beings, capable of doing things in teams that would be impossible solo, even with their powers.

Two years later, City of Heroes has become a game of zombies and dragons leveling themselves up to kill one another in battles with one another, as opposed to battles with criminals. The costume updates to so-called heroes in I7 would do nothing more than turn characters into hideous miscreants, replacing hair with exposed brains and leaves, and body parts with items simply categorized as 'Monstrous.' Well over half of the 'heroes' costume options are clearly created for characters that don't do anything legal for a living.

The release of I7, which took months of preparation and an undisclosed amount of money from subscribers, brought nothing to the classic hero but a ridiculous amount of lag and bugs.

Issue 7 Features

• New High Level Zones (Villains and Pvp only)
• Mayhem Missions (Villains Only)
• Other New Missions (Villains Only)
• Patron Powers (Villains Only)
• New Power Sets (Villains Only)
• New Base Features (Heroes with CoV and Villains)
• Quality of Life Features (CoH and CoV)
• Art Upgrades (CoH)
• New Costumes (CoH and CoV)

Assuming your original crowd, the subscribers that built the game, doesn't have CoV and dislikes PvP, this is a list of the updates they got:

Quality of Life Features (CoH and CoV)

Global chat upgrade, allows heroes to search for channels at the expense of causing the entire global chat system to cease functioning at random intervals. Hide autopowers!

Art Upgrades (CoH)

Lackluster, lag-inducing, and buggy art upgrades lead to random game crashes, a memory leak, broken trams, and massive server instability.

New Costumes (CoH and CoV) Leaf hair! OMGPWNZZZZZ!

City of Heroes and City of Villains has a combined subscriber count of about 160,000. At $180 a year, the games gross $28,800,000. Subscribers should expect a little more than hiding icons and leaf hair.

PvP Love!

"Buy our game! You can be a Superhero! Amazing powers!"

One year later: "Sorry, you're overpowered. Other ATs can't kill you easily!" *nerf*

There are no two comic book heroes that have powers balanced so perfectly that each has a 50% chance of winning in a match. City of Heroes peaked at 180,000 before adding pvp and 'balancing,' the powersets, which upset veterans, comic buffs, and changed the original pve game in a way that drove subscribers away. Combined with CoV, the games have less subscribers than CoH had alone before pvp and 'rebalancing' of powers. When CoV was released, there was no spike in subscription rates like with the other successful MMOs, which suggests it drew very few new customers in at all.

Furthermore, avid PvP-ers are often forced to PvP on the Test Server because there isn't a high interest in PvP. And yet, with Issue 7, the only CoH zone update was the addition of a PvP zone! The Warburg is usually deserted, as is Recluse's Victory. Was anything else expected? People play heroes to team up with each other, get xp, and kill bad guys. Instead of using expansion to enrich that side of the gaming experience, the developers choose to severely alter the PvE game by taking the "nerfbat" to anything that seemed to powerful. Overwhelming criticism has fallen on deaf ears - the Tanker, Scrapper, and Controller official boards bear witness to that.

Of course, in the interest of getting people involved in PvP play, the wonderful development staff took the time to create Stalkers, who exist for no other purpose than to take cheap shots against their foes. It's nice to know that instead of adding PvE content, heroes have been gifted with the ability to get ganked in an otherwise empty PvP zone by someone they can't even see. Fun!

Hooray for QA and Customer Service!

Here are some recent patch note excerpts:

"Grandville: The Grandville hospital is back in the game." "Players should no longer get stuck in the Pocket D Elevators." "Peacebringers in Light Form can no longer appear invisible to players who suppress extra player effects"

These three sentences say a lot about QA. Either the process isn't very thorough or not a lot of care is given when inconveniencing us is concerned.

Don't ever forget the release of Issue 7. People stayed away for weeks, others called for a rollback on the boards. Graphics bugs, game crashes, lag, server disconnects, and massive rubberbanding literally drove people away from CoH for quite some time. Since then, patches to 'improve server stability' have been released, rolled back, and released again, but there has been no reprieve from the problems. The servers have been down more frequently, and the bizarre mass disconnects have lead to frustration, missed badges, and failed missions and task forces.

The GMs aren't terrible. Most are very nice, but the most frequent answer to questions is "We apologize," followed by an excuse the problem can't be fixed. In a game as riddled by bugs as CoH is, the GMs should have the ability to help paying customers, especially since most of the problems encountered are caused by bugs in the game. "Your server dumped my entire tf from the Terra Volta Reactor" shouldn't be answered with, "We apologize, blah, blah, blah." It should be answered with, "We're sorry, have a freespec." It's rather bizarre that you would cause such tremendous inconvenience for your customers and literally do nothing to make up for it.

When the DC Comics MMO is released, this is what myself and much of the CoH community is going to remember:

• Server instability to the point the game often wasn't even playable.
• Expansions that forced the game to become a game for monsters and dragons.
• The many times they missed badges because of bugs.
• How great this game was before you decided to 'rebalance' it and reduce superheroes to mediocrity.
• Spending hundreds of dollars to play, but being denied features.
• Spending that extra $50 just to go in the SG base I spent hundreds of hours contributing to.
• The first time a stalker sneaked up and killed me.
• Terrible customer service, never getting help when it was needed.
• The I7 memory leak that made my computer crash over and over and over.
• Expansions that don't do a damn thing for me except cause problems. Thanks!

The great thing about Villains is that by making some CoH features unavailable to them, you coerced your faithful subscribers and veterans into buying an entire game. Besides being unethical it's an incredibly discourteous and uncaring thing to do for someone who pays almost $200 a year for a game that seems to degenerate and lose more subscribers everyday. Here's an idea - Let CoH access the bases. There are a lot of veterans that have over $300 invested in CoH, it's infuriating that a company would ask someone so devoted to spend more money to see features they essentially funded.

If the technical problems weren't also accompanied by the total lack of reliable customer service, people wouldn't mind as much. Being nice and helping to compensate for the many problems that riddle the game would make most people happy. But veterans have been treated like crap, and ignored by the development team for several issues. Companies that consistently treat customers in this manner always find themselves with no customers at all. Is that what it takes? Will positive changes be made when Paragon is empty because everyone has become so frustrated they choose to play something else?

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Over to you NCsoft...