Arcanaville

Saying "non-badge rewards" is a very odd exception. It implies that these are trivial rewards, but some have accolades that are not trivial. Why is it justified to claim that Task Force Commander is not an exception to the "no significant reward is team-gated" or Portal Jockey or Geas? If the devs removed the badges associated with the accolades and just awarded the accolades, would it change anything?

The other thing is that lots of rewards have been gated in the past to teamed content as a practical matter, and the list keeps changing. While the devs have made some rewards that were gated no longer gated by teamed content, they have also added rewards that were team gated long after release. So its not true that a player should expect that no reward will ever be added that is not team-gated: they've done so many times in the past. The only thing that history shows is that *eventually* most but not all of them gain solo paths to them.

Even now, there is no way for solo players to earn Hamidon enhancements. Sure, you can buy them, but technically you can only buy what a teamed player elects to sell. If a teamed player doesn't voluntarily sell, there is no amount of effort a solo player can expend to earn one. This would be a mere technicality if all HOs always had lots of sellers, but that's not true. You cannot simply buy however many you want at any price. There have been times when I've seen literally a couple of them for sale for certain ones, meaning even with unlimited effort A solo player could buy one, but if more than a couple of solo players wanted one no level of effort would allow them all to get just one. To say that isn't technically team gating is saying people would be satisfied if the devs put one Notice of the Well for sale to the highest bidder a week. Technically speaking, any one solo player could, if they were the high bidder, acquire it. So technically speaking it doesn't lock out solo players. But as a practical matter, solo players would still be excluded. And as long as you think this scenario excludes solo players, HOs also have no solo path to them, which means its been long established that some rewards have always team-gated in this game.

Either one believes there are some team-gated rewards in this game, and there's no precedent for claiming that is out of the ordinary, or one believes the kinds of restrictions that exist for the most solo-unfriendly rewards would be acceptable to place on Incarnate rewards. You cannot simultaneously claim the game has never gated rewards to teaming, then claim the gates on some of those rewards are unacceptable. That's called "cheating."

For the record, personally I believe HOs are team-gated rewards, and do not qualify as having a solo path. I believe if a similar path was put in for NotWs, that would also not be a valid solo path. If someone wants to claim that a solo path is fine even if its at the mercy of the teamed players selling discretion, have a ball with that. To me that is illogical outside of incredibly liquid exchanges. I have a feeling NotWs are unlikely to be a frictionless exchange item. I doubt strongly you would be able to buy them below the inf cap, simply because even players that can earn many of them would first deploy them to alts less able to earn them, then exchange them with friends unable to earn them, and then *finally* try to sell them. And at the moment, at one per week maximum per alt, and needing four to craft one very rare Alpha, it would probably be easier to buy a Gladiator proc for months.

I just wanted to say that separate from whether I agree or disagree with the rest of your post, and whether this was intentional or not, I congratulate you for using "penultimate" correctly in a sentence, which doesn't seem to happen often. Level shift is, at the moment, the penultimate level of character development. The very rare Alpha is the ultimate one.


Last month wasn't too problematic. I don't think February poses a significant challenge either.

Also, the term "established community of soloists" besides being almost an oxymoron presumes there is a monolithic one. There is not. The only community with a significant potential problematic future are the exclusive completist soloers which are probably a smaller collective group than Mids-based billionaire min/maxers and Scrapper challenge veterans. They are no less important a segment of the player population, but no more important of one either.

I consider three serious data points to have reasonable claim to being the "origin of the genre." Everquest and Ultima Online can lay claim to being at the origin of the modern MMORPG. Games like Air Warrior and Neverwinter Nights can lay claim to the origins of the Graphical MMO. MUDs can lay claim to the origin of the MMORPG itself. EQ invented modern MMO teaming, and the modern MMO's foundations include teaming within its design explicitly. Older games like AW have faction-based cooperative play and some teaming. MUDs as a genre were originally invented to add social interaction and cooperative (or PvP) play to single-player adventure games. There's a straight-line ancestry for the modern MMO to have its fundamental origins in the evolution of teamed play. The notion of the modern MMO team is a product of the modern MMO itself, but that's no different an evolutionary thing than the introduction of graphics to MMOs.

The only objective question is whether MMOs have outgrown that paradigm. Its revisionist history to claim the paradigm never existed. Years ago, on these very forums, I claimed that CoH owed a significant amount of its success to catering to two classes of players: "casual" players as distinct from the genuine hard core ones, and "solo-preferred" players that teamed infrequently or only with IRL friends. I also claimed at the time that WoW shared these properties, less than a year after WoW's launch. Both of these were considered extremely controversial (but not necessarily unique) opinions at the time. The two reasons were: one: it wasn't clear then that CoH even *was* friendly to soloers and casual players, and two: it wasn't obvious it was a good idea to be so even if it was.

It is amazing to me how something almost no one would publicly admit to believing just six years ago is now something a lot of people are claiming has been obvious from the start. Amusing, but also amazing.

If anyone's been trying to get you to stop voicing your opinion, they've obviously been complete failures at it.

The problem is that the suggestions about soloability turned into accusations about the devs' motives and biases, completely unfounded assertions about the history of the game, demonstrably disprovable claims about the design of the game, uninformed extrapolations about the actual nature of the end game system, and a whole lot of people claiming to be the representatives for multiple overlapping groups of people that I'm sure forgot to hold an election for them.

All those things have nothing to do with soloability in the game, and are all highly impeachable activities.

As far as I know, Ghost Widow has a PBAoE Dark Regen-like heal. Standing directly next to her, even from behind, is not recommended unless you are soft-capped or happen to be someone's phantom army.

The recharge on it is something like 45 seconds so if you're observant and careful, you can duck in and out of range and attack when its recharging. However, if you screw that up and the team leader kicks you, don't blame me. I've done it, but only when I thought it was necessary (when damage was low and the boost would be helpful) and I could get away with it. I'm also slightly less likely to be blamed for being clueless if I were to accidentally guess wrong, although I've never guessed wrong.

I have to say, having played more PUG STFs in the past week than in my entire lifetime up to this point, I've been most impressed by the fact that for the most part, all it takes is two or three experienced players to figure out how to compensate for a lack of experience in the rest of the team. I was on a PUG STF that did not have an Emp or a tank capable of tanking LR with all the towers up, so I improvised PA dropping with my Ill/Rad and another Ill controller. When I had problems coordinating that, I switched to the much more difficult PA/Decoy alternating tactic I last used maybe in 2008 until we had our timing right, then it was smooth sailing (my PA has a gap on that build at the moment). On another we used two non-emp buffers to keep the tank alive after explaining to them *not* to debuff LR, which was drawing aggro on them and killing them, taking out the tank's support. I guess I've been lucky, but I've seen them go smooth, and I've seen them go bad, but I haven't seen one totally fail yet. People seemed willing to learn and adjust on the fly.

Although, sometimes failure has a silver lining. I had an ITF fail not too long ago when the team basically gave up. One thing I discovered during that particular run is that in a pinch, you can actually range-kill the Nictus in the last mission right out from under his nose without drawing aggro from anything if you limit yourself to single target attacks and stay far enough away. And my En/EN was just slightly under the minimum damage necessary to do that solo. At least, at the time: it might be a little bit different now that I'm fully Alpha-slotted.

In any case, in both the STFs I'm describing above, no team-wide (or tanker) defensive soft cap. Both were non-canonical STF runs that succeeded without directly overpowering the content, and with suboptimal builds and team compositions.

I would tend to agree. The tutorial structure is much more interesting than Outbreak/Breakout, but the early levels are somewhat harder for some archetypes in Praetoria because Praetorians are just a bit more tough. If you're starting with a mastermind, or a melee character (tanker, scrapper, brute, stalker) its probably fine for a beginner. Also controllers and dominators will probably do ok. Blasters, defenders, and corruptors (the "ranged squishies") just starting out might be a little more difficult, particularly if you tend to solo a lot. If you team, then of course practically anything will do well as long as you are on a reasonable team.

Once you've gotten used to the game and aren't just trying to figure out what is going on, then almost any combination of any set of powers for any archetype can solo most of the content at standard difficulty most of the time. PS: in this game there is a difficulty setting you can set by using contacts in the game called fateweavers or field analysts.

Welcome to the game James, and don't hesitate to ask the playerbase questions. A high percentage of the players know most of the details of the game inside and out.

Probably the same dev that didn't think through carefully the logical consequences of putting a decorative door at the back of the natural store in steel canyon.

We did a good job of unequivocally proving even that was too much.

Marketing: "So Positron, is there going to be a solo option for Incarnate progress?"
Positron: "I think so."
Marketing: "What the hell does 'I think so' mean?"
Positron: "We're kicking around some ideas now, but I'm not sure if any of them will be workable. I think two look promising."
Marketing: "They look 'promising?' Yes or no: is there a committed feature frozen option in the dev pipeline?"
Positron: "Well, no."
Marketing: "Then you shut the **** up until there is."

Although technically, this conversation probably happens with production, not marketing. Marketing says:

Marketing: "So, the solo option is happening?"
Positron: "Yep: I just got it approved by production."
Marketing: "Great: shut the **** up until we can draft up a release."

And everyone here is doing their jobs exactly as they are supposed to, and exactly as just about everyone does them everywhere, from McDonalds to Google.

In and of itself, it does not. Heck, I've accused the devs of being short-sighted, insufficiently wary of incremental design, arithmetically challenged, lacking in eloquence, and sometimes inexplicable. But generally respectfully, to the extent that this is possible. I don't generally accuse them of being uncaring, absentee, spiteful, emotionally driven, wishy-washy, or confused. I can prove they sometimes can't add: that's an objective complaint. I can't prove they are confused about what they actually want, and there's no evidence that this is true: to state that suggests that the only way the devs' actions are comprehensible is if they are random, when they simply may have an alternate point of view.

It can be inciteful besides when someone reading actually agrees at least in principle with an action that is being claimed to be nonsensical.

I respec the devs enough to believe the devs have the best interests of the game in mind, and that they have goals that are usually consistent with that. I don't generally question their motives. I respect the devs enough to believe that they are generally attempting to balance the competing interests of the playerbase, and that is an impossible task to optimally satisfy in most cases; when they make compromises I assume that those compromises were with the full knowledge that many would see those compromises as merely contradictory. I don't give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to implementation, if implementation sucks then it sucks.

That would be the boundary between sharp criticism and lack of respect for the devs. The devs know I respect them as professionals, so they don't take it personally when I say I sometimes wonder what percentage of the devs are capable of making change. I don't put words in their mouths, make false claims about what they think, what they've said, what they've implied, what they've signaled, or what they intend. I reserve my harshest criticism for what they do; I'm far more reserved and careful about commenting on what they think, or what they've implied, because unless I have first hand knowledge about it, or are very certain about it, it would be disrespectful to argue against a strawman, especially knowing as I do they are not able to respond in all cases.

"I think its a mistake to not have a solo option for Incarnate progress" is not disrespectful. "The devs lied about the Incarnate system being for 'everyone'" is kinda disrespectful. "The devs are being wishy washy about whether they are ever going to make a solo option" is also about a 6 on the disrespect-o-meter.

Farming them is more like it. Critters and powers aren't balanced that way. cf: old school Family farms.

It may not address all of your concerns, but it may address others. That's why its not a semantic difference: it illustrates how far to one side of this issue you are on. And insisting its a semantic difference also illustrates your lack of awareness of the existence of other positions, not just opposed to you, but even parallel to yours but simply not as extreme.

Theoretically speaking, if you could get +300% global buffs your powers could be slotted to about +100% recharge on top of that, and get a grand total of +400% recharge on that one specific power. If you could do that with multiple powers, you could have the same net effect as having +400% global recharge.

Spectral Wounds is Ranged/Psi. Blind is Psi only**. The Blind can catch you off guard in a number of ways, not the least being a Master and three Illusionist pets have enough hold magnitude to hold right through Practiced Brawler in theory if they get lucky and hit often enough: two volleys would do it. Once held, your defenses suppress and things get ugly from there, even if you aren't detoggled and PB stays up.

A couple other pieces of good news regarding Carnies. MI's Dark Servant's Darkest Night and Chill of the Night are both autohit so it doesn't matter what their types are (and they will interrupt Aid Self if you were counting on that), and while the terrify blast from the spectral terror is ranged, its cloak of fear is actually untyped, and PB offers no protection to terrorize.

Carnies are one of those groups that seem like such pushovers at 0x1, and then start to get really scary for everyone at 0x8. They have something for everyone: end drain, non-positional attacks, heavy psionics, debuffing, mez, and of course phase-shifting bosses. If they had earthquake and vengeance they'd be perfect.


** That's always struck me as being weird. Spectral Wounds is a purely illusiary attack in the mind of the target, and yet ranged defenses work against it. Blind is a painful attack to the eyes that can temporarily paralyze or put targets to sleep, and its considered psionic only even though its not an attack against the mind. That was not one of Geko's better days in the spreadsheets.

Anecdotes can't prove a theory, so they are not very strong statements when used to support an argument. But they can act as a counter-example to a theory, and can be devastating when used to disprove one. For example, if I were to say "adding raid content is a good idea, look at all the other MMOs that have it" that's a weak statement. Just because others have it doesn't mean its a good idea, even if its all of them. However, saying "adding raid content is a bad idea, it always ruins the game for casual players" can be trivially countered by saying "WoW is considered and targeted for casual players, and it has tons of raid content. QED." That's a very strong statement that the theory isn't always true. And if it isn't always true, the burden is on the person stating to demonstrate convincingly that it is *ever* true, given that it can't be simply logically true - if it was logically true, it would be always true.

It is in that sense that anecdotes have to be viewed. They are not simply always weak or always strong. It depends on how they are used. If they are used to try to overgeneralize, they are weak. If they are offered in a context where a single example is all that's needed, they can be very strong.

This is not a semantic difference, because it defines the boundaries of what you think doesn't count as solo content. We've been discussing it primarily within the boundaries of not teaming, and bringing psychology and practicality into it: some people do not want to actually join a team, or cannot organize one, or have scheduling limitations that might require them to drop team at a moments notice (I'm an on-call person: I understand that requirement well). Now you're saying you also include any content where you cannot initiate it and complete it on your own. That's no longer an objection about teaming. That's an objection about every single player having 100% control over content execution in an MMO. I think there's some grey area when it comes to accommodating people for whom teaming itself is problematic. Its something I've put a significant amount of thought into how a compromise might be struck. But that's over the line for me. I would oppose any attempt to implement such a design philosophy.

Why this is a fundamental deal-breaker for me is that this philosophy is mutually exclusive with the concept of dynamic environments, where the players collectively decide what's happening within the game. Of logical necessity, it has to be true within such environments that content is gated to collective player activity - a minor example would be players destroying the pylons in RWZ. To disallow such innovation would be unnecessarily stifling, and to require mandatory alternate paths around such gatekeepers would be both inefficient and trivializing.

They haven't decided to be like everyone else. They've decided to do something you don't like that you think is like everyone else. There's a difference. And the fundamental difference is that other people cannot and will not act with your perspective, but theirs.

You can ask them to be different. You can't ask them to be different as you specifically define different. Furthermore, this game predates WoW, and a lot of the systems that were added much later (like the invention system, for example) go back a long way conceptually and only arrived when resources were available to actually do them. Its entirely possible some form of end game and level 50 power progression system was being kicked around long before many of the games you think CoX is emulating actually shipped. I know for a fact and its obvious to anyone that looks at the systems introduced over time that the NC acquisition created a lot of opportunities to create things that the devs didn't just think up on the spot, but were things they were interested in doing for a long time.

Some things are unavoidably similar in any two MMOs. There are only so many different kinds of mechanics you can use to construct solo and grouped content. But while I'm certain different dev teams see what each other are doing and try to learn from that, each one tries to put those lessons to work with their own unique design perspective.

This notion that our devs are just trying to be like everyone else presupposes that they don't have a mind of their own: that they don't actually want to do what they are doing now because they think its the right thing to do. Its fundamentally their decision, and they should get all the credit and all of the blame for it. But to say they are doing it to be like everyone else is insulting without cause. It would be like me saying you're only complaining because its fashionable.

I'm not using it as an excuse for anything. I'm not talking about the devs. I'm talking about everyone who thinks they can do better. Statistically speaking, only a tiny fraction of them can be right, and every single one of them thinks its them. Virtually all of them are wrong.

What's more, every time a new game is launched, it allows me to judge who was right and who was wrong in retrospect on a wide variety of ideas. It also provides a source of entertainment when I compare what some people say is important to do, and what turns out to be disastrous in practice. CO alone would have been worth a half-dozen Cracked articles if I was allowed to write them.

If the numbers I've been seeing are remotely accurate, you must be talking about some MMO being developed on another planet. Keeping in mind PC and console play essentially two different segregated games (on different server farms) the PC version of the newer and far more appealing to new players MMO appears to currently have significantly less players than we do.

This is not an easy business to succeed in, because there are never any easy decisions. The ones that seem most obvious are the ones that cause the most casualties.

This is true for liquid markets, where trades happen often enough to create at least some semblance of dynamic equilibrium. In thin markets, and a lot of high demand items create essentially very thin individual markets, all bets are off, because adding supply won't just increase the supply side of that market, it will fundamentally change that market. We don't know, for example, just how much demand for certain items never makes it to the markets due to the belief its pointless. Conversely, we don't know what will happen when people who used to make more influence for those items decide to change their activities when it becomes less profitable, creating a negative feedback in supply. Those are minor factors in liquid markets, but not in thin ones.

The only people that annoy me in-game really are people that seem to be completely indecisive about what they want to do *and* attempt to lead teams, and people that have a massively inflated opinion of their capabilities in-game and then demonstrate a huge gap between those claims and their performance. If you're a tanker and you don't have taunt, and you can't grab aggro from halfway across the room, and you tell me you don't have taunt and can't grab aggro from across the room, you'll have no problem from me. I just won't play my blaster half way across the room and expect aggro control. But if you don't just wait at the door chatting and jump in and fight, I won't care if you lack taunt, AoE, mez protection, or pants. You pack break frees and I will look up at the ceiling the whole mission.


As to the "nonsense" quote, I should have perhaps stated more clearly that it was nonsense to believe that devs believe they have to intentionally bribe people to team. Team rewards are not teaming bribes. Some people might be so averse to teaming that they will only do so for the rewards. Those people technically need to be bribed to team. But the devs don't deliberately try to make people who are averse to teaming chase bribes for teaming.

Some people have, in fact, accused the devs of essentially bribing people to not play the game. Not factoring in the fact most players cannot play 24 hours a day and cannot play mroe than one alt per account at a time.

That's tangential to the point I was making, though, which is that most content-related activities are rewarded, so if people have to be bribed to team, they have to be bribed to play as well.

Of course, the whole notion that people have to be bribed to team is nonsense. MMOs don't reward teaming because otherwise people wouldn't team. MMOs like most games award actions. Joining and playing on a team is an action. Choosing not to team is a decision, not an action. Teaming requires the extra activity of finding, joining, and playing on a team. Its rewarded accordingly. That separate from the fact that teaming is desired in MMOs collectivly, even if its not mandatory, and thus a legitimate activity to reward on that basis.

I'm sure someone will come along to say that soloing is an equal activity to teaming, but that completely misses the point. By even soloers definitions, teaming requires additional effort, even if that effort is limited to making one extra decision and taking one extra action on that basis. Teaming is the superset activity: its play where the number of team members is greater than one.

Unless you are on a crappy team, teaming is actually easier in many ways, in terms of content difficulty. That is also completely irrelevant.

The reason why MMOs consider rewarding teaming to be fair is the same reason they reward combat over avoiding combat almost all the time. You get XP for defeating things. You do not get XP for finding ways to not defeat them. Even though this game has tried to be as solo-friendly as is reasonable, it still promotes teaming, just like it promotes combat. People assume rewards are supposed to be balanced around "risk" even if risk is ill-defined or completely undefined. That's one factor. But another factor is rewards are implemented to promote desired activity. That's why you cannot just make up your own challenges and get rewarded for them. You can't decide to solo Lusca with Brawl and then get six million merits if you succeed. The devs have no intention of rewarding that activity, so you don't get any rewards for that activity. Similarly, solo activities have certain rewards. Teamed activities have other rewards, and some are higher than the solo equivalents. Some are a little higher, some dramatically so. That's not bribery. That's just how all reward systems are created.

I am unaware of any dev team anywhere that states or signals the believe that teaming is not a superset activity above soloing, and is thus entitled to higher rewards as a consequence of being superset activity, completely separate from difficulty. But if anyone knows of such a team, I'd like a pointer to it, because that would be an interesting group of people to question on the subjject. "Novel" doesn't begin to describe what that sort of philosophy would have to entail in terms of game design of an MMO. Its probably a much more difficult thing to pull off successfully than "level-less" design.

Defensively, Nin won't be a universally overwhelmingly better set, but it will probably supercede SR in a majority of areas. Outside of psi, Invuln will still have advantages in certain areas, especially when you can soft-cap it. Shield will still be the AoE monster, with Fire having some interesting aspects on single target (due to FE having a base damage increase rather than a damage buff). Willpower will still mature into one of the toughest all around sets. But Nin will probably be almost as easy to soft cap in strong invention builds, plus have a heal, plus have toxic and psionic resistances. SR will have recharge and slow res in quickness and the scaling resistances for all but toxic and psi. Even if you took Hide, Caltrops, and Smoke flash and literally threw them away and left the slots empty, Ninjitsu would be a strong competitor to SR, Willpower, and Invuln. That's eyebrow-raising.

That's not a specific reason to not port it, but its definitely something to think about. Its entirely possible that the reason it was given defensive mitigation and a strong heal *and* exotic resists - something that was unique at the time and is still an anomaly today - was because low health was its actual weakness. In stalkers.

The correct thing to do is to use merits to get expensive things and sell them for the influence necessary to buy the things you want. Under that scenario, inflated prices actually operate in the player's favor, because not all items have inflated prices. In one example, and certainly not the most efficient one, a player could earn 35 alignment merits and use them to acquire one of the capped two billion inf IOs, sell it, and outfit an entire character with a multi-billion inf build. I doubt there are many builds that don't slot excessive purples (or some of the very expensive PvPIOs) that crosses the two billion mark.

In just a couple of days you could acquire several hundred million inf and complete a reasonable IO set build. And this is not explicitly because of the inflated influence numbers, but the more subtle point that some things are worth far more to the players than others, which means no matter what the absolute numbers are, its possible to get one thing with merits, and exchange that thing for many other things of lesser value that are still sufficiently powerful to create meaningfully strong builds. Its the difference in value that drives this, not inflation per se. When we allow players to value X as a hundred times more valuable than Y, we open the door to allow some players to expend a lot of effort to get a lot of Xs, and other players to expend a little effort to get one X and use it to get a whole lot of Ys.

And yet, a ten billion inf build is not a hundred times more powerful than a one hundred million inf build. The pursuit of that ultra-expensive but only moderately more powerful build allows other players much easier access to second tier builds.

Ironically, without the markets at all, you have the situation you mention: having to buy everything with merits. Doing so actually makes it collectively a little harder on everyone, because they lose the ability to trade what they don't want for what they do want: everyone ends up having to expend a little more effort than they might have otherwise. And the players that get squeezed the most are the ones in the middle: the ones that are just outfitting with SOs and common IOs aren't hurt much, and the ultra-rich making multi-billion inf builds will have the resources to work around the problem. The players that want to make moderate builds in the middle would have the most problems doing so with no player-driven economy to allow them to pass unwanted things downward and trade ultra-valuable things upward for leverage in getting what they can afford.