Lothart

It occurred to me last night they may not know if they have the server resources to handle massive base building or even maintain tons of bases. I wonder if prices are high because they haven't been able to stress test the system using just the Test server population?

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If you keep playing, you will eventually have enough to have an awesome base.

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Actually, that's not true. It is quite possible for a group to reach a stage where they are unable to generate enough prestige to regualrly pay their rent. Now, rent only accumulates for a month so it's possible to skip paying rent for a while until you build a fresh stockpile of prestige...but I think we'd agree this is a potential problem for smaller SGs.

Now, if the hideouts/apartments they are adding in the near future act as an acceptable substitute for the small SG (it would be nice if up to as many as 7 people could share a hideout) then this issue becomes less pressing.

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I think it should have been fairly easy to get at least the first version of a secret base

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it would appear the game's developers disagree.

Now, there are a lot of good reasons why they may have set the prices very high at first with the intention of lowering them later. That may be the case here. I wouldn't get too concerned yet. The devs have already said they'll keep an eye on prices for the first few months and see how far people are getting.

The lack of patience shown by the player base concerns me...

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You've never played Everquest I take it. In all the years I played it there was constant griping about Verant's "vision" all the time. It got so bad they had to shut down their official forums and players gravitated to 3rd party forums. You couldn't have played the game and visited any EQ forum without being aware of the Verant "Vision" debates. What's funny is, anytime someone mentions "Vision" I automatically think of EQ and Verant.

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Then they dropped Verant and dirched the vision and things got much worse.

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AND if a character wants to advance at some point the will need to be turning off that SG mode to earn experience.

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Did you mean Influence? XP gain is unaffected by SG mode.

And most 35s can get plenty of influence by selling enhancements.

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Is your SG capable of making a Worktable so you can consume some of that Salvage into the raw material?

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No, not even close.

Granted the limit is only being reached by our mules, but the limit makes the entire concept of "salvage mules" far less appealing and hurts those people who want to focus on being crafters for their SG.

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A Supercomputer costs 1.5 mil to place... loose that in a base raid as well and you just got a huge chunk of hurt put on ya.

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Is it confirmed that destroyed items need to be replaced at full cost?

Yes thanks muchly.

CoV and I6 will change some of this. There will be crafting for one.

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What happened to good 'ol Icarus anyway?

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I came back, maybe the big I is next...

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To sum up- i deleted my level 50 peacbringer. Thats right! I deleted the second toon i ever really played. Too bad really, I was good at playing her.

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You have every right to take your ball and go home.

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Just because the two games interact with each other, does not make CoV an add-on or expansion pack. IT will be entirely possible to buy only CoV, never have once in yoru life had a CoH account, and get all the CoV content your heart could desire.


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Presumably, since they are two seperate games, one should be able to have their Villian and Hero logged in at the same time (a potential boon to two player households).

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If you play a blaster and you are constantly at the debt cap, you are probably doing something wrong. You may want to play another class. Blaster isn't for you.

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If they are having fuin, then they are not doing anything wrong. Let's remember there are people who deliberately stay in debt at all times to avoid out-levelling content.

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I was using a light-hearted analogy to illustrate a point about human nature--you've taken me out of context. Keep to the subject, bud. I'm not talking about politics or astrophysics, I'm talking about day-to-day observations on a sub-set of people that play this game.

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Awll no, you made a sweeping generalization about how the world works with absolutely no reference to City of Heros at all.

In fact, you made a sweeping generalization defending sweeping generalizations.

Let's look at it again.
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Just because I can't "substantiate" with hard data doesn't mean it's any less accurate,

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Actually yes it does, by definition.

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like in this example: most jerks don't have a lot of friends. Can I substantiate that with numbers? Have I met all of the jerks in the world? No, but from observation one can make these kinds of accurate generalizations.

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So take a subjective term "jerk" an unquantifiable AND subjective variable "number of friends". Then, set-up a straw man argument that somehow you would have to meet all the jerks in the world in order to be able to gather actual evidence to back up your unsubstantiated claims.

And, of course, once you are called on your shoddy debating techniques:
-Accuse ther person who points out the flaws in your logic of nmt having a sense of humour
-Claim you were taken out of context
-Accuse the other person of straying off topic despite the fact your original point was off topic and
-Claim you made caveats in your initial claim you didn't, despite the evidence being quoted in the body of the same message

Do you teach a course in poor discussion technique?

In short: all generlizations are wrong; including this one.

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Just because I can't "substantiate" with hard data doesn't mean it's any less accurate, like in this example: most jerks don't have a lot of friends. Can I substantiate that with numbers? Have I met all of the jerks in the world? No, but from observation one can make these kinds of accurate generalizations.

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This is the kind of logic that kept people thinking the world was flat.

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The balanced vision means that Statesman comes up with the worst ideas (eg Defiance) and not a single developer on the team thinks it's a bad idea: they don't have the courage to bring up anything negative.

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Ok, why is it a stupid idea? If you want to insult people (yep, real live hum,an beings NOT just names you read on the Internet) you should be able to back it up with something.

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Besides, States is clueless anyways.

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Have you designed a commercially successful MMOG? If not you should face the possibility that you are the clueless one.

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Keep fighting that boss on your hand-held, States. Maybe one day you'll look up and notice more and more of your customers are GONE.

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Some of us came back because the game was finally getting close to the vision it was designed under. Maybe more are leaving thatn returning but as long as people are returning the customer base won't be GONE as you so apocalyptically chose to put it.

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CoH is not the #1 MMO that it could be.

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I dispute that CoH could be the number 1 game without being run by a much larger company. There is a price you pay for dealing with the small guys and that price includes delays in implementing all the change the dev team would like to implement. The alternative would be much higher fees for the customer in order to increase available staff resources. That, in turn, would drive more people away and start a downward spiral.

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"Well la-di-da". Good for you. But please realize that EVERYONE is not YOU.

Regardless of what you may think, everyone may not have the time - esp when you consider that some AT's are not considered "worthy" enough to team with. "RU empathy?" gets real old, real quick. Sometimes I can't even get a simple 2-person team together to do one of those stoopid "click 2 blinkys at once" missions.

The way I see it is if I have to waste a quarter of my available play time JUST to get a team together, what's the point of playing?

Respecs should cost influence only. I mean a trial to determine if I can ungimp my toon?

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Good for you. But please realize that EVERYONE is not YOU.

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Respecs are generally for gimped toons, and you want them to pass a trial to be able to ungimp? Where's the logic in that???

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This simply isn't true anymore. Respecs are now a tool that allow people to utterly rebuild their characters once they reach regular milestones. In fact, so many Invulnerability builds were respeccing to perma-Unstoppable as soon as they could that the developers felt they had to change the entire line.

Respecs are not just tools to rebuild broken characters. If they were just purchased with influence you would have people respeccing before every bloody mission. Think you lose time trying to build teams now? Imagine if half your team wanted to respec before every single mission.

One key issue remains toggle dependency on a lot of Tanker builds. If some of the passives were more effective that dependency might be less of an issue...

My earliest experiences with Power levelling were sitting in an alternate dimension bored out of my mind with 4-6 other people while a Spines Scrapper and Emp Defender killed the entire map (save enough to keep the mission from ending) and then repeated.

If a 6 person mission doesn't challenge 2 people then teaming is broken.

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Thats what killed EQ,

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EQ is not dead.

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The problem, Lothart, is not that people are complaining that they can't take on two +4 bosses anymore in the godly manner they used to. They are complaining that they can't reasonably take on one single even conn boss anymore. A rather substantial difference that negates much of your argument.

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I fail to see how when Statesman says in the first post in this thread that 1 Boss=1.5 heroes.

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I don't really think of them as artists (or, at least, I only secondarily think of them as artists). I primarily think of them as product manufacturers or engineers. They aren't putting out a product just so people can appreciate its aesthetic appeal and well balanced theory... they're putting out a product that people are supposed to enjoy.


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And filmakers don't? Or musicians?

I say artist first and foremost, and there is where we have a basic values clash.

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Dwindling? I dunno. Smaller? Yes, but that's to be expected for all sorts of reasons, including competition. Let's assume it IS dwindling though; the game had a high soloability at launch. I haven't seen many changes that increased that soloability, but I've seen several that have hurt it. Why the reluctance to assign the "dwindling" to the shift towards solo-unfriendly gameplay?

And guess what? A lot of these "loyal fans" you're concerned about are on the message boards saying they don't like the changes.

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Just that the industry belief seems to be that people who group and form social bonds in the game world are more likely to be loyal. That may be a myth for all I know.

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Then I hope I don't purchase any games by you.

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You can't at this time. I mostly worked on online web games. One was bought out by a major competitor just so they could close it. One got embroiled in a legal issue and the site owner felt it was not worth the trouble of fighting so closed it.

However, I did have a fair amount of design input as one of the core playtesters on the upcoming WWE: Know Your Role d20 RPG so you may wish to steer clear of that.

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"Not working as intended" does not mean "broken." The Devs might have unintentionally stumbled upon a fun game design. If a feature is fun and the playerbase enjoys it, then I'd say it isn't broken.

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If there was a bug that levelled people to 50 by typing in a word there would be members in the playerbase who would enjoy it. Would you still say that wasn't broken?

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Especially if the fix (the return to "as intended")makes the playerbase enjoy the game less.

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We're miles apart on core values underlying this debate. I fail to see how we can hope to reach any form of consensus.

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That's extremely foolish. You're running a company. You have investors and employees. You have hundreds of thousands of customers who are playing and enjoying themselves, and they've spent at a minimum of $50 each (usually much more) to play your game.

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I'm not a capitalist. The econmoic arguements won't sway me.

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They're having fun as the game is but not as you want it to be, so you'd shut it down. The customer be damned... you want a designer-oriented game.

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I wouldn't shut it down in one fell swoop. I'd fix it and hope it remained viable. Let's look at it this way. If the core design is borked how can I add new content? How can I take any steps at all to balance issues that crop up? If the designers are not happy with how the game plays do you think that's not going to affect the future of the game?
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If you're a game designer, as you say, please let us know which games you work on. I would like to avoid them.

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See above, I have next to nothing on the go right now.

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And that's the part that really baffles me. You fight your way through 22 levels to finally get to that glorious SO-stage. You slot your powers up well, start getting the really cool powers, finally having a sense of being 'super' and all you end up doing is still fighting 3 white minions at the same difficulty as when you were level 1. That's not game-design. That's a cop-out.

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Cons and levels are arbitrary. They're only there to let you knwo the level of challenge a foe presents. a level 50 minion is going to be more challenging than a level 2 minion. But the colour coding of their challenge level is supposed to remain constant. That's the point. How is it a cop-out? How is it different from Challenge Rating in d20 RPGs?
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Level 1 - 3 white minions=one hero.
Level 50 - 3 white minions=one hero.

Where's the progress? Where's the feeling of accomplishment?

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Defeating evil villians? Making the city safer? Badges? Accolades?

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To heck with the design. Make everyone happy by rolling back boss-damage and have people who like more of a challenge put their slider on 'you have got to be f-ing kidding me'.

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Never in all my years of game play have I seen a game improved by abandoning the design.

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Great. That goes to whether the changes are crucial to their "vision" though, not crucial to the success of the game. They could end up with an incredibly successful and fun game that's miles away from their original vision.

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And I don't feel they should. Besides what is a "successful" game anyway? Is it successful if you design and build a game that you are dissapointed in?

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I hope they wouldn't tamper with that success in order to achieve some vision that may or may not work or be fun.

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Like any artist I'd want them to be happy with their creation.
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My point was that the game thrived without the changes. The changes are thus obviously not crucial to gameplay.

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So you dispute that the player base is dwindling? This is hardly surprising yet, at the same time, now is the time to look at who are going to be the long term loyal segments of the player base and start working to keep them loyal.

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Question for you:

If you were a game designer,

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I am.
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and you had two choices to make:

1) One choice provided equal fun for the casual player (through the default setting) and for the hardcore player (through the difficulty slider. The latter is true to your "vision" of the game, but the default setting is not.

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But the default setting is BROKEN. It is not working as intended. This is causing more and more problems for the game.

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2) One choice provided fun for the hardcore player, with a game structure that's true to your original vision. It provides less fun (and at times frustration) to the casual gamer.

Which would you choose? I suspect some would choose the latter. I hope I don't ever play any games run by them. I hope the Devs would pick the former choice.

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First off, you're trying to control the terms here. Hardcore and Casual players are arbitrary distinctions you haven't even bothered to define. Hence, your entire binary choice is invalid.

I would implement the game I designed. If it was not commericlaly viable I would shut it down and move on.

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Why not? This game was wildly successful even without that "vision" being realized, and it's not as if rolling the changes back would negate any longstanding status quo.

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Well, let's see what Statesman has said on the topic:

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3 minions = 1 hero is the desired goal. That's approximately what it is at levels 1 to 22 or so. Past that, heroes become disproportionately

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Ah - this is somewhat unrelated. The game is too easy at higher levels. Larger groups need to hunt higher level spawns in order to find challenge, and therefore fun.

The missions at levels 30+ contain foes -1,0,+1 to the level of the mission holder (or at least the level he was when he received the mission). Those foes are trivially easy for players at those levels. Thus, they go to street sweeping - because the fun is at fighting foes +5 levels - and consequently they receive A LOT of experience points.

The goal (eventually) is to make the +1,0,-1 level spread as fun at 30th level as it was at 10th level.

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If whites/yellow become as hard as reds/purples, then of course we'll increase the XP! Risk=Reward.

While hunting hoards of reds/purples now is fun on the streets, missions end up being that much more boring. Even worse, large groups have nowhere to go to find enough mobs to make the fight interesting.

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Emphasis below is mine:
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I want to make the difficulty of the later levels resemble early gameplay. At first, some players will decry "but I can't do what I used to! Ack! I can't solo two +4 bosses anymore?" True - but they'll have fun battling 3 white minions - which is something you can say at level 15, but not at level 35. Long term, the entire game will sparkle once this sort of balance is restored - because so much of the game design hangs upon it.

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Sounds like it's an important, maybe even crucial part of their design of the game to me.