As I’ve said many times in many an interview and to many people in person, City of Heroes was the reason I joined NCsoft.

In April or May 2004, I can’t recall, I was playing the game (on the US servers, natch) and enjoying it so much that I was considering starting a fansite about it, based around a twinned blog – one character based, one player based. A very good friend of mine said to me: “Instead of making all that effort for nothing, why not go and work for them instead?”

The rest is history. (Funny thing is, I never did get around to that blog idea.)

While I worked for NCsoft I never stopped playing City of Heroes (Well – not altogether), but of course I was privy to a lot of behind the scenes information. Which meant often, very little came as a complete and total surprise. (And if it did, it was often not a good surprise.)

Which is why it’s great, now, to start to look at the game from a genuine, uninformed player’s perspective again. Today the EU site is hosting a Developer Diary focusing on the Day Jobs system from Issue 13, and it makes for a very interesting read.

Secret identities are part and parcel of superheroic lore, and should ideally have been in City of Heroes from day one; the old excuse Jack Emmert would give that ‘the player is the secret identity’ never really worked for me, even when I was saying it myself to players! However, I know how hard a workable secret identity system would be to make (I’ve seen design documents for other superhero MMOs that failed to bring it to life – at least for me), so it’s good to see NCNC moving towards (perhaps) an ultimate goal by introducing Day Jobs.

I’m not going to recap what Day Jobs are – you can read the article too – but the simple hook for these is this: offline character progression and bonuses. Simply put, from Issue 13 when you logoff City of Heroes you’ll get bonus, both in terms of experience earned, and various other buffs next time you log on. In other words, it’s a great incentive to come on back.

It’s not the newest idea in the world (EVE Online was doing offline character progression a long time ago, and I believe WoW gives ‘rest bonuses’ depending on where you logout) but still, it’s great to see it in my favourite MMO.

And with new costume pieces that can make a character look like an English Lord, who wouldn’t want to start playing again?