In-Testing: Task / Strike Force and Trial Missions
By
1_800_Spines,
Posted on: 2008-02-26 15:44 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Outliers don't count. Anything the average player can solo probably shouldn't be worth a C drop. The Devs have the numbers on what the mythical average player can do.
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!
At the absolute most degenerate setup, I can leech a TF as much as I want. I can join a Cap SF with my SG and sit inside the door of each mission gaining XP and other rewards. (Worse, I could even do this at level 15 "fighting" +5's and +6's.)
The current change on Test does not solve THAT situation. Nor does it solve similar situations where I happen to be offline instead of sitting inside the door.
Given that this situation is not solved, why would this change be implemented that causes complications and potential bad play experiences in other non-exploitive situations? Seems we're gaining nothing, and losing in other places.
I agree with the reasoning behind the initial change, but this version is much better than the previous method, as it does not punish the TF soloists and still cuts down on the softloading problem. Thanks for listening to player feedback, and GL to Catwhoorg on his next challenge 
Does this change to anything to improve the QOL of a casual player on a strikeforce? Because it seems they either break even, or potentially come out a lot worse! Is there a serious enough problem to be addressed to warrant that?
I fear this is going to throw out the SF baby with the logout bathwater. If many fewer people are even running SFs, then of course the amount of them being exploited will drop.
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This is a better change... but it still opens the door for abuse by not letting the team leader kick players who log off for extended periods.
However, well done on listening to the feedback and coming up with a solution that acts as a compromise.
i didnt really have a problem with the current live one, wasnt in love with it either, but this seems better for those who did, now the offline kicker thing would be nice if you can do it, not sure how easy it would be.
let me restate I do not want this change unless you guys can make a way to kick offline players, which doesn't seem possible without making a "team vote to kick" option that includes both online and offline players on the TF/SF.
one problem with kicking an offline player is that they're not there to defend themselves.
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This change and the previous one is bad because it still allows for some teammates to grief your team should they choose to log off and not quit. I have had it to happen twice since the first change on a few tfs I have done. Once on Katie hannon and once Sara Moore TFs. We need a way to be able to kick people from the team that are not currently logged in. Secondly neither of these changes have done anything to address the reason why this softloading of tf/sfs happens in the first place. If the recipes that people can actually use were more readily accessable we would not be going thru this now in the first place. Either address the issue with the drop pools or you are doing all this for nothing and all it is doing is punishing the rest of the playerbase instead of farmers.
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Understandable and thanks for the feedback. However, I would have to advise you to better get to know the people you are grouping with. Simply put, if someone has a reputation for such, don't engage in a task / strike force or trial with them. You would be well advised to only take your most trusted allies with you to tackle such challenging and dangerous missions!
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Not an ok answer. This is an MMO, and forming teams to do things is how you get to know new people.
"Just team with people you already know" is not acceptable from a dev or any member of the GM/Public relations staff.
Epic fail ;(
Frankly, I didn't think I could be more disappointed, but I am.
In my experience, I see people leaving the TF by logging off and not coming back more often than by quitting. They have computer/ISP problems, something interferes in real life and they say "Well, I have to go for an hour, but I'll be back before the end" and they don't make it back, it's getting late and they get discouraged and just log off.
As it is on live, if the minimum to start really represented the minimum team size to expect to succeed, the change isn't horrible. If you're down to two people for the LGTF, odds are that you're not going to be able to defeat the Honoree. The reason that change is so bad is because, particularly heroside, the minimums have little to no relationship with how many heroes or villains you need to succeed the battles.
OK, with this change, if everyone who leaves a TF early does so by quitting, this is better. But if people leave without quitting, this is worse unless the team is at the minimum to start, in which case it's no better.
And one of the examples I gave above of people who log off but don't return is the real life "I have to log off for an hour or so". Sometimes they don't return, but usually they do. Under this new system, the "rational" choice is to say "Sorry, that's not acceptable, we have to kick you."
If there was one good thing about the furor that arose over the Task/Strike Force change it's that it shown a light on the problems that exist in Task/Strike Forces. So I was really hoping for a short term fix of "we're reducing the minimum to start numbers to something more rational, and we'll be looking at fixing the other problems as we move forward."
Instead, the only fix I'm seeing here is "OK, if you want to solo or duo TFs, we'll let you do that".
I appreciate listening to us and trying something, but I don't like this change at all.
My arcs are constantly shifting, just search for GadgetDon for the latest.
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OK, with this change, if everyone who leaves a TF early does so by quitting, this is better. But if people leave without quitting, this is worse unless the team is at the minimum to start, in which case it's no better.
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Agreed. I fail to see how any of this is an improvement for the average player.
Nor do I really see anything from Lighthouse explaining what this change is expected to accomplish. Exploiters can still exploit just as much as they currently do.
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Instead, the only fix I'm seeing here is "OK, if you want to solo or duo TFs, we'll let you do that".
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Funny, a lot of us wanted to rush to the end of missions and Positron threw a hissy fit over it. I wonder why this form of unintended behavior is acceptable.
It does improve the QoL of a casual player over the previous change.
However, it does not improve the ability of the casual player to do TFs in the first place, nor is it intended to. It is an exploit fix. Exploit fixes take priority over QoL. If TFs are played less often as a result, that will be addressed later as necessary (on the other hand, maybe SF/TFs are being played more often than intended as it is).
TFs and SFs are intended for groups of players who know each other, not PuGs. If you can do one with a PuG, that is allowed and encouraged, but not supported. This may be a bad metaphor, but turbocharging your car engine may be allowed and even encouraged by your car manufacturer, but it is not necessarily supported, or considered normal use.
There is plenty of casual team content in the form of Invincible missions, AV missions, ans such, and can always be more.
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!
That was a bad metaphor.
Also, at this point of time we are at with CoX. With a declining player base this is not the best decision to the players.
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Instead, the only fix I'm seeing here is "OK, if you want to solo or duo TFs, we'll let you do that".
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Funny, a lot of us wanted to rush to the end of missions and Positron threw a hissy fit over it. I wonder why this form of unintended behavior is acceptable.
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Instituteing a change to curb pool C recipe faming is hardly throwing a "Hissy". It is the Pool C farmers that have been throwing the "Hissy".
I like the way it is currently on live. Why can't the minimum starting numbers for all TFs be reduced to 4-5? (obvious exceptions STF/LRSF)
~MR
AE Arc: 305214 Blood Diamonds (Villainous)
Unleashed/Unchained/B.O.S.S.
Was you trying to quote?
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let me restate I do not want this change unless you guys can make a way to kick offline players, which doesn't seem possible without making a "team vote to kick" option that includes both online and offline players on the TF/SF.
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Why? Any griefer can do far worse.
Doom.
Yep.
This is really doom.
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TFs and SFs are intended for groups of players who know each other, not PuGs. If you can do one with a PuG, that is allowed and encouraged, but not supported.
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Since when? I love when people make up rules for everyone. Do you have a reference for this?
Here is one straight from the game manual "A task force is a team up of powerful Heroes that comes together to undertake a long series of dangerous assignments, which usually culminates in a battle with one of the city's Arch Villains. Task force missions require a great deal of commitment, and are very risky, but the reward for success is proportionate to the risk."
Okay, bad metaphor, but I think you get the point: if you can do a TF or SF with a few PuGers instead of a minimum or larger team of people you play with often and can rely on, you are doing something exceptional and unintended. Good for you.
If TFs are content for the average PuG in practice, they may be unintentionally easy and need some beefing up when they are reworked 
Also, the CoX playerbase is only down about 2%, totally within expected paramaters for a 4 year old MMO.
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!
Interestingly enough, this change makes it easier to farm Pool C's from certain TFs by being able to reduce their challenge level below a certain team size, thus preventing certain sizes/contents of spawns. Eg, under Live, it's impossible to run the LGTF without spawning bosses; with this change you can rebalance the TF to any level you want, including a team size that only spawns up to LT's.
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let me restate I do not want this change unless you guys can make a way to kick offline players, which doesn't seem possible without making a "team vote to kick" option that includes both online and offline players on the TF/SF.
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Why? Any griefer can do far worse.
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I believe the concern is over fringe cases where you have several legitimate player drops (ISP outage, power failure, etc.) but no way to rebalance the missions to account for that. In the current system, this isn't a problem unless you drop below the starting requirement. With this change, you would have to suffer through the spawns untill the end or just quit the T/SF. I'm not sure how often something like that would really come up though.
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What's the difference between a healer and an Empath? Join The Repeat Offenders and find out.
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Was you trying to quote?
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Heh,
I thought the 2 lines looked interesting so I left them.
~MR
AE Arc: 305214 Blood Diamonds (Villainous)
Unleashed/Unchained/B.O.S.S.
Looks more like coding tho.
1 of the quote brackets is missing.
~MR
AE Arc: 305214 Blood Diamonds (Villainous)
Unleashed/Unchained/B.O.S.S.
I refer you to the design of the TF itself:
- hours of content.
- can't invite more people to replace dropouts.
- designed with code to allow play over multiple sessions.
- Can't do regular missions in between.
Also, this quote by Positron:
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However, we saw a desire for a group of friends to get together and do some hard, lengthy content for good rewards. This is how Task Forces were born. They are the "casual" raid, something you can plan with your buddies that you are going to do on a certain day and for a certain amount of time, but you didn't need 30 or 60 people to pull it off.
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also
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Now TFs and SFs were made for the casual group of friends. This means that the group could persist over several game sessions. To do this we made it so that when you logged off, or lost connection, you didn't drop out of the group. Coming back into the game you would find that your character was still on the TF. This way you could run a TF "every Friday night from 8 to 9" and if all the participants agreed, you could progress the TF a little bit every week.
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Granted, he does use the phrase 'casual group of friends', but he goes on to describe play that is definitely NOT PuG style.
Casual != PuG in this case, it would appear.
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!
Unfortunately, they system can't yet tell WHY you logged out for awhile. Maybe it was the crying baby, maybe you are playing an alt meanwhile. Then we'd get another round of whining about punishing the good for the actions of the bad...
However, that can be overcome...you DO have a webcam, right?
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!