What would you change for CoH2?

I have a brute and yet I have the option to pick between those 2 powers.

You've explained the qualitative design of World of Arcanaville, and most of it I'm down with. What I'm interested in is the quantitative design of that game:

Considering the above 2 statements, how would a powers designer decide what was "equitable"? What does equitable mean in your design? If the "Arcana" of your game would be stymied by the math required to figure if one power is "better" than another, how is a powers designer supposed to set the numerical effects levels without resorting to the "iterative design" model for which you've taken our current devs to task?

All super heroes and villains now come from the planet Zeist.



.

Two answers. First, there would be design rules which were themselves designed to enforce the appropriate balance requirements that the powers designers would be required to follow most of the time. CoH designers have those now, and they were intended to perform a similar function - although they don't. The damage/recharge rule, for example, attempts to codify this game's qualitative judgment on the relative benefit of damage over time and burst damage. Attacks that do more damage per activation obviously do more damage upfront, but due to the recharge rule they generally do less damage over time. Other factors conspire to blur or even destroy this distinction, but that is what that rule attempts to do.

The more interesting second answer is how would those rules themselves be crafted. And the short answer is that they would be designed around mechanical bottlenecks that guaranteed certain aspects of performance were constrained to reasonably narrow ranges, while other aspects of performance were allowed to range wildly. The power design rules would ensure that the game's explicit bottlenecks were honored, while allowing higher latitude to the designers to implement effects unrelated to them.

Important to note that this game was intended to have lots of bottlenecks: endurance, recharge, etc. However, due to the way the designers implemented the powers and enhancement system, it only really has one: cast time. That's why so much of the fundamental balancing design rules in this game fail. They factor in bottlenecks that aren't actually enforced, while ignoring completely the one bottleneck that cannot be manipulated by the players.


There's another thought I've had for some time now, and that is that another way to ensure that power choices are less quantitative and more qualitative is to simply decouple combat from rewards. Or to put it more simply, design your reward system so it rewards accomplishments more and kills less. Its almost MMO heresy to suggest that the majority of your rewards come from anything other than killing things, but it was also MMO heresy to make a game that is mostly instanced. If we are spending most of our time running instanced missions as opposed to street sweeping, our time is mostly spent running highly controlled mission environments with a much higher diversity of possible objectives. As far back as CoV beta I questioned why it was that a stalker stealthing to the end of a mission and clicking on the blinkie at the end was considered an exploit. Isn't that what stalkers do? Perhaps the reward was too high for that specific behavior, but why is it essentially *disallowed* in this game? Because it seems to be an obvious rule that if you don't have to kill anything, you're somehow cheating, because this game is balanced on the premise that your performance should be related to the speed at which you kill things.

But if rewards came from a much more diverse set of objectives by design and intent not only would that make for a more interesting game in my opinion, it would lessen the advantage of quantifying the precise offense and defense of every power. When all is said and done, all of those calculations would have to somehow be compared to the potentially large qualitative but difficult to quantify benefits of stealth, fast movement, object manipulating powers, alternate damage types, etc. That would be like figuring out the optimal way to slot Combat Jumping without knowing how to determine the relative strengths of Dark Armor and Invulnerability.

One of Turbine's games does EXACTLY this. It's all instanced combat -- there isn't even non-instanced 'sweeping' in public zones, if you're fighting, it's in an instance or it's arena PvP -- and they don't give ANY XP at all for kills in mission instances (there are wilderness instances where kills give XP, but it's a very, very small amount compared to mission rewards).

Instead, you have a base amount of XP for the mission, and each player in the group gets that XP at mission complete as long as they participated. There are modifiers: If someone dies a bunch, they lose XP. If people exit the instance and re-enter, that gets a hit to XP.

If the group hits certain bonus criteria, like killing most, almost all, or all enemies, they get bonus XP. If they hit certain optional objectives, bonus XP. There's even a bonus for killing almost nobody or actually killing nobody. This is possible in some of their missions with the right use of character abilities/spells.

They also lean VERY heavily on semi-randomized optional objectives. Things that aren't always there (but obviously are pre-set for the mission itself).

Personally, I've felt that that game had some of the best mission design from a gameplay standpoint in the industry. Those kinds of missions in a CoX style setting with CoX style character abilities and Paragon's writing (as per the Praetoria zones) would be AMAZING to me.

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

And one of the big complaints with that particular game is that many of the missions encourage speed running. If the optional XP wasn't worth the time spent getting it, it was skipped. That was slightly improved by changes that made getting every available XP important for some characters, but it was still there for everyone else.

Not that it can't work, but it does have inherent dangers that need to be addressed.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Sorry. I can't get behind Archetypes as they're currently implemented. They're far too limited and restrictive. Too many comic characters don't fit into the ones we have and rather than try and make up a dozen more ATs to properly accommodate those kinds of characters, I think the AT concept should be ditched.

Sure, put guidelines for casual/new players to follow so they have a viable character, but don't dictate to me that my swordsman can't carry a pair of guns or that my flying strong man isn't allowed to throw a fire ball if he wants or that a martial artist can't be psychic.


.

My counter argument is simply that this hypothetical CoH2 will be, just like CoX is now, a GAME - and to work at a game, you have to maintain a certain balance. Character creation is where that starts, and if you don't put some hard limits on the players right away, you end up with a broken mess.

Now, I do believe the AT system can be reworked, and made to accommodate concepts for characters that don't fit in to the CoX system - like your Swords & Guns above. (We can already have a fireball-throwing Flying Strongman in CoX. And I am not sure what you want for a psychic martial artist.) But tossing ATs aside entirely?

No.

I've thought about the idea for a long time, but I have Cryptic to thank for implementing a version of it in one of their MMOs that proves to me its workable if the rest of the game is designed around the concept.

I actually don't think CoH did archetypes correctly. But I also know that the second superhero MMO proves a completely archetype-less game is worse.

The third superhero MMO proves it can get even worse than that.

The way I would do it is the way CO *almost* did it, and then for some reason they either changed their minds or never intended to do it that way and it was all a huge miscommunication. I would steal the concept of frameworks from the HERO system. Thematic synergy would be awarded, but scattered power collections could still be made for the most part. The important thing is you could not have everything. When you can have everything, you're basically self-nerfing yourself hard not taking everything. That's why CO originally had a huge problem with melee-focused characters: melee characters were just ranged characters without range: a self nerf with no commensurate benefit. Here, being melee is meaningful. There, unless Superman has heat vision on auto he's an idiot.

So in other words, if you wanted to be physically resistant to damage and have physically strong melee attacks there would be a framework for that, and those correlated abilities would cost less as a package deal. On the other hand, if you want to be resistant to physical damage but deal ranged lightning attacks, that would cost more ala carte. *What* you specifically correlate is the tricky question. CoH essentially correlates personal defense and melee offense: to get range you have to give up personal defense, or give up damage magnitude and trade personal defense for support powers, that sort of thing. A framework system would have to make more intricate tradeoffs.

Unless you have a means to balance those characters that don't seem to fit within our current ATs (knowing you, you're talking about your inability to make a 'Superman' character), you're talking out of your bum.

You shouldn't be able to make Superman in a game because then you win. And if you don't win, there'd have to be some stupid tired excuse that explains why your invulnerability didn't make you immune to everything thrown at you or why your fist didn't liquify anything coming into contact with it.

How does Superman possibly work in comics but is seemingly impossible in a game? Well, he always uses kid gloves. Are we expecting players to keep kid gloves on 90% of the time to police their own power levels? If you think so, you're very naive

Well, actually, that is workable. Stances have been thrown around forever. If you had one that dramatically increased damage and secondary effects while entirely negating recovery and having an endurance cost to boot, it would reduce the amount of time players used it.

It's possible you could make synergistic connections based off of multiple tags (that might weight differently). If you want to encourage melee attacks correlating high durability, and ranged attacks correlating with some kind of support function, you can do that as certain tags the relevant powers share with their cousins. You can then have a set of other tags for things like elemental theme.

This would encourage tightly themed specific role combinations, without ruling out themed combinations that violate role expectations, or unthemed combinations that are not a strictly consistent theme. On the outside edge, this still ALLOWS someone to go outside of both ... at notable cost.

The tricky part is giving incentives to balance the options of more powers of your tightly themed powers (perhaps different effects that are each very effective in different situations) versus different attack types (different elements/whatever that would do more damage against certain enemy types).

Different kinds of versatility. Applying Your Thing to more potential situations, or being able to do Different Things in different potential situations (but not as many Different Things as a tightly themed character... but fewer situations that would put you in a 'oh crap how do i hurt the guy that's resistant to my One Thing?' bind.)

This is possibly not entirely coherent. I blame the somnolent powers of the cat.

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

What of Deadpool, who is physically resilient by way of Regeneration and has both ranged and melee attacks in Dual Blades, Pistols AND Martial arts?

Or Batman, who has Willpower, Martial Arts, ranged attacks, holds, team buffs, etc.

Iron Man 'does everything too'. And Thor.

The fact of the matter is, pretty much every super hero has at least one melee attack, one ranged attack ability, something that keeps them in the fight (be it dodging, force of will or invulnerability), some way they buff or shield their teammates (leadership, power ring bubble, encouragement) and some way of subduing enemies (web, bear hug, block of ice).

Yes, most super heroes DO do everything. Granted, that's not the same as doing everything exceptionally well. Deadpool, while his melee abilities are top tier, probably isn't that great a long range shot and he relies on his self rez quite a bit.

But that's much different than what we have currently, which is that Deadpool is absolutely not allowed to carry guns period, and if he was it would only be after level 41. And no way is he allowed to have swords and ever roundhouse kick someone.

To me, comics don't resound with what classes and ATs are usually about, which is "I really only do two things and only one of them well". Heck, it doesn't really work in the context of a lot of genres.

"Durr! I'm a knight and couldn't possibly work dat dere crossbow!"

Instead of

"Well, I'm trained in crossbow and can use it if I put the shield down for a second, but the armor makes it slower to reload".



.

On a completely related note, if you can provide a game that can (along with only a couple other requirements) provide the experience where my character can swoop into Crey's Folly, summon the entire horde of Freakshow into a very large conjured Cuisinart, hit liquify, and still fail the mission...... I'd probably buy a lifetime sub.

What about them?

Except for, you know, VEATs. Yet, they still somehow don't become dominant uber-characters.

In comparison to HEATs they do. :D

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

VEATs are no exception, they make comparable sacrifices. Among other things, VEATs sacrifice modifiers to get some additional diversity. Lower damage modifiers and lower health for one. Special design rules that moderate DPA for another. They pay significantly for their exception to the ranged/mitigation exclusion rule, which is *why* they don't become the dominant uber-character. They do come the closest to the ranged scrapper that dominates CO, but they do not reach that level.

I'd prefer to start out as a full-fledged hero; maybe even start a real villain once in awhile. Not everyone is amoral in the beginning, at adulthood or whenever age our characters start out at.

What could be done, using the current system as a base, is that you select the type you want to play: Hero, Vigilante, Rogue, Villain. More options could be added, or possibly those mentioned subdivided; for examples, Villain might give you two options: independent or joining Arachnos, Hero could divided into Freedom Phalanx, Vanguard, independent. Those selections determine your first contact instead of the Origins doing so now.