Posts Tagged City of Heroes
City of Heroes: Going Rouge [sic]
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related on May 14th, 2009
C’mon, someone had to. If I had a nickel for the number of times I’ve seen ‘Rogue’ misspelled as ‘Rouge’ on the internet, well, I’d probably be living in the US already where having a lot of nickels actually means something.
The first (or second) paid expansion for City of Heroes was haphazardly announced this week, which might have been some email software’s fault, or a cunning plan to fail to attempt to get buzz. Either way, er… mission accomplished?
It was interesting timing, regardless, with Champions Online spinning up the rumour mill (“We might end up on PS3! We might have microtransactions! We might have cake, and eat it too!”) and NCNC Paragon Studios trying to reverse their way out of the dead-end they seem to have ended up in after cracking down on Mission Architect farmers a little too hard. (Hey, I’ve got no problem with the policy, but from a community point of view, it was a classic case of taking a dump where you eat. Or gnawing on the hand that feeds you. Choose your metaphor.)
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City of Heroes sketchbooks! Signed! Bid! Now!
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others, Pimpin' on May 13th, 2009
Last year we (as in, the Creative Concepts team within NCsoft Europe headed by me) put together a limited edition City of Heroes Sketchbook, and very happy I was about it too, as you can tell from this picture taken with the first one.
Anyway, while I know many of you who attended cons we were at (particularly Bristol ‘08) probably already have a sketchbook, not many of you will have it signed by the artists whose work is inside the covers!
Well, now’s your chance to own one of ten sketchbooks that have been defaced by artists like Dave Gibbons, Doug Braithwaite, Mark Buckingham, Andie Tong, Phil Winslade, Bryan Talbot and many more! Oh also there are pictures.
All you have to do is bid on this charity auction, with all proceeds as ever going to EveryChild!
Seriously folks, this thing is lovely, with loads of sketches inside depicting the well-known signature characters from City of Heroes, including Statesman, Back Alley Brawler, Ms Liberty, Sister Psyche, Lord Recluse, Ghost Widow and more. If you don’t believe me, click the image on the right to see some thumbnails of the imagery inside.
Considering the sketchbook was only available at a few UK conventions last year, and there’s only nine of the signed ones in existence, if you’re any kind of fan of City of Heroes you should really go make a bid! It’s for charity, after all.
Stay tuned for more hot auction items including original art from the sketchbook!
Methods and madness
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related on March 20th, 2009
Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.
Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.
I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control.
That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.
If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.
Bye-bye, Lighthouse
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related on November 17th, 2008
This was a surprise. Looks like it took place end of last week, but with my ear very much not pressed to the ground regarding these things, it’s no surprise Massively was the first I heard about it. (Also shows how much of a WoW-obsessed press we have when this took days to surface; everyone’s busy reporting the most intimate of details from the frozen north.)
Straight off, I’d have to say it’s a shame; just because it’s always a shame when someone moves on from a job that they most probably loved and enjoyed, because of internal pressure or because of a mistake they might have been able to weather. You can probably sense my ambivalence here though, and that’s simply because I didn’t know Alex (AKA Lighthouse) as well as others did. (Not to be confused with Alex AKA GhostRaptor, EU Community Team Lead, by the way.)
I did meet Alex once, a good while ago when he made a quick visit to the Brighton office to get to the know the EU team, just as he was starting in the job. He seemed enthusiastic and excited about what he was doing, and the fact that he lasted two years means he must have liked it. That he’s moved on at this point doesn’t necessarily mean he was pushed, or that he wasn’t valued, but I can’t really comment as I don’t know the situation.
I do know, however, how much developers can sometimes be swayed by an angry community, and how sometimes (just sometimes, and this may not be one of those times) that can backfire on the community managers. Remember people (and I’m talking to devs and players here) community guys aren’t always there to give you good news; sometimes they’ve got to give you the bad. Even if you don’t want to hear it.
Anyway. I’m not going to soapbox. I hope Alex lands on his feet somewhere, and soon.
Re-learning to love City of Heroes
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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