New Year, New Discussion - PVP

My name is Andy Belford, aka Zwillinger, and I'm your new Community Manager here at Paragon.

As a gamer, and a Community Manager I have a significant amount of experience with PvP Communities. As a Community Team we recognize that the PvP community in CoH is challenged and has a desire to know where PvP stands on the priority list for the development team.

In reading the forums here, I understand that there are many concerns and wishes regarding PvP. When speaking to the development team as a representative of Community interests, we convey these concerns, we express the frustrations and we make sure that the devs understand what it is you want out of your PvP experience. When speaking to the Community as representatives of the Development team, we convey that we have an understanding of player sentiment and what direction the development of PvP is heading.

The current development status of PvP, as the Community knows, isn't very active. For an extended period of time, development resources have been focused on improving and expanding upon other aspects of gameplay within CoH. With the introduction of Issue 20 and our continued focus on the PVE endgame, this will likely remain the case for the immediate future.

It would be easy to become disillusioned at the above statement. It would be easy to believe that the developers don't care about PvP in CoH. This couldn't be further from the truth. The spirit of competition is alive and well within us all and we embrace the fact that it's an important part of the game

So where can we start?

I’m not here to rehash the existing bugs and problems; those are already well documented in the threads stickied here in the forums. Your grievances and issues with the current state of PvP in CoH are very clearly and concisely presented, and for that, the Community team thanks you. These tools make it much easier for us to present your case to the developers.

What I would instead like to talk to you about and get your feedback regarding it something that’s very important when it comes to Player vs. Player interaction: What are the best PvP experiences you’ve had, be it in CoH or any other game. We’re not talking about balance wise or delivery wise, but when you get down to it, what are the visceral and exciting PvP encounters that have left your heart pounding and your hands shaking? What is it about these experiences that made them so exhilarating and compel you to go out there looking for it again and again..?

You guys start, and after I’ve had some time to think about it, I’ll chime in and offer my two cents.

Talk with me; have an open, honest and constructive discourse with me. I'll continue dialog with all of you as long as you're willing . I can't promise to fix everything, but I can listen and convey, and hopefully help to focus us as a Community.

I'll check in on this thread periodically over the weekend as I can. Just so you know, I'm still mid relocating my family from the East Coast to the West, so weekends are difficult right now.

-Z

I don't PvP but I wanted to chime in here and say.

BIG PROPS to you Z!!

I'm so so happy to have a community lead that doesn't drown us in corporate speak!

I mean wow, such a simple little thing as being open and forthright has gone a long way in improving Paragon Studio's image for me.

Kudos

My favorite COH PvP experiences were in the early base raids a few years back around issues 7 and 8. It was a group of friends and whoever we could recruit against a similar ragtag team.

I also enjoyed being able to go in to Siren's, Warburg, or Recluse's Victory any day and any time and find at least a few people bopping back and forth. Now on most days I don't see a soul unless there is some specific event.

Finally, I enjoyed arena when we did silly things like level 5 only, or all-squishy-AT-last-man-standing.

I have two things that rank high in my PvP experiences, and sadly, neither of them are City related.

The first and foremost is my time in Planetside, with the extended ongoing battles for control, and extremely high numbers of player interactions both in full platoons and in smaller squads working side missions.

My second is the WoW battlegrounds, my particular favorite being Arathi Basin.

Mostly, it's coordinating assaults on contested resources, working to secure them and hold them. These kinds of arrangements have a lot of room for both group movement as well as value in scouts, small detachments.. Different objectives having different tactical considerations, and room for a lot of different roles.

But most importantly, any battle like that needs an actual win condition. In The Battlegrounds, this is explicit; there's a winner determined by the game. In Planetside, it was 'won' when the base or tower was secured, or on a larger level, the enemy factions had no foothold on the continent.

That's the important thing; feeling like you and your teammates have accomplished something, despite the opposition having every opportunity you did.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Several years ago I was very active in zone and SG arena PvP matches, so that's where most of my experience lies. That being said...

My absolute favorite moment in PvP happened in Bloody Bay, pre-issue 13. Myself and a half dozen SG mates, all heroes, fought our way to the villain's base. For an hour we stood firm and controlled entry/exit at the front door while villains swarmed all around us. It was sort of like a cross between capture the flag and tower defense, in a way. It was us, back to back, fighting waves of other players and desperately holding our ground as other heroes and villains in the zone realized what was happening and came to join/fight us. At the height of the siege there must have been 20-30 people engaged in that battle, either off to the side fighting in smaller groups or front and center with us. I can hardly remember a time when I had more fun, in any game, than on that night. I was playing an Ice Controller at the time... One of the early versions of my main, in fact.

I also fondly remember being part of roving teams in Siren's Call, zigging and zagging to dodge assassination attempts while hunting down the villain that struck down our Defender. Darting around and up tall buildings in hot pursuit was always such a rush!

I'd say my favorite PvP experience in CoH was when i was on my Mind/Kin controller, holding off 3 guys at once. I had one Tked into a corner, a stalker kept bouncing off my repel, and a third i was simply fighting essentially mano-a-mano. The stalker wised up and eventually shanked me from outside my repel range, but it was fun nonetheless.

Another time was i think after the "PvP revamp", the same mind/kin held off two */thermal cors who were literally melting everyone else in the zone. Even though i couldn't beat them both, they still congratulated me for lasting as long as i did and giving them a real fight. Then i went back for more, because it was fun =)

As for in other games... basically similar situations. I'm not that great a gamer, but any time the odds are against me and i still pull off a win or at least a respectable showing (Like once in Counter Strike where i managed to hold off a pair of T's AND defuse their bomb when I'm usually the first guy dead in a given round).

However, I'm not sure how any of this would help your design goals. You can't make everyone powerful enough to hold off 2 or 3 guys without those other 2 or 3 guys being just as powerful, which would beg the question as to why only one person can hold them off. We already have elusitivity (which doesn't seem to work), and short of giving everyone huge damage debuffs whenever someone is targeted by more than one person, trying to enforce this experience might be difficult.

I think the best experiences were play Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

A lot of the maps a fairly difficult, esp. some of the player made maps. You have to know where the choke points are, where the next objective is, what classes are best for achieving the currect objective, etc. At the same time, any given battle is easily accessible. You log in, pick any class you want, and then join and run around and shoot people. You won't be the most effective but you can have fun.

The battles between axis and allies are pretty well balanced too. As long as the server settings aren't ridiculously messed around with, it's aways possible to disloge an enemy no matter how skilled or well hidden or how much cover he has, although it'll cost you time and lives.


City of Heroes: sorry but none. Since we're not talking issues, I'll leave it at that.

Me best pvp times were pre i13 like others have stated...

I cut my early pvp teeth in sirens call... is was tons of fun...

now its a ghost town...

I wish the Devs didnt have the time for pvp back pre i13... let it as it was... things would have been fine...

My favorite times in PVP were in the early days of City of Villains. Back before IOs, and before accolades working at all levels when I worked to get them before 30 so I could have them in Siren's Call. I used to feel super, even when I was defeated, because all of my powers worked. I didn't get slowed down when I wanted to heal a team mate on my Empath. The freedom to move about and have high paced, high adrenaline battles, as well as evading when superior numbers were brought to bear, was a big part of why that early experience was so fun.

It seems as our characters became more powerful though, development did everything they could to stifle that power in PVP. Instead of making those fast paced battles a selling part of PVP, they did the opposite and removed them from the game.

I played on Champion back during that time, and there was almost always something going on in one of the PVP zones. At any given time I could enter Siren's, or Warburg, or RV and find at least 2-3 opponents, and about the same team mates (even very late at night). I've accepted that those days are done now, and that I13 really did drive out the last few holdouts on my global friends list that were a part of that "golden age" of PVP in the game, hopefully when it does get another pass, it's going to get some real attention, and not a major shakeup and then ignored for 2-3 years.

I'm a casual PvPer, and the most fun I've had in PvP was Siren's Call and Recluse's Victory pre-I13.

If you only ever do one thing more with PvP - if you decide to only ever make one more change to it, and then abandon it forever - please make that one single thing you do the removal of Diminishing Returns.
Because unbalanced PvP is still better than dead PvP.

I totally get the thinking behind DR and why it was done - but it simply hasn't work, and has reduced the amount of PvP rather than increased it.
It was a well-intentioned mistake, and rolling back DR would be the quickest and most time-saving and cost-effective way of giving PvP a much-needed boost.

Honestly, the most fun I've had PvPing was during the PvP zone tests during CoV beta. Why it was fun for me was simply that the zone was full of players. It didn't feel "optimized" and you were not generally constantly in situations where you felt hopelessly out matched. The situation was fluid and dynamic, and things could change in an instant: the person that has you completely outgunned could easily find himself the target of another person if he spends too much time focused on you. Teams that became proficient at taking down would find themselves the target of the entire zone.

My guess is that *why* I liked that experience is probably not shared by everyone, but if there is a general lesson there it is that PvP requires large-scale active participation to be viable. The more its just one player wandering into a zone with just a couple of Red Barons looking to rip their wings off from above, the less interesting it is to anyone but the Red Barons.

The best way to "balance" the high skilled players and the low skilled players is to make sure there are a lot more of the latter, and the high skilled players cannot possibly dominate them all simultaneously. The more people you have active, the more interest there is in simultaneous participation, the less important numerical balance actually becomes. Its a good thing to have, but only when it attracts players. If players steer away because its unfair, that has to be addressed. But if nobody cares if something is numerically unbalanced, let them continue to not care. I think a lot of people think the way I do, of the players that would PvP at all. I don't care too much if there are players that can unfairly kill me, as long as there are people I myself can defeat as well. If I never see the latter, and I only see the former, its totally pointless. In a high density free for all environment like there was during some of the test periods in CoV beta, it was always the case that there were people who could kill me and people I could kill, and that even changed situationally from moment to moment, and that was good enough for me.

People have to believe they can win, at least occasionally. And lrn2ply is not an acceptable retort. The game must be engineered so that players believe that there is always a chance. I think the devs tried to do that with mechanical changes, and I don't think that was the right way to do that. It should have been done with circumstantial changes - mini-games, PvP events, and other ways to ensure all the skill in the world would only account for so much certainty in victory, and the rest would come down to what the masses decided to do.

But to make that work, the masses don't have to lrn2ply, they have to actually play.

Almost every "most fun" experience will be pre-i13, simply because even if someone favors the changes for some reason; PvP's more fun when there's an active population of PvPrs. Competition requires... well, competition.

This game's PvP was fun because it was fast, basically. It's similar with certain settings in the Arena, though dumbed down too much and oversimplified to be too challenging anymore. It's also just fun playing with friends, though unfortunately, many people have left.

However, if you reference the thread "Greatest fight ever!", that's my number 1 PvP experience, and for good reason. I mean, it's amazing.

Buuuuuut, yeah. This game's PvP was fun when there was an active population to play with/against.

Oh, I remembered one of my all time favorite PvP events!

When Recluse's Victory was first introduced on test, they auto-leveled everyone to 40 and gave them enough influence/infamy to slot your character with SOs. You could pick up odd power combos on a lark just to see if it could work. Everyone was "balanced" in that there was no IOs, or accolades, or anything but your build choice and your skill.

And since no one felt invested in a character they just made from scratch, there was no ego hurt if you lost.

Good times . . .

my favorite pvp experience was way back in i10 or 11 when I was pvping with Whirligig. We were terrible and we rarely won matches but the games were just so much fun!

edited - please contribute to the conversation in a constructive and rational manner. - Z

My favorite time in PvP was around i10 to i11. It was great getting in on Kickball events held regularly in the D and seeing a lot of the matches that came up on test. Powers acted the same and the game had the same general "flow" as an active session in PvE. The speed and tactics involved was a lot more fun than before i13. It was that very speed that kept the blood flowing and kept the senses sharp. It was a feeling that you couldn't get in PvE, and can not get now in PvP as it exists.

The only other PvP systems that were remotely as enjoyable was with Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. Being able to queue up for a randomly picked team PvP scenario with a goal and actual rewards was fun and easy. I'd like to see something like that be introduced to the game instead of the overly inflated arena system we have now.

~ In other games, various and spontaneous world PvP encounters.

~ Attacks on cities to kill enemy leaders.

~ WoW's battlegrounds. Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm. I have some fun in the larger ones like Alterac Valley as well. (I hate capture the flag.)

~ Yes I like WoW's arenas.

~ In CoH, RV pre-diminishing returns. I loved grinding through enemies there waiting to get jumped. Since a majority of the zone was stalkers and I couldn't actually initiate combat with them I'd grind Arachnos waiting to be attacked. Back then the PvP enemies had good drops.

I never liked the lower zones nor would I play them as long as I lose all my set bonuses. The concept of collecting sets at reduced level so the bonuses work in lower level PvP areas is annoying and frustrating to me.

If I'm going to try and get down to nitty gritty themes of my good PvP experiences I really like those little "you had to be there" stories. I think you can design scenarios that can help produce those moments but it is difficult.

I remember being stuck at a choke point. I managed to sneak around and took down one guy but disrupted the group and helped my team break through. It felt like the A-team. A good plan came together and I played the role my class was meant for.

One of the better aspects of this game (to me) is it's clear class roles for teams. It might be interesting to look at what is learned from trials and applying it on a smaller scale to PvP. Different parts of a match could highlight different abilities.

I've never been a hardcore PvP player in any game but one big barrier to me is that I feel like I lack direction and that can put me in a negative feedback loop. If I can get something going that puts me in a clear role than easily rewards me for doing my job then I start enjoying PvP.

Any who, it's late and I typed this on an iPad so forgive any spelling mistakes or rambling.

The most fun PvP I've ever had was when I was in college playing the original Halo. 4v4 against the guys down at the other end of the hallway; and occasionally teaming up with them taking the xboxes to another dorm and playing against those guys.

As far as other games go, I really enjoyed Guild Wars pvp. It seemed that regardless of how good your build was, there was always something that could counter it. Also, there was a large variety of pvp activities you could do. I also spent a few months messing around on EQ2s pvp server. The pvp there is far from perfect/balanced, but the feeling of accomplishment from going to noob-zone fodder for twinks to being able to hold my own was pretty great.

In CoH, I enjoyed pre-i13 pvp, particularly in BB and SG arena stuff. Unfortunately I never had the privilege to participate in a base raid, I imagine that would top my CoH experiences. For some time I did enjoy i13 when elusivity first came around, as my Fortunata was virtually unkillable in zones, but that got old after about a week. Beyond that, with the current system, there was 1 pvp experience I really enjoyed. There was a pvp tournament on Champion server during the free transfers. Several freedom players went over; the tournament had an interesting setup. Teams were randomly selected, winning teams advanced and were split to face each other. 8v8, winning team split and did 4v4, winning team split and did 2v2, etc. While some people got screwed by a poor team, the randomness, and inability to stack teams created a more even playing field; also knowing that your ally this match might be your enemy the next one made things exciting. Ended up winning that one against a mind/thermal in the finals (which my character should never have been able to beat).

As previous posters have mentioned, and I'm sure you're going to see from following posters there is a key to fun pvp experiences.
1. Cooperative, goal-based gameplay with varying objectives. (CTF, KoH, castle defense, etc, not just kill)
2. A feeling of accomplishment for participating. (This is a little more difficult to accomplish as the feelings are subjective. It can vary from overcoming odds stacked against you, to something as simple as getting a worthy reward for participation.)
3. Ease of participation. (There are a few different parts to this. The learning curve for pvp shouldn't be too steep, or casuals will quit before they learn the system. Secondly, there should be an easy, quick way to participate. Currently CoH has neither of these. The learning curve for pvp is unbelievably steep; there isn't any in-game documentation on how the i-13 changes work.)

I've said this several times in the past (some people here don't agree); I think the best first step to adjusting PvP would be competitive PvE. Simply pit players against other players in a PvE environment, whether it be surviving increasingly difficult waves of mobs, completing an objective fastest, or doing the most damage to an area (ie. mayhem missions or last mission in Silver Mantis SF). Utilize the turn-style system being implemented and toss in some additional reward for winning. Doing this will create a more competitive game within CoH and avoid the immediate hassle of trying to fix/rebalance PvP. After something like this is implemented, PvP adjustments can begin and there is already a base system to introduce competitive PvP missions on top of. When the i13 changes went in, Positron's letter said that the changes would create a solid base for PvP to build and expanded on. That didn't work out. In a game based mostly on PvE, use that as a basis for creating future PvP play. Separating the systems, while practical and appropriate in some cases, was generally a step in the wrong direction.