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“You talk about laws? I AM THE LAW!”
I’m not at GDC this week, which means I missed this fine talk.
In 2005, City of Heroes saw its European launch, soon followed by City of Villains. But, Emmert said, “What I really delivered was a City of Heroes experience with a slightly evil twist.”
I’m sure the rest of the City of team at Cryptic were glad that Jack Emmert was able to deliver City of Villains by himself, emerging Athena-like from his pristine forehead. This is always one of my irritations with the gaming media – the assumption that games are created by one person, usually the one the media likes to talk to, and people who know better shouldn’t play into that. It’s the sign of a rampaging ego. Hell, next thing you know, he’ll start up a blog!
Emmert goes on to contradict what most people on live teams are well aware of through constant beatings. No, really, players don’t mind nerfs!
Despite the forum raging and conflict, however, Emmert stressed: “No nerf ever, ever caused a statistical drop in subscription base, ever. I tracked every single one, and never, in that particular day, week or month, did more people drop the game than in any other particular month. Fascinating.”
Yes, fascinating:
”There is one nerf that I did that we lost a couple thousand people on,” he admits. “It was called enhancement diversification… and that really did make people mad.”
I think on that point, the City of team is quite willing to let Emmert take sole credit on.
I am picking on Jack Emmert somewhat – most of his talk seems to have been accurate, if suffused with the hubris he’s known and loved for. You do have to dance with the horse that brought you.
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about 2 years ago
“You do have to dance with the horse that brought you.”
Unless you’re NCSoft, in which case you can just buy it out and keep the people you want to run it, and let geniuses like Emmert work their magic a second time.
about 2 years ago
He comes off as typical. Not as bad as Jade Raymond in my opinion.
about 2 years ago
What a goof. Maybe the constant stream of crappy live game management meant a constant stream of players were quitting CoH? So no given nerf stood out and caused a spike. But if he’d had a clue, perhaps the rate of quitting would have decreased or, I don’t know, the game might have net retained subscribers?
about 2 years ago
I don’t think nerfs (to their perfectly balanced class that wins 90% of their fights) or boosts (to a class that used to be easy money, but now might be able to win 50% of the time) can, in general, be -the- reason someone cancels, but they can be the final straw that lowers the barrier to exit enough for them to cancel their subscription.
about 2 years ago
I read that and had to laugh myself, his talk of nerfs was a bit out of touch. Sure you can see that you don’t loose players from the nerf but what you loose is their confidence. Once enough confidence is lost, you loose the player.
I also loved how he noted that NCSoft wanted them to focus on endgame and they insisted on focusing where most of the players were level wise.. then admits it was a mistake to not think ahead but never admits NCSoft was right about focusing on the endgame.
What’s really funny is Jack talked like it was a shock City of Villains didn’t sell well. Most of us knew when CoV was announced that it really wouldn’t pull in that many new players.. just give existing players something else to do. After all how different could the game have been considering it had to function with the existing City of Heroes game? They couldn’t do any revolutionary changes to how the game’s engine worked without having to do the same with CoH.
about 2 years ago
I don’t think nerfs (to their perfectly balanced class that wins 90% of their fights) or boosts (to a class that used to be easy money, but now might be able to win 50% of the time) can, in general, be -the- reason someone cancels, but they can be the final straw that lowers the barrier to exit enough for them to cancel their subscription.
Completely agree. Nerfs are often considered the reason, but they are just the escamotage.
Nerfs are also the most explosed part of game design for players, so they usually project on it all the frustration they have.
about 2 years ago
Early footage of Jack: http://youtube.com/watch?v=c7iaNFFynxM
about 2 years ago
What a goofball. Jack is nothing more than a snake oil salesman. All the things people wanted to see in COH as expansion items he took over to his new Champion’s game. Everything he promised (Underwater cities, astroids/space setting) magicaly appears in his new MMO.
Even down to when players wanted to customize powers for COH (ie green death ray instead of blue) he said ‘It’s a possibility’.
Then ditches COH and implements everything people wanted into his FAQ for Champions.
What a joker.
about 2 years ago
Points for sweeping hyperbole though. He’s REALLY tracked every nerf ever? The force is strong in this one.
The sentiment isn’t horribly wrong, but over the lifetime of a game a poorly conceived or (worse) a poorly marketed one can take a toll on your long-time players. The next WoW expansion takes us to level 80. Regardless of the actual time taken, that’s a lot of “investment” one will have in their avatar. If they suddenly make sweeping changes to a class to fit some new grand plan I can see someone hanging it up for good rather than adapt or start from scratch again.
Of course, at that stage those long-term players are also likely flush with alts, max-level or otherwise. I’m in the minority in my guild with only 1 raiding 70 right now, most have 2+. One has 8.
about 2 years ago
You know … I’ve never seen major subscriber fluctuations correlate to balance changes either.
about 2 years ago
You call him a goof or a joker. I call him a ginormous dickhead douche faggot.
In regards to nerfs != subscriber losses, I often find that when my favorite class is nerfed, I tend to stick around and see if they learn from their mistake. Usually they don’t and it won’t be until a month or two after the nerf that I actually quit. In fact, anytime I’ve ever had my favorite class nerfed, it usually takes anywhere from 6 months to over a year before they’re “fixed”.
I think once mmo subscribers start getting the idea that developers don’t consider class balance important enough to be handled in a timely manner, we will see more subs being dropped more closely to when nerfs occurr.
about 2 years ago
Hearsay – the balance changes that fixed “Stungard” led to a number of canceled (midgard) accounts.
What’s “Stungard” you ask? Early on in DAoC, CC had no reduction on effects (or immunity timers) when re-applied. In the Healer, midgard had a class that could mezz entire groups for over one minute, instantly stun entire groups for 9s (or so) and stun individuals for 11s.
You had a scenario where a mid group would run up to an alb group, the healer casts AE instant stun or AE instant mezz, applies a long duration mezz over the top, then individually stunned single target, which would then get assisted down.
Mythic applied a number of fixes, mainly immunity after the CC wore off, not allowing re-application of CC, dropoff of duration from the center of AE spells, and a timered ability that would dispell all CC effects.
Supposedly, a number of mids canceled after these balance changes. I guess it wasn’t fun once the fish had the potential to escape the barrel. /rollseyes
about 2 years ago
I can safely say that nobody in my guild (Mids) quit because of the stungard nerf. Now folks did eventually quit because the game got old, yadda yadda, blah. But I personally don’t know anyone who’s quit a game because of a nerf.
about 2 years ago
As much as I’d like to slam him CoH was at least innovative. ED did suck.
The whole nerfing thing is a bit goofy though. Since the Diku days we’ve been taught as players to look for and exploit the designed variances in the game to our advantage. Things like: ‘that mob is weak to fire so use fire attacks’ etc. Further we’ve been taught to learn as much as we can through black box testing of game mechanics and then min\max on those for advantage too.
Nerfs seem to be the game design version of that Carlin bit: “ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster is a maniac?”.
So we’re left with these sanitized games where deviating from the intended\designed solution is likely an exploit that will be punished, where class balance fluctuates wildly to designer whim, and where core mechanics are “fixed” in ways that leave the same taste in your mouth as directors revising their films years later.
about 2 years ago
An obvious point that Monsieur Emmert misses is the time delay for subscriptions taking a hit after a nerf or patch. This is because MMO players grow attached to their characters – which is sort of the whole point – and they’re not going to cancel in time to preserve your company’s subscription metircs. However hard he may try, Emmert can’t just open his sad little filing cabinet, pull out a big manila envelope with “NERFS” scrawled in carpenter’s pencil and flip to that week or month’s subscription metrics to discover anything useful.
Every player who has ever stopped playing an MMO has done so for the same reason: the game stopped entertaining them. The particulars of this phenomenon are more important, and less measurable, than bean counters think they are.
about 2 years ago
I can’t comment much on CoH/CoV because I got terribly bored after level 15 or so.
However, it seems like one should at least try to avoid systems that make nerfs inevitable. In the case of WoW, even if they somehow “get it right” it won’t STAY right because Blizz has no idea how to design the systems to scale together. The entire spell scaling system, CC diminishing returns, various talent retunes–many of their fundamental systems are ad hoc fixes; it’s one layer of retunes on top of another.
about 2 years ago
The “what I delivered” was so ridiculous I actually read it as “what we delivered” at first, until you mocked it and I had to go back and reread it.
about 2 years ago
As far as how active he was at the helm of CoH, my memory of most of Jack’s postings on the COH boards detailed his exploits at the never ending series of comic book conferences he attended. His (evidently unimportant) underlings were always the ones who posted any meaningful items. NCSoft certainly hasn’t seemed to miss Jack, and most of the CoH team left Cryptic with the buyout.
I do have to question Cryptic’s judgment for getting into bed with Marvel after all that ensued with them legally, but specifically with Microsoft, whose death touch in the MMO segment is well documented.
Now that Marvel Universe Online has been recycled into Champions, I still don’t think there are that many people just waiting for a “better” Generic Superhero MMO. A quick read of the Champions site seems to be “find and replace” retreads of CoH stuff anyway – Millennium City instead of Paragon City, yada, yada, yada…
I have a feeling this one never gets launched either.
about 2 years ago
Wow, a lot of hate here. Jack actually mentioned during the talk how he had read all the people on the message forums blaming him for everything that was wrong with CoH and I told him to stop reading f13 so much. I guess I should tell him to stop reading BrokenToys and QT3, too!
Seriously, the guy’s whole talk was an honest and humble self-examination of the mistakes he’d made in CoH (which, despite it being his first MMOG, has been one of top five the most successful subscription-based MMOGs launched since 2005, and like one of the top 15 ever), and all you people can do is rag on him for not being honest and humble enough.
about 2 years ago
I just think of Jack Emmert as Cryptic’s spokesman and assume he’s naturally developed a bit of a ego. Still if you compare his remarks to guys like Jeff Kaplan or John Smedley you can see he still has a way to go before totally pissing off his playerbase.
I also like that he seemed honest about what he thought about RMT and Microtransactions during the Future of MMOs panel. It seems like a lot of MMO developers are trying to push that payment format because it works so well with crappy and cheap to develop games.
about 2 years ago
It seems like Jack Emmert still misses the main reason most people (that I know anyway) quit CoX. It wasn’t lack of end game. It was the slowness of levelling past 25.
Had CoH whacked off the last 10 levels, making max level 40 instead of 50, and sped up the levelling and had max power acquisition by 40, I bet more people would have played longer – at least the altaholics like me would have. I couldn’t seem to get a character much past 30 (and without an endgame, pointless anyway). But my alts didn’t make it much past 20. Too much stick, not enough carrot.
about 2 years ago
The grand irony here is that a lot of the CoH/V player base DO hold him personally responsble for every change they didn’t like. So it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t for Emmert.
I’d also like to point out that the Gama Sutra article appears to be badly written and is all over the shop – the Massively article on the same topic is better put together:
http://www.massively.com/2008/02/22/gdc08-jack-emmert-on-cryptics-success-and-failure/
Which one is more accurate to the talk I don’t know.
about 2 years ago
The Massively article included the questions, which is nice (mine was about “killing your own baby”), but Massively also has unprofessional editors, which I don’t like.