Killing a myth, for the pvp haters
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So, because we didn't sell toilet paper when we opened the store we shouldn't sell it now that its proven its popularity at every other store.
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I believe a more apt use of this metaphor would say she means that just because toilet paper sells well doesn't mean you should convert most of your stock over to it. There's plenty of room for other material that sells, too, and you don't need to take up everyone else's shelf space to get TP generating money.
It was fun.
This thread should have been named "False Dichotomy Theater."
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My first "official" class in games theory was in 1979, but I was pretty young at the time. I've been studying it as an actual mathematical discipline off and on for approximately twenty-two years.
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Damn I feel young now...Arcana started studying games theory a few years before I was even born.
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This thread should have been named "False Dichotomy Theater."
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Tell me about it.
It was fun.
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My first "official" class in games theory was in 1979, but I was pretty young at the time. I've been studying it as an actual mathematical discipline off and on for approximately twenty-two years.
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Damn I feel young now...Arcana started studying games theory a few years before I was even born.
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I was, uh, negative seven at the time.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
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So, because we didn't sell toilet paper when we opened the store we shouldn't sell it now that its proven its popularity at every other store.
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I believe a more apt use of this metaphor would say she means that just because toilet paper sells well doesn't mean you should convert most of your stock over to it. There's plenty of room for other material that sells, too, and you don't need to take up everyone else's shelf space to get TP generating money.
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No, not really. At least that's not my position at all. As I stated in this thread and many others like it, PvE is an important part of this and most other MMO experiences. What I do suggest, is that not funding PvP is entirely short sighted because PvP content is much more reusable than PvE content and I see both as contributing to the success of a modern MMO. I also believe that games that don't do a good job at both forms of play are going to lose out to games that do.
To further stretch the metaphor, I don't want sell only toilet paper but I would like to have a nice new display since we haven't sold it before.
Thorizdin
Lords of the Dead
Old School Legends
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Here's the trivial example that demonstrates the point. Imagine a game with nothing but super reflexes scrappers and regeneration scrappers, and all SR scrappers had high order tohit buffs in their toggles, and all regeneration scrappers had -regen debuffs in their attacks. In this circumstance, even if the devs messed up and made one of them much stronger than the other on paper, there would be an additional safeguard to making too many of one of them. If SR was ten times stronger than regen on paper, and everyone started making them, eventually there would be a strong disincentive to making them: everyone would have high order tohit buffs, and that would encourage you to roll a regeneration scrapper instead, even if they might be less effective in the abstract case: they would do much better than an SR scrapper against all the SR scrappers.
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Why would the regen scrapper in this case do better against the SR scrappers than another SR scrapper? Isn't there also a form of positive feedback here, in that, if you want to be able to hit all those SR scrappers running around, you have to roll one yourself?
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Third, create a requirement to commit to combat to achieve maximum effectiveness
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I'm not sure where you pulled this from, but it's not a principle of 1v1 PvP combat, nor should it be. Part of any battle is knowing when to retreat, knowing when to pursue, and knowing when and how to limit your enemies' abilities to do either. This is true for 1v1 or 1000 v 1000.
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and force the decision to commit to occur prior to gaining complete information about the combatants.
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First off, that's already in effect because you don't know you are fighting and you never knew what inspirations they carried or what Accolades they possesed. Second, the devs have already subscribed to this idea by removing the ability to look at the powers of Villians. This is something many of us identified very early on, and the devs responded. I also partially agree with Thor, in the getting rid of the Archetype labels...however....I think there is a psychological necessiity to provide the combatants with some information along those lines, it may break the immersion to some degree, but I think it cuts down on some of the frustration. I also think it serves as a form of cross-game advertising. Getting beat by a Brute or a 'troller may motivate many to go and make one.
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That's insufficient, for reasons hinted at in the original post. Although hiding build information masks information about a combatant, that's not what I was referencing. What I was referencing is actually a concept that the devs originally had in the plan for CoH 1.0: combat stances.
Part of the problem with 1v1 combat, or even teamed combat to a certain degree, is that at some point, there are really only two things a player can do to alter their effectiveness in a material way: hop around, and shoot in a different order. Once I know how you hop around and the order in which you shoot, I can easily tell if I have a mathematical advantage over you or not from an offensive or defensive perspective: do I deal enough damage to kill you through your defenses faster than you can conceivably deal comparable damage through mine. That ratio is largely fixed for any two combatants in PvP, except for running and jousting which, even if you thought was a good idea for combat in an MMO, this game engine doesn't support well.
Combat stances change the equation somewhat. Even if you've fought the same person ten times before, you cannot know whether the particular stance he's in is a high defense low offense one, or a low defense high offense one, or something in between. Its not just a question of whether you have enough offense to beat his defense before he can do likewise, because he can change those ratios, and so can you: prior to firing the first shot, there's no way to be sure. Firing an opener and running gains you no significant knowledge, because that stance can be reset periodically.
But on short time scales, once you commit to a particular balance of your own offense and defense, you should be tied to it for a long enough period of time to make the decision materially significant for combat purposes: enough so that a bad decision has materially significant consequences (i.e. you tend to lose).
Actually, I'm thinking about something much more sophisticated than combat stances, but that is a low-end version of the idea. The high-end version of the idea is to allow for more move-countermove in PvP: allowing, say, SR scrappers to shift defense from ranged to melee to handle a strong melee threat, then having the melee fighter whip out a machine gun and rip through the now denuded ranged defenses (as a simple example). That's beyond the capabilities of the current powers design, but *not* beyond the capabilities of the current game engine itself (the game already supports the only thing required to implement this: exclusive toggles).
As to where I got this concept from, it forms the basis for a population simulation I wrote in 1988. But I have to admit, I don't know if I was subconsciously influenced by Star Trek: although its not really explained very well in any of the series, its interesting that the one tactic that isn't often used in ship to ship combat in Star Trek, given their ability to travel up to eight thousand times the speed of light, is to simply go to warp and run away, prepare their weapons, and then dash back. Anyone with functioning warp drive should *never* be destroyed in Star Trek, because human beings don't have the reflexes necessary to maneuver a starship into firing position if the opposing captain simply orders his ship to steer randomly. *Something* generally unexplained commits starships to combat, but whatever it is, its there primarily for narrative purposes, and not because of any consistently explained tactics.
But it does make for more interesting combat.
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Negative feedback is needed, both of us agree on that. However, I am much less than convinced that simply incorporating them will result in any more balanced games. Most games at least claim to be built around the concept of rock/paper/scissors, of course applying the precepts of a zero sum game to a non-zero sum game can be perilous, but theoretically that should create negative feedback in most games now. Arguably that doesn't occur, of course you can reply that they simply didn't implement it well.
I can't prove a negative so I have to say that its possible you can create a tree that will create balance, but I can say that quite a few smart folks I know (that are paid to do just that) have come up short trying to. I believe the reason for this is embedded in the fact that no matter how complex your model it can't predict how everything will be used and how negative feedback can be subverted. Not only do you have to create a perfect model, but it has to be perfectly executed, something that I have never seen happen in more than a decade of managing software projects.
The current game is somewhat dependent on recharge times and end cost per power for its balance. In and of itself this is a reasonable approach. The problem comes in when a team buff is created that allows someone to bypass the drawback of a certain set. In your example adding another AT that could debuff defense or toHitBuffs would have a major impact.
The sheer number of interaction of skills and abilities in an MMO makes me doubt that anyone will create a model that can be implemented.
I do think your approach could provide a good starting point for balance, but that's as far as it can go. I personally prefer a flexible system character system so that balance issues aren't crippling when they occur. In a game like GW, if a skill is weak people don't use it. Given time, the player base will show the developers where the overly strong and overly weak skills are. I also believe that hard caps are more effective than trying to create a web of counters.
Thorizdin
Lords of the Dead
Old School Legends
Ice melee challenge.
Find a way to make it decent in PvP.
Find a use for Frozen Aura anywhere in the game.


Ice Ember
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Here's the trivial example that demonstrates the point. Imagine a game with nothing but super reflexes scrappers and regeneration scrappers, and all SR scrappers had high order tohit buffs in their toggles, and all regeneration scrappers had -regen debuffs in their attacks. In this circumstance, even if the devs messed up and made one of them much stronger than the other on paper, there would be an additional safeguard to making too many of one of them. If SR was ten times stronger than regen on paper, and everyone started making them, eventually there would be a strong disincentive to making them: everyone would have high order tohit buffs, and that would encourage you to roll a regeneration scrapper instead, even if they might be less effective in the abstract case: they would do much better than an SR scrapper against all the SR scrappers.
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Why would the regen scrapper in this case do better against the SR scrappers than another SR scrapper? Isn't there also a form of positive feedback here, in that, if you want to be able to hit all those SR scrappers running around, you have to roll one yourself?
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There's an incentive to roll an SR scrapper to get the tohit buffs to hit all the other ones, but it isn't a positive feedback unless you're more effective as an SR scrapper against the other SR scrappers as a Regen would be against the SR scrappers in question. That's a question of proper protection balancing: you do need to make sure that it works out that way.
Plus, in this highly simplified example, the situation is actually being a little bit trivialized by having only two choices: in actuality, you'd have a couple hundred, and you'd be comparing many to many. The interesting thing is that so long as players are bewildered by all the choices and pick relatively randomly, it doesn't matter if none of them really are capable of even *knowing* what the balancing counters are that exist in the system. But if some subset of players decides to figure it out, and attempts to exploit the system, whether they are right or wrong the system will act against them by making them much more obvious targets of opportunity. The act of claiming something is an FotM will encourage people to specifically build to *counter* it, not to follow it, and the ways in which that will be possible are always going to be obvious enough for enough players to counter the FotM trend.
In fact, if too many players complain about an FotM, and not enough players realize there is a trivial counter to that FotM, at some point if it begins to damage the viability of the PvP environment, I'd simply *tell* the players what the strengths and weaknesses of that build were, to educate them.
But I'd never have to do that. There are simply too many players that are too good at optimizing for that to ever even be a remote possibility: if there is a counter, and its built into the system, lots of players will find it.
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I can't prove a negative so I have to say that its possible you can create a tree that will create balance, but I can say that quite a few smart folks I know (that are paid to do just that) have come up short trying to.
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Are you sure? Because I've analyzed this game, and a couple of others (with which I have admittedly much less experience) and I don't see the "fingerprints" that suggest its either been done to some degree, or even attempted and abandoned. If it was attempted in CoH, even if it was abandoned at an early stage, it should have left a signature in the powersets and archetypes, but the game lacks such a signature.
If there were a game for which this was tried then abandoned, I would expect that unless the entire abilities system was rewritten from scratch, there would be evidence in the form of design decisions that are apparently arbitrary in the current system, but would have been significant in an alternate balancing system.
Given how Defense and Regeneration were originally "balanced" at release, it seems clear that the mathematical tools to even attempt this, at least for melee archetypes, didn't even exist when the game was being originally designed. I'm not sure they even exist now: balance models for regeneration in particular seem to be lacking.
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Ahh...I wasn't talking about this game. This one was pretty clearly balanced around a mathematical ideal of "effectiveness" of some sort given the number of similar powers/sets that are variations of each other with tweaks to certain values. Claws versus Spines seems to be a good example, with Spines having higher burst damage to go with higher end cost and slower recharge, both produce X amount of DPS over time but have drastically different outcomes where burst damage is important or factors (like buffs) strongly impact recharge rates and end recovery. I'd be willing to bet that there is (or at least was) a master spreadsheet with each power set totaling so they matched each other to a certain degree.
Thorizdin
Lords of the Dead
Old School Legends
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Ahh...I wasn't talking about this game. This one was pretty clearly balanced around a mathematical ideal of "effectiveness" of some sort given the number of similar powers/sets that are variations of each other with tweaks to certain values. Claws versus Spines seems to be a good example, with Spines having higher burst damage to go with higher end cost and slower recharge, both produce X amount of DPS over time but have drastically different outcomes where burst damage is important or factors (like buffs) strongly impact recharge rates and end recovery. I'd be willing to bet that there is (or at least was) a master spreadsheet with each power set totaling so they matched each other to a certain degree.
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Unlikely. What we know about how the devs balanced this game, in terms of attack sets, is that they performed, in effect, three separate balancing "passes" on attack sets.
In the first "pass" they designed the attack powers around a balancing formula: two, in fact:
(D - 0.36)/0.16 = R
5.2 * D = E
Where D is the damage of the power in damage scale units (1 DS = 100/36 BI), R is the power's recharge, and E is the endurance cost of the power. AoEs have extra formulas that specify how the AoE power will relate to single target powers. There are exceptions, but every power is balanced around these formulas. Implicit in these formulas is an unspoken assumption, that is hinted at by geko when he talked about them: a reasonable starting point to balance attack sets is to balance each power based on the amount of damage per unslotted recharge cycle. The formulas above add an extra wrinkle: they presume that higher damage attacks are worth more, and therefore are made somewhat more expensive in terms of their availability (thus, the slope of the first equation).
But neither equation factors in activation times, and that's a critical error: for attack powers, activation times are actually a sizeable percentage of the recharge time, and therefore the total cycle time. Worse: fast attacks in terms of activation are often given lower damage. You might think that makes sense, but their formula creates a problem: remember: it makes lower damage attacks less costly in terms of time, which is another way of saying they do more damage per recharge second.
But they can also do more damage per activation second, because they are fast. So the first formula above creates the dangerous situation that fast-activating attacks can also be made more efficient by the attack formula. I.e. shadow punch.
But with some exceptions (especially attacks the devs interpreted as being primarily mez and secondarily damage, like stun, cobra strike, etc) that's how the powers were balanced. And there are very few exceptions besides the mez exception. This actually says something: this says the individual power sets can only have equivalent damage output by coincidence, not by design. That's because the formula clearly isn't balanced, and all the attacks follow it. The only way you can balance the attack sets in terms of damage that is left is adjusting activation times or performing very careful engineering of the sets, and they didn't appear to do that. The exception: Claws, which Castle specifically tweaked relatively recently (i.e. long after release).
The second "pass" distributed secondary effects to all the attacks, like stun, knockdown, immobilize, debuffs, etc. These were clearly and admittedly handed out relatively arbitrarily: they were "balanced" in terms of subjective criteria, but not a mathematical one. There's no rule that says "X debuff = Y% knockdown."
The third "pass" was looking at the sets to make sure their overall utility was "reasonable." This is also highly subjective, but it has admittedly happened. MA was changed after release in I1 specifically because of a perceived lack of overall utility and effectiveness. I'm pretty sure there wasn't any specific numerical metric they were trying to hit with their adjustments, though. Why do I think that? Because the original changes accidentally "overbuffed" thunder kick with more damage than the damage formula above states it should have. In I6, specifically because that was detected, TK was adjusted downward. But if TK was adjusted to the correct value in I1 because of a balancing metric, it shouldn't have been changed in I6. It was, because there wasn't any specific balance metric to keep it at that level, but there was a formula that claimed it was set wrong.
I know the devs look at things like burst damage potential, and sustainable damage potential, but I also disagree strongly with their way of looking at those two quantities: I believe they are methodologically flawed. Somewhere, I'm sure there is a spreadsheet that says MA has this much damage and this much burst, and Claws has that much damage and that much burst, but I think those two terms are not defined in ways that properly represent in-game damage-dealing reality. Moreover, even if those numbers were out of whack, they don't seem to be able to influence power numbers, because the two formulas above seem to be almost pre-eminent: even if set A had less burst damage than it "should" the simple solution of increasing the damage of an attack or two can't be used, because it would violate the formula. That's not me saying it, its what I've been told when actually suggesting changes that violate the formula. *They* will break it if they think they need to, but they never think they need to.
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Agreed, while I haven't delved into the earliest dev posts this is clearly the method used and one of the sources of the problems.
The _easiest_ method for fixing this game would be to implement lower caps on certain critical values and better still to do so that self buffs are held as separate value (with its own cap) from buffs from other sources. Interestingly this would have little effect on the PvE game, but a huge affect on PvP. One of the biggest problems I have with PvP in this game is the magnitude of impact that team buffs have. For example, it should be impossible for a team of 8 facing another team of 8 in an arena match, with both sides possessing PvE effective builds, to have a 100+ to 0 score. However, it happens pretty regularly and the difference is team buffs. While I believe that teamwork (including buffing) should be have strong impacts on success in combat that degree is clearly skewed. So much out of whack that we faced a team in a match that resulted in a score of 115 to 1. The team fortunately had the strength of character to ask what they did wrong. In less than a month we had another match, and while we won again the score was 28 to 4 (or something similar) all because they brought the right mix of support characters with the right skills.
This is clearly indicative of how much of force multiplier buffs are in this game and they are _not_ successfully countered by their debuff counterparts.
Thorizdin
Lords of the Dead
Old School Legends
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I can't prove a negative so I have to say that its possible you can create a tree that will create balance, but I can say that quite a few smart folks I know (that are paid to do just that) have come up short trying to.
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Are you sure? Because I've analyzed this game, and a couple of others (with which I have admittedly much less experience) and I don't see the "fingerprints" that suggest its either been done to some degree, or even attempted and abandoned. If it was attempted in CoH, even if it was abandoned at an early stage, it should have left a signature in the powersets and archetypes, but the game lacks such a signature.
If there were a game for which this was tried then abandoned, I would expect that unless the entire abilities system was rewritten from scratch, there would be evidence in the form of design decisions that are apparently arbitrary in the current system, but would have been significant in an alternate balancing system.
Given how Defense and Regeneration were originally "balanced" at release, it seems clear that the mathematical tools to even attempt this, at least for melee archetypes, didn't even exist when the game was being originally designed. I'm not sure they even exist now: balance models for regeneration in particular seem to be lacking.
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Combat Stance were in the game to begin with to a degree. The non-stakcing armors from Tanker and Scrappers Defense sets. And to a lesser extend the End Cost for maintaining several toggles. It was OK conceptually and would have been fine for PvP.
But PvE evolved to the point where making those trade offs of which armor to use was a moot point. You HAD to run all of them or be near useless in the upper level game. NPC where though mezz attack like crazy. And they mixed in different attack types all of the time with 8 member team huge spawns.PvE for melee types did stink big time.
The idea of combat stances or the like could make PvP much more tactical. I get a lot of that when I'm PvP'ing with my Kheldians. You've got Combat Stances with the forms. High Damage/Mobility/no other defenses iwith Nova form, and Massive Defense/Less damage with Dwarf form. And a moxture of the two in Human Form. You;ve also got all sorts of utilities powers as well without having to did into the power pools. You can try to Stealth Stalker approach, the all out zerg, the knockdown dragout toe-to-toe faceoff. And you have the choice to chance stances/methods of on the fly. You can come in with Paper, if they respond with Scissors, you can counter with Rock. It's a interesting match when I face off a good PB or 'Shade. I never know if I'm gonna get Dwaf Right Hook, or get a face full of an Nova AoE, or both.
It was never really necessary to run all your armors, it was just 'more fun'. The players demanded it, and they got it, and it broke the system to a degree.
It's like the endless posts about removing the tiny self debuff built into Unyielding.
Players might react better to a slider of some sort, but they seem to hate 'disadvantages' built into powers as a means of balancing offense with defense tactically. They see it as a nerf or a gimped power.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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Edit:
I'm also really enjoying the discussion between Thor and Arcana in this thread. Good stuff!
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Wha'? No love for the rest o' us? Just 'cuz we're not posh game terro... uh, theorists? Bugrit!
Thought for the day:
"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."
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Woa, Idea man!
*Juggernaut*
One player is spawned into the PvP zone, every player in the zone is on the same team, and their goal is to defeat the player that is given super-AV level power.
Said player will have a timer of 5:00 minuntes to be Juggernaut, and it will pick at random, so as to not unfairly pick same person over and over.
If Juggernaut is defeated it will randomly attach to another player, and whoever defeats the Juggernaut will get some kind of really good reward, like bounty. Or something.
Since it will take more than one person to kill the juggernaut, they can make it so its like a monster. Give whichever team that does (10% right?) the rewards.
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That would be severely cool.
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Somebody must play Ogre
EDIT: Curses! Scooped
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Somebody does.
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Edit:
I'm also really enjoying the discussion between Thor and Arcana in this thread. Good stuff!
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Wha'? No love for the rest o' us? Just 'cuz we're not posh game terro... uh, theorists? Bugrit!
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Nah, we love everyone here. =) Lots of positives coming out of this thread, from more than one community. =)
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What I do suggest, is that not funding PvP is entirely short sighted because PvP content is much more reusable than PvE content and I see both as contributing to the success of a modern MMO.
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How are you defining "reusable"? I ask because I know players who have been here two years now, know the PvE content by heart, and yet still come up with new toons on a regular basis to re-experience that same "less reusable" content. Seeing that, I think the entire issue of "content reusability" is entirely subjective.
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What I do suggest, is that not funding PvP is entirely short sighted because PvP content is much more reusable than PvE content and I see both as contributing to the success of a modern MMO.
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How are you defining "reusable"? I ask because I know players who have been here two years now, know the PvE content by heart, and yet still come up with new toons on a regular basis to re-experience that same "less reusable" content. Seeing that, I think the entire issue of "content reusability" is entirely subjective.
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Actually it isn't subjective at all, however keep in mind that I speaking of gaming in general not just gaming here in CoX. There are certainly people who can and will play the same PvE content many times in as many different variations as is possible. Having said that, no pure PvE implementation shows anything like the longevity seen with PvP implementations. Keep in mind that both Counter Strike, StarCraft, Warcraft, BF, BF2, and a multitude of other "old" games.
Lets just look at CS since its the grand daddy of em all.
In 2002 there were over 30,000 populated Counter-Strike servers on line.
In 2004, GameSpy statistics showed over 85,000 players simultaneously playing Counter-Strike at any point in time.
in 2006, Steam regularly shows over 200,000 players for Counter-Strike at the same time (though this number includes some of the later releases as well).
According to statistics gathered by Valve's content-delivery platform, Steam, these players collectively contribute to over 6.177 billion minutes of playing time each month.
Thats a game that was released in 2000 (started as a mod back in 1999).
PvP implementations derive much of their re-playability because of the variation. Any time I enter a PvP match, even if I've been on the map thousands of times before, the experience is fresh because I have no idea what my opponents are going to do. The same cannot be said of (most) PvE implementations. (I can run the FrostFire mission in my sleep I believe.)
Now, are there some people who don't get bored by the repetition that is common in PvE? Certainly, but I don't think its all that common, otherwise I wouldn't expect people to constantly ask for more content. Guild Wars only has 4 PvP venues (really just 3 IMO), each with a limited set of maps. Compare that the number of PvE venues, 3 lands each with 40+ regions.
(http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page)
The same is true for most games that don't have open PvP, there are almost always far more PvE content (in terms of maps, assets, etc) than PvP content. I don't think that is subjective at all, it doesn't mean that it holds true for each individual but its certainly true from a statistical view point.
Thorizdin
Lords of the Dead
Old School Legends
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What matters is not direct numerical equality in PvP, but rather roughly equal opportunity for wins and losses. It matters less how badly you lose, as long as you have an equal chance to actually win.
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Sorry to cut out most of this post, but this statement stood out to me. This shows exactly why I believe Stalkers and Blasters are, in fact, balanced. Whenever my stalker duels a blaster, 90% of the time one of us dies in the first five seconds. (If they are particularly skilled and I can time the placates right, we can stalemate for a long time.)
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I don't think that is subjective at all, it doesn't mean that it holds true for each individual but its certainly true from a statistical view point.
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But the fact that there are people for whom it doesn't hold true renders your statement entirely subjective. Its your opinion, and you have the right to it, and I might even agree with it, but its still just your opinion and as such is subjective by definition.
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If I plan a team build with X, Y, and Z in the morning only to find out that Z is now 20% less effective because some moron posted my uber build idea and everyone is running I'd be unhappy.
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That's not what I'm suggesting: I'm not suggesting that the game periodically tune or adjust powers based on how many people take them. You won't be 20% less effective because some moron posted your build: you'll be less effective because everyone is copying your build and now has adequate defenses to your build. Except they won't do that, because as soon as more than a few people do it, the very reason for copying your build will vanish, because they would be building something that had no particular advantage over you and everyone else that copied you.
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If you can define a mechanism that automatically balances without lowering the effectiveness of existing characters and powers then I might agree, but I can't see a method for doing that.
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Here's the trivial example that demonstrates the point. Imagine a game with nothing but super reflexes scrappers and regeneration scrappers, and all SR scrappers had high order tohit buffs in their toggles, and all regeneration scrappers had -regen debuffs in their attacks. In this circumstance, even if the devs messed up and made one of them much stronger than the other on paper, there would be an additional safeguard to making too many of one of them. If SR was ten times stronger than regen on paper, and everyone started making them, eventually there would be a strong disincentive to making them: everyone would have high order tohit buffs, and that would encourage you to roll a regeneration scrapper instead, even if they might be less effective in the abstract case: they would do much better than an SR scrapper against all the SR scrappers.
Its an overly simplistic example of designing for negative feedback, but it illustrates the point that it isn't the powers themselves that is being periodically adjusted by the game, its the players themselves that are each faced with a different decision, based on all the previous decisions made by all other players.
By the way, this isn't the only way to create these negative feedback loops: there are much more complex and interesting ones than the trivial case of "I have my own kryptonite." Its just the easiest one to describe, without resorting to decision matricies.
But you could do this on a much larger and multidimensional scale, so that in theory you could add as many things (read: archetypes, powersets) as you wanted to, while keeping the basic web of counterbalances functioning as they should. In fact, the more powersets and archetypal features you add, the more opportunities you have for negative feedback balancing, *if* you keep them under control. The problem is that people think the only way to balance is with direct numerical equality: X defense = Y regeneration = Z offense. But that's entirely the wrong way to do it, because that's too difficult. What matters is not direct numerical equality in PvP, but rather roughly equal opportunity for wins and losses. It matters less how badly you lose, as long as you have an equal chance to actually win. When you define the problem of PvP "balance" to be "everyone has a reasonable opportunity to win, given reasonable build and tactical skill" instead of "everyone's powers are numerically balanced" it becomes much clearer where the balancing needs to be done: at the level of player opportunity, not power effects.
And that's why I say, seemingly paradoxically, that balancing for PvP is actually easier than balancing for PvE. In PvE, "balance" is a question of level progression, and that is a question of defeat rates in CoH: there is a strong coupling of numerical effectiveness to level progression, and that makes PvE balance a much more computationally intensive thing. But in PvP, four wins and three losses can be a reasonably good day: there's no need to balance around the amount of time it takes on average to kill 4800 other players.
This doesn't mean the powers and mechanics don't matter. It means they have to be designed to support proper negative feedback balancing, and they have to be sane so they can be relied upon for simultaneously diverse, and yet predictable (in the balancing sense) behavior. But "sane" is a much different requirement than "equivalent" for powers balance.
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