A plea for a Foundry

koendians · September 2012

Greetings,

I am yet another refugee from CoH, and while I'm among those fighting to save CoH, I'm also realistic enough to recognize that saving it is a long shot. So, I decided to check out what others have called 'competition' - I wonder if such a term is truly applicable, since from what I've read the people who made CO and the people who made CoH include some common names.

I've now given CO a short whirl, and I suspect myself and my best friend will be joining the community shortly. From what I've seen, as far as most of the features are concerned, CO and CoH appear to be largely equivalent; it's difficult to say for certain which one is better and which is worse (CoH certainly seems more developed, with more factions, but that may be that I'm not yet acquainted enough with what CO has to offer. CO certainly has the same kinds of factions as CoH has, again hardly surprising given who made it).

Except for one feature, one, all-important feature. CoH has a feature called the Mission Architect, which gives players the ability to make their own missions, tell their own stories. This adds an infinity to the replay value and the fun value of CoH that CO simply lacks. Because of this, I regard CoH as automatically superior to any other super-hero-themed MMO, even if the other is better in all other respects - which honestly CO may be.

The solution exists: while CoH has Architect, some of Perfect World's MMOs, among them Neverwinter Online and Star Trek Online, have the Foundry. Given the trends, I don't doubt that adding a Foundry to CO is on your to-do list, but I would like to make it higher on the to-do list than lower, because in all likelihood the day will soon come when we will so very desperately need it.

The slogan of those still fighting to save CoH is "We're Heroes. It's what we do." We're going to try. With a miracle, we may even succeed. But if it turns out that we can't save Paragon City, give us what we need to do the next best thing. Give us the tools we need to build a new Paragon, here, in Millennium.

mistformsquirrel · September 2012

I wholeheartedly agree, as both a longtime CO player and longer-still COH player, not to mention Mission Architect developer.

< . .>

championshewolf · September 2012

The Foundry won't make its way to Champs until after Neverwinter and when it comes that time there will have to be some retagging and reprogramming done on Champs. Not saying it won't happen, but as the system is still being worked on at full steam over in Neverwinter and the work that would have to be done, at the earliest we will probably see the Foundry in CO will possibly middle of next year, if not later.

crypticbuxom · September 2012

"Champions is ready for it. Its just that the Foundry isn't ready for Champions." Or something like that. The longer it takes to make it work the better it will be when it makes its way in. Give it half a year after Neverwinter comes out.

unangbangkay · September 2012

crypticbuxom wrote: »

"Champions is ready for it. Its just that the Foundry isn't ready for Champions." Or something like that. The longer it takes to make it work the better it will be when it makes its way in. Give it half a year after Neverwinter comes out.

This makes some sense. Champs has tons more assets and customization than STO, including big, traditional MMO-style zones (unlike STO's heavy instancing) and other considerations. There's simply a lot to manage and that's not even including of things covered by microtransactions, esp. costume pieces, freeforms and archetypes. It would be kind of sucky if player-created Foundry missions were limited by whatever the player had paid for.

That said, opening up foundry missions would provide players with another reason to pay for stuff...

canadascott · September 2012

It's at the top of my "want" list, followed by a Nemesis system revamp. Here's a tantalizing glimpse at its current development for Neverwinter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pn7iU4EwTc

lafury001200 · September 2012

koendians wrote: »

Greetings,

I am yet another refugee from CoH, and while I'm among those fighting to save CoH, I'm also realistic enough to recognize that saving it is a long shot. So, I decided to check out what others have called 'competition' - I wonder if such a term is truly applicable, since from what I've read the people who made CO and the people who made CoH include some common names.

I've now given CO a short whirl, and I suspect myself and my best friend will be joining the community shortly. From what I've seen, as far as most of the features are concerned, CO and CoH appear to be largely equivalent; it's difficult to say for certain which one is better and which is worse (CoH certainly seems more developed, with more factions, but that may be that I'm not yet acquainted enough with what CO has to offer. CO certainly has the same kinds of factions as CoH has, again hardly surprising given who made it).

Except for one feature, one, all-important feature. CoH has a feature called the Mission Architect, which gives players the ability to make their own missions, tell their own stories. This adds an infinity to the replay value and the fun value of CoH that CO simply lacks. Because of this, I regard CoH as automatically superior to any other super-hero-themed MMO, even if the other is better in all other respects - which honestly CO may be.

The solution exists: while CoH has Architect, some of Perfect World's MMOs, among them Neverwinter Online and Star Trek Online, have the Foundry. Given the trends, I don't doubt that adding a Foundry to CO is on your to-do list, but I would like to make it higher on the to-do list than lower, because in all likelihood the day will soon come when we will so very desperately need it.

The slogan of those still fighting to save CoH is "We're Heroes. It's what we do." We're going to try. With a miracle, we may even succeed. But if it turns out that we can't save Paragon City, give us what we need to do the next best thing. Give us the tools we need to build a new Paragon, here, in Millennium.

The community here is different. Those who remember that the foundry was offered as a possibility remained hopeful for some time. The trolls insisted that despite official dev communication regarding it's eventual inclusion into CO the foundry had never been mentioned. Welcome to CO.

koendians · September 2012

"Champions is ready for it. Its just that the Foundry isn't ready for Champions." Or something like that. The longer it takes to make it work the better it will be when it makes its way in. Give it half a year after Neverwinter comes out.

Mission Architect was, what, issue #17? How long did CoH have to wait before that came out? I'll admit to being fairly new even to CoH (which, if anything, makes its probable disappearance even more saddening). I guess I should be used to waiting. Good heroes are.

This makes some sense. Champs has tons more assets and customization than STO, including big, traditional MMO-style zones (unlike STO's heavy instancing) and other considerations. There's simply a lot to manage and that's not even including of things covered by microtransactions, esp. costume pieces, freeforms and archetypes. It would be kind of sucky if player-created Foundry missions were limited by whatever the player had paid for.

Mission Architect is entirely limited to instanced missions. Just releasing another MA would be great, but if they can make it do the multiplayer zones, too, that would be fantastic!

That said, opening up foundry missions would provide players with another reason to pay for stuff...

MA is the reason why I got a VIP subscription to CoH.

I wholeheartedly agree, as both a longtime CO player and longer-still COH player, not to mention Mission Architect developer.

Cool! I knew people like you would be here - pleased to meet you. Maybe PWI should hire you!

bluedarky · September 2012

koendians wrote: »

Mission Architect was, what, issue #17? How long did CoH have to wait before that came out? I'll admit to being fairly new even to CoH (which, if anything, makes its probable disappearance even more saddening). I guess I should be used to waiting. Good heroes are.

MA came out Issue 14, it was intended for I13 but pushed back as they felt it wasn't ready for launch in I13.

royalflvsh · September 2012

/signed!

More missions/content would result in more players and more money for Perfect World. I hope they get smart and bring the Foundry to CO. It's the one reliable way to expand this game successfully.

Thanks, CoH players, and welcome.

blakewood · September 2012

Considering that CO is a pen and paper game and this is just an online version of that game. It makes sense to let CO have its own foundry, since part of any pen and paper game is creating your own scenarios. I'm also drawn towards games that allow players to do what they want. To elaborate I was drawn to COH/COV/COR due to the character customization, and mission architect. It was something I wanted to play for along time, so when City of x went free to play I naturally jumped on it. Unfortunately they had locked away the mission architect for paying players use only. This basically turned me off to the game. I'm also not a star trek fan, but because star trek has a foundry which allows for user created content. I have sort of been tempted to join the game even, if the only thing I do is create content for the game and never actually touch the actual game. A CO version of the foundry would basically place me in the kid in a candy store situation, and that's something I would actually welcome.

thetruthurts · September 2012

koendians wrote: »

(CoH certainly seems more developed, with more factions, but that may be that I'm not yet acquainted enough with what CO has to offer.

Or just maybe its the fact that COH is 6 years old and CO is only 3? You can hardly expect CO to be as "developed" as a game twice as old. But as far as the foundry goes, I definitely support it being added.

zahinder · September 2012

I have frequently mentioned that if Foundry ever comes to CO, I'll drop the cash for a lifetime account.

I played CoH for many months ENTIRELY because of my love for Mission Architect and some of the amazing fun stories there (and some of my efforts!)

Though I am now convinced the key is that Foundry rewards have to be minimal or extremely limited to prevent the farming issue. Farming pretty much eviscerated Mission Architect -- most resources Paragon spent on MA ended up removing features to combat farming, rather than adding new flexibility.

I think the only productive way to have a Foundry that gives people freedom to tell really interesting stories without their missions being out of date constantly is to remove the incentive to farm.

People keep claiming that nobody would play something with no rewards, but I think legions of roleplayers and level 40 folks would disagree.

royalflvsh · September 2012

zahinder wrote: »

People keep claiming that nobody would play something with no rewards, but I think legions of roleplayers and level 40 folks would disagree.

Completely agree. The Foundry is the answer to the lack of endgame content.

canadascott · September 2012

3 vs. 8 years, actually. I think the most important factor was the state of MMOs at the time of launch. Champions Online launched when there were many competitors in the marketplace and it had to share its customer base, so it became a niche game that the dev house couldn't support to develop in the same way as City of Heroes, which launched before WoW, didn't have anything close to the competition CO faced at launch and made enough money that devs could afford to quickly add a lot of new zones to the game.

The state of the marketplace was also more forgiving about respective mission design and reuse of environments than they are currently, so it was cheaper for CoX to add zones and missions. When devs need to be more detailed and varied, it slows down development time. CoH launched with a much bigger game than CO, and added at least 5 new zones over the course of the first two years (as opposed to 1 for CO). CO had more varied environments, and the speed of travel powers made them feel considerably smaller than CoH. I would have love to have seen CO get half of CoH's pre-CoV development, but in the market that CO was produced in, it hasn't been fiscally feasible, (despite the devs' best intentions and plans).

itsbrou · September 2012

The appearance of Foundry in CO would bolster the demo_record scene as well.

Consider the conveniences it would afford to people who wanted control over entity positions, animations, and costumes, but don't want to mess with the finicky .demo markup language.

koendians · September 2012

As I said, if we must wait, then we must wait.

I will say this, however: I subscribed to VIP membership in CoH solely to use Architect. I suspect I will do something similar for CO when the foundry becomes available, and I'm willing to bet that I will not be alone in doing so.

yogid0nnie · September 2012

/signed foundry yes

canadascott · September 2012

Bumping to make sure game content threads aren't knocked off the front page.

canadascott · September 2012

Another bump, unfortunately, is needed. Sorry folks.

commanderkassy · September 2012

Reported for post farming.

sockmunkey · September 2012

Take a look at the second page. We got nuked by a spammer. Thundrax as just pushing all the revelvnt posts up above that muck.

He probably could of been clearer, but he really was helping.

commanderkassy · September 2012

Don't care. Spamming doesn't fix spamming. Let the mods take care of it.

sockmunkey · September 2012

Sometimes we have to be a little proactive here. We only have 3 mods. Two volunteer unpaid community mods and they don't even have special forum tags to identify them. And Trailturtle.

We are not well staffed, even less so on the weekend. It could be hours, unfortunately, before this gets fixed.

fantasycharacter · September 2012

Two bumps isn't working, you need to bump harder!

koendians · September 2012

Hmmm....

With all the spamming, how confident can I be that the officials (I guess that would mean forum moderators, ideally the developers) have seen this post?

Please note to mods and devs: I am prepared to wait patiently for this feature, but I just want to make sure that it's on your minds. This is the sort of thing that I buy lifetime subscriptions for, and I doubt that I'm alone!

logandarklighter · September 2012

I too would consider a move to lifetime sub if we got the foundry. Count me in on that.

thehendrake · September 2012

A foundry would be awesome, and if it could somehow be worked in with a Supergroup Base builder option, that would be even better. A Base system for our SG would get me to shell out immediately for a lifetime sub. And yes, I'm a recent CoH transplant who is not looking forward to a few thousand hours of base building work to disappear into the ether.

kelplankton · September 2012

The Foundry would be absolutely fantastic. Especially if it's compatible with the Nemesis system. Being able to pull players' Nemesis into custom content would be like, custom content upon custom content, it would be crazy and really cool.

We really need more Nemesis stuff, so, that would kind of be the best thing to have.

thetruthurts · September 2012

kelplankton wrote: »

The Foundry would be absolutely fantastic. Especially if it's compatible with the Nemesis system. Being able to pull players' Nemesis into custom content would be like, custom content upon custom content, it would be crazy and really cool.

We really need more Nemesis stuff, so, that would kind of be the best thing to have.

There is a precedent for this within the existing foundry mechanics. Currently when there is a dialog pop up, you choose the costume for the NPC, and one of the choices is the player's bridge officers(which are different for every player). So whoever is playing the mission sees their own bridge officer in the pop up.

While that is only a pop up box, it at least shows that the system can pull character specific costumes for each player. So hopefully something like you just mentioned would be possible.

ussnighthawk · September 2012

The Foundry is probably the only reason I bother to jump on STO every few months. Some of those missions are 100x better than the official content, and really do capture the feel of Star Trek. With some of those same players playing here, plus the CoH players coming over that made arcs in AE, and I'm sure CO's got more than a few good writers around here (especially since it's based on the Champions PnP), I have no doubt a Foundry system in CO would be a great source of mission/story content.

kelplankton · September 2012

On that note, I wonder how many people would recreate their tabletop campaign stuff in Foundry format? That might be cool to see, though not necessarily something you could directly translate. But I'm sure there's plenty of people who've had adventures they'd love to share with others.

zahinder · September 2012

On CoH, there was a great set of Fairy Tale missions (Beauty and the Beast, an Ice Queen sleeping beauty, I think, and a few others). Great stuff.

I had a misison arc that was fantasy themed, with the player going through dark dungeons filled with weird animate plants, fungi, trolls, goblins, etc. and then having big battles on the surface with the minions of Koschei the undying. Lots of fun.

I was in the midst of working on a Gulliver's Travels mission arc (with those huge Shard guys as Brobdignagians and gears as Liliputians). I was also contemplating a Star Trek homage, but then the constant nerfs and lack of support finally got to me.

That's what makes me really eager to have Foundry on a superhero game, the sheer range of options -- fantasy, scifi, murder mysteries, anything!

jonsills · September 2012

kelplankton wrote: »

On that note, I wonder how many people would recreate their tabletop campaign stuff in Foundry format? That might be cool to see, though not necessarily something you could directly translate. But I'm sure there's plenty of people who've had adventures they'd love to share with others.

Hey, if I can staff an instance with medieval knights and such, I can recreate one of my greatest Champs PnP successes - the Magna Carta Scenario (basically, a group composed of some of the looniest Champs villains kidnap a group of physicists and force them to create a time machine, with the intent of stopping the barons at Runnymeade from forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta; they think that in the new timeline, they'll be royalty, or at least nobility. The heroes arrive in the lab just after the villains have departed, and have to follow them backtime to stop them...).

Too bad the game engine is more limited than the human imagination. When one group of heroes arrived in London in 1215, the guy with the energy-sword drew a cross on the ground, the bow-user fired a smoke arrow into the crosspiece, and the teleporter popped the rest of the group into the smoke cloud. They got a lot of respect from the townsfolk after that.

A plea for a Foundry

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