UberGuy

What facts do you expect? Do you think there are handy reference books about the percentage of UT servers where some bozo huddled up their pub team and laid down a strategy? Don't be ridiculous. Everyone in this thread is telling you that team leaders on gametypes of the complexity anyone sane proposes for PvP (such as CTF) don't need team leaders for pub play. Your response is that you want facts to prove it? Go log in to some other games that has gametypes and try educating yourself.

Again, pointing out ignorance is not an insult. Taking it as such is likely to lead people to think you have an ego problem, though.

You so have no idea what you're talking about.

Back around 2000 I was in a leadership position on an FPS team that ran something like 28-1 in ladder and league competition over the course of a year. We ran of of our gametype's most popular servers, and we were well respected in our community. We played a game with a very steep learning curve. As I mentioned, it had a light "class" system and multiple weapon loadouts within each. Maps were large and allowed for enemy approach from many directions. Bases were large and usually had multiple entrances you had to defend. Combat was fast, as were travel times. (Sound familiar? There are good reasons CoH was the 1st MMO I had any interest in.)

Given the speed and tactical diversity of the game, it was possible for certain maps to be won in under 20 seconds if a knowledgeable player was on one team and the other team didn't know what was coming.

Despite all this, it was absolutely standard in pubs that everyone just did their own thing. If a team got stomped a couple of times, they started to figure out why, and they adjusted. If they didn't someone in the know usually clued them in. (I don't consider that "leading". If you do, I think this argument is even dumber than most.) And if the problem was that the teams were stacked, then no amount of leadership usually had a chance of making enough of a difference to be worth doing.

You don't seem to understand this word "need".

Do you actually play any team games? Seriously, I'd like to know what you play, and how, because I think you're showing a staggering ignorance of the reality of how most people pub on team video games. Go log onto a pub server and find me the "team leaders" in Team Fortress 2, or Counterstrike, or the various UT gametypes. No one "needs" a team leader or an organized plan. People figure out what works, they (usually) take note of what needs doing on their team when they join, and the pieces (usually) fall into place. Even despite the fact that you can end up on pub teams where that doesn't happen, it's incredibly rare for people to "lead".

The benefit goes up. Just because you would do better with it does not mean you need it in a pub/pug setting. In organized competition? Damn skippy. Pubs are not organized competition.

Frankly, it's not remotely reasonable to compare a master TF run to a head-to-head PvP gametype, unless you've designed sudden-death team deathmatch. Master TFs don't need a plan because they're complicated. They need a plan because they call for inordinate levels of caution. A hami raid needs coordination because it requires 35-50 people to operate towards a common goal. Contrast either one with the typical pub head-to-head team contest, where teams of 8-12 players face off and defeat typically means someone respawns back at their base.

Zones are pub play. The gametypes I'm proposing would have pub play, akin to WoW's battlegrounds. Persistence has zero bearing on the pub nature of PvP outside of organized competition, such as ladders and leagues. If you walk into a PvP contest where you weren't asked to show up, the game was in progress, and you might not know anyone on the team, that's a pub. It doesn't matter if you have been playing the game for 5 years.

Frankly, it sounds to me like you terribly overthink all this. I'm really done trying to convince you how ignorant your position is. I know what I'm telling you is true because it's been my experience over a decade of online play. I don't really know what you've been doing if your argument here is based in actual online play experience, but if it is consider it weird and abnormal.

Whereas I can do that to my heart's content because I have two accounts.

It's not an insult to call into question what appears to be obvious ignorance. If you cannot accept the heat of being called on your claims, you should not be in the kitchen.

A team does not require a leader to function as a team. This is the fundamental flaw in your repeated claims. I have virtually never been on a pub team where there was any designated leader, and I have been on countless teams that operated effectively as a team. This is in response to your claims that goal-oriented PvP playtypes would not work because they would require team leaders to organize effective team play. Literally a decade of online play by countless thousands of players in other games proves this false. This is not appeal to authority, it is appeal to common knowledge for anyone who has played other online team games.

Which has zero bearing on the need for a team leader.

Will a more organized team be likely to defeat one with no organization? Yes. This hardly implies that pub play of goal-driven PvP gametypes would end up requiring teams to function or for people to participate. Again, dozens of games and innumerable teams have shown that this isn't how things align in pub play, even with very demanding mission types.

This is a failure of design for the mission and/or map type, not an intrinsic failure of team PvP. The ability to effectively camp spawns can be easily denied by improving the enclosure of the spawn area and providing multiple spawn locations or exits. Moreover, you're once again talking about flaws in our existing zone play format, when I'm talking about team, goal-driven PvP, which can have enforced team-wide mission entry times where both sides are required to start in their bases or other spawn point, away from the other team, until such time as someone is defeated and respawns. I think no sensible CTF gametype, for example, would just have flags sitting around in open zones waiting for people to wander in and camp them. Open zones are deathmatch or team deathmatch, and as I've said, I think this is the least interesting and most braindead of all PvP variations. I'm thinking bigger than deathmatch with flags.

No, they're not. If you don't know how good teams can be played in pub environments without a team leader, I question how much playtime you have with online team games.

The assertion is, and as far as I know, always has been, completely false.

A team with no leadership can fall flat on its face. A team with no leadership does not automatically fall flat on its face. Moreover, such teams do not fall flat on their faces unless the majority of people on the team are too noobish to know what needs to be done. In every game I have played, people familiar with the gametype and the map in question picks up roles that need doing. If this random assignment doesn't work out, someone usually changes what they were doing, since it usually means some other role has a glut of people doing it.

Pub games just don't have leaders. It's not the norm, and it's almost always annoying when someone tries to pick up that role.

Only if one side has more noobs than the other, in which case it's probably going to suffer more because of that than anything else.

Hm. That's not a "team lead", by my definition. That's someone being a smart team player. In particular, more than one person can do that. A "team lead" in my mind is someone calling out strategies, assigning roles, etc. That is usually wild overkill in a pub game.

I spent years playing FPS games with games quite a bit more complex than even CTF. There were gametypes where you had to both defend your base and destroy the opposing one. Ones where you had to play King of the Hill with multiple hills. Those can take quite a lot of knowing what to do, when, and by what means. These games also had loose "ATs" in the sense of a spectrum of armor types and loadouts players could equip.Pub games still went OK.

Sure, noobs coming in often had no idea what to do, or sometimes why their side lost. If they asked, people told them. If one side was getting whomped, good sports would switch sides. In the end, it worked out, and never with a team leader, unless it was competitive play.

Perhaps ironically, the "real" marketeers really wouldn't take issue with the part where you burn inf away. Things like that just change how much inf is in the system. Those who are really zen about market use realize that, yes, while what goods are cheap and what goods are expensive are determined by the interactions of supply and demand, the actual price they settle at is determined partially by the supply of inf in the system.

Anyone who consistently sells goods on the market for non-trivial prices (note I said "sells", not "lists") will tend to earn inf at a rate that reflects the general state of money in the system. Thus if prices increase because total money in the system increases, sellers also make more money selling.

The wonderfully simple key to successful use of the market - for the whole of the market-using playerbase - is to generally sell more stuff on it than you buy from it. Too many people look at the market as a store. They want to wander in, find what they want, buy it and leave. Given the game's random loot distribution system, such an approach doesn't make sense, and almost certainly wasn't the use the market's designers intended.

You aren't actually reading our replies are you?

That's very likely because you're looking at the one power's performance and not looking at what it does to the set's available attack chain.

At the time this all happened, Starsman was active on a project of putting up charts showing comparisons of the various powersets' attack chains. Initially, he showed EM still doing quite well after the ET change, down from a serious lead over its peers in single-target DPS.

Then he realized he was counting the self damage as part of its DPA.

As I recall, as soon as he realized this, he immediately pointed out that he felt that the change was too severe and that something else needed to be done to help compensate. As I recall, this included the improvement to Barrage.

Anyone who's soloing AVs w/o an Illusion Controller or a Mastermind is very likely investing in IO sets to do so.

What?

You're joking, right?

I don't flip stuff or do any of the things most people consider "marketeering". I play the game, I don't use hax or exploit bugs, and I have never, ever, paid for my inf. I play the game, running a mix of missions and TFs, I usually spend my merits on random rolls (with some strategic spending on expensive, hard-to-find pieces), and I sell what I don't want to slot.

Doing that, I have nine level 50 characters with over 1B inf, all of whom are heavily equipped with IOs, most of whom are equipped with all the purple sets I could usefully include in their build. Five of those are villains, four are heroes.

Last month, I started playing a L50 character again I hadn't touched in a while. He's a BS/Inv scrapper - hardly a massive farming character, right? He had 400M inf from where I last played him a fair bit around I9-I10. He now has 1.65B inf.

So please, tone down the hyperbole.

In fact, it feels 2.67 times as long.

Imagine you have a long commute in traffic to get home, and it normally takes one hour. Does one 2.67 hours feel a lot longer than one hour?

There is a big perception thing about people killing your target, and for good reason. People kill the target of other long-activating powers, like GFS or Headsplitter, all the time. But it doesn't stick out in people's mind as much because none of those other deal the user damage if a teammate happens to kill off the enemy first.

If ET was the only power in this set that took that kind of time, and if it didn't deal noticeable self damage when it finished animating, you're probably right, it wouldn't be a really big deal. But EM is the only set I can think of that has two single-target attacks that take this kind of activation time. Sure, they both deal "tier-9" sized damage. The issue is that attack chain efficiency is determined by the DPA of your attacks, where DPA is damage per second of activation time. Reducing the DPA of EM's best attack by a factor of 2.67 is a major reduction in the overall single-target DPS efficiency of the set - none of its other powers are that great for builiding a good chain. So basically this introduces a bottleneck that makes EM's attack chain extremely insensitive to the benefits of +Recharge. That may not sound like a big deal, but when all EM was very good at was single-target DPS, and when so many other sets can now outstrip it so easily because they are not insensitive to +Recharge, it leaves EM looking for a reason to be picked by people who are interested in playing a hard-hitting character.

The part about team organization is false. If it were true, most online team FPS games would fail. See: Counterstrike.

You don't need singleton leaders to organize teams that way. At first, when most people are n00bs, sure, having someone "in charge" who knows what they're doing is helpful. After a while, most people know what needs doing by rote, and someone does it. If something isn't being done, someone switches to doing it. If too much hot-dogging is going on and not enough people take on roles, that team loses, the event ends, and starts over, possibly with the teams re-mixed. It works great and has worked in dozens upon dozens of games. What matters is that it's engaging and fun, and people will make it happen.

The problem is that I don't think the PvP Neeto describes will ever attract truly competitive players. It sounds like the kiddie wading pool of PvP for people with fragile egos. IMO, they'd do better to not bother; I think scrapping PvP all together (not going to happen) or letting it fester as it is now (might happen in principle) would actually be superior.

I like Gavin's ideas of teams in zones, though. And goals. My god, does PvP need goals. I hated deathmatch and team deathmatch in FPS games, and considered them as bad for one's IQ. They were good for honing twitch skills if you played them with other good players, and good for the ego if you didn't. The real challenge and thus real enjoyment was always in contests with tactical goals, especially ones that required you to split your team into offense and defense.