Arcanaville

Not in CoH. No Scrapper really gets a full attack chain of ranged attacks, so they always *must* close into melee to bring anything close to their full offense to bear. No Blaster ever really gains scrapper defenses, inventions notwithstanding. In CO, there's no choice or compromise necessary between these two: nothing really prevents you from having the best ranged offense and the best defenses. And because the advantages to melee are minimal compared to the fact that melee only works in melee, ranged works in melee and at range, the choice is a loaded one.

Imagine if at any time Blasters in CoH could take an entire scrapper secondary with one power choice if they wanted to. The phrase "if they wanted to" is practically ludicrous in this context. But that's the choice CO presents. Only conceptual die-hards would forgo that choice in CoH, and the same is true in CO.

Actually, the way I look at it, in CO everyone starts off as a ranged scrapper. And then CO says "who wants to have a permanent range debuff?" And everyone that steps forward becomes a melee character. It wasn't intended to be, but it ultimately is a silly choice presented to the players.

I hope you mean "undo."

I don't know about apples and oranges: there are people that complain they get kicked from teams for not being IOed out now. Others have the exact opposite anecdotal experience. Those two perspectives appear totally irreconcilable. I suspect an essentially identical situation will occur with regard to end game content. Who's right and who's wrong will very likely come down to which of the two a particular player's experience matches.

It depends on your definition of "progress." Its virtually assured that there won't be any levels past 50, so in terms of combat and security levels, you're done. However, even now there are opportunities to improve the character, for example via inventions. Its character development that is orthogonal to traditional "progress" but it still exists for players that wish to do it.

The end game content will probably extend that option by providing specific challenges designed to challenge those that want to continue to build their character's overall strength. However, those characters are very likely to lose much of that capability under exemplar, which means the only place to show off that extra power might be in the end game content itself. They are not going to want to have end game-boosted level 50s bulldozing Monster Island solo.

I think there's lots of room for compromise here that doesn't create unlimited treadmills yet still allows for significant strength and diversification options for level 50s for players that wish to pursue them. However, in the absolute sense, people who actually *need* progress to halt dead at level 50 will probably have issues with the new end game system, just like there are people who believe the invention system "forces" them onto the treadmill of accumulating purples.

Why? Rushing to 50 just to do the end game content is no different than rushing to 25 to do the Croatoa arcs.

I once said that rushing to 50 was like rushing to the end of your vacation. Knowing your friends were going to throw a party for you when you got back, does that add incentive to rush to the end of your vacation?

The target audience for this game are the people who enjoy playing the game. The people who do not enjoy playing the game but have a pathological need to create maximal barbie dolls in it as fast as humanly possible are not the target audience for this game, although we're more than happy to take their subscription dollars until they figure that out.

I don't tell people there's no point in rushing to 50 because there's nothing to do at 50. I tell people there's no point in rushing to 50 because level 50 isn't going anywhere and you should only be subscribing to the game if you actually enjoy playing it. If you actually enjoy playing it, its pointless to skip one part of the game to play a different part of the same game.

No disrespect to the devs, but there's no way they can make enough end game content to keep hard core players busy for very long. If you rush to 50 just to play the end game, you'll eventually run out of end game. And I'm already thinking about what I'm going to say to the first person who rushes to 50 to play the end game and then complains about not having enough end game. I hope you enjoy it when it happens: I'm putting a lot of thought into it.

Virtually all MMOs are based on that illusion. You get more powerful, but you're confronted by even more powerful opponents. Keep in mind the most powerful level 49 probably levels slower than the average level 14.


All the core content, yes. But the notion that the devs are working on an endgame system that doesn't involve character power progression is something I believe has essentially zero probability of happening.

Plus, players always seem to assume that when the devs say that X is not "needed" that they have to mean "not needed to accomplish to your individual liking." If it takes twelve minutes for someone with IOs to do, and twelve hours for someone with SOs to do, its still doable. It could still be working as intended. People forget that while the devs have said the invention system is not necessary they have also said it provides an opportunity for tangible, material improvements in performance over what you could get without it by design. That additional level of performance is considered optional, because the game isn't balanced around requiring it overall. But "balanced" in this context doesn't mean the extra capability in the invention system is redundant. Invention system participants almost certainly level faster on average, have higher combat capability on average, and can accomplish more for a given skill level of the player on average. That's intentional.

Even if you aren't mathematically exempted from being able to accomplish the end game content without the end game progression options, it'll almost certainly be orders of magnitude easier. Keep in mind it was theoretically possible to complete the original +5 LRSF without inventions, temp powers, or inspirations. That doesn't mean any but a handful of players and builds could actually do so. Does that mean it was "balanced" around temp powers and inspirations (it couldn't have been balanced around inventions for obvious reasons)? No: it was designed to be extremely difficult to complete, and failure simply demonstrated its difficulty.

It was downscaled not because it was too difficult alone, but because it was encouraging magic combinations of builds that made it far easier to accomplish than most combinations of builds.

Endgame content could and almost certainly *will* be balanced around players possessing a certain level of offense, a certain level of protection, a certain level of utility, or rather some combination of all of those, and its mathematically impossible that such capabilities won't be far easier to achieve with a team of IOed players than SOed players, and virtually certainly easier to achieve for endgame-achievement players than generic IOed players.

The highlighted word should probably be "defeat" not "death."

That's actually not true. While no current end game content *specifically* requires things like purple IOs, its never been true that level 50 content was content literally *all* level 50s could accomplish successfully. When the LRSF came out, the devs explicitly stated that while it wasn't intentionally designed to require any specific magic combination of capabilities, it was designed to require *high* levels of capabilities in general. Just because a random group of uncoordinated players couldn't finish it, even if they could *prove* it was mathematically impossible to complete in theory that didn't mean there was a problem with the strike force. It might have simply meant that the team in question was not sufficiently capable to overcome that particular challenge.

It is fairer to say that in City of Heroes, "challenging content" which includes level 50ish end game content has always been designed to not require any specific thing, but often requires some general level of power and ability to overcome. This basic premise of design was even considered to be true for things like Maria's AV-ladened arc. Those missions didn't require a tank, or require a healer, or require a debuffer, but it might have been either difficult or impossible for a team to complete if they literally lacked *all* of those types of tools. And that was considered working as intended.

The fact that some players have figured out how to do these things with increasingly less capability (but more skill) doesn't change that basic equation.



I'd be careful about overgeneralizing the "level 60" statement, especially if it was a colloquialism written by someone that didn't understand the full ramifications of what a hypothetical level 60 would actually be. But extrapolating from the current game system rules, a level 60 would, relative to a level 50, have about four more powers, 18 more slots, 8% more health, and 9% more base damage.


Now here you're implying something more than just the capability intrinsic in leveling. Level 40s are a little weaker than Level 50s, but the primary source of Level 40s being weaker than Level 50s against level 50 content is the purple patch. At -10, they are functioning at only 3% of their intrinsic strength. Or, another way of putting that is that Level 50s are more than 33 *times* stronger than Level 40s at taking on intrinsic Level 50 content.

I think its within the bounds of reasonable speculation to think that end game progression opportunities might make us 10% stronger in raw numbers and perhaps much stronger than that in certain very specific areas (for example, the Invention system practically oozes recharge buffs). But I doubt Castle is working on an endgame system in which we will eventually become 33 times better than base level 50s.


I believe that the best way to create end game character progress opportunities is to leverage the existing invention system and allow players to create better ways of using it. For example, the universal slots themselves could allow for all new types of universal inventions that allow for character progression capabilities that make more sense for level 50s than other characters. For example, level 50s don't level any more. So any balance constraint targeted primarily on leveling could be significantly relaxed for level 50s. I'm thinking here specifically about travel and endurance. Perhaps we'll have ways to buff our max travel caps (flight?). Perhaps we'll get access to powers with huge endurance costs, but with the ability to buff our endurance recovery to make them credible to use.

Personally, I'm thinking the best opportunities for end game challenges are to put a lot of the game effects into play that are "too annoying" to use prolifically at lower levels, and provide end game progression tools to defend against them or overcome them. Perhaps we'll see significant mez protection for squishies, but more mez in general. Perhaps we'll see more friendly fire problems with rescue missions, but also more powers to manipulate and protect friendly NPCs.


Disclaimer: I'm totally spitballing. I have no information about the endgame content being worked on and haven't asked the dev team about it at all. And honestly, the reason why I haven't is that if I do, I'm immediately prevented from publicly speculating on it or really offering public suggestions about it. Sometimes, its better not to know.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can PM the Posi-Team.


(Maybe that's what BaB is up to know: maybe he sports a mohawk and everyone in the office calls him "BA" and comments on his bad attitude and the fact his black van keeps taking up multiple stalls in the Paragon Studios parking lot while Posi keeps saying "I love it when an issue comes together." And maybe there's a reason why I've had limited success in structured office environments.)

That's just my interpretation of Rob Leifeld drawing BackAlleyBrawler with ascii art. The B's are his fists. The a is his head on a bad hair day.

Don't worry: no amount of therapy is going to do that.

Yes, she's gone from being in charge of running the office to being in charge ... of ... running ... the office. Hmm. Funny how that turned out.

Block is a power which, as mentioned above, provides additional damage resistance when used. Its exclusive of attacks (you can't attack and block at the same time) and it generally returns endurance to you every time you're hit. It can also be given extra effects that aren't important here.

Because CO doesn't use recharge to balance most attack powers, the limiting factor on offense is essentially cast time: you can only generate so much damage per second by attacking. Block allows you to convert cast time into defense rather than offense (of course, there are some ways around that that I'm not sure the devs fully considered). This creates a "softer" border between what a player can and cannot defeat. Normally, MMO combat is essentially a race between your offense cutting through critter defense and critter offense cutting through your defense. Basically: burn through their green bar before they burn through yours. Fundamentally, this race is governed by the product of your offense and defense vs their product of offense and defense (well, technically the ratio of your offense to their defense vs their offense to your defense, but its ultimately the same thing) which is fairly constant. In CoH, the dominant way to alter this equation is with inspirations. In CO, Block can act as another means of shifting this equation, almost as if everyone in CoH had the ability to shift into (kheldian) Dwarf form.

Block also provides an opportunity for rewarding skill in combat, by allowing players to choose the most optimal moments to use Block, such as immediately prior to attackers using their strongest attacks. CO has a mechanism for signaling this, by placing indicators over the attacker's head (most of the time) that the attacker is readying a high damage or otherwise dangerous attack.


I'm honestly not 100% sure. I'm thinking that something that ties into the defensive and offensive passives would have been a good idea (and provided a potential way to make the offensive passives meaningful). But I'm also thinking that if you want to go 90% of the way and say "we want people to be able to generate as much endurance as they want to" you might want to consider going all the way and eliminating endurance as a balancing metric altogether. I mean, if you think the problem with CoH is that people are waiting around for powers to recharge too often, why not simply balance the game on the assumption that people will be using powers all of the time, right out of the gate. Block suggests that there are other ways to balance offense, such as by making (cast) time the limited resource, and making players choose how to spend it.



Not by itself: that would cause problems with the endurance management system, and run contrary to the "higher activity" design principle of the game. Increase recharge of the endurance builders, and you have a problem with endurance management. Leave them alone and just increase the recharge of everything else, and you could create a situation where players are forced to "plink" at targets more than they want to, making the game boring.

These game design decisions are intertwined in ways difficult to extricate.


Initially there were powers similar to the main defensive passives today: regeneration, invuln, reflexes, etc. The problem fundamentally is that each is worth more if you already have one of the others. Its like that last 5% defense that makes you soft-capped.** So once you take one, the system encourages you to take more by effectively discounting them relative to their value.

CO's defensive powers are not analogous to things like Focused Fighting or Temporary Invulnerability. They are analogous to whole sets like Super Reflexes or Regeneration. So taking a single power is like taking everything in a set. Taking two defensive powers - when that was an option - was like taking toggle instant healing on top of perma unstoppable.

I don't know why they did that, except as an "inspired by Champions" thing. But I wouldn't have. In effect, although CO doesn't have "points" they do have a cost to powers: they cost power choices. Since every power costs one power choice (just like here in CoX) in effect every power costs the same thing. So in CO, the entire Regeneration "set" is worth the same amount as Power Bolt. I think they intended to add diversity and developmental options with ranks and other power options (in CO you don't "slot" powers with enhancements, you buy "advantages" which act to improve the power in various ways, including increasing its strength by increasing its "rank"), but something seems to have radically capitated the number of available ranks and advantages for powers to a minimal level, whether it was time available or the complexity of the task of inventing them or both. Many powers don't even have any advantages at all, and only have ranks (generally three: the base rank, and two higher ranks).


Identical in value, or close enough that players stop caring.


I'll quote from the poster above:


Although its being offered to demonstrate build diversity, its also demonstrating the homogenization I've been concerned with since beta: characters tend to be clustered more or less around the "Ranged Scrapper with some Tools" archetype.

If I understand what you mean by "other way around" I'll acknowledge that the issue of min/maxing and other combat optimization has been long-discussed for Champions and the HERO system (for example, the discussion surrounding killing attacks, which I've forgotten most of by now), but there is a significant subset of players that believe that in spite of that, the system is amazingly well balanced for a points-based system. That position was the dominant one on the early CO boards, and often brought up as a good reason for basing CO on a variant of or "inspired by" the HERO system (even though it wasn't going to be based on HERO itself). I was in the severe minority in suggesting that perhaps the points system encapsulated in the Champions PnP game was *not* a good starting point for a computer MMO, precisely because the imbalances in it would not be moderated by a human GM.

Paragon Studios interacting with the playerbase.

Coincidentally, that is how I made Bruce run away. I think he left skid marks.

I made Bruce run away.

If I've deciphered the shuffle correctly, War Witch now has his former title of Lead Designer. Which means among other things I believe she's now both Castle and BaB's ultimate boss, and the new high value target for suck-up activity and suggestion PMs. May God have mercy on her soul.

When this doesn't interfere with the game you're trying to make, I can accept this. But this suggests that all repetitive play games deserve to be botted, and by extension players that are looking for games that involve repetitive play don't deserve them.

Suppose a lot of people actually *want* to play a game like, say, Farmville. Are you saying that if it gets botted, the game itself is at fault, and by extension the people who want to play the game "normally" don't deserve to have a game created that satisfies that desire?


Removing "repetitive activity" from your game is the easy way out. But "repetitive activity" has a fluid definition based at least in part on the sophistication of available bot technology. Is the act of defeating enemies a repetitive activity in CoH? How about running missions? How about leveling? The game "makes you" level 49 times. What if I only want to level three. Do I get to declare that leveling is an unnecessary repetitive activity and automate it, and then blame the game for making it so?

There comes a point where the player does not get to say "its the developers fault that I am forced into bad behavior." You're supposed to say "this game is not for me" and walk away. Banning is what the game does when the players don't arrive at that realization on their own.

If the devs don't promise us a specific date, there's no chance we'll be able to blame them for breaking that date.

Ironically, this suggests to some players that they shouldn't promise a specific date, and it suggests to other players that they *should* promise a specific date.

Although they said they were going to be "inspired" by the Champions/HERO system, I don't see too much evidence of that (and I followed the development from before closed beta).

Furthermore, in my opinion a major problem with using the HERO system as a guide to making an MMO system is that it really isn't as balanced as people give it credit for. Its balanced enough for a PnP game which is a totally different criteria. In a PnP game human GMs can "autotune" the game in ways which minimize balance discrepancies. In a computer-based MMO, that's not really possible. In a massively multiplayer game with or without a hypothetical GM it might not be possible at all either.

There is nowhere that Champions/HERO shows its questionable numeric balance than in the defensive powers, where even the rulebooks caution you not to let players get too aggressive with them, but even on offense its a bit vulnerable to min/maxing. One of the reasons it can get away with this is that combat is not the only thing that happens in a Champions game usually. Bring a tunnel-visioned min/maxed cannon into a Champions session, and a smart GM will make sure to throw left-field challenges at you that make it impossible to simply steamroll through their campaign. That won't happen in an MMO with a computer at the wheel.

In my opinion the HERO system gives a good set of tools to players and GMs alike to create their collective vision of a good comic book environment, but it does not actually have sufficiently well defined guardrails to allow a computer to replace the GM. Or to put it another way, the rulebook defines the performance of powers, but its ultimately the GM that determines the effectiveness of powers, and that's something MMORPGs currently don't do, and might never be able to do.**


Separately, I'm not sure myself that a well balanced points system alone would fix the "melee problem." I used to think so, but my experience with Champions Online suggests its not just about numerical balance. I think even if melee characters were somehow offensively "better" than ranged ones to compensate for lack of range, it still might not be enough. As I mentioned above, I think there's a separate component to this where melee characters are, separate from any numerical issues, giving up a gameplay option: using range. I now believe that unless you offer them another one in exchange - one not open to other non-melee characters - there is a separate qualitative imbalance that will exist and turn players off to that option.



** I mention that massively multiplayer games have an issue unto themselves. How many times in a PnP gaming session have we heard the words "for this session..." while the GM lays down the house rules, or attempts to reconcile some otherwise potentially game-breaking discrepancies between the players in the session. Its unclear to me this sort of thing can happen when the number of simultaneous players is in the thousands rather than a handful. And that takes a tool away from MMOs relative to PnP games that has nothing to do with the limitations of computers. In PnP gaming sessions, a group of players can explore elements of the game that work for them, but might not work as well for everyone else that plays that game, because those other people aren't there. In an MMO, the world has to work more or less the same for everyone, everywhere, all of the time. At least, I think it does.

That, and the fact that it was a separate game, with separate content, and required a separate purchase, and shared no overlap with CoH. Initially, CoV was an extension of CoH in about the same sense that Star Trek Online is an expansion of Champions Online.

The only possibility left for me to consider is that NCI marketing is preserving resources for a concentrated marketing push coordinated for when Going Rogue releases. MMO subscriptions have a momentum component to them: if you market and pick up users in small bunches and those small bunches of players join at a time when the core playerbase is itself logging in for fewer player-hours, they may get the impression the game is deserted. If you time your marketing push for when GR releases, the new players will subscribe at a time when the core playerbase itself is also at their peak player-hours of activity, which gives the impression the playerbase is very active and increases subscriber retention. They may even have numbers that suggest new subscriber retention was higher at times such as when CoV was released or when other events occured which simultaneously brought the core playerbase back and encouraged new players to join.

However, if I don't see that sort of marketing strategy synchronized with GR, then I got nothing except that they are asleep at the wheel.

Actually, BaB was sent to NCSoft's Playerbase Interaction Training Academy for refresher courses in dealing with City of Heroes forums and player private messages.

In fact, I got this message from BaB just yesterday: I think he was in the middle of a training session.