My SG, which has been around for years, really has no need for tanks in the missions we run.
Our members build tanks just for variety. No one asks for a tank for a mish unless we really have a sub optimal team.
My first toon was a tank and it was a miserable experience. I have another that languishes but is ok to play occasionally. When I have friends that try the game I would never put them in a tank to start their trial membership.
My gripe with tanks , other than the the number of bad guys that stay attached, is damage. I much prefer to play a scrapper that is almost as tough as my tank but kills a lot faster.
Oh! for the fanboys...I really like reading all the content of the mishes, that is why I have 18 toons. Just to make sure I did not miss anything. Doing the same thing over and over really gets me involved in the whole experience. Especially the low levels. I think the bad people that farm are really missing out. We should stop them.
So wait.
Wait.
Agro cap is 17.
Name a MMO where you can tank 17 mobs, other than this one.
Seriously.
If you're going after spawns bigger than 17, bring a second tank, or a scrapper.
It's like agro-management isn't a party-based skill any more.
Problem solved.
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The wonderful thing about CoX is that no one AT is needed. Ever. You can run from solo to an 8-man team with any combination of ATs. Some might run slower than others, sure (really slow on most Controllers solo for pre-level 32), but it can be done. The only important thing is that every AT can contribute to the team, which I think can be argued quite well.|
Originally Posted by Gwhiz
My SG, which has been around for years, really has no need for tanks in the missions we run.
Our members build tanks just for variety. No one asks for a tank for a mish unless we really have a sub optimal team. My first toon was a tank and it was a miserable experience. I have another that languishes but is ok to play occasionally. When I have friends that try the game I would never put them in a tank to start their trial membership. My gripe with tanks , other than the the number of bad guys that stay attached, is damage. I much prefer to play a scrapper that is almost as tough as my tank but kills a lot faster. Oh! for the fanboys...I really like reading all the content of the mishes, that is why I have 18 toons. Just to make sure I did not miss anything. Doing the same thing over and over really gets me involved in the whole experience. Especially the low levels. I think the bad people that farm are really missing out. We should stop them. |
And personally, Tanks are my favorite AT still. I have a bunch of those, 3 Scrappers, 4 Blasters, 2 Controllers, a Defender, a PB, a Stalker, and two MMs, and Tanks are the ones I love the most of the bunch. All ATs can be good and fun, depending on what you want to run with. Which is a good thing.
Guide: Tanking, Wall of Fire Style (Updated for I19!), and the Four Rules of Tanking
Story Arc: Belated Justice, #88003
Synopsis: Explore the fine line between justice and vengeance as you help a hero of Talos Island bring his friend's murderer to justice.
Grey Pilgrim: Fire/Fire Tanker (50), Victory
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Their report (on page 16 of their PDF) specifically says "access" not "active subscribers". Access means trial accounts (non-paying), press accounts (non-paying), dev accounts (non-paying), friends of devs accounts (non-paying) and so on. As well as paying subs.|
Originally Posted by KaliMagdalene
You seem to be biasing the income heavily toward box sales and microtransactions - to the point of assigning nearly 47% of CoH's quarterly income toward income that doesn't actually increase subscription time. What you're proposing is that subscribers are spending (and still spending now) an average of $14-15/month on microtransactions. While I do think people are buying the costume packs (1 time fees), character slots (repeatable), and story arc slots (up to 8, so max $25 if you buy them one at a time), I'm not sure that people are buying them - on average - at quite that rate.
Also, a lot of box sales go to existing players, who buy them for the bonus items + additional month, as it's cheaper than buying both separately...and extends their subscription time. The spike in Q1 also coincides with the "subscribe for 14 months for the price of 12" offer last December. I don't believe there's any concrete evidence that CoH subscriptions have dropped below 100,000, let alone that far. |
Out of all those that are not paying subscribers I would think trial accounts would make up the largest number by far. Unfortunately NCSoft doesn't list the difference.
However it does list their total income and their income doesn't match the numbers you're holding up as active subscribers (as explained above as well) unless you're going to say that in Q1 2009 they had not sold a single service (besides a sub), not a single box (or D2D), not a single royalty.
While I tend to agree with you that 40%+ difference seems a little high, by the same token, of that 124k access number I'd be willing to bet the number of paying subscribers is actually lower then 100k. How much lower .... shrug. Your guess is as good as mine (well apparently it isn't but ...).
Because Wikipedia is user maintained is *exactly* why it's not reliable. This may come as a shock to you, but you can't always believe everything you read on the internet. Wikipedia is fine for a beginning reference point but any intelligent person who is going to do their homework would tend to want to move a little deeper then what is posted there.
In any event this is all fairly trivial and getting way off topic. CoH isn't changing its overall playstyle in the near future and while I applaud the devs for taking the Fable-like approach to their next expansion and look forward to seeing how it fits in with the current game, historically speaking we're not going to be getting far away from what we have now.
Back on topic .... the agro cap is still a legacy system (as evidenced by today's game play). If not removed altogether it should at least be raised. 34 seems the number people are starting to settle around (for those that aren't cuddling in a corner with their 3 Hellions) ... is that a more acceptable cap limit?
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I did some math, and I didn't come to the same conclusions you did. Also, you might notice that royalties are tracked separately from revenue for the games themselves, and you can also find the actual sales numbers so you can see how much revenue for each game comes from sales.|
Originally Posted by Kruunch
Their report (on page 16 of their PDF) specifically says "access" not "active subscribers". Access means trial accounts (non-paying), press accounts (non-paying), dev accounts (non-paying), friends of devs accounts (non-paying) and so on. As well as paying subs.
Out of all those that are not paying subscribers I would think trial accounts would make up the largest number by far. Unfortunately NCSoft doesn't list the difference. |
It looks pretty likely to me that there's still over 100,000 active subscriptions, and I think you're simply inflating this other stuff because it's more important to you to be right than it is to be accurate.
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| Because Wikipedia is user maintained is *exactly* why it's not reliable. This may come as a shock to you, but you can't always believe everything you read on the internet. Wikipedia is fine for a beginning reference point but any intelligent person who is going to do their homework would tend to want to move a little deeper then what is posted there. |
This is only a sidetrack because you're wrong about the subscription numbers, and of course you can only offer further assumptions to support your initial assumptions, and the real numbers are not friendly to either.
Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)
Sidetrack, I know, but the main reason I don't want my students using Wikipedia (I'm a college instructor that mostly teaches writing) is because it's not a primary source. Any encyclopedia gets its info from somewhere else and is also going to be generalist: if you're writing a paper of any sort in high school or college, you should NOT be using an encyclopedia as a source, other than maybe to get a general idea what a topic is about.
From my reading and research of Wikipedia, it actually is pretty accurate, especially if you can see where the info is cited from. I forget what the exact numbers were that one study found, but Wikipedia has about the same amount of errors as the other major Encyclopedias like New Britannica, etc. It's no match for a peer-reviewed journal article, of course, but it can do okay.
It's certainly more accurate than a lot of stuff you see on the internet and in forums.
Guide: Tanking, Wall of Fire Style (Updated for I19!), and the Four Rules of Tanking
Story Arc: Belated Justice, #88003
Synopsis: Explore the fine line between justice and vengeance as you help a hero of Talos Island bring his friend's murderer to justice.
Grey Pilgrim: Fire/Fire Tanker (50), Victory
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Friends of mine, including one who was doing her thesis, noted that Wikipedia was great for general knowledge (and therefore inherits the flaws of general knowledge, where we get a lot of odd things like duck echoes and too cold to snow), and incredibly specific stuff, because things like the chemical composition of Ecstasy are being written up by hardcore wonks on the topic, and they have a dozen citations to support themselves.|
Originally Posted by Grey_Pilgrim
It's certainly more accurate than a lot of stuff you see on the internet and in forums.
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Unlike an encyclopedia, Wikipedia shows its work (or should, in any article that doesn't eventually get flushed), providing links to its primary sources. In that regard, it's a good student resource, because it shows you where you can go to study the material. An index card, as it were.
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The DEVs set the level that they did for a reason.|
Originally Posted by Kruunch
Ok .. I'm open to compromise .. how about lifting the agro cap to 40? Would that satisfy?
Keep in mind that most Tankers today couldn't handle that kind of spawn. While IOs are nice, they aren't I1 either. |
Your proposing to be able to keep agro magnet on about 6+ groups. This still seems a bit high to me.
The game isn't really meant for a Tanker to run and agro magnet a bunch of groups for the team to decimate.
The mechanics seem clear to be fight a group or two at a time. That means on a large team it is useful to have more than one Tank on a team to keep all the agro - if you are going to rely on Tanks for that purpose.
The point of a Tanker managing agro is to watch out for the team and not to round up as many bad guys as possible.
The problem is that many Tanks just want to use their agro management powers to round up as many bad guys as possible.
In regards to the safety of the team, I don't see the necessity for rounding up/herding an entire room of bad guys.
The only reason to be able to round up as many bad guys as possible is for farming. The DEVs are against farming.
I really don't see any change happening to cap on how many enemies that a Tank can hold agro over per use of power.
If you really want to control more agro, put 3 recharges in Hasten and Taunt. I believe the agro cap is per use, so if you change around your targets, you can control a good number of foe with Taunt.
As you know, I've always promoted the use of Taunt as it is the best agro keeping mechanic for Tankers. If a Tanker has something Taunted, only a higher level Tanker can pull the agro away.
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I can understand your sentiment, however, I can remember numerous times back in the day being glad for the aggro cap. Though likely not an intended consequence by the devs when they put this in, it actually removed a particularly annoying form of griefing. |
Originally Posted by Kruunch
The agro cap (17) was originally put in place back in the day to keep players from being able to pull entire mission maps at once.
Along with this change we had ED, GDN and max target limitations put into place. When considering the current game, the agro cap is a relic and is actually debilitating the role of the Tanker. IO builds allow Scrappers to easily reach the point where they can replace a tank for a group of 17 mobs or less. In the past two weeks, I've built three Scrappers, two of which could replace a Tanker in the STF and the other which (a farming toon no less) could replace a Tanker for virtually any other content. The agro cap hides the true differences between Tankers and Scrappers in todays game. My proposal is to remove the agro cap while retaining max targets per power. The idea is to allow Tankers to flex their tanking muscles again. Let us be Tankers, not short bus Scrappers. RHAR! |
Picture yourself a relative low level character (6-10) in a team and venturing into Perez Park. Now picture a high level toon with flight flying above the groups in the street area, firing a single shot into the group, and moving on to the next group, until he/she has all the groups in the street area outside of the park itself aggroed. Now picture him spotting your merry little band of heroes and dragging the whole lot of them over to you to train them on to you.
He or she gains nothing for their effort, save the joy of watching you and your little friends cry in anguish as you fall to the ground dead. Being immature, this is quite pleasure enough and the griefer is more than happy to spend the better part of a day doing this to you and any other groups unfortunate enough to cross his or her path.
Childish? Yes. Immature? Yes. Was it a regular occurrence? Yes. Worth a petition against the offender? Sure. The problem is, the practice was so rampant that, as far as I could see, the petitioning did nothing to stop it from happening or even slow it down. Having worked in in-game support for another MMO in the past, I completely get this.
So, while I understand this was a huge blow to Tankers and to the practice of herding, if removing it would bring us back to encouraging childish tactics like listed above.... good riddance and may the aggro cap forever stay in place.
- Garielle
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Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme
I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".
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This I agree with.|
Originally Posted by Grey_Pilgrim
Sidetrack, I know, but the main reason I don't want my students using Wikipedia (I'm a college instructor that mostly teaches writing) is because it's not a primary source. Any encyclopedia gets its info from somewhere else and is also going to be generalist: if you're writing a paper of any sort in high school or college, you should NOT be using an encyclopedia as a source, other than maybe to get a general idea what a topic is about.
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Quote:
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From my reading and research of Wikipedia, it actually is pretty accurate, especially if you can see where the info is cited from. I forget what the exact numbers were that one study found, but Wikipedia has about the same amount of errors as the other major Encyclopedias like New Britannica, etc. It's no match for a peer-reviewed journal article, of course, but it can do okay. It's certainly more accurate than a lot of stuff you see on the internet and in forums. |
Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)
A few fairly interesting side notes with regards the WoW discussion.
1) Instanced Raid content, originally, wasn't going to be the main focus of the end-game, they put Onyxia and Molten Core in there as something to do for the less hardcore to gear up (yes I did say less hardcore). Originally it was going to be an EQ style model where various guilds on BOTH sides of the game would race for open world Raid boss style spawns (and these still exist even after the Instance Raid model began the way to go even into the current content in WotlK).
2) 12 million subscribers WAS accurate, with the current problems in China with regards WoW they've taken a truly massive dent in subscriber numbers. Sources say that 40 to 50 percent of WoW subscriber numbers came from China. Though they provided higher numbers they didn't provide very good income (they paid a very, very cheap hourly rate to play WoW instead of a monthly subscription fee). So WoW can't now tout the 12 million subscriber figure, it's more along the lines of 5-6 million...which STILL makes it the biggest game on the block mind you.
3) WoW managed to be the game that appealed to both Western and Eastern markets due to the fact it combines many elements that both like. Specifically Korean and Chinese players prefer everyone of the same 'gaming level' to look the same (hence the armour tiers).
Western players generally hate grind and it's not that much of a grind to level but there are very rare items that can be specifically grinded for, which Eastern players really seem to love (played a Korean MMO at all...they are complete grindfests to the hilt) along with specific quests which were very grindtastic. Admittedly it did still have a levelling grind with 50-60 taking the same amount of time it took to go from 1-49.
Eastern players also seem to prefer Fantasy to any other genre except Sci-Fi. Look at the very anime looking Elves (with the traditional Eastern massive long ears compared to the tolkien variety Elves) for an example.
Edit: Side sub-note: There is a general theory going around about why WoW does seem to be shuffling away from the grinding and loot-******* model it originally had. Some say that with development of WotLK, they already knew they were going to be running into problems in China and decided perhaps appealing more to the Western market and keeping the place where all their profit was coming from happy would be better. Though this is purely speculation.
4) CoH never achieved the big subscriber numbers because it was never big in the Eastern market. Player uniqueness, Western comic book style superheroes and not very grindy at all in most of it's content and nothing worth grinding for anyway besides levelling (Korean players love getting 'teh phat epics') CoH was until Issue 9, a lootless system. All these factors mean that the Eastern market really wasn't going to go for it and thus the servers were shut down.
This is why CoH and even CO or SW:OR will never likely achieve massive subscriber numbers of WoW. They seem to be very much a more western style of MMO, just look at Aion, it had to be westernised before they even considered bring it over here, clearly showing that both West and East have very different tastes on the MMO front.
You know, Kruunch, maybe CO is the game for you since you don't really seem to like this one anymore.
"I never said thank you." - Lt. Gordon
"And you'll never have to." - the Dark Knight
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Originally Posted by Myrmydon
You know, Kruunch, maybe CO is the game for you since you don't really seem to like this one anymore.
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CO's agro cap is like 3. It might 5, but from my experience pulling more then 3 for any distance is impossible.
Emmert loathes herding, after all, so he's fixed that from the beginning with CO.
But I digress, back to arguing by all means.
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I was going to say! Glad you came to your senses! |
Originally Posted by Acemace
But I digress, back to arguing by all means.
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"I am a Tank. I am your first choice, I am your last hope." -- Rune Bull
"Durability is the quintessential super-power. " -- Sailboat
This thread has herded enough rules violations into one spot, I need to nerf it back to a reasonable number.
-Mod8-
If you are using Latin in your post you are probably trolling
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Increasing the Argo Cap is a good idea. The more enemies able to focus on you the more powerful and awesome your character can feel. 17 is too low.