An open letter to the Devs, re: PvP

hmm i13 dropped so close to my forum register date how could I forget. I only started playing just a few months prior. I am nothing more then a zone scrub with the odd kickball thrown in for laughs. Maybe if they didn't change how everything worked I woulda been more involved.

Oh well my sub runs out today or tomorrow and I can't take how the devs ignore the only parts of the game I care about anymore. Though I wasn't hardcore I kicked azz in zones and it was the most fun and best challenge I got from this game.

Your favourite energy blaster Lucky,
I bid you gentlemen and ladys farewell.

So, a short reply.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Psoma Here's about the time where I started losing patience in the timeline. To summarize: every aspect of PvP is broken in some way. The mechanics are not the best, but they're actually the only reason the PvP community exists at all. There is a detailed, stickied list that Putz has posted, compiled by the PvP community, which addresses most of the PvP issues at the time.

I read through that thread, once upon a time.

IIRC, most of the suggestions and fixes were geared towards improving the status quo; it didn't have much for making PvP more inclusive. Only a small subset of players cared enough about PvP to make detailed suggestions for improving PvP, and they had /very/ particular axes to grind. They LIKED the PvP system, particularly the movement and speed. They liked the exclusive, cliquey atmosphere surrounding high-level PvP. They liked the arcane builds required for high-level PvP.

But those are the same elements the devs and community reps were frustrated with. And, eventually, all sides stopped dealing with each other -- the positions were too far apart for there to be a lot of common ground. And, ultimately, the devs decided to cut the hardcore PvPers loose.

FWIW, I find the language used by PvPers fascinating. When they talk about The Golden Age of PvP, they're using a very loaded term ... one that, for me at least, has connotations of rose coloured glasses, nostalgia, us versus them, new versus old.

Anyway ... I have a feeling the devs are unlikely to revisit PvP. As I said, nothing much they've done has ever brought in large numbers of PvPers. And there really haven't been a lot of PvEers saying, "You know, I love the PvP experience, but the bugs keep me away." For most of the game's players, PvP is irrelevant. And I don't think anything will ever change that.

One of the main suggestions made, both then and now, was how to fix "non-viable" sets (AR and most melee) so that they'd be more useful. If that isn't inclusive by dispelling the myth that you needed to roll certain AT/sets to compete, then I don't know what is.

Hey how long has this been a sticky? I jut noticed. That looks like progress if it's new.

Quote:

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

Or maybe is they actually fixed PvP to not be so crappy we wouldn't have these issues I agree with the lol at this game though

I asked several PvP related questions at yesterdays live Dev chat, none got answered. I asked one other question relating to power customization, it got answered... Go figure.

I asked a couple, none of which were answered.

Sort of like my repeated PvP bugfix requests go more or less unanswered other than a patch here-or-there to fix the really broken stuff, yet when I file one bug report for "/em alakazamreact doesn't work right in Dwarf form" or "there is a -jump debuff on Shadow Fall" they get fixed. Go figure.

There was a list as long as Divine's tear stains and half as long as a Psypunk post with what needed to be done to make PvP in this game the best in the MMO market. They implemented a few things, which was cool. But, overall, what we got was the god awful mess we have now. It has driven away PvP'ers.. not drawn new blood to the pool. The intention was good, if foolish, but didn't work. A wise person goes back and does it differently to achieve the original goals and pulls from the most abundant knowledge base available, which would be the people who have been piggybacking this broken system since it launched.

If we could only find such a database of knowledge . . .

It is rapidly deleting itself................

Marco...

Would it really be that hard for them to re-balance the effects of high level enhancements in low level zones?.. You have to wonder. I remember getting immobilized and lynched by a flying corrupter that was originally level 50 in siren's call once. Couldn't hit them, their range, defense and immobilization duration enhancements were too strong.

this thread will never die tbh

I think the original post here has a lot of merit. I didn't really find one thing I disagreed with. My recent forays into pvp have shown me a few things that seriously do need to be addressed as this 'equalization' has done anything but make things equal. The true problem here, as it is in most MMO's, is that players will never be equal. Their powers give them too much diversity to ever possibly truely balance so that things are even every time. These debuffs and buffs to nearly every class in an attempt to even things up created a massive imbalance in powersets that are afflicted more than others by them.

Example: my controller, with illusion/ff is all but useless. My powerset revolves around buffing others with invisibility and bubbles and though it has strong damage bursts, I chose powers which allow others to be buffed in defense. These powers were chosen long before the changes to pvp which rendered them all but useless.

Example: My dark/regen scrapper is almost entirely unaffected by these changes, and in fact benefits by the granted resistance and defense I don't and shouldn't really have.

To normalize or standardize things which are drastically different as these two examples along with every other powerset in the game is really a pointless feat. The most I have learned from this is that I will have to reroll another character just to be competative if none of the ones I have work in pvp. Without being able to use half my powers on one character and while gaining even more benefit on others, if anything, normalization has put things further apart. This to me should say whatever steps the devs thought were good to bring things closer together are the exact opposite of what they should be doing since they drove the powers sets even futher apart in terms of balance. Was any change ever really nessesary? For the sake of keeping things from going stale, I would say yes, but not for the sake of 'game balance'.

Something to remember in these requests, demands, opinions, and rants. Change takes time, especially since PVP caters to a rather small group of the player base. I don't like it any more than anyone else, because I do like PVP, but bugs in powers, costume pieces, missing sections of the map, and LAG affect us all, even the people who don't pvp ever. These will likely always get higher priority than a perfectly balanced pvp system, and it's something I just accept.

The devs made casual PvP un-fun. Casual players don't want to learn a whole new set of rules for how their powers work.

Getting held through your mez toggles, then beaten down by a defender you can't do any damage to as a brute isn't exactly intuitive.