SpittingTrashcan

I see it as the obvious low-hanging fruit, myself. It depends on how much developer time would be spent tweaking the reward tables versus making the level slider in the roll interface do something besides filter the list of available items. Or are we talking about different things?

Edit: I see we are talking about different things. I'm still waving the flag for setting the level of reward rolls, which was not on your list.

There are algorithms for keeping good fresh content on the top of the list using up/down voting. This method could be adapted to the existing star system as well (and it, or something like it, should have been implemented long ago), but first you'd have to determine what constitutes a positive or negative reaction, and because the stars are used in such an idiosyncratic way, that's pretty much impossible without datamining everyone's voting records.

The failure of the star system is really in the psychological tendency to ascribe too much credence to the mathematical mean of the star ratings, as if they were well-considered evaluations on a standard scale and not mostly knee-jerk like/hate reactions. Contrast:

200 plays, 100 upvotes, 25 downvotes
200 plays, 4 stars

In the first case, I can see that half the people who played the arc liked it enough to say so, whereas only one out of eight found it objectionably bad. Given the dipstick quotient among players, it looks like I'll have a better than even chance of liking this arc. In the second case, I have no clue what that even means. Did everyone rate it 4 stars, meaning it's consistently better than average, but not great? Did 200 people try it but only one person care enough to give it a rating? Did a large number of people love it and give it 5 stars, and then some people objected to the color of the custom enemies' costumes or a corny joke or the fact that it's not an optimal farm and give it a 1 star out of spite? You tell me! Yet that 4 star rating is supposed to be everything I need to know. And that's terrible.

Destroy Carthage first.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/you...s-are-useless/

Of course, YouTube has a considerable advantage over CoH here: people don't ragequit YouTube.

I would think that wearing skimpier clothing makes the question of one's gender much easier to resolve. Then again, there are certain combinations of body type and clothing that can leave the question highly ambiguous despite considerable exposure. One of my longstanding gripes with the CoH costume designer is that it places a relatively high lower limit on gender ambiguity, although I've seen some amazing things done.

The tracks are damaged ahead. There is a risk of derailment.

Logically true, but I'm sympathetic to the dilemma of wanting to do as you like on the one hand and wanting not to feel like you're wasting time on the other. Even if you're not comparing the rewards you're getting with the rewards other people are getting, you do compare them with the rewards you could get by doing something you don't really want to do.
The essential error here was treating redside mechanically as if it could stand alone, and then not actually investing the development necessary for it to do so. Perhaps the most important thing GR could do is eliminate the idea of CoV as a separate game.

I'm having trouble understanding what you're asking. I am saying that this game is not a competition. I am saying that it is not necessary to obtain rewards at a faster pace. If you do want to obtain rewards at a faster pace, you do have to employ strategies - in building, in teaming, in combat tactics and in mission strategy - that get you those rewards faster. For the most part, I see this as a feature - note that I did state that unguessable methods for shortening speed runs, strategies that can only be discovered by accident or by word of mouth and that circumvent objectives that the devs intended to be uncircumventable, are serious issues that need to be dealt with at a design level and not at a reward level. But at the most general level, I do support the idea that choices have consequences. I don't mind that speed runs are possible, and I don't mind that they have an effect on rewards.

I do mind that they have an unequal effect on rewards across the diversity of content, but I see that as an artifact of the evolution in design philosophy between when the TFs were designed and when the SFs were designed, and as TFs get revamped this will go away.

This game isn't a competition, so how are you so sure you're losing?

I absolutely disagree with what the devs did, and I do place my view of what the zones should be over what they actually are - or I wouldn't suggest that they be changed! It is in fact quite clear that they wanted a hybrid PvP/PvE zone. My position is that any such zone is a flat-out terrible idea in the first place.

I can follow their reasoning and imagine their expectations as to what would happen: people come to PvP, and play PvE minigames for rewards until the opportunity for PvP arises at which time they switch happily to PvPing. The underlying assumption is that PvE is there to give you a reason to come to and stick around in the zone until someone shows up and you can get down to the real reason you came. What they probably did not expect (although they easily could have) was that people would come with the explicit goal of reaping all the PvE rewards they could and see the introduction of actual PvPing as an unwelcome intrusion on their activities. This is the inevitable consequence of placing rewards that can be obtained cooperatively in a context that allows and is intended to encourage competition. Whether it is irrational, poor sportsmanship, carebearism etc. does not actually matter; it always happens and you can't design your game around the expectation that people will suddenly behave in a different manner than they always have before.

Yes, but they don't create differentials in the per-player reward/time ratio.

I'm going to try to explain this, and bear with me because I'm having trouble coming up with the right terminology. Let's say that any given group of players can complete tasks such as defeating mobs, fighting AVs, etcetera at some average rate. Powerful teams such as the one you describe have a high rate, while an average PUG may have a lower rate. However, if they're both completing the same amount of content, the reward rate for both groups will be consistent across all content, and basically be a fixed multiple. So if Efficient Group EG can complete Task Force A in 20 minutes and Inefficient Group IG can complete Task Force A in 60 minutes, then it stands to reason that if EG can complete Strike Force B in 10 minutes, IG can complete it in 30 minutes. There are some issues with calibrating rewards so that EG isn't getting too much and IG isn't getting too little, but as long as merit rewards are some function of completion times, TFA and SFB will be equally worthwhile to run no matter what your efficiency is because the reward/time is consistent across all choices. Note that this is better for people who want to run lots of different TFs and SFs than the old single-random-roll reward scheme was, because it makes longer TFs and SFs more rewarding whether you're efficient or not.

The issue with speedrunning is that the difference between doing everything and doing what is necessary varies from mission to mission and from TF/SF to TF/SF, and because Strike Forces don't have as many "you must kill everything" missions, they tend to have a higher ratio of optional to mandatory content. So if we now compare Speed Group SG, who does only what is required, to Completion Group CG who kill every last mob on every map, then it might take SG 20 minutes and CG 60 minutes to complete TFA, while it takes SG just 10 minutes to complete SFB but it still takes CG 60 minutes. Since merit rewards are based on a completion time metric that includes both SG and CG, SFB rewards fewer merits than TFA, but CG spends the same amount of time clearing both, making SFB look less attractive than TFA to them. On the other hand, CG's slow completion time skews the reward for SFB upward, making it more attractive for SG. The end result is that SFB is choice for speed runners and TFA is popular with completists. This is, in and of itself, pretty much the situation before merits: the most popular TFs and SFs were the ones that could be run the quickest. The perceived disparity lies in the fact that due to the abysmally poor (and I cannot emphasize this enough) design of the heroside TFs, most of them had lots and lots of mandatory objectives and very few optional ones, while the better designed villain SFs have more optional objectives. And that creates the perceived "merit disparity" between the sides. I would venture a guess that for speed runners, the rewards are actually better redside, but I'm not an expert here.

And that brings us back to the poor choices available as remedies. You can reward infrequent TF runs or first-time TF runs, and that blunts the impact a bit. You can require 100% completion for 100% merits, which would have the net effect of either turning all TFs into defeat-alls (bleh, IMO) or turn speed runs into speed-and-then-kill-exactly-the-optimal-number-of-enemies runs, with little net effect on the disparities. My personal favored remedy would be to go back and fix the TFs and SFs to give them a roughly equal ratio of optional to mandatory content, which would once again equalize merit per efficiency across the board, and then decide how much you want to reward speed running strategies versus total completion - because as has been mentioned, speed running does pass up other reward opportunities to maximize merits.

Actually, I was discussing the in-zone minigames, but if you want to talk about the door missions, the case is even worse. Yes, they have a global effect on the zone PvP. They also grant experience, inf, and drops, and last I heard they do so at better than usual rates. So, once again, the inducements are there for very PvEish content - in this case in an instanced area where even the threat of PvP is absent. And this provides further inducement to avoid direct combat with other players while in the shared zone: why waste time on that when there's XP/inf/drops to be made? Not that you ever have to, since the 30 second PvP immunity grace period is frequently more than enough time to get from one door mission to the next.

What I'm getting at here is that while the zones are clearly and repeatedly labeled PvP zones, and PvP is indeed possible in the zone, there are many activities in the zone that grant consistent, desirable rewards yet do not actually require you to ever attack another player-controlled character, and indeed encourage you to treat anyone who is attacking you as an obstacle to getting the most out of your time. And once again I say: this is an awfully strange way to design a PvP zone.

On a facetious level, not doing speed runs has always affected your rewards. I think that what you are getting at, however, is that because rewards are now based on speed runs that hit only the mandatory objectives, your reward/time is worse on SFs than TFs because SFs have fewer mandatory objectives.

There are a couple of things that could conceivably be done about this. One is to make all the missions in all TF/SFs kill-all, which would serve to make the reward/time for TFs and SFs more or less a constant... and also make them all miserable slogs. Another is to introduce merit awards for optional objectives, but this won't entirely remove the issue because speedrunners will still select the best reward/time objectives and you'll still be penalized for making different choices. There's the idea mentioned above of giving additional rewards for running TFs rarely or for the first time, which will blunt but not entirely remove the differences between the various TF reward/time ratios.

But in the end, basically any time you choose to do a bunch of stuff that you don't strictly have to, you're losing rewards, and the only way to prevent that is to make everything mandatory. And that's exactly the kind of mission design that neither devs nor players seem particularly keen on...

If there's a four-or-more-fold difference between the normal and the speed timing, no formula for merit rewards that ends up giving everyone the same reward for the same TF is going to prevent a small minority of players from "messing things up for everyone else." That's not a problem that can be fixed by fiddling with the merit formula. It requires deciding what the tasks required to complete the TF should be, and then ensuring that the design of the TF actually requires you to accomplish those tasks (instead of circumventing them in a non-obvious way). Once that's in place, it's down to the players to put together a good team that knows what they need to do and wastes no time in doing it, and you really shouldn't try to remove that kind of advantage.

I do support the "occasional TFer" bonus and particularly the "first time through" bonus; it's a drop in the bucket for speeders, but gives more casual players a nice reward for trying something new. In fact, I'd extend the "first time through" bonus to just about anything that rewards merits - players who are doing new things every time they play, and are rewarded for doing it, are players who don't burn out quickly.

There's a whole world of interesting things going on there. In essence, clothing implies something to cover, and this implication is very strong. You can even create mental discontinuities this way. Try this thought experiment. Picture Bugs Bunny, naked as he usually is. No big deal. Put some pants on him. Still no big deal. Have him pull down his pants. Even though you know that this is just him returning to his usual genderless nakedness, it's weird now.

Thanks. All credit goes to Shia, who made it for me as a random act of kindness. I really ought to resize it properly; it was made for the old forums and doesn't do her work justice when automatically resized.

I'm pretty sure that, strictly speaking, anything not clothed is naked. The distinction you seem to be going for is whether this is a marked status or the norm. If I see a dog wearing no clothing, I'm not going to call it a "naked dog", even though the dog is naked, because that's not usually worth noting on a dog. If I see a man wearing no clothing, I'd call him a "naked man", because that's usually enough to distinguish him from any other men in the area.

Of my characters who do not wear clothing, some have nakedness as a marked status and some don't.

You play 24 hours a day? Send me some of your drugs, please!

Slightly less facetiously, if you're worried about not having an ally rez at all, this does get you an ally rez, and for no cost to your build. I'm not sure how many alts you play, but my biggest problem in earning the day job badges is generally not the amount of time I have to spend not playing them, but the frequency with which I grab them and move them from place to place.

I can tell that the PvP community is in terrible shape because it took 17 hours and 20 minutes for this rebuttal to be made. Why, back in the day there'd be 5 or 6 posts saying this by now, probably with additional embellishment and emphasis.

More seriously: this is a true fact. It is also a true fact that when you go look for an NPC to tell you what to do here, as you may be accustomed to, you will find a guy who tells you to go do some PvE stuff. This is true of BB, WB, and RV. Only in SC does the zone game tie rewards directly to attacking an opposing player character - and in order to use these rewards, you also have to play the PvE zone control minigame. In my personal opinion, SC is probably the closest to ideal: there are PvE aspects to the zone game, but if you want to get the most out of it you will hunt down your bounty target.

I'd like to say a few non-negative words about I13 now. Let me preface this by stating once again that the changes as implemented were not the ones I would have wished for, and many aspects of the changes were ill-considered and counterproductive. That said: before I13, PvP was a low-scoring game. When players of equal skill and strategy played to win, the resulting number of kills was in the single digits. Player characters in CoH can be easily made to be very tough, especially when supporting each other. Powerful heals and buffs, extreme movement speeds, and evasion powers such as phases and cages meant that most engagements would end with both parties escaping alive. As long as PvP had no significant rewards attached, this was a neutral state of affairs, no better or worse than any other. However, if you want to introduce a reward system based on getting kills, as the devs did want to do, this becomes something of an issue! When looked at in this way, the reductions in mobility, mitigation, and healing, the removal of complete mez protection, and the addition of high damage to what had previously been primarily mez abilities makes some degree of sense; the idea was to create a higher-scoring game, where most engagements end in someone dying.

Unfortunately, I13 was clumsily handled; I don't think the devs ever made this goal explicit, and the implementation was extremely ambiguous in its intent and heavy-handed in its execution. I'm not sure how the PvP community of the time would have reacted if the devs had come to them and candidly asked how the existing system could be changed to make it more lethal, and honestly I'm not sure if they could have come up with anything more satisfactory than what I13 became, since higher lethality would necessarily have meant more damage, more mez, less evasion, less mobility, and less benefit from healing and mitigation stacking somehow.

But it would have been less of a PR nightmare to be sure.