It wasn't bad. Really. It wasn't bad. What it suffered from was lack of content. They had (thankfully) realized this and installed a randomized content generator for their missions, so that you wouldn't be repeating the same thing over and over again. But... You did anyway. There were only three factions in the missions: Machines, Merovingian, and Zionist. And of those, the character models were random, but except for the Mero faction, you saw pretty much all there was to see new by level 20.
The intention, it was obvious, was meant to be a "MUSH"/MMO hybrid, a hands on flexible content generator where a small group of people referred to as the "Live Events Group" or LEG, would act as a throwback to the old table-top rolls of GameMasters. They'd take over signature characters, spawn enemies appropriate to the on-going story, etc. The problem? The players outnumbered these LEG types about 10000+ to 1 in the early days. No good interface for speeches was allowed, and they tried to interact with their audience by asking questions requiring response, and while it was an insanely insightful vision of what people wanted, it was crippled by social dynamics and the evil lag beast.
It was sold to Sony, and took four years to finally die a slow, painful death at their incompetent hands.
I consider it an object study in why giving people what they want isn't always the best action to take. It's much more nuanced and "on this hand/on the other hand" than that, but I'm sketching a history here, not painting a mural. Maybe that'll be a future post.
After MxO stalled, I decided to try Star Wars Galaxies. Remember, this was the summer of 2005, right after the "Combat Upgrade" had gone live, and people were still griping. "The Total Experience" that I purchased, and played, resulted in the worst experience I think a new player can have.
1) The online documentation hadn't caught up to the game's current iteration.
There were two types of damage, and one was a penalty for dying, but recuperating from this required a medic, a PC medic, which were unwilling to assist without a sizable donation of cash, which you didn't have at level 5 because you were expected to have started due to a friend's invitation, even if you were going in blind. The documentation implied that sitting in a medical bay would remove the damage, but it didn't. I discovered later that ONLY PC interaction would fix this, and there implications in the forums that I was an idiot for being frustrated by this.
2) The level of frustration caused world class headaches.
Really, I was trying everything, and had headaches that lasted for nearly a week before I realized they only struck while playing SWG. I stopped playing for a day, and the headaches stopped, and that prompted my canceling my account.
3) Contrary to the forum posts telling me was an idiot "Newb", people really weren't keen on playing with a newbie.
Letting that go as is.
So, I left SWG. I was pretty much done with MMOs, I'd given up hope that I'd find anything worth playing that wasn't a fantasy MMO, an itch I could scratch with countless offline computer RPGs.
City of Heroes
This was the paradigm shifter. I found with City of Heroes a very relaxed, fun, and friendly community. Well, overall. I'm still subscribing to this one four years later, so obviously it made an impact.
The big one that appealed to me was the honesty. The Developers are fairly open when there are mistakes that were made, and they really do go out of their way to minimize their impact.
Where other companies hide behind the proverbial "Digital Curtain", similar to the Iron Curtain, where you only know what is happening AFTER there's a socio-political repercussion when the Developers drop a nuclear device into a field of ganking daisies , with City of Heroes, you knew they were watching and were going to extensively test the repercussions on test servers before dropping anything on your head.
A lot of this can be summed up by a comment I remember from MxO... "Why can't I fly like Neo?" To which someone responded, "He was The One. He was special."
Someone else popped off with, "If you want to fly, try City of Heroes."
We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.
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