Category Archives: games

Sims 3: Work and happiness

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di090606

Think happy thoughts. Riiight.

Like the rest of us, the Sims have to work to put food on the table. (Of course, if they have the Moocher personality trait, they can eat the foods off other Sims’ tables instead, but what kind of life is that?) So let’s have a look at work and career in the Sims 3.

You can still look in the newspaper for a job, but now you can also simply go to a fitting workplace and ask for a job. The workplaces are now in the neighborhood, and like the rest of the neighborhood you can go there without a load screen. Most likely you would get a taxi, but you could simply run there if you want. In practice, just click on the map and let the Sim decide how to get there. If they have an opening and you are qualified, you can start the next day. Getting an entry-level job is still ridiculously easy compared to real life. But from then on, there are a few changes from the previous incarnation of the game.

In the Sims 2, there were strict criteria for advancement. This is now much fuzzier. For instance, my gender-bent self-Sim obviously wanted a science job, so she got the one at the agricultural research center. When I looked at have a job panel, there was a small smiling face representing her mood and a small neutral face representing her gardening skill. This was because she went to work in a good mood but without any gardening skill. Since the research center specializes in agriculture, their workers are expected to have some experience with soil and plants. If you advance without upgrading the skill, that little face turns increasingly angry and your career climbing eventually grinds to a halt.

I went to the bookstore and bought a cheap introductory book about gardening. Reading this, my Sim gained a level in this skill. (That particular feature is still there, the skill improvement is not seamless. Perhaps in Sims 4? Or perhaps the wish to level up is so fundamental that people prefer it that way. Certainly online games with levels are hugely popular.) Now my job panel had a smiling face for this as well, and my advancement bar filled up faster, moving toward the first promotion. (Around this time I found out that I could simply plant apples, cabbages and other stuff I had bought at the grocery store, and grow my own garden. This way, I can improve my job skill AND grow free food at the same time. It takes some time, but not a lot more than reading the books to gain the same skill.)

After a couple promotions, there showed up an icon for handiness, or mechanical skill. This is also something you can gain either from books or from practice. At first you may get it inadvertently from fixing a broken shower or unclogging the toilet, but soon you can start tinkering on various items in the house. (I strongly recommend starting with the non-electrical ones, even in the game. In the Sim world, electrical equipment is always on – there are no power cords, so I assume Tesla was successful in their timeline in broadcasting electricity. A fascinating story in itself, but not for today.) Tinkering has the benefit that you may invent ways to actually improve the equipment: My Sim now has an unbreakable shower and a self-cleaning toilet! And of course, the skills you gain will come in handy at work.

If you are highly competent, you can come to work in a terrible mood, work half-heartedly and still get promoted eventually. That’s probably not a good idea, though. There are separate reasons why you should keep your Sims in a good mood and fulfill their wishes within reason. We’ll get into that soon, I promise!

But first let me mention another new feature. While you cannot actually follow your Sims into the building and control their work in detail, you can give them general instructions on how to perform their work. If they work hard, the mood will get progressively worse throughout the workday, so you should be careful about this unless they are in a very good mood already. If you spend time at work doing more comfortable things, your mood will stay high but your advancement bar will fill more slowly. You can also spend time socializing with your coworkers, working on an individual project or assisting your boss.

Each of these will have their own effects. For instance, since my self-Sim is a loner, nerding it with the other scientist will lower her mood without improving her work performance. Working on her own will keep her social phobia at bay, but the project may or may not be successful. A charismatic Sim will benefit more from group work. If in doubt, just go with the ordinary setting, keep your skills sharp and go to work happy, and satisfaction is guaranteed. (Unless you are eaten by a carnivorous plant…)

*
Now let us look at mood and happiness. In The Sims 3, you get “moodlets” that last for a certain time. For instance, sleeping till you are fully rested gives a 10 hour moodlet, enough to last you through the workday if you time it right. On the other hand, you may want to get up earlier to make a good meal, which will give you an 8-hour positive moodlet. The moodlets add up, but there are negative moodlets that have the opposite effect. If you get stinky, for instance, it will drag your mood down, not to mention if you go hungry. While the Sims now have a 24 hour grace period before they starve, they will likely be in a terrible mood. (On the bright side, they are able to eat at work, so you can skip breakfast if you don’t need the bonus moodlet.) Fulfilling wishes gives a 6-hour moodlet, so it may be a good idea to try to squeeze in one of those as well in the morning, preferably one that does not take too much time. Like buying something, if they wish for that. Or perhaps better, giving something to charity. It gave my Sim a nice mood boost for 24 hours (although that may work for good Sims and not for evil Sims.)

So having several happy moodlets is good for your work performance, but that is not all. Oh no. If you have enough of them (and no bad ones), you will see your mood bar move into a new level. (It is easy to see since the mood bar is shaped into two sections.) When your Sim is this happy, she will accrue lifetime happiness points. These can always be achieved by fulfilling wants, but if your Sim is super happy, she will add a few points every hour, even in her sleep! And since a pretty environment and good music will give temporary moodlets while they are there, you may want to do your studying in a beautiful park or while listening to music (or preferably both).

These points can eventually be used to upgrade your Sim. Examples of upgrades are a “steel bladder”, for all you guys who complain that the Sims games are about toilet management. (Actually that part is already toned down in Sims 3, but you can eliminate it completely if you really want to.) Or how about learning all skills faster? Or having the boss look the other way when you laze around at work instead of actually working? Throwing better parties, or telling better jokes? The range of upgrades is quite impressive, and I think it is a safe bet there will be more of them in future expansion packs.

To me, the happiness of my Sims is a main goal of playing the game in the first place. (Thus the “good” self-Sim, right?) But for those who reserve their empathy (if any) for the real world, there is this whole game within a game to encourage treating your Sim well. It took me a bit of time to figure out what was going on, but that’s how this game is. The learning curve is not at all steep, but it is fairly long. Even though it works right out of the box, there are surprises in the details. After all, not only the Sims should be happy, but the player too!

Sims 3!

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Sims can now be made fatter than ever before, and the polygon count in their butt is greatly increased so they no longer look angular when you fatten them up. The rest is details.

I have been known to say that The Sims 2 was the best computer game ever made in our sector of the galaxy. I believe that was correct, at the time.  But then came The Sims 3. And it is good.

What I mean is that it is not good in the metaphysical “good vs evil” meaning.  It is a rather value-neutral tool, like its predecessors. But for those of us who have convinced ourselves (if no one else) that we have higher goals in life, it is rather disconcerting to come home from work, pop in the disk and soon after look up to find it is midnight.  Time is arguably our most valuable resource, and this game eats it the way grade school boys eat candy.  That is why I think the game may find a less than favorable judgment.  But that must be weighed against all the people who would have spent that time watching TV, or worse, idly chatting and gossiping. Eating their time would surely be a good thing. So in the end, who knows whether it is good or evil. But it sure is good as opposed to bad.

The Sims 2 sprouted a total of 8 expansion packs that introduced new aspects such as university education, seasons, hobbies and pets.  With Sims 3 we are back to  basics, but the game has picked up some of the greatest successes from those expansions, such as fishing and gardening.  The pets are still absent, and I would be surprised if there won’t be another expansion pack or many, down the road.

From The Sims (1) to Sims 2  there was a major upgrade of the graphics, from small simple sprites to detailed 3D characters.  The change to Sims 3 is much less noticeable.  There are more body shapes – it is now possible to make genuinely fat-looking sims, or muscular sims, not just the old choice between skinny and slightly chubby.  And it is possible to put pretty much any color or pattern on clothes, meaning you only need a different model for each shape, not for each color, as these are user-defined.  Hair too can now be colored directly when you create a sim, rather than by expert “custom content creators” who make pre-defined models.  But the graphics are not overall more realistic than before.  The game world is still a bit cartoonish, probably by choice. It is certainly not like the realism in roleplaying games such as Oblivion or Dark Age of Camelot, which could be easily passed off as actual photographs. The upside is that any computer that could run Sims 2 with a few expansions should also be able to run Sims 3 right out of the box.

Speaking of “right out of the box”, the game comes on a common install DVD for both Windows and Mac. This is still rare and bound to cause great joy among the Mac gamers. I popped the DVD in my laptop with Ubuntu Linux and WINE (a free environment for running well-behaved Windows programs without Windows).  The setup started without a hitch, and ran roughly 95% through before it stopped without a word.  I guess there are still limits to what it will run on, but man, that was close!  Better luck with Sims 4.  Unless someone makes an open-source competitor before that…

The biggest change is neither to the graphics nor the character creator, but to the gameplay.  Oh, it is the same old at the most basic level, the sims still need to eat and sleep and pee with alarming regularity, much like the rest of us.  But whereas the big jump from Sims to Sims2 was the introduction of the life cycle (you must have children because you die), so the new feature is the living neighborhood.  (Or should I say the dying neighborhood, as the non-player sims now also marry, have children, grow old and die, whereas in Sims2 they would stay young forever.)

In order for the “townies” (the characters you don’t play) to live their ordinary life, they must be smarter than they used to be.  This carries over to the sims you control.  They may still win the Darwin award if left to themselves, but it is far from certain.  They now start to get concerned about food 24 hours before they would actually die, and will take steps to feed themselves even if there is something funny to do.  (Some gamers may want to learn from them in that regard…)

The sims’ personalities are completely revamped.  This probably counts as the other big change to the game, besides the living neighborhood.  In the past, all sims had 5 personality sliders:  Sloppy-neat, shy-outgoing, lazy-active, serious-playful and mean-nice. Each of these could vary on a scale from 0 to 10.  For instance my self-sim would be have 0 outgoing points, having very little need for social interaction.  In Sims 3, all this is gone. Instead there are now a few dozen personality traits, of which you have five.  (If you grow your own sims from childhood you start with two for toddlers and add more as they age up.) Some of these are good, some are bad, and some just strange.

For instance, my self-sim would be a Good Unflirty Loner Genius Computer wiz. In fact, this was the personality I gave my first (and so far only) created sim.  And she does indeed behave disturbingly like me. Her goodness is essentially wasted because she has no one around to be good to. Except for the occasional wish to donate money to charity, she could just as well have been evil.  Nobody will know anyway. Or at least that was the case until I finally had the money to buy a cheap computer.  Now she is chatting on the Net pretty much every night. OK, so that is not like me, but then the in-game computer does not have a blog feature, it seems. So let us see if she ever gets to know anyone well enough to do something good for them.  It sure is hard to pull off in real life. Even before Sims 3 ate my day (and much of my night as well).

A game that heals?

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di090529

I’m not talking about my imaginary girlfriend today, but her imaginary sister. Not that it makes much difference, I suppose.

I came home from work and was about to mow a part of the lawn again. I try to do this for a while each day when it is not raining (and rainy days are few here on the south coast of Norway). I do it as exercise as much as I do it for the lawn. So I strapped on the pulse clock and belt, so I can keep track on how hard I work. I try to keep my manual lawn mowing in the range of 120-140 beats per minute, whereas my resting pulse is around 60 (55 on a good day, up to 70 if I have worked hard the day before or if I have a cold.) Well, to my surprise my pulse was much faster than usual. Whether standing, sitting or walking, it was nearly 20 bpm faster than the baseline. That is about as much as it gets without breaking out in actual fever.

Since I had recently walked home from work, it might be some delayed reaction to the walk home or the stress of the workday. I sat down and meditated for about 40 minutes. This had barely any effect at all. So I gave up on the mowing and went online. Soon I was playing City of Heroes, duoing my Fire/Willpower scrapper with the Gravity/Kinetics controller of my imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary younger sister.

After a bit over an hour, I logged off. I checked my pulse again to see if it had grown worse. When it is 15 bpm over baseline, it is usually either because I exercised hard enough yesterday or because I am catching a cold. And this was higher than that again. So I expected a nasty infection, that’s why I checked up again. And the pulse was down to normal levels. Not the very lowest I’ve seen, but normal for a workday.

What’s up with that? Games can be relaxing, but not in the same league as meditation, I dare say. And a fast-paced combat-oriented superhero game is not exactly the most relaxing of the bunch, I suspect.

In the game there are various sources of healing, including the “transfusion” power of kinetics. She used that a few times, though mostly for herself. My character is more robust, and has an innate rapid healing. Not quite Wolverine-level (there is a movie about Wolverine now, right?) but still pretty nifty.

But this should not extend out of the game and into real life, right? I mean, I have been flying since shortly after City of Heroes was released, but gravity has the same grip on me in real life as it had then, 5 years ago. OK, I’ve lost a few pounds, but that’s because I lost the fat on my backside during the Months of Starvation. (If you did not know, men are the opposite of women in this regard. If we lose the fat there, it is almost impossible to get back on. Or perhaps that’s just me. Probably not though.)

There are some things in games that carry over to real life though. Primary emotions like anger or sexual excitement acquired in games can have visible physical effects in real life. (Not that this is why I play CoH, of course. And in any case, both my imaginary girlfriend and her imaginary sister tends toward dressing as Japanese schoolgirls, which are actually not very distracting compared to the skimpy or skin tight uniforms of classic superheroines (complete with gravity-defying breasts of doom). So yeah since hovering is the signature movement mode of Levity Lass, you could theoretically look up under those short schoolgirl skirts and see her light blue panties, but why would you do that with an imaginary character?)

Anyway, I think we can’t credit the in-game healing, except possibly by a slight amount of placebo effect. And even then we would have to factor in all the times one gets wounded over the course of the fight against evil, wouldn’t that too feed back into real life if the health did?

One more explanation I can think of is the social aspect, even if imaginary. Humans are social creatures and in general health is strongly correlated with social involvement. Then again, causality is a two-way street. It could be that sick people have less ability to socialize, because they are, you know, sick. And in any case very few humans make my heart beat slower – the number is down to zero, I would say, these days. Subjectively at least I find it easier to relax alone. That is not to say that I hate humans. Relaxing is not the only goal in life. If it was, I would not be playing CoH in the first place, would I? I would sleep and meditate and wait for my final rest. That is pretty far from my average day, I assure you.

Perhaps it took some time for the meditation to kick in. Or perhaps the body really was fighting some invader, but was already winning by the time I noticed, and the lymphocytes had packed up and gone home later in the evening. What do I know. More experiments are in order! Especially since the experiments involve computer games.

Age of Conan 1 year

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di090523

Sunset or sunrise for Age of Conan?

The Norwegian-made MMORPG Age of Conan is celebrating its first anniversary in Europe today.  For some reason it was released 3 days earlier in the USA.  Perhaps the Americans were used as guinea pigs…  Anyway, the game had one of the smoothest launches in the history of the genre (possibly less than City of Heroes, but better than the current top dog, World of Warcraft.) And then a  few days later, it all went down the drain.

Unfortunately only the first part of the game had been fully implemented and thoroughly tested.  The island where you play the first 20 levels is indeed an amazing masterpiece of storytelling and technology. After that, things started to fall apart, and the high-level areas were buggy and unfinished.  Lots of customers – most of them, I believe – did not renew their subscription after the first month that comes with the game.  The share value of Funcom fell, and the game was more or less written off by many gamers.

Be very careful about leaving a Cimmerian for dead…

Today, the game is earning a nice little surplus for Funcom, and there are new players trickling in by the day. It would seem that many of those who left, simply did not have the computers that could pull such a high-end game. Every month, a number of them get new computers for unrelated reasons. And thanks to Moore’s Law, the capacity of new computers double every 18 months.  If you had a three and a half year old computers last May – and that is not uncommon for casual gamers, especially if they are married – then by now a computer in the same price range is 8 times as powerful.  That makes a big difference with cutting-edge games.

In addition, Funcom has tweaked the game to run more smoothly.  And they have added content at the higher levels and fixed bugs left and right.  This is not exactly unique:  We say that the first year of any massive online game is “paid beta”.  Experienced gamers don’t expect it to be perfect right out of the box.

The game is still evil, though.  Vile sorcery, necromancy, demon summoning, even breasts. And it still splatters blood on the inside of your computer screen occasionally. Rumors have it that the game is less bloody in the German version, I am not sure if that is true.  But you can at least avoid fighting against other players if you want to (and not only in Germany).

In celebration of their anniversary, I opened my account again (it had expired along with my previous credit card when that was renewed for a few more years).  There were, as expected, hours of patches to download, since it is quite a number of months since last I set foot in Hyboria.

Once the patches were installed, I started the game.  I recognized the problem from last time, that my character was almost entirely transparent, only this time so was the terrain, except water.  I don’t remember it being quite that bad the first time.  I did remember however that back then, I had to pretend to change the video settings, even if I changed them back to the original. When I then returned to the game, the picture was fine.  Well, not this time.

I upgraded the DirectX to the March version, probably the last ever for Windows XP.  Still no luck.  I downloaded the latest drivers for my video card.  Still no difference.  I used Google and browsed a few forums, until I saw someone mention that you had to completely erase any trace of earlier video drivers before you installed a new one.  So I did, first uninstalling the last driver and then deleting all the nvidia folders on my hard disk.  I restarted the machine. Amazingly, it has a pretty good screen resolution even without the drivers, and without knowing what video card it has.  I installed the latest driver again, and restarted the machine.  This time the screen remained black. I waited for some minutes, but it did not change.  Then I checked the back of my computer, and yes: For some reason, the video output now went to the port that no monitor was attached to.  Before, it had gone to the other.  (The card has two, although I don’t use more than one.  It can display different pictures to different screens actually, but I prefer to have two computers for my two monitors, thank you.)

Anyway, the problem was now solved.  And the game does run more smoothly on higher resolution than before. Probably because of tweaks to the software, although I suppose the new video driver could be better too.

Right now I have finished playing, and am listening to a Cimmerian dirge that the game plays when not logged in to any of my characters.  It is awesome.  I believe I heard the same song in a valley in the game.  Anyway, I love dirges and lamentations. They rarely fail to cheer me up.  Perhaps there is still a drop of barbarian blood in me?   (Looking back at my younger days, I think that is not a maybe either, but maybe it is still influencing my taste in music, I mean.)  I know the melodies can be bought on iTunes.  (Or perhaps I should pirate it, given that I already bought the game.)  I wonder how my coworkers would react. I have a feeling that perhaps they don’t like wailing as much as I do… It really is beautiful.

I don’t miss the rest of the game much though.  City of Heroes is more my style, not to mention The Sims 2.  And in less than two weeks Sims 3 is upon us.  Believe it or not, I also have other things than games I want to have done while still alive, so… You probably won’t be seeing a lot of this.  I did secure some nifty screenshots though.

Those wacky Asian games…

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di090522

Would I marry this cute elf girl and raise a happy family with pets? Read on to find out.

I came across another cute computer game today. “Luna Online” is one of the new Asian MMORPGs that are free to play but typically sell extra features to do dedicated players. The graphics are less realistic than in western MMORPGs, more similar to anime and usually excessively cute. The games can usually run on older and cheaper hardware than recent western games.

Luna Online looked interesting enough that I almost wanted to try it. Except for the Match Making. Evidently romance is an integral part of the game, with the game matching compatible characters and setting off a “Heart Alarm” when a match shows up, signifying “love at first sight”. This opens the possibility of a “date instance”, a separate area which the dating couple can explore together, with unique loot. (The voices in my head believe the instances are also decorated differently. I hope I shall never find out from experience.) Dates can be rated, and great dates can lead to establishing a family. Other family relations are also possible, like parents and children. Families can get a farm and grow various magical crops, including pets.

I can only assume that in the game’s homeland, this is considered attractive. I doubt it will have the same appeal here. I try to imagine City of Heroes trying to match random heroes, and my mental picture comes up with just static. It is just not done. (Romance certainly happens, particularly on the unofficial roleplaying server, but it is not aided and abetted by the game.) Even Dark Age of Camelot, which had a semi-automatic cleric performing marriages in the Camelot cathedral, left the actual courtship entirely to the roleplayers. I guess (from my anime viewing not least) that people in the Far East are more accepting of arranged relationships still than we are here. It is not like some places in the Middle East where you can basically sell your daughter, of course: You still have to decide in the end. But for those who don’t feel like hunting down a mate for themselves, it is perfectly normal and honorable to leave it either to the families or to highly trained professionals.

It creeps me out, though. Of course, romance creeps me out in Real Life as well, but even so. I rather not have my games try to marry me off, thank you. At least there ought to be romance-free zones or a no-romance flag…

Not real life at all

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I spent some time using City of Heroes to create pictures for Kat. She will be making a cover picture for one of my stories, and I am pretty optimistic about this one. It should fit her style, and she has had more practice since “The Boy, the Girl and the Werecat”. Which wasn’t bad either, since it fit the style and summed up the story pretty well without serious spoilage.

kurtcover

Well, I think it is cute, but then again I know the characters.  It isn’t dramatic, though, and the next will be somewhat more of that.

The story is a spinoff from my Lightwielder series, and there will eventually be Lightwielding.  The best way I have found to illustrate this is with the Peacebringer power effects from City of Heroes.

2009-05-18 23:23:56

A practicing Lightwielder will always be “leaking” some light, although at first it is no more than a glow.

2009-05-18 23:27:10

Serious Lightwielding going on.

2009-05-18 23:28:41

I wonder what Kat will make out of these.

2009-05-18 23:44:53

Non-aggressive aura.  Lightwielders don’t have destructive magic, unlike Peacebringers (ironically,  given their respective names).  Anyway, the idea is to have a picture in the style of Japanese game covers, similar to manga but generally more “chibi” (small, childish).  It will take some time before it’s finished, of course, but hopefully you will see the results sooner or later.

CoH: My first story (continued)

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So I continued to work on my first Mission Architect story in City of Heroes. I ended up using a scrapper for my third mission instead of the mastermind.  I still consider adding a mastermind later, and possibly a controller. For now, the story is published with these three missions:

-Assist the tanker, levels 1-14

-Assist the defender, levels 20-29(?)

-Assist the scrapper, levels 25-34.

Apart from freeing the heroes, you help them complete their missions, which vary slightly but contain at least one boss (but no elite bosses or archvillains). If one or more of the missions is outside your current level, you will be set to the nearest possible level.  You will not get new powers if you play at a higher level, but your current powers will work at that level.  (This is always the case with Architect missions, not just mine.)

I tested it after publishing, with my level 8 mastermind.  I made him spesifically to level up on Architect content, since I hate the evil missions in City of Villains. But I have not played much lately, so he is still a lowbie.  He did gain a level from testing this story arc a couple times though.  (I did some pure testing before I published it, which gives badges but not experience points, influence or tickets.) After it was published, it gave all those things, but not a whole lot since it is not very difficult.  In addition to giving villains a wholesome classic heroic story, I also wanted it to be useful for newbies who are still not very good with the game, and for archetypes and power combinations that start out weak and may have problems soloing a normal mission. (I remember having that problem when I was new myself, and made a promise to myself to help others when I got the chance.)

I consider making another story arc that is even more designed to help weak characters, but this is it for now.

CoH Architect: Making my first story

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2009-05-04 22:16:30

Me and Otaku Offense, screenshot from testing my first Mission Architect story.

Today I made my first story arch in City of Heroes.  As recently as before Easter, only the developers from NCSoft could make stories for the game.  Now even I can do it, and trust me, this is not the kind of creativity I have a natural talent for. I really feel like a newbie at this, and fellow players would probably notice that newbieness if they played the story I have made.  Then again, give me one more day to finish it and it will look pretty good.

The tools are amazingly easy to use.  I did miss out on some details because I did not scroll far enough down, but  the program reminded me if it was important, and took me to the place where there was missing information.  Creating new enemies and allies is as easy as making a new character in the game proper, which is famously easy and fun and a main attraction of the game.  (Probably also a main reason why a large number of the players are women in real life, or at least on LiveJournal.)

It is also possible to build some randomness into the story arc, such as a randomly chosen abandoned warehouse among several different possible, or a randomly chosen boss to fight among several possible. On the other hand, you can put in a lot of detail such as things the allies and enemies say.

I made a story arc in which you are sent to help (computer controlled) heroes who got captured while doing a normal hero mission, fighting a house full of villains.  They are held capture inside the house, and once you have freed them, they will assist you with clearing out the baddies.  (Story-wise it is actually their mission and you are assisting them.) I made this story for people who have not made their heroes good at playing alone, but who for some reason may have problems getting a team.  Or for newbies who suck but will improve with time.

The first mission is to help a tanker (heroes who can take a lot of damage without getting defeated).  The creatively named Tankman Man has a bright red, white and blue uniform and a vacant grin on his face, but he can take almost unlimited amounts of attacks without buckling.  He is also excessively agrressive, running ahead and attacking anything in sight.  After the mission is over, he takes all the credit (but you still get your tickets so who cares). The mission is very low level, but this does not really matter much since you automatically get translated to the correct level.

The second mission is to help a kinetic defender, Otaku Offender. She is dressed like a Japanese schoolgirl (see picture) and has an impressive array of powers to power up her teammates.  (Or teammate, if you play alone.) She also has a few attacks, but will not hare off on her own, staying near you and assisting you instead. This mission is in the level 20-30 range, or around the middle of the career.  (50 is the highest level.)

I plan to have a third mission, on an even higher level, featuring a mastermind (villain archetype) doing a heroic mission.  But perhaps I will publish it with just the two missions first and see how it works in terms of rewards before I complete it.

Or perhaps I suddenly think of something else I would rather do, and wander off.

City of Heroes Architect tickets

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So this day I found out something new.  I haven’t held the Architect missions (user-made) in high regard because you only get tickets, not recipes and salvage and enhancements.  But then I got the message that I could not get more tickets because my inventory was full.  It turned out I had 9999 tickets after a couple levels.  I went to the ticket person elsewhere in the AE building, and it turned out I could use it to buy… recipe, salvage and enhancement.  Actually I got a lot of stuff, more than I could have gotten the usual way. That may be because I had been on farming teams for a couple levels though.  I thought they only farmed experience and influence points, but evidently they make lots of tickets too. I never noticed.

City of Heroes night

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2009-05-02 20:23:34

Serenity in City of Heroes.  Crimson Star Fighter enjoys the beautiful wilderness landscape.  (Never mind the group of shambling zombies at the foot of the hill behind him, and the Nazi werewolves you can’t see in front of him.)

Yesterday and today I played City of Heroes for some hours.  This game is the hobby that has suffered the most from my adventures into brainwave entrainment this spring.  Sims 2 has continued much like before, except that I have switched to a Sim neighborhood that requires less attention.  CoH, however, has gotten very little me time, despite the awesome new free expansion I wrote about.

Perhaps the real reason is different:  The peaceful everyday life of my Sims goes better with the serenity of meditation than the excitement, danger and violence simulated by the superhero game. As I grow older, it is natural to wonder why setting bullies on fire remains one of my greatest joys.

In any case, I have spent some hours in CoH again.  My return to the game was partly caused by reading that the prices of invention salvage were ridiculously high.  People have been leveling so quickly in the new Architect missions, they were desperate to get enhancements suitable for their higher level.  I rushed to meet the increased demand with my supply, but the prices soon started to drop. Clearly others have thought the same way. I also saw (and was invited to) several teams doing classic missions (not user-made), so the death of the classic content is clearly exaggerated.

This is not to say that  AE (the Architect building) is not packed, especially in the most populated servers, especially in the evening and night American time, and especially in Atlas Park (the most popular newbie zone).  A good number of the people there are probably new players drawn in by the new feature, or people who have been away from the game for a while.  The broadcast channel is full of people looking for AE teams at those times and places, mostly farm teams but some specifically non-farm.  By farming we don’t mean raising livestock and pulling weeds, but rather doing missions repeatedly for profit (experience points, influence and tickets) rather than for their story content.  This is a long-standing practice in all massive online roleplaying games, but has become even more profitable with some of the user-made missions.

One nice little feature of the new AE mission system was one I discovered by accident when my game crashed. (I was lazy and tried to play with Vista.  Needless to say I rebooted to Linux after the first and only crash of the night.) I was feeling pretty bad about the crash because I had failed to memorize or write down the name of my team leader so I could call him in-game when I reconnected.  But to my delight, I came back into the game and was still a member of the team!  This also happens in task forces, long rows of missions that are performed by a fixed team that may sometimes stay together for days, logging off and meeting again.  But in task forces, you cannot invite new members once the chain of missions has started.  In Architect missions you can.  (Incidentally, this also makes it easier to kick parasites off the team, since you can replace them easily with more motivated players. I saw this in practice as well, although I was not the target of that.)