First week DOOOOM: a look back
By
Arkyaeon,
Posted on: 2011-04-11 08:01 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Well after a week of being able to play a lot I've gotten tons of very rare and rare drops.
I now have 9 tier 4's on my SS/Fire/Soul Brute on Freedom HtRiyther.
I wanted to focus on 1 toon for a week and see how far i could get.Ihad no idea how
ez it would be to get all the goods.here are 2 proof sceenies.
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@Kreegor
On the subject of the new currencies, I find the new system to be easier.
Look at the shards system, you're forced to traverse a tree of crafting components then crafting components into other components with shards just to get to the uncommon power and beyond.
I think there's the same type of system in place for threads, but I honestly haven't even looked at it. To get a very rare, you just need the very rare + some commons. To get a rare, you just need the rare salvage + some commons. To get an uncommon, you just need the uncommon salvage + some commons.
Commons are easy to get by breaking down the tons of astral merits you get (or in some people's cases, the tons of uncommon components you're getting from completing the trial
So whenever a reward table comes up with rare salvage, I just open the incarnate window and pick out what my next rare power is, then make some common salvage to throw on it. Much less of a pain than getting the alpha very rare with shards.
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I like to call it, as inspired by South Park, the "No Life Principle". You cannot kill that which has no life, meaning you cannot stop your top-end players from blitzing through your content.|
Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano
Basically it's not confirmed from Posi himself but everyone reckons that the reason for the change in salvage was to stop people who had horded shards/notices/favours from blitzing through the system on day 1 and coming out with very rares.
It didn't actually work though since it didn't really slow people down |
The multiple currencies failed to do their job. As expected.
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You're misreading the point.|
Originally Posted by Daemodand
I like to call it, as inspired by South Park, the "No Life Principle". You cannot kill that which has no life, meaning you cannot stop your top-end players from blitzing through your content.
The multiple currencies failed to do their job. As expected. |
The issue isn't to prevent high-end players from blitzing your CONTENT. It's to
1) Prevent high-end players from buying all the reward without PLAYING the content. (by using pre-existing rewards to just buy what they want).
2) Prevent players from repeatedly doing ONLY the easiest single mission in the game to maximize that single currency then buy whatever new reward the devs release.
3) LETTING players use old currencies like most games use points (an almost constantly-increasing value) as studies have shown players enjoy this. Rather than battling mudflation and making a player feel taxed to death by constant currency penalties needed to keep any currency relevant, they introduce a new reward metric that ignores the previous one (or requires harsh conversion rates if you DO want to use them.)
I'd mostly agree wtih your summary, but I think you're missing a couple of points.
As many including myself have pointed out, the BAF and Lambda trials are pretty low quality which seems strange compared to the excellence of the two new 20-40s... I can only surmise that Sutter and Kal were told to be a story with a solid vision, whereas both the new incarnate trials have a feel of being designed by committee, where certain elements must be included and what we get is a pretty poor result.
The Incarnate system itself is frankly horrid. For such an important new feature in the game the interface is truly dreadful, and really not worthy of the "End Game." It's not even in the same bleedin' place ffs!
The League system is very meh. I can see what the Devs tried to achieve with it but it's pretty ugly and clunky too, and the fact you can have 24 people running around a small map seems to make it very laggy.
The Salvage system is pretty bad. I've commented on that at length in another thread but the Devs have clearly done an about face since they decided to get rid of Base Salvage, but what we get served up is a confusing dogs dinner of bits and pieces of salvage that mostly makes no sense.
But worst of all the story is just dire. The whole concept of Incarnates may have seemed exciting initially but this insane hole in the ground driving meta-humans mad and taking over others and pitting them against each other in some kind of social darwinism is so jarring and contrived and just rips any control the player has of his or her character away and gives you a one-eyed vision. This is how the Devs want my characters to be and so they will be it if I continue to play them.
Thelonious Monk
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My objective wasn't to do a broader critique, it was to contrast my experience with the expectations derived from the most widespread complaints I'd read on the forums.|
Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker
I'd mostly agree wtih your summary, but I think you're missing a couple of points.
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If I allow myself to stray outside of that framework, my biggest gripe by far is how the client UI gets out of synch with the server especially during the prisoner phase of the BAF. Not being able to fire off powers that appear to be recharged is maddening. I was playing my Dom and it was seriously un-fun to wait until a bunch of mobs grouped up just so for maximum AoE hold effectiveness when... surprise! The AoE hold wasn't recharged after all! Grrr.
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I can think of at least three ways off the top of my head to prevent this without resorting to adding new currency for each release. And I don't even design games for a living. It's really not rocket surgery.
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
You're misreading the point.
The issue isn't to prevent high-end players from blitzing your CONTENT. It's to 1) Prevent high-end players from buying all the reward without PLAYING the content. (by using pre-existing rewards to just buy what they want). 2) Prevent players from repeatedly doing ONLY the easiest single mission in the game to maximize that single currency then buy whatever new reward the devs release. |
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I've actually been thinking about this over the past week...|
Incarnate currency overload? While I understand Posi's reasoning for the new Incarnate currency I strongly dislike it. This is one area that I think might inhibit vets from returning to the game. Just try explaining to someone how to create set IOs and the benefits they give, then the Alpha slot and shards, then the other Incarnate slots and threads. Bleah.
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See... There are Alpha Abilities that can be made with either Shards OR Threads...
I get the feeling that at some point in the future, the same will be true for all of the new Recipes, too (possibly after the next set of Incarnate Slots are unlocked). I'm certain Shards will still be useful throughout the course of the Incarnate path.
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I have been on only one trial where I just queued in LFG with a friend, on the first night after the issue was published. The server crashed after a couple minutes.|
Originally Posted by Golden_Avariel
My only comment on this was that it was too tough for the LFG to ever have a hope of working as intended. Pre-formed leagues seem to be the preferred method now.
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Since then every trial has had 16 or 24 players, making it impossible for anyone to get in with us with the turnstile mechanism. This is on three different servers.
I'm curious about how many people actually get into trials queuing just themselves.
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I only end up waiting about two minutes on Virtue for each queue.
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Originally Posted by Rodion
I have been on only one trial where I just queued in LFG with a friend, on the first night after the issue was published. The server crashed after a couple minutes.
Since then every trial has had 16 or 24 players, making it impossible for anyone to get in with us with the turnstile mechanism. This is on three different servers. I'm curious about how many people actually get into trials queuing just themselves. |
I pretty much agree with the OP. The new salvage system for the Incarnates is annoying but Posi seems to like his systems and enjoys making things a grind; I am very happy he is no longer the lead dev.
The new TF is meh and the SF kinda stinks. The SF is just old maps and it feels like we've done it before...a patron arc....midnighters arc....etc. The same old environments again. Give it a rest already. It is just sickening...
I really hope future raids are added and different mechanics are put in. It's a great change of pace and they are decent to play.
I really hope future raids have nothing to do with Praetoria. Enough of that.
Finally, I will skip the Lore slot on all of my toons. May reconsider when I see the updated list of pets but for now, I don't want Praetorian pets. They do not fit my characters.
I pretty much agree with the overview in the OP.
My own personal gripe list, after playing fairly intensively for the last week, would be:
- The LFG system is a bit too fond of minimum or near-minimum sized leagues. Couple that with it only adding "join in progress" players if the league is below minimum size (am I right in thinking that?) and preformed teams become a far more attractive option. Which reduces the number of people using the LFG system. Which makes it even less likely to give a decent size league.
- While I can accept that it's a new system and we'll get more trials later on, I really wish there'd been more ways to get ixp for unlocking the slots (and to a lesser extent, components). With successful BAFs becoming faster and faster, and more and more streamlined, my ixp per completion has been going down (I was getting less than 10% Lore per run yesterday). It wasn't so bad on my first character, but with only one activity available to unlock each slot, once I move on to my alts it starts to look and feel overly grindy. Hell, even just letting Apex and Tin Mage contribute there would be nice.
- On a related note: ixp should be shared through the whole league, not just your team. At least if the bulk of the ixp is coming from killing the "trash" - on leagues that designate one team to killing reinforcements, if your slots aren't unlocked yet you best hope you're on that team.
- Not being able to skip the cut scenes.
And that's it. Overall I'm having a lot of fun (with the odd bit of frustration - check your ******* temp powers for acid!) and I'm eager to see what's coming down the line.
My one big hope is that we'll have an Issue 20.5 or Issue 21 that allows us to earn iXP and Threads in the older content.
I genuinely enjoy the new trials, but having only two to proceed in the Incarnate system is rather limiting. For me it's akin to having only the ITF to get from 35 to 50. I like the ITF, but doing it over and over and over again would kill it pretty quickly for me.
I do try ration the new trials for myself so I won't get burned out on them in a week, even if it means it'll take forever to get my 7 50s Incarnated out (on the plus side, that means it won't be as long for I21 when I'm done), but, well, the siren's song of the new Incarnate slots is hard to resist.
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You've summer up near everything I had to say and feel about all of this.|
Originally Posted by Sardan
I wasn't able to test i20, I only read about it sporadically on the forums. So I knew about the 2 new trials, and I was concerned by the high failure rate reported. I also read just enough about all the new Incarnate salvage that it made my head spin.
When i20 went live, the amount of doom-crying was high:
I predicted that within a couple of months people would have strategies figured out and the presence of people on leagues who already had lots of beyond-Alpha slots unlocked would make the tasks easier. I was wrong. The transition from "OMG this is too hard!" to "If you listen to simple directions this isn't very hard" happened some time before I started playing on Saturday. So what I predicted would happen in a couple of months took less than a week. Not casual friendly? Many people have wrung their hands because part of CoH's appeal is being the casual-friendly MMO and they worried about end game raiding ruining that. While the Incarnate Trials are definitely harder than regular content, they are fast and can easily be done by a first-timer as long as he or she will follow some simple directions. I think that qualifies as a casual-friendly end game! I can't stress enough my gratitude to the devs that even though the Incarnate Trials are intended to be hard, they're designed to be sub-hour encounters. If these were multi-hour encounters, players like me would only be able to participate rarely. Yes, the Incarnate system IS designed to be a time sink. Welcome to MMOs. If you only do a couple of Incarnate Trials a week it will take you a long time to unlock and equip the various slots. But that's by design; just as you're not intended to get to level 50 in a weekend, you're not intended to blaze through the Incarnate system in a few days either. Incarnate currency overload? While I understand Posi's reasoning for the new Incarnate currency I strongly dislike it. This is one area that I think might inhibit vets from returning to the game. Just try explaining to someone how to create set IOs and the benefits they give, then the Alpha slot and shards, then the other Incarnate slots and threads. Bleah. Incarnate grind? This one I now strongly sympathize with. It really gets old fast having to run the same 2 tasks repeatedly. Still I don't blame the devs. I'd rather have i20 now than wait for more Trials to be created/tested. Too grindy? Take a break and do something else. This is a problem that will solve itself after they release a few more Incarnate Trials. I'm going to follow my own advice and not do any Incarnate trials for a while.  After two long days, they are indeed feeling pretty grindy. |
Due to work, I had no to little opportunity to Beta test (that plus beta testing burnout for the last few issues), thus, when I20 went live, most of it was as new to me from the getgo. As such, my first few attempts at the trials ended in our team/league's utter failure, as everyone was trying to understand the stategies. I'll admit, I was demoralized by this, angry even, that the content was too over the top/difficult/grindy. As my Irish/Lithuanian/German temper subsided, I found that dying repeatedly, and 'learning as we went' strategizing aided our teams/leagues in figuring out what to do.
Truthfully, I am equally amazed at the 'vertical' learning curve that this game's players have overcome in only a week's time. Put a challenge in front of some of these die-hard players, and in short-span, they'll steamroll it (I'm sure, much to the devs chagrin).
As such, I am overall happy with the content, and have enjoyed dozens of runs with the trials, unlocking Judgement and Interface (and tier 1 slotting each of them), and 1/2 done with unlocking Lore and (the other one; lol can't remember), all on three 50s.
I'll continue to roll with these trials, grindy as they are, so long as I don't burnout and overdo them. Effort over time, I guess.
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To my understanding this is server-side, and there is no excuse for it. It's like lag hill in the ITF; do we really need all those Romans standing around and patrolling the edges of the map, where most teams will never encounter them? Creating content your systems can't handle is a failure in design, period.
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Originally Posted by Sardan
If I allow myself to stray outside of that framework, my biggest gripe by far is how the client UI gets out of synch with the server especially during the prisoner phase of the BAF. Not being able to fire off powers that appear to be recharged is maddening. I was playing my Dom and it was seriously un-fun to wait until a bunch of mobs grouped up just so for maximum AoE hold effectiveness when... surprise! The AoE hold wasn't recharged after all! Grrr.
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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
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Excellent post and I agree with everything you said. Even though my personal prediction of routinely succesfull PuG trials within 2 weeks, was more accurate. 
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As you say, the problem lies more with the limited time and resources of the development team rather than with a flaw in the overal design.|
Originally Posted by Sardan
Incarnate grind?
This one I now strongly sympathize with. It really gets old fast having to run the same 2 tasks repeatedly. Still I don't blame the devs. I'd rather have i20 now than wait for more Trials to be created/tested. Too grindy? Take a break and do something else. This is a problem that will solve itself after they release a few more Incarnate Trials. I'm going to follow my own advice and not do any Incarnate trials for a while. After two long days, they are indeed feeling pretty grindy. |
All I hope for is that the next batch of trials will stilll be useable to unlock the currently available slots and that no new line of salvage is added for the next set of Incarnate slots. And I hope the next set of trials doesn't take 4-5 months to reach us. I can wait a bit longer on the slots themselves.
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agreed ten million times over
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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
To my understanding this is server-side, and there is no excuse for it. It's like lag hill in the ITF; do we really need all those Romans standing around and patrolling the edges of the map, where most teams will never encounter them? Creating content your systems can't handle is a failure in design, period.
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Folding@Home
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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
To my understanding this is server-side, and there is no excuse for it. It's like lag hill in the ITF; do we really need all those Romans standing around and patrolling the edges of the map, where most teams will never encounter them? Creating content your systems can't handle is a failure in design, period.
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I agree. There are certain maps that are just broken for teams - Boomtown in the Reichsmann TF is the same
Thelonious Monk
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It's not "mobs standing around and patrolling." The lag comes from the server generating about 60-70 mobs at a time (or more) every few seconds. If they were pre-spawned there would likely be much less lag. Remember, the ITF lag only happens under the Bridge where spawns will rush out of the doors when each General is killed. This is why you can herd up both of the towers in the ITF'S last mission with relatively no lag; the mobs have been generated already. The enemies under the Bridge and in the BAF's second phase are not, so the server has to spit them out.
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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
To my understanding this is server-side, and there is no excuse for it. It's like lag hill in the ITF; do we really need all those Romans standing around and patrolling the edges of the map, where most teams will never encounter them? Creating content your systems can't handle is a failure in design, period.
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By far the worst for me is the final room in the LGTF.
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Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker
I agree. There are certain maps that are just broken for teams - Boomtown in the Reichsmann TF is the same
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Awesome summary. Some notes of my own
The Good:
Love the raids. Hated WOW raids (1+ hours of making a perfect group and the rest of the time spent failing for no gains is not fun)
Love the new powers.
The bad:
LFG is a complete failure as it is. Prime time on freedom seems like the only trial you can LFG solo into is the lambda without waiting around forever. LFG is a negative feedback loop that is out of control right now. The worse it works, the less it gets used, the worse it works...
The ugly:
Maybe have the same number of components as you have trials. So 2 commons, 2 uncommons, etc. What we have is a bit insane. Costs dont need to change, just less of the same stuff with a different name would be nice. I agree that new currencies are required, just how many different nickles do you really need?
The servers are not able to handle the load. Optimize the code or throw more hardware at it. Hardware is usually cheaper.
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I'm one of those players that looked at the trials on the beta boards and thought to myself "Those are probably too tough and/or not casual friendly enough for me to ever be interested in."
Then, they hit the live servers, everyone was playing them and saying how much fun they are, even the failed ones. I decided to hop on a couple. First one on day one or two with my completely unalpha'd MA/SR scrapper, even though I'd heard the reports that they completely murder defense (which they did), it barely failed because I, and a few others, lost sight of Marauder from trips to the hospital and we had him down to about 5% health when it timed out.
Then I tried the LFG queue on Virtue with my level shifted blaster on the BAF, things went ok until the final part when we had lost a couple people, and had already started with the near minimum, and just didn't have the co-ordination or manpower to take out Nightstar, Siege, and the reinforcements at the same time with only 10 people.
Tried the BAF again on my once again non-alpha'd scrapper, this time pre-formed full league. Things went pretty smoothly and it was a success. Not only that, but I was able to breakdown enough threads to create myself a common alpha slot.
So yeah, they convinced me in the end.
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Ah that makes sense, and also explains why the escapee phase is so laggy: the server has to generate large numbers of minions <s every few seconds.
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
It's not "mobs standing around and patrolling." The lag comes from the server generating about 60-70 mobs at a time (or more) every few seconds. If they were pre-spawned there would likely be much less lag. Remember, the ITF lag only happens under the Bridge where spawns will rush out of the doors when each General is killed. This is why you can herd up both of the towers in the ITF'S last mission with relatively no lag; the mobs have been generated already. The enemies under the Bridge and in the BAF's second phase are not, so the server has to spit them out.
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Freedom: Blazing Larb, Fiery Fulcrum, Sardan Reborn, Arctic-Frenzy, Wasabi Sam, Mr Smashtastic.
And yes, if the new currency is solely to hamper the hoarders, then probably should expect new currency with the next 2 trials since the current 2 makes it very easy to amass a stockpile of threads long before they put out the new stuff.