Oedipus_Tex
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Quote:Originally Posted by Kelenar
Eh, there's still a lot of laziness out there. I've seen plenty of systems where anybody with some decent skill at probability can sit down and prove that two options that should be roughly equal in power vary wildly. (Not saying that this applies to CoH, just that the situation definitely does exist.)
Sure, but proving it in a system you have in front of you versus plotting it from scratch without guidelines and actually programming that while accounting for cost, timeliness, quality control, and value add versus the hundreds of other things that need to get done are two completely different things. It's why I can sit on the boards and say I hate the way archvillains are programmed, but what brought me to this message board today was discouragement over a broken pop up window in one of my own projects.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Combat
Just to be clear, I agree with you Sam, and I actually hated it when CoH was so opaque with regards to power numbers. I had no idea whether "extreme" damage was better than "superior", if x power did something better than y, etc. Real numbers have made the game much better in that regard.
I agree that opaque numbers are sometimes irritating. I think it depends on the game though. It does work better in some games than others (e.g. text based games that might give you an idea of your "rank" with a skill or power with a number, but the results of using it are an abstract "wound" you cause to the creature rather than just "hit points.")
Anyway, the thing about numbers is that even if you are given them, they still don't mean what they say. Unless your game is seriously broken. "95% defense" better not mean "you will dodge 95% of all attacks" or you have a system where there is no variation in the capability of enemies to hit you.
The other thing about numbers is that they lie. This is true of every game I've ever played or had a hand in building. They lie because there is a factor you have modest control over: how often the player comes up against certain kinds of challenges. In an MMO where you can easily avoid enemies that cause you problems most of the time, that's extremely significant.
You see people trying to quantify this all the time by totalling up the number of different enemy types and finding the average of which damage types are most common and which are most resisted. But unless you fight perfectly average volumes of enemies in only perfectly average scenarios, this may not be relevant. A single end boss who is very resistant or very vulnerable to your character could spell curtains for game balance if that enemy shows up in a raid the player has to run frequently and has a high chance of failing (in this game, btw that end boss would be "Archvillains.") The kicker is that this isn't predictable just by looking at power stats. You have to be familiar with the game world, and everyone on your staff has to be on board with achieving the same vision. -
I'm going to straight up rip an idea out of another game for consideration. Some of you might recognize the source, but I won't name it because we're not supposed to mention outside games by name. This is just an "out there" kind of thing I've been thinking about.
Anyway, one system I have seen used to some effect is a "domination" one. It basically works like this: an attacker and a defender each have a score called "Position." The Position value is sort of like "Soft Hitpoints." It is reduced any time you have a very close call with an attacker, get shoved, thrown backwards, use an especially powerful attack that unbalances you (especially if you *miss* a very powerful attack), and so on. However, when you successfully strike an enemy, use certain powers, or are rallied by a teammate, you can build a little Position back up. In game it would be displayed as a meter similar to Health or Energy that rises and falls much more quickly.
Defense and resistance is then treated like this: every attack is checked to see if you dodged first, then for deflection, then for resistance. The amount you dodge reduces the amount that you have to deflect, and the amount you deflect reduces the amount you have to resist. All three of these values are weighted more or less the same, except that Resistance is much less penalized by Position than Dodge is, and Dodge is affected by position loss less often. Thus a character with very good Dodge capabilities is able to survive more or less unscathed as long as she is played fast and nimble, concentrating on keeping her Position high. A Resistance based character is played to take the damage, and while it has some defenses, they whittle away after a few hits.
The real fun comes from some of the weird powers this could create. Super Reflexes, for example, could gain a clickable ability to reset its Position to a neutral value if it falls too low. Ice Armor could have the ability to "anchor" itself and essentially get a large "regen boost" to Position that keeps it from falling too low.
The other thing though that Position lets you incorporate is a slightly more dynamic knockback and knockdown system. Among the rules you can introduce are that you don't get KBed at all until your position falls too low to resist it anymore. You can also add the rule that very strong forces might throw the character backwards, but his or her position dictate that s/he actually lands on his or her feet. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I disagree on a fundamental level, in that I disagree with the notion of "skippable" power. There should never be a power in a powerset that a person can look at and go "That's worthless!" That's not to say that every person should want to take ever power, merely that every person should have to THINK before deciding if he wants a power, and eventually make that decision based on preference, not obvious mechanical inferiority.
I very much disagree that as long as a set works and a power isn't broken-bad in it, then that power is fine. It isn't. No set should be allowed to be competitive with other sets while only taking half of its powers. This makes it a clearly SUPERIOR set because it can have the same amount of performance while allowing you to take many OTHER powers from elsewhere and boost its performance above the norm. Furthermore, no power should ever be so bad that taking it is pointless (ye olde Temperature Protection) just because the set it's in is otherwise competent even without it. This is bad balance.
Everything we are offered to take should be worth taking in and of itself. Not in a "greater than the sum of its parts" set. Not within a set that's good anyway even without it. The power should be good in isolation. Not necessarily AS good as comparable powers in other sets, but good nonetheless. Any power I'm offered to take should make me WANT to take it, and a great many right now don't do that.
This is all easy enough to say. In fact I think everyone who hasn't actually written a game goes into it with the assumption that power balance must be obvious, and must be detectable from the beginning. I'm not a "real" game developer in the sense that I don't make my living doing primarily that (though I do write some small Flash and Silverlight games and worked for a little while on a MUD or two). The unfortunate reality is that real life programing is nothing like commenting on the boards.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but here is the biggest one: powers are not powerful of themselves. They are only powerful in the context of the game that builds up around them. You can build two powers almost exactly the same, but there are still things about them that won't flesh out like you expected. This is a 100%, absolute, rock solid guarantee: you will have powers in your game that end up better than others.
You might say "well I'll just fix the powers that underperform" but even that is a lot (lot, lot, lot) more complicated than most people think about, because a spell that seems to be total crap in one setting can end up outrageously overpowered as characters switch gears as the game progresses. I suspect many gamers think the developers of the world are phenomenally lazy, because they never seem to get balance right. But there is a good reason that no RPG in history has ever been totally balanced, and that's because game balance is not only hard to achieve, the target you are aiming for is constantly moving if your game continues to introduce new systems or content. -
IMO Defenders should retroactively have their AT mezz modifiers changed to the current Controllers values. I have also long felt something should be done about crashing nukes on all 3 ATs that get them; the game they were originally designed for has already come and gone.
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Quote:Originally Posted by HexGirl
The graphics for Barrier, just like the old sonic graphics cause me to have a severe and almost instant migraine, along with rather bad nausea (though that is mostly due to the migraine).
I have been on several teams where someone has it, and the colour variations don't seem to do much to change the trigger.
The other power set that still causes me problems is Willpower. That so called "heart beating" effect that's on "Mind over Body" and "Indomitable Will" cause me grief after about 10-15 minutes worth of play time. Which sucks because I'd love to actually play my Willpower scrapper.
I'm looking for information on this. Is it the fact that the effect is going off so close to the camera? Is it the steady pattern? The reason I ask is that I'm surprised (as I'm sure most effect developers would be) that a shield power would trigger a headache, but the stacking effects of 8-24 team members don't. I have characters that produce extremely dramatic color shifts. I don't get headaches and know very little about how that is potentially contributing.
[PS while we're on it, I think the Sonic bubble graphic is still kind of bugged on low graphic settings. It is practically opaque and extremely difficult to see through.] -
My experience has been that that you can knock them down again only once they start to get up. If you hit them with knockback/down before that animation starts, they don't fall. Specifically, it feels as though knockback locks the trajectory of a creature so that nothing can override it. When you are jumping forward and get hit by a knockback 90 degrees perpindicular to your momentum, you also appear to immediately lose all forward momentum and move in the path of the kb.
With knockdown specifically, you can see this in action with Ice Slick. The enemies sometimes pop into midair and fall again once flat on their backs (hence starting to stand up again) but never pop back upward while still falling toward the ground.
FYI the knockback animation has lower animation priority than some attacks. It isn't that knockback isn't affecting the enemy. What's happening is the enemy started to use a power, and then got hit with knockback while it was still animating. This causes the animation they started to continue and them to move backwards. It looks like they didn't fall because the visuals don't show it, but they still suffer time loss for the knockback (but without added rag doll time from what I can tell). -
Reversal question: If someone joins your league via the LFG tool and you find a player note mentioning they are a dirt bag is it NOT acceptable to kick them? Personally I don't police other players very often or use the rating system but I can think of a thing or two they could do that would make me never want to be in their presence again, let alone lead a large scale event with them around (e.g. a player in another game who once launched into a racist tirade because my avatar had dark skin--future interaction is not even sort of negotiable.). Even in the zone events like Hamidon where I can't kick him/her out of the zone I at least don't have to have him/her in my group.
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Hopefully the OP isn't too discouraged. I don't think any of the folks commenting are out for blood. We do see a lot of suggestions for Dark Control. Some of these suggestions are not bad, even if they wouldn't all necessarily be together in one set.
In terms of patterns for Control sets, I'm not sure if there really are any that are hard and fast. Based on what we can see in existing sets, though, for a set to get a "control significant" debuff (which is what I think of -ToHit as), it is usually paired with soft control. Ice and Electric are the models of that type of set. Also, all of the sets with significant debuff are very low damage. FWIW a power that does only debuff can show up in Control sets: see Shiver, Quicksand, Smoke, etc. Spirit Tree also comes out of nowhere with its Regen boost. The key is that in none of these cases does the set have a lack of actual mezzes of some kind.
(BTW to the question that was asked earlier, yes, some AoE holds do have debuff. Glacier does -60% or something Recharge or so, I am too lazy to look it up). -
Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I'd like to offer a counter-rant:
It's high time people stopped having an opinion and preference and started simply accepting everything they're told that they should like and browbeaten into liking it. Furthermore, they should stop coming to the forums to discuss their grievances, because this is not the place for discussion or statement of opinion. Why can't we simply be happy to be alive, even though the game we pay money for continues to ignore our repeated requests year after year and instead adds more and more things we don't care about. We shouldn't be selfish. We should think of what other people find fun and vouch for that, instead, because we're not here to have fun, after all. We're here to provide warm bodies so that other people can have fun.
P.S. "Complaining about complaining" posts hidden behind obvious sarcasm are getting old.
I like you Sam. If you read my post as an attack then I apologize. But I also think your appraisal of me is unfair. It would take you like two seconds to find a post from me about something I don't like. I have always been very vocal about what I think could be improved. I think it is only fair to be equally vocal with praise when things go right. -
Makes me wonder if soon enough we'll have a Praetorian Invasion zone event like the Rikti and Zombie one. That would be the "coded" version of it, and I see no reason why that couldn't award the badge in the future for the people who don't make it to this.
IMO tho a small event is better than no event. Frankly the people running these things deserve a standing ovation. Having done it before myself as a sort-of dev on another game I can tell you it is enormously exhausting. Anyone with the stamina to run it on multiple servers deserves some kind of medal. -
It's time for a rant.
I for one am tired of coming to this site and seeing that the developers are doing interesting things with the game that make me want to play. I am way behind schedule on a number of personal projects and would greatly appreciate it if the game would be allowed to become boring. I never intented to play another MMO again after my last experience with one but COH continues to release systems and content that are fun, exciting, and different, putting a serious dent in the time I am able to devote to my professional development. In addition, the developers continue to respond to player requests with a speed and efficiency that make it increasingly difficult to hold grudges or throw meaningful tantrums. I'm sure I'm not the only paying customer who feels like this game is on the right track, and that this is the worst thing that could be allowed to happen. -
Quote:Well, it's sort of weird how it works out. It turns out a big part of the reason 45% is often twice as good as 40% is actually that enemy ToHit rarely varies. The hitroll in this game is actually more or less the same as in a d20 game (where normally a 1 always misses and a 20 always hits). The difference in those games is that you pretty much never know much much ToHit the enemy will have, so more defense is always better.
I, personally, find it odd that 45% def is twice as effective as 40%. I find it even weirder that 45% def means that a mob will hit only 5% of the time.
My suggestion for the raids in the current version of CoH was that instead of boosting enemy ToHit across the board, that they stagger the accuracy of individual powers so that very heavy hitting powers are easier to dodge and light hitting ones are much more difficult. That would essentially "smooth out" the soft cap. The real issue right now is that either just about everything hits you, or nothing does.
There are also other ways to make some really interesting results. If we found that Super Reflexes wasn't living up to par, for example, we could throw in a special ability that lets them automatically reroll one hit attack that hit them every 10 seconds.
I also very strongly favor a "Multi Opponent Combat" rating for characters as I mentioned in the thread about what we would want in COH2. This rating essentially determines how much your defense and resistance suffers when more than a certain number of enemies aggro on you. Having a rating like this allows you to still have Brutes and Scrappers and perhaps even some Stalkers who are almost equivalent to Tanker survivability against small groups, but allows the Tanker to shine in more extreme circumstances. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Rigel_Kent
Instead of Aim, the devs attempted to make a set of toggles that switched between equally good modes. They failed. Treat Swap Ammo as a "suck" / "don't suck" button, because that's what it functionally is. Fire ammo all the time.
Do, however, switch between Lethal and Fire when you could use the added survivability of knockback. I agree that Cold rounds should be avoided at all costs though. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
You can argue the devs' intent here is contrary to your preference, but there is no ambiguity about the intent itself. The trials are specifically structured to be open trial zones with the turnstile as the gatekeeper.
I disagree. The gate keeper is the league leader. That feature would not exist if it were not implied that some person is in control. This is to say nothing of the silliness of randomly selected league leaders that the LFG tool produces. I'll never hit that button again as long as there is a chance I might end up leading a raid I had no intention of participating in at that level. -
Quote:Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
Oh, to be sure it couldn't be done now. The more interesting point for me is that the developers tried to offer a choice between forming leagues the "old way" - by gathering at a spot and inviting from the applicant pool until a full league is formed - and the "new way" through the LFG tool, and I honestly don't think that the LFG tool was ever given a fair shake regardless of its own merits because people overwhelmingly chose to do things the way they'd always done them. If solo queueing had been the only way to get into a trial from day one, I strongly suspect we would be having a very different conversation.
More personally, the idea of just dropping myself onto a queue and being shuttled into a trial PUG is exactly what I want from the system. To the nearest approximation it is player actions that prevent this system from working as I want it to, but it was the developers who gave them the choice to reject that option. Sometimes a choice isn't a choice in practice.
There are two places you can find groups of people thrown together at random and forced to deal with a stressful situation: horror movies and reality television. Neither turns out well.
The system would not have worked for the type of content it is being used for. It might fly for something where success is pretty much guaranteed (e.g. a zombie invasion or something) but as soon as you introduce the requirement that players coordinate with each other (e.g. "do this something special to get a badge") and especially when you introduce the possibility that other players can grief/mess things up, it's going to break down. This is not a failure on the part of the players. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Y3kbug
Lot's of good ideas that I won't rehash.
I would have the instance maps be randomly generated. I get bored of knowing which hallway to turn at to get to the same end room to get to the "target" in every mission.
This would be wonderful. I'm not sure how doable it is with current 3D technology though. There is at least one major game out there that has been delayed for 11 years or so, and I suspect this is the major reason.
At the least I wish the interiors had differents levels of fog, wall coloring, global lighting and shadows.
While we're on it, I wish Fire, Electric, Energy, Empathy and a few other sets were lightsources. -
Quote:Originally Posted by baron_inferno
As I've already explained in previous posts, the reason why players are using a central meeting point for these trials is because relying entirely on the LFG queue to form league teams is not a realistic option at this time. More of often than not you will be placed in under strength/sized teams with baffling AT composition. Remember, the LFG tool does not care about your AT, power sets or level shift. It only cares about how much time has elapsed before it decides to dump everyone in the existing queue (whether it is 8, 10, 12, etc) into a league and hope for the best. Such a random system introduces far too many unknown variables into the equation. To be honest, if we aren't forced to launch the trial via the LFG queue tab, I would bypass it entirely.
More specifically: the failing of the LFG tool is that it assumes players are rogue agents all playing on their own terms. It doesn't recognize that the success or failure of a trial depends as much on strong leadership and agreement among the players as to their approach as on the activity of each individual. Recognizing this, most players join pre-formed teams because it gives them a very clear sense of who is in control and what the rules of this particular run are. MOST groups establish these rules before the trial even begins.
As a case in point, one time I clicked LFG and warped into a trial as the team leader. I did not know how to move team members around (and still don't know, despite being told I can "just drag them") and absolutely did not want the responsibility of being the league leader. Rather than deal with it, I just quit and went back to looking for pre-formed leagues.
IMO this would be an unmitigated disaster. I don't think there is enough harddrive space available to the message board system to handle the level of screaming that would happen if this system were put in place. The current "problem" is that players turned out to be much more organized and cooperative than the developers anticipated. Undoing that is perilous, to say the least.Quote:Originally Posted by spitting trashcanFrom my perspective as a person who A) sees randomly assembled teams kicking tuchus all the time and B) does not like to wait for teams to assemble, the LFG queue's failing was that it allowed people to form premade leagues at all. And my preferred solution would be that LFG dissolves any group that enqueues, and assembles new leagues from the individuals in the queue. In other words, that premaking leagues would be completely impossible, and hopefully people would just stop trying and start enqueueing individually and rolling with whatever team results. -
Quote:Originally Posted by kusanagi
... So you want to replace one of the two most common calculations the server has to perform from a simple multiplication to an exponential function and you call it "mathematically easy"?
Well, the current "simple multiplication" is broken as heck. His/her system actually is a lot more reasonable. If it were applied to defense, you wouldn't have to worry that giving a player +5% defense from a power means doubling survivability due to stacking, or that it will do nothing at all because they are over the cap. Its basically a series of dimishing returns.
I'm trying to think through a system of "competitive values" where your target defense numbers mostly have meaning in relation to the enemy you are trying to dodge, but I haven't gotten there yet. -
The LFG tool doesn't work for what its designed to do, and probably never will. The sooner we all come to accept this the sooner I think a valid solution can be found.
Players do not pre-arrange teams because they are elitist. They do it because these events require coordination and leadership. The entire team has to be on board with the strategy or the trial is a potential wash. If random players are a potential liability to the team of course some teams will be reluctant to involve them. The badges for doing or not doing certain tasks in particular are practically guaranteed to lead to pre-forming and a resistance to random adds.
The feature we needed, but didn't get, was the ability to post "advertisements" for teams that are forming. Functionally this is almost exactly identical to spamming global and private channels except without the spamming. Another way to look at it is the reverse of the "Looking for Team" flag. -
This is related to the discussion about things you would change in CoH2. I didn't want to tie up that thread with this discussion, so I started a new one.
[Note: This is not a discussion about actual changes to be made to the existing game. It is only a theoretical discussion about what the formulas could look like in the future.]
Most of us know that the current implementation of Resistance and Defense increases survivability multiplictavely as you approach the cap. For example, going from 40% defense (1/10 chance of being hit) to 45% defense (1/20 chance of being hit) doubles your survivability.
My question is, what should these formulas look like if they are kept in future versions of City of Heroes? Should Defense still be all-or-nothing? What does the formula for defense buffs look like in the future? Can you still stack 10 force fields on top of each other? Is Resistance a competitive value that is determined only after looking at the power of the attacker? Does the purple patch still apply? -
Quote:Originally Posted by ThePill
But then, that ends up meaning that there's no new content for some existing players/characters/toons to take part in.
It's not that the content doesn't exist. It's that they won't do it because they disagree with the scenario (not "story" as some call it) being set up. At least some of the people who have said they hate co-op have also said they avoid teaming, which IMO kind of puts them at odds with being able to judge whether co-op content is effective at its mechanical level.
Anyway, IMO there is no story in CoH. There are scenarios, and they are all basically "There are some enemies here and for some reason you need to fight them." Nothing you do will radically change you, the enemy, or the world they dwell in. This is actually pretty much the conceit of the entire superhero genre, so I don't have a problem with it. Any misgivings should dissapear with the deus ex pop-up message that reveals 95% of the scenario and is just as easily ignored. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
Human players can play together in faction-limited content too. All it takes is a "brb, switching characters." Or you can play Vigilantes and Rogues.
Or, all it takes is having co-op zones so people can use the characters they actually want to play. It's not like people in real life have titles like "Villain" and "Hero" and are physically unable to be in each other's pressence. Co-op content is more realistic than non co-op in that sense. If you feel strongly that your character wouldn't do it, then don't do it.
What is different about this and doing the same thing with a group of heroes? Or, if the character is just crazy, doing co-op content in a group of only villains, or even only-tech characters or whatever?Quote:And incidentally, they often team up specifically to defeat a hero or group of heroes that no one of them can defeat alone
Anyway, the idea of villains PUGs just randomly coming together and fighting stuff in an organized and respectful way is preposterous. You might get a group that is loyal to its own faction, but a team of 8 random villains, especially the megalomaniacal type, would have more drama than an MTV reality show. -
I would focus on core mechanics. Graphics are usually correctable over the long run (even though few MMOs have been willing to be spend the millions to redo them). Data issues are much more difficult to correct.
Main things I'd consider:
- Change the Defense and Resistance formulas so they are no longer multiplicative.
- Allow the possibility of "partial misses" to take the edge off of full hit/full miss mechanics.
- Scale back the power of "alpha breaking" AoE control powers.
- Change Confusion powers to give enemy chance to attack players or allies (not just swap sides).
- Eliminate toggle dropping from mezzes. (IMO the mechanic is much too brutal, and forces the developers hands in just making most melee characters completely immune to the effects to compensate.)
- Combine the Defender and Corruptor ATs.
- Eliminate the Hasten power. Reduce the effect of Recharge reduction enhancers. In turn, reduce the base recharge of most powers to a more reasonable level.
- Remove aggro cap. Replace with following rule: every enemy after the 16th reduces your defense and resistance by 1%.
- Change AI for enemies inside instances to always chase players they see rather than allowing them to run by.
- Super Speed grants invisibility only while moving.
- Reorganize all Controller sets so that the pet comes no later than level 12. Level 32 power becomes a flavor power (Bonfire, etc). Wherever possible, no set would need to power level up to a "crutch" power located late in the set's lifespan.
- Stalkers gain single target debuff powers (no reason this can't work in game as is).
- Tankers gain an inherent ability that reduces the max number of targets a power can hit by 5. Two Tankers in a normal cone or three in a standard AoE essentially neutralize it. This provides an incentive to bring more Tankers and also allows developers to ratchet up AoE damage while providing an out.
Things I would keep:
- No "power trees." Maybe it's just personal taste, but I despise having to pick up "prerequisite" powers to unlock stuff further down the tree. The pool powers are tolerable, but a whole game based around trees isn't attractive to me.
- Super sidekicking. In fact, every MMO should have this.
- Continue to focus gameplay around fighting huge, Gauntlet-like groups rather than difficult individual mobs. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Yes, it's true that a Rogue can travel to Paragon City and team with heroes, but a VILLAIN cannot. Yet not only can a villain join in to save Paragon City, but he more or less HAS to, because that's the only content for Incarnate power, all the while never having been given a decent reason why a villain shouldn't be looking for a more self-serving path to it, or indeed why a villain should care about the Praetorian war in general.
IMO the reason to have co-op content is so that the human players can play together. There really isn't more justification than that, just like there isn't one for why you can't bring 9 people into a mission, or why player-controlled Villains can't enter Paragon City even though millions (trillions?) of NPC villains apparantly make a living there.
Anyway, IMO it actually makes less sense for groups of random villains to team up together than a mixed group of heroes and villains because villains are in the business of actively screwing each other over. Some of them might have loyalty to specific organizations or causes, or even some warped code of honor, but if there is any four word phrase that should be a synonym for "murderously dysfunctional" it's "supervillain pick-up group."