CoX's State of PvP

But what has that got to do with who's fault the design of the system is?

I mean, I'm pretty much with you on the whole "it's not that smart to crap on the devs" thing. But I don't think it's reasonable to turn that into logic that suggests that the devs are blameless and everything that goes wrong is the fault of players. Bearing in mind that "blame" means they missed the mark, not that they willfully produced something no one liked.

Hear, hear.

As this is the only MMO I play, I would love to know what successful PvP looks like.

This is a hopelessly naive thought process.
Players will always use whatever loot is available, whether it's Hamidons, SOs, IOs, PvP IOs, Accos. We're going to get the best gear, equip with the best gear and use the best gear. Given that, the Devs would have been wise to give other ways to acquire it, PvP Merits perhaps granted on completion of an Arena match, which could be cashed in for a PvP IO after a while. Award additional Merits for victory, defeat, damage dealt and prevented, etc.

100% correct and well stated.

Two teams of players that know their roles, are on Ventrilo, play their roles to the best of their ability and have a good fight. That's pretty much it.

An Arena PvP system of Merrits is a great idea. Not only would it invigorate the Arena, it would give players a path to tricking out PvP builds for use in the PvP zones.

So you agree, the PvP zones should be team-only?

This may sound weird, but in my opinion the fault happened further upstream. Even with someone like me writing guides and posting explanations, the simple fact of the matter is if it takes someone to explain it, you've already lost: most players won't hear the explanation, won't understand the explanation, or will forget the explanation.

If you want PvP (and for that matter PvE) mechanics to be understandable, you have to start with the explanation and then implement the game to match the explanation.

Here's a generic example of what I mean. Suppose I was writing this game from scratch, and I wanted to explain what Combat Jumping did in terms of defense. I would *like* to say that it causes you to dodge 5% of the attacks that would have hit you if it wasn't on. That's simple enough: with it off: X. With it on: 0.95 X. But I can't because what it does depends on what you have. If you have no defenses, it does this. If you have a lot, it does that. And when the attacker has tohit buffs, break out the calculator. I can do all of this in my head basically instantly, but its not intuitive. The problem is that I have to *devise* an explanation for what CJ does, given what it does.

If you want to make casual friendly mechanics - which was the goal of the original dev team including Statesman - you have to start with the explanation. CJ reduces incoming hits by 5% period. Then I would make the game work that way so the explanation was accurate.

Similarly, but much more difficult given we're integrating into an existing game, I would have written out the *simple* explanation for what was going to go on in PvP first, and then made the mechanics work that way. And I would have tested the explanations on an eight year old. If he don't get it, its too hard.

That doesn't mean PvP itself has to be simple: the complexity just comes from the diversity of powers and player tactics, not opaque mechanics. Real life is governed by less physical laws than CoX's game engine enforces, and that doesn't seem to limit the complexity of real life.

Some people may find this surprising, but I think CoX's mechanics are too complicated to understand, and ironically too simple to compute. That combination of easy formulas but hard to intuit concepts means min/maxers have too much of an advantage. I would go the other way around: use very complex formulas to simulate very simple to understand mechanics. Think that is a contradiction? Check this out:

This is the current way defense works in CoX:

NTH = Acc * [BTH + HTB - Sum(Defense)]

Conceptually?

Defensive percentages are percentage points subtracted cumulatively from Base tohit prior to the application of all accuracy factors to generate a final to hit percentage.

Ok. Now try this out:

NTH = Acc * [BTH + HTB] * (1 - D1) * (1 - D2) * (1 - D3) ...

And conceptually?

Defense percentages are the percentage of attacks you'd dodge if the power was on, relative to if it was turned off.



Another observation: in its current form, or for that matter in any of its previous forms, CoX PvP has always favored disorganized PvP rather than organized PvP. I know that is not what you meant, but its still true: organized team PvP is the purview of the experts: a good PvPer will win most of the time against an inferior foe, but a good PvP team will win every time against any team not explicitly of comparable skill and experience. Skill should matter, but less experienced teams should at least be able to get lucky - not in terms of random rolls, but in terms of being able to surprise the other team with something novel. No matter how good you are, you should not be able to prepare against everything. Otherwise, no one will fight you except for the few people in your league, and that makes for a barrier to PvP all its own.

There is a place for team tournament caliber PvP, but I think the "casuals" need a more chaotic environment. Think the open mass PvP from near the end of CoV beta. Or even to a certain point the pick up PvP from that other game. You can't throw newbees into situations the experienced PvPers have full knowledge, control, and experience with, and have all the variables covered. There has to be a random element to it, random as in limited chaos or unpredictability.

Nah, that's not weird. We're just seeing the same fault at different points in development ... which suggests that there were multiple points where the fault should've been caught, but wasn't.

As someone who has patiently tried to describe what my bubbler's doing to a team of newbies, I'd totally support that I can hear the eyes glazing across the Intertubes when I say some simple like, "The more def you have, the better it works."

That's what I was getting at -- the end of beta CoV event was OMG wild fun. Even the Cuppathon was good. But, at some level, those events, which are a pretty gentle entry into PvP, require a good deal of organization. Ideally, you have Paragon staff there ... and you have some experienced PvPers putting together PuGs of newbies to help get things rolling ... you put up a notice on the front page ... make a big deal out of it on the forums ... That's what I meant by organization. Organized PvP with ladders and practices and Vent? That's not my cup of tea.

I like PuGs. I like jumping into the game, hanging out for an hour, and splitting.

Too bad the devs never managed to make PvP approachable on that level.

/unsigned.




There seems to be a lot of mish-mashed points in this thread...

To me, I'll itemize some things I think are (or should be) fairly self evident.

* PvP is always more challenging than PvE, and one reason it is often used
as "end-game" content. Even idiotic players consistently outperform PvE AI.

In CoX, a lot of players simply don't get that - the PvE game is designed
for anyone on any AT to solo, and for teams to run roughshod over the AI.
PvE Players spend 100's or 1000's of hours doing that, and when their PvE
toon of ultimate awesomeness gets whacked in 5 seconds and 2-4 hits,
it's a shock of astounding proportion. Many refuse to acknowledge or
adjust to that ... That has been true throughout PvP (both 1.0 & 2.0).

I'm not sure *why* that seems to be the case with a lot of our playerbase,
but I observe this simple fact, consistently, nearly every time I go into a
PvP zone.

* Many CoX players team, and many solo - both should be possible in PvP
(which, they currently are) with reasonable expectations of effectiveness.

To me, that point is one of the keys for me. Sure, it's an MMO, but that is
simply a business choice they made for business reasons. Were it a
standalone game, many of us would have been pleased with it that way
too. The fact that players can play it either way is a *strength* that I
would not want to change in PvP. Obviously, soloing in PvP has it's risks,
but I'm ok with that part.

I would like PvP content suitable to both approaches, of which zone is
just one example.

* CoH (and later CoV) simply wasn't designed for PvP, and to that end,
the game engine IS problematic. Many, many powers are binary (they do
nothing, or they kill you) -- Mezzes, particularily were bad that way, and
while skilled teams could offset those things to varying degrees, solo players,
were severely subjected to Rock, Paper, Scissors effects, moreso, I think
than other games having PvP. That seems to add to the first point as a
player disincentive for PvP.

I think this area is what PvP 2.0 was hoping to fix, or ease somewhat - so
it would be harder to be mez proof, or chain held, or unhittable, etc.

Unfortunately, it appears to me that they threw out the baby with the
bath water. Worse yet, they didn't actually fix the problem with the
changes.

* I don't know the devs thinking, but by every single imaginable measure,
PvP 2.0 can only be categorized as an unmitigated disaster.

The pre-existing PvP community was largely driven off, the players who
actually do PvP now are substantially fewer (and non-existent in some
zones on many servers), the barriers for entry level PvP are higher than
they ever were (including builds, re-learning powersets), and there are
just as many non-viable AT's and builds (if not more so) than PvP 1.0.

Additionally, there have been few meaningful changes or communications
from the devs regarding PvP since PvP 2.0 was implemented - I cannot
think of any metric that could rate PvP 2.0 as anything other than
supreme fail.

* Players will gain and use anything to achieve their goals in terms of
what their toons can do.

This is true in PvP certainly, but no less so in PvE with PL'ing, AE exploits,
marketeering, or even Base Building. This is simple human nature. If you
put powerful items in game, or sufficiently valued rewards in game - players
will get them, and use them - Most times, that is a good thing - gamers as
a class are overachievers (in the game at least). In PvP, that can be
(and arguably has been) a problematic balancing nightmare...

* Fault - does it really matter? If hollywood produces a movie that flops,
is it the audience's fault? If GM produces a PoS car, is it the driver's fault?
If a software house produces an MMO that tanks (TR, Auto Assault,
Hellgate London - to name a few), is that the player's fault?

Last I checked, I'm a consumer trying/wanting to enjoy a product - I'm
neither the designer or the creator of it. I'm simply an end-user. If that
product fails to meet reasonable expectations, I guess I simply don't see
how that is my fault.

Frankly, it falls to the manufacturer to either fix it, drop it, or ignore it...

In two of those cases, it's a concession that the product isn't well suited
to it's audience (for whatever reasons), and likely unprofitable, as a result.

While I think the overall product (CoX) is very good, it seems clear that
the PvP 2.0 product is disappointing, and, so far as we can tell, the
manufacturer's current take is to ignore it, going forward.

To me, it appears to be written off as a dead-end in the game presently.

As a player, I'm fairly active in PvP (not the hardcore tier, but not the once
a month type either) and have been since CoV came out (I didn't bother
with the I-3 Arena).

I agree with Arcana's point that we'd like a PvP product that is reasonably
fair, and popular enough to provide us with motivated players to compete
with and against.

Whether that is actually do-able in the context of the overall game, or if
the current folks are willing to bother with it at all remains to be seen.

Personally, if I were a designer, given this game's engine and approach, I'd
have used Guild Wars' idea for PvP with these basic features.

* make a subset of the base ATs that can only be used for PvP content

* make these PvP toons start at L50 automatically.

* make them use a subset of powers and slots (to help mitigate and
manage the balance headache)

* I'd make the powers that are allowed be as close to the PvE powers
as possible (subject to any balance constraints)

* make them slottable (for free) with Common IO's (ie. like Build #2 on a
L50 - kit it out how you want, and then save the toon).

* make PvPIOs bind on pickup - so it's non-tradeable junk if you don't
need it, and good if you can use it... I'd raise the drop rate to something
like rare salvage, so if you PvP for a few months, you have reasonable
odds of getting some useful PvP IO's.

* I'd make PvPIOs only available in PvP, and only for PvP toons.

* I'd add a bunch more PvP content like tfs & missions against other
player teams, etc.

* I'd forget entirely anything that was even attempted in PvP 2.0
(ok, I just couldn't resist - it really is that bad imho)


In the end, I don't know if that would be any better or more popular or
not, but I doubt it would be much worse than what we currently have
now.

The simple concession I'd make, is that PvP cannot be like PvE in many
respects, for numerous reasons, but I'd like to get as much of the feel of
the PvE experience of fast paced, high mobility, chaotic combat as close
as possible while minimizing the sheer number of combinations that need
to be balanced.

In the meantime, as a PvP'er, I'll occasionally tolerate what we have, and
hope that someday they'll actually provide a product that we'd prefer.

I simply don't expect that occur during the life-cycle of this game anymore.

That's the state of PvP in my mind.


Regards,
4

Ha. Hahaha.


BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!

This is a problem right here. I like PvP, I like fighting against other players. The problem is that the PvPers take their ultra IO'd builds out against people who are just trying it out. Not landing a single hit isn't fun, having THEM land most hits on you is annoying. I still vainly go to the PvP zones and see if I can find someone else like me, who likes PvP but who go out with a PvE, or a concept build, or basically, a build that won't frustrate my opponent while we fight.

I'd PvP a lot more if I fought a War Mace/Willpower tank every once in a while, a Rad/MM blaster from time to time, the occasional Stalker who doesn't have Stealth. But no, when I go to the PvP zones, I find everyone has Stealth, Super Speed, Phase Shift. It's not fun fighting five different Widows with perma Elude. Sure, I realize those builds are the best at what they do, but it doesn't mean they're fun to fight against. Ultimately, knowing that I'll have to fight yet another Scrapper/Tanker/Brute who likes to joust against another meleer is what keeps me away.

Some of my characters

Pretty much this. As much as I'd like some of the ideas in here considered (especially Fourspeed's) I don't see them touching PVP until they are well into rounding out GR and Incarnates. Meaning not anytime this year.

But see... The vast, vast majority of people who play PvP of any kind in any game do it for one reason. They want to win. Within some boundaries, those people play in a way that's meant to maximize their chance to win, not to fit a concept. The typical PvP mindset is competitive, and if adhering to concept means that you're going to be less effective, then concept is usually right out.

Just to head off where I can see this possibly going, this competitive nature has nothing to do with trash-talking punks, though there's a lot of tendency by non-PvP-minded folk to characterize seriously competitive PvPers like this. When I play vs. other players, I do it to win. That doesn't mean I cheat, or that I'm going to be verbally abusive, but I'm going to play the game in a way that will lead to the greatest likelyhood of victory. If my opponent has a weakness, I'll take advantage of it, and that may frustrate him, but that's what I need to do to win.

If you want to play with limits on how other people get to PvP with you, the arena provides instanced play where no one else will bother you. The arena has many significant limits, but I would think that it would be vastly preferable to wandering in an open zone hoping people would honor your self-imposed limits on how to fight.

I always imagined it would work out in reverse. Those with the billion inf builds would gravitate towards the arena since that's where they'll be able to organize balanced matches against one another. All those spiffy rules that they can set for a match, were in my mind, for those who wanted the best challenge. Zones were for the casual PvPer who just wandered in to check out what it's like.

Some of my characters

Well, unfortunately I think those arena limitations I mentioned I think did contribute some there. But I think that sort of misses the point. Serious PvP players did use the arena for ladder matches and the like. They still do. But even if you take PvP very seriously, every time you want to play against another player, you aren't going to want to organize a match.

There are people in FPS games who play ladder and league matches, but they spend most of their time in PUGs on favorite servers. The PvP zones were basically like that for this game's PvP. The problem isn't that you wandered into organized play. You wandered into PUG play, but it was PUG play containing a decent percentage of people who are serious about PvP. You really can't go into an open PvP zone in a game with a functioning PvP community expecting anything less.

It's always easy for someone who doesn't know *anything* about what the code looks like to assume that something is easy to implement.

And they're almost always dead wrong.

Well, a WoW-playing friend of mine yesterday got ganked several times by a much higher-level enemy player while he was fighting critters and conversing with NPCs, and the enemy then proceeded to follow him around and wait for him to land for quite some time.

Does that count?

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.

All I'm asking is to have PvP given the once over again, either repealing I13 changes or fixing what is not working. I'd almost certainly guarantee that repealing the I13 changes would bring back a lot of players. It is a mistake for the developers of this game to completely neglect PvP and cast it off like a leper.

Being completely serious here when I say this....

Every MMO has had "successful" PvP. There's always people that like it, and there's always people who don't. The same can be said for anything, and I mean anything in real life.

Ideally.

When I first wandered into Siren's Call on a Warshade, no less, years ago I got teleported to a building top and clubbed by several Stalkers. Definitely wasn't fun and didn't go back to PvP until someone asked me to try the Arena, where I was hooked.

Ideally, you'd have a kind of 'team assembler' that would add you to a queue in a zone and put you on a team. Yeah, I know you don't want to be with n00b over there, but at least people talking to each other and learning is better than someone walking in with their Dark/Elec Defender and getting completely steamrolled. The problem with 'team only' is some items in PvP zones (Shivan Shards, for example) are available solo, and some servers just don't have the 'pop' for teams and so on.

That's stuff you could work out through other means, by making Shivans and Nukes available through a high Alignment Merit cost, for example, or a PvE event of sufficient difficulty.

While castle was not the only person involved in the pvp changes, obviously, he was the one responsible for what was changed, even if he didn't get every change he wanted in, by his own admission.

Secondly, trying to blame players for changes that devs made is simply ridiculous, especially when players made countless good suggestions that were completely ignored, and raised rational objections for the ridiculous changes that were implemented anyway.

And finally, pvp is a mess because the devs have done a poor job on this aspect of the game, plain and simple. PVP will never be as popular as PVE, clearly, and the majority of pve players will dislike it regardless because they don't like pvp in general, and will voice this opinion at every turn, making it clear they don't care about pvp or if the devs abandon it. But there are a good amount of players in this game that would enjoy pvp in this game, if the devs made a decent pvp system, and a good pvp system would improve this game and add value to it, even if the majority of players aren't interested in pvp. I'd venture to say the majority of players in this game don't care other aspects of this game, like badges. But if the devs simply threw out that aspect of the game, the game would be worse for it, even though it would only affect a minority of players. That's why the devs should not completely abandon this aspect of the game, even if I agree they don't need to use a lot of manpower or effort to improve it.