Samuel_Tow

Un-bolded for the sake of discussion. This, really, is what I hope will happen. You say this with certainty, but right now I'm more inclined to say it with doubt, in the "I'll believe it when I see it" sense. Really, though, that's I've ever asked - Incarnate content, defined as requiring Incarnate powers and narratively assuming such - that can be done solo and would offer a more certain way of obtaining Shards than having to rely on random drops that seem to hate me.

I have my doubts that this will ever happen, but if it does I intend to apologise and eat crow as I should.

Essentially, we haven't had actual low-level content pretty much since CoV came out. Every piece of content we've gotten for the low levels has been scaled-down high-level content, to the point where I'm starting to wonder if they may not have simply fired the only guy in the company who could actually design low-level enemies intended to be used in low-level content.

None of the enemies mentioned are all that difficult, they're just vastly disproportionate to the level range they show up it. It's like back when the Hollows was still new, every level 6 Hellion had Fire Imps and super powers. These days, you only get to see super powers only after level 10 where they show up normally in the group. Lower-level Hollows Trolls also don't have Super Strength, not for minions anyway.

I understand that it's probably not achievable, hence why I said "in an ideal world." I love punching things in the face, and even I'll choose to hop on a team and level faster for, say, an hour if the team is fun. Hell, a lot of the time I'll team BECAUSE I level up faster, at least when it comes to PUGs and TFs. And, seriously, what else would I do, say, the ITF for? It's story is boring and confusing, its encounters are repetitive and "Roman soldiers" really isn't my favourite concept for an enemy faction. That, and people always rush it. But I still do it from time to time because it's a good way to grab a level in a couple of hours in the 40s.

That said, I feel that diminishing returns of some sort are not-horrible way to make a game which encourages doing activities, but discourages overdoing them. "Rested experience," aka Patrol Experience is a step in the right direction, in that it helps speed along people who don't play so much while doing little for people who do. I personally have no problem with people who want better rewards gained faster, so long as there isn't infinite leeway to do so, as all that does is shift the bottom line upwards. A hard or a soft limit on how fast you can go, as it were, would be a good way to control this.

In the same vein, a floor on how SLOW you can go would be nice, too. Take Shards, for instance. If you're unlucky enough, you can go days and days without seeing a drop. Some are already suggesting that, if the RNG doesn't give you one in a certain amount of time, enemies taken down or whatever metric, that a "streakbreaker" of sorts would give you one anyway, at least as a pity drop. We already have a streakbreaker for to-hit designed to mitigate precisely that sort of annoyance. There can be systems to speed along slower players in a variety of fields, be they experience, "money" or what have you.

Of course, the more you control it, the more people complain that they can't influence and optimise their own efficiency past a certain point. That, to me, is an acceptable evil, as I see unmitigated optimization as the central problem to any game system. Make the system's scope too great and balancing it becomes a nightmare. Therefore, upper and lower limits can help.

I don't believe "a game that's fun without giving rewards" is a valid construct even theoretically. As I've said before, rewards are part of the game, and thus part of the fun. We may claim to play for the action, but we appreciate rewards as well, and thus play for them all the same. What I meant was a game that's so much fun that we never run out of things we WANT to do, to the point where we have to do things we don't like just for the sake of rewards. In essence, it's a game where gameplay is strong enough to hold people over from reward to reward without actually feeling like a grind.

To a point, this is limited by physical resources and the availability of game content, as well as the natural boredom that comes from playing a game for so long. But a great part of why this happens in MMOs in general and this one in particular is because the developers, whether intentionally or unwittingly, compensate for certain shortcomings of content by hanging rewards at the end of it.

Years ago Jack and other discussed what to do about the old Hamidon and its absurdly powerful Hamidon Enhancements. Many people managed to claim - within the same sentence - that they LOVE raiding the Hamidon and would do so just for fun, and yet that they hated raiding the Hamidon and did so just for the rewards. I said it then, and I've said it many times since: Sticking a big reward at the end of bad content is not good design. It's lazy design. Yes, that will make people play it, but not because they want to, but because they feel they have to. They key to making content good is to make good content first and only then worrying about rewards.

According to Jack, when he and Matt sat down to design the original 40-50 game back in Issue 1, they designed it to take as long as the 1-40 game. Why? Well, he didn't say, but accounting for standard MMO logic at the time, because it's "end game," so it's supposed to be slow, plodding, difficult and painful. That's what end game IS, right? I've said before that there are only three realistic ways to make sufficient end game content: Make it absurdly hard, absurdly slow or absurdly repetitive. Skip all three and you'll never make enough. And I've been proven correct for seven years now, over and over again.

To a point, time sinks and "carrot on a stick" designs are par for the course when it comes to games of this size, that much is a given. But to a much larger extent, developers design these because they're an easy way to save money and effort. And it shows. Our developers seem to have become more aware of this factor in recent years, especially when they started slashing badge requirements. The original thought behind badges was that they would be something you sort of got as you went along, not something you went out looking for. Players proved otherwise, and the developers now seem aware that their players will go out looking for these badges, so they seem to be trying to make them less painful to get. Well, for the most part, anyway. Still, anyone remember defeating 10 000 Rikti Monkeys?

Long story short: You can't design a game that's so fun people would play it endlessly without ever being rewarded with progress, but you CAN do a better job of balancing fun from basic gameplay with fun from progressing through the game, ideally letting people progress to the next step before they're utterly revolted with the previous one.

When I give things away, it tends to be to whoever is around at the time. But I'll think of you next time I get one, I promise.

It probably could have, but I figure I'll get more in time, especially if I try to solo my Incarnate slot on Crash, which I intend to. I'm pretty cheap in real life, so I try to give away in-game as much as I can, just for the sake of it.

To be honest, sometimes I wonder how much of this game's success is due to how good it is and how much is due to the fact that basically the sum total of our competition is complete garbage and consists of essentially a completely different type of game.

Because, yes, I have tried the competition, and if ever I had gripes about soloability here, those pale in comparison to those same gripes in every other MMO ever made in history.

Yes, they very much are much harder. You quote Nemesis Staff and Black Wand and so forth, but have you forgotten how many months you need to be subscribed to get those? Because I keep running into people who have neither. And those are precisely the people thrust into Praetoria with no choice in the matter - new players forced to make a Praetorian before they can make a hero or a villain.

I never said the game shouldn't reward people for the time they put into it. After all, that's part of the fun in a game - doing things and getting progress for them. Hell, there's little as hideously demoralising as spending hours doing something that nets NO PROGRESS AT ALL when you could instead do something else in-game that's still fun but also rewarding.

What I am saying, however, is that I don't feel the game should encourage people to WORK HARD in the first place. My ideal game would be one which would let me have fun, with progress and rewards as just a nice bonus, rather than a game which makes us play through things we really don't want to in the hopes of getting paid.

I work a job only because I need the money. I don't want to work a game only because I need the rewards. I want a game to give me rewards because I'm an awesome human being and be nice to me, even if it has to lie to my face about my worth to human kind. That's where I want games to differ from real life - in that it can make those of us who aren't awesome in life awesome in our own little make-pretend world.

I'm in this camp. I find a select few things fun - namely most of the same things I was doing back in 2004 - and would very much like to keep doing those things. However, I realise that those things are badly inefficient. I'd LIKE for the game to account for them and make them efficient, but I know that that won't happen. Failing that, I will just keep on doing what I like doing, keep on complaining that the game no longer supports it and, if worse comes to worst, find a game that lets me have fun AND get rewards rather than constantly making me choose between one or the other.

I refuse to do things I don't like unless they can be contained to either one isolated "hard push" or otherwise just an everyday minor chore. I still want the bulk of my gameplay to consist of things I want to do. To think that my gameplay will turn into nothing more than a string of compromises is terrifying, to the point that I want nothing to do with that.

You get "some" rewards at "some" pace, this is a point to remember. Some rewards you plain do not get in the ways you want to play, and some you get at such a reduced rate it's almost pointless. Examples?

100 Rularuu Overseers for the Rularuu weapons. There's no chance in hell that I'll do enough Rularuu missions that the odd single Overseer spawn per mission will make up the 100 needed. I need to hunt them. I hate hunting one way or the other, so as long as I'm hunting, I may as well pick up on greys and get it over quicker.

1000 Vanguard Merits for the full costume. To get those from just running Rikti missions would take forever. The entire War Zone storyline plus the Organ Grinders plus Division: Line aren't even close to enough. So I either run Borea's paper-equivalent missions, or I do a ship raid. I don't like either, so my only option is to farm (which I don't do), grind (which I don't want to do) or run Mothership raids (which I hate).

The Romulus Sword and/or Romulus Shield. The only way to get that is via running the ITF. I am SICK AND TIRED of running ITFs, and I don't like the TF to begin with, or TFs in general. But what option do I have? So as long as I'm doing an ITF, it might as well be a fast one.

Incarnate Shards: At the drop rate they have now, trying to gain enough solo is next to pointless. Well, unless I want to run at +OVERNINETHOUSANDDD!!!, which I don't. Teaming is an option, which I generally don't want to do, and end-game TFs are an option, which again basically means ITFs over and over again. Either that, or Tin Mage, which sucks big time. As long as I'm grinding for Shards, I might as well get it over with faster.

Hunt 50 Rikti in Abandoned Sewers at level 38. Trial Zone size (aka 8-man size) spawns of level 38 and up in all locations other than the Atlas Park entrance where they're 36 and up. Solo. Yeah, I hate hunting, I hate hunting huge spawns with bosses, and I hate having to go through large spawns of high-level Hydra before I get to what I need. So as long as I'm doing it, I might a well pick the place where they're low level and gank them for a fast mission complete.

Making lots of money. "Just play the Market," they say. "Buy cheap recipes and craft them." "Get things with Tickets and sell them." "Use Hero Merits." Yeah, no thanks. Playing the Market is hideously boring, and playing crafter is even worse, especially when I have to wade through people's horrible fan fiction in the Architect. If I ever NEED to make lots of money via these methods, you can bet your cat that I'll find a way to do it as fast as I can with as little effort.

I would LOVE it if the game allowed me to eat my cake and have it, too, by letting me just play the game as I enjoy it and still get the good stuff, but it doesn't. And suggesting it should only gets people to call me greedy, arrogant, spoiled and so on and so forth. Because clearly if I don't want to put in the hard work, I don't deserve the reward.

In my case, I did it on a Stalker, whom I effectively played like a Super-Scrapper. Masterminds have some technical problems that HUGELY disagree with Incarnate stuff in general, mostly because henchmen don't inherit Incarnate Boosts, so I can imagine a Mastermind would have been a pain in the **** to get through that mission with. That's something to address in future Incarnate content, I dare say, because otherwise Masterminds would become useless as Incarnates.

That said, the "fight" was probably my favourite mission in the game, if for no reason other than because it essentially told me "You're awesome! Go make people say how awesome you are!" I wouldn't want to play too many of those, I freely admit, but having the game admit to me that I'm awesome is still a very good thing

I want to second that one. JUST animal heads are great, but if we're able to put hair on them, even if it's just one or two hairstyles per head, then this would be AMAZING.

I wonder if we'll ever see Frozen Fire's suggestion of separate snouts and animal eyes as face details for normal heads. That'd open a whole slew of concepts.

The reason I say this is from personal experience, actually. I joined City of Heroes in May of 2004. By about I4 or I5, I realised that I just didn't feel like playing the game any more. At all. And I couldn't figure out why. As it turns out, what was bothering me was a combination of things, but the most prominent of those was that I'd bought into the MMO convention that you have to team, and I was trying to team as much as I could. At one point, I realised that this was simply bothering me, and that if I didn't get a certain quote of "personal game time" per play session, I started getting cranky, finding reasons to log out early and not feeling like I wanted to log back into the game ever again. And this had been going for over a year, to the point where I was just about ready to dump the game wholesale.

In another example, I've recently shared with a few friends of mine that "I am done with Blasters." I've been trying to make the AT work the way I want it for years, I've lobbied for changes, run numbers and I even have no less than three level 50 Blasters. And it took a combination of quite a few factors to make the experience just painful enough for me to stop and wonder: "Why do I keep trying to play the AT when I clearly and obviously don't want to?" And the answer is one part sunk costs (I have 3 50s, after all - I need play the AT, right?), necessity and just habit, I guess. However, with the advent of Inherent Stamina, the I18 changes to Brute Fury and my recent deletion and rerolling of a level 50 Scrapper, I have become keenly aware of just how much I hate playing Blasters and how much I no longer NEED to.

Right as I type this, I'm already making plans to decide what to reroll each of my 3 50 Blasters as, and I already have some ideas. AR/Dev can go Bots/Traps Mastermind, Energy/Energy/Force can go Energy/Energy Brute, Fire/Fire/Flame can go Fire/Fire Scrapper... Yeah, I'll be deleting a lot of 50s, but I do not want to torture myself doing something I don't want just because I feel obligated to like all of my characters. I am not obligated to them, and I will not piss myself off with them any more.

And it took me seven years to finally admit to myself that I had been dead wrong for seven years, and I'd wasted probably over 2000 hours of my life.

As regards player characters, you'd have to become absurdly big to break bounding boxes. As I understand it, the problem is that power ranges aren't calculated based on a box, but rather based on raw distance between a central point on your character and a central point on the enemy, plus a bit of offset to account for character size. The problem with Rularuu the Ravager is that he's long and spindly, meaning that there's no good offset value to account for him. Too little offset and you won't be able to hit his head or the bottom of his skirt as they would technically be "too far" from his body. Too much offset and you start being able to hit him with melee attack fro 50 yards away.

That said, "pixel size" characters are indeed out of the question, for the simple fact that all player models share the same bounding box. That is to say, all player characters are equally tall when it comes to what height ceiling they can fit under and equally wide when it comes to what width door they can squeeze through. Pixel-size characters would constantly run into places where they should be able to walk through, but still can't because they're taller than they appear.

I don't see a reason why we can't go a bit more in the opposite direction, though. I've always wanted to see our characters able to grow at least as big as a Fake Nemesis. I mean, Fakes don't seem to have any trouble navigating terrain, even if it looks odd sometimes, and the game doesn't seem to treat them as being "too big." They are a fair bit bigger than even the biggest of us, though.

I'm not saying they're less elitist. Any challenge with a high chance of failure will have elitists bragging about it and rubbing it in people's faces. What I'm saying is that this is a challenge that's simultaneously more involving to the player and one which requires less of an investment to attempt.

A stat-check challenge may be simpler and thus available to more people theoretically, but it requires a certain level of preparation, which will both lock out more people for the simple fact that such preparation may constitute "work" inside of a game, as well as present an actually lower challenge once the right stats are met.

This is the fundamental difference between challenges for the character and challenges for the player. If we view our characters units in an RTS, then it makes sense we'll want challenges to basically constitute preparing said character and sending him in to do his best as a father might send his son to his first baseball game. I, however, happen to see City of Heroes as a more action-oriented game where character performance should depend more on the player's intervention than that, and as such challenges should test the player's ability to actually use said character's abilities as a driver might take his sports car to the race track.

Character-specific challenges take the game out of the player's hands, and as such don't constitute an actual challenge as I see it. They constitute a gate. "You must be this tall to ride." Player-specific challenges, that is to say events which challenge the player's actions and reactions, are both in keeping with the game and more proper challenges. City of Heroes really isn't "actiony" enough to actually constitute any challenge which requires extraordinary player skill, so the task falls to testing people's ability to interact with each other. And for a team encounter, it only makes sense.

While I don't know a lot of this playerbase personally and well enough to make deep personal judgement calls, I know a fair few people personally and professionally who are indeed miserable, but manage to convince themselves that they are, or at the very least will at some point in the hopefully but not really near future, happy. In general, I have a very eccentric view on precisely this subject, as I damn near burned myself out not just on this game, but on practically everything in life at one point and have had to sit down and re-evaluate my life on numerous occasions.

From personal experiences and from examining the lives of people, including people who've listened to me and told me they were happier in the long run (I was as surprised as you are at hearing this), I actually fully believe that more people are miserable playing this game, and indeed any MMO, than you might suspect. A lot of the "blowing off steam" aspect of forum fights, rants and flame wars actually harkens back to this - the game is pissing people off, but they put up with it. They put up with it and put up with it and put up with it until something comes along that just puts them out of their skin and you get disproportionate, irrational anger in response. It's usually "not just that," it's a whole series of problems and gripes and irritants pent up over many years that really add up to a lot of bile once the person stops trying to justify and excuse the game.

People are susceptible to suggestion in a lot of different ways, and the strongest suggestion comes from actual inanimate objects, I've found. This usually comes in the form of convincing people that they like or want something that they actually don't, usually through some kind of logical fallacy. You can see this in something as simple as peer pressure causing people to think they want something because they've been conditioned to believe that's what they should want, and that there is something wrong with them if they don't want it. The insidious part about these kinds of conditioning is that people don't actually realise what's pissing them off, just that there's SOMETHING the matter, but nor what specifically.

Now, that's not to say people who play MMOs are idiots or somehow weak-willed. All I'm saying is that it takes quite a bit of introspective reasoning to actually work out the logical trail of one's own emotional responses, and the results are often surprising once a person is willing to consider the unthinkable, where "Maybe I really shouldn't play this game any more even after six years of it?" qualifies as unthinkable within context.

While this is certainly true, it's also a question of self-conditioning. Generally speaking, these effects mostly occur to people in isolation, in the sense of people who only play one game and use that as the bulk of their entertainment. I say this because occasional breaks and motive checks tend to stifle this in a big way. When, for instance, someone is forced away from a game that has turned into a chore by real-world events, such as loss of Internet access for a few days, just to pick something random, that person may find he really hates the game when he comes back, having lost the conditioning but being faced with the same old crap. I know I swap characters on such occasions, myself.

More than anything, though, that's one reason I always try to tell people to think of not just what they want, but if what they're doing right now is actually worth doing. It's all too easy to get attached to a specific activity just because it's familiar and because it feels necessary without stopping to think what it's necessary for.

The easiest example I can think of is the "next level" effect. It's the belief that, even though you really don't want to play the game any more, "that next level" will make everything so much better. Maybe it's a power you really wanted, more slots for something that's important to you, a new round of enhancements, or maybe just a simple one more level. People will be convinced that if they just work hard enough at that next milestone, everything will be well.

And it isn't. Well, it is for a while. A very short while. But before long, you find yourself right back to where you started, hating the process and looking forward for "that next level." And when you get that, it's great for a short while, and it all starts all over again. The moral of the story is that if the game ain't fun right here, right now, then a lot of the time it won't get any better with that next milestone. I know this more or less contradicts what I said before about progress being part of the game and skipping past unfun parts, but you have to remember that I'm talking about awareness.

---

Something else I want to point to is the fallacies sunk costs and a paid price. Sunk costs are pretty evident - you've already put so much effort into a character, a level or an item, so it doesn't make sense to abandon it, even though it's no longer fun, so you keep working at it to the point where you hate it by the end. And once you already have the level or the item, you IMMEDIATELY forget the price you paid for it and judge it solely on its inherent value. This makes achievements seem a lot more worthwhile than they actually are, which is good for moral but bad for judgement, because you're liable to try and shoot for the same thing again, still unaware of the steep price.

I personally like to see things in terms of worth, that is a combination of the final reward's value against the method of acquisition's cost. Yes, a particular item may be great and valuable, yet at the same time not in the slightest worth it if the process of acquiring it is far too costly. Yet so many people see something they want and think "I want this!" rather than "Is it worth getting?" Sometimes this leads to greatness. Most of the time it leads to burnout and abandoned projects, and it makes people neurotic and stressed out about what should be, at the end of the day, a game we play for fun and pleasure.

*edit*
Before I forget: I find no shame in achieving a monumental goal, then turning around and saying "This was not worth achieving. I have it now, so I'll take pride in that, but I do not want to do this again."

This kind of mentality gives birth to really evil games. "Life is tough, so what if a game is tough?" is only valid if you want a game which mimics real life. Ignoring the incompatibility of super heroes with real life, the bulk of the reason why a lot of us play games is to GET AWAY from real life. So if real life ain't fair, we want our games to be fair so we feel better. If real life is hard, we want games to be easier to compensate. If real life is comprised of all work and no play, we want games to be more play and less work.

Yes, different people want different things, and for those looking to work at a game, there's always Eve Online. But to me, using real life as an excuse why certain game systems are as if purpose-designed to be a chore and not fun is not a valid argument, at least in the context of making a good, fun game.

People are capable of convincing themselves that they want to do an activity that they don't want to simply because they condition their brains to associate difficulty with reward, even in cases where such rewards no longer exist. That doesn't mean games should be designed to capitalise on that, because it ruins the fun.

No. The original Sewers Trial was added in I1, yes, but even then it was 38-41, whereas the same Issue brought the level cap all the way up to 50 and shifted the Hamidon raid to being a level 50 encounter dropping level 50 rewards.

This is the primary reason I don't do multi-team content. I've actually coined a term for this: a "soup." That's exactly what experience in large-scale, many-people action resembles: Staring into a swirly bowl of soup, a homogeneous mass of matter and colour where occasionally you can see things moving around at random. Maybe such events are fun for the leaders and coordinators, but for be as one more pixel in the effects soup, it makes me feel like Z from AntZ.

I think the disconnect here is between games and movies, in that you're trying to compare apples to oranges. Movies are non-interactive media that don't require anything of the viewer, other than possibly knowledge of the language. Yes, some movies do require a sharper mind, a specific field of knowledge or just flatout PATIENCE (looking at you, Lord of the Rings trilogy!), but the only thing one needs to actually do when watching a movie is keep his eyes open.

Games, by their very nature, are interactive media defined by the player's interaction with the system, based on a system of rules which define what you can do but, much more importantly, what you CAN'T do. Video games are an extension of group games, only it's the system setting the rules, not people among each other. As such, parts of the game - especially in more complex games - may be "gated" behind certain requirements. In Commander Keen 4, you need the scuba gear before you can attempt the underwater level. In Captain Comic, you need to Lantern before you can explore the dark castle. The examples go on and on.

But consider the following - you like a particular scene in a movie, say a very climactic, very exciting fight, but aren't necessarily interested in the godawful plot that leads up to it. So what do you do? Do you sit down and watch it anyway? I, personally, just fast-forward to the part I want to see. Now suppose you want to play a level in a game, but don't always want to play the levels before. For instance, you want to play the cool firefight level, but you don't want to play the crappy sewer level, so what do you do? Well, you don't have much choice - either you play the sewer level anyway, or you cheat. Well, or you reload a save game. Online games allow neither cheating nor independent save games, so the only thing you have left is to get through the part you don't like to get to the part you do like.

Personally, I LOVE green SOs and I HATE yellow DOs. What this means is that I LOOOVE level 22, but I HATE HATE HATE level 21. So what do I do? The only thing I can do, really - find a way to get through level 21 as fast as I can. Lately, this has included using my veteran power to grant myself Patrol Experience to speed things along.

Not all parts of a game are fun, but oftentimes you need to play the parts you don't like to get to the parts you do.