Lothart

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I didn't make my point very clear there.

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A common hazzard of text based communication. People accuse me of being "nitpicky" or obsessed with semantics but the fact is without absolute clarity in text you will be misinterpeted and that wastes time and energy for everyone involved.

It's not a problem that will ever be solved, only alleviated. Kind of like game balance.

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I was more trying to point out that if you want to fight an AV now or after the changes that will require a team, and if you have a team the Invincible spawns should be more than doable. It will be a pain to force an AV spawn in some cases, but overall I think that will be less annoying that the current system.

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Ok but I still don't want to kill an Elite Boss, get a mission complete message and suddenly realize I've missed my chance to fight the "real" version of that mob.

And make no mistake, in my mind the AV version will always be the "real" version and I won't feel I can claim I've fought that mob until I face the AV version. With the current system my 38 could at least invite a 50 and pummel the AV into submission (and amazingly, get XP if I kick the 50 after they enter the mission but before we finish the fight - talk about an exploit!) and feel I beat the AV even if I needed serious help to do it.

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Only because I am assuming/hoping the AV spawn will set when the mission is begun not halfway through it.

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If that is true then AVs will spawn differently than regular mobs. You can test this in any mission with an elevator. Clear the first floor and then invite a bunch of people to the group. Once they enter the mission proceed to floor 2. You'll be facing larger spawns appropraite to whomever was in the mission map when you enter the radius where the computer generates mobs for a given spot on the map.

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Doesn't an entire instanced mission spawn at the moment the first team member enteres the mission?

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Not any more. Mobs now spawn based on the group composition when you first reveal that spawn of mobs.

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If fighting AV's is the only reason you level up a character why is it a big deal to fight them on Invincible solo?

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Because I can't fight the standard spawns solo on Invincible. Nor do I feel I should be required to in order to face an AV.

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I think the changes allow for more options in play style.

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If you go back to my first post in this thread I explicity stated I'm not asking for these changes to be repealed. I don't like them, but I respect the developer's right to make them. I simply see it as another in a line of decisions made that take the game away from its stated designs and I have never had a good experience with a game that does that.

All I've asked for is:

-Clear mission text so I know in advance what I need to do to ensure I ever see an Elite Boss when I really want to see an AV.
-A significant reward for AVs that is significant even if one is at the level cap
-A mechanism to prevent me from spending the time to gather the appropriate group to spawn an AV only to have someone drop mid-mission and thus prevent the AV from spawning when we reach the point where the team size is checked to determine if an AV spawns.

I don't think any of these requests are unreasonable, hard to program or contrary to the spirit of making the change in the first place.

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And before you say that PFF could also be on the chopping block (it probably will be at some point), there are other no-risk exp examples, that I decline to mention for a variety of reasons, but will in PM if you like.

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I'm all for removing all of them.

Doesn't mean I don't want the most obvious ones fixed first. I don't expect the devs not to fix a single thing in the game until they can fix every single thing in the game. Nothing would ever get done.

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But the point remains is that stealthing glowies while Statesman believed that to be a problem, given the design goals he has announced it is not a problem.

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Design goal "risk=reward". I fail to see how this is not a step towards that.

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in this case, i'm gonna have to say yes, it does mean there wasn't a problem.

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Well, that's not your call to make.

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That won't solve the problem, though. Usually when an AV/Hero appears in an arc, it's not in the first mission, it's later on. If you're not warned about the AV/Hero from the very start, you can end up stuck with an AV/Hero mission later and not be able to not only to clear the mission, but the arc.

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That's not the problem I'm referring to. I 'm referring to, post-change, having to check each and every missions I am about to start to make sure I have a large enough team that I /do/ spawn the AV.

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And since there's still no way to drop a mission, you're stuck, without forewarning.

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That's coming.

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But design isn't something that's set in stone from day one. It evolves as the game proceeds (which is why playtesting is so crucial). In any case, when you face Antimatter, you're still facing Antimatter, just the Elite Boss version rather than the AV version.

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That's not the same to me. If I want to run a marathon I'm not going to run a half-marathon and claim I've run a marathon.

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As a game designer myself I want the implementation of a game to match it's design.


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I don't see why you'd want to face the version that requires a team rather than the version that doesn't. AVs weren't designed for solo players, so citing original intended design seems a bit odd to me.

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And AV missions were not designed to be soloed. That's the design I'm referrring to. They are meant to be teamed. I will now have a harder time getting teams but I'll just resign myself to that. I /like/ getting the call "Need help with [insert AV here] rest of mission is cleared please come help" and I expect I will never get one of those tells.

If designing AV missions to be grouped was a poor design choice then the devs are now abandoning their core game design due to complaints from the player base. I have never seen that end well.

There are people out there who can both design and implement good games. If Cryptic can't do that they have no business running an MMOG.

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Then I apologize for the first part of my statement then. I do believe that the Devs sometimes need to take the attitude that if its not broke dont fix it.

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The fact remains they define what is broken, not the playerbase. I'm sure there are MANY things they consider "not broken" and don't fix in every patch. The playerbase might disagree with them on it not being broken but it's the developers' call to make.

After all, if they fixed everything that wasn't broken they'd have to fix everything.

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Improve Yes!

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Again they define improve. Not us. Which is good because we can't agree. ED, to me, improves the game. To many others it does not.

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Out of curiosity, why is the original intent relevant?

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As a game designer myself I want the implementation of a game to match it's design.

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Excellent choice, miss.

And for dessert?

Perhaps you'd like to try the creme brulee.

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Would you like a mint?

It's wafer thin.

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How is seeing an Archvillain with a full team *better* content than seeing the same character as an Elite Boss when you're solo or in a small, low difficulty group? I expect the difficulty of facing an Elite Boss solo is comparable to facing an Archvillain with the average team, especially the average team which is planning on facing an Archvillain.

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It's not about difficulty as much as it's about being able to play the game as it was designed on the level if difficulty it was designed for.

I want to beat Archvillians. It's one of the only reasons I bother levelling up characters.

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I think some people are confused, with the idea that they won't see the character at all, but some other Elite Boss. I'm certain that that isn't the case.

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No confusion here.

What I don't want is to get to the end of a mission, meet an Elite Boss, realize that I need to recruit a team and reset the mission to face that Elite Boss as an AV, the way I was originally meant to face it, which now means I earn nearly double the XP for that mission. That's a serious problem if I'm already outleveling my contacts.

So, I'm left with the choice of continuing and taking the "easy way out" or I'll have to keep redoing my missions.

Again, all of this will be solved by adding explicit text to the mission briefing before I accept the mission. Cryptic has a mixed record of doing this on mission text for AVs, simultaneous clickies etc. so I want to start asking for it NOW.

A copy of this message has been sent to Statesman via pm.

Dear Statesman,

Thank you for designing an excellent game. This is my first pm to you despite numerous forum posts. I don't bother busy people like yourself frivolously so please understand I consider this issue important.

Regarding:

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AND now...we're changing the way Archvillains spawn. A ton of forum goers disliked adding so many AV's into missions a while back...so we've come up with a solution. If the team size and mission difficulty are ABOVE a certain level, an Archvillain spawns. Below that, players will face only an Elite Boss. If the mission is set on the first two levels of difficulty, it takes 4 heroes or more to spawn an Arch Villain. On the third level, 3 heroes or more. On the fourth level, 2 heroes. On the highest (Invincible), a solo hero will spawn an AV. Note this works in BOTH City of Heroes and Villains.


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Let me say I realize I am likely in a minority here but I deeply dislike this change.

As a player who solos many missions I still want to be able to encounter Archvillians. Under the current set-up I will find those Archvilians when I take the missions they are in and then be forced to find a way to deal with them. I like this.

Under the new set-up I will be forced to research every mission I take, in advance, to ensure that I have enough people and/or a high enough difficulty to see that AV.

This raises a number of questions in my mind:

1) I thought Heroic was the base level of the game. Why do I have to increase my difficulty to experience the base content in the base game?

2) When will this check be performed? When I accept the mission? When I zone into the mission for the first time? Or when I reach the point on the mission map where the AV/EB will spawn? If I have an appropriate sized team but someone link dies or drops just as we are about to spawn the AV will I have to reset the missions? If so, won't I outlevel my contacts even faster than before because I'm now being forced to both raise my difficulty, pad my teams and quite possibly redo missions multiple times if I encounter an Elite Boss and want to upgrade them to an AV?

I am not asking that this change be reversed but I am asking for the following:

1) mission text for any mission that could spawn an AV needs to state that directly and explicitly so that I know I have to round up more people in order to spawn an AV.

2) AV spawning/not spawning needs to lock the first time the mission entrance is clicked so that if someone drops and the rest of the team wish to try to continue anyway they still face an AV. Otherwise they can reset and face the EB. I feel the onus should be on people who seek to avoid the AV rather than the people who seek to face it and this will help with that.

3) The bonus for fighting AVs should be significant. even to a character at the level cap. Significant enough people will hopefully dust off retired level 50s to rerun old storyarcs with new people.

Adding these, hopefully minor, features should go a long way to mollifying the concerns of the people who were not calling for a change.

Thank you for your time. I would be happy to receive a reply but understand if the sheer volume of mail you receive makes this impossible.

Still awaiting details on this...

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This is unrelated to anything about the discussion, but for the record, Your avatar causes me to superimpose Stephen Colbert's voice on everything you type. ;p

It's a good thing!

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I'm hoping it will help people "get" the tone I'm taking with most of my posts.

Anyway, thanks!

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No offense, but focus groups are next to useless.

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I'm going to have to disagree with you there.

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They were concieved as a way for corperations to generate statistical models without all the cost of, y'know, generating statistics.

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No, they weren't. Anyone using them for such is violating the codes of the entire industry.

Focus groups are qualititative research. They are designed to establish the breadth of range of opinions that exist concerninga given topic. They are not quantitative research they give no insight into how commonplace those views are in the general public unless thos views are nearly universal.

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Their functional value has -always- been dramatically overrated.

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In fact, I'll actualy agree with this. Many people use them incorrectly. That does not mean, however, they are useless when used for what they are designed to do.

There are just too many ways that people differ from each other for a small number of people to speak for a large number of people.

Nor is that their purpose. By carefully crafting your group(s) composition to target as wide range of respondents you inherently skew any chance they offer a numerical representation of the population. People who try to do so are wasting their time.

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The only way to get reliable data is to poll a significant number of people. The more you poll, the more likely your data isn't being skewed by personal quirks.

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Yes, but you can't design your poll in the first place until you have a sense of the range of opinions you need to test.

A focus group with CoH players will tell you, for example, that some people feel they level too slowly in CoH while others feel they level too quickly.

A follow-up survey will then establish how many people in the player base feel one way, feel the other or have no strong opinion either way.

But to simply design a survey with no foundation to design it on leaves that survey instrument vulnerable to missing critical questons, or phrasing those questions in a way that skews the results, or bias by the designer.
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Modern psychology just is not effective enough to categorize people in the way Focus groups try to.

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Again, you have an erroneous view of what focus groups are designed to do. But I can't say I blame you since they are often misused in just the way you describe.

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But then how would they form your focus group..

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Through recruitment screening and pre-selected demographics. It's kind of complicated and since I do this for a living I could write several pages on the subject that I'm sure no one would care about.

For once, I won't.

The problem with ther forums, as is often pointed out, is they contain a small, self-selecting portion of the player base and cannot be considered representative.

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The real question is, are we going to be loyal enough to stay when the next Hero MMO comes out?


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By then I expect I'll have taken a hiatus, returned and probably be on another hiatus.

Another superbeing themed game would have to be FAR better than CoX to encourage me to start over in it.

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If they asked me I'd rather spend part of my own money to sit down with Jack and Crew face to face to talk rather then rely on getting my opinion right in online surveys and chats.

A chance to say "Here's what we're doing" "do you mean A?" "No.. not quite A... more like B" "Wait, but isn't B like C?" "No, no.. more like A". "A?". "Yeah"

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A focus group is not an online survey. It's a meeting between a small number of people specifically recruited to meet a pre-defined range of demographics and/or psychographics. It can be done live, or in an online chatroom type environment. The meeting itself is conducted by a neutral moderator with an agenda of items to discuss. It allows the free and open exchange of ideas you seek without the developers being stuck in a position of having to defend themselves OR the people involved being potentially intimidated in their presence.

Focus groups are often a good way to help refine questions for a survey to be conducted later but they are in no way the same thing.

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I suggested once a player/developer summit and I think this whole rent thing is a great example of why we need to do them. Get some players to sit down and have a verbal dialogue, person to person with the developers rather then relying on the boards and PM's to figure out what the H is going on.

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Or hold a few focus groups, they really aren't that expensive and can be conducted online these days, especially with an online savvy consumer base.

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Do you seriously think that most players will turn over their saved prestige to their SG.

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I'm guessing you meant INF?

Yes. I've seen uber guild mentality at work in other places.

Heck, I nearly cashed in a million the other night on a viurtually inactive hero SG just because I had no other use for it and it would have been enough to add one more item to the fledgling base I'm working on. That's on a toon with 2 million Influence in total. Now, imagine someone with a billion+

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I believe I mentioned during test that at the rate we were getting prestige vs. salvage that prestige is far and away the bottleneck to building the base.

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A very keen insight, save for the absolute rarest salvage items.

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I'm still hoping (it is only hope, no word at all about something like this) that the devs released the bases with "super conservative" settings just to avoid problems if people found a quick way to earn prestige and maxed out the bases before the devs realized it.

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I also think they had to be concerned that the large CoH SGs who potentially had billions in stored influence would convert it all to prestige and gain a huge headstart on the villain groups.

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And Statesman (the living oxymoron) told us after i5 that "We are done making major changes to powers." Of course, he didn't SPECIFICALLY SAY that ENHANCEMENTS wouldn't get nerfed later! So, of course, he was just telling us the truth. Sure he was. But at least his later apology for the “confusion” made it all better. Sure it did.

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Show me a link to where he said that.

He said power sets which is a very different term than powers but, as Statesman himself pointed out:

"I love it when people quote every third of my words and then try to interpret what I mean. Cmon people Im just sitting here at the computer making a post."

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i bet you stuck with E&B until they literally unplugged the servers

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Nahh, I just play a lot of sims.

Total Extreme Wrestling, finances are a key part of the game
Civ? Maintenance costs for units and cities
Tradewinds 2? Constant repair costs
EQ2? Rent
Raw vs Smackdown 2006? Even in a PS2 game the GM mode requires paying salaries!

Never heard of E&B

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I dont play games to pay bills.

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That's funny (meaning odd), because thinking about it I'm hard pressed to think of many games I play where I don't have some form of bills to pay in the game itself...