macskull

...Was there logic connecting that thought process? At all? Even a little? I didn't see any. If anything, using your raise money (obviously not all of it, just enough for a nice dartboard) to buy a dartboard would make you benevolent because your co-workers benefit from your success. Even if you somehow made it an incredibly obvious point that it was only due to you that the new dartboard was purchased, it wouldn't be entitlement, it'd be you being an ***.

What you, and all the others who say "it's no fair that these people have an advantage," are asking for is simple - you're asking for them to be brought down to your level, negating most of the time and effort, and in the case of I13 PvP, skill, instead of you taking the time to get better in the hopes of being able to compete. To hell with keeping up with the Joneses, it's much less work to just drag them down to our level.

EDIT: I think of all the non-PvPers who have posted in this thread thus far, Werner's insight and logic has been the most sound, simply because he understands the mentality and the system behind it.

Right, because it makes complete sense for someone who wants to put in neither the time nor the effort to have exactly the same stuff as someone who does. Now that is entitlement.

So my boss comes up to me and says "Hey, you've been getting almost three times as much done in the same amount of time as everyone else!" but instead of asking me how I did it, he tells me "We're cutting your hours down to 1/3 of what you're working now, so you're on an even output with everyone else." Sound stupid? It is - but that's exactly what you're saying.

People build certain ways for PvP because those are the most effective ways, just like people build certain ways for farming or AV/GM soloing. You don't need IOs or accolades for zone PvP, though they're extremely helpful especially in team and solo arena matches. You don't need accolades or IOs for PvE, though they're helpful. Your goal is to make your build as good as you possibly can, and accolades and IOs are a helpful tool in reaching that goal.

Everyone in this game has access to the same set of tools - the game servers, the character creator, NPCs to defeat for XP, respecs. The difference is how you use the tools - refusal to use them doesn't mean they don't exist or that you don't have access to them. If you want to get good at something, you need to put the time and effort into it, and if you don't want to do that, you don't want it badly enough. Every PvPer worth their salt knows that beating up on inexperienced players isn't a measure of skill. It never was, and no serious (good) players think it is. The ones with the sense of entitlement are the ones who have almost no PvP experience and think they can bring their PvE builds into a PvP zone and do well against players who have invested time, money, and knowledge in getting better at PvP.

Here's an amusing social experiment: go into the suggestions and ideas forum and start a thread about how the game could stand to use some rebalancing to bring certain "problem" builds in line, as everyone knows there are certain powerset combinations that are way better than others. In this thread, you'd list off the changes made to PvP in I13, but reword them and apply them to PvE so it's not immediately obvious. Make the post, and then watch the uproar as people would say "wow, if they did that, I'd quit the game." The devs knew this when I13 happened, yet they also knew that the existing PvP playerbase was so small as to be completely expendable so they had absolutely no qualm with making all those changes. Now, the PvP playerbase is even smaller, which makes me wonder if they're thinking to themselves "well, it can't get much worse, let's throw some more changes at them and see what happens," or if they're saying "hm, we should fix this."

You hit the nail on the head, good sir.

People that liked the old system liked it because of the mechanics, not because of the rewards system (mostly because there was none). While post-I13 PvP is still better than most other MMO PvP out there, I13 took one of the most unique aspects of CoX PvP (the speed) and gutted it completely in favor of bringing down the high end instead of bringing up the low end. Basically, they sacrificed (for the most part) damn good mechanics and no rewards system for very mediocre mechanics and a rewards system that's only there so people can say "look, PvP rewards!"

You're talking about fiteklub, or stand in melee range with another melee character until someone dies. That's like wading in the kiddie pool at the YMCA - it's fun for a while, and then you learn to swim and realize how much more open and freeing the big pool is. In fiteklub, there is almost no skill, only button-mashing, and build makes all the difference. In normal PvP and team PvP, skill is more important than build because it introduces variables like debuffs, movement, and inspiration usage.

The problem with PvP before I13 wasn't that it was unbalanced (yes, there were some things that needed to be changed, and just about every PvPer worth anything in the old system knew that, and many even offered suggestions for changes that would make it more beginner-friendly), it was that there was absolutely zero incentive to PvP other than for the sake of PvPing. Obviously many people will simply avoid PvP under that scenario, and that's what happened. After I13, most encounters under zone rules (travel suppression and heal decay on) are hopelessly unbalanced in favor of pure damage dealers, and there are no real rewards for PvPing (a token amount of inf and prestige and the chance for an inspiration or salvage drop don't really cut it, and the actual drop rate of PvP IOs is far too low).

If the devs are serious about "fixing" PvP to make it more attractive, it needs to have more tangible rewards that improve your character in PvE as well as PvP - rewards need to be common enough as to be meaningful and not feel impossibly difficult to attain, but rare enough that there won't be a glut of them. PvP needs actual minigames instead of the non-PvP-related zone events in the PvP zones, with worthwhile rewards for the winning team. Lastly, revert to I12 rules, keep the global resistances in the patron/epic shields (not the base resists though), add unresisted travel suppression for being hit by a melee attack, and find a middle ground between the old and new mez systems (neither one is very good in a PvP context).

Fun fact: the PvP IO drop rate is actually higher than the purple drop rate (something like 1:100 or 1:200 for PvP IOs versus 1:5000 for purples - though note that these are estimated drop rates as we've never been given hard data for either of those drop types). It's just that in an evenly-matched PvP event (whether it be groups going at it in the zone, team arena, or even 1v1 arena) the scores will be low, and because drops are tied to rep, they're very rare if there are only a few people in zone killing one another.

In CoH, mezzes are used as offense, defense, and disruption. Under the old rules, the best way to take someone out of a fight in a team match, where Clear Mind and the like would be flying around all the time, would be to bring a Sonic or FF and cage them. However, cages are virtually useless under the new rules because their duration is so short, even on control ATs.

There are far better Corruptor builds than Fire/Dark. Until every powerset is exactly the same, though, there will always be builds that are popular because they're better. That's just the nature of the beast. I13 was supposed to eliminate FotMs, but all it did was axe some old ones, introduce some new ones, and some are still around from the old days (Fire/EM Blaster, anyone?).

Reaction time and movement is part of player skill - if you're always aware of your surroundings, as you should be in a PvP environment, you won't often get surprised, and when you do get surprised, you'll have the reaction time to do something. Now, though, you'll get hit with a mez and you'll be dead before it wears off because there's nothing you can do until it wears off. Under the old system you could've at least popped a Break Free and tried to get away. Your powers work exactly the same way against NPCs in a PvP zone as they do in a PvE zone, but the reason encounters are more dangerous against NPCs is because of DR, travel suppression, and heal decay (which NPCs have none of).

Pre-I13 PvP was balanced just like PvE is - for the most part, team encounters. Team balance was thrown out the window in favor of solo balance so that everyone could "contribute equally" (read: do damage, nevermind that a team would have disruption/debuff, buff, and damage dealers so everyone was contributing). The reason you don't see many buffers around these days is because they've just turned into farm targets who are much less able to help their teammates than they were under the old rules.

The concept of DR isn't a bad one (it's not one I agree with, but I can understand why it was implemented), it's how it works with the rest of the game that causes problems. The PvP base resistance that's granted to all ATs (except Tanks and MMs) compounds the problem - between the base resist and my epic/patron shield, I'm very near (if not already at) the DR hard-cap for resistance, and external buffs like Thermal or Sonic shields will add almost nothing to my stats. DR and the change to cage powers have made Sonic a completely worthless set. However, melee ATs (which already have good defense or resistance, tons of hit points, and sometimes even multiple self-heals) aren't hit nearly as hard by DR. I can understand DR if you apply it to trying to stop a tank-mage Blaster (say, for example, a Blaster running double-stacked Sonic shields with an Emp backing him up), but a smart opposing team will be going after that Emp while the rest of the teammates are providing disruption so that Blaster is less effective against getting a lock and quick kill on a target.

What really needs to be removed is travel suppression and heal decay, and I wouldn't be too opposed to dropping the base resistances either. The problem with the changes as a whole is they took balance from team encounters in favor of balance for 1v1 encounters, and everything's about damage now. Under the old rules there were some builds that didn't win because of damage output, but because of attrition - they wore their opponent down over a 10-minute match. With the new rules, everything's focused on damage and there are very few real attrition builds that are still viable. In a 1v1 situation under the old rules, the rock/paper/scissors metaphor applied, unless the participants were using similar builds, and in that case the better build would win assuming equal skill. Under the new rules, none of that has changed, but everything's been slowed down and essentially having skill lopped off at the top instead of being boosted from the bottom means being "good" doesn't mean nearly as much as it did before.

Thing is, rewards shouldn't be what brings a player in. The system should be reward enough by merit of having fun while doing it. Hell, there were no PvP rewards from I4 until I12, and yet PvP garnered a respectable population. Fact of the matter is most MMO players aren't in it for the PvP. They don't want to PvP, they despise having PvP forced on them, for whatever reason. Rewards aren't going to illicit anything more than a short-lived curiosity from most people, and when they find they can't just magically waltz into a PvP environment and win like they do in PvE, they'll get frustrated and leave. A PvEer is very unlikely to just wake up one morning and decide they want to PvP - more often than not a PvEer becomes a PvPer because they go into a PvP environment and say "hey, that was fun," or they've got friends who try to get them into it, and they all have fun together, regardless of the reward.

Your post seems to imply that there are two statuses for NPCs: right in melee range, and way below you on the ground. Something tells me you must get royally screwed when you run an indoor mission. None of my characters with Flight (I mentioned them upthread, and the reasons why they still have Flight) use it defensively - they only use it to get from point A to point B.

You can buy a temp raptor pack if you're really that badly in need of staying above the mobs. Meanwhile, I'll just be using my travel powers to stay at range horizontally. Best of all, the CJ/SS combination (often in conjunction with Hurdle) gives you the best combat movement you can get without a Kin. If you want to take Flight, that's fine - I'm not going to waste a power pick to get it though, because with very rare exceptions, SJ and SS are going to get me there faster, CJ/SS provides combat movement far superior to Hover or no powers at all, and in those occasions where SJ and SS won't work (like the Shadow Shard, when there's no TPer on your team), you have the GvE Jump Pack and the Raptor Pack.