City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Reichsman is not fun.

Adeon Hawkwood

By Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-05-31 13:39 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

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Originally Posted by Decorum View Post
Personally, that's my definition of a "story bible".
By my definition, a "story bible" would be something used to make sure that different writers don't contradict each other. Our story bible does not seem to be very good at this.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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Kahn TF is way easier than Baraccuda SF. Both are easy up to the Reichsman fight.

Baraccuda would be better if the Patrons actually helped you fight. And you have to keep them alive for thier "special powers" to work on Reichsman.

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Yikes! Man, now I kind of feel bad for the guy. But at the same time, that's a pretty serious gaff when you launch a story that contradicts your own lore and players have to keep pointing out the plot holes. Jack used to beat us over the head with this mythical story bible, which apparently was big enough for him to hide behind when the Council car wreck was dumped into the game, and boy were THOSE fun times! The Independence Port Security Chief briefing still has Atlas fighting an "alien armada" because game lore suddenly became phobic of the 5th Column and nazism, replacing them with the Council and fascism. I don't know why that was, but it ended up laying so many eggs we're STILL not done counting our chickens before they hatch, and I promise to stop saying stupid things!

But, yeah, the Khan TF is just... Awkward. I don't know if the actual writing for it is any good (I assume it is), since my team didn't exactly let me experience it, but the story as best I could piece it together seemed... Well, yeah, seemed like it was written by someone who didn't know the first thing about City of Heroes lore. And I'm not talking about getting character nuances wrong that we, the players, might have memorised after five years. I mean obvious mistakes that anyone who'd played the game from 1-50 ought to have at least seen mention of. My God! Akharist as the Citcle representative? Holy cow!

That's actually something that bugs me a lot about new content being added to the game when there's old content it references. When the Rikti War Zone was added, that basically invalidated Angus McQueen almost entirely. His story arc no longer makes sense. When the Statesman TF was added, this invalidated Maria Jenkins' story arc entirely, because it relies on the Statesman missing, which he clearly isn't. Adding the Midnight club didn't invalidate much, but the game is still filled with little references to people coping with the Midnight Club being gone, and it's not!

I dare say the best stories are those who introduce an entirely new zone with entirely unrelated plot points, like Coratoa or Faultline. And even THEN they managed to dump all over the Trolls and the Outcasts with the Hollows, putting their leaders 2-3 level ranged before the factions stop showing up, and don't even get me started on Striga and the Council/Column car wreck!

I'm actually reminded of Linkara's review of Donna Troy's backstory, from her accidental creation to the many revisions she's gone through, all for the sake of making sense and, according to him, all making less and less sense. That's kind of how I feel about the Khan TF. It sounds like it started out as just gigantic misunderstanding by an author who may have otherwise made a good story, but one which had nothing to do with the game, which was then crowbarred into in-game lore a little at a time until it at least stopped falling off, but it still bears the trace of "whatthehellary."

Seriously, I sincerely hope that the storyline in Going Rogue is more concise and the people writing it talk to each other more. Hopefully avoid goofs like this in the future.

I felt sorry for the guy too. You know it's a bad scene when I'm the one talking other people down from attacking the devs. I went into the TF with the understanding it was the guy's first shot at TF design. I was willing to let the lore gaffs slide, provided they were corrected with further revisions to the TF. Those revisions never really came and the TF is now what it is.

But at this point, the TF isn't being shunned because of the story, but because of the final encounter. I don't expect it to get fixed any time soon, even if the devs had the time. Right now it's radioactive and neither the players or the devs feel like going near it until it has a cooldown period.

Eventually I think it should get a Positron TF-style reworking. It's an important story point, I think? No way to tell how it plays into the Coming Storm, because that's an even bigger narrative mess IMO.

But story-wise, I can't see any of the factions that are on the same level as the 5th Column cooperating with Reichsman. They've got nothing to gain. I could only see it being appealing to the lower tier gangs because they want to move up. The Outcasts, the Skulls, Hellions, the Warriors, yeah I could see them at least coming to parlay.

I would totally want to see Reichsman take the now directionless Outcasts and shape them into a highly trained and dangerous elemental powered 5th Column division.


.

 

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
The rest, though, are just dull and Grimfalcon or whatever his name is just... Makes no sense! The Malta Group don't have "a leader." They're not like the Trolls where one tough guy is sitting on a throne and slapping everyone else on the back of the head for kicks and giggles. They're an international conspiracy with enough bureaucracy to sink the Soviet Union and whose leaders - the Directors - are not not defined by being kickass fighters, but rather by being able politicians, capable leaders and cunning bastards. They don't go out and fight things because they don't HAVE to. No-one is ever supposed to be able to so much as connect them to Malta, and even then, no-one can lay a finger on them. And suddenly we have a jacked-up Gunslinger as "the boss" because someone needed another AV and didn't feel like using someone that made sense.
Words cannot describe how much that ticked me off. Although he is not technically their leader, just one of the board of directors...who are supposed to be a bunch of Cold War relics sitting around a table, sending faceless lackeys to do all their dirty work, not running around with six-shooters. At least the Slinger is just a jumped up faceless lackey.

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
I honestly wouldn't be too opposed to this, provided they drop the concept of ridiculous offence along with the concept of ridiculous hit points. There is NOTHING WORSE than the intangible Thorn Tree in the Villain Respec trial that you have to run in plain sight of, taking huge damage while not even being able to taunt it. Why do boss fights always have to come with such ridiculous damage output, anyway?
This is false. You do not need to run in sight of the tree. Many of the vines in front of the tree can be taken out by a ranged attacker from the side of the tree, out of line of sight of the AV, and the rest can be taken out by the meatshield, who would be the one taunting anyway.
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Again, a lot like the Hydra Head. Yes, if you approach it it will smoke you, but you can take down the shield generators without having to face the head, itself, instead fighting lots of Rikti, perplexingly all bosses.
The Hydra head is much like the tree in that sense. Stay out of sight, stay alive. My mind boggles at how many people can't seem to get that concept after multiple attempts at these trials.

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Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano View Post
Actually GreyFalcon is a 'stand in replacement' AV for the original Circle of Thorns AV, unfortunately whoever wrote the Taskforce didn't know the lore well enough that Akarist (who was the AV at the time *said in Grampa Simpson voice*) wasn't actually an evil member of the Circle of Thorns but a traitor to the Circle and got called on the fact it made no sense for Akarist to be fighting the heroes.
Even if it did make sense, the Akarist AV was really just a jumped up version of one of the bosses in the Justin Augustine TF, which means he has crazy resists and is another tedious fight.

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To them a Super-powered Nazi represents actually the kind of thing Malta hates personified into an evil gloaty form.
A super-powered Nazi represents the kind of thing Malta IS. But they're so far in the proverbial "closet" they're finding Christmas presents.

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Speaking of that, the Omega Clearance Rikti info is given out in a 40-45 arc, and only as an extreme exception.
35-40 actually.
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Or WAS. Right now the Dark Watcher is handing it out to anyone who walks by like he's giving out free dinner vouchers. "Just say you learned it elsewhere." This isn't quite the same level of BAD as how villains learn about it, of course - which is basically Timothy Raymond dropping an afterthought to the effect of "Oh, and by the way, the Rikti are altered humans. You know, just sayin'." Ugh... Who wrote that?!?
Those in the know in Paragon City kept it a secret to avoid a panic. Dark Watcher doesn't care; you have signed up to fight the Rikti, you should know what you're fighting. Timothy Raymond doesn't care either.

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Speaking of clandestine secret organisations, what THE HELL are the Malta Group doing calling you out in broad daylight? No-one is supposed to know they even exist, much less be printing their manifestos. That's what the definition of hidden conspiracy is. The Malta are suppose to be the Illuminati, the Templars, the Freemasons, the guys who rule our lives without us knowing and have fun putting pyramids on dollar bills just to show how cool they are that we don't understand the symbolism. They don't go around the streets yelling threats at people on the news!
I just pretend those paper missions don't exist. Let's not even mention the fact that the random boss generation nature of paper missions gives Zeus Titans Gunslinger names. The Malta scanner missions heroside are much better done, even if they are played mostly for comedy; you don't know who the enemy is until you go inside.

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Grimalkin or GrimFalcon or whatever that guy is is just the tip of the iceberg of Malta mischaracterisation. The Malta area group that pretty much no-one aside from Crimson and Indigo even knows about. Their contacts know specific details, but they're not aware of the overarching conspiracy. OK, I can deal with Recluse knowing about them, and Daos through him, but they shouldn't be in the newspaper. Moreover, police scanners shouldn't be mentioning them by name!
I don't think they do. If they do, point out which ones so I can complain about them.

The thing is, the Malta group operates behind a veil of secrecy. Being out in the open is the LAST thing they want. If a few people tell the world about them they can have those people discredited or disappeared. But when a large group of respected heroes is willing to back up these "nutjob conspiracy theories," people will start to listen, and the Malta group's methods will become less effective.

Plus, you know, a giant robot rampaging through Founders Falls is a bit hard to hide.

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Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
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Originally Posted by Iannis View Post
Many of the vines in front of the tree can be taken out by a ranged attacker from the side of the tree, out of line of sight of the AV, and the rest can be taken out by the meatshield, who would be the one taunting anyway.
I can't remember if you can target the tree or not for the villain respec but for sure you can't target the tree during the STF version.

No target, no taunt. I found that Phantom Army dancing in front of the tree works pretty good though.

 

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I have to agree, this TF stinks. The SF isn't much better. It seems rushed and, once again, uses a lot of the same old maps/scenery we have seen for years.

This game has been going downhill in many ways and this TF is an example why. It rivals the older TFs in regards to enjoyment - sad when you consider it's the second most recent add to the game. These guys really need to think twice when launching stuff.

 

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Originally Posted by PumBumbler View Post
I can't remember if you can target the tree or not for the villain respec but for sure you can't target the tree during the STF version.

No target, no taunt. I found that Phantom Army dancing in front of the tree works pretty good though.
I can't remember if you can target it, but you cannot taunt it. My point is you do not need to, since the guys who can survive the aggro (ie the guys who would be taunting if they could) will have all the aggro because everyone else should be out of line of sight.

Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

 

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Samuel_Tow took me seriously:

By my definition, a "story bible" would be something used to make sure that different writers don't contradict each other. Our story bible does not seem to be very good at this.
I was kidding, Sam. Of course that's what it is.

I'm tempted to buy you a sense of humor for your birthday, but I'm afraid you'd just break it.

Dec out.

 

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It's nice to see that players actually ARE seeing the same problems I've been seeing.

Whenever I brought up my issues with the Reichsman TF/SF story, I would get in response a lot of "Oh, well, maybe it's this..."

Considering a lot of the storyline for I-17, it's good to know that the Reichsman TF/SF is NOT a strong indicator of the direction of the writing for the game. Sure, the new arcs are a little strong on the assumption side (Villain: "No, I don't want an army of people who can do exactly what I can! I can see hundreds of ways that can go WRONG!" Hero: "...I helped arrest Vahzilok... I disassembled the Wheel of Destruction! How can you even BEGIN to think I would commit these despicable crimes!?"), but they've got solid writing in them.

I believe the Reichsman TF/SF is in serious need of an overhaul. Frankly, I would have made the whole thing about the Fifth Column fighting the Council... Or at least half of it, anyway. Limiting it to five missions is... Odd.

Frankly, if there were ever a story that was deserving of the six-hour slog timeframe that the Quaterfield TF is, it's the Reichsman plot. That is a lot of story that simply should not be compressed into five missions because, simply-put, most of it gets squeezed out by the constriction. I mean, the Council isn't even mentioned in those arcs, and they're still QUITE active.

One of the statements I got in explanation of that is "Oh, well, in the Kheldian arcs, they're broken down and trying to recover."

That's a bull-plop excuse. The proof? The Redside Viridian arc, where the Center has regained control and has Requiem and Arakhn firmly in their place. The Council is still a force to be reckoned with (though it's hard to tell with the level disparity in the street sweeping; four-out-of-five times, the one level higher 5th Column troops win, simply because they're one level higher), and they should have a presence in the storyline that brings back to the forefront one of their greatest enemies.

It just irks me that all of this nonsense is happening, and the Center simply goes "Hm. That's interesting."

You would think Nosferatu at least would look at Schadenfreude and go "HEY! That's MY idea! And my FACE! And my UNIFORM! You little <expletive deleted>! Did you go through my closet! Did you touch my teddy bear!?"

I think either the Fifth Column or the Council needs a major overhaul. More likely, both. It would be kind of cool if the Council stuck to a "Safe to Handle" type of Super Science (Force Fields, Sonic Weaponry, Robots, Cybernetics), as opposed to the Fifth Column's "Tearing Me Apart From the Inside!" type (Vampyri, War Wolves, Galaxy Soldiers). This would, of course, necessitate a new Column/Council war in which the leaders of the two groups split apart from each other (rather than maintaining their status quo). I could see the Council becoming more of a "gray area" enemy group. Sometimes they fight heroes because they're ruthlessly violent and indiscriminate in their assaults, sometimes they fight villains because they're actually trying to develop some form of control and order. I can see the Fifth Column being full-on evil (unquestionably so), though, as their continuing experiments upon themselves drive them further and further into insanity and depravity (Nosferatu would fit RIGHT in! I can see him coming up with something that makes him actually merge with Schadenfreude and further empower himself).

I don't believe it's a good idea to simply gut one or the other and do away with the carcass. I mean, come on, they did that with the Fifth Column initially, and look how the fanbase reacted. Plus, there is more story, story that the Council is involved with. It would be another tremendous slap in the face of the game's community to simply Copy/Curbstomp/Paste one of the groups and move on.

I discussed a lot of this in the I-17 Closed Beta forum, but didn't request that it get saved because, frankly, I figured the Devs had seen enough of it (if they even cared to look it over). If anything was learned, considered or contemplated upon, we'll obviously have to wait until future Issues before we see a change. For now, we have something different headed our way, and it's probably better to look forward to that.

My biggest gripe with the Reichsman SF, however, the one thing that KILLS me on the whole storyline (aside from his costume being a Fifth Column outfit OUT OF THE BOX; how did they get it to him in the first place!?) is his line "I serve the Fifth Column!"

He doesn't. He simply has too much power to be shackled to the whims of a group that didn't have the gumption to stay in the game in the first place. If he serves anybody, he serves Axis Amerika. However, I don't see that being the case. I see him being a leader in his own right (much like Tyrant/Emperor Cole). Where the Praetorians are intent on making a "Lie of Utopia" world, Reichsman has no qualms about keeping his world in a state of perpetual war (a la Nineteen Eighty-Four).

The rest are plot holes that have been covered in this thread (Who is Gyrfalcon, and what is he doing here? Why is Countess Crey here? How would Reichsman know about Vanessa DeVore?). Some that haven't been really touched on include Schadenfreude simply being a renamed Nosferatu (all of the same powers AND the same outfit) and the odd explanation for Reichsman's health being that he's abducted a number of alternate Marcus Coles (implying that he's kidnapped Statesman and Tyrant, but when the Hell did THAT happen, and why are only eight heroes/rogues being entrusted with putting this massive global threat down?).

The rest of the arc is game mechanic gripes, which have been done to death (Oh MAN! More HP!? How long have we been doing this? Forty-five MINUTES!? On this last fight? I'm late for my date! Hey! Stop laughing! She's not a prostitute! She's not a man! Come on! He's healing! We're gonna be at this even long-! WHY ARE YOU ALL JUST SITTING THERE!? STOP LAUGHING AT ME! *RAGE-QUIT*). Frankly, the mechanics have been beaten, but they remain a slow crawl through molasses (molasses that is full of razor blades). They can be dealt with, albeit slowly (Master Run! And now, I go to stick needles in my ear canals...) or quickly, though you won't necessarily be working with a full team (Okay, five of you have Venge? Queue up... New Meat! Go over there and die!). Mechanics can be tweaked and altered, so can tactics for defeating them. Players have beaten these arcs, so it's not an impossibly grueling task. It's just like bashing your face in with a rock, though. Sure, it dulls your senses, but there are less painful ways of getting that buzz.

My Stories

Look at that. A full-grown woman pulling off pigtails. Her crazy is off the charts.

 

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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction View Post
This is false. You do not need to run in sight of the tree. Many of the vines in front of the tree can be taken out by a ranged attacker from the side of the tree, out of line of sight of the AV, and the rest can be taken out by the meatshield, who would be the one taunting anyway.
"This" is simply the fact that you have to stand in full sight of the tree for a few of the vines while being unable to affect it, which is true. You don't have to do that with the Hydra Head because all of the generators and all of the paths between them are either out of range or out of line of sight of the Hydra Head. In fact, it's usually the tree smoking people that causes respec teams I'm on to see vine respawns. It's just too slow to be cautious around it and too dangerous to not be.

Personally, I'd like nothing better than for the tree to simply be inactive until the vines were dead, but oh well. I honestly don't feel its presence prior to downing the vines adds anything GOOD to the encounter.

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Those in the know in Paragon City kept it a secret to avoid a panic. Dark Watcher doesn't care; you have signed up to fight the Rikti, you should know what you're fighting. Timothy Raymond doesn't care either.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, I'm saying it invalidates the gravity of Angus McQueen's arc and the importance of being given this information, when the Dark Watcher is handing it out like leaflets. The War Zone arcs are interesting, but they are made so at the expense of older arcs and older stories.

And "Timothy doesn't care" is a really bad reason to have his reveal be so ***. It's like Luke Skywalker learning that Darth Vader is his father mid-way through Episode 4 when Obi Wan says "Trust your feelings. Oh, and Darth Vader is your father. Just thought you might want to know." Even if it makes sense, it's just BAD storytelling.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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Originally Posted by Mr_Grey View Post
I believe the Reichsman TF/SF is in serious need of an overhaul. Frankly, I would have made the whole thing about the Fifth Column fighting the Council... Or at least half of it, anyway. Limiting it to five missions is... Odd.

Frankly, if there were ever a story that was deserving of the six-hour slog timeframe that the Quaterfield TF is, it's the Reichsman plot. That is a lot of story that simply should not be compressed into five missions because, simply-put, most of it gets squeezed out by the constriction. I mean, the Council isn't even mentioned in those arcs, and they're still QUITE active.
While I can see the argument for it being a longer arc I am really glad they didn't make it longer. Few people actually enjoy the absurdly long shard TFs. Personally I think an hour to an hour and a half is the perfect length for a TF. It's long enough that it's worth the tiem spent putting a team together but not so long that you get bored. Additionally shorter TFs allow for a higher proportion of interesting enemies (like AVs). If I wanted to mow down hoards of mooks I'd farm, I play TFs for the interesting encounters.

 

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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
While I can see the argument for it being a longer arc I am really glad they didn't make it longer. Few people actually enjoy the absurdly long shard TFs. Personally I think an hour to an hour and a half is the perfect length for a TF. It's long enough that it's worth the tiem spent putting a team together but not so long that you get bored. Additionally shorter TFs allow for a higher proportion of interesting enemies (like AVs). If I wanted to mow down hoards of mooks I'd farm, I play TFs for the interesting encounters.
I dare say a lot more people would enjoy absurdly long TFs if they weren't team-locked. Of course, at this point that's simply not something which is likely to change, but the pressure to do it all in one sitting is what ruins the TF experience.

Well, that and having to do it with other people who've usually done it dozens of times and just want to get it over with, but that's besides the point.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
I dare say a lot more people would enjoy absurdly long TFs if they weren't team-locked. Of course, at this point that's simply not something which is likely to change, but the pressure to do it all in one sitting is what ruins the TF experience.

Well, that and having to do it with other people who've usually done it dozens of times and just want to get it over with, but that's besides the point.
Interesting thought. I've never played another MMO (more than a month anyhow), so I've never considered what defines a Task Force.

Inviting new people to join is an interesting concept, but I guess you'd have to have a way to track how much they participate/contribute in order to get the necessary merits/badges. Of course you'd also have people gaming the system, just like the old log out and fight reduced mobs exploit, so I never really thought it would be/could be done much differently.

 

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Originally Posted by PumBumbler View Post
Inviting new people to join is an interesting concept, but I guess you'd have to have a way to track how much they participate/contribute in order to get the necessary merits/badges. Of course you'd also have people gaming the system, just like the old log out and fight reduced mobs exploit, so I never really thought it would be/could be done much differently.
That's kind of what I mean. Since we have so many rewards tied to the end of a TF, we're really beyond the point where we can just fiddle with the system to allow dynamic team building. It'd just be far too exploitable.

To be fair, I'm not sure WoW Dungeons are much more time-consuming than our own TFs, even if they generally constitute less overworld travelling. I guess full-scale Raids in WoW might take longer, but they usually constitute of one lone fight or several smaller ones in a gauntlet fashion. However, I do know WoW allows on-the-fly invites. I don't know how they handle rewards in those instances, though.

To the developers' credit, they seem to have completely missed their guess when it came to how people would play TFs when they originally made them back in 2004. TFs were designed to be something SGs would do over several days, taking breaks when the play session became too long. Because this requires serious coordination, reliable friends in-game and actually quite a serious commitment, people chose to instead just sit through the whole thing all at once. So the old TFs designed to be long enough to fill a few days' worth of gaming were rushed through in, say, four hours, causing people to complain.

In a smart move of changing to game to match how people are already playing (rather than Jack's version of getting people to play how the game had been designed), newer TFs were made smaller and shorter, designed with the expectation that people would try to sit through the whole thing even if it sucked, so it made sense for it to not suck. However, because of this, TFs are now self-limiting. They are designed to be done in a single sitting, but are constrained by how much people are willing to do in that one single sitting. About four ling-ish missions seem to be mid to high norm.

However, as story arcs have shown us, you CAN'T condense a story indefinitely. Even if you have excellent writing, some stories just take longer to tell. Granted, a lot of hero-side arcs are padded with missions that accomplish nothing, but a lot actually aren't. The response to "story arcs are too long" can be seen in CoV, where stories are still long, but split between several arcs and several contacts. For instance, all four of a villain Ptron's story arcs put together aren't longer than Crimson's World Wide Red, but the story is still staggered.

Personally, I enjoy long story arcs more so than short ones because I enjoy the story more than the rewards, and if I were ever given the chance to play a TF for the story, I would choose a longer TF over a shorter one. Sadly, the only way to play ANYTHING for the story is to play it by yourself, and I can't start TFs alone, and probably wouldn't be able to finish them if I could.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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WoW does it like this: Rewards drop per boss, those in the group and present at the defeat of a boss in a dungeon/raid get to roll on the loot, those who aren't can't. So if a group defeats 2 out of 4 bosses, one drops, and someone else joins, they'll then get a chance to roll on the loot from the remaining 2 bosses.

In the random dungeon finder, if you're joining a pre-existing team instead of one put together by the system, it'll let you know how many bosses have been defeated before you accept or decline.

 

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Originally Posted by Slashman View Post
First and foremost is probably Bioware. I can believe that about Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Especially after seeing interviews with their lead writer.
Well, duh. They've been using the exact same one since KotoR.

Branching Paragon Police Department Epic Archetype, please!

 

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Originally Posted by Mr_Grey View Post
(aside from his costume being a Fifth Column outfit OUT OF THE BOX; how did they get it to him in the first place!?)
Should be noted that Axes Amerika used Fifth Column iconography so he's probably not actually be wearing a Column uniform.

 

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To be fair, I'm not sure WoW Dungeons are much more time-consuming than our own TFs, even if they generally constitute less overworld travelling.
It varies greatly. Some can be epic four hour+ affairs, like say running the entire Scarlet Monastry (which itself is split into 3 dungeons) or Karahazan or Naxxramas (both truly massive raid dungeon with many, many bosses). However most of the modern 5 mans are actually pretty quick on the time scale, very few will take longer than 45 minutes.

Most Raids are actually designed how Taskforces were originally designed. They don't reset for a full week and once you defeat a boss you're given a specific Raid ID number which means you're locked to that particular instance. Since there's more to learn about WoW Raid bosses than there is about any boss in CoH it usually takes a day or so (most guilds raid for four hours a night, 3 nights a week at a minimum) worths of tries to defeat them before moving on.

So a raid will rarely be completed in a night unless you're either completely overpowered for it (level 80's doing a level 60 raid) it's a one boss/small number of bosses raid encounter (Onyxia, Gruul) or the guild has perfected the instance so much that the instance is now on 'farm' status and they usually bring one or two undergeared people along to get them loot.

Of course the way things are handled differently is gear, WoW is very much the old school hardcore gear treadmill (you have to get the gear to defeat all the bosses in dungeon X but you also need the gear from Dungeon X to take on instance Y) whereas City of Heroes is a case of fighting lots of non-AVs is actually a better way of getting the 'phat lewtz'.

 

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Dr_Mechano tells me something I don't know:

Most Raids are actually designed how Taskforces were originally designed. They don't reset for a full week and once you defeat a boss you're given a specific Raid ID number which means you're locked to that particular instance.
Just curious, when was "originally"? Alpha? Beta? Did it make it to Live like that? First time I've ever heard that.

Dec out.

 

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Heh probably wasn't too clear...by originally designed I meant how Taskforces were originally designed to take more than one play session to complete. WoW raids are designed to take more than one play session to complete.

I apologise for going off on a tangent mid-explanation.

 

Posted

Oh, oh, yes, I've heard that. That Jack was a little bit shocked that people were doing them straight through and that's not what he had in his head.

Jack has never struck me as a particularly perceptive man when it comes to the player base.

Dec out.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Decorum View Post
Oh, oh, yes, I've heard that. That Jack was a little bit shocked that people were doing them straight through and that's not what he had in his head.

Jack has never struck me as a particularly perceptive man when it comes to the player base.
Jack also said something along the lines of "people roleplay in this game?!" and other such idiotic statements (heh Statesman's Statements...sounds like a CoH Fan Newsletter). No...he generally wasn't very perceptive of the playerbase, I'm thankful he created the game, I'm also thankful that he stepped down and then left when he did. Personally feel the game is in much better hands at NCsoft than at Cryptic...but that my friends is another thread for another time...

I'm also incredibly glad that the devs did see the light as it were and now make the modern TFs/SFs about 2 hours long at most considering that TFs/SFs = WoW 5 man dungeon and Hami/Mothership = WoW raid (even then you can complete them in less time it takes to learn and beat a WoW raid boss).

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Decorum View Post
Just curious, when was "originally"? Alpha? Beta? Did it make it to Live like that? First time I've ever heard that.
Originally, as in the original Survivng Eight TFs, all of which are still in the game in their unchanged forms, other than Positron, plus the four Shadow Shard TFs, which would be Quaterfield, Sara Moore, Justin Augustine and, of course, Faating the Jerk, to quote the Hamster.

Back in the day, there was a very hard divide between Task Forces and Trials, and if you look at the paper map that shipped with your CoH box (if you have one), you'll notice a clear divide between Hazard zones and Trial zones, as well. I don't know what Trials were originally supposed to be. I'm not sure anyone ever had a good answer to this, because when the game launched, there WERE no Trials. I guess the Faultline Dam trial was supposed to ship with the game, but it did a Cathedral of Pain move and was never actually put in.

The first actual trial tagged as such was the Hydra Trial, access from the Abandoned Sewers, which was and may still be tagged as a Trial zone, hence the HUUUGE spawns down there. Then, and perhaps even now, the Trial consisted of one massive hunt (150 Rikti in the Abandoned Sewers), followed by what was essentially an hour-and-a-half boss fight. Back then, the difference between TF and Trial was TF mode, as the Hydra Trial did not use it. It was basically a mission which could be taken from some woman near Penny Peterson in Founders' Falls by people between 38 and 41 and over, but it did not lock the team, did not have level requirements for team-mates (above and beyond the level 36 requirement for the Abandoned Sewers, which should no longer be in effect). Instead, the TF made it so that if you brought people higher than 41, then either they couldn't take the anti-hydra weapons, or possibly even that the crates would not give anything with high-levels on the team. Since the hydra head could only ever be harmed by anti-hydra weapons, that would make it unkillable.

However, the next TF added to the game - the Respec Trial - broke the "no TF mode" rule by basically instituting TF mode to split the trial into its respective level ranges. I don't know what motivated this decision, but I assume it was the fact that non-TF mode Trials were chaotic and difficult to scale and, most importantly, difficult to keep high-level players out of to prevent them from just pwning the trial.

Every Trial since then - the Eden Trial, the Hollows Trial, etc, has been using TF mode. Actually, I'm not sure if the Caverns of Transcendence or Terra Volta was first, but either way makes sense. The point is, Trials began using the TF mechanic. So then the question recurred - what is a Trial and what is a TF? At the time, reverse logic suggested that TFs were like story arcs - long strings of missions that followed a story, whereas Trials were kind of like raids - short build-up to a large, long, intricate boss encounter. The Caverns, Terra Volta and Eden trials certainly suggested this.

Then CoV came out and threw it all out of the water. Not only did CoV dispense with the concept of Hazard and Trial zones altogether, but its TFs were actually a lot like what we called Trials in CoH. And, yes, we call the, Strike Forces, but it's still the TF mechanic at play. Virgil Tarikoss' SF, for instance, is basically a few short missions followed by the HUGE final encounter in Bat'Zul's cave. Even Kathie Hannon before that was a fairly short TF with "interesting" boss fights.

And then we got the Recluse SF and, subsequently, the Statesman TF, both of which play more like raids than they do like TFs. And then we got the Barakuda SG and the Khan TF, both of which end in a HUGE final confrontation that takes up easily half of the storyline's total time commitment. I honestly don't think there's any point in using the term "trial" any more outside of simple convenience, because Task/Strike Force and Trial are completely interchangeable at this point. The old ones aren't exactly the same, but in new content, there is no distinction. A TF is a SF is a Trial. It's the same thing by different names.

But why have a distinction to begin with? Why have TFs distinct from Trials? What did they have in mind? Well, to my mind, I don't think TFs were ever supposed to be anything like what they became. Like Hazard and Trial zones, they were designed to be nothing more than forced team content, but I don't think any of them were designed to be more "epic" than regular content. And you have to remember, back in the day, content was never designed to be specifically soloable. In fact, we weren't meant to solo it, which Jack tried and failed to fix. Тhe distinction between solo content and TFs was never meant to exist. It was ALL team content, TFs just needed to ensure you had a team which could beat the AV at the end. The distinction came out of our ability to solo things we weren't supposed to, so it stopped being a question of "able to solo" so much as "allowed to solo." That gave birth to the notion that TFs were the only team content in the game, when in fact THE WHOLE GAME was intended to be team content.

Read your Launch manuals and look for the entry on the Boss class. There it will tell you that bosses are very hard enemies which really should not be faced alone and even if you could somehow manage to defeat a boss, you should know you really weren't intended to. Not how it worked out, is it? But Jack tried to force that with the I4 boss buff, but that tanked. This train of thought is also why we can disable bosses in missions. They were supposed to be unsoloable, so he threw us a bone and let us turn them off if we wanted to solo, under the impression that... Why would we want to solo, anyway?

The reason I'm talking about this is that if you look at the old game - I'm talking pre-I1 content - you will notice an astonishing lack of AVs of ANY kind. There's Dr. Vahzilok, yes, but he's the ONLY ONE you meet until you get to the final level range (which at the time was 35-40), where you meet the only other one - the Envoy of Shadows. I'm entirely convinced that the ONLY reason for TFs to be team-only content was so that the system could ensure there were enough people by the end to defeat the AV you would face. Elite bosses appeared with I2, but even today, they are just a handful. Frostfire, Atta and... That's all I can think of, pre CoV, anyway. So TFs WERE basically just regular content, only with an AV at the end.

Of course, I1 gave us the 40-50 game which Jack says he and Positron designed around being "epic" and taking as long as 1-40, so it made sense it would be epic forced content all the way, hence the "AV in every mission" difficulty. People like me complained a lot, so eventually somewhere around I7 or I8, AVs began scaling down into EBs under certain conditions. And that's when TFs took their final turn into what they are today - "solo" content would scale down, but TFs never would.

Then we got rare recipes that dropped from TFs only, then we got Merits, then we got Quick Kathies, and little by little the whole TF system mutated into something that was coded to require all of those people via several different system. NOW TFs are team-only content, and I've been insulted over suggesting there be soloable, reward-less double of them... Like the Ouro TFs. I do not know what the design intention behind those was, but they were technically TFs that used the TF mechanic, only they scaled down like solo content. I don't know if they scale their rewards, but I doubt it. That is kind of what TFs originally were, but people refused to accept them if they didn't mandate teaming, so the Ouro TFs are the only ones that do that. Pity.

Basically, it seems like TFs were designed to be nothing too special, while Trials were intended to be the EQ-style raids and dungeons. As with most of our game, it was originally built after the most rigidly traditional styles but because of poor implementation and questionable development in its infancy, mutated into something wholly its own. And I dare say little of it was by design.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

Posted

Ha! You do go on, Sammy.

It didn't really answer my question (that was already answered), but as always, an enjoyable read. I knew most of it, but there were tidbits of old history there for me to learn from. I'm an "old hand" to a lot of newbs, but those early days I missed with their radical changes are always interesting to me.

I'm still glad I started with I6, though. I think if I'd started pre-I5 I'd have gotten bored quickly and maybe bowed out.

Dec out.

 

Posted

The Trials were timed. They were called a trial because they were just that--a kind of nerve wracking experience where you fight against the clock. Eden Trial? Timed. Sewers Trial? Timed. Hollows Trial? Timed. If I remember right they originally wanted a timed Faultline Trial that would've consisted of multiple groups protecting the back portion of the Dam (Arachnos City) from being overrun with Circle of Thorns mages but they couldn't code for multi-group encounters (likely the exact same thing that grounded the Cathedral of Pain, although the SG PvP raiding aspect was another just as likely a hurdle they couldn't get past.)

Granted, Eden's timer was pretty long and you probably had to really suck to fail it. Maybe they expected you to FULLY CLEAR the cavern network. The TV Trial just hides the timer and you're fighting boredom while those timed waves spawn against you in the Reactor room...and you're fighting against vine respawns in the Treespec which is a kind of clock.

Task Forces, on the other hand, weren't timed. They were designed to be time consumptive. Since you didn't actually have enough content in some ranges to level up into the next Contact bracket before XP curve rebalances, difficulty slider higher Debt cap, yaddayadda you could easily exhaust Story Arcs and be stuck having to groundpound for XP...TFs were nice and long guaranteed group content rife with copy+paste missions intended as an alternative to street patrolling with PUGs (bwahah pulling literally 1/4 of Brickstown and then AoE'ing so many dead at once the game client crashed)

As far as I can tell that was basically the intended difference between them.