AussieJohn

[ QUOTE ]
Great, grand, let them be "teh uberz" then. But give us a way to tell who is "teh uberz" so we can steer far and claer from them.

The little baseball scenerio above should be more like.

MLB Player/Hamidon user- Hey kid wanna play?
T-ball player/non hamidon user- Um... Your alot better than I am
MLB PLayer- Nonsense, you can beat me if you use good tactics! *throws a pitch over the plate at 103mph*
T-ball player- *tries to bunt and thus his wrists are shattered*
MLB Player- HAHAHA! NOOB!

[/ QUOTE ]

If it were as simple as that I would be happy, but they have created a mechanism for PvP that allows loot and not toon abilities or skill of play to be the deciding factor. Anyone who keeps on yanking on the Hamidon slot machine over and over will become increasingly uber for PvP. (thumps head on table)

The mindset of the people prepared to do that boring and mundane task over and over to become leet in PvP are the very ones who will poison the PvP experience for the rank and file and marginalise PvP to an ‘also ran’ compared with player numbers in the PvE world. It seems like many of the words written in the CoV forums fell on deaf ears. All the cries to keep a playing filed as tight and even as possible and not let players string out too far in power came to naught.

It seems to me that PvP has been delivered into the hands of core power gamers more interested in PvP victory then PvP interaction, because a mechanism has been given to them that allows this to occur.

Kid "Hey, want to come play baseball with us?"
New Kid "Sure, can I bring my bat, its twice the size of yours".
Kid "No, sorry, we will have to cut your bat in half."
New Kid "OK, I will go play with someone else then."

Nobody loses, nobody wins, nobody plays. Well, they probably do play, except most of the time with half a team on two differant fields...

...and thats only in player organised and managed matches... what of a zone battle with the rules set by CoH alone? A Hamham zone on and a Hamham zone off?

"Hammies are killers in the Arena" speaketh the powers that be. I can appreciate that enthusiasm IF it were PvE, but in PvP it's two sided, one to be the killer and one to be the killed.

[ QUOTE ]
Just to clarify, this means that the official stance is that from levels 45-50, COH changes from being a loot-free game, to being a loot-based game. I'm not sure why the devs want this, but it's their game. Shame, some of us liked COH because it wasn't like other mmos.

[/ QUOTE ]

That’s it in spades, essentially after all things are said and done the developers feel that a good way to keep people paying for CoH after they tap out the content is to keep on upping the bar for relative toon power. Not a bad thing in a PvE world, but in PvP it tends to burn the possibility of a level playing field to ashes. Once again the logic of getting people to keep paying money in a PvE world thrusts itself into the heart of PvP play, empowering the dedicated individual at the expense of the community.

Lord Recluse, is it possible to clarify your thinking on how important you think levels should be in CoV, because you have obviously stirred up a hornet’s nest. You say a solo LV10 taking on a LV40 should be suicide, and all things being equal I agree with you.

However at what point do you envisage sheer numbers outweighing level difference? To my mind I would like to see between 4 to 8 level 10s being able to take down a level 40.

I don’t want to compare cross classes here, as the ability to take down an opponent (blaster, scrapper, tanker), is not the same as the ability to protect yourself from being taken down (defender, controller).

Roughly how many LV10 scrappers do you think should balance against a LV40 scrapper? 4…8…16... or 'aint gonna happen'

PvP could be implemented and pass in-house testing easily enough with either 4 Vs 1, 8 Vs 1, 16 vs 1, (or 5000 vs 1 if you had a big enough servers) but that doesn’t tell us what your thinking is on how important you feel level differences should be.

"This is wrong. Encounters with other players of lower level does not need to be a challenge, exactly as encounters with other mobs of low levels is not a challenge. It works fine in PvE, I don't understand why it would be necessary in PvP. "

I can experiance PvE content alone at any level, but I need people to experiance PvP with. It is a fact that the higher you go in levels the fewer people you are able to find to team with. If I, as a level X hero, can find no suitable villains to PvP with then I am hanging in the wind. As it is I find that getting used to being alone starts to happen around LV28-30. Whats my chance of meeting up with someone on the opposing side in a level range I can rumble with? There is no point being in a PvP game where the levels of power are so stretched that you have few if any opponant worthy of you.

Consensual PvP… the PvP you have to have to keep people happy because RPG game designers can’t break the mould of avatar levels and death punishment.

Where is the genius who came up with the concept of the side-kick mechanism? The concept that effectively transmutes a level based game into a skill based one for the sidekick? He must understand what is being argued for here and why.

Its fine to say a LV40 deserves his ‘due’ for working to level 40, but what of 2 level 40’s who have their butts handed to them by another level 40 and his sidekicked level 10, are they going to feel cheated that someone who has not played nearly as long as they have is responsible for their demise?

What will make them feel the most hard done by, that they lost the battle or that they are now burdened with an ungodly amount of debt?

People need to realise that implementing a PvP system based on levels is bad mojo of the highest magnitude, the best PvP systems are skills based. D&D blew chunks for PvP, which is why in-party conflict between disparate level characters was a DMs dreaded nightmare. We have a fantastic skills system now that gives extra powers and enhancement to them as an avatar rises in levels yet somehow the developers still cant get over levels being intrinsically important in and off themselves. Please slap me and tell me this is 2004.

[ QUOTE ]
The problem with scaling damage up or down based on target level is that you're basically denying the higher level player the just reward he's earned for leveling his character. If a level 10 shooting at a level 40 does 40th level damage, what's the point? They should not be on a equal footing. The 40th level player has presumably worked hard to earn his extra hp and his larger damage, so it is unfair to strip that from him. Scaling up the level 10's damage to the level 40's equivalent does just that.

PvP needs to be fun and something that doesn't get abusive. However, that doesn't mean a 1 on 1 fight has to be fair. If I decide to pick fistfight with a grizzly bear, well, I expect to lose. You can even give me a knife and I'll still expect to lose. That's just common sense. A level 10 should know that picking a fight with a level 40 is suicide. It should be common sense. At the same time the system needs checks and balances so the level 40 isn't deliberately hunting level 10's just so he can gank them.

There ARE things that can be done -- both to reduce ganking (I'm not promising it will ever completely go away) and allow a broader level range in PvP combat. Lower levels should have a chance to attack and defend themselves, even if it is hard. As we implement them we're going to test them internally and the ideas that survive that test will then move on to various stages of beta testing.

So at this point I won't say just what our plans are (because I like to test things first), but I just figured I'd shake the web here.

Lord Recluse

[/ QUOTE ]

Bangs head on table in frustration…

Look, your customers are paying money now, month after month, in PvE because levels of detail are revealed to them as they play the game. They are revealed because they HAVE to level their avatar or they WILL die fighting that grizzly bear. This is the mechanism that keeps people paying money to play CoH. At some level this is recognised by the developers because levelling gets exponentially harder the more you advance your avatar. If it were a linear progression people would race through all the game content and then close their accounts. While avatar levels are NECESSARY to maximise profitability in a PvE world, it is NOT for PvP, as witnessed by World War II Online.

I would put it to you that were WWII online to implement a system that rewarded longer standing players by levelling their avatar through Private-Major-General with commensurate rewards they would effectively break their own game. They would end up with exactly what kills so many other fantasy RPG games, too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.

Do not make the mistake of bringing PvE thinking into a PvP world or you will repeat the mistakes of the past. You need mechanisms to make PvP fun across the board, not simply fun because you can one day grow to become the grizzly bear if you keep paying money to level your avatar.

The more you develop a PvP system that rewards levelling an avatar the more you will kill the desire for new blood to enter the PvP world. How many RPG PvP games have you seen die on the vine because only a ‘core’ high level PvP crowd stays to hang around? It gets stale, fast. You don’t need to reward the level 40, you need to reward the level 10, and not by simply making it easier for him to get to level 10 then it is from level 30 to 40.

Whatever your current thinking is on how broad a level range should be able to engage in reasonably equal PvP I suggest you had better double or triple it, because a good PvP environment is 10 times more important than personal rewards achieved within it, especially where those rewards may well kill the environment itself.