Hephaestus

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I have seen comments that state that if the devs are going to be devs then they should grow a think skin and learn to take the insults. We disagree. We care an awful lot about this game. We pour our hearts, minds, and energy into making this game. Many of us have spent years of our lives working as hard as we can and trying our best to make the best game possible. We want players to have fun. We stealth team with lowbies to hear the reactions to things like super jump for the first time. To experience the joy of a great pick up team take down an AV.

Hurtful insults and disrespectful comments affect us. We are human. To have people disrespect you and insult you and something you have worked so hard on in front of the whole internet is disheartening and demoralizing at the very least.

The bottom line is we respect you and your comments, we do listen, and we are glad you play and thank you for being heroes. We ask for your respect in return.


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I agree, and on that note I wanted to relay a little story of how this type of thing can get way, way out of proportion.

In one of the earliest MMOGs, UO, the lead designer's (Raph Koster) house burned down. I'm not talkoing an in-game house, although UO, unlike any other game before or since, has had real player housing, but a real life house. Raph has a family, wife, kids, the whole nine yards. He had to scramble to find a roof to put over his/their head. This is a great tragedy in anyone's life, and quite a bit more important then any video game. What was the reaction from his "fan-base"?

Well, like any fan-base, reactions varied. However several people came out with comments like "Good, he deserved it for bringing us the crap that is UO". Now, by all accounts, Raph is a nice, friendly person, very well-educated, into music and games. However, even if he were a nasty scumbag, what sort of person would cheer his and hsi family's house bruning down, just because they didn't like how he had designed a game which they nonetheless continued to play? Doesn't that strike people as just a tad extreme? It did me, and it will always stick in my head as a prime example of man's inhumanity to man over the smallest, pettiest of motivations.

I'd like to think this community is better then that, but it isn't. I'm sure that if Jack Emmert's house burned down tomorrow people would be stating on the boards that it "served him right for the regen nerfs" or something idiotic like that. The majority, like on the boards for UO, might well sympathize, but the nutcases would speak the loudest and would have the biggest effect. We cannot change that. The anonymity of the internet guarantees that [censored] will be [censored]. We can only control our own actions and reactions to things, and on that note I would like to ask each person here to please, think of the humanity behind anyone you refer to in your post, whether a fellow player, dev, community coordinator, or what-have-you. You don't know much about them, they may be nasty, venal people in real life, but what you do know is that they are fellow human beings, and deserve to be treated as such.

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That's pretty funny... when I debuted the first real "fluff" piece--"The Paragon Times Building"--the populace howled that it had nothing to do with in-game play. I mean it was vocal. Then folks got used to these historical articles. Twice now, I've written about things that do affect in-game play and folks now complain it doesn't have enough background story.

So, I'll take whatever is said on this forum with a bucket of salt--and just keep on truckin'.


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Yep. Absolutely true. I was one of the more vocal people about the first article not having anything to do with in game play. It's important to always take anything said over the internet with a large amount of salt, like you said.

I personally prefer the articles that DO talk about things that affect in-game play, and don't mind it when there is less background story there. I like background story, but I come to this website to find otu about changes to the game. I would far prefer more stuff in game that held more background story. The badges, plaques, missions, task forces, et all, are vastly enhanced by the story associeated with them.

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I think people misunderstand why developers interfere and make changes. I could care less how fast someone earns influence. But I am concerned when someone is doing somethingg "unfun" in order to gain levels quickly and thereby bypassing other, more interesting content. Admittedly, "fun" and "unfun" are completely subjective, so people can disagree.

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Yes, I'm guessing that States love to fight against trolls, hellions
and skulls more often that he does anything higher than lvl 20.

Personally, I don't have a prob with PL. I use it to get past
stuff I've seen numerous times. I mean....how many times
can you arrest Frostfire in the Hollows? ..and who keeps
letting that little [censored] out of jail?!?

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What if they had this thing after you did the Frostfire mission that you could appear as a witness in his trial for the prosecution, and the trial would mostly be scritped, but you could give your own answers to certain question and, at the end of a month, say, if they determined that someone had given good enough answers to convict him, they would give the full transcript of the court case including that person's answers on their website and that would be the end of Frostfire. Locked up for life. Or, if he did appear again, it would be in entirely different missions and there would be some backstory about how he broke out of jail.

In other words, what if, with the participation of Cryptic employees (so it couldn't just be gamed) there was a way to make a real difference, even if in a minor way, to the world?

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If it isn't timed, you can "repeat" the mission as much as you want. The game engine can't tell how many times you "started" the mission. Only how many times you've completed it.

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If the system carries enough bitfields on a player to track dozens of "how many clockwork gears have you killed" type integers, it can certainly carry a "how many times has this mission been reset" integer. The coding is trivial.

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It doesn't track that you killed one *particular" wolf, it just tracks numbers. Only specific bagdges (after completing missions, BTW) happen for specific named mobs.

The biggest reason they can't do it another way is disconnects. When you disconnect, all of your mission in play reset (but timed ones keep counting down.)

This really was the only way to keep farming down.

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Or they could, as I suggest, have taken some measures to prevent a total mission reset by tracking a few numbers, and this includes preventing total resets when you get disconnected.

Didn't see your solution before. It's very similar to my own, but I think saving the mission map and positions of everything as well as what it was, basically saving the whole status of the mission as you suggest, might result in too much data. Imagine doing that for all three missions on all characters of an account for all accounts in the game. That's an awful lot of memory.

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There seems to be a tendency in this game to stack drawbacks - tanker and Kheldian design come immediately to mind. Now it's extended to wolf missions. "You get this beneft, so you'll get this penalty, and this penalty, and this penalty." Eventually, the idea of risk vs. reward gets skewed and people feel punished for trying to play the game.

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I've noticed this tendency too, and find it very annoying. Statesman says that the new change is intended to make it so that less people will do rewarding but unfun things by making one of the unfun but rewarding things less rewarding. Taking that at face value, it still comes down to the fact that some people farmed the wolf missions and as a result of that the developers made a change that, potentially, impacts everyone negatively. Once again we see the phenomenon of the few ruining somethign for the many. I think that, at base, a few people finding some weird tricks and using them over and over is responsible for a lot of this Benefit-penalty-penalty-penalty-penalty business.

I'd like to see solutions that make less people do unfun behavior but don't put additional penalties on the people who never engaged in the unfun behavior in the first place. Unfortunately, sometimes that simply isn't possible. With mission, though, maybe it is. AS it stands, each character can have no more then 3 missions at a time anyway. What if, in addition to tracking the missions that characters had while the character is offline, the game also tracked the number of mobs left alive in the mission when you last visited. Let's get a tiny bit more sophisticated and track the number of minions/lieutenants/bosses/AVs separately for each mission so that, we may not get the exact mobs right, but we can get the mobs approximately correct when you go back in. We could even recall the number of people that was in the team for the mission last so that it still adjusts the mobs based on team size. The upshot is that if you go into the mission after logging out or resetting the mission it doesn't really reset the mission. The mobs may get repositioned slightly, but there won't be any more mobs, so you can't farm missions. You can't behave in "unfun" behavior in this way. Yet, any benefits (badges, killing AVs, taking your time, doing the mission with a team of friends who don't all happen to be on when you get it, all of that is still possible.

Sounds reasonable?

I enjoy role playing a lot. I do play female characters, but I'm a guy. If people ask I will tell them, or if they think something outside of the game is going on I will tell them (now). That being said, there are many aspects to role playign that I enjoy which have nothing to do with gender. The other day I was axplaining how my character (I) got the name "Vicious Killer", both as my "real" name and as a superhero. People got confused and someone asked me if my parents had named my character, to which I replied: Character?

It was all in fun, and since they were confused after this I explained I was just speaking in character/role playing. The person who didn't get it before understood, but still didn't participate. the other person had fun goofing with me in character.


These games are more fun, they are more rich, they are more three dimensional, if you role play. At least, they are for me. If others don't role play, well, no biggie, people get their jollies in different ways.

I'm going to go with that "accuracy nerfed" statement, given who's saying it.

On a more serious note, seeing as we are just picking random dates out of a hat, I'm going to guess April 2nd. They'll announce it's going live on April 1st, as a joke, just so that when it really does go live on April 2nd no one will believe it at first.

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It has been my experience that no other archetype can reasonably expect to do their proper job in a team when fighting opponents that are 4 or 5 levels higher then them. Healers can't be effective enough at healing people, buffers' buffs don't help enough, debuffers don't hit often enough, controllers can't stop the mobs well enough, blasters can't hit enough or do enough damage, nor can scrappers. Why should /Invuln tankers be the exception to this rule?

[/ QUOTE ]Again, missing the point entirely.

The point is not that I should be effective against them. The point is that I should be overpowered by them when I try to draw their aggro. If I try to keep their aggro, I should drop, due to their overwhelming power.

This is not the case. The reverse is true. I was unable to keep aggro, and they were unable to drop me.

This is the issue I'm trying to make.


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I think you missed my point. I understood very well that what you had a problem with was your inability to keeop aggro over the long term from a blaster 4 4levels higher then you fighting mobs 4 or 5 levels higher then you. You'll notice I never referred to you dying or not dying or doing damage or not doing damage. You're main job is to keep aggro while others kill the mobs. You recognize that, I recognize that. That's fine. You're secondary purpose is also to do some damage to the mobs and kill them faster, but the main one is to keep aggro. In my example, I repeatedly referred to people on a team unable to do their jobs. Exactly for this reason. You were, by your and my lights, unable to do your job on a team, but neither can anyone else fighting groups of mobs 4 or 5 levels higher then them. That's just the way it is. That's the way it was meant to be.

Just to repeat what I said: you should NOT be able, over the long term, to do what you were trying to do. If you could before, that was clearly not the intent of the designers. I have given plenty of evidence why this is so and have clearly pointed out how this applies to everyone else as well and why this is fair. I feel virtually certain your next post will be to quote me out of context as just saying the first sentence or two in this paragraph and then coming up with all kinds of counterarguments why those are wrong while blithely ignoring all the arguments I have already made in my previous post which counter your arguments. I won't repeat those arguments. It would be futile. If you choose to go a different route, great, we can continue the discussion.

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I can already tell you that the results will be the same regardless of "enemy level differences"
When you have a team of 4+ players, and running Invincible missions, you'll routinely be facing mobs that are +4 to the person whose mission is selected, so the argument that my sample was flawed is actually invalid. However, to appease the bean-counters, I'll demonstrate the invalidity of this.

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Yes, large teams fighting on Invincibility will get +4 level opponents. They won't get +5s, but they will typically get +4s and +3s. Not small teams on Invincible, but large ones will. This does not mean they should be able to accomplish them. They shouldn't. Not unless some of the people (and preferably the tank is one of them) are higher level then the person with the mission. As I said, soloing is a different story, but people basically can't do their job in a team when they are 4 or 5 levels below the mobs.



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My contention is not whining that I can't take on +4's

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Other guy's arguments, not my own.

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My point is that I can't do my job role due to the inability to keep aggro during Rage 3.0's downtime

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And my contention is that now, with Rage 3.0, you can do your job just as well, in general, as any other archetyp can do their jobs when fighting opponents that are 4 or 5 levels higher then they are.

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I would have been happy if I had been able to keep aggro during Rage 3.0's downtime, and had fallen like a blind roofer, earning debt

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That's kind of like a blaster saying I would have been happy dropping like a fly after novaing that group of +4/+5 mobs if I had managed to kill all but the bosses in a single shot.

Both of you would just be trying to "do your job" and both of you would be asking for a lot more out of your abilities then you can reasonably expect.

It has been my experience that no other archetype can reasonably expect to do their proper job in a team when fighting opponents that are 4 or 5 levels higher then them. Healers can't be effective enough at healing people, buffers' buffs don't help enough, debuffers don't hit often enough, controllers can't stop the mobs well enough, blasters can't hit enough or do enough damage, nor can scrappers. Why should /Invuln tankers be the exception to this rule? Why should they be the only ones that can do their proper job on a team when fighting opponents 4 or 5 levels higher then themselves? Granted, there are a few builds that can solo opponents like that, but that's a bit different then doing your job on a team with opponents like that.

Now, I'm sure someone here will bring up the fact that they have an X archetype or saw an X archetype on a team who was 4 or 5 levels lower (or even more) and seemed to be doing their job quite fine. Just to head that sort of comment off at the pass I will point out these are a tiny, tiny exception that proves the general rule, and the purple patch itself is pretty much positive proof that this goes against what the designers had intended for the characters.

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I have to say that raising the bosses like this at 25 was nuts. A level 25 character is not prepared to deal with the raw power of these bosses. I had a same-level Tank swiper take my 29 SR Scrapper to 10% life in one shot with Fortitude running on him.

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Whther or not you have fortitude on you and are SR will have little effect on how much damage you take when you do get hit. Both SR and fortitude help significantly in not getting hit in the first place, but tneither gives any kind of damage reisstance for when you do.

Tank swipers always hit very, very hard. I remember going up against them with a /Invuln scrapper when I got into the early 20's and seeing about 2/3 of my health drop in a single hit. Now they're even more insane.

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However, what I think you missed in Statesman's quote is "If a player gets a mission with an AV, he'll be able to drop it and get another." Meaning, the player chooses to not kill the AV, not complete the mission, not receive the rewards, and....wait for it..... not experience the content created by fighting an Arch-Villain . To further clarify - the player makes the choice to forego game content because he/she is solo.

...

I really dont think Statesman meant to say a solo player should be able to do anything he/she wants. I think what he meant was a solo player should be able to do what he/she wants until they encounter something that requires a team. At that point, the solo player can choose to skip that content and move on to something else.

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Very nicely put.

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and, frankly, that capability, in and of itself, will make the game far, far more solo-friendly.

Thank you, Statesman!

This was kind of a make or break issue for me, and I really appreciate the fact you went back and looked at the effects of your previous decisions and not only changed your mind, but are implementing a system that is better for everyone (both solo and team player) in the long run. Thank you.

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My mistake. Sorry.

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Come on, man! Someone with your post count should know everything.



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I know enough too own up to my mistakes when I know I've got it wrong, how's that grab you.

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I am pretty sure the scrapper primary Dark Melee has a power which can drain endurance, can't speak for the rest.

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Several powersets have powers that hurt foes (moderately) to give you endurance. Only Kinetics and Electricity actually drain it.

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My mistake. Sorry.

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They need to do something to make bosses more difficult than they were though. Before I3 they were just too easy. now they are just way too hard.

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They were too easy compared to what? Minions? They were a hell of a lot harder then minions to take out. AVs? They were easy compared to AVs, but then, what's wrong with that. I think the yardstick you need to use is whether or not most people thought they were the best way of gaining fast influence and experience and, frankly, they weren't. Bosses sucked for experience. Yes, it wasn't hard to take them out, but it took about ten times as long as an equivalent level minions and you got only about three times as much for them. People avoided them except during the levels they didn't need experience anywhere near as badly as they needed influence, because the influence and drops you got from bosses were barely better then those of minons compared to their difficulty level.

If you haev some sort of arbitrary idea about how hard bosses need to be, then I have to wonder why you have that idea. I have heard that Statesman thinks that most boss types should neo be soloable by most players. I have yet to hear his rationale for this decision though. If trying to hew to the combic book genre, most heroes can take out most merely boss types. It's not like the boss is an archvillain, and a lot of solo heroes were even capable of taking on what I would consider archvillains.

Now, granted, in superhero team comic books, for the most part, individual heroes were not able to deal with major threats, but that's just because they were comics about superhero teams. In the comics featuring one particular superhero that one was always somehow able to deal with the threats he/she was faced with.

I am pretty sure the scrapper primary Dark Melee has a power which can drain endurance, can't speak for the rest.

OK, I'm sick and tired of the soloers compromising more and more, and the teamers just trying to take more and more. Let's take things in a slightly different direction.

Look, everyone can solo at all times, not everyone can alwasy get a team. By that logic, EVERYTHING should be soloable, but it's not that big a deal if certain aspcest of content aren't available to teams. Abolish the badges that require teaming (for mentoring, for example). Make task forces soloable. Any mission which currently contains AVs or monsters should either no longer contain them if you enter solo or the AVs/Monsters should, in some way, be soloable. I want to see story arcs, missions, and other cool content which teams can't get at all, ie, only available to people when they solo. I want to see it made possible where most people can solo most groups in hazard zones, solo.

I'm sick of this. Look, nothing prevents you from teaming, but currently every single MMOG on the market focuses on teaming, and tons of people stop playing those because they don't like to be forced to team. Do somethign different for a change here. Let's focus this game on soloists, with the possibility for teaming. Let's make all content, especially the good story content which people in teams won't have the time to read anyway, soloable, and let's make tons of stuff available ONLY for soloists.

Now that's going to be a fun game.

And or all those people who insist this game must be another clone of EQ with team-only garbage, incredibly slow advancement, items required to get, and epic encounters of one mob versus hundreds of players, well, if that's what you want, play EQ, damnit, or one of the many other MMOGs that are virtually clones of it, and stop littering up a fun game.

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Herding goes way beyond what I am talking about. Even on impossible the typical spawn for a 6 player mission is trivial for a large number of builds. The people herding pre issue 3 (and possibly post issue 3) were fighting 10+ spawns simultaneously. I.E. it was supposed to take a team of 6 people to fight one of these spawns and they were fighting/killing 10 of them at time, often solo.

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can you enlighten me which mission you're talking about?


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Shadowhunter/warwolves. It's not the only one, but it's the most common one probably.

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and what AT can solo a mission meant to be for a 6+ mission and what lvl?


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Tanker, mostly fire tanker, but the other types (certainly Stone, Ice, and the old version of Invuln) can do it too. Level 50.

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and just how do you know the "optimal" # of people these missions were designed for?

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If 6 people go into the mission it is designed to be a 6 person mission. If 1 goes in it is designed to be a 1-person mision. Mob number, types, and levels, adjust to the number fo people entering.

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Not true. There are a number of missions (most notably the warwolf/shadowhunter ones) which level 50 tanks routinely invite 5 other people, two of which are being powerleveled, to come in the door for. Then they round up all the mobs and kill them, all by themselves. They may use a few defense inspirations during the process, but they use no help whatsoever from teammates.

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While this is somewhat true, the tank would usually ask for help in wiping out the mobs (after they are all nice and stacked) so that it doesn't take him forever.

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Nope. Not the ones I've seen, and I've seen quite a few. As I said, no help herding them up, and no help killing them.

Now, granted, you also have the team efforts where tanks do get help, but there really are a number of tanks that do this all by themselves.

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Teaming wasn't broken before, and this is not a fix to it.


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People routinely solo missions spawned for 6+ players. How can that not be broken? If one person can do is alone what challange does it offer a team of 6?

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Okay, PUH-lease. That one was just bunk. One person is not doing what a team of six does. The missions are, and always have been, scaled for the number of people going in the door. The numbers a team of six encounters in a mission are WAY higher than what a single is doing and so the one is not accomplishing what the team of six does outside of a relative comparison. That's the whole point of the scaling. The one DOES accomplish the mission with a number of mobs appropriate to one hero, the team accomplishes the mission with a commensurate greater number of mobs appropriate to whatever team size goes in so that the mission remains challenging for the greater number entering. Effectively, in terms of absolute numbers and types, proportions of mobs faced, it is two different misisons. The two are in no way directly equivalent. Give me a break.



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Not true. There are a number of missions (most notably the warwolf/shadowhunter ones) which level 50 tanks routinely invite 5 other people, two of which are being powerleveled, to come in the door for. Then they round up all the mobs and kill them, all by themselves. They may use a few defense inspirations during the process, but they use no help whatsoever from teammates.

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Teaming wasn't broken before, and this is not a fix to it.


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People routinely solo missions spawned for 6+ players. How can that not be broken? If one person can do is alone what challange does it offer a team of 6?

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Well, first off, only a very, very few people at thehighest levesl 45+ did that. If by routinely you meant they did it over and over again you're right. If by routinely you meant this comprised more then, say, 1/1000 of all missions completed you're wrong. I don't see that such a small fraction of mission sis really all that representative. Moreover, typically, these same missions did offer a significant challeneg to a team of 6. Not every team of 6, but many of them. Now, if you are saying that all content should be geared toward the most uber min/maxed players with thebest possible builds and themost fantastic strategies out there I respectfully disagree. Maybe, maybe, those should be taken into account, and for that I point you to the mission difficulty slider, but all missions should not have that as their lowest possible difficulty setting. That's insane.

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Ok, then let me ask you a question? How is this a fix to team play?


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It doesn’t fix it completely, but you have to start somewhere.

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Teaming wasn't broken before, and this is not a fix to it.

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What people are actually saying "Oh boy, it's going to be so much more fun to team now that bosses can one-shot us and take forver to take down," or maybe they are saying "dang, we used to always crash when we went into missions as a team, but now that bosses can one-shot us and take forever to kill the game runs smooth as silk when we team."


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Until people figure out what they have to do I suspect they will find large teams very challenging indeed. For teams of 7-8 players you now need several different AT’s all played properly and using good teamwork to succeed. Missions spawned for fewer then that are likely still soloable for a large number of builds even on impossible.

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You're not answering my questions here. The problem isn't that this makes it too tough for teams. the problem is that it doesn't actually provide any kind of "FIX" for teaming. The reason for that is that teaming didn't need a fix, especially not with the new difficulty sliders. All this does is BREAK soloing.

If you want to FIX teaming, then FIX TEAMING, don't BREAK SOLOING.

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Every time somebody says to you that the Devs promised solo AND team play, you keep replying as if people are demanding solo play to take priority.


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They are. They are trying to get a badly needed fix to team play removed on the grounds it prevents some people from soloing 100% of the games content. The only way one could ever justify such a position was if they considered this a solo game with an option to team if you want. This is the complete reverse of what Statesman has repeatedly stated as his vision for the game.

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Ok, then let me ask you a question? How is this a fix to team play?

What people are actually saying "Oh boy, it's going to be so much more fun to team now that bosses can one-shot us and take forver to take down," or maybe they are saying "dang, we used to always crash when we went into missions as a team, but now that bosses can one-shot us and take forever to kill the game runs smooth as silk when we team."

Nobody.

Face it, this did not "fix" a thing about teaming. What this did is nerf solo play in an attempt to FORCE certain soloists to team who weren't doing it before. Now we have people goimg "Dang! no way am I going to solo this mission. I'll have to team up to do it." There's a big difference between fixing somethign that was nbroken, and breaking something that was fixed. In my opinion, they broke much of solo play.

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It'd be better to address the core reasons that people solo by choice. (People who solo by necessity are going to keep soloing no matter what, or they'll find some other game.) That includes things like "I get better XP when I'm solo", "It's hard to find a good pick-up team", "It's hard to enjoy the story in a team", "It's hard to complete my missions / story arcs when I'm in a team", and the like.

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Or even, I can't read all the mission text due to the tim pressure of being in a team.

What if they simply put all mission text, everything the contact mentioned about missions, both before and after, everythign friendly NPCs you ahd to talk to mentioned, everything in a souvenir at the end of a story arc, everything the major bad guys said in missions, everything, into some kind of text file or system of text files you could read whenever you wanted to. It's still nto as good as being able to read it at the time it happens, but it's better then nothing.

In a similar vein, I remember at one point using Phase Shift on a character whenever I talked to a contact. The idea was that if I got ambushed, I could still merrily enjoy the mission text and ignore the ambushers until I wanted to deal with them.

Frankly though, I think something should be done to help the peope who solo by necessity too. Why lock yourself out of that market by not catering to these folks? Why have them go to different games?