Chase_Arcanum

... no, it means that there's a good-odds chance that one (or more) of HIS alts is a lesbian catgirl.

YOU were gonna dress up as ghost widow and do nothing but wave your fingers at the camera saying, "Oogedy boogedy boo?"

It was somewhat successful, some of us just took the potential double entendre and ran with it.

Ya gotta forgive Dark_Respite's literal interpretation. She probably came into this thread wondering precisely how such a development would affect her ongoing writing.

If this Positron-Numina "item" involves any binding, I'm pretty sure CoH loses its "Teen" rating.

Agreed. I see that as a case of "unrequited love"... on both their parts. GW died never fully able to express her love to wretch, and as the dead can never change, she will forever be unable to do so.

I know what you mean. I really miss the Mothership raids... they were so fun... so memorable. I did so many of them back in the day.... Makes me feel like Issue 10 was just last week.

Ah, your initial complaint framed things in an "thematic" way (why does this make sense to a hero) rather than a "design" way (why this makes sense from a game), so many of your responses were framed similarly.

This is a gripe of mine as well-- I often duo's with my wife and we have one high-performance PC and one rather anemic one. Small groups work best for us. Many of the larger-group task forces just don't run well for us.

Let's not forget, though, that this is REALLY a small subset of content. Practically all of the story arcs are solo-capable, and the total number of arcs is far more than the total number of task/strike forces and trials. That's a sizable chunk of content that's still VERY solo-friendly. I also suspect that we'll see a new zone for the upper levels that'll be virtually all solo-based content soonish(tm).

As for why: well,

1)there's a limit to how well you can autoscale content and keep it balanced. At the lower levels, you generally try to have wide margins of error, as the players are often still learning and builds aren't fully realized or optimized. At the higher levels, you're preparing content for more experienced players and more complete builds. As they're more tightly-defined, you need more tightly-defined encounters to have a chance at challenging them. A group of foes that is a viable enemy for a group of 4 heroes isn't necessarily viable when you double it for a group of 8... and sometimes it can be scale to be too much. By making a mandatory team size, you're reducing that variability and making it more likely you can strike that critical balance.

2) You're also increasing replay-ability, in theory. Encouraging more players encourages more variety in potential archetype combinations that can be used to take on the challenge. You may need entirely different tactics to take on the challenge without a solid brute... or an all-illusion-controller team... or a team with only bubblers (nobody with a dedicated heal) or no strong debuffer. Each comes with its own challenge. (Sure, doing it with fewer teammates would also increase variations, but see above about assuring a specific margin of challenge).

3) Finally, MMO designers have a 'retention' goal, and studies have shown that one of the biggest reasons for sticking with an MMO is 'community' -- this was a bit of a bigger factor than 'new stuff to do.' They want you to stick around, so it's in their interest to get you engaged with others. Part of that can be from teaming with other people, part of that can be in socializing during downtime... and assembling larger teams for task forces often requires a bit more "downtime" than running solo. By putting larger team requirements near the end of the game-- where players are getting close to having consumed much of the "new stuff" you have-- you're involved in a last-ditch effort to engage that person in the community and keep them as a paying customer long after the "newness" is gone.

True. It hurts even more since many people have a backlog of level 50's that they now feel compelled to get back to "the cap." Had this been available with Issue 1, people would have played that one character all the way to the last of the incarnate stuff, then started another... feeling a lot less grindy than looping through a half dozen level 50's.

EDIT: I'm not feeling the grind myself, but I'm not going hog-wild on my endgame play, either. I'm comfortable with dawdling around, playing my lower level characters and dabbling with the trials when it suits me. So far, only 1 of my characters has any of the stuff unlocked, and she has three entry-tier and one 'incarnate shift"

Guess again.

Look at the BAF and Lambda. They're almost all art assets that existed from GR's launch. The interior of Lambda is about the only new map, but a sizable chunk of its contents can be seen in older, preceding maps. A larger portion of art assets can be seen in the new TASK FORCES that were part of the new issue (ships, ship interiors, etc).

More likely, as the devs have said before, they are hard at work on future issues' material. Animation and art are resources that needs to be well on their way to completion before you can include it in zones, stories, and missions. They're often much more forward-looking... often begun over a half-year to a year before you'll see it in a finished product.

Agree with so much you provided there, Arcanaville, but I wanted to share my own experience here. I started the trials late and with virtually no good research, so as a casual "noob" I was probably pretty close to what some others would experience. I just "went where everyone else went and did what everyone else was doing." The result:

• The Lambdas regularly gave me 35-55% progress for Interface... pretty close to what you experienced here. Lambda groups regularly cleared the map before entering the facility, so it tends to farm iXP rather well. We also weren't very good at taking out the reinforcement doors, leading to more iXP. In the runs that had the reinforcement doors shut down quickly, I saw notably less reward.
• The BAFs were all successes, but I rarely got over 15% of my progress for judgement. The reason: seems to be 1) you destroy far fewer NPC's in the first phase compared to Lambda, 2) "following the crowd" means concentrating fire on the AV's, not their reinforcements, in subsequent phases... losing a significant chunk of potential iXP. That changed on my third and fourth BAF's... when I started to make my own judgement of what needed done. My SR scrapper varied from attacking the AV to taking down the reinforcements that were decimating the squishies. Not only did I get get almost triple my usual jump in the progress meter, but those netted my first rare and very rare rewards.

People that are new to the BAF and reluctant to diverge from (following the crowd) as I was are probably seeing similar bleak progress. I'd bet that your experimentation and testing is giving you a more comprehensive experience, and therefore more reward.

Heh... the first week the issue released, I would've said the opposite. The forums were full of so many people lamenting about I20 that anyone saying "give it a chance" seemed to be threatened with online stoning. There was so much doom and gloom that I (who couldn't play much at all that week) all but dreaded taking my /SR scrapper on her first trial.

Unfortunately, the pendulum swings both ways, and you can point to dozens of examples where someone reasonably saying 'this isn't healthy for the long-term' getting painted as an irrational doomsayer. Its the nature of online forums to lump each side into categories defined by their most extreme representatives. They're not just responding to YOU when you post- they're responding to every person, however irrational, that shared even a fragment of your perspective or tone-- and there are always some nutcases out there that really skewer things. Very few people of the "doom" crowd are as bad as others think, and very few of the "love the trials" are, either. They just unfortunately frame the debate for the rest of us.

This is where I was leaning as I was thinking this on the way home, but it made me feel somewhat unclean for considering such deception... and this coming from the person that had no qualm with bringing up "jiggle physics" in his mock response.

Hmm... Already have a ninja mastermind pet named Ed Gruberman. Maybe I'll rename the Oni "Mel..."

Wait. Next round of trials, we'll find that Cole's legion will be using confiscated Vanguard vorpal blades, too...

Precisely.

I mean, having a blaster with a soft-capped defense is nice, but with 16-24 people, you're bound to have a primary, secondary, and probably a tertiary tank. If those tanks are executing their roles right, that soft-capped blaster isn't going to be a target often enough to see a real survivability difference between it and the SO-equipped no-defense-blaster. Execution and coordination thus can trump the IO/SO divide.

---

They have the right to ask. You have the right to decline.

How that request and response is delivered is what determines which party is making an *** of itself (often its both)... and sometimes its unintentional.


SCENARIO: A group of roleplayers wants to have a social gathering in the Tiki lounge. They can't stop people from popping in via the VIP pass. A player drops in, sees people milling about, doesn't know what they're doing, and starts hopping over and dancing on the table in front of them.

• A Roleplayer may say: "Go away. This is a private gathering."
  
  
• The Roleplayer feels like he said: "I'm sorry, we're trying to have a private gathering, and the tone of the event really doesn't fit well with people dancing on the table in front of us. Could you take it elsewhere?"
  
  
• The Intruder feels like he's been told: "Get lost, *******. You're not wanted."
  
  
• So he replies: "I have every right to be here, too, y'know."
  
  
• He feels like he's said: "Look, I used the power to get here. I paid for access to this area, and I didn't have any reason to expect that I wasn't wanted here. Why are you being so damn rude? You could have asked nicely."
  
  
• The roleplayer, having experienced this many times before, blends all the previous fights into this statement and hears, "There's no designated RP server or RP zones. I'm allowed to be anywhere you are, and I'm going to prove it by GOING anywhere you go and interfering with ANYTHING you try to do. You'll just have to figure out how to have your somber little gathering with me making 'humping" emotes behind you the whole time."
  
  
• Things go downhill quickly from there.
  
  
• Eventually, both will go back to their own subgroups, ranting about the idiots they just encountered... and giving such divergent accounts of what happened that most people would never even believe they could be talking about the same encounter.
  
  
• Next week: lather. rinse. repeat.
  
  
• (Occasionally throw in a REAL griefer or a REAL arrogant roleplayer to add enough truth to make the bias especially difficult to break.)

In the past week, I've seen numerous requests for league recruitment to move away from the RWZ so the groups don't impact efforts to organize Mothership raids. People have even proactively done it when they see the announcement for the raid-- before any Mothership Raider requests it. In all those times I've never seen an objection raised as to the inconvenience this causes the Trial-runners.

Granted, the people objecting to the RP'ers requests here aren't the same people that made such concessions, but it does seem to reflect something of a community double-standard- its fine to make accommodations for other raid/trial-minded players but not roleplayers requesting pretty much the same.






Roleplayers can't EXPECT you to turn down the toggles or possibly consider assembling teams elsewhere, but they're not out-of-line in making the request. Non-roleplayers have a right to be there, too, of course, but when the activities of either start impacting the other, its fair and reasonable for everyone to seek some kind of resolution.

Unfortunately, the tone of those requests matters most... and there's been a good history of derision between non-roleplayers and roleplayers over the years. Many times we assume chat words were "spoken" more derisively than they were intended... and many times we immediately jump to derisive statements in anticipation of a fight.

It learned all its social skills by parsing user posts on gaming and political forums. I don't think there's any chance of charm there.... unless it goes so far into the negative that it rolls over the bottom buffer....

I'd opt for more content that's for levels "40 through 50+" rather than just post-50 content. I really don't care if they mention Incarnates or not in it-- preferrably not, so I can reasonably write in my own character's story and ignore the Incarnate mindset. Just give me something new to do when nearing/at the level cap that doesn't require teaming.

Sounds pretty close, but not 100%.

Even generating new mobs isn't really an issue- TRACKING the mobs and communicating that tracking data is a big chunk of it.

When a mob is instantiated but it just running its default behaviors, there isn't much that needs communicated to the clients, just "Mob_A started default animation set B at time C." Nothing deviates without player interaction, so nothing really needs updated... and no heavy AI calculation needs done.

In the case of the BAF, there are even default paths that the resistance will run. They, like ambushes, just need to tell the client "mobA going from pointB to PointC via pathD" and forget about it...

...until player interaction. Then the AI needs to calculate alternative paths, or initiate combat commands, and then every moment-by-moment action needs to be relayed to all players within range... along with all the other players' behaviors and locations.

Whether all that causes a process bottleneck (many calculations, multiple times a second) or a bandwidth bottleneck (it IS a lot of data to relay several times a second) I'm not sure. It could be either or both.

- If it was a PROCESS bottleneck that was slowing down server time, you could add a few bits to the bandwidth every few seconds to make sure that your tray icons "recharge" was working at the same clock speed as the server's.

- If it was a bandwidth issue, the last thing you'd want would be more bits transmitted per second. You'd instead look to see whether you could curb the frequency of the updates... if you could cut them down from (fictional numbers here) 4 times a second to 3 times a second, and you reduce the load by 25%, for example. Cut it too much, though, and users would experience more warping. Alternatively, you change how often SOME data is transmitted (positioning is critical info... but maybe the hit point meter data could be sent half as often, for example)


(DISCLAIMER: While the principle behind the solution is simple, none of these solutions are "simple" when it comes down to changing the code at such a fundamental level. This part of a codebase is usually the "here ye be dragons" domain-- where programmers fear to tread (for good reason).