Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 11:48 pm Post subject: Roleplaying in City of Heroes is dead?
I recently played City of Heroes, my character was a female Controller (Illusion/Force) . She was a pixie who'd been taken from the Misty Wood and experimented on by scientists with reptile DNA, so natually she was 8 feet tall with scales and pixie ears, and a ravenous appetite to eat anyone and everything in sight. "Yummy!"
I never went out of character, sad thing is no one else was ever in character. In the hundreds of hours I played I only ever ran into one other person who roleplayed! Are gamers today losing the ability to roleplay in MMO's, or is my experience just the exception?
Last edited by SuperHiro on Fri Apr 27, 2007 4:34 pm; edited 1 time in total
I'm don't know. I'm following the development of Lord of the Rings Online. It will be the first MMO I've ever played. It seems like RPing will be possible and fun, especially in Middle Earth, but many people who've played MMOs have shared their fear of the 1337 speakers and powergamers. I was thinking of picking up COH the other day, but since it's been out so long, my guess is that there isn't any point in starting now.
The biggest problem with COH, besides no roleplaying is no user economy. I also play Ultima Online and have since 1996, and most anything worth buying is purchased from another user's vendor. There are players in COH who give out millions of influence without batting an eye, because they're purchased all the enhancements they need, all the base add-ons they want, and have nothing left to spend it on.
Well, I don't play MMORPGs because I'd get obsessive about them (like I do with Superhiro.org and mega scratch tickets) but here's what I've noted from the live-action paintball roleplaying I do:
About 10% of paintballers will try to play the characters they receive at an event. Most people will receive ordinary characters, but most never use their characters' names because the event is only 24 hours long and they'll just receive a different character at the next event.
People who get into their characters will often dress up but they won't change their speech patterns unless they're really serious.
In addition to characters, there are also special roles (heavy weapons, medic, demolition, etc.) About a third of the people assigned these roles don't play them because they never organize sufficiently well enough during the game.
I was a big Everquest player in the day. when it first came out for a few years. have up to the expantion of Shadows of Luclin..
I played in my prime almost 8 hours a day when I was laid off for the winter. it was crazy and scary. I didn't really roll play much there was a static server for those who where really into rollplaying. I mostly played with my mom when she was also on line.. it was fun.. I stopped because I couldn't play as much any more, maybe a total of 10 hours a week at the most. so paying for it was not feesable and now a days everyone is just in it to powerplay themselves. it started to suck. you would see a LVL 3 player wearing LVL 47 stuff and the next time you saw them they where like at lvl 30.. that pissed me off.
it was hard to find groups once you got to a higher level and when you did, you couldn't play anymore because you had to leave.. my highest character was stuck at LVL 30 something for like ever she was a human female Monk.. I miss her RIP Achika Masaki.
To get into a good role playing situation in any MMORPG, you need to plan ahead. First, choose your game well. A MMORPG that suits itself to role playing has a lot of avatar customization, and preferably a robust crafting sphere. Crafting is a great deal more important to a robust role playing community.
The reason you need to plan ahead is because the roleplayers choose the unofficial roleplaying server as well as the role playing "rules" well before the game comes out. It will usually be something like the second listed Eastern and Western servers. Then that server becomes one of the most populated server and can become closed to new players.
Joining guilds before the game comes out allows you to create your back story on the guild forums, always have a group to role play with and infrastructure towards whatever part of the game you like least. For instance if you like to craft, others will support you with combat, if you like combat, others will support you with crafting.
There has been a shift in MMORPGs recently with the overwhelming success of World of Warcraft with the tendency towards trying to capture the casual gamer. This works against the role player as the crafting system is one of the first things to go. If Lord of The Rings Online is anything like Dungeons and Dragons Online, expect it to be detrimental to some aspects of role playing but a boon to small group role playing because of the nature of its design.
On the other hand, if the peak of your role playing memory was Everquest, the game you need to look at is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. This is a more serious game which is a bit on the hard side but which has a Combat Sphere, a Crafting Sphere, and a Diplomacy Sphere. It is currently in Beta. It not only has mounts, it has flying mounts. It has no instanced dungeons, so like Everquest, you will have great masses of people coming together for rare and random outdoor spawns.
I have played MMORPGs for years but have not played anything for the last year. It tends to take up a lot of my time but so do a lot of real world things and so I decided a while ago to not even start getting involved in the games anymore. I do keep up some since the friends I made online still play them and I play other games with them (Battlefield 2, etc.).
Pick your guild first and you will have a happy experience.
If you are interested in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, check out Silky Venom
I was fortunate enough to have been in the early beta for City of Heroes, and have been playing off and on since. And I can honestly say I've been in the company of some great RPers. But being "massive," as it is, the level of immersion is controlled in part by the behaviors of the players, and that can't be controlled.
There were never any official RP servers, but the Virtue server was chosen by those on the Beta boards to be the one where the RPers would gather. And in the early days, nobody didn't RP. The game wasn't about stats and items. It was about being a superhero. And you felt that. At first.
What really led to the downfall of CoH was, of course, World of Warcraft. A beautiful game with more mass appeal, particularly to the powergamers. There is a lot of potential for RP there, but it's very rarely seen. Everyone left CoH because all of their friends were on WoW.
CoV revived things a bit, but the roleplaying aspect is all but gone. I'm holding out hope for a CoH 2--one which can incorporate those things that made WoW so successful.
But the best online roleplaying experience I've had has to be Neverwinter Nights. A server containing a persistent world called "Narfell" was the BEST place for an avid roleplayer to be. It only supported 60 players to be online at once, and with more than 300 regular players, you often had to wait to log on. That aside, though, it was roleplayers paradise. There were 3-5 DMs online at any time to set up custom, on-the-fly scenarios, drop in some surprises, and, most importantly, hand out roleplaying XP.
I'd really like to see this come back, now that NWN 2 is out (a fine game, I might add.)
I Loved Legend Of Mir but i had to quit as it clamed The Love of my life my home my job and now i live with the floks again (Cant say job tbh but i think so and was renting with my X)
Ps She has agred to gon on a date with me on sat its now 5 months later so i hope i can show her the changes in me
PPs sorry about that i cant help it im crazy about her and miss her sooooooooooo
I had some really great times RPing in CoH with Global Heroics on Triumph. It was rare for anyone to be OOC for very long, and even when they went OOC they didn't really break character much.
You've just got to find a good Supergroup full of RPers, that's all.
Never RP'd myself but Virtue was generally considered the RP server.. I was mostly on Victory... LOVED that game but the Dev team beat me senseless with sweeping changes so frequently. Played a bunch until I5 then slowly as my SG got frustrated and crumbled,, not even COV could save us. RL friends got me into WoW finally last summer and only popped my head in to COH a few times... Sad really, So much more community and IMHO a better combat system than WoW.
I too used to play COH and are grand master SuperHiro is right Role playing is dead every time i tried to roleplay i felt alone and there is no economy once your 50 you just give out your money. That is why i switched to more pvp based games..=)
Well SH, I've been on quite a few MMORPG sites myself.. I actually was one of the first folks to help get Realms of Despair up and running back in 1993!
I've played CoH, and WoW, and it, like any online gaming experience, is going to have those who are in for the RP, and those that are just there to powergame, and do the nice hack 'n' slash..
I have some friends who have been playing WoW for so long, that when someone comes in to the game that they know, they'll slap high-end equipment on the newbie, take them out, and powerlevel the new character without letting the person get the feel of combat or tactics at all.. It's sad, but it does happen.
I'd have to say that in order to find the RP you're looking for, you're going to be needing to find online friends with the same interests, and get them all to join with you in making an RP group. Once you have that established, there will be others who will try to join in, as they'll see something that they don't have. Once that happens, then you have the luxury of being able to set rules and boundaries of what is and is not acceptible behavior in your online experience. Granted, you'll still have to deal with some non-RP outside influences, but for the most part, you'll be able to define at least your own little corner of the CoH world!
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