The Impossible Mr. Trapdoor and Issue 19's New Theme

Are you not the guy who used to throw hissy fits cause invulnerability didn't make you as god like as Superman or Statesman?

If we were arguing about things that hadn't already been set in motion, this would be a perfectly reasonable response, and I couldn't respond to it any better than to turn it back around. Except there's an asymmetry here - these TFs exist. The end game is being developed already, and we are being told it is more challenging. The ball is rolling, and it's not in the court you want it to be.

I really do feel for you in this regard, but you do seem to have lost that fight, not with me, but with the devs.

Ah, the ever popular ad homenim stance that people who are good at the game must spend all their time at it and have no life.

I'm an engineer and developer for a living, Johnny. I work with numbers and optimize as a matter of my daily existence. It might shock you to consider that I enjoy doing those things, and ability to do them comes to me rather naturally. I'm sorry that I therefore find it fun, easy and casual to do something with this game you think takes the attention of a 2nd job, but that's just the shakes.

Accurate.

Anything that is done can be undone or redone.

The devs need a figurative kick in the face to take action. Perhaps the sub numbers over the next few months as well as the data coming from the two TFs and the upcoming raid will do the job before the game gets too many boot marks and bruises.


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You take the cake for being the biggest and most ill-informed doomsayer on the forum. Seriously, go pat yourself on the back.

Sooo...you are expecting numbers to show a more drastic decline then what we saw before GR...despite the current view that there seems to be more people online then previously.

I await the Q4 numbers to see if that happens. This could be neat.

Good luck with that. I don't think that boot-encased foot you see flying is headed where you think it is.

That's not even remotely a realistic expectation in this situation. There's an entire sub team of devs and a whole new boxed expansion involved in this end-game. The subs are going to, as they pretty much always do, stay relatively stable. More likely than not, they're going to tick up due to the new box. I'm betting that, as with all of the other stuff that was "too hard" the new content will be figured out and practically farmed in due time.

My suggestion to you, is to play the old content you enjoy and pretend the endgame stuff doesn't exist. The rest of the dev team will still be adding to 1-50, so ya got that to look forward to, and there's still 30 level of stuff to come in Praetoria. Or, go play something else...Incarnates and tougher content to challenge them are coming...feeling as if you're the only person the devs should focus their attentions on is just going to end in disappointment for you.


Hmm...looks like that farming is coming sooner rather than later See pumbumbler's post here

Keep paying subscription dollars, and you can keep complaining all you want. Mine are paying for the privilege of saying you aren't likely to get what you want. Its simple, and its fair.

Keeping in mind that this is just for discussion purposes. I don't discuss changing the game to try to change the game. I try to change the game to try to change the game. Its more efficient.


I can't honestly answer the question of why you should support a game you don't like the development of. I wouldn't. But I don't have that problem. No one can credibly accuse me of either being a munchkin or a difficulty-*****. The vast overwhelming majority of my contributions to this game have involved making sure the average joe isn't screwed by something odd in the game, or making sure standard content really is matches standard content rules. I'm one of the few people that both understands and practices min/maxing, but keeps reminding people that most players in this game cannot play blasters for more than a few minutes without dropping dead, and that's the target audience. I'm perfectly fine with that being the current state of standard content.

The end game is not standard content, and not bound by standard content rules. I'm also fine with that. I'm not saying there isn't large room for improvement, but I'm also not going to apologize for wanting the end game content to not be a rehash of standard content rules that we already have a gigaton of content for, and are continuing to develop content targeting. In that respect what I want personally and what the devs appear to be targeting are pointed generally in roughly the same direction. That's a fortunate coincidence, but anyone who wants to try to make the case that supporting the current end game direction is all about a personal desire of mine to hijack the soul of the game, please by all means give it your best shot. Aim at someone that can shoot back and is packing nuclear weapons.

No Ion Radial Final Judgement will have a longer recharge but can it up to 15 targets.

It isn't a natural environment, everything in it is dev defined.

they make the game, so everything is "arbitrary, artificially reinforced" limitations to be overcome by various means.

In my hypothetical D&D campaign the only reason a level 1 party with blunt sticks and butter knives can't take down Tiamat are "arbitrary, completely artificial" limitations called THE RULES.

If you play a game, whatever game, you're bound by the rules. Otherwise there's no point to your actions. If you start your D&D party out at the peak of power, everyone might as well go home because there's no challenge or interest there.

Ditto for any game. The (arbitrary, artificial) limits on player progression and power are the game.

this is a remarkably vapid argument even by your standards.

Unfortunately, that ball is neither big nor red.

Did the devs win or lose the fight with AE?

I think AE can be considered a Pyrrhic victory... or scorched earth policy....

I think the community has only two opinions of AE: Those that swear that "It is too still relevant!" and those that refer to it as "The Incident". It can still be the greatest thing about City of Heroes, but it will need conscious, deliberate, and bandwidth stretching resources to do so. That is to say, the developers will need to be convinced that fixing it is a viable focus for a game with limited resources that's trying to prepare for the onslaught of other games in the SuperHero MMO Genre. They need to be convinced that making this better instead of doing whatever other plan they had is the answer to fighting off those other games.

Is it the answer? I have no idea, but I suspect it won't be in patch noes; it'll be a significant part of an Issue, widely advertised to the internal CoH community.

You don't even need to *know* the numbers. I'm blissfully ignorant of the numbers and most of the mechanics of the game and I limp along well enough. If this was considered like a 2nd job or 'work' for me I'd be long gone.

It's a game, and if the game ceases to be fun, quit. I left this game for a while and that was all it was, a game. It was the community that drew me back in, but that's a different story.

I use my +20 Blunt Stick of Holy Smashing on Tiamat and throw my Elven Vorpal Butter Knife at Tiamat.

I think Posi lost that fight after his tantrum. Now the devs seem loath to penalized anyone for AE exploits.

The term Munchkin has been around for ages, it's one of those terms that entered the gamers lexicon so long ago no one really remembers (Wikipedia has an explanation but I'd take it with a grain of salt). It's been turning up a bit more on these forums of late due to the new content making the differences between different types of players more obvious.

It should be noted that Jimmy is (as Arcana pointed out) using it incorrectly. Munchkin is an insulting term implying that the person's sole interest is in winning and becoming more powerful than everyone else and is perfectly willing to break the rules to do so. The related terms min-maxer and power-gamer are also not entirely applicable to the sort of people who want end-game content (although they are closer than Munchkin). End-game content does, by it's very nature, require a certain degree of min-maxing since the devs are bound to select a "base power level" that is somewhat above average. But it's perfectly possible to want challenging content without being interested in min-maxing.

Thanks for the info.

As for your last sentence, yes it is. And it's not unreasonable. And yet, no one seems to care about either of those two little things for the sake of being an ignorant crapwad on an internet forum.

I will agree with you that this game didn't necessarily need a difficulty increase, and that this TF really isn't fun for some people. But people who want to play casually in the same style they have been for years have had issues seeing to their needs up until this point. Why can't people who enjoy this, as you put it, "challenge", have their challenging content to play with? Why can't the people who have been asking for a difficult endgame get content they've been asking for?

For those of us who don't want high-end challenging content, the ITF isn't getting any harder. The LGTF is exactly as it was before. The rest of this game isn't getting a difficulty increase. There are story arcs out there that could well be right down your street. As long as all future content isn't aimed at a higher difficulty, then what's the problem? Why does every addition have to cater to you personally?

On a lesser note, I'm doubting that sarcasm or splitting the playerbase into casual players and elitist "munchkins" is an effective way of getting people to take your opinions seriously; valid or otherwise.

Nobody really won the fight over the AE.

Also, the mechanical problems with the AE are fundamentally just numbers. Numbers are fixable. The more fundamental problem with the AE, in my opinion, haunts every aspect of its design and usage. Its design imperative was to be as inclusive as possible for authors. That's fundamentally wrong. Its design imperative should be to generate as high quality content as possible. If a hundredth of a percent of the players end up writing content that everyone wants to play, the AE is a success. If ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the players write content that no one wants to play, the AE isn't.

And really, when you get down to it, the difference between the two philosophies is the difference between seeing AE authorship as a privilege, and as a responsibility.

To an extent, I think everyone lost to a degree, and a few people won to a degree.

The people who really, truly wanted a tool for pure expression for its own sake got a very good tool. The people who wanted a tool for expression that other people would see got a tool with tremendous failings. The people who wanted a tool that would result in a large amount of novel content got a mixed bag - there is some very good content out there, but there aren't that many people producing it, and it's buried under tons of either non-attempts or honest attempts gone wrong. The people who wanted something with which to break the trends of reward/time got a fantastic tool, even when it's working basically as intended. The people who like to participate in forum flame wars got one of the best subjects ever. And the devs, well what they got depended on which of those groups was responding to them.

Yeah. As someone who likes to fiddle around in it some, I hate to say it, but I agree.

I thought Johnny used the term correctly when he talked about people wanting to be leet and purpling out their characters while telling the rest of us how to play. "Learn to play" seems to be an undercurrent of munchkin attitude, and that has been displayed in spades. Heck, it's in the snarky titles of these threads.

Case in point.