Arcanaville

None of those things are what the other archetypes use, as evidenced by the fact that those things did not adversely affect defender or controller performance. They use pervasive and cumulative non-damaging effects.

You can't take away defender and controller survivability all in one jump because there is no target for the devs to hit. Total Focus was an outlier, and thus vulnerable. When I asked Castle why he was taking away one of the best defensive tools away from Blasters when they clearly needed defensive help, his reply was basically "should blaster survivability come down to a single power that not all blasters can have?" And he was right - and wrong. It shouldn't, although that doesn't mean we should be taking away the very thing the archetype needs. But that's what made total focus vulnerable: it was a great power in a good blapper set that was seen as an extremely good offensive and defensive power. It was famous, and thus also a bullseye.

Whatever Blasters get, it should be easy to add, difficult to remove, and impossible to neutralize without neutralizing Defenders and Controllers as well, so they all rise together or fall together. Mez protection ironically doesn't do that, because Defenders and Controllers don't have it: you can target Blasters without affecting them. You'd affect Scrappers and Tankers instead (I'm not forgetting the red side, its just easier to keep the comparisons to one faction at a time) but they have carte blanc to have as much mez protection as they need.

That same section says:

Which means Blasters are *not* supposed to be the sole victim of enemy damage. However, I would accept that definition if it was followed, because of this:

I would be happy with a buff to Blasters that made them by far the most damaging to the enemy. "By far" is not 5% better, or 10% better, or what we have now which is "debatable and currently impossible to prove as to whether they even are better."

"By far" ain't going to happen. That's a delusion on the part of whoever wrote that.

Wait, didn't you just say it was an objective reason? Did I misunderstand this post?

Actually it sounds like once again the devs said something was going to take more time and resources than they had available so it wasn't going to be done, and then later time and resources became available and the devs decided to revisit it. I doubt that datamining had anything to do with the Stalker changes. I think its simply the case that Castle's priorities and the resources available to him were different than Black Scorpion's priorities and the resources available to him.

Of course, my experience is not going to be identical to everyone else's, but I do think I critique every MMO I play as its own thing. I'm not specifically looking to replicate the City of Heroes experience everywhere else. And there are rational reasons for the devs of the other MMO doing the things they are doing; the design decisions are not random. But in my own opinion the problem is design priority. If you decide its a priority to make sprawling explorational zones, you can't have people just teleporting around them and never seeing them. You have to create reasons to explore it, and you have to restrict movement to prevent skipping too much of it. If you also want to create an atmosphere of actual danger in some parts of it, you will have to place combat threats within it. All these things create a certain atmosphere that you can't replicate in a game that doesn't have those features.

But the question is whether those features override the desire to encourage casual teaming. Some people will think they do, but I believe most people will believe they do not, particularly a majority of the target audience for the game. And if you are actually correct that the devs are releasing patches to address most of my concerns (I'm not actually convinced that's true yet) then actually its likely the devs agree with me, that the collateral damage of those features is undesirable.

Its important to realize that you could produce an MMO with a random number generator and *someone* would love it. Everyone prefers different things, and everyone's circumstances are different. Someone who plays with a regular group will have an entirely different set of desires than someone who PUGs, or solos. Some people care about story more, some people like to explore and some don't.

What I can say objectively is that I do not believe it is remotely possible to claim that this other MMO allows for casual teaming remotely as well as this game, and the reasons for it are because many MMO dev teams don't even *want* to make a game that prioritizes casual teaming, because they have other priorities that deliberately or incidentally conflict with casual teaming. And that's what tends to make this game unique. Is it better because of that? Well that depends entirely on whether you think casual teaming is valuable in an MMO. To some degree that is a matter of opinion. But I believe that it better aligns with the majority of potential MMO players, which means in another sense there is an objective reason for making it a priority if you are a producer of MMOs.

In either case, this is just one aspect of the game I'm mentioning. There are lots of things I like about that other game, and I'm still a subscriber of it. However, I believe that optimizing the things they have, and not optimizing the things I believe they lack, is taking an enormous gamble that they do not appear to be winning.

I did define it in relatively testable terms immediately afterwards.

There's still a lot of spawn camping, which is something that really shouldn't exist in any modern MMO. There's still a lot of excessive travel.

And there are things about its design that are uniquely problematic for itself. Travel costs (time) encourage people to chart efficient paths to mission destinations. But that means you are frequently doing different missions from different story arcs in a jumbled order. In most MMOs, the story telling is frankly weak: it doesn't suffer for that. But this game's story telling is extremely strong, and it *does* suffer for that. The zone and destination design should have been created to serve the narrative, but it doesn't: it serves the classical MMO model. Of 1999.

We're not all going to agree on what is and is not a good MMO design or implementation thereof. But I can make an objective prediction that isn't subject to subjective interpretation. I believe the game will quickly run out of steam, and players will abandon it (I'm not saying its going to die, just that its momentum will run out and its subscriber base will drop to levels far lower than expected for a game like this). And when that happens, people will look for a reason. And given the strength of the single player game, everyone will gravitate to "the MMO aspects were too clunky and primitive." Whether they are or aren't is a debate that would take a long time to resolve. That it will be fingered as the cause of the lack of success of the game is something that will only require waiting and watching.

Unless of course they change them, and relatively quick.

By the same token, I tend to favor solutions I believe will actually work, won't cause greater problems, and have a decent chance of being implemented by the developers. What's complicated and unproven to you may not be to me.

I've been down this road before. I pleaded with the devs not to make so much defense available, and especially to everyone. They basically didn't listen. What they did do was decide everyone now has too much defense and is adding tohit buffs back into the game at an accelerating rate. The same tohit buffs I worked for years to remove in the first place are back with a vengeance, and with them defense sets are starting to feel the cracks.

I don't plan on living long enough to be able to repeat this experiment enough times to be statistically certain. I'm plenty certain enough now.

In any case, I know mez protection is not the only way to solve this problem, because two out of the four hero archetypes solve this problem without mez protection. And their tools are so much less likely to be tampered with. I know they work because I know they did not have performance numbers in the toilet with Blasters prior to D2.0. Their solution is actually in many ways so much better than mez protection because its active defense, and active defense is a lot harder for the devs to nerf away.

I'm not sure I would call that an objective reason to keep Blaster performance low. That would imply that Tankers, Scrappers, Controllers, and Defenders are all relying on Blasters to give them purpose. Tankers aren't designed to control aggro, they are designed to take aggro away from Blasters. Controllers aren't designed to control targets, they are designed to control targets so they don't shoot at the Blasters. Defenders aren't ally buffers, they are Blaster buffers.

I actually suggested a few weeks ago that this might in fact be true to a degree, but that doesn't mean its actually a good reason to continue the practice. Its more a statement of fear and prejudice than an actual valid game design rationale. It would imply that Blasters are the sacrificial lamb of the game, and if that's the case the devs have an obligation to state so.

I double-dare them to do so publicly.

Interesting, because I've never seen that before. I've been invited to teams that were on different instances, and I had to *select* the instance. I've been on teams where we had to tell people that the reason they couldn't see us even though they were right on top of us in the map is because they were in the wrong instance.

And I have never, ever, been teleported to another player when invited to a team. Not in normal content, not in flashpoints, not in giant world-boss-killing mega leagues. If that feature is in the live game, its somehow escaped me completely. If it was in beta, I must have missed when that feature existed, and I guess there was an exploitability issue that removed it. Then again, it would not be the first time a feature of that game escaped my attention for an extended period of time. But if I'm a moron for not knowing about it, every single person I've ever teamed with in the game is equally brain dead.

That's a question of degree. But the ability to shoot X number of attacks while mezzed is an alternative to mez protection, at least in the technical sense of protection. And an advantage of that sort of non-protection solution is that its less vulnerable to mez staircasing, where blasters get mez protection, so the critters get more mez, so blasters need more protection. We can shoot while mezzed: mez *magnitude* doesn't mean as much to blasters as mez *duration* - which is one of the reasons why I'm a bigger proponent of mez resistance rather than protection.

And they probably *saw you* and invited you. You were standing right there.

If you're on Hoth and someone in your guild asks for help on Tatooine, if you decide to help them:

1. It will take you a long time to get there. There is travel to the space port, then travel to the system, then travel down to the space port, then travel to their location.

2. You may have to fight your way there. If the person is in an area with a high density of enemies, they won't just part for you. And you can't fly over them or teleport past them. You can shuttle to the general area, but then you're on your own.

3. You may get virtually no experience rewards for that mission. You can still get money, but not really progress, when running lower level missions.

3a. Bonus: you could be going to a lower level area for which you cannot earn significant XP, but it could still be high enough that if you try to simply speeder your way to the destination, the critters can still shoot you and knock you off your speeder forcing you to fight things you can't get significant XP from.

4. You may arrive and discover the person wants help for a Heroic-4, and is going to spend time looking for, recruiting, and then waiting for two other people.

I once offered to help someone with a mission, and from that moment when I abandoned my own mission until when I arrived at his was nine minutes. And I'm very good at it. I then spent twenty five minutes waiting for him to recruit two other people and wait for *them* to arrive.

I don't think there exists two points anywhere in the City of Heroes universe that is separated by nine minutes of travel. I think I can sprint from the Atlas Globe to portal court with a level two in less time than that.


And of course, first you have to *find* someone to team with, or they have to find you.

Just a quantitative note: mez resistance is generally duration resistance, which means it does not work the same way as damage resistance. 50% resistance to damage means damage is cut in half. 50% mez resistance means the mez duration is cut by 33% - 1/1.5. To cut the duration of a 30 second stun grenade down to 10 seconds - still a long time to be stunned - would require 200% mez resistance (1/(1+2) = 1/3 = 0.33 x duration).

"Nothing that forces you to group." According to this keen observer of MMOs, the problem with this game is that nothing forces you to group, even through the core elements of the game. In fact, the implication at the end of the quote is that if only they forced you to group to unlock the game's travel power things might be better.

The problem is not that its extremely clumsy to group. Not that its very inconvenient to group. Not that even if you want to group you have to sometimes wait tens of minutes for party members to reach you even with that "easy" to unlock travel power. Not that its difficult to chat globally across the game to find team mates. Not that there's no system for normalizing combat level and rewards between different players. Not that you can't team with more than three other people except in special circumstances.

Nope: its not that you can't find people to team with, can't reach other potential team mates, can't get rewards for teaming with lower level team mates, can't team with more than three people. Its that the game didn't take the precaution of forcing you to team, throughout the game. And this is not an isolated opinion.


And that's why this game continues to offer a unique gameplay experience. We don't force you to team just to cross Indy port, we don't gate travel powers behind teaming, we don't force team mates to crawl to your location at a slower speed than they could physically jog to your house, we don't restrict people to only teaming with other people of the same level, and we're apparently the crazy ones.

And its not that Paragon Studios simply doesn't care if we team or not. They *want* us to team. They think teaming is important. They just believe its better to encourage us to team, and eliminate barriers to teaming, and provide the odd carrot or two to team, and not generally *force* us to team. But apparently that's not the right way to do it.

This is why this game has no competition: you're never going to see another City of Heroes, because no one wants to make one. Apparently, that's not the way an MMO is supposed to work.

It never ceases to amaze me, how no MMO is so bad, that it couldn't be made worse by listening to its playerbase. Change just one thing - force me to team in a game whose teaming mechanics suck - and you wouldn't have any players at all. Its ironic that I was saying what this writer said at the start even during this game's beta: "BioWare has successfully created the first Massively Single-Player Online Role-Playing Game." I actually used that exact phrase on these forums. And yet he thinks its because the game doesn't force you to team, and I think the game *can't* force people to team because teaming sucks so badly that I actually think an MMO based on Checkers would be more likely to form groups.

We do a lot of things wrong. And there are people who would say we even do this thing wrong sometimes. But nowhere do I see the contrast between this game and every other MMO I've played than in this one single MMO dogma: if you don't force people to team, they won't, and then they'll leave. People believe this so strongly that even when presented with a game whose teaming mechanics are so bad no one *wants* to team someone will say that the problem isn't that people don't want to team, its that they were not forced to team.

To me, this seems so obvious. Eliminate the barriers to teaming, and people will team. I've accused people of oversimplifying complex situations, and I'm not suggesting that's a simple idea here. But its a *true* idea, isn't it? But its a truth no one else that makes MMOs seems to believe. I'm not even sure *our* dev team would believe it, if they didn't actually live it.


One last thing: isn't it odd how so many things that make this game a solo-friendly game are actually teaming considerations? In effect, this game is not solo-friendly because the solo game itself is special - actually that other game does that in spades. This game is actually solo-friendly because it constantly provides openings to team, which the player can take or not take. You can solo, then decide to team, then quit teaming and go back to soloing. That ability to decide almost moment by moment whether to team or not makes it easy to solo all the time if you want. But its the result of the game spending time making sure you *could* team if you wanted to, by making sure the solo game is not terribly disconnected from the teaming game. You don't lose much by soloing most of the time. But you don't lose much by deciding to team either.

If you're close enough to lick Statesman's belt, you are probably a bit too close to the screen.

Castle was a bit more conservative than the current dev team is on average, but I doubt Rage would survive a port to Scrappers in its current form regardless. It would have twice the strength of Power Siphon's average buff, and that's just too far of an outlier.

To be fair, there are ways to deal with mez other than having mez protection powers, like being able to continue to attack while mezzed for example. The question really is less "should blasters get mez protection" and more "to what degree should mez be deleterious to blasters?" If we decide its too harmful now, the mechanical way we make it less harmful is less important to me than it becomes less harmful in the way intended.

The all around best way is for me to quote you, and then for you to claim I was constructing a strawman by quoting you.


On the other hand, I don't think I'm over-reacting when someone suggests that I'm unaware of anything besides numbers and calculations:



Are you willing to concede my proof by counter-example, or should we continue this debate further?

Power creep is not a problem for Blasters because:

1. Blasters are supposed to do unambiguously more damage than anyone else, having traded away everything else. Anyone else who tries to say they should do a comparable amount as Blasters is simply wrong. There is no way for creep to occur here on the Blaster side of the equation.

2. Blasters have been datamined to underperform in the past, and are the *only* archetype to have been stated to underperform as an entire archetype - meaning every powerset combination, every teaming situation, every level range. That means by definition they are the only archetype that can claim to objectively have insufficient power. Power creep is therefore irrelevant to them.

When everything else does better - and they objectively do regardless of anecdotes to the contrary - and blasters do worse - and anecdotes to the contrary are equally irrelevant - then saying that "power creep" should make us cautious about addressing Blaster problems is like saying global warming should make us cautious about adding more subscribers to the game.

I know I'm not going to convince everyone that blaster problems are real. I know I can't convince everyone the Earth is not flat. All I care about is objectively proving that they need help, objectively demonstrating precisely what help they need, and working with anyone who has good ideas to contribute in that regard. The people that think this is a fools errand can continue to think that, because it is not one of my objectives to reduce the number of such people that exist. I don't know what that number is; I don't care what that number is. What I do know is that, as someone who indulges in them myself from time to time, the case I eventually make will be invulnerable to quips.

In case anyone's not been keeping track, I've already started laying my cards on the table: I've discussed in the last two months blaster damage modifiers, blaster damage buff powers, blaster DPA, blaster range, blaster secondaries, blaster snipes, blaster nukes, blaster mitigation, blaster performance, blaster archetype popularity, blaster design, blaster tactics, blaster build options, blaster comparable power comparisons, blaster mechanics, blaster conceptual evolution, blasters in the modern game. The case I intend to make is not that by one specific viewpoint blasters need help. The case I intend to make, and the blaster archetype helps out by actually being this deficient, is that by all possible objective viewpoints blasters need help. That the only evidence that can be brought forth that blasters don't need help is "my blaster is awesome" and "I've been around for a long time and I know blasters are fine."

If that's what the competition is, then there is no competition. *Every* angle I've looked at says Blasters have not been treated correctly. Even things that appear to be unrelated. For example, its sometimes said, in reference to other design discussions, that mitigation is easy to get in the invention system, but damage is hard. For something that is often stated, its very obviously false. Anyone who tries to get more damage with an invention build knows the first obvious way to do that: get recharge. The invention system is loaded with it.

Recharge can't possible benefit melee characters more than blasters offensively, can it?

Actually, it can. But those calculations aren't finished yet.

Incidentally, I'm waiting for someone to come up with an *actual* objective reason why Blaster performance should be constrained to what it is now, and so far no one has. I'm actually encouraged by the fact that "power creep" is one of the few counter-arguments of any objective nature being made. Its at least an objectively measurable thing; its also in the case of blasters objectively dismissable as being not applicable. That's what's encouraging.

Condescension would be pointing out you can't subtract. Pointing out that anyone who was playing blasters very well prior to D2.0 must have been at or near the top of all blasters in existence at the time because datamining showed blasters performing lower than everyone else is simply a fact. No moreso than claiming one's personal experience would grant them the ability to judge an entire archetype's performance, say, which I considered to be only a misunderstanding and not condescension, even though what was claimed was a skill I believe to not actually exist.

Completely separate from innumeracy, I could also objectively point out illiteracy, because that fact was not offered to show that my perspective was better, but rather the reverse: that everyone's individual perspective is likely to be skewed. I said in spite of my ability to play blasters well I can still see the problems overall, because I do not rely on my own personal experience to judge the archetype. That implies that being able to play blasters well is actually an impediment to correctly judging blasters, not a benefit, the same impediment I was claiming the poster I was responding to might have, given they claimed to play blasters well also.

Synapse: does this mean those pets' attacks are not immune to recharge buffs? Is that unique to the Howlers?

Well apparently that's what happens when you come loaded for bear and your difficulty settings are still set for teddy bear. Now I have to do it again with better settings just so I can see what those "bosses" even do, besides vaporize.