Samuel_Tow

Can someone explain to me what the NGE is? My spider sense tells me it is somehow important here.

Personally, I feel Free players should not only get their own channel, it should be a channel where Premium and VIP players can chat, as well. Free player announces he's looking for a team but neglects to say which side of the game he's on. VIP player asks, free player responds, VIP player sends an invite. Everybody wins. I furthermore believe that Free players should be allowed to send tells and team invites, but only to other Free players.

I suppose that could cause Free players to get spam from time to time, but then again... Who the hell sends spam to FREE players in a FREE to play MMO? They aren't a cent for their game, do you really expect them to pay stupid amounts of money to shady dealers? Why spams Free players?

My biggest desire is to let Free players have as many of the basic rights of Premium players, but restricted among themselves. Chat, trade, invite, friend and so on, these need to be open to all players. In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest Premium and VIP players be given the option to flag themselves as accepting chat and invites from Free players if they so desire. I would, at least to try and see what kind of chat and invites I get.

You can do multi-quotes by marking all posts you want to quote and selecting "New Reply." The forum software will dump all posts in the order in which you flagged them. I find this incredibly helpful when I want to quote multiple people or multiple posts from the same person. Not criticising you, just saying it's there if you need it.

And I can get tired of trying to put on a happy smile in front of everybody who makes it their business to tell me I complain too much or I don't like anything and so on. I'm not a waitress in a diner. I don't get paid to take your order with a smile.

And like I said - if I get pissed off, I generally say nothing at all. I'm not sure where you get that "sarcasm" and "gloom" from. Those I discuss with people I actually like to discuss things with, not with whoever is tugging on my nerves right at that moment.

And that accomplishes what, exactly? Talking to people who will not listen does not work. I call them "two-dimensional idiots" for a reason. I ask them, nothing happens. I tell them, nothing happens. What are my options? Kick them? Let them get themselves killed and not rez them? How is that different from simply going solo? If I'll be removing all the people who piss me off, that's what it comes down to anyway.

And besides, why do you seem to define "leadership skills" as "the argumentative intolerant person who just happens to have the star?" Because I've said this before - having a star by your name means precisely nothing. The leader of the team isn't the starborne one, it's whoever is doing the most to hold the team together, keep the team motivated and look after the team's well-being. The position of leader is not one of power, it is one of responsibility. Whoever happens to be leading a team has the responsibility to look after his team-mates and ensure they're having fun.

The type of leadership you seem intent on chastising me for not adopting is the kind of selfish, self-centred reason I play by myself anyway - because I want to do my stuff my way at my own pace. That don't work on a team, because I'm not teaming of bots to whom I can issue commands. I team with real, actual people who play this game and joined my team, ultimately, so that they could have fun. I'm never going to put a team together just because a task requires an arbitrary number of other warm bodies to start or complete. If I ever team, it's for one of two reasons:

1. Because I genuinely want human company at this particular moment
and
2. Because the game leaves me no option whatsoever

I vocalise my concerns. It doesn't work. Unless I want to make a scene and antagonise everyone and anyone - and I can - starting an argument with a team member or a team leader is not productive. I've had enough experience with people who will never hear anything but what's immediately in their head right now. I have to put up with this every time I speak with my brother, because if I don't say exactly what I'm supposed to, he freaks out and makes a scene, and then my mother is caught between her two sons not knowing what to do. And I don't want to do that to her.

I've often said it here on the forums that "reason is lost on the unreasonable," and this has held true every single time it's come up. Sure, some people are open to suggestions and even to convincing. I've been lucky enough to run I think three Bastion TFs in a row where we didn't stealth anything. And not for lack of desire. The team leader specifically asked what we wanted to do, some didn't care, some wanted to ghost, I asked that we kill stuff along the way because I'm here to kick *** and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of *** or something to that effect. And the team leader and a few team-members agreed. No harm, no foul.

I start confrontations when I feel there's a point or I feel I need to stand up for what I believe in. I don't start confrontations with team-mates on whether we should stealth this mission or not when they're calling my sexual orientation into question. No-one's going to convince anyone of anything. What the team as a whole decides will happen will happen. If it's what I like, great. If it's what I hate, I always have the option of simply leaving. No TF that I can recall is long enough for this to be tragic, and the players who run the long ones usually come with patience anyway.

This actually ties into something I've taken to doing on the forums, as well - ignoring people. It took a few years for me to recognise that there were a few people who were immune to being argued with and speaking with them was just pissing me off while accomplishing nothing. So I ignored them and I never want to know what they have to say ever again. It's made the forums significantly more fun for me since, making me surprised how it could be a handful of people making it so horrible in the first place. This has taught me that there's no point in starting confrontations when there's nothing to be gained. If it gets bad enough that I have to leave a team unless I make a scene, then I'm leaving it after I make it anyway, so what does that accomplish?

Some people can be reasoned with, and teaming with them is great. Some people are not open to suggestion, but are upfront about just wanting to do their thing. I can respect that, too. Some people, however, only care about their team-mates as an inanimate resource to help grind more stuffs, and these people I simply don't want to team with if given the chance. Which I not always am.

Nor is Greenwich Village a village. Your point?

But herein lies the problem - I don't make for a good leader. I've tried putting teams together for TFs, but I've rarely succeeded at them, and to be quite honest... I don't know what I'm doing wrong. If I put teams together, it's with friends of mine who happen to be online, and considering how many of my friends have sailed away to other games, that usually means a duo with one other person.

It's sort of a no-win situation. I'm not good with organising events and leading people, so by nature I'm drawn to random game joining as that does the building and organising for me. At the same time, random game joining is a pure crapshot as to whether you'll have a good time or not. Teams with friends are almost always good, but I don't have that many friends left, and the ones that are still here always schedule weird events, like "All Saturday we'll be collecting Flashback badges."

Like I said, single player missions are the one thing which never lets me down Well, has never let me down since AVs started scaling down to EBs, anyway.

Something like this I can definitely get behind. Adding more Lore pets, disabling the ghostly aura, adding more Judgement powers and so forth, all of that stuff is great and I support it completely. More options within the existing system is always a good thing. It lets us make our characters closer to what we want them to be while still fitting within a working game system. It's when we start trying to rewrite fairly fundamental aspects of power balance that I begin to grumble.

Extra Credit have often given City of Heroes screen time and praise, though most of the time it's just off-hand. For the most part, screenshots or name-drops from the game are used as examples of good design, even when they barely relate to the context of what's being said.

I was there, as well, and the split in the playerbase was far larger than you make it out to be. Sure, most of the existing City of Heroes players bought City of Villains. We were already paying $15 a month for the thing, why would we not get the first expansion in what must have been 18 months at the time. The inverse, however, is not universally true. Of the people who got into the game with City of Villains, not nearly as many actually bought City of Heroes. In fact, City of Villains got its own forums, full of bitter, angry souls who insisted that City of Villains was a separate game and should be getting separate content and swearing up and down that they would never play City of Heroes if you paid them and that people who played City of Heroes were alternately spoiled brats or trolls who went to "their" boards just to taunt them and all sort of hyperbole like that.

This severe, significant split in the community is easy to remember now, simply because when Jack Emmert sold out, NCsoft gave all existing subscribers both City of Heroes and City of Villains for free, so everyone now has both regardless. We're a single community which plays, or at least appreciates both sides NOW. But I've lost count of how many times people tried to insult me with derogatory derivatives of "hero" and how many times I had to try to convince people that no, really, I honestly do play both heroes and villains. And this never seemed to sink in with people, because they only had either CoH or CoV, sour grapes caused them to become radicalised for their own side and against the other and many stupid arguments were had over which is better.

Even to this day, as a point of fact, you'll see people complaining that "devs hate villains" and that villain-side needs more content and more zones (which it does) and that co-op content is just hero-themed content that villains are allowed to participate in it if they don't mind acting as heroes. Hell, I'm one of the people making those complaints, because villain-side right now isn't even half the "size" of hero-side, and what it needs is villain-specific content, not co-op content. But, at least, now that everyone owns both games, we've been handling these kinds of discussions with much less vitriol.

Unfortunately - and this is my biggest concerns - that can't happen. If Free players "enjoy" the same restrictions as Trial players do now, that means they can't communicate with each other via tells and they can't invite each other to teams. The only way, realistically speaking, that Free players are going to be part of the community and not just part of the 50 feet of game space immediately around their in-game character is through the proxy of Premium and VIP players who can invite them and speak for them.

Now, I'm not advocating that we open the flood gates and just throw the whole game at everyone for free, obviously. But I want to see Free players have the ability to at least communicate and team with each other. This has to happen if we want them to stick together. The ability to form teams is not a good thing to sell for real money.

I have considered it, actually, but I'm not sure I could produce enough content to keep such a thing updated. You should have seen my review on the Doom movie, though. Man that thing hurt my brain, and that's precisely the sort of thing that gets me to say the most

Eh, I don't know. The old animation just felt weak. Which is to be expected - it was a buff cast animation. In Power Push it works relatively well because Power Push does terrible damage and because it's a low-key attack. Energy Transfer is, I think, the single biggest melee attack in the game, not counting Assassin's Strikes, and that thing deserves a big boom. I actually like that the power is slow, because this gives it time to be theatrical, almost like my character stops to yell "My power level is over 9000!!!" before delivering a massive, explosive hit. I love it

But that's my love for aesthetics trumping my desire for efficiency, which is kind of what gets me in trouble with team-mates a lot. I used to have people scoff at me for not having Stamina before that became inherent, and every time I mention not wanting to use Sets these days, I run a 50/50 chance of someone telling me I'm stupid for it or telling me how easy it is and how I really, really should. All that does is make me have to choose between compromising my concepts and picking things I don't like, therefore not having fun, or not being strong and efficient enough to rub shoulders with most players, therefore not having fun when I team with them. Ugh...

That's kind of my problem, though, when all 7 of my team-mates are just in the TF for their reward and they don't really want to do much of it anyway. Me, I'm in the game for the cool fights and the awesome powers. Even on my level 50s, I still clear all missions, including ones that aren't "defeat all." If my gameplay ever turned into doing tasks I don't really want to do for the sake of a reward at the end, I'd see that as a major problem. My ultimate goal in playing any game is just that - to play the game. Rewards, achievements, "wins," all of that is secondary to playing the game. I don't play the game to get rewards. On the contrary, I see rewards just milestones in playing the game.

This, really, is what gets me in a conflict with team-mates so very often. They just want to win at any cost, I want to win in a cool way, and the two aren't always compatible. I want to get off Daedalus' boat, carve a path of destruction along the beach, storm the hill and smash through the enemy defences, attack the Nazi compound, hack their computers then go down the stairs THROUGH the enemy soldiers, smash the computer then go up the stairs to the upper platform and beat Romulus and Requiem's faces on their own home ground. To this day, this has never, ever happened to me. Not even once.

I don't call people idiots to to their faces, and when someone pisses me off on a team, I tend to simply stop chatting with them. I know my conduct here may make me seem like a confrontational *******, but I actually make it a point to never pick a fight with anyone in-game, especially if we'll be stuck on the same TF for the next hour and a half.

In another game, I once teamed up with a player who was TERRIBLE. He walked on spikes for no reason, he never blocked enemy attacks, he got in the face of monsters and ate death lasers over and over again and died all the time. In that game, you can revive people by giving them half your current health. Every time this idiot died in a stupid way, it cost me half my health, because every time he died, I went over to revive him. Until eventually I died, and he never bothered to revive me. And this in a game where dying costs you energy and energy costs real money. I never called him names, I never yelled at him. I did ask him - politely - to not walk on spikes and to use his shield a few times, but that's the extent of it.

Can you see how that might upset me slightly? Not only is that player a pure dead weight and refusing advise and help or even communicating in chat (and how he got to Tier 2 dungeons I cannot say), but he's costing me cold hard cash by doing this. We failed that run, and we failed HARD. When I returned to Haven, I really didn't feel like going back down for another run. I eventually did return, but this time by locking my team to be invite-only so random strangers don't suddenly pop into my game uninvited.

Where do you suspect I went wrong in the above example and what part of the events which ruined my fun was my fault? What more do you suppose I could have done to salvage a player who, from everything he did, appeared to be have ten thumbs? Serious question here.

*sight*
Yeah... Yeah, this is a problem, and one that's been the bane of my existence pretty much the entire time I've been subscribed to this game - not all characters are created equal. In fact, some are specifically and intentionally designed to be weak at soloing so as to make up for the "force multiplier" they bring to a team. And that's a genuine, unpleasant problem that I really have no universal solution to.

To be honest and perhaps slightly hypocritical for a moment: Remember how I talked about never playing Blasters again? Well, I don't and I haven't since. Do you know why I said that? Solo play issues. I found my Blasters died too much when going solo and found far too many things far too hard to defeat. After trying to campaign for making them easier to solo for the better part of seven years, I gave up, deleted all my 50 Blasters and remade them as Scrappers, Brutes and Masterminds. My solution to "it hurts" was "just don't do it," and it's a BAD solution all around. I certainly wouldn't want to tell people playing Defenders or Controllers that the "solo" option still isn't solo for them, even if it's solo for my Brutes and Scrappers. That would be bad.

That's kind of why I'm on flip-flopping on the subject. On the one hand, I can kind of see why this content would have to be hard. On the other hand, I want it to be inclusive to everyone. And on the third hand (yeah...) I never, ever approved of the balance decision to make some ATs measurably weaker on their own because they were better on a team.

Net result? I don't know. Sadly...

I do agree with this, but only up to a point. There's a certain critical time required for team building that you can rarely go under, and solo missions that can be "stealthed" in a couple of minutes will always, always be much faster and easier solo than on a team, even if the team chose to stealth the mission, too. Incidentally, having a team stealth a mission doesn't really take all that much longer, it just tacks on another, say, 30 seconds of ally teleportation, either via Assemble the Team or Recall Friend.

That's why I'm being generous and putting that critical time at half an hour solo. Anything which takes half an hour or more to do solo will always be doable in less time and with less effort on a team. The larger the team is, the slower it's built but the faster it tends to go through content. And, as you mention, teams already have a bonus to experience. I wouldn't be averse to see them getting bonuses in other aspects, as well. Aspects relating to the Incarnate system, more specifically.

Granted, no contest there. However, iTrials are designed to be run with three teams at a time, I think, so their inherent difficulty is SEVERE specifically because they're intended to be tackled by large groups. They're the most difficult content in the game, most probably, but we shouldn't see this "super difficulty" as the base for actual effort and challenge faced, because they're also the content in the game that's doable with the largest mass of people, and that diminishes difficulty quite a bit.

What this means is that if we give a solo or small team option to do with Incarnates, we need to scale this down to something that's appropriate to solo and small teams. More than anything, we need to make sure the thing is even doable by solo players and small teams, because when you plain can't finish the mission, your difficulty and time to completion are infinite. Remember - Trials are hard, but they can be tackled by up to 24 people, sometimes. Solo Incarnate stuff should be SIGNIFICANTLY less difficult than that.

Obviously, I don't want an easier or faster option to Incarnate progress than the teamed one. But I still want one that's a HELL of a lot more realistic than the Shards-to-Threads option which exists right now and, above all else, and above all else an option which revolves around Incarnate-specific storylines.

Going back on my word slightly, I can deal having to grind, say, a bunch of "alignment-mission-like" Incarnate Missions for days or weeks, provided I can get a reliable source of progress for them. Grind within reasonable amounts isn't that much of a gate, since I can always keep coming back to it and chipping away. What I DO want, however, is a path to progression which doesn't have the overhead of team-building, politics and a chain of command.

---

I'll be perfectly honest here - I love big huge mission instances on which I can kill everything what moves (and NPC allies bug me because I can't kill them). Huge Oranbegan maps are my favourites simply because they're huge and jam-packed with enemies, as is that one "Moth Cemetery" old-ish instance. I like them because they constitute fairly simple tasks that I can get into a groove with, because I can go at my own pace, methodically clearing them out block by block or sector by sector or in whatever way I choose to subdivide the instance in my head, and I can essentially keep on making visible, obvious progress. Every time I'm done with a block on an outdoor urban map, I look at the map and there's one more piece filled in, and my brain goes "Yes! We are making a difference!"

All I'm saying is that if you give me at least a relatively large selection of big instances to clear out of everything and everyone and reward enemy kills rather than speeding through to the end, I honestly wouldn't complain all that much, even if it took a long time to do. I mean, it's not rare for me to grab any of the older I2 outdoor instances and spend an hour and a half just clearing it. Make a mission like this, give rewards per enemy kill and you have the perfect environment. A solo player will take a pretty long time to take out relatively few enemies while a large team of eight will steam-roll through the mission and take out about four times as many enemies in at most a quarter of the time. Teams still benefit more, solo players still have an option.

I don't actually remember a time before team experience bonuses, (I may have simply forgotten) but I remember a time before the purple patch. Back then, large teams would roam zones, fighting enemies +10 to them, getting massive, massive rewards, to the point where teams like "deep purple enemies" were developed and people considered fighting anything that wasn't at least +6 to you to be a waste of time and an embarrassment. Of course, single players couldn't do it, hence why large teams kept forming. The Purple Patch pretty much killed that. Literally.

Do you? I appreciate your insults, but typing in all caps and punctuating every word with a period doesn't make you any less wrong, especially when you accuse me of bringing up things that are "besides the point" when you keep using completely irrelevant examples. No team task will ever take the same amount of time or effort as a solo task, because teams accomplish everything faster and easier. This quickness and ease more than makes up for the time and difficulty of putting a team together many times over. Even if you give the exact same task to a team and to a single player, the team will still be done with it faster and easier even with the time it takes to put a team together taken into account.

This is an argument as old as the game is, and people have already covered it in the past. The cost of putting together a team and the difficulty involved in finding team-mates is more than made up by the speed with which said team blows through content and the ease of said content on a team. I could fancy putting together an ITF right now, and even if it took me 45 minutes to put it together, I'd still end up with at least three times more experience and Inf, not to mention Shards than if I had just soloed my own content. And I'm not making that comparison up. I know this for a fact because I've run enough TFs and done enough solo play to know how they compare.

Team play does not need help. Team play is already many times more productive than solo play for many times the reward. Refusing to admit that is just petty, and suggesting that not only should solo play be slower and harder, but it should also be impossible is just adding insult to injury.

I hope all-caps word-punctuated sentences will be enough for you to respond to my audacity without resorting to bold, larger-size coloured text with links to lolcats embedded, but we'll see how that goes. I'd personally prefer it if you'd address the documented, obvious, unquestionable superiority in terms of speed of reward gain that team play enjoys even with set-up time and effort accounted before you start speaking about a team task taking as long as a solo task.

This is a good way of putting it, yes. When I make characters, I aim for very general concepts, such as "hitting things with fire" or "some form of psychic powers" (Pain is a good representation of this, as is Empathy). In fact, it's very rare for me to define a character down to the last visual aspect. For instance, Sam - my namesake - was pretty much defined as "dude with sword, guns and super reflexes." I never really stopped to specifically pick out anything in particular he could do with those powers, so any combination of katana-type sword, handguns and super-fast reflexes will probably work for him.

In many ways, I tend to define my characters more by capability rather than by ability. I want a character to be very strong and have the tools to handle a wide variety of situations while still fitting within the thematic framework, say of "sword, guns, reflexes." Whether that's expressed via Golden Dragonfly being a long narrow cone, a wide shallow cone, single-target or PBAoE isn't as relevant. So long as the character fits the given themes well and without extraneous abilities and this character plays as capable as I want him to be, that's a character built to concept.

Personally, when I still did that, I was making Blasters for the simple fact that I saw them as representing enormous power. They were built for extreme damage, after all, more so than Scrappers. I never specifically designed them with the idea that they would be specifically and functionally WEAK when attacked, however. Quite the opposite. The primary reason I no longer play them isn't that I didn't have "sword blast" or Shield Defence for Blasters or anything of the sort. It was simply that I could retain the theme while picking a character that was - in my hands at least - far more capable for far less effort.

The difference, at least in my eyes, between a Fire/Fire/Flame Blaster and a Fire/Fire/Pyre Scrapper is academic. They're both powerful Fire users, they're both adept at dealing damage, they both look cool.

Ugh, and then there's that. Playing with friends is always fun. Playing with strangers is sometimes fun. But when you can actually LOSE stuff you've worked to earn because of other people, and even when you can utterly fail through no fault of your own... That's problematic. These, actually, are the instances that tick me off the most - when I've done pretty much all I can to succeed and I still end up failing because other people just couldn't be arsed to participate.

I'm all in favour of giving everyone as many tools for social interaction and community-building as possible. I just like it when I'm given the option to play by myself, too, when I don't want my experience to depend on other people.

I, on the other hand, find it at best bitter-sweet and most commonly just bitter. Putting more effort into something doesn't make me more excited to see the result, it makes me feel I deserve greater compensation for my troubles. And when I fail the specific task yet again and get, to quite K: "precisely dick" in return, I am unhappy. And even when it's finally over and I have the damn thing, my reaction is not triumphant jubilation, but rather a mix of "It was about bloody time!" and "I just busted my butt for that stupid thing?"

The more effort your game requires me to put into playing it, the more it owes me in return.

You know... You keep saying solo play requires much less effort and I have to call you out on that. No, it does not. Solo play requires significantly MORE effort and a lot of the challenges it presents are significantly more difficult. I have, to this day, not played a team task that I have not seen at one time or another done for me by a team without me even lifting a finger. If you want to claim that somehow me contributing next to nothing to a task and still getting rewards is harder than me fighting three elite bosses at a time, as is the case with Mender Lazarus' solo TF, then we'll never see eye-to-eye.

Yeah, sure, putting a team together and leading takes effort. Joining a team and pressing buttons does not. And yet joining a team and pressing buttons is already far easier, much faster and many times more rewarding than going solo irrespective of task, yet you feel solo play is not quite penalised enough? I don't agree. I'm already taking three times as long to get through the levels as people who just hop onto whatever large team happens to be available at the time and doing a lot of not much. Is that not enough, but now my solo tasks have to be impossible while a team can sleep-walk through its tasks?

And cause me to rage-quit and never want anything to do with the game ever again. Any system which requires, as an intended course of progression, intends for me to fail at it more than I succeed is a horrible system, irrespective of how fast I can progress in it. That's my beef with random drops, as well - you bust your *** beating a very difficult encounter and you end up getting the consolation price you never wanted in the first place.

I'm fine with slow and grindy AS LONG AS IT'S RELIABLE. Very rare random drops are pretty much the polar opposite of reliable. I'm fine with something taking time, I'm fine with it taking days and weeks and months. My first 50 took me something like 800 hours to achieve and I never complained. But when you're giving me a choice between a task where my drops are a crapshot or my ability to complete it is a crapshot, you're not giving me options.

And please, let's not be disingenuous with terms like "challenge." The iTrials may be difficult, but they are distinctly possible. Putting an AV in my missions makes them functionally, practically and quite very literally IMPOSSIBLE to complete regardless of how much you choose to talk down to me about "challenge." I'm not Bill Z Bubba. I don't have characters who can solo AVs, or come anywhere even close. I don't have characters who can even survive eye contact with an AV on their own. And I don't regret that for a minute, because AVs are not and never have been - and never will be - solo content.

Yeah, I'm not saying I expect games to just give everything away for free. The developers would go out of business. I do, however, believe that social tools should all be free, because that's the way to get people to stick with your game for more than a day. Sure, if they're free, that's no revenue in the piggy bank, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that people who pay money for F2P games don't do so within an hour of first logging in. Get 'em to stick around, get 'em to make a few friends, get 'em to have a few fun evenings and then they'll probably turn around and pay you anyway.

Well, except a lot of F2P games don't actually allow free players to build any kinds of networks. Want to form a team? Premium only. Want to pick the people you play with or against? Premium only. Want to save people to your friends list? You don't have a friends list, that's premium only. Want to chat with people? You can't, because most channels are premium only.

I do agree that finding someone you like playing with is a lot of fun, and it does serve to improve the overall experience by quite a bit. As I said, a lot of the games I tried, I tried because a friend asked me to, or I got a friend in it so we could play together. When that was even possible. A lot of the times it wasn't, and there's really little that's worse than downloading two copies of an F2P game, logging in and finding you and your friend can't play together. Ever.

This is part of why the Trial/Free account limitations here in City of Heroes worry me so much. Yeah, I know they're there to oppose RMT spam, but it has to be horrible to log into an otherwise great game and realise you can't speak with people, you can't invite people, you can't join any of the more public channels... I'm really not sure what to do about that, but this sort of thing is bad for community building AND it means people end up teaming with whatever random people are available at the time.