CoX's State of PvP

Point of fact: Castle had nothing to do with drop rates.

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the inherent mechanics and assumptions that the original team made work against PvP, over the years there has been a lot of work and resources spent on PvP trying to get work arounds. if there ever is a CoX 2.0 I could see them starting fresh from the ground up doing it better.

• The new hold system is questionable at best. You end up getting held no matter how many Clear Minds you have on you. Break Frees are all but useless.
• The new damage per activation rules have made some sets all but laughable (Hello, Ice Blast!) while some powers are quite frankly over the top (Spirit Sharks...).
• Cages are nigh useless with their durations.
• +Res Shields are useless because of DR.
• The big Mez protect bubbles are useless.
• You need 43ish points of KB protect so that you don't get back juggled and insta-killed.
• PvP IOs drop about as often as manna, and high end builds need multiple procs and PvP sets to remain competitive.
• Sudden Death in Arena is awful, with no option to turn it off.
• Innate Damage Resistance has all but eliminated the need for shield granters and means you need 3-5 Blasters to bring down a single target.
• Nukes are useless, wheras before a "Nuke Rush" was a viable, though risky, strategy on some maps.
• The buff protect period encourages laziness.

I could go on, but unless an I12 Arena button is forthcoming, the new system is a gargantuan mess that we're forced to deal with on a daily basis. What the Devs failed to understand was that those 2-1 matches were the result of evenly matched players, all on Ventrilo and knowing their roles to a "T". The really, really good teams would absolutely roll the newer teams, until those teams practiced...and were rolled a little less.

Oh, and we lost Base Raids, no one knows why. Likely has to do with IoPs which are garbage for the most part and relegated to CoP.

Also:



People nostalgic for the glory days simply miss a time where you could legitimately bring Kins, Forcefields, Sonics, varying line-ups and throw a wrench into things once in a while. While Ex was awesome, she was given a rough time from start to end, but she gained a ton of respect from the community by at least trying to understand and integrate into it.

This one is the players' fault, not the devs. The stated intent was to close the gap between highly IOed characters and non-IOed characters. The players took that and turned it on it's head by putting so many IOs in their builds that it actually widened the gap instead of closing it.

For all the vaunted skill there is in CoH PvP, most PvPers I've run across would prefer to stuff their character full of IOs to the point an SOed character stands literally no chance against them. When you can kill an opposing player in 10-15 seconds and they are essentially helpless to stop you, it removes a lot of the skill involved.

Instead of the intended result of closing a gap, the players decided that it would be better to widen the gap themselves and then blame the devs for it. You are NEVER going to see a PvPer admit that, but it's true.

Yeah, the devs MADE you slot all those IOs into your character, you didn't have anything to do with the decision making process, it's all their fault. You just logged in one day and found all those IOs sitting there that weren't there before.

The players chose to load their characters down with every IO under the sun, at least put the blame for that one where it belongs.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

This particular problem is systemic and developer endorsed, don't fault the players for it.

That players have taken it upon themselves in the past to balance PvP by adding arbitrary rules to arena matches (limited caging, Vengeance usage, small insps only, bans on rushing, etc.) is a testament to the lack of attention given to PvP balance in this game. Asking players to go to the extreme and purposely limit a character's abilities by leaving out the IOs expressly created for use in the PvP environment is just willful naivety.

This is the fallacy of CoX PvP. The PvE game was always designed and balanced for team play, and PvP was no different at first. The devs even said as much. PvP dedicated teams worked very well and were very well balanced when they played against each other. The system worked when it was used correctly.

The problems occured when people who normally were used to rolling an entire mission solo on their leet AT of choice went into zones with that same solo attitude and got rolled instead. Usually by a team. Suddenly there were cries of imbalance. People felt that because they can do the PvE content without help, they should be able to do the same in PvP. They honestly couldn't understand why their amazing AT of choice was dying so fast to a team. So instead of taking the time to invest in team skills, they chose to cry about how unbalanced it was. Unfortunately, the devs listened. The PvP mess we have now is the result of that selfish solo first attitude.

As Burning Chick mentioned, Castle didn't get all the changes he wanted. PvPers thank God he didn't because then we would have the infamous Anti-gank code he was working on. The ultimate reward for soloists, and the ultimate punishment for those foolish enough to team in PvP.

The devs pretty much killed any hope of PvP growth when they made the decision to make PvP different from PvE. Why would anybody who has never PvPd before want to try when everything they know about the game is different the second they enter the zone? Suddenly, powers that worked one way in PvE, now do something completelt different. Attack powers do completely different damage. Holds work for a fraction of their duration. Powers that are supposed to protect you from holds don't work at all. Buffs? Debuffs? Forget about those, they are amost worthless now, and will probably get you killed if you use them thanks to a Draconian movement supression.

Well, if zone PvP doesn't happen anymore, then you pretty much have what you're asking for. It's a PvE zone with content for both sides.

Those IOs aren't necessary because the game makes them necessary.

They are necessary because everyone else has them. The players chose to spend billions on their characters, forcing other players to spend billions on theirs to keep up.

If no one used IOs in PvP, it would be just as balanced as when everyone is. Since everyone IS using IOs in PvP, the fact that you have to spend billions on IOs to even hope to hold your own is the fault of the other players that are using them, not an inherent flaw in the game.

Don't get me wrong, the devs are responsible for a lot of the problems with PvP. But the fact that you have to spend 10 billion on a build to be competitive is not one of the problems they are responsible for.

I KNEW someone would come in and say that players using IOs in PvP is the devs fault. Because it is so much easier to blame them than to take any responsibility for it.

The players chose to use them, therefore, if the use of them is a problem, the people that chose to use them are the cause.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I won't claim this didn't happen to any degree, but that you seem to think that this is all that happened, I have to wonder if you PvP'd at all, or if you did, if you had any idea what was going on when you did.

I liked old PvP. I didn't play it much because I prefer FPS PvP, where twitch skill determines things like whether you hit a foe, not a random number generator and your build. But even though old PvP was fun, there were things that were essentially pointless to bring, whether you brought them on a team or solo. If you brought certain powersets to PvP, you were bringing a spitball straw to a capital ship exchange, and if you brought them on a team, you were dead weight. Anything that relied on sustained DPS instead of burst damage, anything that relied on defense that wasn't through the roof, anything that lacked KB protection (still true), pretty much anything that used fly as its sole movement power, anything that relied on ground patches... there was a long list of stuff that was pretty "lol worthy". If you brought these things to a team contest and they mattered much, it wasn't because PvP was balanced for teams, it was because your opponents weren't very good.

Remember, I'm saying I liked the old PvP mechanics. But there was a whole lot more going on with why they were changed than you're suggesting. Unfortunately, some of the things that were no good in old PvP were like that because of what I think was one of old PvP's best features - high speed mobility. In a highly mobile, 3-dimensional playfield, a long animating debuff patch is mostly pointless, and nothing is going to change that. But I wanted them to keep the high mobility, not create the feeling we have now in PvP zones that everything is coated in lead-based glue. The harder thing to fix was how rooting animations interacted with mobility to make many melee builds low-value. I don't know what a good alternate fix for that would have been, but what they did was the last thing I would have wanted - neuter the mobility that I think was this game's PvP's distinguishing feature. This was the MMO that felt like an FPS. Now, not so much.

Yes, but it's with the horribly dumb rules changes. I suppose I could just be asking for a PVP rule change rollback.

*Winces because it's true.*

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

You can't fault the players for using things in PvP that are available to them. Especially, stuff that is specific to PvP like PvP IO's.

And no, you don't need billions in enhancements to be competitive.

By the same token, you can't fault the devs for creating specific rewards for specific content.

Right, blame the devs for everything.

When a player ventures into a PvP zone equipped with just SOs and gets annihilated by players with oodles of set bonuses from purples and PvP IOs, it is somehow either that player's fault or the devs?

They can't even hold their own because other players decided to load their character with IOs, but those players can't be held accountable for their choice to do that. Right.

The point of the PvP changes in the first place was to even the field between the IOed characters and the non-IOed characters, so you wouldn't feel like you needed to spend a bunch of money on your character to do well. But currently, building a PvP character is more expensive than it has ever been, because you have to invest a lot of time and money into that character in order to be at all competitive.

I'm sorry, but you can't tell me that 2 players of equal skill will be completely even when one is IOed out the wazoo and the other is running SOs. It just doesn't happen, given comparable skill levels the IOed character is going to win every time.

The players took the changes and completely upended them, making the performance gap between IOed and non-IOed even wider than it was before the changes.

I really don't see how the disparity between a 12 billion inf build and an SO build isn't the fault of the players themselves.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I guess I don't really understand the point. It seems a bit like talking about God creating oxygen, hemoglobin and lungs, but blaming people for breathing. I know that's an overboard analogy, but what's the point in "blaming" people for making use of what's available to them? If people have the means, why wouldn't they use them? If you create variable strength of arms you will get an arms race, because some people will obtain the highest strength of arms, and other people will want to match them in order to win against them. Personally, I have no problem with an MMO's PvP working that way, but if you don't want an arms race, you don't create variable strength of arms.

What are you talking about?

That might have been the point of the PvP changes, but they failed horribly. So yes, I'm blaming the devs for that.

Never said they would be even. The devs implemented these changes and it became an even bigger mess than what it was, and what was intended didn't actually pan out. The devs then released PvP IO's, you can't blame the players for using something they gave us to use.

I'm sorry, but you can't tell me that 2 players of equal skill will be completely even when one is slotted with SO's and the other isn't slotted with anything at all. Now, that may be extreme, but are you going to blame the player for using SO's? Probably not.

You said before that the original purpose of the changes was to lower the gap between these builds. Now that the devs failed at that, you blame the players?

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Who designed and implemented the PVP in this game? Elvis?

Hooray for rocket surgery!

--NT

Who ultimately has the say of what does and does not go in-game?
Some suit businessman with a degree in Marketting and Product Management who's never palyed the game, more than likely. If it was all up to the Devs, we'd probably have CoX 2 by now, or something like it.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I think the kernel of truth to this statement is that the PvE game was never balanced at all originally, for teams or otherwise. PvE was designed for players to have roles on teams but it wasn't balanced for teams. PvP wasn't balanced against by any standard at all, as far as I can see, except for the trivial statement that if your team was substantively identical to the other team, you were balanced.

Although some elements of the game engine and game mechanics don't help at all, the problem was never with the game engine. The problem is that the powersets and archetypes themselves were not designed for PvP, and for balanced PvP they have to be, from the ground up. The stated design intent of Tankers is that they be able to take the damage intended for a team of four players or so. All blasters are intended to be vulnerable to mez but not all defenders are intended to provide mez protection. The only critters intended to last longer than a few seconds are Boss rank and higher, and no player has as much health as a boss critter. This is an on-paper recipe for eventual PvP disaster. When PvP was new, it was also chaotic, and chaotic is exactly the environment CoX PvP can function. Once people figured out what they were doing, CoX PvP quickly demonstrated itself to be plagued by highly optimized strategies that essentially bypassed nearly all of the functionality of nearly all powersets.

That's all numbers and spreadsheets. The real problem with PvP in CoX is this: in many games PvP is the ultimate eventual destination of everyone, or most players. Its the feature of the game: the PvE is the sideshow. In CoX, PvP is a metagame to PvE. Because of that, the goals and requirements for PvP must be substantively similar to the goals and requirements of PvE, so that players can make the jump from playing the central PvE game to playing the PvP metagame. If the build requirements, tactical requirements, mindset, and even solo/teaming dichotomy are radically and irreconcilably different between the two, then its PvP that's going to lose, both in terms of players not participating, and in terms of the developers not making it a priority. PvP must *work* like PvE in CoX in a large enough measure to not be a totally new game to succeed in CoX. Otherwise, it will always be a marginal activity, and the only question is how small the margin.

I think that was ultimately the fundamental error of the last round of PvP changes. Its one thing to upset the apple cart and annoy the existing PvP base, but if you do it by pushing PvP mechanics to be even more unrecognizable to the rest of the player population, you haven't gained anything. It will still be unpalatable to the rest of the players, and now even more unpalatable to the existing PvPers. Some changes needed to be made, but they were made with very heavy hands in many areas, and in ways that didn't attempt to bridge the PvE and PvP world, but rather rewrite the PvP world from whole cloth. Some compromise was needed because much of the PvE world is not fully compatible with fair PvP. But I think it needed to be done in a more targeted way.

In my opinion, while PvPers will say they want this mechanical change or that mechanical change, what most ultimately really want is a healthy PvP game. They want combatants. If PvP changes upset their game but bring in tons of new PvPers, I think the existing PvPers will adapt. So long as skill plays a role, they will still have the upper hand through experience. They would forgive an ugly mechanical change that generated targets. But the changes didn't do that, and I don't think they had a real chance of doing so in their current form.