Are PvP drops actually helping PvP?

Right, because it makes complete sense for someone who wants to put in neither the time nor the effort to have exactly the same stuff as someone who does. Now that is entitlement.

So my boss comes up to me and says "Hey, you've been getting almost three times as much done in the same amount of time as everyone else!" but instead of asking me how I did it, he tells me "We're cutting your hours down to 1/3 of what you're working now, so you're on an even output with everyone else." Sound stupid? It is - but that's exactly what you're saying.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

That makes no sense.

Missed this on my first pass. Its that word "NEED". Saying you don't need something in pve means you can win without it but with it you will win faster or more easily. In PvP it doesnt mean the same thing. In PvP saying you don't need it means not having it won't affect your win/loss ratio and that is pretty obviously false.

No, it's not obviously false.

If you suck, having IOs isn't going to change your win/loss ratio against good players in the least. If you're really good, having a hyper-IO'd out build isn't going to change your win/loss ratio against a bunch of raging fools, even if they have hyper-IO'd out builds - you're going to clean their clocks. If you have a really IO'd out build and bring the wrong inspirations, or the wrong AT/powerse to a duel, you can get your face eaten by a good player with an SO build.

When they're clearly going to affect your win/loss ratio is when your skill and AT/powerset choices are closely matched. And guess what? That's what it's supposed to do. Either gear does something or gear does nothing. If it does anything at all it makes a difference - that's by design.

Actually, look outside the bolded, he said "zone" pvp, where teams and skill can make up a large amount of the holes that IOs leave, so, technically, people with amounts of zone pvp experience, will agree with mac. In zone, its team on team, and arguably, you having UBERL33T ios on your blaster/stalker/troller/corr/dom/emp/UBERTOON, is very minor when infact, most of the zones are won by overwhelming numbers.

Lets try this again with your own example.

You are getting three times as much done at work and your boss notices it and gives you a giant raise. Now you go out to a pub after work and everyone is playing darts. You want to spend your raise to play against your coworkers on a bigger dart board with better darts.

That is entitlement.

Not to be rude, and to get this troll out of my system;

Do you have your own babelfish translator yet?

Absolutely. If you are on servers where you can have teams in the zones that is 100% true. You just have to ask what kind of game is an N v 1 gank ?

The rules of this game includes gear you can gather and/or buy in-game. You are allowed to carry that gear into a PvP zone. You're saying that people have a sense of entitlement about using the resources available within the rules. Is it entitlement to buy all the boardwalk hotels in Monopoly? Is it entitlement to buy the better rifles in Counter Strike when your team has been winning? Those things are provided for within the rules. There's no sense of entitlement about using the resources available. The sense of entitlement is from the players who think the rules of the game should change to allow them to individually come out ahead even though they have no hotels or their team never wins.

...Was there logic connecting that thought process? At all? Even a little? I didn't see any. If anything, using your raise money (obviously not all of it, just enough for a nice dartboard) to buy a dartboard would make you benevolent because your co-workers benefit from your success. Even if you somehow made it an incredibly obvious point that it was only due to you that the new dartboard was purchased, it wouldn't be entitlement, it'd be you being an ***.

What you, and all the others who say "it's no fair that these people have an advantage," are asking for is simple - you're asking for them to be brought down to your level, negating most of the time and effort, and in the case of I13 PvP, skill, instead of you taking the time to get better in the hopes of being able to compete. To hell with keeping up with the Joneses, it's much less work to just drag them down to our level.

EDIT: I think of all the non-PvPers who have posted in this thread thus far, Werner's insight and logic has been the most sound, simply because he understands the mentality and the system behind it.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

Look its pretty simple.

The market is a mini game, pvp is a mini game. Mac is saying that because he is good at the market mini game he should gain an advantage in the pvp minigame. I am saying thats like saying "I am good at chess so I should start with a king when playing checkers"

Here is an even simpler way to look at it. I play chess alot. In chess when there is a big difference in skill between the players, the more skilled player will take a handicap of a pawn to keep the game fun. In our pvp the unskilled player gets the handicap. Is it a giant fricking surprise people don't play ?

Asking the wrong question. The question is should someone be able to start the monopoly game with twice as much cash and the red properties because they won last nights game of parchesi.

You apparently feel that the answer is yes, and whats more the people who are at a disadvantage should love it. Then you are shocked that for some reason after you have won at parchesi nobody wants to play monopoly the next night and has left you alone at the board while they went out to the movies.

Look, IOs are part of the game, and the in-game market is the most efficient way to get them. If they don't like it so much they refuse to use it even remotely, that's tough, because it's part of this game. Complaining about "having" to use the market is like complaining about having to take travel powers because you hate the idea of them for your heroes. This gets back to the sense of entitlement wanting the game to change to what they want it to be.

If there was no upper bound on cost for what you need to equip a character, sure, that analogy might hold more water. But the truth is that you don't have to play the market mini game much at all to make absolutely stupid amounts of money, and you only need so much money for a build.

I don't "marketeer" in the classic sense at all and I've made 3.5B inf just playing the game in the last 5 weeks. I play the game and sell the stuff I get. I could do a pretty good job IOing something out for 3.5B inf, don't you think?

For every option we can come up with for how people can get loot, someone can start complaining about how they don't want to do that. If they don't want to use any of the options, maybe they need to step back and really look at the kind of limitations they're saddling themselves with.

I'm not saying that at all - I'm saying that because I am putting more time and effort into getting my characters ready for PvP and practicing playing them in PvP, regardless of what I'm doing (accolading, IOing, messing around with friends in the arena, or whatever else), I should have an advantage. If I don't have an advantage after all that, why should I bother in the first place? If there's zero incentive to improve, why bother? Using the market to buy the IOs I want for my characters is only part of that (interesting point to note: I haven't engaged in any serious market PvP in probably 18 months, and yet I've managed to amass a large amount of inf and enhancements simply by selling what drops and storing what I can use). Checkers and chess aren't related except they use the same board and have pieces with two different colors. Apples and oranges are related because they're both fruit, therefore if I like apples I should like oranges.

The market's a mini-game. Badging and accolading are mini-games. PvP isn't a mini-game in the same way PvE isn't a mini-game.

There is no handicap in PvP (well, there wasn't before I13, but now the entire system is one giant handicap). There's "baseline" and there's "above baseline." You come up against someone that's not as good as you, and you want to play down to their level, that's fine - but know that you won't be helping them improve because you won't be giving them a meaningful challenge, and you won't be doing yourself any favors in the process. One of the problems with the entire I13 system is that it forced the changes upon everyone at all levels of play - high-end team or 1v1 arena was forced to get dumbed down as well, even though the players participating in that were perfectly capable of using the system that existed at that time. Here's something from Sirlin's "Play to Win" article:
At any rate, I'm going to step away from this discussion now, as we've managed to deviate pretty far off the original point, and I don't wish to intrude on AF's amazing insight into how the game and even the world around us works.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

That analogy is ridiculous. There's no analog to that in this game. No one here being rich when you got here is meaningfully retarding your ability to get rich too, unlike the analogy you give above.

No, I feel that the people who are disadvantaged should get off their self-entitled ***** and make use of the multiple tools in this game that let them catch up with the Jonses. Your side in this makes it sound as if there's some barrier to that besides these people's own outlook, and that's just not true.

I am chuckling so hard over this. First I didn't know I had a side. Do we have meetings ?


By god this is a game, what kind of twisted place does that come from to make it into here. People play this for fun. Sportsmanship and fairplay should be the watchwords not strange theories of social darwinism.

I mean your "side" in the sense of the position you're taking in the argument. Not some nebulous group of people who agree with you.

Games take different forms. This is a persistent world MMO. All such games have as features a series of ladders to climb that lead from the place of weakness from which players start to heights of power which they can attain. Climbing those ladders takes effort. Because it is a game, that effort is supposed to be manifested in ways that are entertaining, but it still an investment in effort. The rewards of that effort are persistent and can be accumulated upon over time.

If people do not want to deal with the "effort" of cumulative progression, then they should play an FPS, or checkers. If they play a persistent world MMO and demand effortless progress, then they are playing the wrong type of game.

Completely agree.
Completely agree.

(EDIT: OK, maybe I'm getting some insight into where part of the disagreement is coming from.

Putting it overly simplistically, on one side, we have the people who think of PvP as a mini-game. From that standpoint, arguments like "Why should success in one mini-game like marketeering translate into an advantage in another mini-game like PvP? That isn't fair." actually make sense. Hey, you're right! If PvP is a separate mini-game, that kind of isn't fair. It is indeed like starting Monopoly owning a bunch of property because you won checkers last night, or whatever those analogies were.

On the other side, we have the people who think of PvP in the context of the whole game, just like PvE is in the context of the whole game. So the PvP game includes leveling up, figuring out a good build, doing whatever is necessary to afford that build, and putting it all together. It doesn't start when you enter the arena. From this perspective, there is no separate mini-game. Success in planning and purchasing a good build IS part of success in PvP, just as much as it is part of success in PvE.

I'm firmly on the second side. I don't break this MMO into a bunch of separate mini-games, and I certainly don't suggest that for things to be fair, these mini-games should not interact. It's just one big game, called City of Heroes/Villains. There isn't really even a PvP game and a PvE game. There are just ways you can fight other players, and ways you can fight computer-controlled enemies. You may build differently to fight other players, just like you build differently to farm efficiently, to handle general team play, to specialize in a particular task force, or to solo AVs with no temporary powers and inspirations. But in my mind, that doesn't make it a different game. It's all the same MMO. I might describe the market as a mini-game, but not in any deeper sense than I would describe working for a living as a mini-game. It still has obvious and inextricable consequences for the rest of the game / the rest of my life.)

Let me lay out the upshot of that and ubers position. What you are arguing for is allowing additional advantages to people who already have a skill and familiarity advantage with the game.It should come as no surprise to anyone who is thinking about how any game is played or even basic human psychology that people stayed away in droves.

You can say it makes sense all you want but what it amounts to is giving the big kids large bats and telling them go beat on the little ones.

I thought I had a dim view of the community before, but to have people seriously argue that they have a right to wail on people just because they have "Paid their dues". Well that is really just ugly. What kind of sense of accomplishment could anyone take away from that ? I don't even want to go into the great joy of a team of 8 beating on 1 guy in the zone.

That isnt a game its just sick. Yes you can make the rules for a game however you like just don't be shocked when people don't play.

Edit: and if you want to take the real life work as a mini game most sports place strict limits on the equipment that can be used and what athletes can do to enhance performance.

This mentality is not supported in any MMO I know of. I don't think it should be supported in CoH either.

Try PvP in Aion. It's brutal. You get ganked by their equivalent of 'purpled out' players. You'll get ambushed mid fight. You'll have a raiding party 6v1 you. If you don't like doing that, well, you don't enter the PvP zone, or you adapt and find ways to fight back. You level up and get your own loot. You grab a few friends and completely wipe that legion in PvP.

That's PvP, and it's fun. You will get angry at players for being 'mean' and 'unfair'. So the question is: what are you going to do about it? You could fight back, using the exact same tools that are available.

Casual players shouldn't dominate PvP - and they don't in other games. However, casual players should be able to enjoy PvP. Right now, in CoH PvP 2.0, casual players still don't dominate PvP, and now the majority of players do not enjoy PvP. The concept failed: balance PvP and try to lessen the gap between the casual player and the hardcore player.

The goal should be this:

Make PvP challenging and fun. Give reasons to PvP for not only hardcore players, but casual players. Give reasons to encourage players to team up so that casual players can play alongside hardcore players.

I have a topic in the suggestions forum of a way to encourage teaming in RV, that will likely attract players of all types. Some players will have an advantage over others, but don't discount humanity's capability to adapt to circumstances and learn from painful defeats. So you lose to someone who plays dirty. You can come back and do the same thing. Get ganked? Gank back. Just don't get your blueside spandex pants into a wad because some villain is being mean.

Welcome to every game in existence. Should someone who's only played chess a few times expect to win against a grand master? Even in FPS games where there is zero equipment advantage, additional advantages exist for people who have skill and familiarity advantages with a game.

For years before I came to CoH I was a member of teams that were formed to play FPS games in organized competition. We played a lot. We held practices multiple times a week. We worked on strategies for how to play on different maps, on tactical skills so that we could try to be better fighters one-on-one and in small teams. We assigned roles, studied map terrain, and played with internet voice communications. We recorded demos of our matches, and reviewed them to see what we could learn from both our play and the other team's. We used what client side modding was allowed without going so far as to hack the game. Most of us had good gaming rigs and low pings - you had to have them to be competitive.

Players like us murdered new players if we seriously went head to head with them, such as in pub matches. Most of us went all out even in such pubs, but we also usually held to an honor system with respect to spanking the other side - if we blasted them so badly that people would leave the other team, we would switch sides to help the guys who were losing. (As an extension of that, we tried not to gang up together on the same team.) We tried to show people who asked for help what we felt were good basic strategies and tactics. We tried to foster a good community in human terms, but also a highly competitive one. We strove to be tops in that competitive community, and in one case succeeded.

Player vs. player gaming is, by definition, competitive by virtue of the "versus" in the middle. Some people will take it more seriously than others. Those people expect to have an advantage from that effort, however it manifests in that game environment. MMOs are about progress - you have to spend time to gain "power", be that in levels, skill points, gear, or whatever your MMO of choice provides. People naturally expect more progress to mean better advantage. If there's no progress, then there's no reason to play an MMO.

Having a PvP game where investment in playing equates to progress is what attracts what people think of as "hard-core" players. It's having a core of such players that usually helps head-to-head games succeed - they're usually the people who form the leagues and ladders and the general sense of the game's community. That was one of the biggest failures in CoH's PvP 2.0: its handling gutted the core of CoH's PvP community as people left in disgust over some combination of the game changes, the seeming lack of attention to their feedback, and Lighthouse's poorly timed and worded post about who the changes were "for".

So does this one. It has attribute caps. It has slotting rules, like the "Rule of Five". Everyone has to be the same level, and everyone at the same level has the same number of powers and slots. (OK, except Khelds on the powers...) You aren't allowed to hack the client. You aren't allowed, in general, to bar anyone else from progressing in the overall game (and doing so is probably a violation of the EULA). You aren't supposed to pay real life money to buy gear.

You may dislike those rules, and think they are too broad, but the rules do exist and apply to everyone.

Edit: And Werner, I thought your edit there was spot on. PvP is not a mini-game. It's something we can do in the context of the larger game.

This.

Maybe two months ago I used to pvp alot both in zones and arena with an I12 spec'd Rad/Son defender. The build has zero purples and one LOTG+. I slotted the build with cheap +Rech sets to try to get AM perma and did fine in zones. Sure I died alot on it in zone vs more than two people. I only lost in the arena on it when I jokingly engaged in fiteclub vs a BS/Regen with no inspis.

Until I put purples on my Mind/Therm I did zones with it and faired better vs multiple targets since the build has phase instead of trying to rely on the temp phase like I did with my Rad/Son. I even occasionally break out my Fire/Elec dom that is pve spec'd and do decent. The bad thing is I'm not that good at pvp. The only good thing I've done in the arena is win a small pvp tourney on virtue for a costume code.

tl;dr: Practice and knowing how to play your toon makes a world of difference. Remember kids knowing is half the battle.

Look at it from a PVE perspective. Does hamidon roll over and spit a reward into your lap because you casually strolled into the hive and wanted it? How about lord recluse? Statesman? Reischman? See where I'm going with this? There is a lot of content in the pve game that requires you to actually plan to succeed at it. You have to learn the ins and outs of what particular npcs do, how to counter it, how to build your own toon, how to assemble an effective team.

PVP is like that. It's not about paying dues, it's about taking the time to learn how the content works and developing a strategy to get what you want out of it. If you are unwilling to invest then you will fail at it, just like you will at the more challenging PVE content.

Name one sport worth playing where investing time beforehand in practice, training and study of the game does NOT provide an advantage. The goal in PVP is a level playing field not "equal" players.