Old Complaints ~or~ 'A More Perfect Superhero Simulator'

And suddenly, super reflexes is broken.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Dodgeball with our current "hit is determined at time of cast" system would be really amusing. Someone with superspeed running across the city, leaping over a wall, and hiding behind a building would still be pegged with a heat-seeking ball and have to sit out.

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

Yea, since I found a walk-trhough for Tetris, it lost all the fun!

I don't like puzzles that are too easy to simply hint-guide away in the general case, although I recognize that its non-trivial to make puzzles that can't be.

I do believe that MMOs provide an escape hatch to puzzles that an actual puzzle game doesn't. MMOs are balanced based on reward *rates*, not actual rewards. Developers don't *like* "riskless rewards" but in actuality if you achieve a "riskless reward" in an MMO and the time it takes to achieve it is actually much higher than the average time to earn that level of reward any other way, you're actually underperforming.

This means its actually possible to *codify* the amount of time a puzzle is allowed to "stump" a player in an MMO before its reasonable to allow them to brute-force a solution by some method. In fact, brute force itself should probably be the actual escape hatch. Puzzles in MMOs can be used to offer "reward bonuses" to players that solve them quickly, and "reward penalties" (really, a slower earning rate) to players that don't, in a way that doesn't require guides.

But actually, if you adopt this sort of gaming theory, its actually more imperative that you make puzzles very difficult to strategy-guide away, because if its trivially easy to hand someone the solution, that limits the maximum level of reward that puzzle can award.

The two strategies that I think work best here are first: puzzles designed to make the optimum strategy for solving them require more time to explain than it takes to execute. Branching puzzles potentially work here, where the player can be forced to use so much work to *find* a solution, that it takes longer than the typical amount of time it takes for a reasonably good player to *formulate* a solution. Also, puzzles designed around complexity features of the game can also explode any possibility of creating a comprehensive documented solution.

The second strategy is to make puzzles in which there are no generalized solutions at all. This is not easy, but there are known "puzzles" for which there are no general solutions and which can be partially randomized by a computer. Some mathematical problems that are usable for zero knowledge proofs can potentially be turned into puzzles (hamiltonian cycles comes to mind, where you have a set of dots connected by lines and you have to find a way to traverse all the lines while visiting the dots only once each).

The tricky part is integrating these into a game in a non-forced way. For example, its theoretically possible to make an instanced map that is comparable to a hamiltonian graph (junctions connected by paths) and create an objective within each pathway the team must reach and acquire. If the junctions have particularly difficult challenges that slow the team, then the team that can achieve all the objectives while passing through the junctions the least number of times will get rewarded with the fastest completion time and by extension the best reward per unit time. Its possible to make just a couple of maps and have the computer generate random variations of those all guaranteed to have similar solutions, but no amount of running the mission would ever give you a reusable solution to the map.

The nice thing about integrating puzzles in this way is that they are much more seamless than literally placing a puzzle in front of the players in a gameplay-disruptive way. And the solution isn't binary: there is a best solution, and a worst solution, and a lot of solutions in between, but there's no way to literally be unable to find *any* solution, unless you literally cannot navigate maps without assistance.

I don't think a tetris-like game was what was suggested.

Why not, though? Assuming the tech exists.

One of the nice things about Dungeons and Dragons Online is all the Pipe Dream puzzles, at least for me. Yeah, a walkthrough can exist, but it's still fun and challenging to just do them.

Also, puzzles with randomized setups or initial states can definitely work regardless.

Code the ball into a snipe...

My Arcs
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Mission Architect Handyman

Because if I wanted to play freakin' Tetris, I'd play freakin' Tetris.

I'm not against the idea of getting puzzles in the game per se, but this is a superhero-themed MMO. Any puzzle would have to fit within that theme. A Riddler-style or Sphinx-style supervillain would fit in wonderfully. A Tetris minigame or eight level tower of Hanoi would not.

My thoughts were along the line of the Electronics mini-game from Sid Meier's Covert Action, which was used with slight variation for wiretapping, defeating electronic locks, bomb disarming, etc. It was effectively a pipe game variant including simple digital logic elements, where you swapped out "chips" (tiles) with various internal elements (sometimes unknown) while trying to connect certain areas and not others (e.g. make a path that powered the door latch but not the alarm).

Snipes just check again for LOS. Doesn't do anything to allow the person to dodge by moving unless they go behind something solid, which doesn't normally happen in dodgeball.

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

Quote:

Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler I don't think a tetris-like game was what was suggested.

Perhaps. But it all goes down to "non combat advancement opportunities." Obviously for it to offer tangible rewards it would have to also have opportunities for failure.

Perfect example that even perfectly fits in the game's context: Bomb Assemble/Disassemble missions.

Make a small tetris/gems/columns like mini-game that works as an interface to activate and deactivate bombs. Once the mini game starts you would be on a timer regardless whether you are setting up or deactivating a bomb, loose or run out of time and the bomb blows up effectively failing the mission and killing you. This means just half end of mission xp and, off course, debt. After all, nothing is as boring as being perma-held, this may give players something to with the reward of breaking out of the loop!

Also, don't take me literally with the puzzle type, it can be a balance game of sort (trying to keep perfect balance between the liquids in an explosive device) or a wire cutting/connecting mini-game that works like a minesweeper (giving you clues what is bad to cut next, but not entirely giving it away.) Every bad choice would not insta-kill but it would "hurt" a health bar that once empty would make the thing explode.

And off course, story wise this can be attached to many things, from bombs in car trunks on a building basement to missile launch/sabotage.

Can also see computer hacking (this one can really be a tetris/gems clone) and lockpicking mini-games.

Combine them all together and you have to hack computers and lockpick doors to make your way through a building all the way to the silo/basement and disassemble/set that bomb in the trunk of a car or launch/sabotage that missile launcher.

Ideas keep flowing in right now, making the full gamble on a final bomb disassemble/assembly may sound a bit too harsh, how about 3 bombs where you got to, giving you no end-of-mission xp but instead a nice xp bonus for each properly disassembled bomb.

Then you can always mix these things into normal combat missions. Like lockpicking doors instead of having to find the keys, forcing players to actually do these puzzles for every single bomb activation/deactivation currently in the game and add these elements to TFs where cooperative Tetris is played to solve a huge minesweeper thing to, I don't know, permanently disable the Striga TF giant mek-man before you face the final AV. Oh and lock-picking prison doors! Or hacking the energy doors in Arachnos prisons. Or dispelling (with similar mini-games) doors in CoT prisons.

While at it, would be interesting to have a quick hold-breaking puzzle game that casted break-free effect on you if you manage to solve it before your hold/stun/fear runs out.

They can, but in MMOs they have a lot of things working against them. Like other players. On your own team.

Puzzles in MMOs suffer from having to deal with teams of players. Either one person does the puzzle and everyone else stands around waiting for it to be unlocked or more than one person does it / is required to do it and potentially stuff it up for the rest of their team.

If the solution is known and only one person can do the puzzle, then the rest of the team will be screaming it out for the puzzle maker to just finish the damn thing by cutting the green wire, then blue wire, then red wire.

If the solution is known and everyone / anyone can do the puzzle, then the more experienced in the team will run through it as quickly as possible. Someone else mentioned DDO - the dungeons there often held the "puzzle" of secret doors and pathways. I remember watching other players screaming through those puzzles like they were the first in line at a Black Friday sale.

If the solution varies and only one person can do the puzzle, the team is left waiting for that sole player to complete it.

If the solution varies and everyone has to complete the puzzle, there will be fits over getting it right. The CoT trial requires 8 players just simply to all click on a glowie at the same time - and we can talk to each other, so it is hardly a guessing game as to when - but that was one of the most frustrating sessions of my CoH/V life. I can only imagine the joy of trying to get 8 players to solve some sort of pattern-recognition game in order to progress in the mission.

I'm all for a non-combat system - currently playing through a trial of Vanguard and the diplomacy and crafting systems aren't too shabby at all - but let's recognise that such things work much better solo than they do in a group. Given the importance of teaming in CoH/V any puzzle / non-combat system needs to work in both solo and multi-player situations.

It would probably need to be a new attack - likely a very, very, very narrow cone. It would have similar activation rules like a PBAoE, so it can fire without targetting anyone.

Now how to actually come up with a way to have it acquired and lost is another story, and probably involves the cone being a pseudopet spawning a glowie, which probably isn't possible.

This of course, is just conjecture on what I see from playing the game. I have no clue how it actually works.

Some do, some don't. If you can randomly generate it (like a maze or a Sudoku square), no amount of Googling will give an answer.

On that tangent, I would like to see AV designed as encounters and not as hard hitting HP bags. AVs that are entirely unmezzable but that don't hit THAT hard, instead having pets that can't be defeated but mezzed, and other pets that do heavy damage but easy to kill, and extremely vulnerable herds of debuffing micro-critters that debuff players while they last and are resummoned often and also have very high melee and ranged defense forcing players to need true AoE typed attacks to defeat them. Some of these things being immune to debuffing or do things that make debuffing irrelevant.

This to-do list would make these encounters more than just HP bags and the "critters" don't have to really be humanoid or animals but can also be fixtures and turrets and the like to make sense on the given environment and encounter. In short, things to make more than just plain damage or debuffing useful.

Yeah seriously, let's not turn this into City of Resident Evil where we need to solve some obscure logic problem to unlock a door and then wonder how all the villain's idiot henchmen manage to get around the place without being stuck ten times a day.

It could be clearly stated the mission in question contains or is entirely based around puzzles.

That's only because of the general mentality of the FFXI community. I also played it, very long, long enough to know what I'm saying.

I wold guess somewhere between 75% and 92%

My estimation would be close to 87% Maybe 85%

Can we have Tetris with Inspiration blocks? Please? Oh that would be awesome. So sooo awesome.

ohoho....BAB actually knows how bad TS is