Leif_Roar

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Well obviously their entire battle plan has already been derailed. The point is to pick on a bunch of people like NCSoft in a court that apparently hates foreigners, get the desired decision, and then use the precedent to defeat big companies like Blizzard without ever having to face them.

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I doubt the battle plan contains going to court at all, except as a plan B. Seems like a pretty standard patent bully strategy. What you want is to force your target to accept an out-of-court settlement, so you want to target someone that's got enough money to be worth your while, but not so much money that they can take the cost of a lengthy legal process on the chin.

You certainly don't want to target someone like Blizzard, because even if you actually did have a good case, Blizzard has the resources to make the legal process drag on for years, slowly bleeding you dry, and they have the motivation (in the form of sacks of money their millions of subscribers are sending them) to want to defeat you soundly and loudly in court.

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Not possible if everyone has individual PvP flags. And you can prevent "flag abuse" with people toggling the flag on and off by giving it a cooldown period. You toggle it, it takes say, 30 seconds to actually toggle, and you can't retoggle for say... 15 minutes? That will put paid to people hiding behind their flag.

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Now, this is just my irrefutable, divinely inspired and unassailable opinion, but I personally prefer the more relaxed milieu given by dedicated PvE zones, and wouldn't want to see a flag-based PvP system introduced.

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They're not intrinsically boring to play against, the problem is pants RPing

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Yes and no. High-powered characters, like self inserts or child characters, can be played in a way that's fun for everybody -- they just never are.

Okay, that was rethoric exaggeration -- it does happen. But it is a lot more difficult to play them in ways that are fun for the people you're playing with than more limited characters are, to the point where fun "god characters" are rare as hen's teeth. Most oldtime roleplayers have learnt to avoid them on sight as experience bears out that the chance there will be fun in playing against them is too small to warrant the time and effort.

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If you check some of the earlier posts, people have said they're both boring to play and boring to play against.

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It doesn't matter if overpowered character are fun or boring to play so long as they are dull to play against, and they are.

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OK, so a few people who have posted DO have god characters, and some think they're just boring to play.

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You've misunderstood. The problem isn't that they're boring to play. The problem is that they're boring to play against.

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The problem I have with PvP is not to do with the mechanics but rather the motivation behind it.

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"And it's one, two, three,
what are we fighting for?
Don't care, I cannot recall,
next stop is Siren's Call.
Woohoo, we're all gonna die."

There are two different areas for change in CoH's PvP. There is the PvP mechanics as such -- the nitty gritty of hit-points and mez resistance and all that jazz -- and there's the PvP infrastructure: the arenas, PvP zones and their layout, rewards, scoring, the context of the fights and all those blues.

The first is important, sure, but primarily for the hardcore PvPers. For casual PvPers the second is really the more important, because the mechanics only determine how you win or lose -- the infrastructure determines how easy it is to have <i>fun</i> winning or losing.

Compare it to board-games: for <i>casual</i> players it's less important that the rules are exact, encompassing and allows for greath depth, than it is that the game can be picked up and played quickly and easily and doesn't involve a lot of paperwork to keep track of the scores.

That's not to say you can't have both -- chess is a great example of a game that's quick to pick up and play, and yet allows for great depth and strategy -- just that we shouldn't focus overmuch on the mechanics when talking about casual players, as that's not the more important for them.

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If what they say is true, then this whole 'prior art' argument doesn't matter anyway. The original patent pre-dates the modern mmorpg so they are perfectly with their rights to sue.

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There's nothing in the patent that's specific to modern MMORPGs, though, and the patent doesn't predate 3D online games with player avatars. The first version of BZFlag, for instance, was released in 1992.

I'm still not convinced that the patent even covers the way CoH is implemented -- CoH has nothing like the "N closest neighbours" filtering discussed in the patent, for instance.

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a. Trashtalk in CoH is no worse than that which you'll find in any other MMO or online game featuring PvP.

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Quite right. I should have said "the nature of trashtalk in MMORPGs," or even online video-games as a whole. (Well, I've found turn-based strategy games to be an exception as far as video games go, really, something I'll chalk down to a generally older playerbase.)

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Won't happen.Ever.Mainly due to the fact that developers of this game wont admit they made a huge mistake.

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More to the point, it won't happen because the I12 and earlier PvP wasn't working. If CoH is even going to have PvP -- an NCSoft seems determined that it should -- something new is needed. They might end up scrapping all of the I13 PvP, but they won't go back to I12.

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Please NO!PvP should be kept at all times totally separate from PvE.

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Which the system I suggested would do: a storyline would at some point branch into two separate branches: one PvE and one PvP, wholly separate from each other. The purpose is not to lure PvE-ers into the PvP zones, but to make the decision to go into PvP team-centric.

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Imo individual skill when it comes to rewards should be counted in as well.

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That only works when the game is balanced on the individual player. If you balance on the team, you need to give rewards per team. Individual skill is then rewarded in as much as it is applied towards a team victory -- the goalie might not score goals, but that doesn't mean he isn't important for the team victory.


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Player versus Player.The taunting and the trashtalking will always be part of it.

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Chess is player versus player too, yet I've never been trashtalked during a chess game. I find the nature of the trashtalk in CoH PvP more indicative of the playerbase than of the nature of the game.

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And while the first part is totally correct the second part is totally inaccurate.WoW,Lineage,WAR top ranking MMO's all of them have PvP community as a major target in terms of sales.

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And even so the MMORPG PvP is insignificant compared to PvP in Real-time strategy and first-person-shooter games. (And I'm going to question WoW's PvP being a "major target in term of sales" -- from what I can see, the vast majority of WoW players are more or less casual PvE-ers in their late twenties and over.)


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And this is the reason why you dont see new subs coming.Pve wise there is a saturation.Nothing really new offered that is not already done better than other games.

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I disagree -- the upcoming mission architect is an example of something new PvE wise; and CoH PvE has several aspects which individually are small, but taken together makes the PvE game both different and in many ways better than the competition's. For instance, no other MMORPG comes even near CoH when it comes to allow for casual play.


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They are not the ones that would make PvP side of the game better but attracting more PvPers would.

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And clearly, the previous attempt at a PvP system failed to do so. That the people who enjoyed that form of PvP dislike the changes introduced in I13 is, to be blunt, irrelevant, as they're not the kind of PvPer that's going to make up a significant population.

Is that patent even applicable to CoH? It's been my impression that the CoH server supplies the position information about all players in a city zone to every client in that zone -- you can, for instance, see the target reticule of a team-member no matter where they are in the zone. There doesn't seem to be any "neighbours only" filtering which is what this patent claims. (There is "neighbours only" filtering of mobs, but the patent only covers player avatars, not mobs.)

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All they had to do was leave pvp alone or listen to the changes that were asked for to satisfy the pvp comunity they did have.

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Frankly, as long as NCSoft's strategy for CoX includes PvP, the opinions and views of the existing PvP community is not very important: they are fans of a style and form of PvP that, as far as we can say, does not appeal to the wider subscription base and does not appear to draw new people to the game.

The situation is similar to a flagging bar or nightclub: the views and opinions of the few remaining regulars quite honestly dosesn't matter, because it's not the regulars who are going to rejuvenate the venue and make it profitable again.

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And they had 5 years to realise their vision of pvp for all was going to be a failure, because 95% 0f this games players dont pvp because they dont want to pvp.

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While there is a vocal faction who seem moribound to oppose any kind of PvP, whichsoever, in CoH, I don't believe they're representative of the majority. I think the majority of CoH players hold views similar to my own: I'm not negative to the idea of PvP in CoH, just the current implementation.

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So you are basically saying "screw these guys, we don't need thier money" then?

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I'm saying that I don't see any way in which CoH can both target hardcore PvP-ers and its current subscription base. For all practical concerns, yes, I do believe this means it would be a folly for NCSoft to listen overmuch to that segment.

(And, just for balance, it would be equally foolish of them to adjust the game trying to please the hardcore roleplayers.)

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But casual PvPers are just that, casual. They don't PvP very often. It's the people who PvP regualy who will actually quit the game if the system isn't right, those are the people PvP needs to cater for as it's core market.

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But hardcore PvP-ers are not the core market for CoH (in fact, I'd go as far as to say they're not the core market for MMORPGs in general.) And while PvP is not going to be a deal-breaker for a casual PvP-er, it can still serve as "one more thing" to keep their attention and, with that, their subscription.

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It's the hard core PvPers, who would rather be doing PvP than anything else, who the game has to be fixed for.

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To be honest, I don't think CoH can both satisfy its current PvE-heavy subscription-base and hardcore PvPers. To "fix" CoH in order to please hardcore PvPers strikes me as robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Get in place an in-game, automatic arena league and cup system, with in-game prizes and published listings. Involve supergroups in the system.

Zonal PvP has to be rejigged to be not just balanced for teams but also focused on teams. The decision to go into a PvP zone should be taken by a team, not individual players. For instance, with branching story trees, it should be possible to introduce PvP into regular PvE storylines as a choice to either continue the story as normal in the PvE zones, or branch out to perform story missions or patrol goals in PvP zones for a variant ending.

The incentives, "game flow", bonuses, rewards, wins and defeats of PvP has to be based on the team as the central entity rather than the individual character.

There must be some system put in place to gauge victories and defeats beyond "number of trips to the hospital." Even a simple on-screen counter of "villains / heroes killed in zone" (nulled out every half hour or something) would be a huge improvement, particularly if they also included personal and team kills / deaths.

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Wow I guess GR got some new 'Thread Clippers' for xmas! I would dearly love to know what all the deleted posts were about

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Oh, just a discussion about some photos from the NCSoft Europe Christmas party. Don't know why GhostRaptor decided to remove the links -- after all, he still had his thong on.

Post deleted by GhostRaptor

Post deleted by GhostRaptor

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Also the 25% is people who are pvping often and hardcore. Not including people who go to pvp once in blue moon.

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I seriously doubt the precision of that number.

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In most games now (MMO wise) PvP is just as important than PvE. Due to the potential customers it brings.

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CoH does seem to be an exception, though.

Post deleted by GhostRaptor

While there'd undoubtedly be upside to a forum merge, personally I would prefer that they remain separate. I prefer the more manageable size of the EU forum and that the discussions here primarily take place when I'm actually awake and paying attention. I also prefer the slightly less "Texan" tone of the EU forums, although the US CoH forums are by no means the worst offender I've seen when it comes to tone.

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When BAB did post here he was met with a torrent of abuse.

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I'd honestly label that an occupational hazard and say "Welcome to the glorious world of customer relationship." The abuse BAB received, while unfortunate and not warranted, wasn't "enough to strike fear into the heart of any man and bring despair and famine to the land" either. I don't think it was anywhere near bad enough to be a valid excuse to stop posting in his professional capacity. (Besides, it's not like the US forums are all rainbows and sparkles either.)

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I think WoW thrives through sheer volume of content,

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To a certain extent, WoW thrives through the sheer number of players. There's a network economy at works here: the more players you have, the more "valuable" the game becomes -- everybody has a few friends who play WoW, and that becomes its own draw. I have no interest in WoW as a game, but even so I've considered playing it just to spend some online time with some friends I see rarely.