The_Cheeseman

The problem with the powers you suggest is still the fact that they do nothing more than give numeric bonuses to your character's stats. As I mentioned previously in the thread, powers should be fun and change the way your character plays. New attacks, controls, even defenses can achieve that goal by altering your tactics in battle or sometimes even just by looking cool. The Fitness pool feels more like a "power tax"--they're just boring stat boosts that make you feel like you didn't really get a new power at all.

Rate of reward gain is not really the purpose of playing an MMO, however. If it were, then simply making a game that involved pressing a button to earn points would be a major success. Rewards are meaningless if the challenges faced to earn them are not engaging. There is no reason to even seek rewards in CoH unless your goal is to improve your character to overcome more difficult obstacles.

In a perfect world, the rate at which you can earn rewards would be directly proportionate to the challenge-level of the content your are consuming. If you face trivial content, you earn trivial rewards. If you face extreme content, you earn extreme rewards. If you are no longer even considering the challenge level of the content, and merely examining the rate of rewards earned in a given amount of time, I suggest that the very point of seeking those rewards has been lost.

Anybody can simply repeat trivial content enough times to accumulate trivial rewards until they equal something significant. However, I would suggest that this sort of play is counter to the intent of the game, and probably an aberrant behavior that only a minority of players actually practice regularly. Sure, there will always be people who farm easy missions to make loads of cash, and if they enjoy doing so, then more power to them! However, is not the purpose of a super-hero MMO to build a super-heroic character, engage in simulated combat with evil foes, and eventually emerge victorious with your hard-won spoils?

What I was referring to when I said, "there is no penalty to moving slowly through missions" was that completing a mission does not become more difficult because you stopped to rest between every encounter. Therefore, your ability to overcome the challenges in the mission does not degrade because you decided to take a 5min AFK to make a fresh cup of coffee. Because of this, the actual challenge level of most content in CoH is not significantly impacted by your endurance recovery rate, because only very rare encounters actually last long enough that running out of endurance is a factor. That vast majority of the time, your recovery rate has little to no bearing on what content you can complete--and therefore what quality of rewards you can earn--it merely imposes an artificial restriction on the speed at which you are able to complete that content. Basically, the only thing it challenges is your patience.

I can see your point here, but I disagree. First of all, because I have never found resource management on a tactical level to be very fun (this is opposed to strategic-level resource management, like in a game like Civilization or similar), but mostly because resource limitations in FPS and RPG games are designed specifically for the environment and duration of the game. FPS games and RPGs (the non-MMO variety) are designed with a definite beginning and end. The player starts with a certain amount of a given resource, and the designers ration out additional resources according to their intended level of scarcity. If the devs don't want the players to use rockets all the time, they will only place a few rockets in their levels, or make rocket spawns more rare than simple bullets. If a designer wants you to save your Mega-elixers for emergencies, they will only place a few of them in hard to reach treasure chests or as drops from unique bosses.

This method works because the designer knows exactly what challenges the player will face, and therefore exactly how many of the resources they want the players to obtain in order to succeed at those challenges. The developer can place only 5 mega-elixers in the entire game, and that's okay because the player will probably only need a couple of them, anyway. However, MMOs like City of Heroes do not have a definite ending. Players can play the same characters for months and even years. They may repeat the same limited selection of content over and over, or they may try to consume all the content in the game without ever doing the same thing twice. The players do not have a predictable, finite set of challenges that the designers can reference when portioning-out their resources.

Because of this, limited resources are almost impossible to balance properly. You want every player to have the same experience consuming your content. You don't want one player to breeze through it by expending some sort of unique resource, while another player continuously loses until they give up in frustration because they don't have the same resource. Since it is impossible to predict what resources a player will have going into the encounter, it's impossible to determine how much of said resources the encounter should expend. Unless you want every mission to include a shopping list, this is how it has to be.

Therefore, resources in an MMO are necessarily either specific to the individual challenge (such as a mission where you are given a temporary power that you are meant to use for that specific mission) or are meant solely as an aid, not a requirement (such as inspirations--they are useful, but a sufficiently well-designed character in the hands of a skilled player doesn't usually need them).

The Endurance bar in CoH is not a terribly effective means of limiting character power in most situations. A character will usually not find running out of endurance mid-fight to be a significant issue in the vast majority of encounters. Instead, the endurance bar acts more as an artificial throttle on how quickly a character can transition from one encounter to the next. Since there is no real penalty in CoH for moving slowly through missions, the effect of the endurance bar really doesn't significantly impact a character's effectiveness in most aspects of play. Instead, it just makes the player have to spend more time between encounters, which is neither challenging nor fun. It's just waiting and wasting the player's time.

I'm not quite sure what your point is, here. Yes, the categories are fairly broad, but the fact is that the powers chosen for each of the sets, as a whole, work in unison to allow the character to fulfill the role of the set. All buff/debuff sets have powers that, when used together properly, will allow the character to buff his allies or debuff his enemies. Any given power in the set was designed to assist the character with his role as a buffer or debuffer.

This is contrary to the powers in the Fighting Pool. The pool is a mix of specific-use offensive powers and general-use defense powers. Defenses are of great interest to many characters, because almost every character, regardless of archetype, can benefit from increased survivability. On the other hand, very few characters derive any meaningful benefit from weak melee attacks because those that actually would choose to enter melee combat (brutes, scrappers, tankers, stalkers, occasionally a dominator or blapper, certain builds of epic ATs) will have much more useful attack choices from their primary or secondary sets. The Fighting Pool attacks are barely comparable to the T1 power in a melee pool, and many scrappers and stalkers don't even take their T1s.

Anyway, I hope this clarifies my point. Again, I am not entirely sure what you're trying to argue, but I stand by my previous comments.

The ATs were designed around creating a coherent theme for play, then the powers for each set in the AT were further sub-divided by theme. In your example, the Dark Miasma power set is a buff/debuff set. It is available to certain ATs whose role is to buff or debuff, such as defender, corrupter, or mastermind. The individual powers in a given set are not supposed to be mechanically identical, as long as the complete package fulfills the role that the set is meant to fill in the AT. Tar patch and darkest night are both debuffing powers (though tar patch also contains a strong control element, as much of Dark Miasma does), therefore they belong in a debuff set.

On the other hand, the "fighting" pool really doesn't do much to inform players of its use. Obviously it is meant to make you better at fighting, but that is the purpose of almost every power in the game, so that really isn't terribly relevant. Also, the first two picks are both melee attacks, which are mostly worthless to many ATs (blasters, controllers, dominators, corrupters, etc.) and for those ATs that may get use out of them (scrappers, tankers, brutes, etc.) they are nearly always the worst attack that character has access to. In other words, they are a totally wasted power pick in the vast majority of builds, though they are required as prerequisites for two rather nice defensive powers that are useful to many ATs.

I just wanted to let you know that the information here doesn't necessarily display any connection issues. I ran a lot of traceroutes and pathpings when I worked in ISP network troubleshooting, and it is not at all unusual to get no response from gateway servers like you see on Lines 9 and 10. Some servers are configured to not respond to ping requests, or are protected from such unnecessary traffic to minimize load.

I am having the exact same issues that other have mentioned in this thread regarding the intermittent packet loss. See: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...74#post2843274 for more information.