Rewards and cooldowns

Originally, in this thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=234755

it was asked why there is a timer on the spending of alignment merits. My response was this:

"The entire morality system, including tip missions, alignment missions, and the earning and spending of alignment merits, is a more of the cooldown/gated content philosophy(which is already present for TF rewards and pvp IOs) that Positron describes as "super-annoying to players."

http://www.mmodesigner.com/?p=113

In essence, activity/reward cooldowns are a restriction/punishment for those who are able and willing to play quite frequently, and a fake balance mechanism. If a particular reward is difficult or time-consuming enough to get within the bounds of gameplay itself, there is no need to install an artificial cooldown."


I am interested in exploring this topic further. This forum may not be the most 100% appropriate, but since most of the gated content in this game involves rewards, usually IOs or the means to get them, it seems relevant here. Plus, this forum has better math skills than most. if I get any facts wrong please point it out.

Currently, the majority of things in the game that are character-locked are merits of all kinds. "Regular" merits are a bit strange in that one method for obtaining them, TFs, are on a cooldown(to receive full reward, anyway), yet others, like killing GMs, or running story arcs in ouro, are not.

Why is this? It definitely seems like it favors the soloist who can fine-tune a character to run an efficient arc for good merits. The fact that it can be done without taking the time to assemble a team, and that completion time will not vary based on team composition and behavior, seems to favor it heavily compared to TFs. Also, it can be started and stopped at will, whereas on a TF any player who takes a break while the rest of the team is not has effectively slowed everyone else down.

Many players prefer teaming to soloing, or have a character that is not particularly good at soloing. These players would obviously rather use TFs than solo arcs for gaining merits. Why are they penalized for liking a given TF enough to run it twice in a row(or within 18 hours) with the same character? If a TF has the appropriate reward for the time needed to complete it, why would anyone care how often it was done? This seems like an implicit admission that merit rewards are too high.

Even more strangely, some of the most desirable recipes in the game, purples, have no cooldown whatsoever attached, and are best earned by soloing repetitively. Inf earning also falls into this category, for the most part.

Now we have alignment merits. These have cooldowns on both earning and spending, and they can also be spent on almost any recipe in the game, including purples and pvp IOs. They can be earned solo.

Is it just me or are there a lot of contradictions here? Repetition is allowed/encouraged for soloists, but discouraged for team players?

Wouldn't the simplest solution be to reduce TF merit rewards to the point that it is acceptable for someone to repeat it?

I am absolutely rambling at this point. Opinions, agreements, disagreements?

A debate on the beta forums over the timers on tips/alignment points showed that some people want people faster than them throttled.

So I think the timers are understandable when you realize it is there to "penalize" the good players. They want to handicap us to feel better even though it actually hurts them more. We pointed out we would just hop characters to deal with the timers while they, in their casual play, will be blocking themselves on the weekends when they can play in large chunks.

A pretty small minority of "casual" players got this point and hated the timers.

I view the majority attitude as: "If I cannot get it all, I don't want you to get it all even if it would help me."

From what I have seen, the timers are the devs' way to artificially impose an efficiency limit. You will have players that could do the content (great soloing toons/multibox/etc.) all day long and you have casual players that may play once a week. I would guess that the best route to getting these new merits and spending has been figured out or will be soon.

By using these timers, we all are in the same boat as to how fast we can earn/spend. You will have players earning them at the very fastest we can earn/spend, and others at the opposite end. Plus, I haven't seen any indication that these are written in stone and the timers adjusted.

Maybe we are all saying the same thing too in these replies lol!

I don't agree with having timers; I see no real reason other than the developers not wanting players to blow through the content quickly.

I understand the reasoning for having timers on tip missions and Task Forces, I don't necessarily agree but I understand their thinking.

What I can't understand is the limit on spending the Hero/Villain Alignment Merits. If someone wants to save up 10 at a time then roll for a bunch of salvage or recipes at once why does that matter?

What are the limits on spending anyway? This is the first mention I've heard of them.

You can only make one purchase with your Alignment Merits every 20 hours. I was gonna roll all three I had for recipes but it only let me do one and told me you can only do one purchase every 20 hours. Lame.

The timer actually makes alot of sense if you consider one thing first. Alignment merits give the worst players in the game the ability to earn rewards at rates that had been reserved to the best players in the game. If something wasn't done to prevent everyone from earning at that rate all the time we would be neck deep in items.

The big problem is that the HVMs take what was a very easy game and reduce it to about the difficulty of Keno.

Edit: I am surprised they didn't put the HVM system on an account wide timer, and they probably should.

Let's take it from a game design point of view:

Nothing is ever balanced perfectly. I suspect they try to balance so the best stuff is no more than, roughly, twice as good as the average.

Let's pretend that someone finds an intensely repetitive, intensely boring thing that is ten times as good as the average.

People now have the choice between boring themselves TO DEATH or penalizing themselves by a factor of ten. Want examples? Issue 4, level 46, Wolf and Dreck maps. Stand around for 15 minutes while the tank actually plays, the Blaster nukes and dies, and gain way more XP than you could possibly have done by actually playing.

If the boring thing can only be done once per character per day, you have throttled this choice.

And a 10-minute katie or a 10-minute eden IS boring, if you do it enough times in a row.

The correct answer is "Fix the thing that's 10 times better", but in the mean time, you're forced to either do more than one thing, or to take extreme measures to bore the pants off yourself.

I really hope my math is wrong, dear God that is an insane amount of time to get one recipe. That is worse than day jobs.

You can get a 30 HVM recipe in 20 days. 3 HVMs are available every 2 days if you spend the money and RMs every day. The point I was making is that you can spend them as fast as you earn them, and you'll still build up to that 30 in 30 days.

The thing I don't get is...why are TFs on reward cooldown but ouro arcs arent? I was hoping someone would jump in with the explanation for that one today lol.

Probably because they haven't had an issue with people farming the crap out of a single arc super-efficiently. Maybe someone with better knowledge of what arcs give what reward merits can chime in with some napken maffs and let us know what's possible?

I don't think Ouro has many outliers left... there WERE superefficient arcs [mostly single missions- Negotiator, maybe?] and they got hammered down. Aren't Ouro arcs still balanced around "15 minutes per merit" or something?

Ouro (Mission) arcs are balanced at 12 merits per hour rather than the TF 20 merits per hour.

The last BIG outlier that I was aware of (Spy Hunt) was hammered down by making the last mission not timed. (and thus not fail-able)