NCSoft and/or Cryptic Studios are certifiable geniuses. Not necessarily in the money-hat-factory sense of Blizzard, but they’re certainly putting in the effort.

About a week ago I received an email warning me of the impending “free weekend” for City of Heroes. The free weekend is exactly that - free. No muss, no fuss, just log in and play on my old CoH account with no restrictions or hooplah. For serious!

The process was literally thus:
1) Find install CDs (harder than it sounds)
2) Install & Patch (1.8gb from launch masters to issue 9, 8 hours)
3) Play. Well reset password and then play.

No codes, no activations, nada. I did waste another 2 hours making a new character on a newer server as my old one was “double yellow” and laggy as hell. That and it really did take 8 hours to patch at an abysmal 70k/s, but if I had installed a few days after I got the email vs 5 minutes after I decided to play…

That’s all fine and good, you say, but “what’s the point?” The point, dear reader, roadblocks. Or more precisely, the lack of roadblocks. This is a lesson Blizzard taught the industry with the runaway popularity of WoW. WoW isn’t a super l337 hardcore game. Learning the basic mechanics of any class and the game itself is a process easily completed in the first week of free play. This allows a new player the maximal amount of time to discover the game and not just how to play.

Cryptic “got it” with the concept of free weekends. It looks like they do these events periodically when there’s a major change to the game. The “excuse” this time was Issue 9 going live. I played CoH-beta and for the first 3 months following launch. I know exactly why I left, but this chance to jump back in with no strings attached had me seriously considering a 1-month resub. Ultimately I came to my senses and realized that none of the reasons for my departure had changed so a resub would be silly.

But still… good try. No MMO I’ve ever played has ever come close to this level of nostalgia.

The end result? I can spare the 2 1/2gb. So who knows what might happen?

So I dragged the chimps back into Karazhan again last night for another crack at ye ol’ Curator. Dropped him (again) like a bad habit and moved on to whack the loot pinata in the Chess Event.

Fun stuff, and the handy Consortium vendor sells supplies and fixes your shit and whatnot.

Nabbed some druid and … caster? boots. I don’t recall and I forgot to write it down.

In an entirely in-character and unfunny move Electronic Arts announced this week that they will be acquiring Mythic Entertainment. Uh… ok.

While I can’t say I ever, EVER want to play Dark Age of Camelot again I can say that I respect the company quite a bit. Unlike some other manufacturers Mythic was very vocal and active in fighting currency/character sales over the last few years. This, of course, is one of my hot-button issues and I applaud their stance. Mythic did a lot of things right that go largely unnoticed now that the sleeper has awakened and 250k players is barely “hahaha, nub” territory. First and foremost is the unprecedented access to back-end data outside of the game. No MMO prior to DAoC gave players screen after screen after screen of stats and data to nerd over. As far as I know only Eve has even bothered since! That’s a shame, really, as these games are achievement-oriented in nature and if there’s one thing we love it’s to nerd over stats/items. The mechanics of Blizzard trying to pump out 6 million player profiles is rather staggering, but I’d love to see it happen.

There’s a rather decent conversation going on over at Lum’s place on this issue. He, among others, are being rather mum about the whole thing for the moment, but those of us not constrained by business propriety (or any propriety really) are slinging the hurtful invectives like there’s a 2 for 1 sale on oh-snap.

City of Heroes launched publically today, much to the fanfair of it’s players. Never have I bore witness to such a smooth launch.

We’ll see if the NCSoft billing servers hold up as well as everything else did so far.

Thread In Progress <– edit (10/3/07) I actually had forums when I wrote this. durrrr

Doesn’t everybody?

A wanker from Milwaukee, who will go unnamed, has been gushing like a little schoolgirl about City of Heroes for a couple weeks on a near-daily basis. Combined with the unholy amount of BEST GAM EVAR I hear in IRC all day long these days a situation was created for which there is only one response - preorder.

At present I am just passing the first hour mark of the download and as luck would have it my super l337 bandwidth pulls it down at 60 whole k/s. 60! I know, I know - but HF how can you possibly be downloading a file at that speed? It’s unbelievable!

Some of us are just blessed with fat pipes I guess.

I’ll post something sane after this pig finishes… 2 nevers from now.

edit: Blessed be, the game doesn’t suck. The controls are a bit nuanced but once you get used to them it’s not bad. The game systems seem serviceable and I dare say even the Wolverine and Hulk knock-offs on every corner aren’t nearly as offensive as say a horde of Drizzzt, Drizzyt, Drizit’s, et al.