Amberyl

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With all do respect Statesman, the last time you posted about looking at Blasters, you said Controllers were in front of us - that's fine. However, now you're saying that Scrappers and Tankers are in front also?

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I suspect that scrappers and tankers are in the nerf bat line, as opposed to the buff line.

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I'm not a big fan of the first. I can understand for five levels when people are still getting used to the game, but by L6 I don't see the need for no-risk gaming. Especially given your affirmation of not wanting reward without risk.

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It means giving new players about 10 hours of risk-free play, as opposed to about 2 hours of risk-free play. It also means that you get a bunch of chances to learn how to navigate around the Hollows without death after death, which is aggravating not only because of debt, but because of the long run from Atlas Park (no travel power and pathetic run speed).

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I like the idea that, instead of a death timer, all xp gained while dead goes only to debt.

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This is a fantastic idea. (Anything that is left over can be converted to Influence, but it's very, very rare that you'd work off your debt in its entirety while dead.)

If you're dead, you can still get some debt worked off while you're lying there waiting for your rez (which can easily be several minutes, especially if most of the team has wiped and there's a wait for rez recharge, or, in lower levels with no travel powers in the Hollows, for someone to make the long trip to Atlas hospital, and come back with a bunch of Awakens).

If XP earned while dead only goes to debt, then it can't be used for "drag around a corpse to power-level it". Yes, you could drag a corpse around to help the guy clear off debt, but "dying in order to clear debt faster" is only going to be popular with those who have capped debt.

This is a nice solution that doesn't hurt or inconvenience legitimate players, while still removing a potential exploit.

Please add my two guides:

A New Player's Guide to Team-Ups and the Hollows

A New Player's Guide to the Post-Winter-Lord World (which is really a general CoH guide, albeit one geared for those who have leveled up exceptionally quickly)

There are a couple of things to consider in XP per minute. One of them is the amount of time it takes to kill an enemy. Another is the time spent between enemies, both within a mission and getting between missions.

I find, for instance, that my scrapper can generally kill a yellow in two attacks, but the first attack generally takes them down to a tiny sliver of life. A critical will one-shot the yellow. I can also kill an orange in two attacks; a critical will still one-shot the orange. There's no difference in downtime with most villains. So generally, my highest XP per minute is going to be running from mob to mob, all within short distances of each other, and whacking moderately-sized groups of oranges, with mission complete bonuses coming at a nice, steady pace.

My blaster, on the other hand, lives on AoE'ing blues and whites, in as dense a spawn as possible, depending on alpha strikes for quick kills (and thus downtime reduction).

Some missions have denser spawns than others. The office building layouts, for instance, usually are good for lots of spawns in quick succession. Tunnels, on the other hand, tend to suck, especially since you are going through twisty passages a bunch, slowing down how fast you can really run from place to place, and you generally find spawns only in caverns.

Downtime between missions depends on lots of things, depending on whether you stop to sell (and how picky you are about where to sell), whether you can call contacts or have to run to them, where the contacts and missions are located, and the like. Your travel power also matters here, as does how quickly you zone.

I watch my XP/minute counter on HeroStats pretty closely. It's a great guide to whether or not I'm making efficient use of my time.

Each individual's mileage will vary, and it will even vary from level to level, depending on your power choices and how you have them slotted, as well as what villain groups you're fighting (villain resistances to various damage types).

The XP per minute will vary heavily depending on your build, in my opinion. Significant factors include:

- To what extent are your attacks overkill?
- Are you single-target or AoE?
- How much downtime do you incur because of the need to heal or recover endurance?

Overkill is a particularly critical factor when you judge how much of a time difference it takes to kill a +1 vs. a +2 vs. a +3 -- and this will differ based on villain group resistances to damage. If it takes you two shots to kill a +1, for instance, it may still only take you two shots to kill a +2 -- for instance, it could be that with the +1, your first hit is taking most of their HP and the second attack is just a finisher, whereas to kill the +2 requires almost the full damage of both attacks.

Single-target vs. AoE is not just a matter of what types of attacks you have; it's also a matter of what your supporting powers are. For example, are your defenses stronger against smaller mobs or bigger mobs? Such things will impact how much damage you take and how much endurance you use in the fight. This, in turn, will affect your downtime between fights.

For instance, I find that with my regen scrapper, I finish solo missions on Unyielding just as fast as I finish them on Tenacious. While I get hurt more on Unyielding, I've nonetheless regenerated it all by the next mob, so there's no difference in downtime. Moreover, because of my overkill factor, I can rip through +2s just as quick as I go through +1s. This thus translates into significant more XP per minute for me.

So these numbers are nice, and it's cool to see them, but everyone should try out the various difficulty levels for themselves and see which suits them the best. HeroStats is probably the most effective way to watch XP per minute stats.

This is all excellent, Statesman -- very sensible. Thanks for listening.

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We will be making it so that a Boss will NEVER show up on the mission for a solo player at the lowest Reputation level (Hard-Boiled, though we’re changing that to Hero). Instead, any named villain will be a Lieutenant. That Lieutenant will have the same name, powers and costume as the Boss; his villain rank will simply be lessened. In this way, solo players won’t miss out on the flavor of the mission’s story. If a team or a player with a Reputation at Tenacious or higher enters that mission, the Lieutenant will become a Boss.

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What will you do about the generic bosses that currently appear in missions with great frequency? Will these also disappear for those who are Hard-Boiled? It seems like people have not complained nearly as much about the named bosses, which everyone expects to be hard, and have warning dialogue as you approach them; it's the generic bosses that are the surprise death.

My suggestion would be that one more rank on the difficulty slider, after Hard-Boiled, be added for "minions and LTs the same, but I also want generic bosses, and a named boss if there is one".

Being an active, contributing part of a team = Fun.
Being a spectator while other people do your mission for you = Not Fun At All.

People need to feel like they're contributing something useful in every situation.

As a side note, being able to successfully do missions with a moderate spread of levels is vital to having sidekicking be useful. Useful sidekicks make it easier to find pick-up teams, and for groups of friends and SGs to play together, obviously.

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The Hollows needs a lot of attention, IMO. Great zone. But it doesn't balance well and it becomes a stopping point for many players, I think...

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My experience is that a lot of Hollows missions really need a team (although many new players make the mistake of thinking "if a small team is good, a large team must be better"). Most lowbies do not have the survivability and bag of tricks necessary to surviving these missions otherwise. There are exceptions, clearly -- a lot of tankers, for instance. But most other ATs will need help with a significant number of the missions. Getting into a team in the Hollows is easy, though -- chances are you'll get plenty of blind invites, and if you're LFT, you can expect a team in short order.

The Hollows is, I think, billed as team content by the contact who sends you there -- I believe it explicitly tells you that if you have trouble, bring some friends. If you want to skip the Hollows missions, you can do that -- currently the contact does tell you that you don't have to do them, you can do other missions instead. There's plenty of other content that you can do instead. (I elected to skip the Hollows almost entirely for one of my toons recently, and easily outleveled the rest of the content available to me nonetheless.)

I believe the door-spawning problem -- putting doors in death-trap places for lowbies -- is getting addressed, which will fix the worst thing about the Hollows.

Realistically, it doesn't seem like most of the people posting solo exclusively, even if they solo most of the time. Virtually all of them say they team when they can -- which is only a small fraction of their gameplay.

Pick-up teams just aren't that popular. I happen to enjoy pick-up teams a lot, but I also realize that they tend to lead to my dying a whole lot, and that I'm trading story immersion for more exciting combat. And many people can't count on enough SG members being on, or friends of the right level available (although the devs deserve major kudos for the sidekick and exemplar systems).

If you want to make progress through your story arc, or, as you go up in levels, unlock your Enhancements from the appropriate contact, you will end up having to solo. At the moment, for instance, I'd prefer to be teaming up -- but because I need to complete a sequence of missions from particular contacts (for good placement to run for inspirations, and for my next set of SOs), and a team isn't going to necessarily do my missions, I have to do them solo. This is a design problem.

It'd be better to address the core reasons that people solo by choice. (People who solo by necessity are going to keep soloing no matter what, or they'll find some other game.) That includes things like "I get better XP when I'm solo", "It's hard to find a good pick-up team", "It's hard to enjoy the story in a team", "It's hard to complete my missions / story arcs when I'm in a team", and the like.

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Let’s face facts here. In the long run a subscription based MMO cannot survive catering to a solo audience because it offers nothing that you can’t have in a standalone game. This means team play needs to come first and have greater scope then solo play. This isn’t to say a degree, even a large degree of solo play is not a nice addition, but it cannot outweigh team play.

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I disagree very strongly. It can continue to survive by continuously offering new, excellent, immersive content. At some point in time the technical engine will end up being dated (Ultima Online, etc.), but there is a very long timeframe involved there, especially now that increases in computing power have slowed down.

If people enjoy a particular type of gameplay, they will continue to seek that type of gameplay -- thus the popularity of sequels and expansion packs for standalone games. Playing an MMO is like getting a continuous stream of sequels and expansion packs, all incorporated seamlessly into the existing content.

This is not to say that the multi-player capabilities are trivial; they're not. Many people enjoy playing with folks they know -- you can see this in the standalone market with the demand for LAN play. There are a lot of people who treat an MMO like a dynamically expanding standalone game that is network-hosted by a third party. Think of it like a continuous LAN party with ever-fresh content. People like being able to play with their friends, without being dependent on their friends for enjoyment.

The ideal game has great solo play and team play, of course. Balance is demanded in the game design, but I don't think that it's unachievable -- City of Heroes, as it existed in I2, presented enjoyable solo as well as team play, after all. The problems that people raised with team play were primarily around bad pick-up teams, which is fundamentally a problem with the players and not a problem with the game itself.

So, here's a sad but sort of funny story illustrating how broken these boss changes are.

I log on my regen scrapper this morning for a couple of minutes before work, and am lucky enough to get immediately recruited by a team to take down the Winter Lord. I'm 25, it's spawned at 28, and I get SK'd up to 27.

So, I'm standing there, whacking the Winter Lord, doing pretty well -- my team and I get him down about to a quarter health. I've been able to survive just fine without needing the defender's heal. I had the usual regen powers, plus the wedding ring +def power, and I use Divine Avalanche (+def parry); a lot of the monster's attacks were whiffing on me, and between my regen rate, Reconstruction, and one Respite in a sticky spot, I was at full health or near it the whole time.

Then we accidentally aggro'd a pack of Freakshow while chasing the running Winter Lord.

A tank swiper (boss, also at level 28) gets one hit on me for 500 points of damage. Combined with the slight amount of damage I've already taken, this is enough to kill me.

Now, looking back at my chat messages, the giant monster of the same level does 210 points of damage with either his ice sword or foot stomp.

Isn't it incredibly insane that the generic boss does two and a half times more damage than the GIANT MONSTER of the same level -- and can hit me when the giant monster keeps missing?

Think about that one a bit.

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What is it that you disagree with about on being penalized for soloing now? Most guides and the manual clearly state that only 1 AT is designed for soloing.

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People don't buy a game on the basis of the manual, which they can't see until they've actually bought the game. For that matter, people don't buy a game on the basis of what they see on the box. People buy games based on word of mouth and reviews. If they want to check things out further, they look on the forums for the game and see the kinds of experiences that people are reporting. This is particularly true of MMOGs, because of the dynamic nature of the games; everyone is aware that the documentation frequently bears only a passing resemblance to the actual live state of the game.

By all the reviews, word of mouth, and forum posts from the time the game was released up until I3 went up on the test servers, City of Heroes was an extremely solo-friendly game. The forums are, in fact, full of posts that tell you how much people solo, and how to make a good solo build -- indeed, it is far harder to find team-oriented builds in forum guides than it is to find solo ones.

Many people pay for their subscription in three-month chunks, or a year at a time. The folks who want or need to play solo a goodly amount of the time probably were attracted to the game by the fact that it was quite reasonable to solo all of the ATs, given the right build. They, fairly realistically, expect that the type of gameplay they enjoy doing will remain the type of gameplay that they continue to have access to throughout their subscription period. We're not talking about fringe styles of play here, either -- soloing a fairly squishy type is extremely commonplace, especially since a large percentage of the player base probably makes characters of each AT to try out the game in different ways. Limiting the solo game to strictly scrappers (and there are certainly some scrappers who have problems with the new bosses, regardless) means further harming CoH's already somewhat limited current depth -- and doing so unnecessarily.

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Sorry, but I don't think you can state that only the casual players are left. hell, every night, 4 of the 11 servers are in the yellow Post I3, when previously they were all in the green. Don't know about you, but with 1.5 weeks having passed, and the server load increasing, I would say most players are enjoying the changes, and have RETURNED to playing the game again.

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Be careful not to confuse "enjoying the boss changes" and "logging in to see what's new with Issue 3". I expect that the latter is certainly true, while the former is, for many people, not true.

Indeed, many of us are playing our pre-25 alts, and checking out the new content, while crossing our fingers and hoping that the boss changes get rolled back. My attempts to play my blaster post-I3 have been frustrating and disappointing, doubly so because that toon is in the perfect level range for the higher-end Striga content. Content that's a blast (cool stories and set-ups), but which leaves me deep in debt, ends up leaving me with very mixed feelings at the end of a play session.

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Just that the industry belief seems to be that people who group and form social bonds in the game world are more likely to be loyal. That may be a myth for all I know.

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I think it's not so much that it's not true, broadly speaking, but that the devil is in the details.

It is very common for players to play MMOGs with people they know in real life. "Friend groups" of this sort are pretty "sticky" in terms of customer retention, because people are invested not just in their own play, but in the shared experience. However, this is a sword that cuts both ways -- if one person in a friend group is dissatisfied and moves on, there's a very high probability that he'll take the rest of the friend group with him. Over time, I've seen my group of friends migrate from EQ to DAoC to CoH -- and lately, to WoW. CoH's boss changes probably came at one of the worst times possible -- when a shiny new MMORPG showed up on the market. Frustration, however temporary it may turn out to be, with CoH is likely to drive friend group conversions to competing games.

It is also true that games with strong social structures that players can invest in tend to lead to higher retention. If you are a leader in a guild, and guild leadership is a meaningful position, you are far less likely to leave the game than you would otherwise. You are not just experiencing game content at that point in time, you are playing the "social puzzle" (as Puzzle Pirates players call it) -- your "play" has become explicitly social in nature, essentially acting as an extension of possible things to do within the game.

There is, as far as I know, zero evidence that simply making players group to achieve things improves retention in any way.

Very little of City of Heroes looks as if it was designed to be primarily a group game. If you are aiming to have a social component as a large part of your gameplay experience, you emphasize things like chat, buddy features, and rich, complex social organizations. Supergroups in CoH are basically nothing other than a shared buddy list that has a chat channel. While there's promised stuff coming in the future, fundamentally the unit of play is the individual hero, which sometimes teams up with other individual heroes in order to get access to a wider range of abilities and thus better threat-handling capabilities.

The nature of CoH gameplay also doesn't especially encourage social interactions. There's virtually no support for roleplay. The "as little downtime as possible" orientation means that there's not a lot of chatter in general, and the pace of combat rarely allows you to get out more than a few words -- and that's immediate tactics only. There are no places in the game that are designed to facilitate conversation, and the lag when a whole lot of heroes are in one place is significant.

If City of Heroes is going to be a primarily group-oriented game, there are a whole lot of group-oriented features that it's going to need. I expected that they would come with City of Villains, which could potentially emphasize group vs. group conflict as well as PvP. Until there's that rich stable of group tools and content, though, pushing the game towards teaming will only lower retention, not increase it -- and even once those additional group features are in place, having both a strong group and a strong solo game broaden the overall appeal and lend life to the game world.

This post is long, so please bear with me.

Boss Balance and Presence

Bosses feel like they've gone up in difficulty more than just one level, but if I think of it in terms of color, bosses that currently con red to me would have conned purple to me in I2. For my main toon, a 28 blaster, I would have avoided purple bosses like the plague, solo, as pretty much guaranteed death. If bosses are going to be that tough, they need to con at another level higher.

I have been seeing bosses all over the place in my missions and in the missions of the people I'm in pick-up groups with. Some have the difficulty slider set higher, which I assume may result in more boss spawns. I was in a Freak mission yesterday where practically every mob had two +2 bosses in it (relative to the mission holder's level, and +1 to me, as the highest-level member). No, bosses were not mentioned anywhere in the mission description whatsoever -- generic bosses never are.

Being one-shotted or two-shotted is no fun at all. Having inspirations take less time to use might help, along with increasing the speed of other powers that allow health to be regained. But the fundamental problem is still the amount of damage dealt, combined with the pathetic rate at which many classes now whittle down boss HPs (especially given that more HPs also equates more regen).

From the standpoint of challenge, perhaps more "Defeat X and his crew" should have a more powerful X -- it seems a little odd that the entirely new category of Elite Bosses has just two examples, for instance. Perhaps the X bosses should be Elite Bosses, who con purple and have the boosted power. But the generic bosses were fine the way they were; those who need a tougher challenge have the mission difficulty slider.

As is, for every single mission that can potentially spawn bosses of 25+ -- including the ones that can do so via the difficulty slider -- needs to be looked at for boss balance. There's an awful lot of generics out there. Moreover, the street spawning algorithm may need looking at, as well. I've seen plenty of the bosses out on the street while soloing -- Consigliere in IP, Archons and Jump Bots in Striga, spawns that contain multiple bosses (Freak tanks, SR skiffs) in TV, and so forth.

I do, however, think that "reduce the frequency of generic bosses" is actually a bad thing -- bosses add interest and variety to fights. Generic bosses did so in I2 by being dangerous rather than overwhelming, and they'd continue to be that if they were returned to I2 levels. Save the big mojo for the Elite Bosses.

By the way, as far as I can tell, "teaming up" to beat a boss more often means "let me find a non-squishy AT to stand toe-to-toe with the thing" (a controller doesn't help sufficiently if the holds don't stack well enough, a bubble still won't deflect the lucky one-shot, an emp defender can't heal you fast enough to deal with the one-shot, and so forth). If you're calling in someone to help you, you often end up feeling more like a spectator than a participant. This is no fun at all for the squishy.

Assuming SOs at 25

Because I don't yet have a toon that has reached the heaven of practically unlimited influence, who can fund my lower-level characters, I've been having trouble scraping together the Influence to get fully slotted up with SOs. Gifts of Influence from friends with higher-level characters have eventually let me get mostly SOs, but my main is still using some Trainings and DOs, and my primary alt is still using a mix of DOs and SOs.

I posted statistics on the disparity between Influence and XP gain elsewhere on the forums previously; a player who is self-funded simply doesn't have the Influence to go to SOs at 22. New players frequently don't know where the stores to get them are, either, and many won't complete the missions for the appropriate contact to unlock the non-Power 10 ones until several levels beyond 22, anyway. Furthermore, new players often don't know how -- or where -- to sell their enhancements for the most Influence return.

Moreover, since players frequently team with those higher level than themselves, and missions will now spawn at higher levels if the holder has their difficulty setting cranked up, players can actually readily end up encountering the 25+ bosses before they can get SOs.

I agree that by the time players reach 32, they are likely to be fitted out with SOs across the board, and have had opportunity to get their signature power. They've also gotten to live with their character for quite a while, have had a chance to respec for a better build (hopefully), gotten the opportunity to pick up their toon's signature primary power, and so forth. This is probably the more appropriate level to bump difficulty at, rather than 25 -- but to judge from the higher-level folks posting, not as much as it's actually gotten bumped.

The Level 24 Respec Trial

The level 24 respec trial is hugely difficult to do without a small team of people that already have excellent builds. Problematically, players who actually need the respec need it because they don't have good builds -- a significant number of them need to make big changes in their builds, not just tweak a few slots here and there, as is true at 34 and 44. The free respec has actually made things worse -- yesterday, I've started seeing people who used their free respec to respec themselves into near-unplayability.

Significantly, as I hear my pick-up teams and SG talk about what they're doing with their respec -- a topic of frequent conversation both given the free one, and the near-24 teams my primary alt plays with -- the thing that comes up most frequently is the need to take Stamina. Unfortunately, Stamina is one of the things that you most need in the reactor room, and in the rooms that precede it. This is doubly true given that it now takes far longer to take a boss down.

The level 24 trial needs to be balanced for a team size that assumes that 1 out of every 4 players, at minimum, has a lousy build. Alternatively or additionally, if nobody on the team has been issued the respec for the 24 trial, the entire difficulty of the last stage of the trial (the building as well as the reactor itself) should be reduced.

Soloing and MMOGs

Many players come to MMOGs not for the social interaction, but for the dynamic nature of the world. They don't need to make friends. They have friends. You'll note that when many people talk about teaming, they talk about teaming up with a spouse or a significant other, or their kids, or their real-life friends. They're looking to CoH for a way to do something fun with people they already know, when it's mutually convenient -- and to solo when their friends aren't on.

Yes, it's fun to chat with people online. But CoH actually doesn't support chat terribly well, although this is improving with the addition of global chat. But CoH is also a fast-paced, high-attention game. I can't carry on a conversation while in the midst of combat. And lots of teams are pretty silent -- a lot of times, the only things said are "pull", "wait", "end", and "Ready!". Indeed, the bigger the team, the less random chatter happens. I think most of my "it was cool to meet you" interactions have occurred in duos, and the occasional team of 3 or 4.

As others have already mentioned, teams also don't really let you savor the content at your own pace, or get immersed in a storyline. They are also unworkable for a lot of people who don't have a lot of time to play, or need to spend unpredictable amounts of time AFK. A lot of missions are completable in 20 minutes, solo; looking for a team sucks up time that could readily be spent in enjoyable play.

Encouraging Group Play

The way to encourage grouping is not to make soloing unfun or difficult, because the people who like to solo will simply find another game. And while certain players may say, "Good riddance!", the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of MMOGs that are great for groups, but very few MMOGs that are good for solo players. It's better to dominate a niche than to be one of many. (I play CoH far less for the fact that it's a superhero game, by the way, than the fact that it's a dynamic MMOG that I can play solo for short amounts of time.)

Unfortunately, CoH's design and group-related tools don't necessarily facillitate easy team-ups. I think lots of people would like to team -- but it's just not sufficiently easy to put together a good team. Two things need to be addressed: group content and tools that foster grouping.

Group Content

The explicit group content -- the TFs and trials -- are designed for big teams that have a ton of time to burn. If you're going to start a TF, for instance, you'd better plan on having at least 4 hours available, and 6 for safety; while it's possible to finish in less, you can't bet on it. Putting together a team for a TF can readily take 30 minutes, as well. And in that giant chunk of time, you don't get any real breaks, since everyone is focused on getting through as quickly as possible. This is actually actively unhealthy; I find myself with eye fatigue midway through, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

What the game needs is TFs designed for 2 to 5 players, completable in 2-3 hours of time. These TFs would present a short story arc, so everyone gets to experience a connected sequence of events. The game could also use more unique team missions like Frostfire.

Smaller groups foster better community. There are more conversations, there is greater flexibility to accomodate individual needs, and the graphics are more manageable for those with slower computers. Threats are more readily managed, since the danger of mass aggro and a team overrun and wipe-out are significantly reduced. It's easier to put together a small team, especially because you don't need a perfect balance of archetypes. And shorter play sessions increase the degree to which group content is available to more casual players.

Group-Related Tools

Friends lists, supergroups, and the pick-up team search feature all need to be vastly improved. It needs to be easier to find a suitable team.

First off, all of these things need to show what primary and secondary power sets each toon has, and preferably allow you to drill down to see the individual powers picked. You may not need a defender if you have a controller of the right sort, you may be able to substitute a fire tank for a scrapper, and so forth.

There needs to be a tool for recruiting pick-up teams that goes beyond 'search a list, invite people'. For instance, team leaders should be able to post 'wanted' notices that specify exactly what they're looking for (level range and ATs), and keep those notices out for as long as they want, so that they can fill team spots midway through a mission (for instance, a team may start a mission without a defender because none is available, but they still want to recruit one, without the team leader having to pause after each fight to do a search).

People should be able to search these recruiting notices and see info about the exiting team -- how large it is, the ATs, and the level spread. The key thing is that existing teams often are willing to get bigger, but don't tend to recruit once they've started up -- so by allowing "wanteds", it would allow folks who log on and are LFT to immediately see if there's a spot they could go to.

There also needs to be a "sign-up" tool for task forces -- people specifically looking for certain TFs. Pepole could put themselves on the list, and go about doing their own missions and so forth while waiting for the team of the appropriate level to be formed.

The limit on the number of friends needs to be increased significantly, and more information made available. It needs to be easier to prune one's friends list of people who are no longer around your level, as well. Furthermore, it'd be useful if you could set an option to notify you when members of your SG log on (just like with your friends list); that way, you could take SG members off your friends list without losing that login notification. We should also be able to annotate our friends list -- most people use this for tracking folks they've played with in previous pick-up groups and would enjoy playing with again, which means that we often don't have strong memories of who they are.

The size of supergroups also needs to go up significantly. At the current size, unless everyone plays together and levels together, the level spread can result in the high probability of logging on and not finding anyone in your SG that you can readily team up with. SGs could also use a ton more tools, but this has already been covered extensively in other forum threads.

Summary

Yes, this post has been very long. The summary of my thoughts is: Don't force grouping. If players find it fun and easy to group, they'll do it naturally. If players don't find it fun and easy to group, and instead view it as an obstacle to the solo game they're enjoying, they'll go play something else.

Bosses weren't broken. You solved the challenge issue by having the mission difficulty slider. Please put things back the way they were, buff some story arc bosses by making them Elite, and make your grouping mechanisms better.

QA is full of tough decisions, really. What constitutes a blocker? It seems like the blockers are considered to be almost purely limited to stability issues, whereas users might assert that major quality of life issues ought to also constitute blockers. I'm guessing that the problem isn't just the choice to release; it probably has something to do with the way Cryptic maintains revision control and release packaging. If they had a flexible system, I'd guess that things that must have been just a line of code here and there -- stuff like the glowie noises, the P#### for Tough Hide, and the like -- would have gotten corrected and made it into the release. But I'm guessing that the system is sufficiently rigid that releases are very all-or-nothing -- you snapshot and that's it, no further options.

Ideally, when you release, you are releasing something that only has obscure bugs (things that are not going to be routinely noticed), or where your timeline for being able to create a fix is sufficiently far out that it harms your business objectives. It could be strongly argued that there was no need to push I3 out when it went out, since the Christmas season had already been missed, for instance.

You can get away with releasing obviously buggy code, but that it's not necessarily a good thing for you -- and in fact, the degree to which it is bad for you can be neatly quantified for management's perusal. Every bug report that QA has to look at, every petition the GMs have to deal with, all cost you money, and they potentially cost you customer satisfaction and renewals.

Anyway, it's entirely possible that Cryptic's internal development tools are sufficiently crude that they only had a choice between taking the 12/23 release live, or waiting until some future release with both the bugfixes and likely other changes was done. Presumably they didn't have the option of a release that had just the bugfixes -- we know that quite a few of the bugs have already been fixed, since devs have posted saying that they were in the pipeline and had gotten done -- and so perceived quality ends up suffering.

One of the strange things about this boss change is that it breaks stated design principles of City of Heroes, as you can see if you go back and read interviews that Statesman has given in the past, particularly the one that ends with comments on combat design.

For instance, it's been said that combat in City of Heroes should be fast and furious, and that battling groups rather than having all players beat on a single thing is the focus of the combat system, and that players are powerful (going from "great to ungodly", to quote Statesman). The new bosses stand in direct contrast to that. For the builds that can handle bosses, an I3-amped boss fight is simply tedious -- it's very slow, because it takes tons of time to whittle down all of those hit points. For builds that can't, it means devoting an entire team to that slow beat-down and hoping nobody dies. And in the process, nobody feels especially heroic.

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Whatever the devs intended, I don't think this was it. I certainly hope that this wasn't it, anyway.

[/ QUOTE ] You said it yourself that you didn't have to defeat him to finish the mission. Defeating the bad guy wasn't needed to "win the day."

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I also said that even if I can skip a boss (which was only doable because I have a stealth power, by the way, which not everyone does, especially in mid-twenties), I don't want to skip the boss. I like a challenge, and the rest of my mission was an entirely trivial cakewalk -- we're talking one white minion at a time. But I want a challenge, not a massacre. It seems absurd to have nothing between "pathetically easy" and "flat-out impossible".

In I2, named bosses were a challenge for me. I had to pop a couple of inspirations and come up with a plan. I made plenty of hospital trips regardless. But with a well-loaded inspiration tray, good tactics, and a little luck, I would win more often than I lose. Regular bosses were tough but nothing that a couple of inspirations and reasonable tactics wouldn't take care of. This seemed like a reasonable balance to me.

I prefer to team. But I can't always find a team, especially when I play at odder hours of the day. I'm perfectly willing to power-level a defender or controller a couple of levels below me, for instance, or sidekick someone, but an awful lot of the time, there's simply nobody LFT that can join me.

You -- or the devs -- can potentially spout theory about how this improves the game. But frankly, it hasn't improved my play experience. I pay to have fun. If the game continues to fail to deliver on fun, I will spend my dollars on something else.

Don't think that people who are talking about quitting are making empty threats, by the way. The impact of continued non-fun takes a while to show itself -- people have multi-month subscriptions, and people will stick around to see if things change -- but it does eventually take its toll. The cooler heads right now are adopting a "complain, wait and see" attitude, on the belief that sanity and statistics will eventually make the devs realize that the boss changes are not a positive addition to most people's fun, as well as a desire to experience the recently-released new content, but an arrogant declaration of, "it's better this way, if you were smarter/cooler/more like my perfect self, you'd realize that" without measures that make things more fun will eventually result in people shrugging their shoulders and finding something that they think is more fun.

So, more data:

I took my 28 fire/dev blaster into a Striga Council mission, solo. Most of the mission (at the default setting) was pathetically easy -- single white minions or single yellow LTs. I whacked them with a Fireblast or two and they went down. Lots of running around the map for the scattered foes -- not great XP per minute, certainly, or really interesting at all. I get to the end, there's a glowie chest, I stealth up to it and click it, for the Mission Complete. Just ahead of it is an Archon boss, though (even level to me, so orange con), and I figure, what the heck, let me take it on.

I suck down a bunch of inspirations, toss a smoke grenade, launch an attack, and get pounded and die while the Archon's still pretty much at full health.

Okay, I figure. That was stupid, or at least insufficiently smart. I hospital, I load back up on inspirations, I come back. I take a couple of minutes to lay a path of trip mines, giving myself a way of retreating -- slow, since I have to wait for the mines to recharge. Trip mines have a useful knockback effect as well, very useful for dealing with something closing to melee. I lay down a smoke grenade, which has an acc debuff effect. I suck down lucks, an enrage, an insight, and a discipline (since the Archons have mez powers). I fire up Hasten. I am now about as buffed as I can get, and tactically I'm in fairly good shape, since I also have beanbags (disorient, gotten as a temp power) and web grenade (which roots and slows).

I launch off an attack chain at the Archon, and run away. I suck down a lot of respites (six, I think). He runs into the trip mines, and the knockbacks allow me to survive for long enough to get him to about half health. And then we have a problem, because I am out of trip mines and my holds aren't doing anything. I do have a respite left, and I have most of a bar of health, and then he enters melee with me and I take over 600 points of damage (i.e., more than all of my hitpoints if I had a full bar) before I can even see the attack animations, much less suck a respite.

I give up. I've completed the mission without defeating him, and a bar of debt is enough to dissuade me from trying any further.

My friend logs on, with his scrapper, who's a level below me at 27, and together we go to the next mission. It's got an identical Archon at the end. He takes it down solo, without much trouble, with a little inspiration use. And the rest of the mission is pathetically easy for my group of three.

Whatever the devs intended, I don't think this was it. I certainly hope that this wasn't it, anyway.

Now, I will say that there do seem to be some temp powers in the Striga missions that do help in boss fights, as they do extra damage against a particular type of villain, or a summon, but ultimately there's still a big gulf between "too easy" and "too hard". It's nice that I can finish the mission by skipping the boss, but I don't want to have to skip the boss. I want a fight that is challenging but winnable. Right now I can't get it.

I've got one more thing to add:

In game design, it's all very well and good to say, "Here is the ideal that I have in my vision." The problem is that when vision meets real people in the form of players, the measure of success is whether or not those players are having fun, not whether you have achieved whatever theoretical design goal you set out to achieve. "Fun" is a particularly crucial factor in a paid MMORPG, because fun equates to subscriptions which equate to revenue.

People have fun in different ways. Some people like to solo, some people like to group, some like to do both. Some people like their games to be as challenging as possible. Other people like their games to be pretty brainless and easy. Some people like having a lot of luck in the equation. Other people like planning to significantly reduce the role that luck plays.

City of Heroes can potentially accomodate all of these desires, via the use of the mission difficulty slider. The relative advancement rates of people with different levels of "fun" can be equalized out by changing the XP values awarded -- or making the maps bigger or smaller. (So, for instance, if you want blue cons rather than white cons, the map expands so in the end you have to wipe more of them to finish.)

When a lot of people are posting on the forums that something is not fun, this is a warning, because plenty of people will simply stop playing rather than deciding to gripe on the forums. Moreover, the activities that players are engaging in are clear indications of where the fun is and isn't, or of what goals people are trying to achieve (I suspect, for instance, that the farming/herding/PLing behaviors are effectively a statement of "leveling up the usual way is sufficiently time-consuming and boring that I am willing to engage in periods of incredible tedium in order to avoid a longer period of mediocrely interesting play").

Yes, people will tolerate some changes that decrease fun, if other things are added which increase fun. Ultimately, though, what is going to determine longevity of subscriptions is fun, not how long it takes to get to level X. Plenty of people will abandon existing achievements in order to go do something more fun -- hours invested just makes it harder to leave.

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Actually, if a boss will appear in a mission, the mission briefing mentions it. Check the text.

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You are totally wrong, and it's not even a matter of old missions which might have borked descriptions. Mission briefings usually but not always mention named bosses. They never mention generic bosses.

I took a brand-new Striga Isle mission (my toon is 28). It involved whacking Banished Pantheon. The very first thing on the mission map was a +1 Totem boss by its lonesome. There were +1 Totem bosses all over the map, in fact. I had a teammate -- a scrapper. We both died repeatedly, even with emptying out our inspiration trays and using what I thought were pretty good tactics -- he's BS/regen, I'm fire/dev, and consequently trip mines, smoke, hold in the form of a web grenade, and knockback in the form of the temp power for the mission were all available, not to mention plenty of damage. We wiped the minions with ease, the LTs (the shamans) were somewhat tougher, but the bosses owned us. We did eventually beat them all, but running back to contact multiple times in the middle of a mission to refill inspiration trays does not qualify as either heroic or fun. I've had other missions with Totems since then, and the answer seems to be: Get an empathy defender.

I have seen named bosses in two other Striga missions, as well. While the missions are completable without killing either of those bosses, this is only true if you have a character build that gives you invisibility (stealth + SS will work, stealth/cloaking device/etc. by itself will not).

Much of the new content is awesome. I am even all for making bosses more challenging. But I died frequently when fighting named bosses on Live, as both my scrapper and my blaster (and I make liberal use of Inspirations, and team often), and occasionally died fighting generic bosses. Right now, my boss-induced debt is easily exceeding my XP gained on those missions. This does not qualify as fun.

I took on a single (non-minion-surrounded) yellow-con boss last night on Striga, as well, with my blaster, with an empathy defender as my partner. This went fairly easily, but it was tedious -- repeat attack cycle over and over again, while emp defender pours stream of healing onto me. This, too, did not qualify as fun.

I am all for a challenge. Having something one-shot me is not a challenge, either to solo play or team play. Having something two-shot me is not much better, especially when the things that can one-shot often have some kind of mez power that means that the second shot is basically a given.

The current level of increase to boss HP and damage decreases the fun of the game, and it makes the mission difficulty slider pointless. Want a challenge? Up the difficulty slider. I'd be all for taking on tough minions and possibly LTs, and even tougher bosses when compared to I2, when I'm teamed up with solid reliable players that have good builds. As is, though, I can't think about using the slider because I'm never sure who my team is going to be, nor am I willing to risk making the bosses any tougher.

City of Heroes is fun because it's got fast and furious action, with portions that require tactics. I love tactics. I really enjoy teaming. What I don't want is either forced teaming (especially if we need the exact right blend of ATs), nor do I want it to take forever to kill something by doing something tediously repetitive.

Thumbs down. I like the new content, but the boss changes suck.

One missing key:

numpadenter - The enter key on the numeric keypad.

Thanks, Statesman. Addressing door placement in both the Hollows and Perez (and similar areas) will help a lot; doing it in all the zones, especially the lower-level ones, would be helpful as well. (Sending a level 2 brand-new player fresh from training into the red zone in Atlas is every bit as bad as sending a level 5 to a door deep in the red part of the Hollows -- indeed, possibly worse, since this is the level 2's first game experience.)

The points that have been made about "friend groups" vs. "pickup groups" is an excellent one. CoH could use vastly better tools for friends management -- the ability to have a very big list and manage/search it like the LFT screen, for instance, and preferably be able to attach notes on each friend. (I keep a file offline on the people I've friended for the purpose of being able to find them for grouping more easily.)

Like most people, I prefer to group with friends, or at least with people that I've encountered before and found to be good players. However, virtually all of my play experience is with pickup groups; I solo only until someone gives me a team invite.

I have had a tiny number of superb pickup groups, and I have had many mediocre pickup groups, and I routinely have awful pickup groups. These groups tend to be awful because of just one or two people in the group, as a side note. But I'd say that the percentage of awful runs at least 20-25% of the groups that I end up in.

The following stories come from the last three days:

- The scrapper who refused to slow down and wait for anyone else (including everyone running out of endurance), who ran around a room while everyone was unprepared, aggro'd three big mobs, and thus caused a whole-party wipeout. (Most teams are full of good folk who will go in to try to save these kinds of players from the trouble they've gotten themselves into, alas.)

- The 8-person team where not one person had an ability to do pulls, and the fire blaster who thought it was a great idea to open with a rain of fire, aggro'ing an entire cavern full of Vahz and resulting in a whole-party wipeout at the beginning of the very first mission.

- The team doing a mission where all the mobs were huge Devoured mobs, and red/purple to the damage dealer, and there was no one to manage the aggro (tanks with no group-useful tanking powers, a pet peeve of mine), resulting in FOUR whole-party wipeouts before a bunch of people bailed the team midway through the mission. (Yeah, I know. I should leave teams after the first whole-party wipeout, because usually, they're the fault of either a bad player or bad team composition, and it rarely gets any better. But I hate abandoning people.)

- The player who kept going idle. (The rest of the team was heavily suspicious that he was trying to powerlevel without being honest about it.)

You simply don't know, when you start a mission, how well a pickup team is going to turn out. Adjusting your tactics to suit the players in the team is one thing. Coping with players who suck is another.