An open letter to the Devs, re: PvP

Seems to me that whenever a nerf happens the devs don't shave the neck, they slit the throat. I'm just sayin'

I'm really just happy all the devs are posting in this thread telling everyone how hard they are working at reimplementing Pre-i13 PvP, and making comments on the massive amount of concern that a particular player base has (I would say a PvP player base is relatively integral to a games success as well) and reassuring us that they aren't just trying to **** everyone, because honestly, as reasonable as I am, the sheer magnitude of this blunder makes me think someone was intentionally trying to lose subscriptions. CoH has a spy among their midst.

No idea why I keep resubbing to this game. I wish the PvP was on par with what it is capable of being here.

League of Legends and now Bloodline Champions has all my attention. To much PvP letdown in MMO's. I love Bloodline though, completely skill based DoTA style pvp, no farming, no grinding, pure awesome. Some here would probably enjoy it, great team based action. Still in beta atm though.

Hell yes. Signed.

I agree to this post by Mac 1,000%

Endorse Here: X______Goon, 06/16/2010

The old PVP system had much, much more freedom. freedom to roam, freedom to heal, freedom to kill, freedom to escape, freedom to cage, freedom to get better at what ever you did or like doing to achieve what was necessary to win and/or support.

Now these restrictions is like a Shock-Collar. Its unexplainable of how it feels now to play in the PVP zones of any.

Examples of what it feels like to PVP now:[You have just popped a "Righteous Rage" you cannot proceed yet, 3 - 2 - 1, now you are free to excelerate movement towards your target]. [Wait, you have been blasted from behind, your movement has been suppressed, 3 - 2 - 1, now proceed], [Wait your travel suppression has been engaged again by popping a "Righteous Rage" because the previous one wore off while suppressed].LOL Is this the reason why "Slow's" do not work in PVP because Slowed + Suppression Travel would really SUCK. Now how is this balanced for the skilled-R A P E D ice/ and /ice AT's?

Archetypes are not Heroes and Villains anymore, they are merely slaves now trying to do the best with their ability. Some are lucky, some SUCKS and thats not fair at all. Ice blasters? I have pitty for those who worked hard for their accolades/enhancements so they can be just worthless. There are may others like Kin Defenders for an example that has a R.I.P headstone in PVP zones. There are many others as well. So those F.O.T.M toons in PVp still dance the same but thats even suppressed, LOL.

I think the best thing that happend among these ingenious-idealistic changes was that the toggles do NOT drop when mezzed which should have been implemented in begin with.

I must admit, this is probably the best ever mmo ... WAIT, It is most definitely the BEST mmo ever but if you (Developers) listen to your PVP'ers and actually played PVP much more often so you too can cry "please change it back to like it was before I-13" (Assuming the undeveloped-cryers were the reason for the change), I, 100% Guarantee the Devs will wittness a long, very long lasting successful hit from the PVP veterans and "new commer's" to PVP community.

Goon keeping it Gank-U-Ster

First of all, the OP was awesome - Thank you Mac.

Now, it pains me to realize that I missed out on a great deal of fun. When PvP was introduced, I looked at the learning curve's steepness and said to myself, 'maybe later'. From everything I read above, it's well explained more than once how the changes were made to level the curve, as well as how it failed miserably and steepened it far more dramatically.

As I said, it pains me to see what I missed. What pains me even more is that the changes made in the ironicly numbered Issue 13 were counter-intuitive in several ways. I am not going to re-hash what has already been said, but it is related. Instead, I'll look at this through the lens of 25 years of gaming experience.

Fact #1: Many games that have had significant policy changes made midstream gain notoriety at the least, some simply don't survive. The CoH PvP community was happy with the dev's 'hands-off' attitude, the new 'hammer-on' attitude caused serious grief.

Fact #2, and very important: Every game that is or was a celebrated and loved Multiplayer / PVP game does NOT treat 'single-player', or PvE, ANY differently than 'multi-player' or PvP. Why? Cue next fact...

Fact #3: The PvP / multiplayer aspect of any game possessing such a thing ALWAYS has a steeper learning curve than the single-player / PvE aspect does. The environment will NEVER challenge a player as much as their fellow players will.

How do development and design teams of famous games get this right? I can think of a few rules, presented in no particular order:

1st Rule: Documentation! Seriously, many gamers may not read the manual beforehand, but if they can't figure something out and it's not documented, or the info isn't readily available? Then hope the community is feeling helpful or you might be losing a customer. It is really depressing how often this happens. In CoH, the documentation for PvP seems incomplete and must be found after searching, and this can be discouraging.

2nd Rule: Engage! Paragon Studio Dev's are admitedly solid here. Not perfect, they're human after all, but props where due. Anyway, this one's a 3 step process --

• A: Dev's, play thy game. Even the parts you're not good at - especially those parts. If you're having problems in the game, others are, too.
• B: While playing, identify the people who know what they're doing, and find the ones who're struggling, too. In the case of CoH, lot's of people like giving honest feedback, and are an excellent pool of players to tap.
• C: Now, listen to both sides of your newly established think-tank. They number among the many who keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered - don't piss them off.

/signed in blood

Good show, mac.

There was once a time that I PVPed in this game.

Then I brought my brute (Fire/Shield) into RV and never went back. What a colossal let-down. :/

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus This entire post should receive some kind of award for being both hysterical and fantastic. Well done.

Mac's OP makes too much sense. Hence why it's being ignored.

Well.. honestly the devs know the i13 changes were a failure. But Devs being devs ego comes into play and they refuse to change them back. Someone posted in another forum asking for the changes in pve and they got booed, hissed and called a troll. But he/she made a really good point. The changes have not been migrated to pve because they know they would lose a huge chunk of the pve population. It was even pointed out the ED was a big change to the game but that was rolled out across the board.

The goal of the pvp changes were supposed to make it easier for the inexperienced player to pvp and enjoy it. Has that happened? Forget the loss of a huge amount of veteran pvpers. If they had achieved thier goal, wouldn't there be more pvpers? New players who like the changes?

The advent of pvp ios and the changes to pvp means they do take pvp in the game seriously to some degree. What needs to happen is someone needs to apply change control logic to the i13 changes. If you put in changes to a system and the result was not the desired outcome, you need to revert back.

If the developers cannot get over their egos, admit (at least to themselves) that the Heal Decay and Travel supression have cost them players - then pvp will die on the vine.

There have been several attempts to get the pvp ladder started again. Fails everytime because there is not enough "arena" pvpers to sustain and grow. Those pvpers are born in zone and zones - are dead. The new pvpers they thought would come never did and the old population left. What remains can't support a pvp community.

I know for a fact a number of players would come back to the game if we got rid of hd and ts, if not i13 changes all together. It is not unheard of. The problem is the developers see it as giving in, rather than saving pvp. Until one or all of them have the guts to say...yeah we messed that up, it's going to die out.

Yeah I don't care if they admit they messed up. Just fix what they broke, at least then we could retain some PVPers instead of losing more and more every month.

it's not a matter of assinging blame or even admitting it failed. They tried something it didn't work change it back and move on. we can turn it off in arena so I am guessing it is not that hard to turn it off in code for pvp zones, they gave away free server transfers for months to stop the hemmoraging in pvp zones and that just built freedom up as having the most pvp...and even that is dismal in zones. They have done everything but turn it off for good...and I have personally been told "that is not an option so don't even ask"...smacks of ego to me.

/signed a million percent!

i had just started getting into PvP right before these changes and was really starting to learn a lot about it. I was falling in love with PvP.

Then they changed it all, i no longer had fun and i have not been in a PvP zone or arena since.

I think I just miss some dev or Paragon crew member being assigned solely to PvP.
Someone that is responsible only for PvP, learns it, knows it, experiences it, plays it with every possible archetype. Not someone that is only allowed to take a peek at it whenever there is nothing else to do.
I think that would already help PvP more than all the comments we could ever make on it.

(
And in case it doesnt seem worth it, if a decent PvP has among the playerbase only

- 5 % hardcore PvPers that PvP some 75% of their time in the game (on average),
- 5 % also-PvPers that PvP some 20% of their game time, and some
- 10% casual PvPers that peek into it now and then for only 2.5% of their time playing,

then that would still mean 5% the entire game is PvP. I dont know how big the Paragon Crew is, but even only 5% of the game and the income sound important enough to have someone see to it to me.
)

there was a dev assigned to pvp he showed up once on test and said "hey guess what we are giving cameras full perception cuz that was on your pvp wish list.."


you know the one putz pulled together before i 13 changes - and it was not even high on the list....or right....lol.

Just to throw something out there ...

The devs have seen spectacularly poor return on investment for the work they've done on PvP. I know the PvP community has developed an everybody hates us mentality over the years, but step back and look at what the devs have tried.

Arena: they devoted an entire issue to it. I4 brought relatively few changes or additions to the game other than the Arena. Everyone tried PvP at first, but by the end of beta, the Arena was largely empty except for dev-sponsored events. The trend continued once the issue went live; there were successful player-run events, but there wasn't whole lot of action in the arenas otherwise.

Yes, PvP was buggy. Yes, some maps were horrible. Yes, it was horribly unbalanced. Yes, there were no mini-games ... or anything to do other than try to punch faces. But it was implemented. But what seems to have happened is that the devs built it ... and few people came. At this point, the devs are in an awkward position: fix it under the vague hope people would come, or work on other, more important tasks (CoV).

But the devs were listening to feedback. The players said, "Punching people in the face is OK, but we want mini-games and open PvP where you can jump into the action without having to set things up and wait at the Arena terminals. Oh yeah, and we'd like to beat down villains."

And so CoV brought three PvP zones with mini-games, villains and heroes. The zones were popular, even on Pinnacle, for a little while. But slowly the zones emptied out. Meanwhile, the devs also delivered bases. Horribly broken bases. But base raiding and IoPs were supposed to be huge (no, seriously, NCSoft's press release for CoV specifically mentions them as Big Features). But bases, raids and IoPs were painfully, comically buggy. For a feature that States once said was the single, most expensive addition to the game, bases were a not-very-funny joke. But some people loved their raids, even though players had to have agreed-upon rules for how bases could be built to make raids remotely enjoyable.

Eventually, raids were cut from the game; they couldn't be fixed because the entire implementation of bases and raids was flawed from the ground up. It would, I'm guessing, be easier to start over than fix what's there, and at this point the devs were down to a skeleton crew and didn't have the resources to take a flyer on a potentially unpopular feature.

Bugs. Power imbalances. Griefing. Lack of lewt. No real option for advancement through PvP. People increasingly found reasons not to PvP.

The players said, "Those are the wrong games. We want to see our actions have an affect on the world. We want to use our highest-level toons. Give us something spectacular." And the devs coughed up RV, the most sophisticated zone they had ever built (although the re-vamped RWZ is close -- but it recycled much of the tech developed for RV). GV was popular for a while.

And then see two paragraphs up.

A lot of effort, time, and money has gone into CoX's PvP by this point, that's completely disproportional to how much time people spend PvPing compared to PvEing.

Meanwhile, Test is starting to heat up for cross-server PvP. It's not immensely popular, but it draws in a couple hundred people regularly, and a few hundred more sporadically. Ex Libris helps to foster this community. This particular brand of sped-up, hardcore PvP, however, still isn't broadly popular, but it's a base Ex thinks can grow. And she works at growing the community. And she gets the devs to fix a lot of Arena bugs, some of them long-standing bugs that should have been dealt with much earlier.

But, as the hardcore PvP grew and became more boisterous, it also became ... more assertive, I guess. Ex started to grow frustrated with the community. PvPers started demanding more dev attention. And things advanced into a swirling vortex of fail as the devs did little to improve the Arena crowd's PvP experience, and a subset of PvPers became increasingly obnoxious (note: I did not say all / most PvPers, I said "subset"). And, while a significant portion of people did some PvP, most players still spent far more time PvEing than PvPing.

And then ... someone looked at PvP. Well, definitely Castle and BaBs did. They looked at an amped-up Arena match and had trouble following it: it moved too fast. It had too few ATs and too few power sets represented.

And then I13.

I was never a huge fan of CoH's PvP, but I couldn't wrap my head around the changes even though the changes were geared towards players like me. In order to make PvP more inclusive, the devs fundamentally changed how powers work. Which, of course, raised an entirely new barrier to PvP, especially since there is in-game documentation for PvP. None. Nowhere is DR explained. Nowhere are mezzing mechanics explained. Nowhere is suppression explained. The PvP experience is so different it may as well be a different game.

And the changes still didn't bring in AT and power set parity.

And Lighthouse's impolitic comments about who the changes were for.

...

Some time after most of the Arena players left, BaBs commented that he wasn't able to discern any patterns in the subscription numbers; i.e., many accounts were closed, but the data didn't look any different than the usual subscriber churn numbers. Some people leave and come back. Some people leave for good. And sometimes new players join.

What it all amounts to, I guess, is that given the time and resources already sunk into PvP for relatively little RoI, why should the devs invest even more money, time and energy into PvP?

They've added PvP. They've added open PvP. They've added lewt. They've added mini-games.

Maybe ... PvP just isn't a good fit for this game, and money spent on PvE, emotes, costumes, new powers, and animations gives the devs more bang for the buck.

And ... one last thing to add.

For their part, I think the devs have strung along the playerbase in general, and PvPers in particular. They have, from time to time, promised to look at PvP issues on an on-going basis and not delivered.

Or they're looking at things and then putting PvP issues into the "Why Bother?" pile.

I'd be happier if the devs grew a pair and simply laid out what their current PvP plans are.