The Katalyst

Striga sure, you can just hide in the forests for 10 mins if you really want to, Industrial and Eden you can possibly spend the first 5 minutes trying to find eachother even if you aren't trying to hide.

Skyway and Steel allow for some differently paced matches, but I don't think it will turn into as much of a hide and seek game as the above mentioned 3 might. Rest of the maps are probably fine.

I've also been pretty vocal about Alpha only, but to be honest, we haven't tried any organized events where anything but Alpha was allowed. A 3v3 tournament is probably a safe way to test these things, more so than an 8v8 setting.

I still think incarnates are unbalanced, to clarify, but I think it's worth at least giving it a try and see what happens. Who knows, people may end up having a lot of fun with some of the new stuff. All in all I'm in favor of at least trying it.

Some of the fotms actually benefit less from some of the incarnates then other stuff. Like the OP said, reactive gives fire blast or any DoT heavy set a pretty noticeable boost. Psy blast with reactive will give you a little extra oomph, but over all it's only noticeable when you have a bunch of them hitting the same target. Some of the other stuff benefits some things more than others, for instance rad fenders have become a somewhat popular dueling build again because of Alpha and Destiny mostly, other stuff is in a similar boat.

Lore is dumb, there is nothing that will ever convince me that Lore should ever be used in arena PvP.

Other than that it looks pretty good.

You're good at the PvP in this game that's important, which is bcast PvP, Green.

Oh, and stop de-railing the draft thread please. PvP is srs.

you tell him, kara!

Can you also magic up amazing PvP builds, Z?

No, not literally "nothing" has been done to fix PvP since i13. The nophase timer is good, selectable arena maps are good, some of that stuff. The problem is just as they do with most PvE things is those are all band-aid fixes that don't address the core problems with the system. i21 is a step in the right direction on a lot of the PvE stuff, though obviously there are no substantial changes to PvP, nor am I going to fool myself by thinking that there ever will be. It's hit or miss, i13 PvP WAS as broken as this PvP in a lot of ways, but overall was more fun and allowed for more diverse builds and strategies. Looking back at it, it was worth it to revamp the PvP system, they just didn't do it right, simply put. They took the wrong perspective on the issue. I have no faith in them to do any more sweeping changes without creating another i13, so to speak. Reverting to i12 or earlier would be the worst thing they could do at this point.

For the most part the "fixes" have been bug fixes, and even then there are plenty of arena bugs that have been around for a long time.

The goal of playing video games for 99% of gamers is to have fun, TS takes away from the speed that made this game's PvP unique and enjoyable. HD made playing any kind of support healer a nightmare and unfun. Sure you're allowed to turn them off in arena, but most of this game's PvP happens in zone, and the easiest solution to appease the remaining diehard PvPers would be to remove TS and HD from zones.

Obviously there are some serious issues with DR, but quite frankly, I don't trust this dev team to fix it in a way that is actually good. To fix DR, inherent res and epic shield res would need to be looked at, inherent res removed. If that were to happen, they would also need to look at every single power and probably lower the damage on them. Without the res that squishies have, blasters would be 2-3 shotting squishies again, which would overall be bad. This is because almost every single target power in the game had it's damage increased substantially under PvP rules.

Some things in i13 were not COMPLETELY bad ideas, just very poorly implemented and were never revisted for the most part. In zone, they could have had HD only count for respites, and maybe self heals, while leaving outside heals untouched. They could have left out the inherent res, and allowed for therm/sonic/cold/etc buffs to still be important. I have no idea how they could have implemented DR in such a way that it wouldn't cause the problems it does already.

The mez changes were sort of good, nobody liked being perma held. The problem is squishies can get stunned for very long times, and the stun is guaranteed. There's also the concern that when mez'd, it is guaranteed, thus in order to set up AS's or other things that work better with rooted targets, all you need to do is use a half-decent mez. Before i13 being able to AS consistantly meant something, and being able to pull off a good spike meant something. Not sure how to treat this without removing the guaranteed mez or reverting to the PvE mez system. The stun issue could be fixed if they added stun res to acro or something, and fixed broken mez durations.

Sorry for the wall of text rant, just wanted to clarify the more specific views I have on this.

Oh also, if you make it so only melee attacks cause TS, it will most likely just convince more players to play regens and tanks in zone. We already have too many of them in RV. Ranged being the stand by for PvP in this game is sort of important to keep that fast-paced feeling. Imho, there is no great way under this game's mechanics to create parity between ranged and melee. Ranged will always be king in this game's PvP. To make it the inverse would destroy the fun of this game for a lot of people. I don't see any way to make them truly equal.

Reverting to pre-i13 rules sounds good at a glance, and would have been fine if they did it a while ago. At this point, so few of us even know or remember how PvP was before i13, and have built a lot of toons around the new mechanics (those of us who are still here).

Your sentiment on how the update failed face first is pretty much spot on.

That said, removing Travel Suppression and Heal Decay would go a long way for the remnants of the PvP community.

PvP was not openly addressed like this (Since the devs abandoned it) until neglect of PvP and base building was asked about in an interview. Whether that's because they felt more pressure to address it, or because Z coincidentally brought it up is something we will never know.

Also in terms of devs vision of the game versus player base vision, the player base vision should ALWAYS be more important. It's bad business in this industry to ignore player feedback, in the end all it does is push paying customers away. Also if you were educated on the subject, you would know that the Devs did center the changes around player feedback, unfortunately the feedback came from PvE'ers who came into zone and got thrashed, and QQ'd about it, instead of people who actually PvP'd regularly and understood what the system is lacking.

There was a post from a redname a long time ago that basically openly admitted to it, who mysteriously resigned soon after.

I appreciate that you are trying to be reasonable, your info is just very misinformed and uneducated, and is largely composed of assumptions.

I will contact Captains and hopefully have a definite answer by tommorow, so far the only one's I'm sure of their opinion's/votes are 3 teams, which if it were quantified at this point would be 2-1 in favor of raising it to 10. I know I can count you and PF's team as in favor for sure, the one who is against I will clarify with, and the 2 I'm not sure about I should be able to contact today. I'm sending offline's to them after I post this. Believe it or not, there is opposition to raising it from some people, I'm just not sure whether or not it's enough people to outvote the ones in favor... Either way it will be figured out very soon.

That's reasonable, and to be honest that is one reason why it makes sense to increase it to 10... If people want to play on a certain team that badly but can't be on the core, there's ways to get around it. 10 is a good compromise imo to balance both viewpoints. If each team picks up 2 more to make 10 on each core, with 5 teams that will only occupy 10 more people, who may honestly not make a team anyways. To assume that they will is more of a gamble then a surefire reason to leave it at 8.

It's actually already up for vote on the GP under a poll. So far, to be completely forthcoming, I've yet to hear from a team that is already confirmed that they don't have enough. In fact, all 5 teams so far seem to have 1 or 2 people they would like on the core but can't fit, if not more.

Basically aside from it maybe contributing to an extra team, which is kind of a big maybe, it will only benefit the teams that are already confirmed.

That is moreso me voicing what I've heard from different people scattered about than my personal opinion on it. It comes down to people want to play with their friends, which is very understandable. I stated from the beginning that this league's main focus was fun, obviously if you can't be on your friends team part of that fun is potentially lost.

If you're on the GP, there is already a discussion thread for it there, with an attached poll.

Yes it definitely is, it's just been a long time since anyone used it, forgot it existed. :/

Since it's going to be best of 3 you can decide it sort of like 8v8 leagues, person being challenged gets 1st map pick, challenger gets 2nd, 3rd map pick could be random or something and just reset until you get 1 of the 4, or you could just in-game dice roll for map pick or something.

It's obviously up to you, that's just how I would do it.

in a 1v1 scenario, the only 1 of those maps that could give a really big advantage is probably Graveyard if someone brings a devs blaster or something and gets a kill, then just webnades and stays on the cliffs or something along those lines. For the rest of the 4, the advantages to certain builds is very slight.

1 more suggestion is to add a rule against spawn killing... I guarantee you if you don't explicitly ban it in some shape or form, people will exploit it, I believe the queue attack/follow dead body bug still works, and there are plenty of other ways to get around the initial phase timer.

Sorry I will let you do your thing, all in all it's a great idea, I just like to throw in my opinion.

The difference is there have been suggestions on the matter since before i13, put into concise and reasonable posts, most of which can be found on the PvP forums. Just because we ask for it to happen, no matter how reasonable or important it is, doesn't mean it will happen. In terms of PvP, it is most likely NOT to happen, speaking from a historical standpoint. The player's opinion of the direction PvP should take has been laid out many, many times, brought to the developers by community mods, and done in a very reasonable fashion.

This post was meant to be more for lulz than anything, but if the devs do intend to take this suggestion seriously, they already know the stance of PvPers on how to start fixing PvP, and really have known for a long time, but nothing has changed. Literally. Nothing.

If you cared to read my post above yours, I already stated this in part of it.

The devs are far too busy making band-aid fixes, such as adding costume pieces and other useless cosmetic additions to fix PvP. This is only acceptable by most of the CoH community because PvP is not popular in this game, and because people like shiny things that in the end do nothing but glimmer in the sun.

EDIT: Havoc beat me to it.

Ur fase seems unlikely.

Also your guess is actually incredibly innacurate. Avatea stated that at the height of PvP popularity (sometime around i10) the "hardcore" PvP population was just over 10% of the sub base. This only includes people who frequented zones, not people who were strictly arena PvPers or casual PvPers.

Since we are making uneducated guesses, I'd say the casual PvPer playerbase was something like 11.27234% of the game. So that would make 22.27234% of the population, which is pretty sizeable. This still doesn't include strictly arena PvPers.

Nice try though.

Doesn't matter if you feel the thread is constructive or not, the basis of it is very well founded. Most of us PvPers who still play have very little hope that anything will change, because history shows even the most well thought out posts with the most constructive and reasonable feedback means nothing. So naturally we are going to be a little cynical and bitter, you would be to if there were sweeping changes in PvE that caused an exodus of 75% of the PvE population, and were clearly wrong and against the wishes of the PvE community.

Believe it or not, ED does not count. ED is a change that was very warranted, this game is already easy enough, if ED was never implemented and we were still given IO's we would be soloing trials.

Also believe it or not, the hardcore PvP population, meaning people who visted PvP zones on a regular basis was at it's peak just over 10%. This does not include strictly arena PvPers or casual PvPers, so saying that PvPers never made up a signifigant portion of the population is very mislead, and wrong.

tl;dr
PvP is broken and has been that way virtually untouched since i13. PvPers remain upset about this, and always will, rightly so.

It's also ironic how you answer an unconstructive post with an even more unconstructive post. Nice attempt on sounding smart by using sarcasm.