Another_Fan
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Quote:Originally Posted by B_L_Angel
I don't think you have covered everything.
I think if it was a goal to have blasters as easy to play as the other ATs then they needed a buff, but that was just people seeking a foolish consistency. Not everything has to be the same and when you try to make everything the same you alienate people that cherished the differences.
When you talk about depth to the game I agree, but if you increase the power of blasters in the game you take away part of the skill development needed to play them.
My feeling was we needed more complex NPC behavior after all the ATs were brought in line. Think what the Cimerorans would be like if the surgeons played more intelligently. -
Quote:Kind of expected. Not really your fault at all.Originally Posted by Tater Todd
Um I have failed at time because I couldn't kill the prisoner before he reached the door and my lockdown power didn't work on him/her.
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Quote:Shoot me an email, I will be back home by Monday and send them to you.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'd like to see those fifty lines of code.
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Quote:You just did.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Who said anything about it failing? I consider it a weak showing if one gets out. Solid play there gets people a badge and/or an extra Astral Merit.
I certainly did not.
" seen the prisoner escape fail to stop everyone because someone used a judgement"
I still would love to know how you can say you have lost that because someone used a judgement at the wrong time.
I am sorry I fail to see how dragging this down to the purely personal does anything or why you felt the need to.Quote:No. I said it showed skill. Really, can you have a conversation without twisting the conversation?
Re: Skill, walking is a skill, sitting in a chair is a skill, logging into the game is a skill. The whole conversation is about depth of skill. -
Quote:Just how often do those occur ? To take your baf example I can't think of a time where I have seen the prisoner escape fail to stop everyone because someone used a judgement. I have seen prisoners escape because people just weren't paying attention.Originally Posted by UberGuy
More on-topic of the relevance of skill, I do agree with folks here that think skill matters. Maybe what's up for grabs is what "skill" means, but in the context of this game, I think it covers a few things.
- Target selection. This spans things like selecting the right foes to cripple or eliminate first, to "aiming" cones and bursts for maximum benefit.
- Positioning. This can be something as basic as kiting, but I think more realistic "skill" is reflected in maximizing movement while ostensibly rooted. As a non-Blaster-specific example, I will often fire PBAoE ally buffs on allies in dangerous places (near multiple AVs or Monsters) by running in, pausing ever-so-briefly, then leaping away just as I activate the buff. Executed properly, I minimize my exposure to enemy AoEs and still buff my allies. Another example would be to jump across a hallway intersection to blast foes. More generic positioning choices are related to target selection, such placing slow patches at corners so foes are already clumped for AoEs as they come into view, or firing team buffs in the rough centroid of the team (perhaps with a heads-up) instead of constantly calling for the team to gather.
- Power activation timing and sequencing. By paying attention to when powers recharge, you can still try to optimize your attack chain while needing to insert non-damaging powers. As an example, my Dark/Psi Defender has to occasionally fire Subdue to maintain a non-stop attack chain, but it's got the worst DPA of all her attacks. If I need to cast Tar Patch, Howling Twilight or some other non-damaging Dark Miasma power, I try to wait until Subdue's place in the chain comes up. Another example would be knowing when it's optimal to activate Dull Pain (around 50% health) rather than firing it whenever its recharged.
Some time back there was a thread about what people thought "skill" in an MMO was about, and I defined my version of it as recognizing "fragile" situations (ones that are more likely to get out of player control and lead to wipe) and using appropriate powers or other tools (like inspirations) suited for "stabilizing" such situations.
If the powers in question have long recharge times or other frequent-use restrictions, I consider it a mark of a good player that they tend to save those powers for emergencies instead of firing them willy-nilly. Consider the prisoner phase in the BAF - I've seen many a player fire judgement powers at a juicy spawn of prisoners when there was little danger of that spawn getting past other defenses. While that's gratifying, I'd rather save my judgement for a large spawn of prisoners that's already gotten past the other defenses.
Combat jumping in and out of melee is something you consider a big skill ?
Even if you grant that items you cite are skills that have a large impact on the game just how long would you expect a person of average intelligence to pick them up ? A day, a week ? A month ?
I have been playing golf for nearly 50 years and there are skills i doubt I will ever be good at, let alone master. I can't think of a technique in this game that has that kind of staying power.
Edit: I take that back there is base building -
Quote:I'll agree there may be more as well. The problem is even forgetting about incarnate powers and the vast increase in IO power. In that time frame we got inherent fitness and insp combining.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Some other critters got taunt too, but I think most of them were new critters, such as the black knights in Night Ward. To be honest, I think some of the Incarnate Tsoo are supposed to be taunting us, but it doesn't seem to work. (They play the animation and we play the "hit" effect, but nothing else happens.)
It feels a bit like I'm forgetting some noticed AI change since I16, but I agree, even if that's true, it's not that noticeable in the scheme of things, or I'd probably remember it. -
Quote:That really sums it up.Originally Posted by Garent
I would have preferred controllers getting nerfed, but that's an unrealistic expectation. -
Quote:Really ?Originally Posted by UberGuy
I'll freely admit in advance to it being something of a nit-pick,
Well you can also toss in the Circle of Thorns getting KB ability for their crossbows. But the problem is those are all old hat. I think just about everything you mention is pre I14.Quote:but they have gotten slightly harder, usually in indirect ways involving their AI, spawn rules or via fixing missing/broken powers.
As an example, Rikti Mentalists and Mezmerists did not always have Fear protection. They silently gained it at some point, I think around I11. I very much noticed this particular example because it significantly affected my ability to solo them on my Dark/Dark Defender - being unable to terrorize the mezzers caused a dramatic increase in how often they mezzed me.
An example of AI-based changes are the ones that "fixed" the ranged combat AI of Malta robots, who went from something I could casually save for last in Malta spawns to something I almost always want to defeat ASAP. They not only started dealing vastly more damage at range, they gained significant mezzing capabilities as well. (Something I hardly felt Malta needed, but that's an aside.)
Trolls with Integration used to never get any mez protection from it, and now they do.
I'm positive there are more examples like this, where critters got at least indirect powers upgrades, though I think I've forgotten some of them over the years. Many of them were probably like the Malta case, where broken AI or powers definitions meant something the critter was always supposed to do was missing for years.
Another indirect difficulty increase came from the fix to spawn rank randomization, which corrected the fact that LTs used to not spawn for small teams (including solo). It didn't get a huge amount of attention, but I thought was a really big deal when it was fixed. I forget when it was exactly, but I know it was after CoV (I6) and before Inventions (I9).
Finally, critter AI has evolved some over the years. Critters used to pile around corners as efficiently as their bounding boxes allowed (once they actually got bounding boxes), but this changed eventually so that some would swing wide around the corners and pelt you from afar with ranged attacks. Spawns used to sit statically in nice clumps, but were changed so that at least some of them would wander around as if on patrol. Even the static ones started spawning such that they were often less well-clumped for AoE beatdown.
I'm certainly not going to claim that critter powers kept pace with characters equipped with high-end IO builds or especially Incarnates. But they did grow somewhat, and that's not counting some of the factions which seemed designed explicitly to be harder than usual, such as Arachnos and Longbow.
After i14 that You have what superstunners being added to the freaks, and Black Scorpion getting taunt ? If there is more it hasn't been particularly noticeable. That is of course the point. -
Quote:Thank you for answering the implied question.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
I've personally had moments where I've done things that people would probably think are highly unlikely if not mathematically impossible, such as soloing an 8-person Malta spawn on my DM/DA scrapper after the rest of the team wiped, and this was before stacking armor and end drain resists were added, so /DA was fairly weak. Again, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, my Peacebringer rarely died to void hunters or quantum gunners, and this was in 2005, when they were new and both mobs were literal kryptonite to them. And this was when people were saying on the Kheldian forum that it was impossible to get through a mission without being killed, but players came up with strategies to survive and kill the kryptonite mobs first.
That is exactly what you just did.Quote:I am not claiming to be uniquely awesome.
It takes about 50 lines of code to play a character in this game. Admittedly that is stacked on top of libraries. Just how much decision making do you think that encapsulates ?Quote:But you're making decisions every moment when playing that impact your success or failure. These decisions can be based on any number of factors, and can dramatically impact how well you perform. You can tell the difference between a good and a mediocre Fire/Kin controller pretty easily, for example. Yes, it is a powerful build, but it requires keeping track of a lot of buttons, and if you lose track of some of them it can have a rather detrimental impact on your performance. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Hopeling
I don't think anyone can honestly claim that IOs, Incarnate powers, and various other buffs and general power creep haven't raised high-end performance dramatically as well. Whether the gap between low and high has gotten wider or narrower... well, I'd say wider, but that's hard to actually measure. Still, when some characters/players struggle at very low difficulties and others can thrive at maximum difficulty (in a game where the difference between minimum and maximum difficulty is very wide), it's pretty clear that the gap has at least not narrowed excessively.
The enemies haven't gotten any harder, there is no such thing as more survivable than unkillable or more dead than dead for the enemies.
Edit and I have allowed you to do it again.: You are speaking of low end build vs high end build. I am talking about the skill level needed to make a given build perform.
I get the feeling people here think they have some magical ability to extract performance from their characters by doing exactly the same things everyone else does. -
Quote:Well that is certainly doom if you make a mistake. I doubt anyone would describe COH's original design as a maze of dark twisty passages.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
Examples such as WoW's early years, City of Heroes' original design, Champions Online after the day one patch, Star Wars: The Old Republic as it exists now - in this case, you can make choices for some characters at 10th level that will lock those characters out of endgame raiding, or at least make them extremely subpar for that purpose, or force a specific spec that may not fit your intended role (tanking or healing instead of DPS being a common one).
5 damages and an acc
6 slot hasten for recharge
6 slot health, and stam
Edit: I realized you are speaking about something different than what I was in general and I have been addressing your points but not communicating mine.
You are talking about the selection process as opposed to execution. An example difference would be games that have charging mechanics where you have an optimal charging points for attacks. So you have not only selection but also execution coming into play.
I am observing a trend and I have a theory yes. I am open to contradictory data.Quote:You're arguing a theoretical position with little more than circumstantial data.
Is tic tac toe a thrilling game for you ? It does mean you have cut the difference between low end and high end by definition.Quote:A marked rise in low end performance is not a bad thing. This doesn't mean that everyone can reach high end performance with little effort. -
Quote:Do you have any examples ?Originally Posted by BellaStrega
Actually, I am claiming that what you have identified as a lack of depth may not be a lack of depth. Also, rather frequently, what appears to be "depth" in some games turns out to mostly be a maze of twisty passages, many of which lead to DOOM and a few of which lead to good character builds. So you either design a game where people have enough options to hang themselves or you try to make the options balanced enough so that players have a harder time hanging themselves. The latter? Better game.
In ours it seemed the devs recently were trying to obfuscate what would constitute a good build.
I am an electronics engineer by training.Quote:I don't know about you, but I've always felt that reality > theory.
I see endless streams of accidental master runs these days ( I have the habit of always setting challenges when possible). Matter of fact ever since inherent fitness I have seen a marked rise in low end performance.Quote:In the real world, with IOs and without IOs, before IOs, I've seen players perform at different levels even when they're on what should be equivalent characters because some people are better at playing the game than others. Things like IOs and incarnate powers can shrink the gap, but the gap still exists. Everyone doesn't perform to exactly the same level, even if you give two players identical characters. -
Maybe.
To say more would be to speculate using a lack of information as a basis. -
Quote:Maybe we were talking past each other.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm not exactly sure if you're agreeing with me or not at this point, but as peak performance was not relevant to the original point, the ability to create bots to achieve peak performance, whatever that's defined to be, would be twice removed from the original point, which was about whether developers target the average capabilities of their intended playerbases or not.
It's fine to target so the average person or average person can play the game but where we have been aiming for, is downright easy for the average player to do everything.
The closest we have to hard things are the MO badges/RHW badge. These are all team accomplishments and really don't reflect so much on individual skill in game play but on external factors. -
Quote:You are actually claiming lack of depth to a game doesn't cause burnout/loss of interest. ?Originally Posted by BellaStrega
No, "correlation is not causation" is always a true statement. You're essentially picking two separate bits of information and claiming that one caused the other, but you really don't know. It's always easy to claim one's personal peeves causes games to burn out, but it's not a very logical or factual argument. If you want to establish true causation, you need to go beyond "these two things happened in the same place and possibly at the same time" because that is not an argument.
Most likely they don't have an IO build. Skill in gaining IOs does not equal skill in playing the character.Quote:No, I've seen real players with significant performance gaps for whatever reason. The ability to design bots that can achieve some things in-game does not reflect a lack of real performance gaps due to skill. -
Quote:Got trapped in the excluded middle there. You are right, there were people that thought some blaster sets needed improvement but overall the AT was fine.Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
I know it might sound like semantics but there really is a difference between any of these and what I've been saying. The Blaster archetype to me wasn't in need of a buff, many of the sets available to Blasters were just in need of re-balancing. Comparable to what I was saying before, I think it was the best idea to balance around the best possible sets; Sort of what we saw for Blaster secondaries being revamped with +regen via Mental. The nuke and snipe buffs were nice too but those weren't Blaster buffs, they were blast set buffs, shared between 3 AT's.
I personally didn't feel the other ATs needed the blast set buffs. Did anyone really feel Widows were underpowered, corruptors or defenders ? The snipe changes just struck me as poorly thought out. The range boost effect as an attempt to fix looked like it would be horribly overpowering. I was looking at archery and you wound up with a ridiculous combo of rain of arrows, snipe, fistful of arrows, explosive arrow just covering everything. -
Quote:That would be true except that there is a very clear mechanism at work. If you don't have depths to the game you burn out quicker.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
Correlation is not causation. Also, one of the MMOs I was thinking of when I said that was World of Warcraft, which had a fairly long growth cycle before it started shrinking.
No that was a reality in our game. Very simple computer programs could accomplish tasks at levels comparable to the best the best players could. From what I saw people doing the most complex part of what they had to deal with was navigation. Personally I was able to get my keyboard to run my characters when I was AFK.Quote:This is a slippery slope. -
Quote:It's a consequence of limited human intelligence. There is never enough time for a person to process the input they have so people use heuristics (shortcuts) instead of actually rationally examining things. It gets to be a problem when the shortcuts get defended to the point rationality wont penetrate.Originally Posted by Evil_Legacy
Figures.
Now I bet if I blow that off like ML did then it would be WW3.
Wouldn't take it personally.
As to the agent provocateur stuff going on don't sweat it, maybe it will go away. The worst thing you can do with that is try to fight it. -
Quote:Given that it should really come as no surprise they can't hold onto their players.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
I've seen devs from other MMOs talk about designing toward statistical performance. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons that stuff gets nerfed, as well as driving many buffs.
The problem is when the difference between what the average player can achieve and what the best player can achieve is negligible.Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm not exactly sure if you're agreeing with me or not at this point, but as peak performance was not relevant to the original point, the ability to create bots to achieve peak performance, whatever that's defined to be, would be twice removed from the original point, which was about whether developers target the average capabilities of their intended playerbases or not.
The difficulty involved in building bots to play the game is a good measure of the amount skill it takes a human to play the game, the obvious exception is reflex speed. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Tater Todd
Didn't this same argument happen when Doms got buffed lol? In fact people still complain about that. The same with Stalkers.
Could you elaborate ?
What I see here are
1. People who didn't think blasters needed buffing and didn't want a buff.
2. People who didn't think blasters needed buffing but were happy to get one.
3. People who thought blasters needed buffing but didn't like the nature of the buffs.
4. People who thought blasters needed buffing and were happy with the buffs. -
Quote:Peak performance needed to be considerably more difficult to achieve than it was in this game. It was far too easy to get to the top and once you were there what could you do with it ?Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
I don't think the game should be entirely around peak performance, but I think once a peak has already been established an effort should be made to bring other options up to the same potentiality.
And of course this is where people start talking about power creep... But meh. I think the COH difficulty controller is enough to counteract it, and Incarnate content can be challenging for anyone. As good as it might be, there's no way even the most decked out SS/FA is gonna be able to solo a MoM or something.
I agree about balancing sets so there were no FOTM or at least so the difference between a fotm and a non fotm was small. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's irrelevant to the point. No one said anything about the average player achieving peak performance. That doesn't even happen here. The subject was, as even you put it, "designing to the statistical performance of the target audience." Every game, Eve Online included, does that. In fact, Eve Online does that to a higher degree than City of Heroes ever did; they have far stronger design tools to do it with. From the very beginning they were extremely cognizant of what their players were doing across the spectrum of players and they very closely monitor what the playerbase does. In fact, their exploit detection systems are explicitly designed around recognizing what their playerbase is generally doing and looking for anomalous behavior.
It can seem on the surface that Eve Online is a completely lawless game where the devs control nothing and everything is within the control of the players, particularly the economy, but nothing could be further from the turth. The truth is behind the scenes, CCP exerts powerful control over the large scale macro-elements of the Eve economy and other game systems. Their balance criteria is far harsher than City of Heroes ever was, far more quantitative, and just as keyed to their overall player performance.
I have macro programs that get peak performance from my characters in this game. I can't say that for eve. I know people that used to have more complex bots for AE farming. I am pretty sure it wouldn't have been too hard to have bots that ran tfs. I am pretty sure that writing decent bots to handle combat in eve would be an order magnitude harder.
The only thing here that is a block to peak performance is access to IOs. Heck our hardest challenge in the game now, the really hard way badge is more about team composition and access to high end inspirations than anything else.
Although now that I think about it, maybe I could dig up that Russian Chatbot from a few years back that was swindling people might be just right for EvE -
Quote:I learned a couple of things from threads recently. Every argument I have had on the boards over the years has come from my desire to see the game improve. A more accessible market that didn't so grossly favor the manipulators, Bringing blasters up to the performance level of other ATs, trying to get depth added to the game so it would have a wider audience all of that was because I saw potential for this game that now will never be realized. I was willing to fight because I cared.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Rock on. If how things usually go for you on the forums here are any indication, I'm guessing you needed the amusement. It must be a real downer to be so right all time, and yet not only have no one acknowledge it, but have so many people actually deny it. Nemesis plot, indeed.
Of course, contrary to PPCRegularGuy's conclusions, I don't actually think I have any special reputation for denying your correctitude. After all, look at all those example quotes I posted earlier. My only claim to fame (shame?) is that I just happened to have a really long example handy. I can't actually take all the credit, though. My personal posse of forum pit bulls, so ready to take you down a peg on my command, have to factor in somewhere. Truly, I owe them all a pint or five once the lights go out on these forums.
Without the concern about the games future or the hope of seeing it improve, you are nothing to me just a guy with a really big chip on his shoulder.
Come Dec 1, I will find something new to do with the wife, and you will still be a nobody that needs to be right on the net. -
Quote:I can't think of non MMO, game or sport anywhere that use the philosophy.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's because there is less discussion about targeted performance for other game types, and because its primarily in MMOs where that design target can be effectively iterated. However, the principle forms the basis for basically all game design. Virtually no one designs games with an abstract target, and then doesn't care how many people can actually play it effectively.
I would be surprised to find a professional game designer anywhere that doesn't believe in some variant of that basic design philosophy.
re: stable audience, almost every MMO has declining audiences over time. So if the technique was supposed to do something about that it has a high failure rate.Quote:Originally Posted by Void_Huntress
Not one with a stable audience, anyway.
Matter of fact I'll go further thinking about it all the really great games that have stood the test of time pay little to no regard to the low end or average player being able to achieve full potential. Sports, baseball, basketball, golf, standardize the performance of the equipment and that is it. Chess,Checkers, backgammon, poker, krigspiel at most care that people can understand the rules but there has never been a succesfull attempt to make certain everyone can achieve a level of play with them.
Edit: It just occurred to me that the one MMO that has been able to have not just a stable but actively growing audience is EVE online and there is no way you can say the average player gets anywhere near peak performance from their units. -
Quote:I am sure the IAU is looking forward to hearing from you.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The same thing's going to happen when the Sun eats Mercury.
Also, Pluto is a planet. I'll consider Pluto not a planet when the IAU makes a definition for planets that isn't completely stupid. The IAU's explanation for redefining what a planet is was that it was scientifically important to make a definition that could be consistently applied. Then they made that definition only work within our Solar System: the definition for planet everywhere else in the universe is different. Pluto would be a planet by IAU definition if it was in a solar system exactly identical to ours ten light years away.
The definition is also very hazily argued to include the Earth as a planet, even though it does not technically meet the neighborhood requirement, as the Earth does not "gravitationally dominate" the orbit of the Moon and is a satellite of the Earth only by the circular argument that the Earth is a planet in the first place. If the IAU cared about Science, it wouldn't care one way or the other if the Earth was defined to be a planet or not. It does, because it knows it can redefine Pluto's status but if it redefined Earth's status everyone would ignore them completely.
Knowing that, and generalizing the sentiment scientifically, I ignore them completely.