Chase_Arcanum

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... The third, and short term easiest version involves tweaking individual powers of effected sets -- which would almost certainly nerf some powers, buff others and cause a whole slew of new imbalances.

It's not as easy to get things done as you might think.

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If I might make a suggestion:

ASSUMING:
1) This appears to be more of an issue at the higher levels
2) Enhancements could be modified to work this way

Make SO- level enhancements that are TYPED. If my claw scrapper adds a "cold steel" damage enhancement to "slash" that adds 33% damage, that 33% increase is COLD damage. Likewise, damage resists could be typed, allowing tankers that might have less resistance to ice "mitigate" that weakness a little.

Even some powers that seem contradictory can be explained away easily enough: pyrokinetics might work by drawing ambient heat off surrounding things into one concentrated area, so i could do both fire/ice damage!

Heck, poor fire blasters who feel like they're tickling the "envoy of shadows" with his fire resists might just want to slot for smashing/lethal.


Sure, players with a load of free influence could go through the trouble of swapping out enhancements to match their upcoming foe... but honestly, doesn't the hero game need alot of "money sinks" right now?

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Ugh, excuse me. It's my turn on the soapbox.

But the Flight Pool in general is in a pretty sad state. AS is a great attack, but Hover is too slow for any real effective level of use, and there are so many -Fly attacks in PVP that more than half the time you're going without a travel power at all. I don't really mess with Group Flight, but I'm sure it has its own pitfalls.

Castle, for all that is holy, please give a timeframe one when Flight will become viable as a travel power, or at least as viable as the other options out there.

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I agree that flight could use some performance loving, but let's remember that flight has alot of "intangibles" going for it as well: it's one of the few powers that allows for a broad view of the battlefield (from higher up), it can eliminate many foe's ability to direct melee attacks at you, it's one of the "safer" travel powers, and it absolutely avoids all obstacles. Then there are the indoor uses for flight..

Now, teleport comes close to this, with the obvious pain of moving faster than the enemies load, and running out of blue on a rooftop you thought was unoccupied when you ported there is a pain. have you ever tried to teleport up a floor indoors? Not fun, not much control.

Superspeed? As long as you're selective in your adventures... Some maps are nightmares... Even Jump- by far a solid power- has a tougher time in the Rogue Isles with all the overhead obstacles interfering...

Many of the requests here appear to be akin to the "i win" button. They want to fix ALL flight's troubles, when all that SHOULD happen is flight should be adjusted to be more comparable to the other travel powers, each of which has advantages and disadvantages.

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And you might be finding that this will come in a number of ways- imagine if all -fly powers also gave temporary immobilization as well. IIRC, that's something that was added to the MA -fly attack. That way, it affects most (teleport's unaffected) travel powers, putting them closer to an even footing.

What if they did that to all -fly attacks?

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The 1500 word limit is tough. When I sent in the story that got put in Issue #6 of the comic, I had to focus on the fact that the readers would be familiar with the setting, because you really can't build a big backstory or flush anything out in 1.5 pages.

http://www.onamistrikeforce.com/origins_title.html

Is the link to the Origins of 3 characters: PhoenixHawk (mine), Tropic (Joe Koelbll's), and Solanum (Mike Valcarcel's). We've all sent in parts of it over time, but even the separate chapters are simply too long to be used in the comic. Put together they are a full length book, made up of 3 novellas. 85,000 words. 245 pages. Please check it out, but expect more than a short story to download

Arctic, maybe you could use some of the plethora of submissions you are getting on the fan fiction webpage? Even those that are too long could get used...or maybe have links added to the page to stories that are posted on other sites that fit in with the current theme?

There's a lot of good fan fic out there built on this universe. I have sincere hopes that the prose project will grow beyond the current 3 book contract with CDS Books. Someday I hope there will be openings for submissions for books rather than just going through contracted, specific authors.

D

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Very impressive, I'm downloading it now to take a look.

It's nice to see that other people share my madness... I have a work-in-perpetual-progress that ties 3 primary characters together (and has background elements of at least 3 others) (mine, my wife's, & my friends...) in a tale that explores their origins and the event where they first come together as a team (the evacuation of Paragon U at the start of the Rikti war)...

It's turning into quite an epic...

I've gone back a few times to re-introduce elements as the world is fleshed out in-game. I had exchanges where my main, for example, an adjunct professor at the U, was warned against going into arcane lore or "heroic studies" or risk academic backlash... it seemed a bit unlikely after encountering the university's occult annex in Croatoa.

Good luck with it!

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Trick Question. The answer doesn't matter. It has the same psychological effect that a one-shot does.

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Bingo. This was exactly my point.

PvP is a very fine balance and there are a lot of ways to creatively combine powers for extreme effect. Assassin Attacks, while powerful, are only the most visable (irony?) example. There are others which are worse and whatever solution we come up with for 'The one shot problem' has to address as many variations as we can identify.

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Well, to go back to a variation proposed on the beta boards:

There was a suggestion to put some more meaning behind the health bar's color coding: you couldn't be bumped down more than two color code per attack... so if you were at full green, the farthest you could fall would be to orange, 1hp* above red. At yellow, you could fall 1hp, and at orange or red, you're in jeopardy of death. (note, you could just as easily make this "fall 1 color" at a time, but that might be too much of a blow for stalkers in PvP)

Now, this wouldn't work for the caltrops/mines issue... unless... instead of measuring this per attack, we look at per (timeunit). In other words, your health bar could only fall at a maxrate of 2 colors per second or 3 seconds, whatever. That way, instadeath for players is avoidable, stacked attacks don't work well, and a player always has some (albiet momentary) repsonse period to try to get out of things.

*(note, the 1hp might be too tough got quick DOT attacks, maybe 1% above death, or something similar)

My wife and I are a near-perpetual teal

Liberty Server
Chase Arcanum & Cinder Flame
Targe & Ka'rayi
and about a dozen other alt couples.

You rarely see one without another.

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States,
have you any insight (that you can share) on How NCsoft will be reporting Coh/CoV numbers. Logic as it is single billing would suggests a single combined number, but it would be nice to have my curiosity confirmed.

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That's how I'd suspect it, given how the software treats CoV as an "upgrade". If you install it as a separate game (for more user accounts) you'd get billed twice, so that would count as "two subscriptions."

I'm more curious about the Korean release. Saw the website. Looks like PvP is being encouraged for the asian release (good idea, given their preference toward it.) Revenue models differ in Korea, so comparing subscriptions can be misleading. If NCSoft lists the numbers as they do for Lineage & Lineage II, we'd expect a MASSIVE increase in numbers.

I'm hoping for more informative numbers (maybe divided between north america, europe, and asia servers). but we'll see.

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Look, I realize that PlayNC may not have wanted the game on the shelves before the 31st (which I still think is the worst possible launch date they could have picked). But they ARE. People are buying it RIGHT NOW, totally unaware that they cannot play it.

Are you guys following me? Even people who didn't reserve it! Guys just looking for a new distraction, who check out the neato box art, read the back and then buy it, are getting burned when they get home. Every person I've spoken to has said that if that happened to them, they would return the game and spend the money elsewhere, with no exceptions.

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Don't see you posting on the thread anymore, but just in case: one of the elements you're missing here is that one of the best things an MMO can do is SPREAD THE LAUNCH POPULATION OVER TIME, which makes Monday an excellent start date.

Why?
1) Hardcore fans with the preorders had 2 days to start and move on to the upper-level zones.
2) On monday, the current subscribers who didn't preorder will be "in the know" and asking for the game. They'll start, but not cause a "flood" of lag on the newb zones- something that will ALSO DRIVE PEOPLE AWAY.
3) Over the course of the week, the casual purchaser will get the game and come on, preferrably to a less-crowded zone.

Plenty of MMO's tried the "UBER LAUNCH" and got badly burned by it. Heck, WoW, which succeeded, had plenty of criticism for having to "ration time" for players. It wasn't just that SERVERS were at capacity- the NEWB ZONES were at capacity.

Better to distribute launch... first by giving rabid players a pre-start, then by starting regular subscribers on days normally "down" in retail, and finally accepting the flow of new people once the "heavy retail days" start.

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Regarding what they can do when they discover that the servers aren't ready? Devs can't do much- open the servers early seems to be what you wanted to hear, but doing so would be a form of a breach of contract to the preorder folks who bought the right to those 2 early days.

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Because there's this industry called the "retail" industry, that allowed me to reserve the game even when it was first announced. I find it convenient to use, because unlike purchasing things online, I get to go out of my apartment and interact with actual human beings, who can answer questions and deal immediatly with any problems or issues that may arise.

So you're saying that its the retail industry's fault that they launched the game early, and not at all playNC's fault for locking the game out for anyone other than pre-order customers. Just sit back and imagine right now how many kids got this game on Friday from their local EB or GameStop or (fill in here) and got it home, only to find themselves locked out because they weren't a Super Special member? Think of the customers PlayNC is losing!

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First, the pre-orders were through the thing you call the "retail industry" and the retailers should have been easily able to tell you the difference between a pre-order and a reserved copy.

Second, the game doesn't "launch" until October 31st. This is what the pre-order people get for ordering it early. Again, it would be your retailer that deceived you

Third, every newsletter (not just the order) I received in the last 3 months expressed the special nature of the pre-ordering, where you can go, and how to insure yours is right.

Fourth, as for "what other game"... let me see. Everquest2, world of warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Lineage2, all come to mind for services that used this strategy OVER THE LAST YEAR ALONE.

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I'm sorry you were ill-informed. Complain to your retailer for misguiding you. I know folks at stores with preload packs actively ASK and insure people get what they wanted.

Look, this same retail industry is the same one that will make up their own release dates with no developer input just so their customers can put down money to "reserve a copy" and then claim the game is "delayed" when no public release date was given. I've known gamers who reserved copies of games that were "delayed" a year this way- and it's retail profiting off player ignorance.

Not much a developer can do about this but inform players through the conduits they had available- which is what they did.

edited out... sounded worse than I intended.

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As for your brother going to Iraq... I recall he was recently in Korea before. Seems he's chewing the same dirt as this former combat engineer (korea 93-94, Iraq 90-91).


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That's funny chase. I was stationed at Camp Hovey Korea from 93-94.

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Camp Castle, myself. Spent enough time harassing the soldiers at Hovey, though. We might have crossed paths a few times.

I have to say I prefer your undeited comments over any edited ones. Of course, when I see something that's seems sarcastic from you, I usually agree- and am amazed at your restraint.

As for your brother going to Iraq... I recall he was recently in Korea before. Seems he's chewing the same dirt as this former combat engineer (korea 93-94, Iraq 90-91).

Some words of advice:
Aviod at all costs:
Saudi Scorpions
Kuwaiti Fleas
Iraqi Spiders
and MRE's.

As I saw it, the devs did a great job balancing the best and worst of a "tank mage" character. Normal tank mages- offensive and defensive powerhouses- are the group-breaker in a game, with few weaknesses and little to no interdependencies.

The devs here took a novel approach: they made the tank-mage group dependent. The bigger the group, the more powerful the tank-mage.

What's its role? Well, that depends on the group and whether its a war or a peace kheldian. IIRC, the warshade amplifies the strength of the group, so a damage intensive group becomes more damaging, while a peace___ balances the group- that same damage-intensive group would see a more defensive counterpart emerging.

Ok, I know it's likely this post will be lost in the billion-page thread, but what about this:

The biggest problem with bosses seems to be that the Controller-Defender-Blaster is often taken down on virtually the first hit or few hits- with little time to respond.

What if the high-damage bosses had their damage changed to 1/2 initial and 1/2 Damage over Time. This way, a player could have the opportunity to take an inspiration / heal a friend.

A similar way would be to give players a brief 3-5 second "grace period" before they collapse, where inspirations could be taken or a heal would be given. It would fit the comic book concept of a nearly-defeated hero reaching in for that last burst of strength- even after all seemed lost. This would eliminate all "1-shot kill" complaints.

I know in my battles, we have defense buffs running to the point we can usually take on larger foe (leadership + invisibility + others) but our damage bars exist at two levels- completely full or completely empty. Forget healing- we're either 100% or leaving the hospital...

Thanks for being one of the most responsive development teams around. Thanks for knowing the value of listening to your players.

But most importantly, thanks for knowing the value of listening TO your players, examining the numbers, and making the tough decisions that might upset some, but contribute to the integrity of the game- when, after listening, you have to say "no" to their demands.

I've seen too many games that buckled to the rants of those uninformed in game-model mechanics or too interested in being uber. The game becomes more imbalanced, more bugged, or heads down a path that's virtually impossible to back away from.

OP: Good idea- and one that faces many MMORPG's.

When player cities were added to SWG, within a month people were complaining about "ghost cities" everywhere. What did they expect. While a 40-character area might seem huge, take into account that of that set:

- 1/8 are alts of another primary, or two people share 1 PC, so only half will be on at a time (-5 from total)
- I'd say another 1/8 are inactive accounts, with players trying out other servers, beta tests, or new releases. (-5 more, 30 remaining)
- at most, half the players will be on at any given time- usually the 4-hour "peak" period (-15 from total, 15 remaining).
- when they are online, the player area only made up a fraction of the game region. I'll be generous and say that a third of the time they're online, they're in the player area, but I doubt they're even there that long. There's too much to do (-10 more players, 5 remaining)

So, during PEAK times, that's 5 out of 40 in the player hall / city... and I think these numbers were conservative. I don't even want to think about off-peak hours.


It's pretty tough to make a large place seem populated by players.

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I just have to make my opinion known, I see alot of people here ranting about how PvP is gonna make Tanks worthless, Blasters gods and the only Scrapper worth anything is one with Ranged...Just wanna say i think this is a bunch of piled up dog doodoo....What i think WILL happen, is poeple will start realizing that there are other worthwhile builds in the game besides Fitness, Travel and Concealment...I forsee some NEVER used abilities becomming quite effective indeed, for instance, Air Superiority, the Toughness line ( Does ANYONE have this skill set??? ), and those nifty Group Travel powers! Anyways, I just wanted to point out that there are quite a few more options than PvP ending up something where only the Blasters can participate and everyone else better have Phase Shift...

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Sadly, most often, PvP creates even more rabidly-followed templates. You haven't seen "flavor of the month" builds until you see what PvP can do.

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What I want to know is, why don't we (the CoH game community as a whole) get this kind of info first? It comes from a gaming site. Why isn't it posted on the Main City of Heroes page?? Are we second rate citizens? We pay our monthly fee and have to get our news about upcoming features from 3rd party sites.

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It's called "public relations" and while I agree that they could have announced that a new interview was available on X site (they may have, I might have missed it) it's very possible that the game site itself didn't notify CoH that the article had, in fact, been published.

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Since it mentions design is underway for PvP, so it's recent, because that's what I've been doing.

Am I going to tell you what we're planning? At this stage? Are you mad?!

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Well, sir, you are a villain, so it's your duty to spew out your evil plans at the point in the story where most viewers have accurately guessed 40% of it, guessed 50% incorrectly, and are hotly debating 10% of it.

Right now, we're still hotly debating 60% of it and have no clue for 40%, so I think you have some time.

BUT, you have to leave us enough times to break free from our certain-death device and thwart the villain's evil plans. You'll slip away, cursing us for our interference...

I believe this period is called the "beta test."




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Oh, and since this is in the comic book genre, you can announce plenty of random, misleading hints only to write them off as false memories from brainwashing, create a storyline suggesting it was all alien mind control, or simply deny there's any lapse of continuity and pretend the earlier stuff never happened.

They've been doing that for years...

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The game's not due until summer/fall 2005, for heavens sake...

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Where is that date from? I was thinking (maybe just my own wish) it would be around first quarter 2005. Could have sworn I was thinking that for a reason.

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As a rule of thumb, For MMORPG's, don't expect any "substantial" expansion less than a year after the original. Non-online games release expansions sooner, but they're more equivalent to the periodic "free" updates.

Release an expansion too soon (under a year) and you run the risk of alienating potential players who see a "cost creep" with playing the game- it's not a bigger investment to get involved. Release an expansion too late, and you risk losing the spotlight.

IMHO, City of Heroes has been on the bestseller list for what... 4 months? It's high on the public scene- and still has a prominent place in many game stores. They don't need an expansion in-store to keep a high profile. They've suggested that some PvP features will be offered prior it's release, so it doesn't need to be rushed for the PvP crowd. I wouldn't be suprised if the release came 1-2 months AFTER the 1 year mark of CoH's release.

No sooner.

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I'm still hopeing at the first release of PvP they will have it very restrictive hammer out the bugs and then open it up a little more. Repeat, Repeat , Repeat. I'm afraid of the jini getting out of the bottle an not being able to put it back in.

Besides balance issue's always mean a nerf for someone and nobody likes a nerf.....

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That's how I see it. The fact that the devs are conscious of the "stigma" associated with PvP and the expression that they'd prefer to change this suggests they're going to take careful, incremental steps, and not rush blindly into something too big

think of it this way- this expansion is likely to come out just over a year after the original. They didn't even announce what the expansion would be until right after this release.

Probably the last 3 months have been nothing but planning- it's all pseudocode and a few proof-of-concept models.

Give em time.

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That sound like the interview I read months ago and can't find any more, could you give us the link so I can read the whole thing please?

Thanking you in advance

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well, this one is oct 11, so I think it's newer, it also mentions the epic archetype being introduced in the next publish- which I KNOW would make waves, so I doubt it's a repost.

http://www.gaminggroove.com/article.php?id=21

Most stuff centered on other features, but there were these three facets of PvP I thought people here would find noteworthy:
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GG: Are you planning on spending any time rebalancing classes after Villains comes out?
CoH: We're spending time now trying to adjust the Archetypes! That's an ongoing issue for us. We hope to get the Arena out before City of Villains so that we can get an idea of how PvP plays out. As every designer knows, plans go right out the window once players get a hold of a game.


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Looks like arena (or danger room) will come first, as suggested...
Also looks like the devs are keeping an open mind to player feedback. Let's keep fleshing out the excellent ideas folks!

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GG: How will Hero vs Hero work, when it is implemented early next year?

CoH: We'll start out with an Arena, where heroes can test their might against one another. It's purely consensual and purely optional. We're making a couple of tweaks to powers so that no Archetype is too powerful, but I'm not ready to talk about those things yet.


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1) "Purely consensual and purely optional" to me suggests no substantial reward for playing / no penalty for staying away- nothing to make someone feel "coerced" into participating-- at least in the arena.

2) Looks like there will be some rebalancing after all. I know some have suggested that there won't be any effort to balance hero vs hero, but this suggests otherwise. That's 2 PvP / CoV references where "balance" has been mentioned.

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GG: How is Villains vs Heroes going to work? Can you fight anyone anywhere or is it only going to be in certain areas?

CoH: We're working out the final designs at the moment, so I can say is this: PvP should be a choice. Players should never be forced into situations that they didn't want to be in. That said, there's a lot of stigma attached to PvP play that I hope we can do away with in City of Villains.


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I have some optimism here. I'm reading between the lines here, but from my prespective, I'm seeing:

1) A STRONG emphasis placed on consent, but SPECIFICALLY NOT drawing the line between PvP and PvE as separate entities. It would have been real easy to word it that way, but he used the more ambguous "never be forced into situations" part. I'm hoping this means a form of selective-PvP in some way (PvP consent to some players, but not all.)

2) They recognize the very negative reputation PvP has developed due to other gaming systems methods of handling it, so rather than imitate the past, they're trying something new that may offer appeal to people who have been turned off in the past.

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few quick points:

I assumed we were talking about a zone with guarded entrences like hazard zones now, meaning there will be no load killing, sorry for the confusion.

Secondly, I have never advocated a PvP zone ONLY as PvP. I would mearly like to see it as one of the options, having arenas, guild wars, etc, is completely fine with me.

Rheticus

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Thanks, Rheticus, for the clarification. I was basing my assumptions on recent posts and misread you.

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Also, for dragonhunter's sake, I hilighted the part that counters his opinion. If I re-enter the PvP zone after you maul me, and you're waiting for me, and maul me again, and again... you're breaking the line between constructive gameplay and griefing. Camping "spawn sites" is the same as camping the entrance- it's effectively a spawn into the PvP realm

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If youre killed as your loading, thats griefing. If they wait till your ready, even if they kill you over and over i dont consider that griefing. Youre choosing to enter the PvP area so that you can PvP. If youre entering for some other reason, like you have a mission there, and/or theres no other way to get into the zone, thats just poor design.
As for the hopelessly outclassed, i would imagine theres going to be different areas of PvP for different levels just like theres different areas for PvE. If a level 20 goes into a zone designed for level 40+ to PvP thats his own stupid fault.

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Agreed- and I wouldn't object to that, except in the models some people are advocating, PvP zones were our ONLY PvP locations. If my friends and I REALLY wanted a private, story-driven sparring match, we'd have to enter and find a secluded part of the server to spar. If someone has the ability to deny me access to the entire PvP area- REPEATEDLY, it interferes with my play. If I'm left without recourse- no game mechanic to aviod the repeat-attacker, it's gonna cross the line to griefing.

I'd prefer entrances- and a small area surrounding the entrance- be off-limits- just enough that if I decide to run, rather than fight, I have a small window of opportunity to do so.
Either that, or multiple entrances, so I can choose an alternate route past that one person.