Another month, another respec trial complaint.
By
AlienOne,
Posted on: 2010-07-27 24:24 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Minimum team size to start the respec trial is 4 players.
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Originally Posted by Peacemoon
Also the two examples of poeple who failed it are (seemingly) from small teams of 3 or 4. Now I thought to do the trial you had to be a full group, which makes it much easier actually because there is less emphasis on individual people.
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I can't fail my story arcs, yet they give me Merits just the same. By that logic, the game should just give me the merits. In fact, it should be giving me Merits all the time, because I could be doing Story arcs which I cannot fail, so why bother do them, anyway? No pun intended, but I fail to see when "Can you succeed?" became the determining factor. It may be uncommon game design, but most things in City of Heroes you not only CAN, but WILL succeed at. You might just take longer to do so, and it may be more difficult to achieve, but rather very few things actually outright FAIL.|
Originally Posted by Peacemoon
Also I would like to turn the argument on its head. If the respec trial should be incredibly easy, verging on impossible to fail; then why not simply remove it instead of forcing people to jump through hoops. Surely if there is no way to fail the trial, then in principle it is serving no purpose. I am not suggesting this should actually happen, I'm just trying to make a point about what purpose its actually designed to fill. Rich people buy respecs off of Wentworths, poor people sit through 90 minutes of boredom?
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I'm not saying that the Respec Trial should be boring. Far from it. But by the same token, the Respec Trial is exactly the WRONG place to be looking for challenge, as many people have over the ages. There was a time when Jack believed that Respecs were this HUGE, once-in-a-lifetime reward, and they had to be safeguarded and secured because you were not supposed to be altering your character. I believe he thought it cheapened the game somehow. He's the same guy who believed that giving players access to real numbers cheapened the game, too. I like to think we've moved past Jack's patronising attitude towards his players.
Make it more fun, by all means. Redesign it if you have to. Why not? Never liked that Sky Raider hunt anyway. But let's try and not go the route of recent content in trying to make ever more pressing challenges. This isn't the place for them. And can we get an actual ramp up to the Reactor Complex, please? I'm tired of climbing pipes and shipping containers.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
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 don't disagree with your point about redesigning the trial; however, the trial is far easier to fail with large groups than with smaller ones.
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Originally Posted by Peacemoon
Also the two examples of poeple who failed it are (seemingly) from small teams of 3 or 4. Now I thought to do the trial you had to be a full group, which makes it much easier actually because there is less emphasis on individual people.
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Make it faster and harder.
The notion that this would make it too hard for gimped builds is absurd starting from the current level of challenge. If the entire team was gimped and new players, then they might fail it on the lowest difficulty if they intentionally ignored details like the coolant belts. They'd still probably win on their second attempt, and recruiting even a single competent player would allow them to win easily.
The last one of these I failed was in i6, after ED and the GDN but before IO's and (obviously) SSK; the team lost some people due to connectivity. We had a level 27 Tank, my level 24 Scrapper, and a level 24 Blaster, and the mission was set for 6 level 31 heroes. The Tank was a newbie who took all but one of the coolant belts (I got the last one myself) and didn't know how to use them. We made it to the last wave.
The trial is far too slow and easy as it is for the "gimped newbies" excuse to work for a small or moderate bump in difficulty.
Respec trials shouldn't be so easy that you have to bump your difficulty higher then what you normally play at to have a challenge. That removes the point of making you do something for the respec all together.
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I'm not disagreeing with you entirely Sam. I agree with the notion that respecs shouldn't be this once-in-a-lifetime reward like how Jack first perceived them. Having said that for the other part of your argument you are essentially comparing a Trial which is a specific mission that is intentionally designed so that it can be failed, to a Story Arc which for all intents and purposes cannot be outright failed.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I can't fail my story arcs, yet they give me Merits just the same. By that logic, the game should just give me the merits. In fact, it should be giving me Merits all the time, because I could be doing Story arcs which I cannot fail, so why bother do them, anyway? No pun intended, but I fail to see when "Can you succeed?" became the determining factor. It may be uncommon game design, but most things in City of Heroes you not only CAN, but WILL succeed at. You might just take longer to do so, and it may be more difficult to achieve, but rather very few things actually outright FAIL.
I'm not saying that the Respec Trial should be boring. Far from it. But by the same token, the Respec Trial is exactly the WRONG place to be looking for challenge, as many people have over the ages. There was a time when Jack believed that Respecs were this HUGE, once-in-a-lifetime reward, and they had to be safeguarded and secured because you were not supposed to be altering your character. I believe he thought it cheapened the game somehow. He's the same guy who believed that giving players access to real numbers cheapened the game, too. I like to think we've moved past Jack's patronising attitude towards his players. Make it more fun, by all means. Redesign it if you have to. Why not? Never liked that Sky Raider hunt anyway. But let's try and not go the route of recent content in trying to make ever more pressing challenges. This isn't the place for them. And can we get an actual ramp up to the Reactor Complex, please? I'm tired of climbing pipes and shipping containers. |
Actually it has made me think, the problem with this respec trial is it is a trial which is designed to minimize the chance of it being failed. What we end up with is no challenge and a very boring 30 minute wait tagged onto the end.
The solution for this is simple but it depends what the devs want to achieve. Either keep it as a trial and make it a proper trial so that it can be failed and also have a substantial increase in reward merits in order to attract more people, or simply turn it into a Task Force (kind of like what was suggested earlier) and remove the potential to fail it. You could easily do this without the destructable object. Just have a bunch of Sky Raiders in the core room which you have to clear out. No defending an object. You could even have that AV from the Faultline story arc make an appearance.
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I'm not sure where this notion that the Respec Trial, or Trials in general, ought to be failable. That has precedent to the contrary, namely the villain Respec Trial, which cannot fail because it has not been coded with fail conditions in the objectives. It cannot be failed short of people simply deciding to stop playing. In fact, the difference between what is a Trial and what is a Task/Strike Force at this point in the game's life is purely academic. Once upon a time, Trials acted like very difficult missions and mostly consisted of that one mission - the Trial, as it were. That was when TFs were designed to take several days and before Trials locked you in TF mode.|
Originally Posted by Peacemoon
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely Sam. I agree with the notion that respecs shouldn't be this once-in-a-lifetime reward like how Jack first perceived them. Having said that for the other part of your argument you are essentially comparing a Trial which is a specific mission that is intentionally designed so that it can be failed, to a Story Arc which for all intents and purposes cannot be outright failed.
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This is no longer the case. The Respec Trial is a trial in name only. Mechanically, it is a TF, just like the ITF or the Positron TFs. These days, TFs are made smaller, faster and comprising of fewer missions, approaching the length of ye olde Trials quite handily. In fact, one of the villain Respec Trials is three missions and a hint, which I suspect is tantalisingly close to what you have to do in the ITF and believe is actually LONGER than the Katie Hannon TF.
Trials are like Hazard Zones - they exist in name only as the legacy of an old system which never amounted to anything and was retrofitted as part of an even older system. I don't think even the Sewers Trial is "a mission" any more, so much so as a rather peculiar TF, in the same way as Serpent Drummer's "Protect the Negotiations" is a rather peculiar mission, but a mission nonetheless.
The point of all this is that despite there being the word "trial" in the name of the Respec Trial, it is a TF. We need to treat it as such, because that's what it is. We can try and make it an exotic, eccentric TF, but as long as it locks you in TF mode, it's a TF.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
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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But that same logic can apply to nearly every TF in the game too. Just because something is easy for one group of players doesn't mean it is nearly as easy for others.|
Originally Posted by LISAR
Respec trials shouldn't be so easy that you have to bump your difficulty higher then what you normally play at to have a challenge. That removes the point of making you do something for the respec all together.
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I've been on TF teams that steamrolled through +3 & +4 spawns. I've been on TF teams where the team could split and go 4 different ways, and be perfectly fine. Just the other day, I was on an Ice Mistral SF. We ended up with 6 VEAT's, one Fire/Rad Corruptor and a Brute on the team. Just about everyone was IO'd to some extent. We went at +0. We ran all over every map in different directions like fourth graders on a sugar high. The brute was laughing about how he could barely build any fury at all because everything was defeated so quickly.
But that doesn't mean every team is like that. For every one that blitzes through content, there will be another that struggles to get through that same exact content.
I do agree with your overall point that something like the respec trial that offers a tangible and substantial reward like a respec, shouldn't be TOO easy. There should be a challenge. The trick is balancing that challenge against the whole playerbase, and in the case of the respec trial, the players most likely to really need that respec.
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Yet, people still can and do fail it as has been pointed out in specific examples given in this thread.|
Originally Posted by Teeth
Make it faster and harder.
The notion that this would make it too hard for gimped builds is absurd starting from the current level of challenge. If the entire team was gimped and new players, then they might fail it on the lowest difficulty if they intentionally ignored details like the coolant belts. They'd still probably win on their second attempt, and recruiting even a single competent player would allow them to win easily. The last one of these I failed was in i6, after ED and the GDN but before IO's and (obviously) SSK; the team lost some people due to connectivity. We had a level 27 Tank, my level 24 Scrapper, and a level 24 Blaster, and the mission was set for 6 level 31 heroes. The Tank was a newbie who took all but one of the coolant belts (I got the last one myself) and didn't know how to use them. We made it to the last wave. The trial is far too slow and easy as it is for the "gimped newbies" excuse to work for a small or moderate bump in difficulty. |
I'd like to tell you a story that has quite a bit of bearing on this topic.
I first started playing 4 weeks before Issue 2 launched. My first character was a Mind/Empathy controller whose build I absolutely made a mess of. About the time I started realizing what my mistakes were, I heard about the Respec Trial. "Perfect!" I thought.
So around Noon one Sunday I started advertising in Broadcast to join a Respec team. I got on one pretty quickly, as the servers were all very busy back in those days compared to how they are now. It was a nightmare. Death after death after death. The team broke up before we even made it to the reactor room. Not to be discouraged, I joined another team. There were quite a few deaths, but we eventually got to the reactor. And then we failed, the reactor blew up, and that was that. No respec for us. Want to try again? Gotta start the whole thing over.
Total time from when I started to failure of the second Respec attempt: six hours. Six......HOURS. The next day I cancelled my account and bought a copy of WoW on the way home from work. I had already started feeling frustrated with CoH and this was just the last straw.
I realized later that a lot of my frustrations with CoH at the time were due to my own newbie status with the game. I just didn't know enough to build and play a toon properly. But at the time, I was a highly frustrated customer who left the game because I had the perception it was far too tedious.
So, I ask you, from the standpoint of new player retention do you REALLY want the Respec to be hard? Remember, for a new player there are all of 3 ways to respec a toon: Respec Trial, Respec Recipe, and $10 real world cash. New players likely won't have the funds for a Respec Recipe, and they may not like the idea of sinking $10 into a respec. That leaves the trial.
So now you have a player who is new, has learned just enough to know they royally screwed up their first character, and you would like their only realistic means of fixing that to be a trial challenging for vets, let alone new players? Not a good idea in my honest opinion.
At that, be glad your heroes don't have to deal with the villain trial, which has the opposite problem. I have no idea how a team full of screwed-up builds is supposed to complete that one, unless they're all brutes and buff/heal type corrs and MMs......
@MuonNeutrino
Student, Gamer, Altaholic, and future Astronomer.
This is what it means to be a tank!
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Yeah, that seems like the best option. Off the top of my head, how about that AND a mechanism to give newbie players at least a hint that the next spawn is imminent? Maybe there are klaxons and flashing lights that indicate another wave incoming, thus prompting teams in trouble to brace themselves rather than just dumping troops on them -- and players could manually hit the alarm themselves, bringing more villains to investigate the alarm (i.e., forcing the next spawn).|
Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
or a "next wave" button added
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Bad teams get more warning, fast teams get lots less downtime, everybody gets loud warning klaxons and flashing lights!
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
I remember doing this respec back when I was in college 2004-2005. It was hard then. Since I rejoined CoX in Jan.09, I must have ran that trial about 12 - 15 times. I would have to agree that the lag time between spawns is very strange. I say "very" because it seems in the early stages of this trial while trying to protect the reactor, more spawns occur. Then, later in the trail, the gaps of lag time become wider. In fact, some of the lag time between spawns is so ridiculous, one would almost think it was a glitch of some kind.
Then you get teammates who haven't done this respec before asking how many more spawns left. You randomly throw out an arbitrary number hoping they won't get too bored and stay awake. In the meantime, you're running to charge your red bubble patiently waiting for the next spawn to occur.
I do remember failing this trial a couple of times. That, if you can believe it, was kind of fun. Seeing the screen go pitch white like a nuclear bomb just went off. Then you're standing outside with the words "Mission Failed". Hehee.
So, in a nutshell, I would have to say that I really don't have much issues with this Trail but I do have to agree that those "weird" lags in the later stages of this trial should be tightened up a bit. They need to maybe make it much more random. Heck, maybe for giggles, have two spawns come in at the same time to keep you and your teammates on your toes. The big bugaboo with this game is a lot of missions and trials have the same predictable patterns . Once you figure out those patterns then I think the "boring" factor starts to creep in. 
I guess pretty soon we will all be able to just do the villain one instead...
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I remember when the respec trial was first put on the test server. It was about TWICE as difficult as what went live which is about twice as difficult as it is today. I had a bad build then. I remember the struggle to keep up with those spawns of Sky raiders. I remember having to get together a well-balanced team who had to pay attention, target through the tank, and give it their all.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
When people are crying about how it used to be, it very much has a leg to stand on, because how it used to be was very, very difficult. Too difficult for what its point was in the first place. Getting a reward once you've proven you don't need it is not good game design. Not for anyone who does not enjoy self-torture, at any rate.
If people are looking to improve the hero Respec Trial, then it's a good idea to avoid daydreaming about the old days. Many of us did not enjoy the old days and would not want to see a return to that. |
When we beat that really hard raid (after three attempts), it felt as epic as just about anything I've done before or since (and there's a lot of stuff after that). That I remember this from 5.5 years ago shows me how great that challenge was.
I think the devs made a mistake in lowering the difficulty of the trial too much. It's far too easy. People with bad builds need to build a better team or use their alt build to create a decent build to do the trial. It's good to have consequences for failure.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
boring..who cares..try villains last map at low lvl. heroes is as simple as pie...think its boring dont do it as much.
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My thinking is that they should do something akin to the final Croatoa story-arc mission. Once you reach the reactor a timer begins and you have to hold off endless waves of attackers until the countdown ends.|
Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
The trick is balancing that challenge against the whole playerbase, and in the case of the respec trial, the players most likely to really need that respec.
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Those with poor builds can slow or stall the waves by leaving one of the minions alive for a bit after defeating the bulk of the wave... trading safety for a lack of xp/inf and drops.
By contrast, those with the ability to steamroll can take on wave after wave after wave of enemies for the entire duration of the countdown, earning far more xp/inf and far more chances for rare or even purple drops (if doing the trial at level 50).
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You're exactly right... But, that's EXACTLY the argument Positron gave me when I asked if respecs could be overhauled during LAST year's Comic-Con CoH Panel (2009)...|
Originally Posted by Peacemoon
So this whole counter argument that "Oh no, think of the badly specced people who otherwise wouldn't be able to obtain respecs" really does not have a leg to stand on.
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I also posed the question during the last Dev online Q&A session, and they said it's "something we can look at"....sort of like Kheldian power customization is "something they can look at." (BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA)
...It's nice to see several more people "jumping on the bandwagon" about one of my fav things to harp on.... Maybe something will get done about it.
Heck, if they made it more difficult, that'd be cool for people who love a challenge, AND cool for the devs, because people who can't take a good challenge may just wind up BUYING a respec from the online store to not have to put up with the difficulty of a harder respec trial! That, or buy one off WWs/BM...
"Alien"
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
The way you play changes your IO slotting..
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76 characters and Twenty-four 50s later, I still love this game.
AlienOne's Human-Form Warshade Guide (Old guide+New guide = 12,000+ views!)
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Or, if they're a new player who doesn't understand the game well, just quitting.
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Originally Posted by AlienOne
Heck, if they made it more difficult, that'd be cool for people who love a challenge, AND cool for the devs, because people who can't take a good challenge may just wind up BUYING a respec from the online store to not have to put up with the difficulty of a harder respec trial! That, or buy one off WWs/BM...
"Alien" |
Who exactly are all these people I constantly hear about that, when confronted by questions, simply quit? Has the world really gotten that bad? I mean, I know I seem pretty cynical most of the time, but this kind of thing just baffles me.
Dec out.
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The new players who wind up quitting usually aren't the kind that actually liked the game after trying it. Quitting the game because a respec trial was too hard is a bit of a stretch, even if you were going for a hypothetical there--especially since you would have to put in a bit of time playing in order to get up to the level you need to be to participate in the first respec trial...|
Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
Or, if they're a new player who doesn't understand the game well, just quitting.
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Most new players who like a game try to find out everything there is to know about a game... If they fail at a respec trial? The next thing you'd see in broadcast is "Is there any other way to get a respec for your character? I can't seem to pass the respect trial."
Our playerbase being what it is, he/she would have an answer to their question within 10 seconds.
"Alien"
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
The way you play changes your IO slotting..
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76 characters and Twenty-four 50s later, I still love this game.
AlienOne's Human-Form Warshade Guide (Old guide+New guide = 12,000+ views!)
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Well, there's at least one fun thing about.|
Originally Posted by Peacemoon
We all know why, the reactor room is slow, boringly easy and hardest part of the "challenge" is trying to stay awake.
It never used to be this way, once upon a time trying to protect the reactor was an actual feat worthy of the accolade it rewards. Now it is a pure embarressment. Expect another complaint next month when I eventually get enough willpower to put myself through the Rikti version.  |
It involves team teleport vet power and the gap between the reactor and the grates around it.
I call it a "trust test."
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So why don't people just turn up the difficulty and stop whining?
I did the respec trial today (twice - 1st and 2nd version once each) at +2 levels and the boredom was minimal. Due to the random timing, some of the waves overlapped and some had quiet intervals.
This is why we have the difficulty settings. This is why they were recently expanded to give more options and control. This seems like the solution to both sides. People with gimped builds run at base settings and uber players can crank it up.
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
I'm in the "make it less dull" camp. At this stage a total revamp of it is needed really.
I do remember the days of it being a total death-fest and my Illusion/Storm controller having to nervously run and TP between +4 Skyraider spawns before Recalling everyone into the last room, and that was no fun either.
So a total revamp please, into something a bit more exciting.