Judgement_Dave

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So how often do people start trials and TF's and have people drop out - as some of them look like they take a lot of commitment to finish.

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Like anything ingame, it'll vary depending on who you ask.

A fair bit of my recent experience has been with teams found mainly on the channels I mentioned - mainly sals on Union. There you tend to get people who'll:
* do the TF purely for the rewards (well - badge and merits anyway);
* have probably done it before;
* don't mind ghosting/stealthing where possible;
* have a good idea how long it'll usually take (and so won't commit if they don't hav eenough time);
* generally have decent-ish builds.

As such the TFs run with these groups can be fairly quick & everyone knows what they're letting themselves in for - so a very low dropout rate. Usually only the odd one if real-life intervenes or their net connection goes down and doesn't return!


On the other hand, I've also run a lot in the past with PuGs. Here it's reasonably common (or was) to find that the players:
* may never have done the TF (or did it so long ago that they forgot it);
* may have builds that they'll be thinking about resspeccing someday soon;
* may never have done any TF (and don't appreciate auto-exemping and the time commitment).

This can be like running any PuG and expecting them to stay together for anything from 2 to 7 hours... And given that some may not realise that the time commitment may be this long, and that they'll stop earning xp if/when they hit the TF limit, it's inevitable that some people drop out.

It generally helps with PuG groups to make sure that people have an idea how long it may take and also that they understand how the level limits/xp work in TFs...


It's also worth noting that:
* unless you really know what you're letting yourselves in for, TF teams should all set their rep to the normal level (heroic/villainous). TFs set themselves by the leaders rep, so if the leadership changes due to the leader dc'ing the rep of the remaining missions can suddenly change! (and you can't change the team leader in a TF as you can normally).
* The 1st 6 signature hero TFs (Positron, Synapse, Citadel, Sister Psyche, Manticore, Numina) all set the base level of mobs at the top end of the TF level range. So even if the team are all level 10 and they do Positron they'll get mobs as if they were a team of level 15s (with the teamsize and leader rep modifiers).

So if you're not aware of these it's easy to get a scenario similar to a PuG of level 10s going into Positron on the middle rep and then members start quitting when you all realise how hard it is to face mobs of level 16/17 when you're not even in DOs!



BTW - the comments about builds in the above aren't some form of elitism - I wouldn't kick/not pick/criticise anyone for their build but in a true PuG you'll get people stil learning the game and making the mistakes that we all made... these builds obviously don't help a TF go quite as smoothly as 'better' builds would and can lead to more dropouts if the team has poor-enough builds that the TF becomes far too difficult!

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So if 8 people start the Positron TF...
* it scales for 8 at the start
* if 2 people dc/logoff it scales down to 6
* if 2 people then quit (Or are kicked) it now scales for 4, even though only 4 are logged in
* if the 4 people left all quit, then the 2 who logged come back, it will be scaled for 3
* if one of the remaining duo quits, then it is scaled for 3 still


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Fixed it for you

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Not if Suzumebachi (the post above yours) is correct you didn't!

People still count to the team when logged off/dc'd so it looks to me like it should be:
if 8 people start the Positron TF...
* it scales for 8 at the start
* if 2 people dc/logoff it stays at 8 (as logoffs are still part of the team)
* if 2 people then quit (Or are kicked) it now scales for 6, even though only 4 are logged in
* if the 4 people logged in all quit, then the 2 who logged out come back, it will be scaled for 2
* if one of the remaining duo quits, then it is scaled for just 1

Good to see it wasn't just me getting slightly confused at what the final position was... guess that happens when several changes are made in quick succession.


BTW - Thanks Suzumebachi for posting the correct info - I did admit my (mis)information was iirc/what I thought was the settled position.

It was all from a hazy, relatively unused part of my memory as it's rare that many people drop from a TF that I'm on and most of them (other than the dreaded Positron) are usually started with 8 people on the team.

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I'm not a 100% sure about this but ...

The task force scales spawns etc to the number of people who were in the team when you started it. You can re-set the scaling by getting the remaining team members to log out and then log back in again.

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IIRC the TFs scale to the highest of either:
* the number in the team (whether logged in or not)
* the minimum number required to start the TF

Obviously the number in the team does not count those who quit or are kicked.

So if 8 people start the Positron TF...
* it scales for 8 at the start
* if 2 people dc/logoff it stays scaled for 8
* if 2 people then quit (Or are kicked) it now scales for 6, even though only 4 are logged in
* if the 4 people left all quit, then the 2 who logged come back, it will be scaled for 3
* if one of the remaining duo quits, then it is scaled for 3 still

The last two cases are because 3 is the minimum team size required to start Positron.


Pretty sure that this is how it is now. About a year or so ago they changed how TFs scaled in a couple of issues/patches - and I think they settled on the above!

BTW iirc the minimum team sizes are:
Posi 3
Synapse 4
Sister Psyche 5
Citadel 6
Manticore 7
Numina 4

Think that STF/LGTF/ITF are all 8 - though it'd be quite brave to tackle all them with 3 man squads without building especially for it!

I think that the Shadow Shard TFs (SSTFs) are also all 8 man minimum team size - though a little voice remembers some talk about reducing some of these (may just have been a player suggestion though).

Can't recall Katie, Moonfire and Hess - but I think that they're less than 8.

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My question is this - why aren't trials and taskforces scalable?

It seems like there is a large part of the game that just isnt available to the smaller groups or soloers.


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AFAIK it is pretty much that TFs/trials are meant to be big challenges (with accompanying bigger rewards) that need a team to complete. Which I think is trying to keep in a comicbook tradition of some threats being too big for one person to tackle.

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oh - and before you say - well just invite more people to the mission - well - we cant guarantee time towards doing it as we dont play every evening - and sometimes only for 30 minutes at a go - and it would be unfair to have a third party waiting around for days on end just to finish the trial / taskforce.

Your thoughts please

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You could ask on the correct server forums or on the badge/event/TF channels if someone minds filling for you to start the TF. All you need is enough people to start it and then they quit when the TF starts.

Heck - it's been done before with people even soloing TFs once others have helped them to start it.

BTW - if you don't know the channels, I'd suggest the following:
sals badgehunters - Union CoH & CoV
Defiant Events - Defiant CoH & CoV
Union Taskforce - Union CoH & CoV
DefiantBadgers - Defiant CoH & CoV

The 2 emboldened ones are probably, IMO, the busiest in this list for their respective servers. For Union, you could also try Union Badgehunters, but that is pretty much dead with sals replacing it.

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It's roundoff error, for anyone else who didn't read Synapse's post.

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I trust that you're referring to yourself given that the first line of my post stated it's somewhat sloppy that Synapse's list is being published with rounding errors.

What I mildly object to is putting the 3 columns of numerical data with rounding errors so that at a glance things appear amiss. It would have been just as easy to omit the difference column or to display the difference between the (already rounded) integer values.

So I did read Synapse's post... though I'm guessing that you didn't read mine before replying.

clues in the land of wiki

Not read the whole thread, but it's somewhat sloppy that Synapse's list is being published with rounding errors.
Examples:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Task Name New Total Old Total Difference
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Sister Psyche Taskforce 50 40 9
Shadow Science 8 6 1
Synapse Taskforce 57 45 13
The Vahzilok Pollutant Plot 13 7 7
The Strange Case of Benjamin A. Decker 2 2 1
</pre><hr />
Since difference should be the difference between the old and new merit rewards the 1st column should be the total of the last two columns... but last I looked 40+9 was 49 and not 50 (e.g. for Sister P TF).

Why the heck didn't they just drop the difference column, or output the difference as the difference between the 2 integer values.

Note that the above are a mere handful of apparently inconsistent differences for example - glancing at the full list it seems almost harder to find examples where New = (Old + Difference) than to find the ones where it doesn't!

BTW - interesting to notice that not all respec trials are equal:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Task Name New Total Old Total Difference
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Terra Volta Respec Trial 1 27 25 2
Terra Volta Respec Trial 2 20 25 -5
Terra Volta Respec Trial 3 20 25 -5
</pre><hr />


EDIT:
Interesting to note that this updated list gives us the approximate median average time to complete the various trials/TFs/SFS, as the rewards are calculated from the median average with a points/hr rate of 24 for trials and 20 for TFs.

So we now know that the median average time for Positron (64 merits) is something like 3hrs 12 minutes (being 64/20 hours).

Glad that you're enjoying it!

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It does what WAR failed to do by actually making it feel like a battle. Someone helped me kill some mobs, in any other mmo it would have felt like KSing, but in this, it actually felt like we were allies (ok i could have described that better).


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It's good that there are usually plenty of enemy MoBs about and so you get a reasonable feel of it being a battle/war. Also, like CoX, you can feel that you're character is above average as you can often take on groups of a reasonable size with a reasonable chance of defeating them (assuming you're not looking at ones that con too high).

IIRC xp goes to the top 3 damagers (or it may be top 3 damaging teams). So you may get some xp sorta-stolen, but more likely you'll still get a decent return and if 2 or 3 of you are attacking the same spawn, the spawn will fall quickly and you'll each get the prime slice of xp on some.

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May I interject just to point out Spring doesn't begin until March 20th (usually on the Vernal Equinox)? If anything is being flung it should be Winter...

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Which is why I've been quite happily pointing out that the Anniversary event should be in Spring...

Mind you, maybe one of the menders flung Spring backwards a month and a half. Can't trust these temporal-twist-paradox-a-gogo types.


More likely, I guess, that the people writing the announcements for the Valentine's event have the same (i.e. terrible) grasp of seasons that most people seem to have, and think that winter ends around Christmas/New Year.

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Freedom phalanx is in galaxy city.

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That's the Freedom Corps headquarters - Freedom Corps being the organisation of relatively low-powered heroes acting as something like Ms Liberty's private militia/policeforce, with Longbow being part of them.

Freedom Phalanx is effectively the supergroup of the main signature heroes, Statesman and co.

Regarding the OP - sorry but I don't know if their base is under City Hall.

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Everyone that's been watching the game for a while has pretty much agreed that something hueg is on the horizon, and I don't mean the architect. Something so big that it has consumed most of the dev team for almost a year and a half. Building on an existing MMO, that's a massive span of time.

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hueg eh? No kidding?

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Actually I think that this may be a misunderstanding and one of the new recruits is called Hugh G.

Apparently he's consumed most of the dev team (with a massive amount of thyme) in a year and a half and NC have been forced to start discriminating against cannibals in their employment drives.

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I don't think NC ever got around to announcing formal plans for the City of Heroes IP in any way, shape or form.


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I recall seeing Matt Miller saying not so long ago (Massively interview maybe?) that CoX had a solid future ahead of it and they were making plans for the next 5 years. To me that means that there won't be a CoX2 per se, but there'll be lots up upgrades along the way

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So - like I said - NC never got around to announcing formal plans for the City of Heroes IP.

All that they did do was announce (in interview) that they were making plans. They've never officially announced, neither formally nor informally, what those plans are.

And what most people would call CoX2 may well be part of the plans.
There again, it may not be.
Or maybe they'll just keep tweaking the engine and adding bits so that CoX1 becomes barely recognisable if you'd been in stasis for 3 years but it's still officially CoX1 as it grew organically into a form that would have been called CoX2 if it had been developed and delivered all at once.

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Still, nowt like a notable birthday to get all tipsy and start saying things you may later regret (when the players hold you to them)

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Oh - and in that I mean nowt like their 5th birthday.. not that I was tipsy on my birthday back in 2007... oh no. not like me at all.

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Sad part, they did announce the future maps will involve going back to earth (refering partly to richard himself), but afaik this never made it live


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The first map did make it to live over a month ago - though I've not seen it as it's a level 50 instance and my highest still ain't that high... Thinking I'd subscribed to a game that will last longer than 15 months I wasn't racing to 50!

PAU - Personal Armoured Units (e.g. big armoured mechs that you can get into and control).

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Has it occurred to anyone that the zombie invasions are one of the pre-cursors to Judgement day? Just a thought


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More like my ancestors were precursors and you appear to have a typo in my name... but thanks for the thread anyway

IIRC we were told that NC bought the CoX IP on 6/11/2007 (it's my birthday which is why I remmember, I'm not usually so retentive of dates).

So the press release mentioned by the OP was either the buying press release or a quick follow up. Either way Jack had gone as had the MUO/CO work.

Pretty sure that signs and portents for a sequel have come occasionally - but I don't think NC ever got around to announcing formal plans for the City of Heroes IP in any way, shape or form.

Still, nowt like a notable birthday to get all tipsy and start saying things you may later regret (when the players hold you to them)

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Spill the beans Mumsy... You obviously know more about CoX in the short to mid-term than I do. Or maybe you just have different scales - I'd say short term is anything up to the next 6 to 9 months and mid-term is probably more like 9 to 18 months.

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I'd say it the different scales thing JD, I am privy to no more information than you are, but I would put Mid-term at a little more than 18 months. See NorCal are looking at the game and (hopefully) planning a development timetable in the scope of years not months, and then back-engineering all the steps necessary to get to that point.


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Ah - I thought you'd taken short to medium-term to be even shorter, so I reread your earlier post...

I think that, with the background of your expressed disatisfaction at the Valentrine event, I misunderstood your saying City of Heroes is going nowhere in the short to mid-term as meaning 'in the short term there are no real developments happening in CoX' whereas I think you probably meant 'this game is going to last into the long term'.

With that misinterpretation in mind, I thought that you were expressing disatisfaction at Valentines event, and the lack of hard details for the next few months (I14/15). I took it to be the next few months as I didn't think you're the sort to think that the devs havenothing planned for years...

Anyway:

* My mistake due to the ambiguity of the phrase 'going nowhere'...

* And possibly good if the CoX film does go ahead, and bring merch/media-attention.

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Im sure i tried to log in not so long ago and found the game to be offline, has it since come back ?


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AFAIK the live servers have never been away other than minor update/maintenance spots (much as our game servers have).

I think that the test server hasn't always been available.

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Do we not protect the time capsule on the hero cape mission i wonder if this will change?

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Hope so - then the typo in the capsule info wouldn't keep bugging me.

Not a biggy but, iirc, it was only the best part of 3 years ago that I first /bug'd it.

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Or hows about this for a pipe dream there gonna take tek from TR (the clone build type thingy) and cars from auto assault and splice them into COH

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When VEATs came out with branching subtypes/powersets I wondered if it was inter-team collaboration/idea sharing within NC.

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arrow keys

[/ QUOTE ]Ah, that explains a lot of things.

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How?

[/ QUOTE ]If you don't get it, you're part of the problem.

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Do arrow keys still count if they've been pulled up and re-placed where the WSAD keys usually sit?

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TR was an expensive monster to create, and NC wanted to see a good return on it. I think that they've been seeing an operating profit, but one that's several magnitudes lower than planned and would take something just shy of eternity to repay the development investment.

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If that were true, I'm kinda surprised they didn't try and shift the IP and infrastructure off to somebody else... to at least get some return on investment. If the game is making a profit it seems odd to me that it's going to be buried alive.

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I'm waiting to be pulled up on that... as I said 'I think' - i.e. iirc

I've not double-checked for todays post, but a little voice in my head seems to recall that it was making money on a day-to-day basis (before moving to free to play).

Not offloading it has surprised a few people.

We've been told (about 2 weeks ago) that a server merge (to a single server) is coming soon, and some speculate that it's to make running an end-of-game event easier... But there's always the alternate camp still hoping that the free-to-play period and server merge may be NC seeing if there is enough interest to run a single server and look into alternate revenue streams for it...

It'd be nice if this happened.. but, then, it'd be nice if there was no war and cancer was a long distant memory.

I really can't see the similarity to Guild Wars. But the in Outer Space (well... on non-terrestrial planets actually) may be enough for some people to try it.

I have GW (in all it's current incarnations) purely as the non-sub model made it an affordable buy-and-forget package to play occasionally. Having said that - I subbed to TR partly as I'd rather escape the slew of high fantasy/swords &amp; sorcery games.

The play-style and indeed the world setup (open zones vs instances) is very different to GW.

About the biggest similarity between the 2 may be certain aspects of inventory/mission management - and tbh ever since trying GW/TR I've wished that we didn't have the limits on 3 missions/2 arcs in CoX.

You'll notice the word practically and that we may put slightly differing interpretations on this words meaning.

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well ill start saving cash in the hope that it dose happen as my plans were scuppered last time thanks to lack of the green stuff.

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Suppose if we all do that then there's an outside chance that we may have the finances to open our own Omega Sektor-like before NC overcome the many obstacles to another meet.

Hmmmmm... If we then hire out our new venture to NC for a CoX meet we may yet be able to turn a profit from CoX!! Yippeeee!!!

I finally find out what the sad smiley is for.