Flanking Fire

One headache that City of Heroes (and, I think, other current MMRPG games) poses for ludologists seems to have gone unremarked. If play is the essence, why are the players so bad at it?

In a ludological reading, City of Heroes is a series of exciting combat sequences, strung together by a narrative pretext. You spend most of your time crime-fighting, or traveling to the scene of the crime, or shopping for better super powers so you can arrest tougher criminals. And a lot of the game design is slanted toward getting teams of heroes to work together.

But -- at least for the low and midrange milieu my character inhabits, the tactical skill of the other players is unimpressive. They've got lots of experience, most of them -- they seem to have played the game a lot, they know exactly where to go and how to move, so they race around with blinding speed. But it seems to me they generally fight thoughtlessly, inefficiently.

• I seldom see any attention to flanking fire. That's partly sensible, because the criminals don't seem especially dismayed to be taking damage against which they can't retaliate. Bad guys in City Of Heroes don't have much survival instinct. (In general, I'm surprised the enemy AI is so flat and so uniform)
• I never see players pay attention to concentration of force. Never. A big team invariably splits up into a series of individual combats. This has a certain Heroic flavor to it -- it's the combat style of Troy, the battle tactics of Arthur. But, surely, this isn't the most efficient way to fight, the way to squeeze the most tactical success and safety out of the resources at hand.
• The one tactic people talk about is pulling. Exploiting an error in the enemy AI, players lure individual figures at the edge of a group into attacking them one by one. The efficacy of pulling is just a horizon effect. Rather than fix it, the designers have assimilated the effect and its tactics into the universe, creating special powers to exploit the exploit.
• Heroes have no zone of control -- a bad guy is free to run right past a big, scary, threatening hero, even if the hero is completely at leisure to clobber the bad guy. This, coupled with the bad guy's indifference to flanking fire (and to un, sub, and supernatural forces), means that lots of tactics don't work very well. It's hard to protect your fragile artillery and medics, for example, because a bad guy who feels like going for Fred can pretty much go for Fred, whatever anyone does.
• In consequence, nobody is very concerned with protecting Fred.

It's not an issue of realism -- this is a City Of Heroes. But, if combat were really the point, wouldn't players work harder at doing it well?

Now, this is a very preliminary observation based on some arbitrary playing. I might have stumbled across some inept players. Or, the players who understand tactics may rush through the lower levels quickly while the inept kids pile up. At some stage, I understand, you start getting players who have bought rank outside the game, and so they have lots of power and no idea what to do with it: perhaps I'm already seeing some of that, too.

But if the ludic core of City of Heroes was the key, you'd think people who play a lot would be better at it than they are.