Moridin_

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Don't get me wrong, I love grouping, and I wouldn't play the game any other way (personal preference), but when grouped, you tend to end up doing all of the leader's missions, and groups tend to move so fast that you don't get a chance to sit back and read all the content to really get a feel for what's going on.



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I agree. It would be nice if the mission content was a little more in your face. Even as group leader it’s all too easy to completely miss out on what you are doing and why.

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It is true and ONLY true for a balanced team


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Are you suggesting that the problems can be “solved” simply by encouraging unbalanced teams? This changes nothing. What is the point is ever assembling a well played balanced team if there is nothing for you to fight?
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Not every team has the luxury of perfect balance. The teams that have it good are BALANCED teams.


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Unbalanced teams have the luxury of going after weaker foes and turning their mission difficulty down. Weaker teams can easily find situations and activities suitable for the capabilities of the team. Strong teams have no such options. Deliberately creating weak teams is not an acceptable a solution for the lack of content suitable challenging for a team.
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A) You must take into account sidekicks
B) Lopsided teams
C) Gimped builds


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These are already taken into account. There s plenty of room for them to fight lower level and weaker mobs. There is zero opportunity for a good team to go out and find more challenging mobs.

You cannot force strong and weak teams to fight the same stuff. It may have a feel good effect for those who prefer things easy but it simply isn’t fun for experienced players on cohesive teams and these are the people that make or break an MMO in the long term. Sooner or later almost everyone becomes a strong experienced player of quits altogether.

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That's one of the things I really don't understand about this whole mess. They gave us the difficulty slider AND buffed the bosses. Huh? Oh no, don't tell me (like I'm gonna touch it...) the slider only increases the quantity and not the quality of the mobs???



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This only works for solo players. The mission difficulty slider does nothing to fix the problem of mobs being far too weak to challenge teams. (Short of cheats like massive use of status effects, end drains and un-resistible damage)

Currently when you take a team into a mission set at impossible you can get mobs that will be 5 or more levels above anyone who isn’t at or above the level of the mission holder. Certainly this makes the mission harder but it effectively does so by reducing the size of the team since anyone who is below the level of the mission holder is pretty much just along for the ride and except for a few types of defenders can’t contribute much.

The basic issue is this. 1-4 players can take on just about any group of mobs up to 4 levels above their own. These become absolutely trivial with more people then that if you have good players. Raise the level even one more and that group of mobs is now *easier* to solo then it is to attack as a team. In either the solo or team situation the rewards are not worth the time and effort involved.

This leaves anyone who wants to be part of a well played team of more then a few players completely out in the cold except for a small handful of missions where it actually takes a coordinated strategy and effort. But these types of missions and TF’s are very few in number. There are probably fewer then 10 in the whole game.

Without more challenging mobs that fall below the +5 level limit there is almost zero real team content in this game. This has to be a major concern for the devs because what give an MMO longevity and long term profitability is that people keep playing it because of the friends they have made in team situations. The presence of these friends keeps them playing the game long after the game is outdated.

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First, respec is not a crucial game mechanic.

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If it is not a crucial game mechanic then there is no need to prevent a trivial way of obtaining it. If it is unimportant or mundane then provide an unimportant or mundane way of achieving it.



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It is perfectly possible to play the entire game without access to a respect, just ask one of the many people who went all the way to 50 before there even was a respect. Respec is a reward, not a game mechanic, and if you give all the rewards are structured to favor solo play this game is dead.

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Excellent.....

BUT

According to the notes up on the training room, the rollback changes are NOT across the board, but only apply to bosses lvl 25+....so the lower level players have to still deal with nigh-unbeatable bosses?

Hardly seems fair.

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The bosses below level 25 were never buffed up to begin with.

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I will ask, though...can anyone tell me what the future holds now? Does "we will revisit the Boss difficulty after mission abandoning is in" mean that this is something I can look forward to getting back?


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That was certainly my interpretation of it. I.E. that bosses would be cranked back up once people could avoid them completely in solo mission by setting the difficulty slider down, or simply having the mission removed from their list. This way people who wanted the tougher challenge presented by the new bosses could have it while people who didn’t want it never had to fight them in a solo mission.

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I loved the boss changes coupled with a maxxed mission slider. At least my controller likes it, My blaster had a difficult time. With that in mind, If the boss changes stay in the old"softer" version, can we have one or 2 more lvls of difficulty on the slider?


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I don’t think this is possible. At impossible you already get mobs spawning at +4, bump it up any more and these turn into +5 and are simply not practical to kill. Even if you can they take FAR longer then they are worth. The purple patch is so long ago I forget the exact numbers but any power you use on a mob gets reduced to something like 25% of its normal effectiveness on +5 mobs. I.E. all damage, holds, taunts and debuffs work at approximately 25% of their normal value. This includes both their effects and chance to hit.

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Personally, the emphasis they placed on solo viability was why I picked up the game. I suspect it's what drew quite a few others as well.


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And tougher bosses that can still be soloed if you do so skillfully and only occur in some missions make soloing non viable?

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And I do have a reason to complain: the portion of missions that WERE solo viable pre-I3 became significantly smaller with the addition of boss changes.


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You were soloing missions that were never intended to be easily soloable, if anything you got more value then you were promised out of the deal.

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Soloists, from the beginning, have had:
SOME missions minus the few in the 30's with an archvillain
SOME streetsweeping.


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And from the beginning you were supposed to have
Streetsweeping
Some missions minus a few with archvillains and possibly some with bosses

As see it you got more then you were given extra not deprived of anything at all. Which is why I suggested is that the real problem was you became accustomed to easily doing things that you were never intended to do solo and now take them for a right.

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In addition to the points I just mentioned (hopefully) showing you how silly this is, missions in no way equal 100% of the game's content. Task Forces and Trials make up a substantial amount. Events, which usually have an Archvillain or at least one of the new solo-unfriendly bosses, make up another portion of he content.


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How many task forces and trials are there? How many missions? Even accounting for the different lengths TF’s and trials make less then 1% of the games content.

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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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i'm guessing you're talking about PLing herders *mainly*, which has nothing to do with teaming being broken or not. plus those who you're talking about are a very specific builds. most of the ATs can't do that.


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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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"I think every Archetype should be able to solo. The reason doesn't matter - just 'cause you're soloing doesn't mean that you should be prevented from enjoying the game."-Statesman-

Street sweeping is not fun for most soloists for any appreciable length of time. It's repetitive, without story content, and therefore not enjoyable as the main solo available activity.


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And how does that contradict anything I have posted? Saying people can solo is not at all inconsistent with his quote on who can/should be able to solo what. It’s only your insistence on what you think you should be able to solo that is in contradiction.

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Most AT's can no longer solo a good deal of the missions


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Bull

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A large proportion of those players who have enjoyed soloing, if the boss buff is left in, will no longer be able to do so.

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Again Bull

The new bosses are still soloable by almost every power set of every AT with the correct power selection and tactics. The only real concern is the lucky one hit that can put many AT’s in the hospital and statsman has already indicated he is working on that.

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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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I think all of have this wonder about someone who shall remain nameless.

You still haven't provided anything short of your own assertion that 1), 2) or 3) were said by anyone. I've been through two threads with you on this very topic, and I have repeatedly asked you to back up even one of your many claims about what Statesman or other devs have said. You have so far provided no backup short of repeating your assertions.


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Then read the thread again. I specifically quote statesman 3 times. He is very clear and specific.

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I did notice you appropriated my strawman accusation and levelled it against someone else here. Nice use of applied knowledge.)


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My aren’t you full of yourself. As it happens I know a strawman when I see it and I have never read a post where you accused someone else of one. Please note I’m not saying it does not exist, this is a long thread and I doubt anyone has read every single post.

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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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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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For example, explain why returning the bosses to their pre-issue 3 state and then sliding the difficulty slider to maximum difficulty won't accomplish what you want out of the game.


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I already addressed this in a previous post.

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Since you just love attributing statements to Statesman (while never providing a direct quote) and using that as the entirety of your argument ... I'll play ball.


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See the direct quotes above where he says flat out that you are 1) not supposed to be able to solo all the missions your contacts give you 2) not be guaranteed to be able to solo a boss, and 3) the ability for everyone to solo means that there is always something to do even if it’s only streetsweeping.

Seriously he says these same things with such regularity can consistency I have to wonder of some of you people even read these forums.

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Do you still say that missions were only ever intended as group content?


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Did I ever say that? If so please provide a quote as I have no recollection of ever saying anything of the sort.

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but god help you if you get one of the hidden team missions or missions with an unannounced boss.


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If this happens it’s a bug. Petition the GM’s that’s one of the reason they are there.
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The fact that the overwhelming number of games for PC are solo games (or solo games, with an afterthough MP component to it), to me at least, indicates that there's a huge market for soloable content.


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It also indicates that it’s far better to deliver solo content in other game formats, which is why any MMO is going to place team content first.


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Which is all entirely beside the point... solo players want, at the very least, missions that can be soloed. If you have content not designed to be soloed, I'd gather most people are fine with that... just don't stick it in a single player mission.


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There are plenty of missions solo players can do. Most people can even solo those missions with bosses in them once they adjust. If you stopped assuming every single mission in the game was a “single player mission” perhaps you would no longer have reason to complain.

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The fact that the overwhelming number of games for PC are solo games (or solo games, with an afterthough MP component to it), to me at least, indicates that there's a huge market for soloable content.


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99% would entail a whole lot more than "some missions" and "some streetsweeping." But nice try.


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Ummm ya it entails more then some missions and street sweeping. That is after all the whole point. The solo content you were promised is street sweeping and some missions. The content the devout soloists have appropriates as their own and refuse to give up is everything that isn’t a task force or trial.

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No, they became outraged when the one area (missions) that everybody should 100% be able to participate in (soloists AND groupers) was unneccesarily changed so that only groups could do all of it. It was bad enough with the missions that have AVs showing up. It's even worse with bosses now.


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missions = 100% of the ongoing content of the game. Making them all soloabel and trivial for groups makes this a nearly 100% solo game. Again it comes back to the point of the people opposing this change thinking nearly 100% of the games content was specifically designed for them.

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Repetition on your part doesn't make it so.


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Nore does such silly comment on your part make it not so. A truth does not become untrue because it’s repeated. Since you seem to have trouble with the search feather I took the liberty of doing a quick search on your behalf and came up with the following quotes from statesman.

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You should always be able to do your own missions alone.

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I never, never, never said that. Many missions ARE solo-able. Many aren't. Bosses, Elite Bosses and AV's usually require help. So if you see any of those on a mission, get help! The mission text indicates this....

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"For the most part, everyone will be able to solo in some situations. Some builds and ATs more than others. But there are some mobs that can be a challenge - bosses, elite bosses, AV's and monsters - where you'll probably want help. Or not."


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EXACTLY. Bosses weren't meant to be solo-able UNLESS a particular player used Inspirations & strategy. Hence, the Help text & tutorial indicate that a player "probably" should get other friends to take out a boss.

Some builds are clearly better than others at taking out bosses.

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The Statesman has stated, recently, that everything in CoH should be soloable for every AT.

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That is NOT what I said. Every Archetype can solo. Everything? Certainly not. Every Archetype, if they don't feel like teaming up, can at least go out and fight crime on the city streets. Many missions are solo-able - but not EVERY mission.

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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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You are horribly misuinterpreting most of the posts in this thread.

What people want and incredibly appreciated about CoH was that solo play was an option.


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Solo play as an option does not mean being able to solo 100% or even 90% of all missions. It means there are always things you can do solo. There are and even if no one could ever solo a boss there will continue to be.

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This thread is about a stated direction that soloing a boss would not be possible. For anyone.


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I have never seen this as a stated direction and it isn’t even close to being true. My understanding is that the devs want bosses to be tough fights that perhaps not everyone can do alone. In fact this has always been the case up until about level 20.

Even with the new bosses almost every single combination of power sets can solo a boss, they are simply no longer pushovers that anyone can take with no real skill or effort.

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having different missions, and a better xp bonus for helping someone clear a mission than for clearing one of your own, that's encouraging.


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First off there are different missions, it’s just that the solo players have been doing team missions like they were solo ones.

Since when is bribing people with xp in order to get them to undertake an overly simple unchallenging task an acceptable way to promote group play? If all you care about is xp then perhaps, but if you don’t find something beyond that you are not going to stay in the game very long anyway.

Promoting team play means providing people with a source of good challenging content to undertake as a team. If that means that you can’t do some of it solo, it is not a big loss as there are always other solo tasks available.

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Such things make people WANT to team up, and reward doing so, but do not punish you for wanting to play solo.


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The way to do this is to provide content of suitable difficulty for a team. The only reason you perceive yourself as being “punished” for not teaming is that you have appropriated the team content for solo play when it was never intended to be.

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One thing: Played a mission [on hard-boiled] just a few hours ago with a single teammate of my level. I counted roughly 6 of each lost boss [Abberant Ermites and Rectors], all of which conned orange [level 15 as we were].

in two cases, they were found in pairs, one instance of which had one clipped behind some crates [he popped through and began attacking us]. needless to say, two sleeping blasters does not a good fight make. we'd already run through our break-frees from the earlier couple of bosses, but managed to take them out eventually. roughly 3 deaths each for a simple "kill the leader" mission; who's named boss... was an LT(headman swordsman) flanked by two Rectors.

I shudder to think what would've happened if we were on rugged difficulty, or post level 25, or more than 2...


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As previously posted there is no real need for greater mission difficulty prior to level 20. In fact at that point things work out very well with the defaults. Go much past level 22 and every fight becomes a quick wipe out for the heroes unless the mobs are using certain

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It was marketed as a team game that was solo friendly. Notice the emphasis was still on team play

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Really? The following quote is taken directly from an NCP soft press release about the european launch put out yesterday.

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Since its release in 2004, Cryptic Studios' groundbreaking massively multiplayer online game has swooped in and seized the public's attention like few others. With its non-traditional setting, a first for an MMO title, and its casual-player-friendly structure, City of Heroes has attracted gamers from across the spectrum and won two prestigious Billboard Digital Entertainment Awards.

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Given that many of the previous generation of MMO’s often required you to commit 10+ hours at a stretch to accomplish anything of significance I think it’s clear this simply means you don’t need to play 80 hours a week to enjoy the game. This is not a comment on either team or solo focus, it’s a comment on fact you don’t need to commit large amounts of time to accomplish anything. Certainly allowing solo play is part of this, but that is very different from saying the emphasis of the game is solo play.

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Since I found Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series to be incredibly boring and repetitious after about book 4 or 5, I've stopped buying those as well.

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<hugs Dasha_Blade>

Thank you! I'm the only one in my group of friends who thinks this way. I'm not crazy!

<runs off cackling wildly>



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You mean you actually know someone who doesn’t think this? I have never seen a single one myself. There are at least 3 books after book 5 where the story line does not advance at all, not to mention new characters being dropped in out of the blue.

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If you can't solo everythign your contacts give you then they shouldn't stop giving you stuff when you come up against somethign you can't solo, forcing you to either get a team or to not do any more missions. IMO, THAT, is what is horribly broken.


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I agree there are times when the contacts are not clear about what you can solo what you may be able to solo and what you cant solo. I would even go as far as suggesting there be a way to give missions back to contacts if they contain tasks you can’t perform solo.

But…

It’s obvious that even when people are given hints that they need a team they simply ignore them. If you go back a few pages you will see complaints from a fire tanker that he has three missions he can’t solo.

One said outright that it had an AV, and he apparently just assumed he could solo it until he found out it resisted fire.

One told him outright that he should bring along teammates.

He said the third gave him a follow up mission with an AV with no warning. My recollection of this arc is that the AV was hinted at.

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AS for solo versus team difficulty, they had a very nice system in place already where the difficulty of a mission ramped up considerably based on the number of people entering it.


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My experience was that unless you were dragging along 3-5 team members that were well below the level of the group most of the missions were still very easy.

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No, it wasn't. It was marketed as a MMOG that was solo friendly, unlike most MMOGs that ARE team games.

Most of the ads I've seen say something to the effect of "Prowl the streets as a lone wolf hero, or join a supergroup to combat evil."


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I have never seen a single statement by anyone form NCsoft or Cryptic indicating the intention of placing solo play before team play in City of Heroes. BTW, even an average character can still prowl the streets solo and do a large number of missions solo so even the current situation far exceeds what they have promised in terms of solo play.
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This is your opinion. Please don't state it as fact. In my opinion, there wasn't ENOUGH emphasis on solo play, and there still isn't.


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Yes it is my opinion but it’s an opinion consistent with every post Statesman has made on the topic. He has said outright on several occasions that people were soloing things that rightly should have required team, and that he considered it a serious problem. If you want a solo game there are much better ways to go then an MMO, the fact that few exists simply indicates the market demand is small.

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Your premise was wrong, and so is this conclusion drawn from it. I can tell you that this game would lose many, many players if solo play was reduced to a insignificant "degree" of the overall gaming experience.


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This is a strawman. No one has suggested solo play be reduced to an insignificant part of the overall experience. This is entirely different then suggesting team play is the first focus.

It is becoming more and more apparent that the real source of much of the discontent is coming from solo players who have appropriated 99% of the games content as their own despite the consistent position of the dev team that this was a team game first and foremost. These people then become outraged when told that not all the content in the game was aimed at them.

Clearly given very consistent message from cryptic and the dev team this is a misconception on the part of these solo players, nothing more.

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Let’s face facts here. In the long run a subscription based MMO cannot survive catering to a solo audience because it offers nothing that you can’t have in a standalone game. This means team play needs to come first and have greater scope then solo play. This isn’t to say a degree, even a large degree of solo play is not a nice addition, but it cannot outweigh team play.

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I disagree very strongly. It can continue to survive by continuously offering new, excellent, immersive content. At some point in time the technical engine will end up being dated (Ultima Online, etc.), but there is a very long timeframe involved there, especially now that increases in computing power have slowed down.

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It’s cheaper to do this in a standalone game because there is no need to run an expensive infrastructure. In fact standalone games open up the possibility for mods which greatly enhance the amount of content available. If a subscription MMO went against a standalone game for this market it would get killed, thus every MMO works in team play first then hopefully tries to accommodate those players who wish to solo.

In any case this discussion is moot. Your vision of a subscription based single player online game is completely at odds with the frequently stated vision of the developers. It simply is not what this game was meant to be.


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City of Heroes, as it existed in I2, presented enjoyable solo as well as team play, after all.


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Not particularly. Team play has not been anything near great since the purple patch.

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3. The missions are _single player content_ not group. The second you do them as a group you end up re-doing the same missions for different people which really hurts the "suspension of disbelief". If you like the story then it runs better when you ignore the rest of the players.


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This is completely mistaken. Missions are all the standard content and storyline for both teams and solo players. Other activities like task forces and trials or the extra-difficult content to give well coordinated groups and a planed activity that offers a very high level of challenge. As such they make up perhaps 1% of the team content and a fraction of a percent of all the content in the game.

With this in mind it should immediately become apparent that being able to solo everything in the missions your contacts give you is horribly horribly broken for a team oriented environment like an MMO.

I do agree that tough to solo content should be better labeled so solo players do not end up with tasks more suited to teams but under no circumstances should you be able to solo everything your contacts give you.

Here is something to give some people a little perspective. Prior to the purple patch some of the best fun to be had in this game was going after a spawn that had a boss or two 8 to 10 levels above your own. It took a well played well constructed team, but when you could do it, it was amazing. It felt far more heroic then anything you can do in the game now.

Lets face it wiping out masses of weaklings who pose you no real threat is fun from time to time but beating on someone who can’t fight back is not heroic in any way shape or form.

The new bosses are simply the old bossed +1 level. This means that a +3 boss is equivalent, or perhaps slightly weaker then a +4 boss prior to the purple patch, but back then people were routinely taking on much tougher bosses then that. This means that there is still a lot of headroom left, people just need to rediscover those skills instead of resorting to simple attack it until it’s dead.

I understand the desire for immediate gratification, but making things easier seldom makes them more fun in the long run. Doing something difficult far outweighs will provide much more satisfaction and enjoyment then simply doing something easy over and over and over again.