Challenge done right!

The CoP definitely has that "bring debuffs, lots of debuffs, and DPS, lots of DPS, or you will fail" aspect to it. Due to the the Aspect's "untouchable" cycles, it would be failable even if there was no timer. If you took the timers off these trials, a coordinated sewer trial would not be failable. A coordinated CoP would still be.

I think it also induces a certain feeling of being lost in the mass of people in a lot of players. As do Hami raids and Mothership raids. Each person is part of an enormous whole, so you can't see your contribution as readily. If you, specifically, DC or have to answer the phone or die, the rest of the raid won't really notice. On a single-team trial, they'll notice.

I'm pretty useless on large-scale raids due to my crappy computers, and yet I've still participated in successful CoPs, Hami raids, and Mothership raids. My contribution mostly consisted of firing wildly at the nearest available target. No coordination or thinking was required, or indeed even possible, on my part.

I will agree though, in a sense they require too much coordination. However, most of this takes place in the planning stages. You need enough ranged damage, enough melee damage, enough holds, enough healing for a Hami raid. It makes for a pretty boring half-hour for those who actually show up on time.

I hadn't really thought about it from that angle. I can see why something with an organizational flavoured challenge to it would be more enjoyable if your contribution as an individual was more recognizable.

This is the primary reason I don't do multi-team content. I've actually coined a term for this: a "soup." That's exactly what experience in large-scale, many-people action resembles: Staring into a swirly bowl of soup, a homogeneous mass of matter and colour where occasionally you can see things moving around at random. Maybe such events are fun for the leaders and coordinators, but for be as one more pixel in the effects soup, it makes me feel like Z from AntZ.

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.

No. The original Sewers Trial was added in I1, yes, but even then it was 38-41, whereas the same Issue brought the level cap all the way up to 50 and shifted the Hamidon raid to being a level 50 encounter dropping level 50 rewards.

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.

I20 might make you weep

By the same token, perhaps some people enjoy raids because it is neat to see that "soup" overcome a challenge. But yeah, I can see why different people would enjoy different aspects of multi-team content and why it is not for everyone.

It's also the fact that on a single-team task, anyone can step up and be an "organizer." The OP provided an example of this. I have my own pet example, of a poorly thought-out MoLGTF attempt. We really hadn't thought of how we were going to tackle Hami, we were having enough trouble finding someone to tank the damn thing. When we got to Hami, EVERYONE threw out suggestions on how to win, and everyone was listened to. We won, by the way, not by using pre-established strategies, but because every individual was recognized and expected to contribute to the team's success.

On a large-scale multi-team raid, there is no room for that. People flat out tell you "these are the leaders, you do what they say." At Hami raids, you're told to stay off Request unless you're a leader....which is just another way of saying "shut the hell up, nobody cares what you have to say." And the sad thing is, it's necessary. Everyone has to act as a cohesive unit, so you can't act unless you get a consensus from everyone, and that's much harder to establish with a large group than with a single team. At that point, talking in the "leader channel" and throwing out suggestions just confuses people.

Caverns of Transcendence, Sewers, Eden trial and Hamidon are in essence the same thing. For me the caverns is a great progression step for the sewers and the sewers a great progression for the Eden trial and the Eden trial is a great progression for Hamidon. I don't care that the Devs didn't intend these to be progressions to eachother but I'd be damned if I didn't immediately see the pattern. The end content version "Hamidon" would be therefore in my mind be already there. Why make it later anyway? Earlier levels could do with fun stuff and what could be regarded as decent fun overload. Old Hamidon was pretty much sussed by a few players as to what was the right way but people, the majority, did it their way.

I'm referring to the general coordination-type challenges (or combinations thereof) It's not that you can't do them by chat, neccessarily, it's just that it's way more unwieldy, and, more importantly, you can't trust people you don't know to do it.

If I can be pretty sure of having a competent team, sure I will, but if you're talking regular PUG's (where there's always a 50% chance of you being surrounded by idiots) then I'd rather just not do it, unless the rewards are absolutely spectacular (and even then I'm more likely to get a team of trustworthy people and do it instead)

"Stat Check" bosses are much less of a problem because you don't need to assume that your teammates aren't idiots, and you can usually at least check their stats. (IE: Does he have his alpha slot, does he have the right powers needed, etc. etc.)

Mind, i don't mind coordination-type challenges (BM is of the same type, although of course slightly different)

On the other hand, you do need to have these stats. Whereas a coordination-type challenge is equally open to a relatively new player, or a player who isn't concerned with IOs, or a Scrapper trio, because the minimum stats needed are lower.

Meanwhile, these "stat check" challenges are still not idiot proof. If your tank can't hold aggro, or your debuffer keeps standing in the wrong place and dying, or someone with all the "right" powers never uses them, you just spent all that time putting together the "perfect" team just to fail anyway.

Oh agreed, nothing is idiot-proof, but it's a bit more reliable.

My point was that coordination challenges aren't neccessarily less "elitist" than stat-challenges (Note: most/all types of challenges have elements of both) If coordinating becomes required chances are the response would be for people to PUG less and start clustering together with people they know more.

One of the "things" about COH (not good, not bad, just different) is the very low threshold for doing content (and thus the easy pugging)

I'm not saying they're less elitist. Any challenge with a high chance of failure will have elitists bragging about it and rubbing it in people's faces. What I'm saying is that this is a challenge that's simultaneously more involving to the player and one which requires less of an investment to attempt.

A stat-check challenge may be simpler and thus available to more people theoretically, but it requires a certain level of preparation, which will both lock out more people for the simple fact that such preparation may constitute "work" inside of a game, as well as present an actually lower challenge once the right stats are met.

This is the fundamental difference between challenges for the character and challenges for the player. If we view our characters units in an RTS, then it makes sense we'll want challenges to basically constitute preparing said character and sending him in to do his best as a father might send his son to his first baseball game. I, however, happen to see City of Heroes as a more action-oriented game where character performance should depend more on the player's intervention than that, and as such challenges should test the player's ability to actually use said character's abilities as a driver might take his sports car to the race track.

Character-specific challenges take the game out of the player's hands, and as such don't constitute an actual challenge as I see it. They constitute a gate. "You must be this tall to ride." Player-specific challenges, that is to say events which challenge the player's actions and reactions, are both in keeping with the game and more proper challenges. City of Heroes really isn't "actiony" enough to actually constitute any challenge which requires extraordinary player skill, so the task falls to testing people's ability to interact with each other. And for a team encounter, it only makes sense.

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.

I'd like to point out that, with a lot of team compositions, hanging out next to the computer is the safest place to be. A significant number of ally buffs and heals are PBAoEs. Some of them are AoEs centered on foes. Despite the fact that being in the middle of a pile of foes with all the melee characters puts you in the location with the most emitted DPS, being close to your teammates often puts you in the location with the highest DPS mitigation, plus a variety of other extremely desirable buffs (+damage, +recharge, +recovery, +regen), some of which can make the fight end faster, and thus equate to less total damage directed at the team.

If you hang back far enough to be out of range of the concentrated fire aimed at your "harder" teammates, you are not applying any such buffs you have to them and possibly not applying them to other teammates. The Kinetics character is probably going to be in the pile with the melee characters, for example. Absolute best case in such a scenario, your "soft" ATs are off in a huddle buffing one another, and the melee ATs are getting none of the benefit of their PBAoE effects. Worst case, you're hanging back on your own and risk defeat from the fact that some of the Phalanx robots are probably going to shoot at you no matter what, just due to aggro caps, and you aren't as buff as you could be.

Now, some people doubtless get used to playing like that and don't pay enough attention to when there's not enough radial buffs to make hanging out in the scrum a reasonable proposition. Those aren't very bright players, or at very least they aren't paying enough attention to the game.

OTOH character-specific challenges is kind of what RPG's are all about: I can't throw a fireball, but my character can. Why shouldmy character be penalized because I happen to have impaired vision, for instance? And it i my experience that tougher coordination challenges tends to lead to MORE preparation: Rather than just checking the relevant power bars you are pretty much restricted to people you already know (or who are referred to you)

Mind, COH's challenges, stat OR character-based, are pretty trivial in the first place.