SpittingTrashcan

I have a character called Handsome Boy, whose entire schtick is being Innocent Fanservice Guy (his outfits are bought for him by his lecherous step-aunt).

It is strikingly difficult to design outfits for him.

Mmmnotquite. I am obviously not privy to Figure Prints' processes, but there are aspects of the WoW character generator which would permit certain brute-force pre-caching approaches that CoH's more flexible generator would not. I'm not saying that FP can or can't do it, but I don't think that it's as simple as "you can do it here, so you can do it there."

This would do nicely also, and seems much more doable with current technology - especially ultra mode. I'd buy it.

Edited to add: It'd be more of a niche product, but monochromatic models you could paint yourself might be more workable. There's still the geometry issue though.

Fair enough. But if you have a problem with people not wanting to PvP in the zone and wasting your time by running, this is one way to keep you from wasting your time with people who have no intention of giving you the slightest chance to kill them. Not the best way, by far! But it does bear some kind of relevance to the complaint as stated, and isn't necessarily aimed toward the elimination of all PvP.

I'm opposed to removing PvP content on general principle - I think we could use more, not less. But you're basically arguing that having to try to find which of four PvP zones actually has a target in it is less trouble than going to a single PvP zone and knowing that if there are any targets at all, this is where they'll be. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I agree that there's a number of people with a pre-existing antipathy toward any sort of PvP on principle. I personally feel that a number of people started generally indifferent to PvP but grew to resent what they perceived as willful and malicious interference with their intended activities by PvPing players, exacerbated by some of the rhetoric being tossed around the zones. But I'd guess that by far the greatest feeling most people have toward PvP is indifference. I care about PvP on general principle, but I'd care a lot more if I had any actual inducement to. And maybe the IO system has done more harm to PvP than any specific measure targeted at PvP itself; all the bored 50s who had nothing better to do than zap each other are now casually purpling their warshades, and damned if they'll do it twice just for PvP - they've got alts to slot!

I made the crazy suggestion at one point that we could give people alt builds solely for PvP, and fill them with free PvP-only enhancements and special enhancements that could only be earned by PvP and slotted in PvP builds. That one went over like a lead balloon...

What? Who? Me? Not at all! I'm 100% for a healthy and vibrant PvP community and I miss the one we had. IMO the greatest tragedy of I13 was the simultaneous exodus of existing PvPers and the raised bar of entry for anyone considering PvP.

As for everything else you said, I agree with all of it. It must be very frustrating to keep running into people in PvP zones who don't actually have any intention of PvPing and who leave if PvP'd upon (okay, that sounds a bit wrong). What do you want to see happen to prevent this? Because if you're in the zone to obtain nukes, shivans, or badges, and have no inducement to stick around, then leaving looks like a perfectly reasonable plan - and you can't expect people to suddenly start acting in a manner contrary to their interests, any more than they can expect you to start acting in a manner contrary to your interests.

I'm indifferent for the most part, but amenable to bribes. It works for PvE, after all.

More seriously, I think that a lot of the things you mention were good ideas. If it had been up to me, I would have implemented a parallel start-to-finish leveling path for PvP and gotten power effect separation and dual builds in at the same time as the rest of the PvP system. I also wouldn't have put any objectives in PvP zones that had the possibility of being accomplished without attacking or being attacked by other players, of course. It wouldn't have stifled criticism from those who see any PvP development as wasted effort, but it would at least lend total factual credence to the statement that neither PvP nor PvE is a required activity unless you specifically want the rewards associated with those activities.

Then I would have hopped on my unicorn and rode off to fantasy land. :P

Can you expand on this, please? I wasn't around at the time.

Though in actual practice, they did PvEers no favors either, since as macskull correctly observes the new PvP is if anything less newbie-friendly than the old PvP was.

I13 seems to have been designed around the suggestions of a large number of players whose experience with PvP was minimal and entirely negative. I don't think the existence of this large, vocal, and deeply resentful group was a coincidence or without cause. In my opinion, the mistake was in listening to them directly, instead of digging deeper and finding where that resentment really originated. If I were called upon to guess, I'd say that the major basic complaints were:

"I feel like I can't win with my AT/powersets/build."
"PvPers get in the way of what I want (with assumed malice aforethought) and I can't stop them."
"I'm the only beginner in a field of experts. I feel like I'm wasting my time and not learning anything."
(list is neither exhaustive nor universal)

There were other possible ways to address all of these issues: dual builds, auto-teaming, combat tiers or handicapping, a reward structure that encourages at least numerically balanced engagements, etcetera. That's not how it went, and I argue that the way it did go happened in part because any voices of reason were drowned out by accusations of malice and elitism on the one hand and ignorance and entitlement on the other. In the end, the list of complaints above remains more firmly in place than ever, and so does the ill will in the player community.

I can't lay the blame for all of that on poor zone design, but I do think it was a contributing factor.

True, but there are a couple of differences, both mechanical and psychological.

1. Anonymous vs. attributable. When prices are high, people say "hm, those are going for a lot." When PvP is heavy in the zones, people don't say "hm, it's pretty hot in here." They say "that guy right there shot me!"
2. Impersonal vs. personal. It's a lot easier to get excited about a guy shooting you (okay, a guy making his pretendy man shoot your pretendy man) than it is about financial maneuvering. This disparity extends to real life - consider the reaction to white collar criminals vs. murderers (not that I'm saying marketeers or PvPers are either).
3. Symmetry. In general, people are on the market to sell stuff and buy stuff. I don't suspect marketeers of jacking up prices for the hell of it - they're doing it to make money, which is something I might do in their place. I might suspect a PvPer of ganking me several times in a row for amusement value alone, though, and if I'm solely interested in shivans or nukes or badges or what have you then there's a definite lack of empathy on my part.
4. Alternative paths. There's nothing on the market that you can't get elsewhere. For considerably more time and effort in some cases, but it's there, and that releases potential tension.

Then again, I don't get exposed to crazy anti-market people much, so I don't know what passes around that crowd.

100% agreed. Just like badging, base building, RP, AE authoring, etcetera. The thing that those other activities have in common that PvP does not is that a significant chunk people outside the niche hate people inside the niche because of that one time that a PvPer made a decision that made their life harder. Then people inside the niche snipe at people outside of the niche for saying silly things in anger. That's not a healthy place for a niche activity! It leads to forum drama, and forum drama leads to a lack of dev love.

Or badges, or bases, or AE, or costumes...

The non-snarky answer: because it attracts players, and developer actions affect how many players it attracts and what kind.

There are a number of things you can do with niches. You can make changes that people inside the niche ask for, which is generally not a terrible idea because they know what bugs them. Or you can make changes that people outside the niche ask for, on the grounds that making these changes might attract people to the niche. Or you can leave it as is and just bribe people to try the niche. Or if you're really wacky, you can use players in the niche as the risk in a risk/reward system, thus making them the enemy of everybody else. That one's fantastic.

Incidentally, I do agree that people who complain about market PvP are silly. I also think that marketeers get blamed for a lot of problems that actually have more to do with systemic supply issues, and the freedom people have to make bad decisions, than their own activities. And I advocate some remedies for those systemic issues that would be pretty unpopular among the general population. I can do this because I'm not a dev.

Nah, I consider what I said disingenuous because what I said was disingenuous. I'm sure you're being sincere - you just don't evaluate the relative importance of various considerations the same way I do. Funny how that can happen, when different people meet and interact.

Yup, that's completely unreasonable.

It'd be hard not to notice! I already discussed that. I have two counter-arguments: 1) Shivans/Nukes are too strong to be gated by just the "risk" of PvP, and 2) players shouldn't be trusted with ensuring that the risk/reward ratio is maintained. In the case of AE farms, that trust was totally betrayed, and in this case, upholding the ratio means being hated for doing what you're supposed to do.

You know that I'm pulling for option 1. In the right context, I think it'd do a lot for the player community in the long term, at the cost of losing some players who thrive on toxicity and/or broken reward systems. In all seriousness, would you quit over a zone redesign?

Issue 13. You know, the one that was supposed to pave the way for a strong and vital PvP community, and instead strangled it in its crib while spawning more and more ridiculous threads than redesigning the zones could ever have any hope of doing. If the devs can waste that much time on doing the wrong thing, they can afford to spend some time doing the right thing.

Well, what I consider the right thing, anyway. :P

Fair point. The terminology is incorrect; the division is between those who place the onus of responsibility on the cooperator or the competitor. In fact, both are making choices, and neither is forced to act - nor can either dictate the response of the other to their actions.

Nothing I can disagree with here.

As long as even one person decides to PvP, this is all true. If nobody chooses to PvP, surely you will agree that the zone rewards that do not require PvP to obtain become much easier to obtain. Otherwise, the "risk of PvP" wouldn't be nearly the balancing factor it's claimed to be.

Again, this assumes that even one person has chosen to PvP at all - which is by no means an unreasonable choice for that person. It also assumes that people can choose not to lose in PvP as easily as they can choose to avoid PvP. The last I heard, that was not necessarily the case: I was given to understand that AT, sets, build, and player skill had something to do with it. Choosing to avoid PvP, on the other hand, apparently involves... resetting your alarm clock. And then getting the reward without the risk. As the developers apparently intended.

Perfectly reasonable analogies, for the most part, with one slight twist. Someone is paying you, and anyone else who wants to, to play chess games to a draw or take photographs of scenic vistas. It'd be ridiculously easy money if only everyone would cooperate, but some weirdos keep trying to win at chess or play paintball. Even though you don't really like chess much, and didn't even bring a paintball gun. It's bizarre.

In an odd way, there are a lot of real world situations that are analogous to this design. There are plenty of situations where, if everyone cooperates, the rewards are quite good, but if anyone doesn't the payout is much less. What ends up happening depends on how each individual values the relative benefits of cooperation and competition. When those values are subjective, cooperators and competitors end up seeing each other as crazy and unreasonable.

The good news is that the whole mess can be put to rest forever through any number of possible changes. The bad news is that it seems like a lot of people on both sides have gotten used to the current situation and don't want it to end: cooperators, because when they can successfully avoid the competitors the reward is insanely good and they don't want to see that taken away; and competitors, because they see any change as caving to the entitlement complex of the cooperators. The gripping hand is that unless the developers decide they don't like the current situation, the argument will go on forever. Since they haven't made any move to change it yet, I guess they like it just fine; I've laid out my reasons why I don't as best I can, and trying to bring people who aren't devs around to my way of thinking basically accomplishes nothing either way. So I guess, in the end, I'm not doing much here.

Of course I'll keep arguing, futile though it may be, because someone is wrong on the internet. And so will all y'all. It's a symmetric zero-sum PvP game. :P

Fundamentally different. Zero-sum game. Their win is necessarily your loss and vice versa. Not the case in PvP zones: both sides can "win" by obtaining shivans and nukes.

Fundamentally different. Zero-sum game. You can't win without playing. See above.

There are two games, being played simultaneously, on the same field. If everyone plays one game, everyone can win. If anyone plays the other game, the first game becomes harder. I just don't get why this is considered a good way to set up games.

Why would you perversely choose to voluntarily attack someone who has no interest in fighting you?

Why would someone choose to take away free goodies? Sounds to me like selfish jerks.

Before you start on the next go round, let me state for the hundredth time that I do not believe that PvPers attacking targets in PvP zones are doing anything unreasonable. Nor do I believe that anyone is entitled to PvP rewards without engaging in PvP. The sole problem I have is with the design that makes it possible for PvEers to obtain large rewards in PvP zones without engaging in PvP, and then places the decision as to whether this will happen in the hands of PvPers. Who then have the choice between doing what they came to do, what they are allowed to do, what they are even incentivized to do... or not making someone's day harder than it necessarily had to be.

Why do you even want to have that choice? Neither option is good. And as much as you might wish it, the option to attack people, make their acquisition of rewards more difficult than it strictly had to be, and have them always accept this as good and proper is never going to happen. Do you know how I know this? Because we're still arguing.

The essential problem is that this treats PvP as a punishment for trying to get free toys, and it's a punishment that players voluntarily inflict on each other. Why would you not resent the people who punish you when they don't have to, even if they are allowed and encouraged to do so? The expectation that people will learn to enjoy the activity that is inflicted on them as punishment for trying to get what they want is, quite literally, perverse.