Arcanaville

At no time did the devs say that the idea behind City of Heroes Freedom was to design the game so that every option that existed would be available by whatever means the players wanted, and moreover before the store launched this exact sentiment was repeatedly refuted. Explicitly by me, but not only by me.

Very specifically, the devs never said anything about eliminating the concept of bundling completely, and I was watching extremely carefully and would have called them on it if they ever said that in a thread I was reading.

I often wish statements like this were subject to estoppel upon direct evidence to the contrary. Mores the pity the world doesn't work like that in general.

None of that contradicts the fact that your narrative is impossible on its face. In fact, most of that are things that came up in conversations with Zwillinger face to face, and more importantly many of those things are things that were discussed as foundational elements of the Freedom hybrid model within days of its announcement.

Their motivations to make the Super Packs is obvious: its in effect a consumable that contains lots of different things to ensure there is likely something for everyone, or at least the widest possible group of people. Its also obviously true that they thought that up *before* they had any idea whether people would independently buy things like team inspirations because they were a part of the Super Pack concept from the start. This means your narrative of the devs deciding to add those small consumables into the Superpacks to allow them to effectively charge more for the costume elements within them cannot be true because it defies the timeline of design.

That's one way to look at it, but that's not the only possible explanation for their motives. One strong refutation of this cause and effect theory of the super pack's contents is that the super packs were previewed back in May of 2011 during the focus group associated with City of Heroes Freedom, and consumables were already slated for them. So its not possible that Paragon could have followed the line of thinking you're ascribing to them. Given that you believe this to be the most likely logical scenario, and it doesn't appear to be possible, in what way does that revise your thinking?


I don't see how this could significantly promote influence selling between players which is the problem (the game selling influence to the players is a different issue entirely) but as to the pay to win thing, that's an easy thing to tag on lots of things people are opposed to without sticking to a clear definition. Technically speaking, VIP players pay to win relative to premium players, but I don't think that's the kind of pay to win that people believe causes critical problems.

To me, the most serious grey area thing they sell is Experienced and that is debatable as to whether it crosses the line from QoL to pay to win. But nothing else the store sells affects in-game performance quantitatively more than that. And the Super Packs are not the first instance of the devs selling experience boosters.

That's not how most people define pay-to-win.

I honestly don't even spend the merits I earn in-game, but I guess I'm going to start, since buying superpacks means they otherwise pile up like cordwood.

That's true, but the question isn't whether any one person finds the value high enough, but rather if the value is high enough in general to be reasonable. Is it always wrong for the developers to release something that a particular player finds insufficiently valuable for the effort or price?

You're describing Paragon Studios as being "morally bankrupt" for releasing the Super Packs which implies you believe no reasonable person could believe the value within them is reasonable for their price. Because if the developers thought it was reasonable, it couldn't possibly be morally bankrupt for them to sell them. So either they have to believe their value isn't worth it but is doing it anyway, or they do believe its worth it but their belief is so unreasonable as to be blatantly incompetent.

And while there are details I would change if I could or disagree with in the specific, I don't personally believe the intrinsic value within the packs is unreasonable for the price, even if every single player won't use everything in them. If no reasonable person could believe that, then I would have to admit to being one of those people.

In saying I believe their value to be reasonable, I'm not saying everyone has to view their value identically. I only believe the value is reasonable enough to justify selling them at their current price. I believe for every item sold there will be people who believe the value of the item doesn't come close to its price, and will therefore not buy it. I believe that is normal. There are many things I haven't bought from the store, even though I'm in a position to buy everything in the store, because the value isn't worth it to me. But that's a far cry from me saying that Paragon Studios is obviously attempting to cheat me because my valuation differs from theirs.

I would say no, rather both the mental rules the devs have for blasters and the text descriptions for the archetype come from the same root source of a general discomfort with giving the canonical "DPS" archetype significant survivability tools. I honestly believe they know that aggro control and damage mitigation and heals have to be there for *someone* and everyone else was buffed into self-sufficiency. Blasters are the only things left that need ally support, and making them too powerful would nullify the purpose of ally support. You don't need Tankers and Controllers and Defenders if Blasters can solo everything. But contrawise, as long as Blasters exist Tankers and Controllers and Defenders will always have a job.

I can understand that sentiment, but I believe that a) it can be mitigated and b) Blasters ultimately shouldn't be the sole archetype to have to suffer for it anyway.


Grenades were not overpowered, dammit!

Or I can try to change their minds about their mental map of blaster design. And it only takes a crack to get significant features into it. See below.


Good question. I'm actually discussing (off and on) exactly how to do that in a way that doesn't cause unwanted side effects with Synapse, using new mechanics.

I think you might be asking two different questions: mechanically how, and what sort of effect would you give to something that traditionally doesn't have an effect associated with it. And for that, we go to Fire control for inspiration. Two effects in particular are associated with Fire in Fire Control separate from the always present holds and immobilizes in all control sets that are fairly unique to fire, and therefore associated with Fire specifically: -perception and -tohit. Logically consistent with -perception we could add a third when used carefully and in moderation: -range. That gives us opportunities to add damage mitigative secondary effects to Fire that would be comparable to soft and hard mez added to other sets.

I once discussed with pohsyb the question of whether it was possible to change the effect of a power based on whether the target was actually moving at the time. This got into the question of figuring out if a target *was* moving at the instant a power effect landed, and that turned out to be an extremely complex question to answer.

Simple sounding things simply aren't always simple when it comes to writing the code to do it.

The goal would actually be, in all direct seriousness, to offer different things to different players that want different things, and to skew my playerbase in the direction of keeping the players willing to accept they won't get everything they want in favor of the players willing to let other people have some things they want, in exchange for knowing they will get some of the things they want, even if that includes teamed content with content-tied rewards.

You think its pissing off an unnecessary percentage of the paying population, but I disagree. I think its trading one set for another set that wants at least some of what you would eliminate entirely. And I would be willing to put my money where my mouth is on that design decision, if it was mine to make.

To put it more directly, I wouldn't actually *want* customers who are only playing my game because they think I will only do exactly what they want me to do, and nothing else. I would rather be honest with them right up front and promise them in no uncertain terms that that will not be true. I'd rather have everyone else, because I think that group is a thousand times larger.

I don't think this orphans people who predominantly or exclusively solos. I know lots of those people in lots of MMOs, and at one time I was one as well. I think it pisses off the people who have to have everything their way. A think 99% of all people who predominantly or exclusively solo only need *enough* game to be entertained, they do not need to know that *everything* is designed specifically with them in mind.

The obvious answer to your question of how this is a compromise is that some people like content-coupled rewards and teaming, and some don't. This is a compromise between those two groups. You think the first group is inconsequential or simply wrong, so you do not believe their interests need to be represented in any compromise. I don't agree. Unless absolutely necessary, I don't decide who's worthy of the game and who's not. And in this case, its not necessary. I've already decided that anyone who draws a line in the sand is going to have lower priority than everyone else. Having made that first decision, I don't need to make an additional value judgment here.

Ponytails fixed by hairspray? I don't think the formula accounts for that.

As moving hair goes, ponytails have the least set of clipping issues I think, so this might actually be doable in theory. Although I don't know if the devs want to connect anything *else* to their gravitational model, given the zero-g zombie code that seems to have infected the system.

Most of those are not too strange, as fashion goes, but I picked the one that above all others looked like our costume editor exploded onto someone.

The text description in the dated manuals is one thing, but the developers do not design explicitly bound to them. There are, on the other hand, very concrete quantitative balancing rules they *do* follow, and Blasters as an archetype are the only archetype we know for certain failed to meet them completely across all of its powerset combinations. The devs don't just *intend* for Blasters to meet those requirements, they have a *mandate* that requires them to ensure they do. That's the only reason Defiance 2.0 was created in the first place.

The descriptions are only useful when discussing what reasonable expectations should be for players. Bringing them up when talking about balance problems with archetypes is random static.

If that were true, then you're saying if the devs buffed every archetype except one, and discovered that one was underperforming, the solution to accidentally not buffing it would be to eliminate it. Which is ludicrous.

But that's actually what happened to Blasters. Their realm of specialty was supposed to be damage, but just about every archetype that has ever been reviewed or buffed by the devs has had significant damage increases as part of the package. And its not enough to say that Blaster damage was increased also, because increasing *everyone's* damage serves to dilute the advantage. Not to mention the fact that many archetypes' damage have been buffed to a higher degree than Blasters over the years, like both Scrappers and Tankers.


That's an interesting idea, but I don't think its necessary. Adding control to blasters in a palatable way is, however, one of my priorities. Some sets have a lot of it in some areas, some don't. The big question is whether the extreme cases are actually closer to where we want blasters to be rather than outliers, sets like Dark and Sonic for example. If they are more like what Blasters are supposed to be, then such features can be added to Blaster sets by fiat: they do not trigger any special power design formulas (at least by design formula, mez is "free").

I would have forgiven that completely, if they made it so that if you decided to improvise a dance, your character actually did a really bad dance in the circle.

Don't worry, he's talking about my long-winded opinions, not yours. You're free to express your opinions in whatever form is most comfortable.

Really? You mean all this time I was writing on a public forum when I could have been doing it in notepad and saving myself an extra posting step?

Say, does that work with singing also? Doing it in the shoe department of Macy's is not always convenient, but I do own a shower.

Incidentally, I'm writing this for other people who might find you just as amusing as I do. I'm not writing this for myself because I already find you amusing.

They could have said "no." If you objected to them saying no because there should be no exceptions to the rule that everything must be soloable in this MMO, I would once again say you were wrong to not acknowledge that MMOs are going to have some teamed content with either exclusive rewards or extremely advantageous rewards somewhere. Whether that's in the iTrials or somewhere else is not a matter of principle.

One way to deal with the teaming issue and the solo player issue in an MMO is to temporize. Which is to say introduce teamed-specific content with exclusive rewards, and then significantly later introduce solo content with a path to those rewards and more teamed-specific content with exclusive rewards in leap-frog fashion. So long as the delay is significant but not immense, people who want team-focused events with content-tied rewards are satisfied, and solo players eventually get a path to almost everything without intruding on the temporary content-tied team rewards. In that sense, asking for an eventual solo path for anything and everything still cuts the devs some slack to make multiplayer-specific content and associated rewards without permanently shutting out solo and small-team players. If I was running an MMO, I would consider that the best of all possible worlds.

But I would be violating the philosophy of players who believe that solo players should *never* have any disadvantages over players who team, even temporarily. And I would be doing so willingly, and openly, because I believe that to be a better compromise overall. You could argue the solo incarnate path follows that philosophy, although its probably not doing so by deliberate design.

This didn't read so much like a reply, as it did an attempt to appear editorially significant for self-gratification.

By specific strict unbreakable policy, unless I specifically state otherwise any post I make longer than a single paragraph gets reviewed and edited at least twice before posting. That rule has been true since my very first post. Upon rereading it, I'm still happy with its structure and topical flow. If it seems confusing to you, I can break it down for you and outline the specific transitional constructs and the thought progression.

I don't think anything is thinking that looks effeminate. I'm thinking the last man to wear that much random was Doctor Detroit.

Did you specifically ask for a game that segregates all teamed activity into completely ignorable segments of the game without exception? If so, yes you were wrong. If not, that's not what I said.

What you specifically mentioned up above gets into a long discussion of what is "reasonable." That's a completely different subject.

And when that flack materializes, the specific reason I would give would be to address confusion regarding the resistance modifiers.

On the plus side, it would no longer be typed, so it would have toxic and psionic protection like it had in CoV beta. So I don't think those complaints you're imagining would be all that common. I'd probably be cheered.

Whoops, I subtracted the quantity and not the weight in my head. I should go edit that so it looks like you're correcting someone else.

Since the costume parts are heavily weighted, they drop fast and then disappear: the odds *without* them are the odds you'll likely tend to see very quickly for everything except the costume parts, and the odds *with* them most closely parallel the odds of actually getting the costume parts in the first place.

Honestly, you could ask and I could tell you. So far nothing Paragon Studios has done in the last two years should have been a surprise.

In fact, I'll answer before you even ask. Think about everything you hate that the devs have done in the last two years. Are they going to do more of that? Yes. Lots and lots more. Over your objection. Everything you like that they did in the last two years? They're going to be doing a lot more of that also. Are they going to realize that what you want is the best way to make the game and discontinue doing everything you hate and start doing only the things you like? Nope.

Are they ever going to stop adding random rewards to the game? Nope. Ever going to stop adding things to the store that don't have ways to earn them in the game? Nope. They will continue to make *most* things in the store earnable in some fashion or approximated in some fashion by in-game activity. But will they ever realize that anything else is absolutely wrong? No.

If you're genuinely confused, this is the truth whether you accept it from me or not. If you are not confused, but rather holding out hope that one day the devs will not do what they've been doing always, they won't. You have to decide if what they are doing now is enough for you, because no mass epiphanies are going to encompass Paragon Studios. You will always get some but not all of what you want, and you will always have to accept some and never none of what you don't want. That is the direction of this game. It should not be uncertain, because its been that always. If you think its changed recently, that's only because just by coincidence the direction they were heading didn't diverge from what you wanted at that moment in time.

Very specifically in regards to the Super Packs: City of Heroes did not suddenly become a beneficiary of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The hybrid model that Paragon Studios is using for City of Heroes is predicated on this basic fact: some players can pay less, if others pay more. And it presumes that there are ways for the people who can afford to pay more to pay more, while the people who cannot can pay less with the least impact on their gaming experience.

This requires enticing the players that can pay more to do so, by offering them things that cost more. Those things can't be things that can be gained easily through other means, or most people won't then pay for them. So its absolutely certain that Paragon Studios will continue to dangle such things in front of the players who can pay more to get them to spend more. This means there's more money all around to make a better game for everyone.

It also means they will often dangle things in front of the players who can pay more that the people who cannot actually want. That's inevitable, and unavoidable. It will happen, because this is the only way the model works. There's no going back to a flat subscription model. If you are fundamentally opposed to this, you're fundamentally opposed to something the game is now formally based upon.

The only thing you can control is *what* you dangle in front of players. And you have three choices: cosmetic items, performance items, or content gates. Performance items are severely constrained when they are exclusive to the store because they become pay to play items when taken beyond a certain point. The devs have decided not to embrace that, although they have skirted it at times. Most are QoL performance items. The only other alternatives are cosmetic items, which basically means costumes, or cutting off other parts of the game like signature story arcs or powersets.

If you won't sell performance and you won't sell cosmetics then your store becomes marginal. You can't keep selling powersets and QoL benefits alone: the revenue isn't high enough. And if you sell too many content gates your game starts to fragment. And if most players are either subscribing and paying only slightly more than before, or dropping to premium and not even subscribing at all, then the amount of revenue to support the game drops and we all get to have less game.

This was discussed when Freedom was first introduced. You could stay subscription only forever, but that means your revenues are fixed (or descending slightly) and the amount of game you can create for your players is permanently fixed at a lower level. The devs wanted to expand, and there's no question we're getting more content now than before. That's due to the Freedom model providing Paragon more resources to make more game that benefits everyone. That's *why* we're not going back: even people who don't spend any money in the store is getting the benefits of the store in terms of having more game now than before.

It also means we won't all have the exact precise same game with exactly the same options. If that's what you want, even if it means less game for everyone, that ship has sailed: you won't get it here. As I said when Freedom was first announced, the devs can't please everyone and they had to decide who was going to be orphaned by the new business model. And that group of people was going to be the static completionists: the people who wanted to pay the same amount forever and have everything forever, even if it meant making the game smaller so they could afford it all. The moment they shifted models, that specific group of players that wanted everything for a fixed price was no longer going to be specifically addressed by the game.

Of course, since I'm saying this you're free to disregard it and hope I'm just totally wrong and the devs will one day see the light. Its entirely your choice. Personally, I think this model for all its faults is the far superior model: it gives Paragon the resources to make a better game for everyone, personal tastes and preferences aside, and it extracts more revenue from the players that can afford it while minimizing the impact on those that cannot. But everyone has to make their own choice. I just think we have more than enough information now to make it. Tomorrow is not going to alter the direction of the company any more than yesterday did.