Starjammer
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Quote:I'm not going to try to address the MMO industry as a whole, but this does give an opening for my opinion about the comic book/super-hero genre in particular.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Ironically, paynesgrey's last post would have started an especially interesting discussion, because I think his question: "Inequity Aversion works both ways. How do you expect someone who mainly solos to look at Extra More Bigger Super Bonus Reward Just For Being A Joiner?" cuts to the very heart of modern MMO design theory. The question "how do soloers view MMOs" is one of the most interesting questions about MMOs since WoW launched. Even with all the bickering surrounding the end game, I still think its the most interesting question in MMO design theory, and its one that has occupied my MMO thoughts almost since I first started playing this game (I started as a pure soloer myself).
(Incidentally: rewards are presumably granted for team participation, not just joining, but it has been difficult to enforce team contribution in the reward system so door-sitting is still a degenerate case for now).
I believe that every genre has what I like to call a Fundamental Unit of Awesome. That is, this is the number of leading characters around which stories in the genre are optimally built. For most ensemble stories, the Five-Man Band is the fundamental unit of awesome. For military stories, the unit is the fundamental unit of awesome. For the mythic hero or super-hero, the individual is the fundamental unit.
In support of this, I cite the comics industry. What's the sign of a marginal character? They're relegated to a supporting role in a team book. An average or so-so character? Featured role in a team book. A strong character? Solo title. Flagship or signature characters of the line? Multiple solo titles. When a strong solo character is added to a team, it raises the team up. When a team becomes a dumping ground for marginal characters, it brings the team down.
CoH came about during an era when the fantasy archetype quad (Fighter, Thief, Mage, Cleric) was the design standard for MMOs and they followed suit. I always have and always will believe that was a fundamental error. A Certain Other MMO almost broke away from that mold but buckled in the end; but their self-inflicted problems were legion anyway. I have yet to try out the Distinguished Competition.
So I honestly do think that as a genre convention, a super-hero (or villain) needs to stand on their own two feet as an individual character first and then teaming takes it to the next level, as opposed to the team being the fundamental goal and soloing considered the side activity.
I've done it both ways, just for the record. I've soloed and I've played TFs like it was my second job.
I think when CoX broke away from the five-man band design philosophy the game improved. I think turning the Incarnate System back towards that is a design mistake, not from a MMO perspective but from a genre perspective. -
Quote:IMHO, this makes their lives much more difficult, and deservedly so.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
But contrary to popular belief, the devs don't always do what I tell them to do.
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Quote:Honestly? It feels like the guy who knows he's got you over a barrel and gouges you just because he can.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Serious question. Do you think they should just remove the second option? Would some option that's doable solo be better than no option. I'm not trying to set up a false dilemma. I recognize that the devs have set the bar very, very high. Perhaps too high. But assuming they aren't willing to budge, do you truly believe that this is worse than nothing?
It's not helpful and frankly most of the people who like it, like it because they don't want it to be helpful. And please, let's not pretend that's not the case.
Rationally, it's obviously just a starting point. But it does come off as a kind of "Take That, soloers!"
Moderator05's comments in locking the Soloability and End Game thread were not helpful either, IMHO. -
Quote:I would think the most efficient answer would be to time-gate a maximum number of earnable Notices per week, regardless of source. At least, it makes a lot more sense to me to do it via that route than to attempt it through valuation.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The people who team could easily earn one NotW from the WST, and a second one from shards, and end up earning them twice as fast as the devs originally designed the notices to be earnable at. That's not a hand-waveable concern.
40 shards is a lot for a low activity soloer. Its trivial for someone who teams a lot to earn in a week. The problem is that at the moment there is no actual "solo path" there is a path that doesn't require teaming. Its a path everyone can theoretically use, and in fact teamed players are always on automatically, on top of whatever else they might be doing.
It actually is not as easy as it looks to get this right.
The tech and the practice are already precedented with A-merits and Gr'ai Matters.
I think if it were possible to earn 1 per week through purchase, 1 per week through WST and 1 per week through ITs it would be workable. I think that would also be a fairly good balance between the "slow solo" route and the "preferred teaming" route. 3:1 is about the difference between earning merits on TFs and merits on story arcs, if I'm not mistaken. -
Four words: Hand to ship combat.
That is all.
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Quote:I don't really buy that argument, though. They have the tech to time-gate A-merit and Gr'ai Matter purchases so they should be able to apply that to Notices as well, if it matters. Making Notices stupid-expensive is not a necessary alternative.Originally Posted by brophog02
Yep, but I must point out again that the Notice is gated content. I think we're underestimating that fact too much in this thread.
The more I consider it, I really hope the rationale is something beta-related. For example, preventing people from buying a truckload of Notices until they get the time-gating in place.
Anything else just reeks of really bad judgment of one form or another, which I sincerely hope is not the case. -
Quote:If you said that and in fact secretly did like capitalism, then it could be.Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
I don't think "I don't like capitalism" can ever be factually incorrect.
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Quote:Yes. And it's not out of line to think that the disparity between those two is a bit much and does not contribute in a healthy manner to a supposed "solo option."Originally Posted by Golden Girl
A 45-60 minute average KTF this week would save you 88 Shards and 100 million Inf, plus give you bonus merits - and if you spent 60-90 minutes on one average WST once a week, you'd get the 4th Tier Alpha in less than a month, and all for only 5-6 hours total playing time for the whole period.
It's just everything else in the last 10 pages of this thread that's become out of line. I'm with Leandro. -
Quote:In that context, I'm kinda thinking of Squirrel Girl from Marvel...Originally Posted by Yomo_Kimyata
So, Incarnates are the best of the best. We are talking iconic figures here, fantastically super powered folks like Statesman, Lord Recluse, etc. The best of the best. I have a bunch of noble and/or super-evil characters who are qualified to go that next step and become the best of the best.
But then again, I'm looking at my list and wondering if some of the following really deserve going to that next level.
Like: Emu Kid, a AR/fire blaster who is the teenage son of a mutant crime fighter who saddled him with stupid useless wings and who burns himself in order to feel alive. Or Noob Cow, a Mind/Kin troller who was a bovine with mad cow disease before scientists tried to cure her with Superadyne. As two examples.
Don't get me wrong, they are Incarnate now, but I wonder if when a meteor is about to hit the planet, are these the folks you want to be in control of saving us all?
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Quote:True. However, the numbers we've got now are the numbers they chose to start with, so they must see some merit in them. Giving feedback on some imaginary and as-yet hypothetical set of future numbers would be meaningless, as you yourself have pointed out many a time.Originally Posted by Zombie Man
If these were the final numbers with no other option, then my reaction would be....
That needs to be prepended to every post in this thread since these aren't Live, nor are they Open Beta, nor are they even Closed Beta numbers. The *pre*-Closed Beta is still in progress and numbers are always in flux.
Hopefully the current feedback will cause the numbers to change and then we can give feedback on the changed numbers. Repeat until done.
The possibility does exist that the excessive numbers are there for an innoculous reason, say to prevent beta testers from crafting a ton of Notices with saved-up and copied-over shards. Until someone comes out and says so, however, the numbers are what they are. -
Quote:Okay, I'll freely concede I don't regularly read the Market forums and didn't know of the work done there. I was under the impression that the code bug was discovered first.Originally Posted by Grouchybeast
Unless there's been another one since, the last problem with drop rates was discovered by players, many from the Market forum, who devoted a *lot* of hours to testing and investingating, including writing software to perform statistical analysis of the large amounts of drop data collected (DropStats). And even with cast-iron statistical evidence, it was very difficult to persuade the devs that it wasn't a 'perception bias' and they should take a closer look.
IIRC, the problem did indeed stem from an uninitialized variable, though.
Still, it supports the point I was trying to make. If the RNG had some sort of more subtle bug in it, we would be unlikely to know about it because player reports in that regard tend to be discounted. It is far easier for the devs to use their datamining tools to find such trends from the top down. -
Quote:I used the TF conversion trying to make a point, to put the exercise into a context to which the teaming-advocate crowd would more readily relate. In the slight hope that it might elicit slightly more sympathy than "Suck it, soloers! Stick it to 'em, devs!"Originally Posted by brophog02
The problem with this conversion is that the solo player is often not doing the Weekly Strike Target because they don't want to do TFs (for a variety of reasons), so converting 1 TF into ~10 TFs doesn't make sense in the context since neither is explicitly solo content.
However, I concede that Leandro's example did it better. -
Quote:Really, I think this is just another case of the devs spitballing something without thinking it through again. AV Regen buff, anyone?Originally Posted by brophog02
I'm not sure why you're using that conversion, though. It doesn't clarify anything, it isn't standard, and it isn't a good conversion to go from team based earning to solo based earning.
I'm using that conversion because I'm trying to communicate to anyone on the dev team who might read the thread a rough estimate of exactly how much harder they've made that transition.
I mean, seriously, do they really want to set the ratio to 1 WST/IT = 8-12 TFs = 80-500 solo missions (depending on difficulty)? That's just a rough estimate but it does jibe with rough averages I've seen from both solo missions and TFs. -
Quote:Just pointing out that the "solo option" is the equivalent of ~10 TFs.Originally Posted by brophog02
You don't say........
Since I'm going to extend the devs the benefit of the doubt that they can do value substitution and basic addition, I have to assume that's a deliberate statement on their part. -
Quote:You'll need to do 8-12 of them if you're not doing a WST.Originally Posted by brophog02
I'll just do a TF.
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Quote:Really, all it takes is 2 Alignment Merits and selling one of the high-value Rare recipes you can gain with it for about 200M.Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
It's a lot to me. I haven't been playing for seven years. I don't have 50s that have been at the cap for four years with nothing to spend influence on. 100 million inf takes me a fair while to collect, or getting extremely lucky by having a valuable purple drop.
Even so, 88 shards... iye! That really feels spiteful. -
Not advocating wholesale rebuilding of the RNG or anything like that. But...
I have been wondering recently what testing, if any, goes into making sure that the RNG is working properly. Do the devs datamine drop rates or hit rates or anything of the sort?
Yes, statisical clustering and confirmation bias exist and my rational brain tells me that streaks are subjective. Still, every time someone comes on and complains about RNG-based problems, that suspicious part of my lizard brain pipes up and wonders if the RNG is really WAI.
Because there's a natural and not-unfounded tendency to disregard reports of biased outcomes when they crop up, it can take a lot of testing by the player-base to find real problems. And usually they have to be so blatant that everyone notices.
IIRC, the last problem with drop rates was only discovered because Castle or someone on his team just happened to find an uninitialized variable in the code. Nobody even suspected there was a problem because, well, streaks happen. It wasn't until the bug was pointed out to the player base and people started looking for it that the perception of the problem appeared.
Just a thought... -
Quote:Something that I think even the writers have not contemplated fully:Originally Posted by Innovator
So far its Daphne and Jim they keep giving more powers too. I can't wait for the writers to get around to giving more some of that love to Stephanie and JJ.
JJ can use his super-brain to perform physical tasks with perfect precision. This means his power extends not just to his brain but also to his entire central nervous system.
Forget Forge... JJ is Taskmaster with super-intelligence and no need to copy others. And super-senses would not be out of the question either. -
Quote:Actually, Batman will more usually scare the bejeezus out of you, ask your name, suggest strongly that you've made a major error in your response to your life's misfortunes and suggest that you should call the HR department at Wayne Enterprises if you need a (better paying) job. He'll also mention off-handedly that he'll know if you do or not and he'll follow up if you choose to continue supplementing your revenue stream through illegal means.Originally Posted by CactusBrawler
You due to a run of bad circumstances, end up unable to get a job and have to turn to theft to feed your family. Batman will kick the stuffing out of you, despite you deliberately making sure that you were never violent in your crimes.
Interesting note: The US government allocates billions of dollars every year to social programs for various purposes, a great deal of which goes unused because the people who most need the money don't know that the programs even exist. Because the programs have to give out the money or be defunded, they wind up misallocating a lot of funds to people who shouldn't get the money but do know the programs exist. This is how multi-millionaires wind up getting farm subsidies and small business loans that should be going elsewhere.Quote:All this despite having enough money to single handedly correct all of Gotham's none Batman related problems.
Bruce makes plenty of money and programs available through the Wayne Foundation. That doesn't mean that everybody in Gotham who needs them uses them. -
Quote:First I should say that my Claws/WP is organically-grown and probably not what most people would consider an "optimal" build. She just rocks against Carnies but she struggles in other circumstances; she won't be soloing a pylon any time soon. Unfortunately, I don't have a current Mids build to share.Originally Posted by rina_
Really? If you can elaborate on why, that would be interesting. Because my experience with Carnies on a soft-capped Kat/WP (except the ranged and ae smash and psi holes) are not great. I can handle +1/x4, but two of those groups can utterly destroy me if I am unlucky (ok, I wasn't fully e/n softcapped when I last did this, but close). I have not done any longer fight-testing against them to increase my tactics, mostly because the phase-shifting annoys me too much to fight them for fun.
There are multiple problems I am facing with Carnies, the increased pet to-hit is one of them, although very manageable in lower quantities it can get ugly when there are 6+ pets around you. At the same time this pet armada also makes targeting problematic/time consuming. Phase-shifting prohibits me from taking care of Master Illusionists as fast as I would like to (and since there are 6+ pets around it's hard to see whether they are currently shifted, wasting a few hits), they will generally summon all their pets before I can kill them and both the Phantasm (plus it's decoy) and Dark Servant will stay alive after the Master Illusionist kissed the ground. Dark Servants have substantial auto-hit to-hit debuffs which are very annoying especially if there are two of them. To counter the to-hit debuffs I always have Focused Accuracy running. The biggest problem however is that as soon as a Mask of Vitiation goes through, I am done. It reduces my WPs power (-regen), my soft-capped def (-def) and even creates end problems (-rec) that I don't have until this point even with all the ae death-drains and Focused Accuracy running. The Mask is survivable if there are only a few other mobs around other than the Mistress, but if I fight an x8 mob a mask means pretty much instant death.
If anyone has some great tips, please share.
Carnies' defenses are weakest against lethal attacks, so Claws or Kat should be about equal there. However, most of my attacks are slotted 1 Acc, 1 Rech (if needed), 3 Dmg.
I think the first real difference is that I built my scrapper with stupid-high Recovery so that I could run with no End slotting whatsoever, except for Focused Accuracy which I also use. I'm talking QR, Stamina and Phys. Perfection all slotted with PS Procs. That pretty much nullifies Mask of Vitiation.
On top of that, I went very strong on both psi-typed def and res. So all those psi-based attacks (which also includes Mask of Vitiation if I'm not mistaken) roll off her back.
She's also not a softcap build. Instead, I went for a combo of +hp, +res and +regen with def mostly relegated to the f/c/e/n roles. Between those buffs and psi mitigation against the debuff attacks, I think that's where the differences lie.
I tend to view WP, especially on scrappers, from a viewpoint of a slower regen with thicker skin, not a defense build.
EDIT: I'll also throw in that all Carny phase-shifters shift on a fixed cycle. Get a feel for that cycle in relation to your attack chain and you can generally know when to attack the boss and when to lay back or shift targets. Also, you can time your alpha for the maximum window of opportunity. On my blaster, I know that if I start my BR + PB + Aim + BU cycle when the target shifts, my snipe and follow-up will land while she's solid; that will take out a lt. and put a hurt on a boss. -
Quote:Yes, even sociopaths get their day in court... AFTER they get apprehended for committing their crimes. If you're committing a violent felony, the cop doesn't give you a trial by jury before he unloads his weapon into you. Neither does the citizen with a carry permit. Neither does Batman and at least he doesn't shoot you with a lethal weapon.Originally Posted by Smersh
Even sociopaths deserve their day in court, and have certain rights that Batman violates. They retain those rights until they are convicted in a court of law and sentenced by a jury of their peers. That's the foundation of our civil society - that we can only be punished when we are proved guilty, because we have decided as a nation that it's better for guilty people to go free than for innocent people to be punished. Batman skips all of that, and if he's going after you, there's a presumption of guilt. And Batman's never wrong about that.
The issue is one of narrative convenience - Batman's methods are justified because every single person he goes after is a genuine criminal with no extenuating circumstances. They're bad guys, pure and simple, and no one argues that the Joker is just 'misunderstood.' That makes it easy to cheer for Batman, because all the people he goes after are EVIL. He never makes mistakes, so his unshakable belief in himself as the only source of real justice is justified. Narratively, it doesn't matter that Batman's violating their rights or brutalizing them - they're bad guys getting their comeuppance. That's cool, I can understand that - I love lots of fiction where the hero gets stuff done without worrying about technicalities. That doesn't mean that, when you step back, you realize that Dirty Harry is a bad cop and you wouldn't want him in your town, let alone the heroes of Lethal Weapon. It doesn't make Batman noble, it makes him a crypto-fascist vigilante.
You can enjoy the story and gloss over it in your mind, because it's not important to the story - our heroes only do these things to the really bad guys, we're assured, and we don't worry about it. But when you do think about it, it's really hard to justify the existence of Batman.
To hit your major point - Batman is a greater threat to the social order than criminals. In our social order, we know there will be criminals, and we're set up to handle that - we have police, courts, prisons. Batman says the social order is corrupt and weak, and only he and his violent methods can save us from the other, the evil scary criminals.
By the same token, you don't even get a warning if the cops come to arrest you with a no-knock warrant after the fact. Now, we tend to discourage vigilantism because most civilians aren't as well-trained as cops to handle these situations during and after the fact. But Batman can at least make the point (in the fantasy setting) that his training and methods tend to be superior to those of law enforcement.
Batman is a vigilante but he isn't just a vigilante. The situations he gets involved with tend to fall into one of three areas: stopping a crime in progress; compiling evidence of ongoing criminal conspiracies by career criminals; acting as a consulting detective to an ongoing investigation. None of these things are illegal or unprecedented for civilians to do IRL within certain rules. Batman is a fantasy character who has unrealistic limits and therefore can unrealistically stretch those rules. Bear in mind that most of the background work that goes into Batman's investigations happens off-panel. Just as we don't watch Bruce Wayne write checks for drug-treatment centers, we don't watch Batman pull an all-nighter in front of the Bat-computer running forensic accounting analyses.
IRL, we'd stop a guy trying to be Batman because IRL nobody can do what Batman does safely or effectively. The suspension of disbelief comes with the preternatural skill and resources that Bats brings to the table coupled with the unrealistic degree of law-enforcement breakdown in his Gotham. IRL, the state or feds would have been forced to shut down Gotham's municipal government years ago.
So in the context of his world: No, Batman is not a threat to the social order. Batman is an extraordinary expression of the social order trying to maintain itself in an extraordinary setting. -
Quote:You forgot the phase-shifting lieutenants and the fact that all their phase-shifters can attack/use powers while phased.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Carnies are one of those groups that seem like such pushovers at 0x1, and then start to get really scary for everyone at 0x8. They have something for everyone: end drain, non-positional attacks, heavy psionics, debuffing, mez, and of course phase-shifting bosses. If they had earthquake and vengeance they'd be perfect.
OTOH, my Claws/WP scrapper using mostly generic IOs tore through the Carnies like they were Council. For every perfect storm, there's a countermeasure. -
Quote:You can't really hold up the 1930's comic-book-logic "old Gotham" as a comparison to Macauley's pulp-adventure historical setting of Pueblo de Los Angeles. "Old" Batman didn't need a compelling social context under which to operate and you can't cite the lack of one as a context in and of itself.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
The oppressive Spanish colonial government against which El Zorro fought has no counterpart in old Gotham, which, I must emphasize, was portrayed as a corrupt society only much, much later in Batman's history. There's very little sense of social justice in the original Batman. (Even Golden Age Superman was known to fight for the little guy early on, taking such actions as demolishing tenements and beating up slum lords.)
The only way you can disparage Batman as an oppressor is if you claim that the people he goes after are using valid means of expression to change the social order. They're not. We're not talking even eco-terrorists or anti-WTO rioter-protestors. Batman's rogues are sociopaths and psychopaths committing blatantly self-serving criminal acts. There's nothing oppressive about Batman (or anybody else, for that matter) stopping them. Batman is just better-equipped to do so. -
Quote:Ugh, Batman Inc. Excuse my threadjack here but this storyline should just kill Batman as a character dead.Originally Posted by Nightphall
Batman Inc seem to have him focusing on a more global scale now.
I don't classify hero "levels" by power output, but rather by the amount of territory they patrol.
Batman focused on the entire city, and was only focusing on the streets early in his career. Then again, I do tend to overanalyze a bit.
The whole point behind an alter ego is to remain anonymous, partly so that one can remain unencumbered by the legalities of vigilantism.
With any kind of reality, every thug and gangster that Batman ever punched or even threatened, even once, should now be lining up for the great-grandmother of all class-action legal suits. And most of them would win. No matter how good Bruce's lawyers are, they'd win.
Unless, of course, Bruce is willing to buy off the same corrupt Gotham judges and DAs that keep letting the bad guys off. That would be an interesting moral dilemma... -
Quote:In point of fact, Robin Hood's "government" (i.e., Prince John) was quite legitimate by the standards of the day. King Richard went abroad, John stood up.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
An illegitimate government, it must be emphasized. The redistribution of wealth is his own innovation.
The Batman, in his Golden Age origins, was quite content with the status quo in Gotham City, which was presented as well run and honest. He was strictly concerned with battling the underworld, mad scientists, etc., not fighting city hall.
Now, he was an awful monarch, no doubt. But there's a difference between being bad and being illegitimate.
As to Batman... You completely neglect the fact that the social order that Batman fights to uphold is neither self-imposed nor arbitrary. Batman doesn't go around beating up random citizens who defy his "Bat-Laws" because he feels like it. He uses violence only against the violent to uphold a common social weal that most of his fellow citizens agreed upon long before he came on the scene.
You can't discuss Batman without reflecting upon his inspiration: El Zorro, Don Diego Vega. Another aristocrat vigilante, but one acting on the people's behalf out of a sense of noblesse oblige. A motivation that is commonplace in the Batman mythos as well. Bruce Wayne isn't Batman just because he wants to be, he's Batman because he's the only one who can afford to be and because it's his duty to the city and the people that are the source of his affluence and success.
But, obviously, this is a speciously-constructed argument meant to advance a controversial thesis rather than a cogent viewpoint.
tl;dr version: Back under the bridge, troll!