Discussion: Formspring.me 4/23 Dev Q&A Transcript

No, but the lead Dev would like some ideas, and where else would you put them but in Suggestions and Ideas, which, the Devs are on record they *do* read, also, the Mods are on record they *do* read Suggestions and Ideas because that is their job, and their job is to summarize player feedback and ideas and present them to the Devs.

This ventures into territory the devs can't discuss in too much detail, so they are usually cautious try to avoid discussing too deeply. Its also something that they have historically found difficult to articulate precisely even in areas they are allowed to discuss.

I'm not as cautious, and extremely wordy.

First: we were never meant to be "equal" to 3 even minions. Even back when Statesman was making that statement, I discussed with him the fact that statement was misleading and contradicted other things he said about the game balance. What he said was that 3 even minions was originally meant to be a challenge to players, because that was the standard spawn in a mission (for one player). Obviously, when you are designing a game, you try to generate opposition for the player to overcome that is within their means to do so but generally not trivial to do so.

We were meant to be challenged by three minions, but generally win. By definition, that means we were always supposed to be superior to three even minions. Just not so superior that they were meaningless to us.


Today, that rule is just a whisper of a guideline. The devs now recognize that because of the way the level progression works, the players get more powerful relative to the critters as they get higher. And the devs now *want* the players to get more powerful relative to the critters, to provide the psychological feedback of progress. So we are "balanced against" increasingly higher levels of threat as we get higher.

But as I said, that's just a guideline. The game balance is based around a set of boundaries that define a range of acceptably balanced performance, rather than a specific "target." To the best of my knowledge, these are the parameters the game is balanced *within*:

1. Every powerset combination where the player makes reasonable choices to do so should be able to reasonably solo the core story content of the game.

2. When averaged across all of the players that play the game every powerset combination should generate performance similar to that of the average performance of all players playing all powerset combinations, to within a specific range centered around that average. This should be true under a set of different specific circumstances, such as different combat levels.

3. A player should be theoretically be able to level from level one to level 50 by playing and completing some subset of the core story content less than 100%. In addition, the amount of time for the average player to complete that content should fall within a certain leveling range. Above average players can level significantly faster without generating unacceptably high performance up to some unknown (and possibly non-specific) limit.


There are other minor rules here and there I'm aware of that I doubt you'd be interested in. The problem is that I have only a vague sense of the actual numbers involved in #2, and absolutely no idea (except what basic logic tells me) about the numbers involved in #3, and the devs are explicitly barred from discussing either. To the extent that I know anything about those quantities I'm equally barred from discussing them except in vague terms comparable to what the devs have already said in public.


This is just unfortunately one of those topics for which the devs could give answers, but for most people they cannot give satisfactory ones and would be forced to terminate the discussion at almost every turn. The fact that there are still people who think we were, are, or were ever considered to be "equal to three minions" attests to the difficulty in communicating about this specific topic. That statement was never, ever true and even when Statesman was here I worked hard to correct that misunderstanding, with only very limited success. Its just a very difficult topic to cover without falling into a lot of misunderstandings and general arguments.


To the person who rep-commented "you dont need 7 paragraphs every response" this post actually has eleven, but don't worry, its no problem at all to do more than I need to. I go the extra mile just so you have a safe, anonymous, and harmless way to expend those negative rep points. You're welcome.

Shovel arms confirmed for the Mutant pack.

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

Which is kind of silly. Nameless minions are nameless minions precisely because they are meaningless opposition.

There's a term for meaningless opposition in game design: its called destructible environment.

The funny thing here is Champions Online did exactly what I said the devs should do way back in '04. Just rename them. In fact, CO has stronger bottom tier critters than we do (imo) but just doesn't call them minions. If the devs just decided to call them "Super Villains, Super Duper Villains, Mega Villains, Ultra Villains, and Galacticly Insane Villains" they could sidestep 99% of these objections, and that change could be implemented in about two minutes.


Might be time to resurrect Extreme Hyperdodging next.

Well if they're so meaningless, maybe they shouldn't give experience for defeating them =P

Seriously? They had over one thousand questions, and you're complaining that yours did not get answered over someone else's? How's your entitlement complex going for you? Nor is the playerbase dead. Ugh.

I'm not sure what people were expecting of this Q & A... were you all thinking they would bare all and let you know everything they are working on and thinking of working on? There was plenty of information in there that we didn't know already, and if your particular question or niggle didn't get answered, it's okay. You can survive this.

As it is, I was quite relieved to hear that we are getting more content in GR than just the level 1-20 stuff, the alignment changes things, and the one level of +50 stuff. Also, I heard we'd be getting two more slots for characters, which I didn't think I'd know for awhile yet. That helps me with new character creation right now, actually.

So some good stuff.

It's a valid question. It was introduced into PvP and the questioner could have missed Castle's earlier statement that it's not coming to PvE, at least, not the legacy PvE, but maybe special, new content (like raids).

I'd be all for Diminishing Returns coming to regular PvE. The game's mechanics breaks down at the edges when you start stacking things up very high. In order to get around that, there are caps and limits. Diminishing Returns would soften the suddenness of a cap.




Don't worry, they include dancing to the oldies.

Call them what you will, they'll still be the filler episodes of combat.

IIRC, ChO calls them "henchman" which still equates to "faceless badguy that shows up in hordes to get mercilessly pummeled with little chance of taking down the main hero." And the fact that I found them (much less the higher ranks) to be far too tough is part of the reason I left that game to come back here (where the enemies are less "too tough").

Calling all of these faceless badguys "Super Villains" leads to the problem of "why am I fighting so many super villains - where are the faceless hordes of henchies which are relaxingly therapeutic to beat upon?"

>.> but it didn't work in pvp, nothing in i13 did.

Hoping I'll finally get that hover board or hover disk that I've wanted for my assault rifle / traps characters for so long now.

dead? but cold med, you keep coming back, that has to count for something.

What did you expect they want to see the NFL Daraft round 2 and 3.

EXTREMELY disappointed in this! The moon-zone was the TOP vote getter way back YEARS ago when they had their poll asking what new zones we'd prefer most. Not only have they allowed this to languish for years, but now just an off-the-cuff, flippant way of telling us it's never going to come after all???