What do you like about the Current CoH PvP Experience

What I like about PVP as ti currently is...

Tough question, as I don't do much with PVP, except run a once a month RPVP show that rotates zones. Because of that, and how dead the zones are, it makes for a much more enjoyable experience for the everyday layman like myself. I can go in there, and not worry about being ganked inside of 10 seconds. I still get beaten down, but I expect that, and yeah it is fun. In the same breath, sometimes it is really sucky when you go into most of the zones and 90% of the time they are empty of Players.

Why are there posts regarding base building in this thread? This is a rare opportunity for PvPers to converse with a red name (regerdless of what effect it has). Please dont derail it.

What do I like in the current PvP system? PvP IOs. Though I think that a good idea might be to make them A. Much easier to obtain, and B. Have no set bonuses in PvE. So in PvE they act like generic IOs, but perhaps give the PvP bonuses a boost. It will make having multiple builds that much more meaningful as well.

I'm struggling to think of anything else at the moment, will post again if I do.

This is difficult to answer, because a lot of the things are double edged swords.

For example, I like the current Mez mechanic for the strategy it can bring into fights between certain characters. For example, 2 Martial arts scrappers fighting end up having to care a lot about where to put in eagle's claw and how to use that vital 1-3 seconds when the enemies toggles might be suppressed by the stun afterward.

Unfortunately that same PVP Mez mechanic makes fighting against NPC enemies in the PVP zones needlessly frustrating, annoying, and time consuming. Since one of the things I still do occasionally is spend time in the zones completing zone objectives this becomes a problem there.

There are also times when I do in fact appreciate that diminishing returns is making someone who otherwise might be impossible into someone I can challenge. But it seems as though nearly as often it just confuses the fight with complex and difficult to follow systems that are very hard to understand or predict.

Things like activating your self heal, only to find it didn't heal you as much because the system stealth-calculated your regeneration increase set bonus as an already applied heal and then reduced your powers effectiveness according to some bizarre and complicated series of math equations without mentioning it to you makes it hard to track what is going on, or to try to introduce anyone else to the system.

That said- I enjoy PVP in this game, in it's current form, despite it's flaws. I enjoyed pre-i13 PVP more, however I have adapted to many of the changes that were implemented. I enjoy dueling against my friends, especially when it involves RPVP. In other words, the critical thing I enjoy with PVP in it's current incarnation as well as it's previous incarnation is this: Interaction with other people. What I like is the people, and as long as I have friends there I will continue to enjoy PVP.

It is because of this that I believe much of the current difficulty with the system can be traced more than anything else back to a problem of critical mass of participation, rather than any specific system flaw.

__
(Advisory: This may or may not deviate too far from the topic at hand, but I felt it was worth putting here. If it's deemed too far from the topic and needs to be modded out of this particular thread I apologize for that in advance, but I hope it sheds some light on what I mean.)

Good PVP requires a kind of critical mass of people to work. The difficulty with PVP pre-i13 was that the number of people participating was slowly going down over time. It was losing critical mass. The changes they tried to make were intended to help that by using things like diminishing returns to reduce the dominance of the elite and allow more people to participate, thus revitalizing PVP as a whole.

Unfortunately the changes did not have the desired effect, or rather they had far more of an effect on one front(weakening the elite hardcore) than intended, while failing to have much of an effect on the other front(bringing in new blood to compete in the newly leveled playing ground).

The core PVP group of the time felt they had suddenly and unfairly had their system pulled out from under them and replaced with something designed to punish them for the time, effort, and skill they had invested into their characters, causing many of them to leave the PVP scene. Meanwhile, the complex and difficult to understand nature of the new systems governing PVP and the sudden sharp difference between the PVE game experience and PVP game experience effectively created a severe limitation on the ability of new people to pick up PVP and learn to play and enjoy it.

The practical outcome of this was that PVP lost critical mass. With too few people remaining to play, and the difficulty of entering the system for new people now too high, many PVP zones appeared to become ghost towns for long periods of time. And that brings us up to now.

I do not have a magic cure, or instant solution to the PVP difficulties. I don't think as some people do that simply flipping a switch and returning us to pre-i13 PVP rules will make everything shiny and golden and wonderful again. I do think that having threads like this to look at what works and what doesn't is a great thing, and am hopeful that something can come out of it. But if anything is to revitalize PVP, I think it will ultimately have to focus on how to bring people into the system in a way that is easy to understand and conducive above all other things to having fun interactions with others.

What the exact way to do that is I do not know, and whether it's something that can be done within the constraints of everything the Devs have to deal with I also don't know, but I trust them to follow what they think is best for the game.

*deep breath*
Anyway... that's my take. I hope it helps a little.

I am truly sorry. I didn't mean to derail anything. I guess that I was a bit envious that your community is getting attention and the Bases aren't. Please disregard everything that I may have said to derail this thread.

I like that it's consensual. Other than that there is nothing to like about the current implementation of zone PvP. Arena PvP is more fun because you can turn off some of the garbage that i13 introduced.

Not that I PvP much (since I don't like the rock-beats-scissors type thing) but...

I like the fact that pvp isn't a bunny-hoping jump/fly around fest. I don't like heal decay though or travel suppression after buffing/healing a teammate.

To echo an earlier poster: I like that it exists. Even if I personally don't spend a lot of time doing it, the fact that I can is a big plus.

I like the core idea behind the I13 changes: making more characters competitive in PVP. It's never going to be everyone and the consequences of the changes are largely negative, but the intent was solid.

I like arena a whole lot better than zone PVP, as mentioned by several others. Customizable consensual PVP = love. Feels a lot more clash-of-the-titans; the focus is on the fighters alone and there's no last-minute changes of situation that completely alter the outcome.

Revert pvp to it's i12 state and I'll be happy.

(ie, nothing)

Like to start off by saying I'm not and, as a mom with special needs children, will likely never be a hardcore pvper. It's nice to play around with it a bit here and there...well, used to be for me anyways.

Since issue 13 there's nothing that I like personally about it anymore unless you want to count the fact that it's now easier to get badges in pvp zones because no one is there to fight you other than NPCs (that's really not a plus for pure pvpers I'm sure). It took me a while to figure out the initial system and the current is not nearly as fun so I'm in little to no hurry to figure it out (admittedly am still a bit bitter over no base raids) and genuinely look forward to some changes in the next year or so. If it were more fun again (not necessarily pre-13 just more fun!) I'd go back to dabbling in it. Sorry if that isn't quite what you're looking for, just how I feel and wanted my two cents in. Best of luck trying to find the best way to bring back the fun devs even if it isn't on the front burner...or even one of the back burners yet!

In addition to some of the things already mentioned, I like the Incarnate Shard drop rate in PvP. It's nice to have at least one reward structure in PvP that is nearly on par with rewards in PvE so that my PvP toons can actually progress by doing what they do best, without any fruitcake abstractions that make smart play a barrier to earning rewards (like the PvPIO drop rules).

about zone? nothing
About arena - that we can turn off almost all of the dev's mistakes and get kind of close to i12.

pvp ios were a good idea but you can get them now without pvping.

Nothing about zone pvp as is...

Arena I like that you can turn off DR, HD and TS...

Let's keep the discussion on topic folks.

Thanks!

I like that as a MM and The Best, I can still dominate anyone easily. I also like travel suppression in PvP zones. It became annoying when I'd have people who just shoot once then run around for 2 min, shoot again, and continue running around. Especially for MMs who don't have the capability to run around anywhere safely, being able to hold a person down on the ground, even if only for a few seconds, is generally enough to make a major hit.

Nothing.

I like the intent of the current PvP system: previous versions of PvP left you dead immediately or held indefinitely. Certain characters were nigh-invulnerable because they healed faster than you could possibly damage them. The intent of travel suppression is good, to prevent certain obnoxious tactics.

The problem with these changes is that they drastically altered the game from how it plays in PvE. PvP throws away exactly those characteristics that make our characters fun to play. The core game mechanics were altered to force particular behaviors on the players. Take travel suppression. When you fight your speed slows way down to prevent you from using hit-and-run attacks and fleeing battle.

Rather than force arbitrary rule changes on players to slow them down, there should be an intrinsic motivation coming from the game that gets the players themselves to eschew undesired behaviors.

I've always wanted PvP to be like the final confrontation in the Lord Recluse Strike Force. A big battle that lasts a decent while, where there's lots of duking it out. The standard PvE tactics don't work there, and you usually wind up fighting all the AVs at once (unless you use the Mind Dom sleep gimmick). You generally focus on one of the AVs at a time and whittle them down, but you still can't gank Numina in two seconds.

Now how fun would that be if every time Numina got down to 25% she bubbled herself and ran away? We know exactly how tedious that is from the universal hatred of the Diabolique AV in the Maria Jenkins arc. But that's how human players often react to impending death.

But instead of forcing a rule change -- travel suppression -- on players, the reward structure of the encounter should punish undesirable behaviors and reward desirable ones. Fleeing battle, for example, could be punished. Standing your ground heroically while taking fire from a half a dozen enemies should be rewarded. A full team ganking a lone opponent would be penalized in same way -- perhaps diminishing the likelihood of rewards for a period of time. A "Courage/Cowardice" stat could be added that adjusted the drop chance for juicy rewards.

What would the nature of those rewards be, and how would they be judged? Well, that's the tricky part. Getting a chance for shard or a component for extreme acts of valor seems reasonable. Controls are needed to prevent gaming the system. But if gaming the system takes just as long as playing the game as it's intended, it doesn't really matter.

Perhaps one way of doing this is to basically turn all player characters into AVs in PvP. You get the same purple triangle mechanic (important for squishies), the same level of AV hit points (but tanks still get more than defenders), etc. All powers would work the same way they do in PvE. This would allow defenders and controllers to last quite a while, avoiding the whole "kill the healer in the alpha strike" scenario. If a team brings six Mind Doms and holds everyone all at once, the punishment mechanic kicks in and the team gets docked Courage points, reducing their shot at a nice drop. Interactions with NPCs have be worked out. To avoid interminable battles the purple triangles or hit points might decay over time, equally among all participants.

The exact details obviously need to be worked out. But instead of changing all the mechanics of the game to prevent undesirable player behavior, it would be better to reward players for desirable behavior and make them police themselves. They will still have the option to do the undesirable things, but they will pay for it in some way.

Getting defeated in PvP doesn't have any real downside (except you don't get a reward), but there's still a perceived penalty. If there's an upside to getting defeated courageously (a Notice of the Well, for example), people won't mind PvPing. The system just needs to smart enough to differentiate between players farming rewards and playing the game as intended. Metering rewards over time isn't an optimal solution, but it would be serviceable, and is already well established throughout the game now.

I'm a fan of the minigames in the zones. I think it would be interesting if there were some more, smaller side-games around too.

Disclaimer: I am not what anyone would consider a PvPer. The most fun I've had in PvP is probably playing around with gladiator battles in the arena... and it seems that I might have been the only one to ever enjoy that.