Lj-Cut for those who don't care.

I spent some time away from the actual game to focus on the CO community itself. Like all gaming communities it has its usual groups: the casuals, the RPers, the PvPers, the social butterflies, and the business-oriented. CO doesn't seem to have as many costume contests that you'd see in CoX, though the CoX refugees are working on promoting events like that.

I decided to check the CO-wiki to look up information like supergroups and the like. Here's what I found after searching for "supergroup":

1. Where do you go to create a Supergroup?
To create a supergroup, form a team of 5 people, head to Millennium City and travel to Champions HQ. (This is the same building which you enter during the end of the tutorial and looks like a big, purply-blue backwards-C on the map, just east of the Renaissance Centre.)
Head inside Champions HQ and talk to the Primus Registration Officer right in front of you upon entry. You will see an option to set up your Supergroup there. You can choose the name of your supergroup, set the supergroup's colours and choose an emblem for the group.
2. How many people can you have in a Supegroup?
Currently, the limit is 500 based on characters. It is NOT based on unique globals.

And that's it. I poked around the CO-wiki a bit more and a disturbing trend started to appear. This wiki does not receive nearly the kind of attention to detail that the CoX-wiki did. Most of the pages listed on the wiki have very bare-bones information on a given topic. I began to wonder about this until I began to dig into some specifics.

First and foremost, the missions you tend to pick up in CO follow these lines:

1. Go to a specific location on the area map
2. Kill a certain type of mob
Optional 3. Grab a certain loot drop

As you can probably guess, these kinds of missions require almost NO explanation. As such, any wiki entries on them are short and to the point. That's not really a fair comparison, so let's look at one of the major releases of CO: the Resistance Adventure Pack.

This story arc was released about a year after Going Rogue was for CoX. It involves a dark mirror universe where the Heroes are Villains and the Villains are Heroes. Sound familiar? Anyhow, I went to the wiki entry for the Resistance Adventure Pack to see what kind of details there were for it. So what does it have?

It has an opening blurb that explains the basic story.

It has an entry meant for missions, but there's no link for it.

It has an entry for a guide of the Resistance story arc, with a link, but the link itself doesn't exist.

It has a link that denotes what costume pieces you can unlock.

It has a link that notes what Perks you can earn.

It has a link entry for what Action Figures you earn, but the link itself doesn't exist.

It has a link that lists the items you can earn during the arc.

It has a gallery of 4 pictures that were provided during the release announcement.

...and that's it.

This was released in May 2011, the wiki page was last updated in May 2012. Its now 2013, and there's still nothing there! No locations, no maps, no characters, no dialogue, no details, NOTHING. The only things the community has focused on are the rewards you get in terms of unlockable costume parts, perks, and items. And that kind of sums up the community's attitude. They've put almost NO effort into documenting aspects of the game, outside of what you can get out of it.

Now you can look at this as spoiler prevention, or you can look at it as encouraging the playerbase to use the forums for information and advice. There's some merit to both arguments. But this is a wiki: user-created content. The users of CO have put almost no effort into it, leaving several pages to languish in an incomplete state for months or even years. Even the most recent update to the game (Champions Online: Reloaded) doesn't have its own entry yet. It doesn't even appear on the list of game updates! There is a list of the new for-purchase vehicles, but you have to search under "Vehicles" to find it.

To me, this speaks volumes of just how little investment the community has in its game. For the CoX community, their wiki was a source of pride, one that was constantly being added to, corrected, and detailed. But the CO community just can't be asked.

Now to be fair, the entries for the other 2 Adventure Packs (released in 2010) do have more detailed entries, including a basic rundown of mission objectives, important characters and events, and additional screenshots. So the community has acted in the past. Why they've been reluctant to do so for more current aspects of the game is unclear to me.

And all this is a very long-winded way of saying I haven't played much. Stay tuned for Day 9 and let's see if I say anything interesting.

Current Mood: confused

Thanks for posting these, they've been very interesting reading. I hadn't planned on going to CO, but it's still good to read what's going on over there and whether it would be worth my while to try.

It may be that the folks who updated the wiki in 2010 aren't playing the game any more, and so haven't worked on the wiki. Or maybe the playerbase just doesn't care.

The utter sparseness of the CO Wiki pages was one of the things that just astounded me about CO, when I first started playing. I was so spoiled by CoX, that it never even occurred to me that if I got stuck during a mission, or needed help finding a contact or location, the Wiki might not have the info I'd need. I took it for granted...until I got stuck, and found that the Wiki was not terribly useful. A Google search tends to bring up more results.

I always had the impression that the CoX community had a strong sense of pride in their game, in their dev team, and in the community itself. I just haven't gotten that impression from CO. Like you said, it's like they just can't be bothered to get more invested.

More and more it looks like ParagonWiki was a rare exception rather than the rule. It's not JUST a matter of the community caring, it's also that CoH had a focused community. For instance, if you search around enough, all the kinds of information you might have found on the Titan Network is available for LotRO, but it's scattered among the official wiki, tentonhammer and a half dozen other sources.

I take it CO lacks these other sources?

I'm getting that impression, as well, that CoH was truly unique in how focused and dedicated a community it had. It was a real treasure, and honestly? I think I miss that more than anything else about the game, and I know I'm not the only one.

I've found that with LOTRO, too; a search on their page doesn't really net any useful information, aside from your standard exciting promotional stuff, but if you do a Google search with your question, you'll get an answer (that's how I resolved the "You Shall Not CHAT" bug, when I first got into LOTRO). CO doesn't lack those other sources; it's much the same--the information is out there, but you have to hunt it down. The Wiki is not the focused depository of knowledge that it could be, like it was with Paragon Wiki.

Yeah. Most games do NOT have as obsessive a team of catalogers that P.Wiki did (as a P.Wiki admin, I will forever and always be 100% appreciative of the people that helped edit).

We (or the player populace - not just us!) would regularly see stuff on other websites and go "THAT SHOULD BE AVAILABLE ON WIKI/TITAN SOMEHOW!" And in a little while, it would be integrated somewhere! Those people were amazing.

P.Wiki was (and still is) a labor of obsessionlove for a small core number of people, and a hobby for a huge number of people. P.Wiki's level of editor dedication is really rare. The only better wikis I've found are mostly single player games that no longer get updates (so eventually all the data gets catalogued and there's no more to do!) - although the wiki for Kingdom of Loathing http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki is AMAZING and literally *THE* most complete wiki I have *EVER* come across. It's what I strove for in the P.Wiki.

This is one of the things that I really love about GW2. There is a very strong community there. The wiki is doing quite well and gets updated regularly and the GW2 reddit is very active.

When I first went to try out CO, one of the things I did was check the wiki for information about what you get from membership, how much it costs to get certain benefits, etc. Parts of the wiki still make reference to Cryptic Points, which to my knowledge went the way of the dodo after Perfect World stepped in.

To be fair, the CoX wiki (especially in the last year of the City's existence) had it's threadbare spots too.

UO's player wiki (UOGuide) is very well done... It's amazing to me that so many people are so fanatic about that game after all these years and the boneheaded actions of the dev team and the publishers... (*Sigh*, including me... I've got to go tend my garden once I'm done with LJ.)

I had so much fun editing random trivia onto paragonwiki.

Yeah, I wish that sort of stuff was in the LotRO wiki. Stuff like the translations of various battle cries characters use when attacking, for instance.

That's what the Silmarillion is for, silly.