City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

ZAM Q&A With Nate "Second Measure Birkholz"!

Arcanaville

By Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2011-02-21 13:26 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion

 

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Originally Posted by Lightslinger View Post
Typical marketing speak interviews, lots of text and very little content.

NCSoft, these interviews bore/insult the players you already have and do nothing to attract new players. No one out there is going to read that tripe and say "I'm going to play City of Heroes!"
Beg to differ. Look at the third and fourth questions:
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ZAM: You refer to the Incarnate Trials in your producer's letter. While I have a basic understanding of the Incarnate system as being a way of "powering up" players beyond the level cap with these new paths of progression, what are your future plans for the system? Can players expect to be hearing of incarnate boosts for a long time coming?
Someone who hasn't played City of Heroes, or played in the past but no longer does, now knows there is an Incarnate system and has a rough idea of what it does. That may interest them into checking out the game further.
Quote:
ZAM: Your latest expansion, Going Rogue, was met with a fairly positive reaction from the community, especially with your decision to explore the fascinating grey area that separates a superhero from a vigilante. What is it that you can do with an expansion that you can't do with multiple issues released in sequence? Can we expect to see another expansion in the future?
This same potential player now knows that Going Rogue was well-received, and maybe it's worth checking out the game or reactivating the subscription to have a look.

This isn't interesting or useful to you, because you're steeped in this information every day from visiting the boards. But someone that hasn't kept up on City of Heroes news in a while is going to get a lot of snippets of info from this interview just from the questions themselves.

De minimis non curat Lex Luthor.

 

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Originally Posted by MrHassenpheffer View Post
Wonder what "honesty" we could get for bases.
i think posi said it best when he said " what base love? i dont even know where that came from"

 

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I thought the PvP question was handled as well as it could be, given the audience. If you read between the lines, no PvP changes until they sit down and rethink it over from the ground up. No rollback of i13 changes.

Did you really want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

 

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Originally Posted by PumBumbler View Post
I thought the PvP question was handled as well as it could be, given the audience. If you read between the lines, no PvP changes until they sit down and rethink it over from the ground up. No rollback of i13 changes.

Did you really want the truth? You can't handle the truth!
so you say thats the truth huh? did you read the other stuff that contradicts the truth (otherwise known as a lie or what i call BS) like "we fix bugs all the time" and "we listen to our player feedback" despite having implemented none of it.

you gain no more from "reading between the lines" of this than you do reading between the lines of dev activity regarding pvp over the last 3 years.

Positron's i13 letter: We are trying to make PvP more accessible to new players, while giving experienced PvP'ers the advantage that comes with formulating tactics around the new systems we're putting in place. PvP from now on will be on our priority list. If something isn't working out, we'll be in there tweaking it and making it work, for the entire future of the product, not just Issue 13.

 

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Originally Posted by PC_guy View Post
so you say thats the truth huh? did you read the other stuff that contradicts the truth (otherwise known as a lie or what i call BS) like "we fix bugs all the time" and "we listen to our player feedback" despite having implemented none of it.

you gain no more from "reading between the lines" of this than you do reading between the lines of dev activity regarding pvp over the last 3 years.
Angry guy is angry.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by PumBumbler View Post
Angry guy is angry.
agitated more than angry, doesn't detract from what i said.

Positron's i13 letter: We are trying to make PvP more accessible to new players, while giving experienced PvP'ers the advantage that comes with formulating tactics around the new systems we're putting in place. PvP from now on will be on our priority list. If something isn't working out, we'll be in there tweaking it and making it work, for the entire future of the product, not just Issue 13.

 

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ZAM: It seems that for the PvP crowd in City of Heroes, development hasn't been exactly at the level of what they've wanted. Are there any future developments coming along for die-hard PvPers?

Nate: We always fix bugs that come up with the current PvP system, and a couple of years ago we made it possible to balance PvP separately from PvE. The challenge is that it is very difficult to balance PvP in a game with over a thousand powers in hundreds of potential combinations, and we have made some changes in the past that didn't end up the way we wanted them to. "Just doing something else" isn't going to make anyone happy, least of all us. The community has given us great PVP feedback over the years and we have had some sound ideas internally, but we also want to find the right solution.

While the article is not meant to inform the current player base of the status of the game, or the PvP system, it seems as though its common knowledge outside of CoH that there is disdain for the current system, especially if an interviewer brought its up as one of his posted questions. This type of round about answer shows to a prespective customer that would be interested in PvP that the system IS indeed broken, and sadly will be until they find "the right solution".

That being said , PvP is not balanced, and to be completely fair, should not be in the aspect that powers should work no different than in PvE. Every AT has its role, has its strengths & weaknesses. Whats its been turned into is who can mash buttons fast enough with whatever Fotm that is broken to the advantage of the attacker.

This is a discussion forum about the article, so if the do have sound ideas, and (really)want to find a solution, why not implement some of those ideas on the test server, with the understanding that it is not permanent, looking for feedback. PvP needs to be treated like beta again to get it to a workable system .

Don't read between lines, don't put a spin on words, just ask when?...that goes for bases too.

 

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
If I were to teach a class on everything I know about how the game engine in general and the powers system in particular works, it would be a three to four day class. Of eight hour days.
Where do we sign up?

Virtue
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Originally Posted by Chaos Creator View Post
I was genuinely hoping he'd address PvP... I don't pvp anymore but I used to do it very casually before i13.

Sigh.
So did everyone miss this comment from the interview: "The challenge is that it is very difficult to balance PvP in a game with over a thousand powers in hundreds of potential combinations, and we have made some changes in the past that didn't end up the way we wanted them to."

Seriously, you either have "balanced PvP" with very few power options, or you have "impossible-to-balance" PvP with with the myriad of power options that we enjoy. I'll take unbalance-able PvP any day if I have to give up power options to achieve it.

 

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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison View Post
All that stood out to me was the massive dodge of a "What do you plan to do for the PvP crowd?" question.
This

as Ood Sigma said....We will sing to you, Doctor. The universe will sing you to your sleep. This song is ending. But the story never ends.