The Katalyst

PvPers are people too, Fleas are not people, however.

Well and even then, even with the 7 teams we have now there are like 4 teams out of all 7 that make any real effort to practice and actually take practice semi-srs. I highly doubt if we can hardly pull off 4 active teams, as Vinnie said active being the keyword, in a league format, that we could pull off anymore in a ladder. This would be an even bigger deal in a ladder since matches aren't mandatory on a certain day for every team, each team fighting each once, etc...

Also, we were lucky that so many people actually came back to this game for this league, since half the teams are made up of mostly returning players.

It's a better format all round, it's more self sufficient than a league so you don't need as much central organization, teams are around longer and build a better relationship and what not as a result, you don't have to deal with drafts or free agents, rosters are generally pretty big... It's just sort of hard to find enough interest or dedication in PvP these days to actually run a ladder.

I agree test would be far better but I think the turnout for it would be much lower, and at this stage of this game we can't really afford to turn people away because they won't move servers, and most people have their PvP toons on Freedom now anyways, although it would solve the issue of build limitations.

Running this league on test was something I considered but I'm not sure what kind of limits are on test at the moment, and I was pretty sure interest in moving to test would be pretty low.

It was pretty close... I looked back at it because I recorded it and I had about 10-20 HP before AP wore off and I was able to pop all 18 of my remaining greens. Probably had a bit to do with luck, but I was also missing like 60 HP from Invader and 3 Apocs.

Oh yeah, practice is definitely to get you to a point where you are capable of winning matches, but it's also a good time to try lineups and other players even though the lineups/players may or may not be succesful. It's less about winning and more about improving, which would also infer that you are trying to win with whatever you are doing in practice matches. Obviously if you aren't playing to win you aren't going to get the most out of practice. I guess I didn't really word that the way I meant it.

Also yes, one of the reasons we decided to practice with WARE in the first place was we saw them as the best avenue to fight a team that would give us the greatest challenge, even if they beat us more often than not, you don't get better by fighting teams that are worse than you.

That said, I don't think internals are worthless, but if all you are doing is internals then they are. There's some more specific things that teams can work on in internals and pinpoint things people aren't doing so well better.

I'm not sure if it's the same bug that you're talking about, but I have also ran into an issue where healing myself or another person on my Emp causes my heals to become useless very quickly, and when I use my heals I also experience the issue you stated above.

Yeah, which to me says something because Purples are also far more expensive than they have ever been. This is probably because the population is lower in general and nobody Purple farms anymore, they just AE farm.

I think they should increase the drop rate of both Purples and PvP IOs to the point where they are actually affordable by more than the rich of CoH after we start reaping the benefits of the increases. They would probably just continue to argue that it's exploitable to have such high drop rates or something, but does that really matter when the end result is substantially lower prices? Is it really worth it to punish legit, non-exploiting, non-farming players for the few people who can and do exploit things? People who want to exploit will always find a way anyways.

Take a hint from the real world, inflation sucks. (The last paragraph was more directed towards the devs even though I know they probably won't see it anyways)

I actually like Hemm and some other members of this team, I was just teasing him.

I'm also not extraordinarily worried about a fight that isn't happening for another 4 weeks, because my team is still committed to improving, but I do appreciate the Badgers actually practicing, and practicing with practice in-mind as opposed to winning.

I actually did indirectly address all of your questions, I basically stated that by supporting i13 you support zoners being forced into phase/hiber builds. I didn't address Teleportation because that was never an issue that people cared about back then anyways. Not many people used Teleport, or as you said in your own words, were good at it. So once again, you are supporting the dumbing down of the value of skill.

All of your concerns were addressed. And yes, the result of removing TS and HD would be an increase in survivability for people, POTENTIALLY. Good evaders thrived under pre-i13 mechanics, as did smart offensive players. Post-i13, those people really can't utilize their ability as long as those abilities don't really make a big difference. TS/HD manages to destroy the effectiveness of good evasion or smart offense.

No, this game is not incredibly difficult, yet people like you continue to support the homogenization of skill levels so that the bad players can keep up with the good players even though that doesn't really make any sense.

Also, playstyle is influenced MOST by game mechanics, and I think that's what you are failing to understand. People emphasize heavy amounts of damage because it's what works best in PvP. It's always kind of been that way, but since squishies don't benefit from buffs other than damage/tohit buffs anymore, it eliminates the need for most buffers. That's why Emps are the only real support you see in 8v8 anymore. Disruption is limited to a few specific setups, in terms of equal effectiveness. Even then, disruption is, for the most part, very simple. It really doesn't vary much. The reason why damage spam is the most popular/most effective method of killing things in a zone is because all you have to do to keep something TS'd is to attack it, so people just spam attacks to make sure the target can't evade, which is why phase/hiber are the only truly viable methods of avoiding spikes in zone PvP.

Don't get me wrong, pre-i13 PvP was pretty broken, but at least it made sense. Most toons played different roles that were often more important than just damage. Most of those roles have been rendered useless because of i13 mechanics. It's not just TS/HD that do this, but they do happen to dumb down what little skill is left in PvPing in this game.

I guess if you enjoy a game where the scope of viable winning tactics and builds is very small and unvaried, than this system is fine for you. For most of us, we are tired of it, and really miss how the old system at least had some variety, despite that it was pretty broken.
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You are welcome to your opinion that post-i13 is more fun for you, that's fine. You are disputing what are actually facts and claiming that they are based on opinion. You are arguing with people that know the mechanics of PvP very well, and understand why i13 and beyond limits what is viable vs. pre-i13. Quite frankly, it's very justifiable to say that you are wrong in a lot of your statements, not just from a standpoint of opinion, but from a standpoint of logic, experience, and more or less, facts.

Anyways, I promised myself that I was done with this discussion, but I want to see if that is an elaborate enough explanation of the positions I stand with, and most PvPers stand with in some manner.

I probably forgot to touch on why HD is bad, but I think that has been touched on as much as TS, and would probably require me to write another 3 paragraphs that would really just restate what everyone else has been saying against HD but in such a way that Dahjee might be able to understand because he's kind of dumb.

Calling someone a troll is trolling, stop trolling trolls because that also makes you a troll, and now that I have accused you of trolling, I am now also a troll! The cycle never ends until someone breaks it.

Also, yes, I was told by Mod 13 that calling someone a troll is considered a form of trolling on the CoH Forums, and yes, the word troll is explicitly included in the ToS for the CoH Forums.

That guy who posted above Smoke is the first person to make an intelligent argument in this thread since Dahjee came in and hijacked it.

I think the reason people have been asking for just simple fixes is because we have lost confidence that the Devs will ever do any additions to PvP. The PvP community has on many occassions laid out what the Devs could do to vastly improve PvP, and attract new people to PvP for a long time, even before i13. It's mostly been met with just being completely ignored.

I completely support expanding on incentives to PvP, but I just don't see it happening. I will happily eat my words if it ever does, but I sort of doubt it will. I don't doubt that we will see some amount of attention paid to fixing things that we have asked for to be fixed for a long time because of F2P and CoH: Freedom, but I think it would be a huge leap for them to invest any time into adding things to PvP in this game.

To repeat myself; I completely agree that the best route to make PvP in this game better and more popular is to expand it's scope of incentives and it's scope of things to do in PvP besides kill people.

I really think this game had the potential, and still does technically, to be a really fun and competitive game in terms of PvP, but the devs have shown very, very little interest in pursuing this. It's sad, because I truly believe this game could be a lot more if the dev team of this game wasn't so lackluster.

I think if the devs just turned over PvP to the players, allowed them to make their own PvP maps with their own rules in a similar style to AE, it would improve the potential of PvP for this game greatly and they wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. The playerbase has shown over and over that they know how PvP in this game works far better than the devs do, and have a pretty clear vision on how to improve it. I think some of this translates over to PvE too, but that's not what this thread is about. I think of all things, that would be the least likely change, but I think it would be the most beneficial.