City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?

Adelie

By Adelie,
Posted on: 2009-12-21 03:59 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Here's the crucial point, though: they help sometimes, but they help exactly when you need them.
I meant what I said: Defense has been very ardently described as "they help, but only kind of, only sometimes, and not when it really counts."

The argument has generally been that Defense fails to mitigate "lucky bursts" and it is the high damage bursts that comes from bosses that scrappers need damage mitigation the most; they practically don't need defense at all against minions and LTs.

Mind you, I'm not making this argument, I'm repeating it. And my counter-point has generally been, among other things:

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Blaster "survivability-through-killing" works sometimes, but FAILS exactly when you need it most.
Everything always fails exactly when you need it most. That's because we usually judge failure by getting dead, or close to it. And every one of those situations is when we needed it the most. Practically everyone says that defense fails when you need it the most, regeneration fails when you need it the most, mez fails when you need it the most - nothing ever fails when we didn't need it anyway.

What matters is whether something does what it is supposed to do, when it is supposed to do it. Is Blaster damage supposed to be able to kill a Boss before it can return enough fire to put the Blaster in jeopardy? Probably not. So the mechanism of allowing Blasters to mitigate damage through cutting down on the number of attackers is primarily a tactic intended for minions and LTs. That's almost certainly intentional. The fact that it doesn't work on Bosses is almost certainly a direct design requirement *of* Bosses. if it worked on Bosses, the devs would probably increase Boss health until it didn't.


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A couple of points to make here. One would be the one you alluded to, but avoided - damage modifiers only matter insomuch as they determine the strength of a melee attack relative to the strength of a "similar-size" ranged attack. That means that, all things being equal, things will hit harder in melee than they do at range. And this is true for a lot of things like Warriors, Trolls and even Rikti, to some extent. That is because they are, by and large, melee NPCs with a ranged attack. This fails utterly, however, when you are pitted against NPCs designed to be ranged damage dealers, whose ranged attacks are so strong they end up dealing MORE damage than their melee attacks. And some enemies don't even HAVE melee attacks at all. Nemesis Dragoons are a good example of this, as are Rikti Drones. And given how AI operates, you are unlikely to suffer melee AND ranged attacks if you go to melee, making some enemies actually safer in melee. A good example I can think of is Zeus Class Titans. If you force them into melee, they will only cycle their punch, never actually firing their much more damaging Plasma Beam, Plasma Beam Barrage, Explosive Missile Swarm, Incendiary Missile Swarm and Gas Missile Swarm attacks. They are LITERALLY safer in melee, because they are designed to be ranged enemies. Gunslingers are in the same boat, lacking a melee attack, as far as I've seen.

To add to this, the developers have continually acknowledged that while, yes, that's how things were designed to work, when things ACTUALLY work like this, they find themselves scrambling to fix it. When people were farming wolves by hovering out of their range, they got a ranged attack. When people kept doing that anyway, they got a ranged attack that STUNS, so as to knock fliers out of the air. It ought to have been working as intended. So why was it "fixed?" I mean, OK, give them a ranged attack, but why keep making it stronger?
1. As I said, it usually works.

2. Sometimes, you're correct, the critters do dumb things that make this work less well than intended. That's a problem that hopefully will be fixed sometime in the not too distant future.

3. Sometimes, the devs don't do the right thing, or they do contradictory things. However, that doesn't in and of itself contradict the notion that range (specifically, *being* at range) is a form of attack mitigation. If you said smashing resistance was damage mitigation, you would think I was quibbling if I said "oh yeah, well what about all psionic critters?"

And by the way, there really aren't very many critters "designed" to deal more damage with ranged attacks than melee attacks. That would require breaking that damage/recharge/endurance formula: the critters follow basically the same one we do. The only way a critter does more damage at range than in melee is if it has more ranged attacks than melee attacks and fails to use those ranged attacks when in melee range and their attack selection is exhausted (they run out of melee attacks to use and they are all recharging). That *does* happen, but only because, as I said, sometimes the critters are unintentionally brain-dead.

Unintentionally, so there is some hope that down the road this gets addressed, although ironically if the critters get smarter about how they attack, the first canary in the cage that could get negatively affected is the archetype running with the lowest margin of survivability: Blasters (believe me, this is something I've put a lot of thought into).

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Except "that other game" also fails to offer any sort of teaming incentive, whereas ours offers a pretty fat experience and influence buff to those on a team. Granted, it's less than what you get solo, but a LOT more than 1/8 of what you get solo, which is how things tend to be divided elsewhere.

No-one teams because there's no incentive, not because there's no need. There's a difference.
Errrr not exactly.

In that other game you can literally get to lvl 28 without EVER having to team with anyone. The content is that easy, and the builds you can make are that strong.

There really is NO NEED to team until you get to LAIRS. Think of the them as a supped up instance with bosses and AVs. The first one is around lvl 28. Prior to that I've leveled toons over there without EVER seeing a team and in often times not hearing that many LFG requests in their equivalent of b-cast.

Now all that info above is COMBINED with the fact that, yes, you are correct that there really is NO INCENTIVE to team. the critter xp is sooo low it's pointless. Also there was NO GROUP MISSION BONUS if the mission wasn't your own. They were planning to rectify this at some point.

I quit the game back in early December for good and haven't looked at their website since. So I couldn't care less if they have rectified it at this poins, as I and many others TOLD them so during alpha, and closed beta.

Since this is "your thread" I won't bore you on how the complete idiocy of their teaming UI and LFG interfaces combine with the issues we both just stated, to make teaming a chore. Also things they were warned about during pre-live.

Before some silly rah rah cheerleader storms in here and says I'm talking out of my ***, here is a thread for folks to read in their spare time coming from the horse's mouth: AKA their own freaking players.

http://forums.champions-online.com/s...ad.php?t=96514


/rant off.

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Range is not suppose to be a total defense. Blasters aren't suppose to be able to pick hover and a couple of ranged attacks and get a free ride on the easy XP train. This is why they started handing out range attacks to NPCs. Those without range attacks get 1 power. The ones that crossed the comfort line between advantage and exploit in the developers eyes got a ranged attack with some punch.

Range still gives a huge advantage against almost every NPC.

 

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Except "that other game" also fails to offer any sort of teaming incentive, whereas ours offers a pretty fat experience and influence buff to those on a team. Granted, it's less than what you get solo, but a LOT more than 1/8 of what you get solo, which is how things tend to be divided elsewhere.

No-one teams because there's no incentive, not because there's no need. There's a difference.
Our game also has:

* Four basic ATs that are designed around the concept of teaming through a support set. They are less effective when soloing and are force multipliers for people in teams, making content go faster. CO has no classes and no penalties for taking certain powers, so if you can do high damage and have self-defense, why do you need support? CO also has, as far as I'm aware, only one buff/support oriented set, and it's pretty much all healing.

* A "looking for members" function where we can seek out people and invite them to our group to do content. I'm not sure of the extent of CO's LFM system, but due to the way we have defined classes, you know that if you recruit a Tanker he's going to tank, or if you invite a Corruptor he's going to have buffs/debuffs. If you invite someone in CO there's no telling what their powers are going to be without asking or sifting through everyone's skillsets, though odds are it's going to be damage/self defense.

* Teaming-encouraged content like task forces, giant monsters, zone events (though rare and sometimes limited to holidays), and AV-missions.

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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU View Post
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

 

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Originally Posted by Dispari View Post
* Teaming-encouraged content like task forces, giant monsters, zone events (though rare and sometimes limited to holidays), and AV-missions.
CO has those things too, but one additional small but I think significant factor in the teaming situation in CO is that it relies less on instances and more on shared zone content. Ignoring team bonuses, leveling rates, and every other reward-based advantage to teaming, in large teams you simply tend to *see* bigger groups of foes than solo (or at least you used to, before the current difficulty system). Even if you leveled at exactly precisely the same speed in teams as solo in CoH, there is a different gameplay experience in teams: its simply a different kind of fun to play eight vs twenty than it is to play one vs three.

That sort of thing adds an incentive to teaming at least some of the time in CoH, even for people who predominantly solo. This effect is significantly muted in CO, because a team fighting foes in a shared zone often degenerates into eight solo players heading in random directions and essentially "playing solo in a team." While CO does have instances, they don't seem to scale in quite the same way they do in CoX, and more importantly the percentage of time you spend in them is much lower.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
I meant what I said: Defense has been very ardently described as "they help, but only kind of, only sometimes, and not when it really counts."
I completely misunderstood what you meant, and there is no point in me making a long-winded argument why I agree with you here. I agree and recede my previous point.

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Everything always fails exactly when you need it most. That's because we usually judge failure by getting dead, or close to it. And every one of those situations is when we needed it the most. Practically everyone says that defense fails when you need it the most, regeneration fails when you need it the most, mez fails when you need it the most - nothing ever fails when we didn't need it anyway.
I'm not talking out of the air here, Arcana. I admit I may come across as a right fool, but there is method to the madness. I know full well what my characters can typically handle, what they can typically not, and where the "maybe" area is. I can see it a mile away when I get in over my head, accidentally trigger three ambushes onto myself, walk into a spawn convergence or aggro something that's incredibly dangerous. I know when the chips are down, and I know that those are the times some powers can save me, and some simply won't. When I walk into deep trouble, Elude WILL save me, but Total Focus will most decidedly not.

Here's the thing - as a Scrapper (or a Brute or a Stalker), I can extend my survivability past the point where, by my estimate, I should already be dead or high-tailing it. At the very worst of times, I can bring myself back to life and carry on. Blasters really don't have that option, not until pretty much the end of the game, and even then only sometimes, and even then only kind of. When a Scrapper walks into trouble, he has additional performance he can call on that, by virtue of its design, is otherwise saved and hoarded. A Blaster, by comparison, has no such reserve, so when he ends up needing a little bit more, he has nothing to draw on.

That's what I define as "when you need it." In the situations where you need to surpass what you can normally do, a Scrapper can pull out all the stops and survive anyway, at a cost. A Blaster is pretty much BORN without any stops to speak of. I guess if nukes were on a 1000 second recharge but almost always killed almost everything (unlike how it is now, when they sometimes kill most things), then I guess I could count them as a final line of defence, but as it stands right now, they're better used to just skip a spawn than when you're backed-up against the wall.

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And by the way, there really aren't very many critters "designed" to deal more damage with ranged attacks than melee attacks. That would require breaking that damage/recharge/endurance formula: the critters follow basically the same one we do. The only way a critter does more damage at range than in melee is if it has more ranged attacks than melee attacks and fails to use those ranged attacks when in melee range and their attack selection is exhausted (they run out of melee attacks to use and they are all recharging). That *does* happen, but only because, as I said, sometimes the critters are unintentionally brain-dead.

Unintentionally, so there is some hope that down the road this gets addressed, although ironically if the critters get smarter about how they attack, the first canary in the cage that could get negatively affected is the archetype running with the lowest margin of survivability: Blasters (believe me, this is something I've put a lot of thought into).
I agree with you, but I wouldn't call enemy behaviour as it is right now brain-dead, insomuch as it feels, at least to me, to be the intended result. Melee enemies fight in melee, and fire ranged attacks only at range. We don't have any explicit penalties for ranged attacks used in melee, which is all the better for players, but critters have long followed designs which are more aesthetic than practical, so for them to avoid shooting their fire blasts point-blank and instead fire-punch you is, at least to my eyes, intended. As such, certain enemies seem to be designed to be explicitly more dangerous at range than they are in melee, and it's not just Zeus Titans that do this. A LOT of enemies can be forced into a melee stance where not only will they not use their ranged attacks, they will actually CHASE you and try to use their melee attacks even if you hover out of range. The reverse is also true - it's possible to lock an NPC into a ranged mentality and have it plink away with its one weak, slow-recharging ranged attack while ignoring its three devastating melee attacks. I can't tell you how many times that has happend to, say, Champion Swipers.

A lot of critters are designed with a melee framework on top of which a single ranged attack exists just because everything needs at least one. Certain other critters, however, have been quite clearly designed with a RANGED framework, and have had a single melee attack, usually a basic Brawl, thrown in just because. In fact, a variety of enemies exist that do not possess ANY melee attacks, such as Nemesis Dragoons, of which I'm sure you're well aware. Basically, enemy design means that while some enemies are safer to keep at range, some are actually more DANGEROUS to keep at range. Easy example - Chief Mesmerists will perma-hold you if you stay at range, but will exclusively sword-slash if you close in. Also easy example - Malta Tac Ops will not approach to throw stun grenades, but will pull out a rifle, instead, and will only grenade you if you approach. A variety of enemies do this, and I have, quite honestly, not seen a great many that use their entire arsenal in any one situation.

All of that is to say that "range as defence" only works against certain enemies, and fails SPECTACULARLY against certain others. And even in cases where it's still safer, it's often not safe ENOUGH, when enemy ranged attacks are just as ruthless as their melee ones. Crey Power Tanks abusing Power Burst are just evil. At the same time, Crey Voltaic Tanks abusing Thunder Strike are no less sinister.

But you are right - any direct increase in enemy toughness, smarts or otherwise difficulty will sink the lowest-hanging fruit first - Blasters. This was demonstrated beyond question during the I4 boss buff, and it has been demonstrated every time something "challenging" is found since, up until the point where the Rogue Vanguard were designed seemingly specifically to shut melee up. Even Malta, the ones designed to kill overpowered heroes, are STILL rougher on Blasters than they are on Scrappers.

This exactly why I don't believe fiddling with difficulty will ever be a solution. Any change which affects all ATs at the same time will arm the most vulnerable first, and in a lot of respects, that is always the Blaster. Personally, I feel they should have been left as Ranged/Melee and given some better tools to thrive in melee, rather than the enigma they have become these days. Even something as esoteric as a Mastermind is easier to figure out, and that's saying something.

*edit*
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CO has those things too, but one additional small but I think significant factor in the teaming situation in CO is that it relies less on instances and more on shared zone content. Ignoring team bonuses, leveling rates, and every other reward-based advantage to teaming, in large teams you simply tend to *see* bigger groups of foes than solo (or at least you used to, before the current difficulty system). Even if you leveled at exactly precisely the same speed in teams as solo in CoH, there is a different gameplay experience in teams: its simply a different kind of fun to play eight vs twenty than it is to play one vs three.

That sort of thing adds an incentive to teaming at least some of the time in CoH, even for people who predominantly solo. This effect is significantly muted in CO, because a team fighting foes in a shared zone often degenerates into eight solo players heading in random directions and essentially "playing solo in a team." While CO does have instances, they don't seem to scale in quite the same way they do in CoX, and more importantly the percentage of time you spend in them is much lower.
I managed to close my tab by trying to copy all text in it. Oops! Let's see if I can say it with fewer words this time.

I agree with this completely. City of Heroes has focused teams that have a point and stick together, where enemies scale to make the whole team needed. Most other MMOs I've played have a disorganised rabble that roams the world one by one, hoping they'll randomly kill something that accomplishes someone's quest. Well, I can be by myself on my own just fine, I don't need a team to be alone with.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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Originally Posted by Aura_Familia View Post
In that other game you can literally get to lvl 28 without EVER having to team with anyone. The content is that easy, and the builds you can make are that strong.
To be fair, I do the same thing here. No, I'm not joking. I'll pick up a new character, typically play that new character until I'm somewhere between 25-35 and then go play another one. During that time, I may have teamed, or I may not have. It depends on which server I picked, which side I picked and what the people I know have planned.

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There really is NO NEED to team until you get to LAIRS. Think of the them as a supped up instance with bosses and AVs. The first one is around lvl 28. Prior to that I've leveled toons over there without EVER seeing a team and in often times not hearing that many LFG requests in their equivalent of b-cast.
"LAIRS" are the moment I slapped my head, rolled my eyes and turned aroun to leave. Talk about WoW in tights. This is my LEAST favourite way to promote teaming, to be quite honest.

And I believe what you say, trust me. I still feel it's crappy design choices pooping all over teaming more so than JUST the ability to take care of yourself. As people who have explained the system before have said, it comes down to class balance, or lack thereof as may be the case. No reason to team, no benefit for teaming, no convenience to team well. Why bother? Here, this is a TEAM game that gives you the option to still go solo if you really want to. There... I've no idea what that is.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Here, this is a TEAM game that gives you the option to still go solo if you really want to. There... I've no idea what that is.
Jack's 'Vision'?

 

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Originally Posted by Slashman View Post
Jack's 'Vision'?
I never really got a good idea of what that was, since I pretty much kept out of that trainwreck of a thread. Far as I saw, the game was running just fine and I saw no reason to debate theology. Mainly, I don't know what they have as I haven't played high enough in the game to actually know. From what I've seen and heard, though, player characters can span the whole gamut from utter gimp to totally overpowered and, knowing me, I'd probably end up with something that sucked and die a lot.

Champions Online is a game that is simultaneously very easy to solo everything in if you know what you're doing, and very difficult to solo anything in if you're not very good at this which... Is actually the exact same problem which has been cited as why City of Heroes scrapped the "Champions-inspired" points buy system and instead went with locked ATs and power sets. I'm not sure if I'd call this making the same mistake twice or just the (probably mistaken) belief that you can fix it if you just tried the same thing again, but I'm not confident City of Heroes Pre-Beta 2 will meet with as much success as was predicted.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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I fully understand Jack's vision for CO. We talked about it alot in PM's during Alpha.
Guess what?! The game is NOTHING like what he had envisioned.

And - when Bill came - the game went further and further from his original vision.


err edit:

The original vision as I understood it was just a more open City of Heroes. More open being "our" your characters. Having more choices. Not being stereotyped into one thing... "Oh your a scrapper" or "No you are a tank! Do your job!"!!
The worlds/zones were supposed to be more indepth instead of the stagnent zones we have here like IP or Steel Canyon. The world was supposed to be engaging, draw you in.

Things IMO got all ****** up when they decided "loot" needed to be in the game... or when they announced PvP was gonna be the balancing factor for the entire game...

When Jack stepped out of the picture I think internally that things really began to shatter at Cryptic for the goals of CO. When Atari stepped in and someone told them Star Trek is going to be the Next WoW. It's like the companies entire focus got disrupted and everything started to be rushed. instead of putting the time and effort into that game that was needed... They just started inviting more and more people to each wave of beta testing without fixing any of the stuff we were reporting as failures of the game. More and more people flooded the forums, not even testing the game... Just shoveling large heeping spoonfuls of praise down the Devs throats. Not helping the process at all. Going through extreme fanboi rage at anyone who was trying to say "HEY TEAMING DOESNT EXIST IN THIS GAME?!" Fanboi's nerdrage shot that stuff out of the sky.

It was as if all the important people who were working on CO left. And in stepped their replacements just trying to finish stuff up and send it out the door not listening to the feedback. Not trying to make the game better... Just get it out the door.

 

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Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain View Post
When Jack stepped out of the picture I think internally that things really began to shatter at Cryptic for the goals of CO. When Atari stepped in and someone told them Star Trek is going to be the Next WoW. It's like the companies entire focus got disrupted and everything started to be rushed. instead of putting the time and effort into that game that was needed... They just started inviting more and more people to each wave of beta testing without fixing any of the stuff we were reporting as failures of the game. More and more people flooded the forums, not even testing the game... Just shoveling large heeping spoonfuls of praise down the Devs throats. Not helping the process at all. Going through extreme fanboi rage at anyone who was trying to say "HEY TEAMING DOESNT EXIST IN THIS GAME?!" Fanboi's nerdrage shot that stuff out of the sky.

It was as if all the important people who were working on CO left. And in stepped their replacements just trying to finish stuff up and send it out the door not listening to the feedback. Not trying to make the game better... Just get it out the door.
Stuff like this is why I am much more for them improving this game and adding stuff to it rather than hear that they are making a COX 2. MMOs are way too iffy as is for me to trust that any dev team(even the great one we have here) would get things exactly right, even if they had a 'do over' opportunity.

There are too many examples of external factors interfering and pressure from publishers and investors causing bad things to happen. That's in addition to all the other quirks that can mess with development. This isn't just MMOs...but game development as a whole these days.

We're not 'perfect' but we at least have a decent base game to build off of. It took us a while to get there, but I don't see a reason to stop growing and improving. The '15 dev' drought we went through should never have happened and if it didn't I suspect we'd have an even more awesome game than we have now. I have high hopes for GR...and it better deliver!

 

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Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain View Post
The original vision as I understood it was just a more open City of Heroes. More open being "our" your characters. Having more choices. Not being stereotyped into one thing... "Oh your a scrapper" or "No you are a tank! Do your job!"!!
The worlds/zones were supposed to be more indepth instead of the stagnent zones we have here like IP or Steel Canyon. The world was supposed to be engaging, draw you in.
That would explain his boastful City of Heroes dis in that article from way back when. It also explains why all the boasting fizzled in light of yet another WoW clone, that even has silly things like "copper, silver and gold" tiers for "resources" and several inventory bags. It might have ended up being a decent game, and I honestly expected it to be one, but things turned out exactly as I expected them to. The things they boasted about were all there, but the things they never mentioned that everyone assumed would naturally be there... Just aren't.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

 

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
That would explain his boastful City of Heroes dis in that article from way back when. It also explains why all the boasting fizzled in light of yet another WoW clone, that even has silly things like "copper, silver and gold" tiers for "resources" and several inventory bags. It might have ended up being a decent game, and I honestly expected it to be one, but things turned out exactly as I expected them to. The things they boasted about were all there, but the things they never mentioned that everyone assumed would naturally be there... Just aren't.
That's what I like to call 'Developer-lock'. It's a lot like scrapper lock, except that scrappers are actually, you know, tough enough to survive having it.

 

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
That would explain his boastful City of Heroes dis in that article from way back when.
There's A LOT in that article that I disagree with, but I think this is the worst:

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Originally Posted by Jack sez...
Finally, consider player nature. "People will make it as un-fun as they possibly can if they think there's something to gain by that," Emmert added, concluding, “Worry about the players you've got. Don't worry about the players you don't have. You are what you are at launch," advised Emmert.
No matter how good a game is, people are going to slowly trickle out of the game as they get bored or new things come out. Left alone, every game would eventually die just because not every player will stay interested forever. Every game needs to worry about getting at least some new players. I don't disagree that you should be catering more to your existing ones, but you should always be looking forward to new things that existing players and new players alike will enjoy. Jack makes it sound like after launch, you don't need new players at all.

Also, "you are what you are at launch" is a terrible perspective. Every game at launch is going to get a huge influx of players trying out the game and seeing what's going on. Then, odds are, a massive amount of those people are going to figure out it's not that fun, or isn't what they're looking for, and leave. You can't honestly judge what the game is doing for at least three, if not six or 12 months down the road, once things have evened out and you have your devoted playerbase down pat. Judging the game at launch is counting all your chickens before they hatch. In that sense, CO is too young to even tell what's going to happen to it.

CO had a really rocky launch, followed by refunds on lifetime subscriptions, and people migrating back to where they came from. I don't think "you are what you are at launch" is a good perspective at all.

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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU View Post
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

 

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What I think he means by "you are what you are at launch" is that the impression the public will have of you is the impression they get at launch, doesn't matter how much the game grows and irons out the kinks the general public will still have the preception of whatever problems at launch are still there.

Age of Conan is still regarded as a bug riddled mess of an MMO with content that runs out at level 40 and doesn't start again until level 70, meaning you have to grind 30 levels...everyone knows they've done a lot to fix the problems they had at launch but AoC will never shake the general perception it had about it at launch.

 

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Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano View Post
What I think he means by "you are what you are at launch" is that the impression the public will have of you is the impression they get at launch, doesn't matter how much the game grows and irons out the kinks the general public will still have the preception of whatever problems at launch are still there.
CO's not off to a good start then.

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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU View Post
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

 

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I was kinda interested in AoC but then everyone stops talking. I had gotten used to listening instead of reading and then I took a boat and everyone became mute. I didn't even finish up the free time because I didn't want to see what I liked that stopped working as I progressed.

AoC still presents itself as an unfinished product as of August 09.

 

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Originally Posted by LISAR View Post
I was kinda interested in AoC but then everyone stops talking. I had gotten used to listening instead of reading and then I took a boat and everyone became mute. I didn't even finish up the free time because I didn't want to see what I liked that stopped working as I progressed.

AoC still presents itself as an unfinished product as of August 09.
I just logged off of my lvl 51 Bear Shaman. I have a full book of 32 quests and zillions of quests to go grab when these are done. Some are Epic foes in little dungeons spread across Field of the Dead... and others are quests spread across maybe 10 lavish zones. I haven't even gotten to some of the zones I have quests waiting for me in yet.

They still have the 24 hours of ingame Double Exp Potions available by pressing /claim

When people talk about AoC being an unfinished mess, I might suggest they play the game instead of powergrinding through the whole thing... People who say there is nothing to do... are the same people who say Champions Online is the end all be all of MMOing in the New Millenium.

(otherwise they are full of ***)

 

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This is it, AoC has actually gone a long way to fix a lot (but not all) the problems it started out with, at launch it was (to be brutal) terrible but they really got their act together and made it a lot better but that doesn't matter for jack because people will still go "Age of Conan...wasn't that really awful?".

As mention, CO had a fairly craptacular start which means that it's going to be stuck with that same impression, MMOs only get to make one decent first impression on a customer after that, it all goes down hill. CO didn't help itself by the opening day power nerf, it was needed yes but it didn't help peoples impressions. The dev team (namely Captain Bill...) have shown they're rather nerf happy at times and really don't know how to tweak things (offensive passive powers being reduced from 'meh' to 'awful' thanks to the opening day patch anyone?) often times not realising that their nerfing has knock on effects to other powers or the game itself in general.

CO had some great ideas but they were fairly awfully implemented, not to mention the shadow of STO looming over the staff (which rumour has it caused a large chunk of the CO staff to be pulled from it to work exclusively on the new big cash cow of STO).

This does tend to follow the trend of a massive number of 'subscribers' (who aren't really subscribed but using the free box time...I am one of these people) all converging on an MMO at release then once that free month is up, a sizeable chunk of them disappear.

Take Aion for example and the fact that their more popular servers were full to the point of bursting, people complained that they couldn't get on without a massive wait. NCsoft replied that they weren't going to open up more servers and there's a good reason for this, they knew those truly massive numbers wouldn't last beyond the initial free month, so why open a load of servers only to have to cull them back three-to-six months later when it all died down or leave them running with the player base spread too thin.

Warhammer Online suffered a similar problem, it opened with simply too many servers and six months after launch they had to merge a load of them because the playerbase had spread itself too far across all the servers, though this wasn't WARs only failing, it was one of them (Though I will admit out of the recent MMOs I've played, I enjoyed WAR the most and if you're looking for a fantasy based MMO that isn't WoW I would heartily recommend it).

Fallen Earth (which I tried to enjoy but was just too complicated for a 'fun time game' for me) and Eve (same problem) both have/had the right idea, start out small and grow. Oddly enough the two games, mechanics wise, are kind of similar in that they require a lot of planning and a decent knowledge of the game to actually get the most out of it. The playerbase is going to be smaller but far more dedicated.

 

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Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain View Post
I just logged off of my lvl 51 Bear Shaman. I have a full book of 32 quests and zillions of quests to go grab when these are done. Some are Epic foes in little dungeons spread across Field of the Dead... and others are quests spread across maybe 10 lavish zones. I haven't even gotten to some of the zones I have quests waiting for me in yet.

They still have the 24 hours of ingame Double Exp Potions available by pressing /claim

When people talk about AoC being an unfinished mess, I might suggest they play the game instead of powergrinding through the whole thing... People who say there is nothing to do... are the same people who say Champions Online is the end all be all of MMOing in the New Millenium.

(otherwise they are full of ***)
I say it's unfinished and I'm not sure how power grindy I could have been since I only made it off the island after burning up the army of zombies or what ever.

 

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Err what i was getting at in a really round about way >.>

I played Age of Conan for the first 3 months... and quit. To me the constant nerfs to powers just sucked every ounce of fun from that game. At launch time... I only got up to 49 and quit.
We checked back in through the year, but we resubbed for 3 months each because the game has improved alot.

While I have a Lt membership to CO... I check back in with that game. But sadly wow they still only have 5 zones... and the gameplay is still a total borefest. I dont think CO will improve until Bill gets FIRED.. That guy has done nothing but run that game into the ground.

 

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Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain View Post
While I have a Lt membership to CO... I check back in with that game. But sadly wow they still only have 5 zones... and the gameplay is still a total borefest. I dont think CO will improve until Bill gets FIRED.. That guy has done nothing but run that game into the ground.
What? And here I thought he had learned so much from his work on Hellgate: London.

 

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Originally Posted by Slashman View Post
What? And here I thought he had learned so much from his work on Hellgate: London.
Like how Jack learned so much from CoH?

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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU View Post
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

 

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Originally Posted by Dispari View Post
Like how Jack learned so much from CoH?
You just brought up the brain shattering turning moment for me in the Champs Alpha...
I was admittedly harping on how awesome it is to log into Atlas Park as a first time player. How awesome the music is, the whole ambiance of the moment. It's exciting! You can see CRIME happening all around you. And the non-existant police force obviously needs some help.

AND BAM! There you are! Hero-whoever to Save the day!


That is like "epic" to me.

And Jack send me a PM asking me... "What is so immersive about Atlas Park?"

And I was like ?!!!!!?!!!! What do you mean you dont know???? You dont know?????

And he didn't know. And I was like ???!!!!! How do you not know???!!!!

So I send him a longer version of what I just typed here. I went into more details.

And I swear to God... what showed up in the next few weeks was the Crisis areas of the current zones.

My heart was BROKEN. It was all downhill from there.

 

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Originally Posted by Dispari View Post
Like how Jack learned so much from CoH?
At this point I'm not sure if he learned diddly squat, learned exactly the wrong lessons, or learned the right lessons but stormed off to the Star Trek MMO and left someone else to handle Champions Online, but... Put it this way: what the game doesn't borrow from WoW, it largely implements via the wrong lessons learned from City of Heroes.

Easy example: people don't want to be constrained to just one city. They don't? Must'a missed something here, because I thought the relatively modern-day setting, set in a contemporary city, was exactly what set CITY of Heroes apart from World of EverQues II. So what does Champions Online do to distance itself? It sets you up in a forest to beat up forest animals and zombies.

Err...

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.