Feeling Powerful

Last night I decided to give one of my wow alts some attention. I had a level 5 Blood Elf Rogue sitting at Falconwing Square and I decided to load her up with bags, the Heirloom shoulders and Heirloom daggers (enchanted of course).  Over the course of the evening I played her up to level 11 and it was entirely too much fun. I reminded me of how much fun I had in City of Heroes the first time my hero dispatched a large group of villains, and it made me realize how much fun it is to feel powerful and advance quickly.

Then today I read a small discussion about if CoH Mission Architect ‘farming’ missions, are good or bad for the game. I only spent a week in CoH with the MA, and it was interesting. I played more MA missions than dev. built ones , but that was not because I could not find non-ma groups; there were plenty of sewer, and task force groups around. It was because they hit on so much of what I like in MMOs.

I tend to be having a lot of fun in an MMO when:

• I am advancing quickly
• Spending more time exploring or fighting as opposed to simply traveling from a -> b
• Feel powerful, able to defeat strong enemies or multiple weaker ones.
• playing and chatting with friends.

And I tend to burn out in MMOs when a few things happen:

• friends I started playing with stop playing
• When I spend more time traveling than fighting or advancing myself
• Feel weak; I can only defeat single weaker enemies.
• Time between character advancement becomes too long. (this includes gear as well as traditional leveling)

I understand that the time a player spends running MA missions is time they are not running dev missions. If the goal is to get more people running dev missions, then I think they need to rework alot of the dev misions. The addition of newspaper/radio missions to the game shows me that the devs were already trying to correct some of the problems with the original arcs.   Which leads me to believe the MA missions are simply another attempt at providing players with the time-risk-reward balance from missions that they want.

Of course there may be some group size+mission parameters combinations that are providing a rate of advancement that is far beyond what the devs (and I) might think is enough, and they may need to make some adjustments.    I just hope the devs find creative ways to keep the advancement rate “in check”, as opposed to them using a chainsaw when a scapal would do. I fear them removing XP from MA missions, drastictly cutting in MA XP, or some other big reduction, which could impact the overall percieved “fun” from the game.

I would start with something along the lines of dimishing returns for running the same MA arc repeately within a day. This would allow “farming” groups to continue to opperate and enjoy the game the way they want to, but to be most effiencent they will need to play through several different arcs.  Which should in theory either lower the amount of XP gained, since the number of farming missions are limited. Or increase the number of players building missions, which I believe is a good thing.

*shrug* Of course none of this really currently affects me, since I am currently not a paying subscriber. Though right now the MA is the biggest draw for me, and if I did resub, it would be because the MA; both the farming and story based content.

Edit:Â I completely forgot the fact that Paragon Studios had already dropped one hammer on the farming missions. Ouch. Also I was pointed to an excellent blog post on the subject that I thought was a great read.

Back to my new Rogue.
I know I will not be able to always keep her ‘above’ the power curve, but I am going to enjoy her “powerful” time.  My time with her last night was enough fun to make me extend my WoW subscritption another month.