Arcanaville

Everyone is different here, but I think most players that play games at least exist somewhere in the vast middle where "failure" of some kind is possible, but not overly strictly penalized.


On the subject of protecting players against dumb mistakes, I think all forms of possible pure free-choice power systems that could possibly work for a game like this one would need training wheels. You would start with exemplars of reasonable powersets, and let players override them as they learn what the heck they are doing. The game would warn them if they were doing something dumb, but if the player turns those warnings off then they are then responsible for their own actions, just like a player that turns off the warnings in-game now become personally responsible for things like accidentally deleting valuable things. That is normally considered a reasonable compromise in any user interface situation.

I meant, the devs don't write their own (not with approval anyway: I think every instance where a pseudorand was written into the code it was taken out and replaced with rand() long ago). All modern C compilers have decent rand() functions. The problems with them would not be visible to MMO players and difficult to even detect with random analysis. Some of the tests that break those require more random rolls than I can reasonably collect in a lifetime, which is hundreds of billions of rolls. One of the problems with testing the rand has been that the really good tests require far more data than I can collect, so I've been forced to use lesser tests. If I can't find a problem in the rand() in a hundred million rolls, no player is going to find one in one hundred drops.

They would go down.

My guess is that the floor is somewhere around 5/10/30/55, plus or minus a few percentage points here and there.

The devs use rand(). And even clock hashing wouldn't amplify Thursdays: that would be difficult to do *deliberately* much less accidentally.

Well, it seems after checking I don't actually have very many close ups of my own chest in screencaps going back that far. I was wasting time capturing things like Nova going off and what Skyway looked like from the air.

But I did find these two (click for link to maximum size):






One from profile and one from the front. I think you can see the texture "anomaly" doesn't precisely line up with the vertex geometry.


Since I had to literally look at hundreds of seven year old screepcaps, I thought I would share two more I noticed while browsing:



This is how we used to die before ragdoll physics.




I don't know who Joe and Todd were at Paragon Studios, but the art team didn't think too highly of their salesmanship prowess.


Those pictures above also document *my* blaster prowess at the early levels. Those two pictures are literally taken just a bar and a half apart. Notice that in that time I managed to use three awakens (the third picture shows you the moment just before the first one, actually).

On the one hand, you can pick almost anything. On the other hand, once you're done iterating you're usually left with a ranged scrapper. Every CO character I made either became a ranged scrapper, or an unplayed character. All those choices eventually funneled into ranged attacks, maybe a PBAoE or two, a defensive passive, and a block.

Don't even get me started on Martial Arts / Reflexes over there. Both sets sucked at launch in City of Heroes. They outdid themselves the second time around by making both sets inexplicably worse. Unless you paid someone in China to level the thing to 30 for you, and even then that only fixed Reflexes.

That's the implication of what the devs have said. I cannot prove it with the data I have, but I can say if individual participation score affects your drops, it doesn't do so by enough to be noticable. The best possible bonus achievable by any means to improve your drop rates seems to be modest, and decent leagues seem to reach that limit relatively easy, and nothing an individual does can exceed that.

Its *possible* that a *fantastic* player on a *horrible* league that somehow manages to succeed in spite of themselves anyway might be getting a small bonus to their random drop rates, contrary to what the devs said about the system. But I don't think that possibility is strong enough to affect trial participants in a meaningful way.

Its hard to prove a negative in this case. I don't see a strong individual effect, and the devs have said there is none. Either that statement is true and there is none, or that statement is false but its too small to measure.

I can also say that almost anything you can do which helps yourself at the expense of your league mates is probably counterproductive. Doing things that help you and help your league are better than things that hurt you and help your league, certainly. But doing things that help you and hurt the league can hurt you even if you don't cause the trial to fail. Certain experiments I can't describe directly imply that helping your league mates can improve *their* score, which improves the overall average, which indirectly improves your rolls. So the counteraction: hurting league mates, and and probably does boomerang back to you. You're doing something that probably won't help you directly, but can hurt you indirectly. That's not a good trade. Because the numbers are small either way, people who do this might not even notice: they could do it and get a good drop, and assume it works. It doesn't.

Although the devs won't reveal the details of the system, even to me, one thing I can do (because everyone can) is report potential exploits. So I did make a list of all possible ways I thought I could, in general, game the system and reported that as potential exploits. Only one of them turned out to be even possible in the system, and its a weird one no player would ever attempt to do unless they actually knew it would work, because it doesn't look like it would do anything and the benefit would not be obvious without doing it repeatedly. I can't say the system is not exploitable, but I can say the devs have looked at every obvious possibility that has been discussed on the forums.

I consider all of the crash to be all of the crash when I say that, and I do think -recovery would be less of a big deal if a) the nuke removed the immediate threat completely, and b) it lasted less long than the threat was removed for.

For example, if you give me EMP and I'm going to hold (or stun) everything in sight for 20 seconds, I wouldn't mind -recovery for 10. I do mind knocking something over for about six seconds of ragdoll and getting 20 seconds of -recovery. Its a question of balance there.

Incidentally, here's an interesting thought to consider. I've done the calculation many times in the past but I'll update it for the current situation. Powers normally obey a balance equation that determines their recharge and endurance cost by the amount of damage they do and the area of effect they affect. So lets take Nova (its the simplest to analyze) and just see what the equations say. Recognizing that the equations don't necessarily apply in extreme cases, this will at least provide some guidance when looking at the recharge, endurance costs, and crash of the power.

Nova does a maximum of 6.0 scale damage, but averages 4.875. It has an AoE factor of 4.75. It therefore does an effective damage of 23.16 DS. This translates into a recharge of 142.5 seconds and an endurance cost of 120.4.

Given that Nova's recharge is 360 seconds, its recharge is way too high for its damage output according to the recharge equation. But interestingly its endurance costs are way too low. Nova costs only 20.8 endurance to activate. However, it also crashes you to zero. You could argue that the *maximum* endurance cost of Nova is 100 endurance (for a player with unenhanced maximum endurance). Stopping recovery for 20 seconds is essentially another endurance cost of sorts: it robs the blaster of 20 seconds of endurance recovery. Prior to inherent stamina, that would have been at base about 33.3 end, and today assuming 3-slotted SO stamina (because by the time you have Nova you have access to SOs) that would be 49.6 endurance. So the absolute maximum endurance cost (assuming 100 max end) is about 149.6 The minimum cost is 70.4 endurance. The average is about 110 endurance. That's actually, coincidentally, just about what Nova should cost endurance-wise.

You could say, when describing the crash, that Nova is "borrowing" endurance to fuel its activation and the player has to pay it back after it fires through the crash. However, that line of thought only makes sense if Nova recharged three times faster: otherwise its obeying the endurance equation by applying a penalty to the blaster, but not obeying the recharge equation and allowing the blaster to use it as often as the equations would ordinarily allow. I think there is an opportunity to split the difference by keeping the crash and significantly increasing the damage of the power. A 360 recharge power intrinsically implies 57.96 DS, or at Nova's AoE factor 12.2 DS. That is 2.5 times higher than Nova's average damage and over twice its maximum damage. There's a lot of room to negotiate. If we didn't consider Nova to be anything special, strictly on the basis of its recharge it would deal about 763 points of damage *on average* at level 50. That's *base unenhanced damage*: more than enough with SOs to obliterate practically all minions and LTs at level 50. Its more than enough, with BU and Aim, to take out an even con Boss.

A meet-in-the-middle power would exist between the damage predicted by the endurance costs including the crash - 4.34 DS, slightly lower than what Nova actually does now - and the damage predicted by the recharge (12.2). It would then do more than its endurance costs and less than its recharge, and be roughly balanced in that sense. That would be about 8.25 DS in round numbers, which is about 68% more damage than Nova does now. That is plenty of damage to take out minions and LTs. You would have to be damage-capped to take out an even con boss with that, but you would be able to take out damaged bosses. And I think at that level of damage I would accept an unavoidable endurance crash (meaning: inspirations wouldn't work to restore end during the crash), at least for, say, the first half of the crash (the first 10 seconds).

As I mentioned way back in the beginning (and here) the reason for the devs' surprise is almost certainly because they didn't factor in the default average league bonus into the likelihood of common vs uncommon. They either didn't account for it at all (accidentally) or presumed a lower bonus than the players themselves ended up generating on average. That's enough to shift uncommon relative to common by a lot, and in a way that would have been difficult to fully anticipate.

The effect was most pronounced on uncommon drops because the way random roll bonuses work they impact the more common drops more than the less common drops. Otherwise the system would be able to make a 5% chance for very rare drop into a 55% chance with a high enough score.

If *individual* participation score affects what components are rolled, I can say its effect is constrained by the data to be relatively small.

Probably random. At this point I've gotten six very rare drops total. Four have been on Thursdays. Statistically speaking, that's pretty weird because most of my trials are run on weekends. In fact, I've only run about fourteen trials on Thursdays, for a 4 out of 14 very rare rate. Of course, there's no possible way the participation system could be weighted for Thursdays, so that's just what happens when you stare at raw data too long: random chance says you will find patterns if you look long enough.

The reason is probably that however many changes there are in the powersets currently being proliferated in I21, those changes were relatively obvious changes that were easy to agree upon. Illusion generates debates even within the player community over the best way to proliferate it, whether it would be too powerful or underpowered for dominators, whether it is even already problematic for controllers as-is, and how much tweaking should be done purely for conceptual purposes to mate the set better with dominators, completely separate from numerical performance.

I have to believe those same issues are things the devs themselves struggle with, and that means any attempt to proliferate Illusion to Dominators will be a much more complex and drawn out process, because it is so controversial and the devs would want all interested parties to have their fair say, from the powers people to the art people to the senior designers to the QA testers.

They may even be contemplating something similar to Empathy, where villains didn't get Empathy at all because they wanted to use the opportunity to create a completely different set (Pain Domination) to be the anti-Empathy instead. That option is also on the table for Illusion Control, and its a reasonable option to at least consider in the grand scheme of things.

Many things about CoH development become easier to understand when we eliminate the subtle but often very strong inclination to think of Paragon Studios as a hive mind.

There really isn't an abrupt change at level 40 that makes blasters unplayable, at least not in a literal sense. But it is true that critter health goes up faster than player damage (making a one-shot kill into a two-shot kill into a three-shot kill into a four-shot kill, continuing to increase the threat that critters create), mez continues to become more common (that 30 second stun grenade that the Malta has just plain screams I hate blasters), and higher damage attacks become more common. These three things often conspire to make it seem like there is a breaking point for blasters, and for many of them it arrives on or about level 40 (for some, significantly earlier than that).

The most important thing for a blaster is to keep the initiative. That means always getting in the first strike, always having spare inspirations to get out of trouble, and always keeping solid control of aggro (drawing adds while engaged with one spawn is hard for people not experts at playing blasters to deal with).

You have a couple of choices here. You can stick with the blapper attacks, make sure you have power boost to make the stuns last longer, actually take stun, and try to keep everything stunned as much as possible. If you're going blapper, I'd also recommend air superiority. You want as many tools that can incapacitate your foes, even if only for a few seconds.

Or, if you're going range, I would recommend using blazing bolt to try to take out at least one thing quickly (boosted by Build Up and/or Aim) to even the odds. And start learning to recognize your foes so you know who the most dangerous ones are, and what their bag of tricks is. You don't want to waste a Build Up snipe on an Illusionist that is phased and unhittable, and you need to know that Malta sapper is way more dangerous than the Lt standing next to him.

Either way, remember that blasters' two best friends are the Luck, and the Breakfree. If you're mezzed, you're options are limited (although you can still shoot a few powers). And if things look bad, four lucks = soft-cap, making you nearly unhittable for one minute. Even two or three small lucks can make a huge difference in survivability in tight situations.

Take this for whatever its worth, but I believe that the "intrinsic" rate of commons is actually higher than uncommons, but the problem is that the average team/league participation bonus pushes uncommon over common in actual practice. Since the vast majority of players do more than enough to qualify, and leagues composed of such players are likely to thus score at least nominal bonuses, that's why "uncommon" is so common.

I believe this is part of the source for the devs' original miscalculation on how "common" the uncommon drops were at release. They didn't factor in the fact that the average league was going to have a consistently non-zero random roll bonus.

I will also say something else I really cannot elaborate upon, but those numbers are consistent with what I believe are the drop percentages that good leagues will tend to get assuming very good (but not necessarily difficult to get) random roll bonuses. This would suggest that its not hard to basically saturate the best possible league bonus with normal (but reasonably good) league play in general.

Alternatively, we used to say in the old days that if Scrappers get to be immortal for a couple minutes, blasters should become raging lunatics for at least one. Today, I would say freem our offense: buff our damage, recharge, recovery, accuracy**, knockback strength***, endurance drain, slow strength, and whatever else I think up that sounds like offense to the caps for say 60 seconds, and then crashes with a hard zero endurance, zero recovery, 100% resistance to endurance and recovery (meaning: no ability to recovery endurance at all) for 15 seconds. And probably 1000s recharge or even more, but who cares.

But I think with modern mechanics, there are lots of new options to give blasters an offensive overdrive that isn't a nuke. Reactive Interface suggests one potential option. Maybe these need to wait for blaster primaries to get a tier 10 power.


** Accuracy, not tohit. Capped tohit can be countered by ultrahigh defense. Capped accuracy would allow us to land on even MoGed targets 25% of the time.

*** Because it looks cool that's why, and at these levels of damage buff scatter isn't really going to be a major problem.

There are lots of things that could be done to improve the lot of the people who already like or are good at playing blasters. Adjusting the crash in nukes or rethinking snipes would be one such area, as well as tweaks to movement or endurance (but note that tweaks to base unsuppressed movement rates theoretically have PvP side effects).

But none of those things would significantly improve blaster leveling or reward earning performance for midrange (not end game optimized or invention-heavy) blasters, nor would they significantly improve survivability for players that are already challenged in that area. So in that sense, as I said the devs could keep buffing blasters, and there are blaster lovers out there that would appreciate every single buff, but at the end of the day the on-paper offense/survivability ratio of blasters would only change a little. Allowing us to shoot three attacks from mez was probably the biggest buff to survivability and total offense the devs could pull out of their hats.


Incidentally, the crash isn't the problem with nukes (for the nukes that crash). The problem is the powers don't do enough damage for nukes that crash. And even the ones that provide mitigation (i.e. Nova's knock, Thunderous Blast's drain) have effects that last less than, or equal to, the amount of time the power tries to incapacitate the blaster. TB debuffs foe recovery for 20 seconds. It debuffs self recovery for 20 seconds. That's not really a good trade. Nova debuff self recovery for 20 seconds and applies knockback to the targets. No knockback effect that doesn't ragdoll the target into a pretzel in a tree lasts 20 seconds.

You know what a good emergency attack for blasters would be? Shield Charge. Its fast (1.5s vs 3.0 for Nova, 3.7s for TB). It has knockdown. It has absolutely no drawbacks and the blaster could still fight. You can use it every 90s. It even doubles as an escape power because it as a teleport range of 60 feet. It has offense, defense, alpha strike, and escape all wrapped up in one power. And we give it to melee archetypes.

I know there are players that love TB and I wouldn't take it away from them, but I would take LR over TB. If I was designing Electric Blast from scratch with no legacy constraints I might trade TB for a version of LR that had TB's recharge, damage, and drain, and LR's mechanics, KD, and cast time. Maybe not exactly that, but something close to that.

To be honest, when I performed this thought experiment the last time, I wasn't specifically thinking about players. I was thinking about a way to autogenerate thematic critters.

The idea was if I wanted a pseudo-individualistic boss, I would randomly generate a theme, say fire (or fire/ice, or energy/dark, or sword) from a table, then a melee/ranged preference, and then a set of numbers specifying weights for a set of parameters: control, offense, defense, support, movement. Based on those weights and the theme, the system would then autogenerate a critter to match, and bingo: one fire themed boss.

Its actually a slightly *harder* problem than making a free form player powerset creator in numerical design, so you sort of get that for free.

Blasters have been buffed three times, although technically speaking you could count it as two.

The first buff happened back around I5ish, when blaster health and damage cap were increased to their current levels. The second buff was the addition of Defiance 1.0. Since they had to go back and change that since they were worried D1 was encouraging blasters to commit suicide, you could argue that D1 doesn't count and its really D2.0 that counts as a buff. But being able to shoot while mezzed and having ranged modifier increased plus having a follow up effect in all attacks definitely counts as a buff.

The real problem with blasters is that fundamentally speaking they are the only archetype that doesn't specifically have damage mitigation written into its archetype definition: that's actually unique. You can quibble individual powersets, but controllers and dominators are assumed broken without control, tankers, scrappers, stalkers, and brutes are all specifically assigned personal damage mitigation powersets, defenders and corruptors are explicitly assigned buff/debuff sets, and masterminds have aggro drawing pets, bodyguard, and actually specifically designed to take some minimum amount of aggro.

Blasters *can* have potentially lots of damage mitigation: Sonic/Ice comes to mind. But fundamentally speaking the archetype doesn't mandate it. An Energy/Energy blapper has tons of active offensive mitigation: I lived that build for over six years. But it takes significant skill to pull off. Meanwhile a Fire/Fire blaster with almost no damage mitigation at all is considered comfortably within the parameters of the archetype definition.

Blasters are supposed to get *some* mitigation by being at range, and supposed to trade better offense for lack of defense. However, the problem with range as a defense is that every single archetype that doesn't have personal defenses *also* has it, or to put it another way every single archetype that is melee-focused also has personal defenses. So while blasters do get range as a defense, everyone else gets the same range as defense *plus* other stuff, or they get straight up personal mitigation. Saying Blasters get range as a defense is like saying they get regeneration as damage mitigation. Sure they do. So does everyone else.

And as to giving blasters more offense, numerically speaking they almost certainly do deal more damage on average than the other archetypes - while they are alive that is. You could argue that an SS/Fire Brute farming build outdamages virtually all Blaster, but that's really a corner case. The more important fact to note is that we know for a fact that extra damage didn't translate into extra survivability: the devs datamined blasters dying far more often than everything else, under all conditions. And the reason why is actually obvious: the game is designed around fast combat. By most MMO standards, even a lowly solo FF/Arch defender tends to kill pretty fast. The game was actually designed around the metric that the players should defeat the typical minion in about three to four "average" attacks, which probably means scale 1.0 modifer 1.0 attacks. Such an attack would deal about 56 points of damage unslotted at level 50, and about 112 points of damage slotted. That compares to the about 430 health of a level 50 minion. At lower levels it takes less attacks, and at higher levels slightly more.

But four doesn't leave a lot of room to speed things up. If a defender is killing a minion in five attacks, and a blaster in three, if you want to improve blaster survivability through offensive boosts alone the next step takes you from three-shotting minions to two-shotting them, then one-shotting them. You enter the realm of degenerate combat where the blaster can literally wipe everything out before the critters can even react: you go from being in jeopardy to being immortal in only a couple of jumps if you are not careful.

If combat was slow, the devs could make blasters kill way faster than everything else to compensate for lack of damage mitigation. But there's almost nowhere to go there because combat is already very fast. And that means Blasters will never have the same survivability/performance ratios of anything else, and still remain blasters. They could keep buffing blasters every single issue, but so long as their archetype definition precludes significant personal damage mitigation and as long as the devs won't allow blasters to contain game-breaking levels of baseline offense, the box they can operate in is likely going to constrain anything they do to blasters to no more than very small tweaks to overall performance.

If I could wave a magic wand and fix it, I would. But if the only way to do that is to make blasters just like everything else: like defenders but with more damage, or like corruptors but with less buffing, or like dominators but with less control, I would rather they remain what they are, even if what they are is numerically less than everything else.

The trick, and its a very difficult trick to pull off, is to not attempt to value those powers based on a pure numerical effectiveness equation. Instead, you qualitatively value them with something I'll call "flair points" for now. Each of these powers would have some base cost, but also have a certain predefined limit on the number of them you could take, in effect by giving them an additional cost that is more limited than the individual costs of the power.

Just like most melee sets have a tier 9 that is difficult to fully quantify, just like Nova is a difficult power to value, every powerset would have an opportunity to get a certain number of these. Just making up examples, if you take Fulcrum shift, that's likely to be the only "flair" power you'll have. On the other hand, you might have enough discretion to take Voltaic Sentinel *and* Thunderous Blast. That sort of thing.

In reality, such open powersets are likely to be more restricted than the ones we have now. Its too dangerous to allow people to literally make Kinetics or even Illusion Control, not specifically because those powersets are overpowered, but rather because any power system that can create those two sets can likely create far more problematic ones.

The way I would do it if I was doing it from scratch would be to use advantages and disadvantages. The current CoH playerbase is primed to oppose power disadvantages so it would be controversial here. But it would be a relatively trivial design detail in a game built from scratch.

Near as I can tell, its always been the same. However, when the proc first came out not many people understood the mechanics of grantpower and assumed that if the proc fired twice and the second time didn't do anything, there must be suppression in the effect. Instead, there was just a non-stackable limit-one passive power involved. You can't get another until the first one expires. That looked like suppression to many testers at first glance.

Now, testers would recognize that what the FF proc does to us, is basically what Bruising does to foes.

In overall design, I actually consider City of Heroes to be a power tree. The tree has fourteen initial branches: you pick an archetype. Then you pick from one of a handful of primaries, and then a handful of secondaries, with a few restrictions on combinations. Overall, you end up with a couple hundred distinct non-overlapping choices. From that point on, the number of fundamental choices drops off dramatically: some players complain that all Fire/Fire blasters are similar at high levels when they mature, and there is some truth to that claim. But CoH still ends up with a couple hundred different legitimate choices for gameplay. All of those "swimlanes" represent opportunities for replay.

When you let people pick whatever they want, whenever they want, with very little in the way of prerequisites, that's not a tree. That's really a single gigantic power pool you can take anything out of, more or less. And essentially, when everyone is picking from one power pool, you basically have one archetype. A true tree would have legitimate choice-altering branches. That other game lacks those, so it lacks distinction in choices, so the number of real choices is actually *lower* and not higher than ours. That was a fundamentally bad mistake in my opinion.

The problem isn't power trees, but whether the branches in the tree are meaningful. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. The tree that goes Scrapper -> Claws -> Invuln is a strong if somewhat shallow tree. The one that goes Widow -> Fortunata is a shallower but more extended (in time) tree. And the most important aspect of choosing a powerset is that it locks you out of all other powers in all other powersets of the same type. This "limitation" is fundamental to why the choice is actually meaningful. Its not a weakness of the design: its a critical strength.

Our trees are disguised, but they're there. And they work very well, and they are something many players have not given proper credit to since the beginning of the game. But I knew what they were doing for this game, which is why I was so interested to see what Cryptic would do when they decided to eliminate that axiom from their design. I guessed they would not realize how much power that accidental choice granted to City of Heroes, and how important it was to replicate that power in any new system in some way shape or form. I believe that guess was unambiguously vindicated.

At one time I believe gravity powers had less attack typing. Some may have been untyped or only positionally typed. So that's somewhat of a legacy I think.

Its not a completely dead legacy either. Have you ever taken a look at Singularity? Its actually been like that since forever. Good luck dodging him.

I'm not sure how hard they tried the second time really. I wasn't in the beta for this game, but I pretty much saw the entire second round from the very beginning. From the very beginning, it was apparent to me that the technical engineering required to create one was outside their specific development capabilities. They actually did things during the process that were insane by City of Heroes *launch* standards, which was a gigantic leap backwards.

At one point, and I'm not making this up, the powers system presented you with this option: of the over one dozen powers you could take, you could take the functional equivalent of perma-elude, perma-unstoppable, and perma-instant healing each for a single power choice. And you could be a ranged blaster while doing so.

The reason to *not* take those three powers would be...? You want ten attacks instead of nine? They eventually fixed this by forcing you to take only one passive defense power (or at least only have one active at a time). I think people who were not in the beta would be *stunned* to know just how late in the game's development that decision occurred.


Edit: also, they went from a game that launched with five classes to a game that launched with one: Ranged Scrappers. Everything is a ranged scrapper. Everything can take range: taking melee is an optional choice with virtually no benefit (although they've tried to address that over time). Everything has scrapper-level defenses unless they specifically go out of their way to not use them, because the alternatives to taking passive defenses are largely non-credible options. Stances are an interesting idea, but fundamentally speaking they didn't offer players choices, because there are no choices. Nothing you do can really offer you a different set of choices than anyone else, so everyone is almost completely identical in terms of fundamental choices. And that means there is essentially one class.

That's not automatically true of a "classless" system. Classless systems can have choices governed by prior choices, so that for example even in City of Heroes there is in one sense just one kind of Widow, but once you pick one side your choices become different from players that take the other side. So there really are two that are mutually exclusive. Everyone (that rolls widows) has the option to go either way, but there are two distinct choices with two very distinct playstyle options.

In that other game, almost nothing you do has much of a noticable impact on downstream choices. Taking an offensive passive does not change my offensive options relative to taking a defensive one. In CoH, choosing to take defensive powers essentially requires taking a melee archetype: you're forgoing playing a ranged attacker for the most part. That's a distinct choice. By giving almost unlimited choice in what powers you can take, they made almost all choices meaningless to gameplay and therefore indistinct. So really, there's just one choice and everyone is forced into it, unless you want to self-nerf yourself for fun.

People keep harping on this, but the truth is most like that far from being canned for "telling the truth" he got into hot water for telling a half-truth that caused unnecessary controversy, which is the exact opposite of what a community manager is supposed to do.

From the very beginning the devs were extremely open and transparent in saying that the purpose to the PvP changes were not specifically to make improvements designed to make people who were already PvPing like it more, but to attract more people to PvP. The fact that they did not specifically succeed at that goal does not detract from the fact that the stated purpose to the changes was, if you wanted to put it tactlessly, "not for the PvPers." It was not to cater to their specific requests that would tune PvP to their whims. It was to attract new players, and to the extent that the PvP community was solicited for feedback, it was within the context of asking them what, in their opinion, would make PvP more attractive to newer players that didn't PvP.

You can argue that the changes they made did not work, and even that they were doomed to fail: I argued against many of them from the very beginning and long past that point; some I thought were literally broken at birth. But as to this belief that Lighthouse leaked some big gotcha, people need to get over it. It was only a big secret if people were just not paying any attention at all.

I'm unaware of an MMO that's done it right. I'd be interested in studying one that has, or at least that people think has.