UberGuy

Yeah, but experience with what it's like in the game influences immersion immensely. What makes more sense if you want to be immersed in the game? (A) It's a wildly advanced gun that can fire about 50 different things, or (B) that it's really not like that, it just works that way for game function/balance.

In the pursuit of (A) the default gun even looks like it fires 50 different things.

Yes, because we're comparing the available tools you can use to completely disable foes. Whether it's balanced or not is irrelevant - what's matters is what we need the powers to do.

This discussion started with your claims that the -toHit in TG (of all things) was enough to "usually" make foes with annoying powers miss. I say that it's better to have a 95% certainty that at least one mob in question will do nothing all the time. (Note: your odds the foe will miss based on debuffs is also reduced by the same 5% miss chance on your debuffs unless you spend the time using Darkest Night on them.)

Even moving from Twilight Grasp to the more powerful debuffs in FS and DN, each of those unstacked leaves a +2 foe with at least a 38% chance to hit you, and that's before we account for the fact that LTs and bosses inherently resist toHit debuffs.

Your options for ensuring the mob in question can do nothing are Howling Twilight (8.33% base uptime), Dark Pit (19.9% base uptime) or PG (74.4% uptime). If that mob is a LT, Dark Pit isn't even an option. If the mob is a boss, your only option is to stack Dark Pit with HT or to stack PG.

What does that have to do with the topic at hand, exactly? Did I make any claims at all about how damaging a DDD is? No, in fact I advised against taking Blackstar on the basis that I don't think it's a good use of a DDD's endurance.

The time spent between a DDD's opportunities to stack stuns is the big waste of potential. Instead, fear most foes, petrify the ones that you can't afford to be able to hit you, and save HT's stuns for emergencies not covered by the fear/hold combination.

95% hit rate for well-slotted PG versus a roughly 50% chance for a foe hit with a single application of TG to hit you. My option works 10 times more often than yours does.

PG's base duration/recharge ratio at level 50 is 11.9/16 or 74.4% uptime. With double duration and 66.6% recharge slotting, that rises to 248% uptime.

Compare that with Dark Pit, at a base duration ratio at level 50 of 11.9/60 or 19.9% uptime. With double duration slotting and 66.6% recharge that's a 66.1% uptime ratio.

Dark Pit only works on minions, whereas you can use PG on LTs, and stack it to affect bosses, though it is difficult to keep a boss held with it without additional recharge bonuses such as Hasten. In order to affect bosses at all with Dark Pit, you have to stack Dark Pit with another power. If that power is Howling Twilight you will affect them for a maximum of around 24 seconds before they break free. Under an extremely favorable +200% recharge for HT you wouldn't be able to repeat that stacked mez for another 36 seconds.

So despite being the worst mez in the game, PG is still a vastly better hold than Dark Pit is as a stun. That's saying something.

Foes that mez, debuff, drain endurance, or activate obnoxious defensive powers will still use those attacks when mezzed by Fearsome Stare. If you want certainty that they do not do these things, you mez them with PG. Good luck defeating that Paragon Protector who activated MoG or Elude because all you did was terrify them.

I solo +2/x6 missions on my DDD. If I ignore my DPS, I'll do that sort of thing much more slowly than if pay attention to it. Everything is relative - when I play my Defender I want them to do as much damage as a Defender can do, because damage is how you get stuff done in this game. You go ahead and laugh, and consider that my Defender probably kills stuff faster than yours, and probably in greater safety based on my power choices. If you are fine with that, so am I, but please don't try to claim that your choices are numerically superior.

Definitely try teaming. Once you settle on a server (nothing wrong with Virtue), check out that server's part of the forums and ask about global channels for server events, team finding, etc. These are your best way to find teams. Looking for a team in broadcast (the default way) just isn't that effective any more because most people don't loiter in the open zones.

The real benefit of teaming with people is that it helps you find and hopefully identify people who share your interests in playing this game. If you add them as friends (per character, no permission needed) or global friends (know when they're on with any character, permission required), you can grow a support network of people who share your interests.

You can play solo many character types very well in this game, but some fun content is intended for teams, some rewards are most efficiently gained by teams, and generally, at least chatting with people while you play (teamed or not) is a whole lot more interesting. Take it from me... I solo a lot.

My apologies, I did misread that. So tell us... What did "managing" these 3500 players entail? Were you responsible for their test cases? Did your team document that they formed teams with clear leadership structures when faced with complex challenges a significant percentage of the time? How do you know that their testing and reports were an accurate simulation of how people would play the game "in the wild"? Did your game promote such structures through its teaming interface? Did combat have large scale persistent ramifications closer to EVE's approach, or was it a non-persistent match interface such the Arena in CoH?

Sorry, I work for a multinational corporation with 350,000 worldwide employees. My views on what constitutes "middle" management may be a little out of line with EA's size. Try not to let your e-peen get caught in the door.

You are very hung up on this idea of scale. I'm not. I don't want epic scale, and have explained what context I'm talking about in prior posts. I propose something light, repeatable and fun. I want FPS-style team matches (besides deathmatch) imported into CoH's mildly persistent environment. CoH's "persistent" world is very static. All that persists is our individual charcters' or SGs' progress and achievments. That makes importing new types of low- or no-impact PvP matches a very natural fit. Stop trying to envision this as Heavy Gear or Planetside or Eve. I'm talking about 8-on-8 CTF or Defend and Destroy and you keep referencing the MMO equivalent of Alexander's conquest of the known world.

I'm not posting about how different different environments could be. I'm talking about how consistent they are in practice. I'm sorry, but I don't accept that every pug team head-to-head I've ever joined across a half dozen games in the last decade has miraculously lacked team leadership when in fact it's very common. It's like you're telling me the sky is red, then lambasting me for not providing you proof that it's blue.

Lack of knowledge of what? I work in enterprise systems development and architecture. What does that have to do with this topic?

The only data I've demanded is to know what game's you've actually played that had team head-to-head. If you can't answer that, you really ought to stop talking.

No, they adjusted drop rates based on player feedback. As much as a few people really want a +Stealth, there were an army of people who were sick of getting one when they really wanted a Decimation, Mako's Bite or an Obliteration.

Then they made it easier to level. Then they accidentally unleashed the PL tool to master all PL tools on the multiverse (but they did mostly put it back down again). Then they did various things that made it increasingly attractive to play at 50, and less inconvenient to go to 50 and then backtrack to missed content.

So we got a lower drop rate on something that people spend less time producing in non-50 level ranges.

They either slot level 50s or they buy them with merits. I don't have a Fire/Kin, but I still use a lot of LotG:Recharges. I buy level 25s, personally, and the price tag on those sometimes means I buy mine with merits. The level 25s that are out there are almost certainly being produced via direct merit purchases.

For non-level 50s, merits is probably the way to go.

I would hate this, because I use the prestige sprints to have optional IO stealth without having to spend a power on it. I don't always want two minutes of stealth because I engage sprint, or Fly, or Hover, but I do very frequently want more stealth. The ability to fast switch to the Prestige Sprints is ideal for this purpose. I would not consider the ability to slot BotZ or WG in my actual sprint adequate compensation for losing that.

Actually, he used it as an adjective.

A significant part of your post serves to reinforce the notion that your ego is blinding you to a great many things. You think that your past experience in the middle management of a game company means you have insights that your posts on the topic belie.

I'm sorry, that qualifies you to understand the teaming dynamics of online players how? Assuming you were actually a manager in charge of a staff that size, those people weren't a team of online players. Even if we make the ridiculous assumption that they were, I seriously doubt you had 3800 direct reports. Even if those 3800 people included play testers, how many of them were testing the game unscripted?

All this claim shows is that you were involved in an effort to create an online game. It doesn't show that you actually understand how that should be done. As a counterpoint, I think Jack Emmert has whole lot more recognizable MMO resume than yours, and I think the man is a giant ignoramus about how players actually play games. Ultimately, your posts are vastly more damning than any such credentials serve to counter.

What matters far more in my opinion is how much you've played these games, and how much you've interacted in meaningful ways with the players on the teams you've played on.

Your aforementioned ego-blinded ignorance is showing. Tribes is just the context in which I was heavily exposed to the mindset of competitive play. I've pubbed on plenty of games since. Teams are teams are teams are teams. The head-to-head teamplay behaviors I'm describing don't depend on the game, as long as the matches in question are individual, stateless contests. Read that carefully - the contests need to be stateless, not the environment.

Tribes 2 was not Tribes. Tribes was not based on the Torque engine. As a player, I considered Tribes 2 a pretty serious failure in the eyes of its community, and I liken it in many ways to I13 here. We (and I mean the communities I was part of) never experienced a problem with modded servers in organized Tribes competition, so I'm curious if you think this was a problem on paper or in practice. The only reason people took exception to servers was based on their ping versus that of their opponents. It was typical that each team chose a server, and if needed the matches were split across them. Tiebreakers could be on a 3rd server if needed. Many matches were held on servers managed by the league itself.

In any case, none of that is germane to the topic. None of that is an argument in defense of your claims that people need dedicated team leaders to manage complex gametypes.

Claiming you were an EA insider isn't you asserting "special knowledge"?

By the way, when debating an argument, it helps to say why people on the other side are wrong. All you've done so far is declare me wrong or flawed, but you've not actually shown how my position is logically unsound. This is how we've gotten into whipping out backgrounds - it's not like there's some mathematical derivation that one can use to prove how online teams play. We can only cite experiences. It seems kind of telling that you seem to be the outlier in this thread.

So, again, what experience in playing online team games do you have? How many people do you consider part of the community do you play with? How exposed to their play experiences (and not just your own) are you?

I'd like your stats on how often that happens.

I think you are either much to worried about things that don't happen that often in most games. That they happen is not at issue. The question is: how pervasive are they?

No, they don't. The zones we had don't have anything that works like what I'm talking about. The zones we had were deathmatch.

And pardon me if I take your opinion of human nature with a grain of salt, since you seem to think that people in random pubs have the gumption to form up into an organized squad under a designated leader as a matter of course.

People are way lazier than that.

This attack on my argument is particularly weak, because I can't have formed my opinions on this particular matter without hundreds or thousands of other people. Do you really think it's reasonable that not only did I almost never run into people doing this sort of thing you claim happens all the time, but none of other players I got close to did either? That no one else in the ladders or leagues I was in talked about this big endemic problem? That essentially none of the pub teams I joined in any game over a 5-year span had this "needed" leader in place?

So either I'm lying, I'm the luckiest SOB ever for never running into this big problem, or you're exaggerating the issue.

I'm curious about what part of EVE can be compared to a 3-map CTF match. I'm curious how EVE corporations compare to ladder teams. I'm talking about adding stateless matches that happen to be held in a stateful world. You're talking about losing a CTF match costing you a capital ship or a mining outpost. You're over-thinking again.

Anyone who gets sick over stuff like this needs to not play head-to-head online games. I also think that online games that worry overly much about people like this end up not being very fun.

LoL

To the OP: Grats!

The new version supports that. In fact, it swapped the internal definitions for what level travel pool powers appear at, so that if you import an old build, it will screw up your travel pool power choices.

There's a litany of things wrong with your OP that other posters have pretty much covered. But I had to stop and comment on the specific quote above.

How on earth can you consider it a useful situation for people to use bases as a pass-through to get to other places for no other reason than that they have no better mechanism? That's your improvement to bases? "Hey, it's the least obnoxious way to get between zones!"

I don't think bases have any horrible problems that need fixing, but you sure didn't propose much for how to fix them if they did.