How can we make this game more challenging?

I don't know things get kind of crazy when you start talking about making things harder. I have seen the MA missions where people blow through nothing but bosses, but most of the time it's just bosses that don't really do anything to make them hard. With that said I have seen some MA that are crazy mad hard, and they even tell you, "Hey this is hard, you WILL need a team, ect" Only thing is those people get nothing but one stars and stuff said like "This was too hard I couldn't solo it"

Heck I have seen custom mob made so well they turn a High power Purple IO'ed character into a level one rookie with one hardly working attack, they die two times and quit looking for something easier.

Heck call me crazy, but whats there a patch/issue a long time ago where they made all the enemies hit harder and have my hit points? But it was so crazy it didn't even last a week before people where asking for it to be put back? (I could be wrong on this!)

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First off, *looks at avatar*, wow someone knows Shantae exists

Back on topic, something that would help without even having branching paths would be new unique skills for enemies. Let's take Reichman for example. I'm too low a level to fight him but it seems like reports have him as a sort of standard big boss who hits hard. Lowering his HP but giving him a new attack would make the fight more interesting by forcing the players to adapt (if the attack were innovative enough).

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See title.

The reason I ask this is because I see AE mission teams mowing down groups of lvl 54 bosses with very little trouble. With the exception of EB's and AV's, these are the hardest mobs in the game and random PuG's can kill them in groups now.

With I9 and the invention system, the game has gotten easier than ever. What can be done to make it more challenging? Is the current linear mission system holding it back? Do missions need to be more dynamic in some way? Do mobs need to be harder to kill? More damaging? More CC?

What do you think needs to be done? Or do you think nothing should be done?

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AE bosses are not the measuring stick by which you measure challenge or difficulty in the game. AE farms purposely pick spawn that give a disproportionate reward for little risk. AE bosses are just bags of hitpoints; they're nothing special and require little thought and effort to mow them down.

That same group would die against groups of Vanguard Rangers, Malta, Knives of Artemis, etc. especially on maps where you don't have clear lines of sight with spawns set up like sitting ducks.

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I'm saying: why change the entire game to suit a "but it's not HARD enough" mentality? When 90% of the player base comes along and says "my god this game is ridiculously easy, do something about it" then I'll say yeah, that's time to think broad changes.

When one person finds it too easy, it's that one's responsibility to understand what THEY can do in their game play experience, to make THEIR game more challenging.

I solo - I have soloed since I started 5 years ago this month. I don't need to rush through anything, I enjoy playing to read the missions, and I enjoy *well made* AE missions as well. I do not play PVP and I don't need to trick out my toons with purples and such.

I am, in a nutshell, the core of the game's player base, not a hardcore anything - not a rush to 50, not a where's the endgame, not a I can't find the Hollows nub either. So yeah, any kinds of changes to the basic "challenge" level of the game would DIRECTLY change how I *have* to play it. So I don't advocate any kind of game-wide changes - I advocate players making their own decisions about what THEY can do to make THEIR game challenging.

You have to remember that the default needs to be "average". Not "hard" for a game like this, in order to keep and attract players. This game has never espoused itself to the hardcore crowd of any bent, and I don't expect ever to do so.

I absolutely agree with you about the MA - that's what it's there for. So, any individual who finds themselves lacking a challenge should consider doing something there, or gimp their character (which is a common thing for some groups, witness the ironman type threads) or just moving on to a more outright difficult game.

[/ QUOTE ] I agree with pretty much everything you say in this post, except I despise the idea of intentionally gimping a character. When I look for a challenge, I want it to be hard while I'm at my very best. With the proper slotting almost anything past level 22 can be stupid hard.

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The thing about this game is that it uses typical diceroll combat. Making it more 'difficult' wouldn't make it more 'challenging', it would just change the numbers in the computer's favor, thus making both combat and downtime longer and more tedious. To make it more challenging would be to rebuild the combat engine into something more skill based, which would be ideal but is not likely to happen. Ever.

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Yuo could always go the Darkfall online route, and make targeting FPS-like, rather thanb ased on an internal dice mechanic. I've never been sold on this idea though, since I've always felt my character's performance should have more to dow ith my ability to do with build than reflexes, but thats just me, and I do see the appeal of the other way of doing things (I had actually planned to buy DFO when it came out, but due to the uselessness of Adventurine studios, I was literally unable to do so - I was trying to give them money, but their website refused to sell me their product).

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And herein lies the major disconnect. Some people, myself first and foremost, don't enjoy the kind of "battle" that is waged in the books and via calculators, which is decided LONG before the first blow is ever landed, with the actual encounter only the final, physical representation of a foregone conclusion. Even if this outcome is possibly affected by random chance, the obvious aim is to minimise how much that random chance vulnerability affects you. That you want power to depend on your build rather than your reflexes, while I can respect your preference, is a symptom of a significant culture clash.

City of Heroes, at its base, is a click-n-kill RPG with jumping, which is about as static as it gets. Lacking an auto-attack as it does, however, and putting such emphasis on short-term, high-yield benefits (like a 10-second hold on a single enemy out of a 30-second battle) and fine positioning brings it about as close to an action game as a click-n-kill framework is pretty much ever going to get, which leads many people, myself among them, to treat it as an action game where success depends not so much on the numbers you crunched, but on what you actually DO in combat. To me, specifically, an "attack chain" is a mythical animal that may as well not exist for all it matters, because combat doesn't come down to chaining attacks in a pre-decided patter over and over again to defeat foe after foe. It's an exercise of thinking on your feet, knowing your enemies, their strengths and their weaknesses, knowing your powers and when they are appropriate, and being able to spot opportunities as they arise. That's about as close to an action game as it's ever going to get.

To give you a good example, I'm a person who SUCKS at strategy games and plays RPGs rather very simplistically. However, I'm also a person who's right at home in just about any action game that doesn't require reaction time enough to hit a 50 millisecond "blink." I've tried just about any fighting game that can be played on the PC (including just about any arcade fighter) and found most of them to be either too slow or too complicated. About the best ones I've ever found have been Capcom's VS series (largely Marvel vs. Capcom) for their breakneck speed, wide array of easily-used, effective tools (full-screen dashes, super jumps, push back, switch counters, etc.) and the simplicity of the combat system. There really isn't much that's needed to play these games but to know what your characters can do and when you should have them do it.

One final note on difficult has to be made. It's true that some people see a system and immediately shoot for the highest potential in that system, upon achieving which they start looking for the toughest challenge. It's a matter of balance between power and opposition. This balance doesn't have to be drawn between the top ends of both scales, however. There are people like and a few people I know, who look for the balance lower down. See, when I see I have extra power and I'm doing exceptionally well, my reaction isn't to think "Cool! This means I can go even higher!" but rather to think "OK, I'm ahead of the curve, so I can afford to do some things I WANT to do, rather than the things I HAVE to do." For instance, if my character is sucking wind like a jet engine, I will have no choice but to take Stamina (or delete the character), and it's a no-choice that will get made against my will. However, if the character is doing just fine without it, I see no reason to take Stamina when I can take, say, Intimidate and Invoke Panic because this particular character is supposed to be a psychic who induces maddening fear in other people. Sure, no matter how well I perform, Stamina is better than no Stamina, but the point is I don't NEED better, because I don't WANT better. What I want is "good enough," and if the game were to suddenly get "more challenging," then I will no longer be good enough. Which will suck pretty seriously.

As with PvP and as with "end game" raids, I'm not opposed to the game holding venues of extreme challenge. As long as they're not put directly in my way and I don't HAVE to drag myself through them, then they don't bother me. As long as "the game" doesn't require me to have a top-tier, expensive, planned out, BORING build, then I won't bat an eye at people manufacturing their own "challenge," even if in this game this strikes me more as a simulation stress test than anything I would describe as challenging. Regardless, as was said before - the quest for more challenge should NOT be such that it yanks the game from under all the people who came here for the super heroes and the cool powers and the fun of curb-stomping faceless mooks, rather than for the ultimate challange. Added venues, yes. Game-wide core principle change... Not so much.

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See title.

The reason I ask this is because I see AE mission teams mowing down groups of lvl 54 bosses with very little trouble. With the exception of EB's and AV's, these are the hardest mobs in the game and random PuG's can kill them in groups now.

With I9 and the invention system, the game has gotten easier than ever. What can be done to make it more challenging? Is the current linear mission system holding it back? Do missions need to be more dynamic in some way? Do mobs need to be harder to kill? More damaging? More CC?

What do you think needs to be done? Or do you think nothing should be done?

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I know what would make it more challenging... it even directly addresses the reason you state has made it less so: remove set IOs from the game, and grant influence to the effected characters.

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QR - 4 and a half year vet here. I'm fine with the level of challenge the game has ATM.

Eco.

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MArcs:

The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)

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What do you think needs to be done? Or do you think nothing should be done?

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The limited AI means that the real challenge isn't to be found in PvE.

Perhaps there is another form of confrontation within this game that doesn't depend on the limited AI to provide challenges.

Look around and see if you find it.

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Winner of Players' Choice Best Villainous Arc 2010: Fear and Loathing on Striga; ID #350522

Heh, those bosses they're farming in AE are purposefully designed to be as weak as possible.

Go fight a bunch of level 54 Vanguard bosses and see how well THAT goes. Mmm, massive -DEF -RES debuffs feel GREAT. Or, Rularuu. Eyeballs with hax accuracy, Wisps that can shove you inside a bubble.

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*chuckle*

There's of course the way to raise the difficulty that's been mentioned- run a MArc with custom-designed murder-bosses (or AVs as far as the eye can see, whatever).

Another simple way: run with people that don't know what they're doing. Believe me, the challenge will rise sharply

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"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"

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Heh, those bosses they're farming in AE are purposefully designed to be as weak as possible.

Go fight a bunch of level 54 Vanguard bosses and see how well THAT goes. Mmm, massive -DEF -RES debuffs feel GREAT. Or, Rularuu. Eyeballs with hax accuracy, Wisps that can shove you inside a bubble.

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Or fight lvl 54 AE custom critters that are actually set with extreme/extreme for Super Strength/Willpower. As previously mentioned, it's not like the AE enemies are actually universally harder. There's a reason that people are farming AE rather than Portal Missions and it's not just the fact that it's always in the same room and it doesn't matter if people complete their mission. It's mainly the fact that players can custom design enemies that deal easily resisted damage and have no marked resistances themselves.

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I pretty much agree with Sam on this.

I also don't think more difficult is the issue for this game. More variety is closer to where the sweet spot is for me.

The last real hurdle for playing this game(for me) was removed when real numbers got introduced. I could now look and see the results of my slotting and the exact effect of powers and just make decisions based on what I liked for my toons. I don't look up builds and pour over guides...because I think that's largely pointless unless there is some high performance ideal you are trying to achieve.

The turth is I've been on teams and TFs with people who use mids and forum guides to build the perfect whatever and been just as effective if not more than them because I prefer to play by observing the mobs and what they're doing and playing to best support my team by using my powers in the optimal way.

I hate being a sheep and just following the crowd in any case.

Anyway...more variety in missions and gameplay? I vote yes. Making the game harder overall? Can't say that's needed right now.

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AE bosses are not the measuring stick by which you measure challenge or difficulty in the game. AE farms purposely pick spawn that give a disproportionate reward for little risk. AE bosses are just bags of hitpoints; they're nothing special and require little thought and effort to mow them down.

That same group would die against groups of Vanguard Rangers, Malta, Knives of Artemis, etc. especially on maps where you don't have clear lines of sight with spawns set up like sitting ducks.

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Agreed.

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Character index

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Heh, those bosses they're farming in AE are purposefully designed to be as weak as possible.

Go fight a bunch of level 54 Vanguard bosses and see how well THAT goes. Mmm, massive -DEF -RES debuffs feel GREAT. Or, Rularuu. Eyeballs with hax accuracy, Wisps that can shove you inside a bubble.

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That's why I wondered in another thread (does AE need XP) if XP was scaled based on how difficult you build the mob. If they are Standard/Standard they should have less XP than if they are Extreme/Extreme (or anywhere in between).

More on-topic...I'm fine with the level of challenge. I want to be occasionally challenged, but not to the point of going into a joystick-hurling rage (not that I play CoH with a joystick). Sometimes I don't really want to be challenged much at all. The difficulty settings and the ability to pick and choose groups to fight and contacts to run has generally been sufficient for the range I'm looking for.

Oh - I am also not in favor of anything FPS-like. Heck, I couldn't even last more than a minute in the original DOOM...just not suited for FPS.

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Suggestions:
Super Packs Done Right
Influence Sink: IO Level Mod/Recrafting
Random Merit Rolls: Scale cost by Toon Level

Mobs in this game need a serious AI overhaul.

Positional Perception needs to go. There are times when you can literally be beating up a mob's buddy right behind him and it will not react.

Patrols need to be more aggressive. Or rather just BE AGGRESSIVE. Often they will walk right by you unless you're directly in the line of their pathing, even if you're fighting.

Amubushes not only call out there approach, but don't search for their target once they reach the spot that target was at when the ambush was triggered.

Runners! God, nothing says "I'm not really trying to win this fight" than the Runaway Code.

The mob AI in this game has bothered me for awhile. I just don't understand how anyone in charge could witness the AI coding in action and give it a pass.

This, IS NOT challenging ---> yawn

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Heck I have seen custom mob made so well they turn a High power Purple IO'ed character into a level one rookie with one hardly working attack, they die two times and quit looking for something easier.

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Or, and more easily, made idiotically difficult; my first custom villain group got tossed out after establishing to my satisfaction that Hide + Ranged Attacks = Pain, adding Placate made it worse, trying to restrict that combination to lieutenants, bosses, or EBs just makes the pain geometrically worse, and the lack of fine control over mob placement prevents you from being able to use them judiciously. Although I can see a few specific uses for them.

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"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

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Mobs in this game need a serious AI overhaul.

Positional Perception needs to go. There are times when you can literally be beating up a mob's buddy right behind him and it will not react.

Patrols need to be more aggressive. Or rather just BE AGGRESSIVE. Often they will walk right by you unless you're directly in the line of their pathing, even if you're fighting.

Amubushes not only call out there approach, but don't search for their target once they reach the spot that target was at when the ambush was triggered.

Runners! God, nothing says "I'm not really trying to win this fight" than the Runaway Code.

The mob AI in this game has bothered me for awhile. I just don't understand how anyone in charge could witness the AI coding in action and give it a pass.

This, IS NOT challenging ---> yawn

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Writing good AI code is probably the most difficult thing to do for gaming. Your statement that it is not challenging is just revealing your ignorance. You don't have a clue about how to design such a thing, do you?

As a software developer, I'd LOVE to have a crack at gaming AI. I think that would be a very fun challenge.

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Mobs in this game need a serious AI overhaul.

Positional Perception needs to go. There are times when you can literally be beating up a mob's buddy right behind him and it will not react.

Patrols need to be more aggressive. Or rather just BE AGGRESSIVE. Often they will walk right by you unless you're directly in the line of their pathing, even if you're fighting.

Amubushes not only call out there approach, but don't search for their target once they reach the spot that target was at when the ambush was triggered.

Runners! God, nothing says "I'm not really trying to win this fight" than the Runaway Code.

The mob AI in this game has bothered me for awhile. I just don't understand how anyone in charge could witness the AI coding in action and give it a pass.

This, IS NOT challenging ---> yawn

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Writing good AI code is probably the most difficult thing to do for gaming. Your statement that it is not challenging is just revealing your ignorance. You don't have a clue about how to design such a thing, do you?

As a software developer, I'd LOVE to have a crack at gaming AI. I think that would be a very fun challenge.

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You are the one showing your ignorance. The mobs in this game did not always behave the way they do today. Positional Perception was not in at launch, mob AI was altered with new AI rules to make mobs less reactive to things behind them. At some point in the game the devs decided to make mobs more passive. The game had good AI code at launch, it has been systematically made more passive over time.

Did you even look at my link? There is no justification for mobs that pathetic.

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Vahz have always been back-blind. Always. You chose the one group which you COULD actually get that close to. Pretty much everyone else - unless you show me more ingame evidence - would notice you by then. That's a very specific case of ai being 'dull' from the start. Seen it since my *very first day* in the game 5 years ago, and see it today with that specific mob. Bad example.

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Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
Repurposed

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Mobs in this game need a serious AI overhaul.

Positional Perception needs to go. There are times when you can literally be beating up a mob's buddy right behind him and it will not react.

Patrols need to be more aggressive. Or rather just BE AGGRESSIVE. Often they will walk right by you unless you're directly in the line of their pathing, even if you're fighting.

Amubushes not only call out there approach, but don't search for their target once they reach the spot that target was at when the ambush was triggered.

Runners! God, nothing says "I'm not really trying to win this fight" than the Runaway Code.

The mob AI in this game has bothered me for awhile. I just don't understand how anyone in charge could witness the AI coding in action and give it a pass.

This, IS NOT challenging ---> yawn

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Writing good AI code is probably the most difficult thing to do for gaming. Your statement that it is not challenging is just revealing your ignorance. You don't have a clue about how to design such a thing, do you?

As a software developer, I'd LOVE to have a crack at gaming AI. I think that would be a very fun challenge.

[/ QUOTE ] How does him not knowing how to code something like that relevant in any way?

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How does him not knowing how to code something like that relevant in any way?

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It's quite true that not knowing how AI works doesn't mean you can't not like how it works. However, I think the thrust of the argument is that making AI behave 'intelligently' isn't a trivial thing.

Anyone can make 'AI' that can kick the player's [censored]. You just have to make it cheat. Lots of RTS games employ this tactic for their AI opponents. They simply enable the computer opponent to do things that a human player cannot...like simultaneously move two attacking forces into position to engage the player while 'clicking' on build queues to produce more forces for backup and managing their research trees all the while. You only have one mouse and can only click on one thing at a time...you have now automatically gained a 'challenge'. But its not really a fair one.

The problem is getting AI to do things as if it truly were 'thinking' rather than cheating. That not only takes decent programming...but for an MMO, a whole lot of server side resources as well. Tabula Rasa(from my understanding) had an entire server dedicated to just mob AI. Of course, that was an exceedingly expensive game to run and it ended up not running anymore.

The point is that to give us(the average joe player) a fighting chance, they had to take the stupid route with some mob behavior. Now that may not be desirable in a lot of cases...but that's what we currently have.

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<QR>

3rd time trying to post this. Thanks Comcast. (BOO! HISS!)

A few suggestions for more challenging missions:

<ul type="square">[*]The House Is On Fire! A mission in a burning building involves two main ingredients: fire and smoke. Fire does fire damage, and smoke does toxic damage as well as provide a to-hit debuff. The fire damage only occurs if you enter a hot-spot. However, a building that's on fire may have falling debris. If the debris hits you, you may take fire and smashing/lethal damage. [*]Bombed Buildings. Fairly close to burning buildings, except that a bombed building is a mangled mess. Think more along the lines of a twisted mass of wreckage, nowhere near as clean and neat as an office building. Harder to navigate. Herding gets harder. Further, the building is far more unstable. The chance of being hit by falling debris is far greater, and there's a reduced risk of taking damage from fire. However, there might be a lot of smoke/dust. Missions in bombed buildings would almost always be timed, since you'd have to rescue the survivors or retrieve vital evidence before the building completely collapsed.[*]Level 14 Rogue LFT! Add traps to missions. A trap can produce just about any offensive power effect, from a fireball to summoning an ambush. However, a trap can be disabled by locating its accompanying device and clicking it. Note, on the other hand, that neither the trap nor the device that disables it glows like a normal glowie unless your character has a high enough perception. In that case, you can locate the device (which isn't necessarily in the same part of the map) and disable it. I'd even create a badge for successfully disabling X traps.[*]Everybody Loves a Cave. Revamp the caves: make them truly cavernous, with massive stalagmites and stalactites, crystal veins, magma pits, and geysers. When a character falls into a magma pit, the character takes damage. If a character is in the AOE for a geyser, they take toxic damage. (And when I say cavernous, I mean really cavernous: big, big, big open spaces.) And make them DARK. Caves aren't lit up like a supermarket.) And add neutral vampire bat swarms, while you're at it, just for the additional risk of poison damage.[*]Wolves Among the Sheep. Every now and then, have one of the panicked civilians in a mission turn into a villain. In truth, the civilian was always a villain, just running around watching for your arrival. [*]Nowhere to Go But Up. Introduce random anti-gravity zones. These are small in size, and affect both NPCs and PCs equally. When entered, the character is propelled towards the ceiling; vertical movement is reversed. Controller hold powers pin characters to the ceiling instead of the floor.[*]Leveling the Playing Field. Introduce random power dead zones. Like anti-gravity zones, these would affect NPCs and PCs equally. When all characters are reduced to relying on brawl, munitions fire, and inspirations for combat, it gets really gruesome really fast.[/list]
And my personal favorite:

<ul type="square">[*]Fill a map with velociraptors. Rescue the hostages from the velociraptors.[/list]
Seriously, though, I think part of the problem with creating "challenging" missions is that the notion of "challenging" is different from one group of players to the next. After all, Jack Emmert's idea of "challenging" certainly wasn't my idea of challenging. To me, challenging is a mission where I have to think my way through it. Just slogging my way through tons of foes that are harder to kill than I am...not so challenging.

I am not always as eloquent as I wish I was, so I am probably not saying this as well as I think I am. For that, and the inevitable confusion that will arise from it, I apologize in advance. The truth is, a lot of folks enjoy the challenge of facing tons of foes in a massive mob. And I admit, sometimes, that's tons of fun. But I don't want to do that all the time. Sometimes, I want to be faced with a mission that is challenging in a different way: I want it to make me stop and think about alternative ways of reaching my goal. Is there another way of rescuing the hostage aside from beating the snot out of every single foe on the map? Is there some better way to have the team work together? Is there some way I can learn something new about my character's abilities, some new strategy that I've never seen before, or never considered?

To me, that's challenging, and rewarding. But each of us have our own opinions, and it's *really* hard to make a game that satisfies everyone. In point of fact, I'd guess that's impossible.

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Actually I like some of the stuff you suggested here!

The magma pit thing has been done once that I know of in the game. That's the last mission of the Tarikoss SF. I DO like the mission too!

I always wonder why the city has no NATURAL disasters or emergencies like other cities. Heroes spend a lot of time saving people from dangers that aren't the brainchild of a supervillain.

It would be neat to use my powers(or other skills) to help save people from something other than 2(insert random villain group here) guys that have them backed into a corner.

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It would be sheer awesome, once they get an "underwater" function in the game proper, to have a flood. A real flood - instanced perhaps? But either way, a flood like in FAULTLINE where the water just goes higher and higher until you have to swim to wherever you are. Rescue missions, etc, possible there. Instead of a fire extinguisher, you have some kind of vaporizer to keep water off of things while people are running out...

Variety is better than outright "challenge" level imo.

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Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
Repurposed

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Mobs in this game need a serious AI overhaul.

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"Good" AI is a double-edged sword. Sometimes "good" AI can just be really, really annoying. Guild Wars had much more intelligent enemies, but generally speaking, it just made them really frustrating.

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