What is the Ultimate "FREEDOM"?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-07-11 20:35 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Cryptic has tried twice to create a free-form power building system and wound up both times creating a class sytem instead, although, they'll only admit to one being a class system.
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I have high hopes for Funcom's upcoming project...
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm unaware of an MMO that's done it right. I'd be interested in studying one that has, or at least that people think has.
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I'm not sure how hard they tried the second time really. I wasn't in the beta for this game, but I pretty much saw the entire second round from the very beginning. From the very beginning, it was apparent to me that the technical engineering required to create one was outside their specific development capabilities. They actually did things during the process that were insane by City of Heroes *launch* standards, which was a gigantic leap backwards.|
Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Cryptic has tried twice to create a free-form power building system and wound up both times creating a class sytem instead, although, they'll only admit to one being a class system.
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At one point, and I'm not making this up, the powers system presented you with this option: of the over one dozen powers you could take, you could take the functional equivalent of perma-elude, perma-unstoppable, and perma-instant healing each for a single power choice. And you could be a ranged blaster while doing so.
The reason to *not* take those three powers would be...? You want ten attacks instead of nine? They eventually fixed this by forcing you to take only one passive defense power (or at least only have one active at a time). I think people who were not in the beta would be *stunned* to know just how late in the game's development that decision occurred.
Edit: also, they went from a game that launched with five classes to a game that launched with one: Ranged Scrappers. Everything is a ranged scrapper. Everything can take range: taking melee is an optional choice with virtually no benefit (although they've tried to address that over time). Everything has scrapper-level defenses unless they specifically go out of their way to not use them, because the alternatives to taking passive defenses are largely non-credible options. Stances are an interesting idea, but fundamentally speaking they didn't offer players choices, because there are no choices. Nothing you do can really offer you a different set of choices than anyone else, so everyone is almost completely identical in terms of fundamental choices. And that means there is essentially one class.
That's not automatically true of a "classless" system. Classless systems can have choices governed by prior choices, so that for example even in City of Heroes there is in one sense just one kind of Widow, but once you pick one side your choices become different from players that take the other side. So there really are two that are mutually exclusive. Everyone (that rolls widows) has the option to go either way, but there are two distinct choices with two very distinct playstyle options.
In that other game, almost nothing you do has much of a noticable impact on downstream choices. Taking an offensive passive does not change my offensive options relative to taking a defensive one. In CoH, choosing to take defensive powers essentially requires taking a melee archetype: you're forgoing playing a ranged attacker for the most part. That's a distinct choice. By giving almost unlimited choice in what powers you can take, they made almost all choices meaningless to gameplay and therefore indistinct. So really, there's just one choice and everyone is forced into it, unless you want to self-nerf yourself for fun.
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As a friend of mine just pointed out, people keeping score IN the beta were stunned, too.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
They eventually fixed this by forcing you to take only one passive defense power (or at least only have one active at a time). I think people who were not in the beta would be *stunned* to know just how late in the game's development that decision occurred.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
At one point, and I'm not making this up, the powers system presented you with this option: of the over one dozen powers you could take, you could take the functional equivalent of perma-elude, perma-unstoppable, and perma-instant healing each for a single power choice. And you could be a ranged blaster while doing so.
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This has always been why I'm wary of "power trees" and unlimited flexibility in game choices. Too many choices that are too varied actually reduces the number of choices. Characters with infinite choices are too easy to min/max, and a maxed character either dominates the entire game or the content is shifted to deal with the min/maxers, forcing everyone else to min/max as well.
I think CoX is the biggest winner in this portion of game design on the current market. Using the blast sets as an example, the powers really are fairly closely related from set to set. But the game makes you play that entire set as a distinct swim lane instead of letting you grab from all over. You do have the possibility of a secondary set and tertiary and can min/max those to some extent, but since you will always have some combo of sets that do similar (but not exactly the same) things, the end result can be controlled.
To call up another example of a game nearly imploding under its own flexibility rules, AD&D v3 and v3.5 allowed you to combine a nearly infinite number of classes and subclasses. But the way the system worked, you would need to play a very specific way: for example if you want a level 1 Monk level 19 Cleric, you had to make sure to start as a Monk because you weren't allowed to switch to that class later. But the fun really got started when you had stuff like level 1 Lawful Evil Elf Warriors with 12 Dexterity who became Nightblades for the +2 Dex which qualified them for Arcane Archer before turning Neutral at level 10 and becoming a Druid for the ability to sneak attack while shapeshifted, and so on.
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In overall design, I actually consider City of Heroes to be a power tree. The tree has fourteen initial branches: you pick an archetype. Then you pick from one of a handful of primaries, and then a handful of secondaries, with a few restrictions on combinations. Overall, you end up with a couple hundred distinct non-overlapping choices. From that point on, the number of fundamental choices drops off dramatically: some players complain that all Fire/Fire blasters are similar at high levels when they mature, and there is some truth to that claim. But CoH still ends up with a couple hundred different legitimate choices for gameplay. All of those "swimlanes" represent opportunities for replay.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
This has always been why I'm wary of "power trees" and unlimited flexibility in game choices. Too many choices that are too varied actually reduces the number of choices. Characters with infinite choices are too easy to min/max, and a maxed character either dominates the entire game or the content is shifted to deal with the min/maxers, forcing everyone else to min/max as well.
I think CoX is the biggest winner in this portion of game design on the current market. Using the blast sets as an example, the powers really are fairly closely related from set to set. But the game makes you play that entire set as a distinct swim lane instead of letting you grab from all over. You do have the possibility of a secondary set and tertiary and can min/max those to some extent, but since you will always have some combo of sets that do similar (but not exactly the same) things, the end result can be controlled. |
When you let people pick whatever they want, whenever they want, with very little in the way of prerequisites, that's not a tree. That's really a single gigantic power pool you can take anything out of, more or less. And essentially, when everyone is picking from one power pool, you basically have one archetype. A true tree would have legitimate choice-altering branches. That other game lacks those, so it lacks distinction in choices, so the number of real choices is actually *lower* and not higher than ours. That was a fundamentally bad mistake in my opinion.
The problem isn't power trees, but whether the branches in the tree are meaningful. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. The tree that goes Scrapper -> Claws -> Invuln is a strong if somewhat shallow tree. The one that goes Widow -> Fortunata is a shallower but more extended (in time) tree. And the most important aspect of choosing a powerset is that it locks you out of all other powers in all other powersets of the same type. This "limitation" is fundamental to why the choice is actually meaningful. Its not a weakness of the design: its a critical strength.
Our trees are disguised, but they're there. And they work very well, and they are something many players have not given proper credit to since the beginning of the game. But I knew what they were doing for this game, which is why I was so interested to see what Cryptic would do when they decided to eliminate that axiom from their design. I guessed they would not realize how much power that accidental choice granted to City of Heroes, and how important it was to replicate that power in any new system in some way shape or form. I believe that guess was unambiguously vindicated.
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But you admit that a free-form power selection system could be done in CoH. The technical and balancing problems are solvable.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
And the most important aspect of choosing a powerset is that it locks you out of all other powers in all other powersets of the same type. This "limitation" is fundamental to why the choice is actually meaningful. Its not a weakness of the design: its a critical strength.
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The next step is giving such a system useful choices so that players have to make decisions, and you hit it on the head; selecting some powers should exclude other powers. Ranged attacks could exclude strong defenses. Buff and debuff powers could exclude melee attacks. Strong defenses could exclude control powers. The CoH power system could be organized not as a tree, but as a type system like Magic: The Gathering where some power types oppose other power types and cannot be mixed. In this way you would have meaningful choices that lead to the exact same archetypes we currently have but with more player customization.
It's doable. I can understand them not wanting to put the resources into it, because now they're all about getting new players rather than improving play experience for veterans. But it is within the realm of possibility, and it's a feature that some players desire.
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Once you have exclusionary choices -- which we agree is critical -- you effectively have a tree. Your available options naturally narrow as you make choices that cannot be combined. |
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
But you admit that a free-form power selection system could be done in CoH. The technical and balancing problems are solvable.
The next step is giving such a system useful choices so that players have to make decisions, and you hit it on the head; selecting some powers should exclude other powers. Ranged attacks could exclude strong defenses. Buff and debuff powers could exclude melee attacks. Strong defenses could exclude control powers. The CoH power system could be organized not as a tree, but as a type system like Magic: The Gathering where some power types oppose other power types and cannot be mixed. In this way you would have meaningful choices that lead to the exact same archetypes we currently have but with more player customization. |
"Free-form" is a loaded term, because to a lot of people it means roughly what Cryptic tried to do for their second game: I can pick whatever powers I want.
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Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I can understand them not wanting to put the resources into it, because now they're all about getting new players rather than improving play experience for veterans. But it is within the realm of possibility, and it's a feature that some players desire.
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Yes, they want new players, but that's not ALL they want. They want to also make the game awesome, but Paragon Studios has finite resources. They have to decide what they can budget to do for us, both in time and in finances. They do what they think will have the greatest returns in the near term, and plan for setting up the ability to do larger things longer term.
A key thing to note is that 'Near term' is 'the next 9-15 months' in a studio like this.
If you look at what happened after Paragon escaped Cryptic's management, it's fairly evident that they began positioning to do larger things immediately, but those larger things took a while to even be hinted upon. Never mind when they actually showed up where we could see it.
Have you considered that they might need a larger playerbase in order to be able to budget larger projects?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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If they sell XP, I stop playing. Simple as that. This is the kind of desperate crap games pull when there's no other way for them to stay afloat, not when they're supposedly expanding. Paying for in-game advantages should never happen, and no matter to what extent it might already be happening, I intend to fight it tooth and nail wherever it rears its ugly head. "Pay to win" is easily the worst, most damaging aspect of "free to play" models, and it has the capacity to ruin games.
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Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I agree with you. But it's already happening. They're even floating the idea of directly purchasing XP. All I'm saying is that if they're going to twist the game with the influx of real money, they might as well twist it into something that offers new gameplay experiences.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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They're the same between all players, and constitute a significant increase in ability for no investment from your actual build. There is no situation in the entire game where having veteran powers is worse than not having them. The very worst situation at all is when you just have no use for them, but even then you're still better off having them than not. Yet these powers are not customizable, they're inappropriate for many concepts and they are, to be quite honest, ugly. And at the same time, anyone not using them is gimping himself, because they are just that good.|
Originally Posted by Emberly
May I ask how veteran powers and booster pack powers are harming the game or your experience thereof? I'm being serious.
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I can give you an easy example: Controllers have a low damage mod and almost no direct damage attacks for quite a long time. This is how the AT is balanced. But this doesn't really matter, because from level 1, veteran Controllers have access to the Nemesis Staff, the Black Wand and the Sands of Mu for no cost whatsoever. This gives veteran Controllers a significant advantage over newbie Controllers, and creates a situation which I HATE. Character power should not be dictated by the amount of money spent or the length of time of veteran status. It should be dictated by the player's ability to manage a build and possibly by the player's ability to find the components needed to do so. Sure, veteran players will have an advantage in that regard, as well, but this advantage can be quickly closed up with enough effort and for no cost whatsoever.
I want a game that's fair to all players regardless of standing, wealth or property. The build system is ALMOST fair in this way, City Traveller notwithstanding, because even if we veterans know what to take from it, for everything we take, there are a whole bunch of things we DON'T take. Now, if you needed to give up a power pick to get and use the Nemesis Staff, then fine. I wouldn't complain. Or, alternately, if EVERYONE had a "misc" power pool that they were forced to pick something from and the Nemesis Staff was one item out of a list, then that's fine, too. But the Nemesis Staff is a benefit with absolutely no downsides to the players that have it, yet completely unavailable to the players that don't. This is very much not fine.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
When you let people pick whatever they want, whenever they want, with very little in the way of prerequisites, that's not a tree. That's really a single gigantic power pool you can take anything out of, more or less. And essentially, when everyone is picking from one power pool, you basically have one archetype. A true tree would have legitimate choice-altering branches. That other game lacks those, so it lacks distinction in choices, so the number of real choices is actually *lower* and not higher than ours. That was a fundamentally bad mistake in my opinion.
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This actually gets into the territory of the Mary Sue and has some of the same problems. The primary problem with a Mary Sue is she's one single character who can do what all the other charters can do, and better. What point, then, is there to having those other characters at all? Why would play as them? I recall playing a WWE game on the PC back in the day, and when making a custom wrestler, I made his move list be just a combination of all the existing wrestler's finishers. And he was a strong wrestler. He was. But then when I played some of the existing ones, I was very disappointed because they were so much weaker and they couldn't perform a finisher out of most situations, since they only had one. Why the hell would I ever want to play them at all?
If you don't force people's characters to inherit some kind of weakness, then players themselves will almost never intentionally choose to have one. Players don't play games to lose, and almost no-one would ever pick a clearly inferior power over a clearly superior one. The only time people accept having weaknesses is when they're given a package of powers that has both strengths and weaknesses to it. In other words, they'll only ever accept taking a weakness when the game mandates that they have one and are simply allowed to choose which one that is. In fact, speaking purely for myself, if I'm given the choice between being much stronger in one aspect but much weaker in another and being strong in all aspects, I will pick the latter every time.
Choice is good to the extent it allows you to build the exact character that's in your head. Choice isn't good when you try to extend it to allow you choose not to have any weaknesses.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I tend to picture this as two trees, but I'll do this with Invulnerability since I know that set better.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The problem isn't power trees, but whether the branches in the tree are meaningful. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. The tree that goes Scrapper -> Claws -> Invuln is a strong if somewhat shallow tree.
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Tanker Invulnerability:
Temporary Invulnerability or Resist Physical Damage: Player must spend her initial buy-in power point in one of these two powers.
Dull Pain: Must have spent at least one power point in the Invulnerability Tree, Must have spent two power points over all.
Resist Elements: Must have at least one power point in the Invulnerability Tree, Must have spent four power points over all.
Unyielding: Must have at least one power point in the Invulnerability Tree, must have spent five power points over all.
Resist Elements: Must have at least one power point in the Invulnerability Tree, must have spent seven power points over all.
Invincibility: Must have at least one power point in the Invulnerability tree, must have spent ten power points over all.
Tough Hide: Must have at least one power point in the Invulnerability tree, must have spent fourteen power points over all.
Unstoppable: Must have at least one power point in the Invulnerability tree, must have spent seventeen power points over all.
Now, one way to switch to free form building is to change the prerequisites for each power, eg:
Invincibility: Must have at least seven power points in the Invulnerability tree, must have ten power points over all.
However, I think this would necessitate redesigning a lot of sets, because there are some powers that currently have no prerequisites that would really need them, and I don't see a way to get rid of archetypes with this method. Energy Melee, for example, is shared between Stalkers, Brutes, and Tanks. The prerequisites for Energy Transfer on each archetype are different. Tankers need to have spent at least 18 power points to have access to Energy Transfer, Stalkers can get it with just 14, and Brutes get it at 17. If archetypes are not maintained, how do you keep a Brute from getting Energy Transfer with just 14 power points?
The amount of work involved in switching to a free-form system would be entirely massive, and the game we ended up with afterwards would be so different that it wouldn't really be City of Heroes anymore. It might make for a good City of Heroes sequel though, if they included a new engine and a graphics upgrade.
For City of Heroes, I'd like to see the Ancillary Power Pools expanded to allow more concepts, similarly to how the Incarnate powers have begun to be expanded.
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Thanks for the reply, Samuel_Tow. I guess my confusion comes from the fact that players are not in competition with each other regarding power levels, and so I am not sure why it matters that your controller, with seven years of vet rewards, has access to powers that my three-week-old account doesn't. Fairness doesn't register for me in this instance, because someone else having a vet reward doesn't detract from my gameplay experience in any way. It sounds like it gets under your skin, but I don't see how it actually affects your gameplay. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
They're the same between all players, and constitute a significant increase in ability for no investment from your actual build. There is no situation in the entire game where having veteran powers is worse than not having them. The very worst situation at all is when you just have no use for them, but even then you're still better off having them than not. Yet these powers are not customizable, they're inappropriate for many concepts and they are, to be quite honest, ugly. And at the same time, anyone not using them is gimping himself, because they are just that good.
I can give you an easy example: Controllers have a low damage mod and almost no direct damage attacks for quite a long time. This is how the AT is balanced. But this doesn't really matter, because from level 1, veteran Controllers have access to the Nemesis Staff, the Black Wand and the Sands of Mu for no cost whatsoever. This gives veteran Controllers a significant advantage over newbie Controllers, and creates a situation which I HATE. Character power should not be dictated by the amount of money spent or the length of time of veteran status. It should be dictated by the player's ability to manage a build and possibly by the player's ability to find the components needed to do so. Sure, veteran players will have an advantage in that regard, as well, but this advantage can be quickly closed up with enough effort and for no cost whatsoever. I want a game that's fair to all players regardless of standing, wealth or property. The build system is ALMOST fair in this way, City Traveller notwithstanding, because even if we veterans know what to take from it, for everything we take, there are a whole bunch of things we DON'T take. Now, if you needed to give up a power pick to get and use the Nemesis Staff, then fine. I wouldn't complain. Or, alternately, if EVERYONE had a "misc" power pool that they were forced to pick something from and the Nemesis Staff was one item out of a list, then that's fine, too. But the Nemesis Staff is a benefit with absolutely no downsides to the players that have it, yet completely unavailable to the players that don't. This is very much not fine. |
Put another way: from my point of view, someone else having a better/tougher/faster-killing character than I do affects me in no way whatsoever that I can see. In fact I run into it all the time because I don't find myself drawn to the bleeding edge of performance.
Can you give an example of how your gameplay or game experience might be negatively affected if (for example) a character joins your team possessing a power that isn't available to you for whatever reason? Of course, I don't mean that the Scrapper has Headsplitter and your Peacebringer doesn't; I mean something like you not being able to take the nem staff while the other character can. Is there a situation where someone else having access to these powers might deny you some reward in game? If so, I can understand being frustrated, because that would mean these powers are in fact an unfair advantage. I don't think it's the case, though.
The balancing problem is threefold. One part of it is the strictly mechanical evaluation of power. But the other two parts are what I think of as the mechanical/thematic mashup, and the respecability question.
Let's say we create a system where going down a "blast" route locks you out from going after armor. We might have Ice, Fire and Lightning blasts of some kind. But what if the -Recharge in one Ice Blast is really good, and the extra damage in one Fire power is especially a standout, and the -Endurance in one electric power is attractive? Then one of two things has to happen: we have to accept that players are going to min/max to the detriment of coherent theme, or we have to lock them out of thematic choices with too much conflict (including ensuring they can't "point buy" their way halfway up one tree and one third of the way into another to grab all the best powers). The former option is often troubling to players: they quickly find they want rails to keep the best choices from being cosmetic mismatches.
[Addendum: Note that medieval fantasy games have a leg up on superhero games here, as it is somewhat feasible for an Archmage to throw both lightning bolts and fireballs. People would be annoyed if a hero game's version of Iceman did the same. The thematic consideration is therefore somewhat related to the genre of the game; I would have more confidence in a system implemented for a high fantasy game than a hero one. But not much.]
One possible solution is to have an 'elemental blast: ranged', 'element blast: cone-based', 'elemental blast: pbaoe' etc powersets that players pick from, and then after picking that, they then pick an element, and the element determines the damage type and extra effects. However, while that does provide some flexibility, it's actually still "powersets." We've just moved the elemental type back a cog. And while this might work ok for something relativily repetative, like Blast sets, it likely wouldn't for buff/debuffs or controls. There isn't any system I can think of that could normalize powers as varied as Ice Slick, Flashfire, Mass Confusion, Telekinesis, and Phantom Army.
The other issue I mentioned is respeccability. Basically, the way I think of it, if I can't respec out of it, that's a "class" and not a "tree." While class/archetype selection involves branching, the locked investment prevents strategizing it as a temporary solution. You can't level up as a Super Strength/Fire Brute and switch over to an Ice/Force Field Controller. If you want that Ice troller, you have to strategize within the confines of the class.
One recent game provides 4 classes with 8 possible trees each. This sounds flexible, except it means its only worth playing through the game 4 times unless you just want to play different factions. A power selection system that let you respec without limitation encourages a similar outcome. Why bother playing a Fire Blaster from 1 to 50 when my Ice Blaster is a Fire Blaster who just isn't specced for it right now? Why bother leveling up as anything other than the fastest soloer ever? And if the game allows you to retain multiple builds you can switch between easily, the problem becomes more pronounced.
Basically, you end up back at powersets/classes again, and the need for meaningful boundaries.
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The way I would do it if I was doing it from scratch would be to use advantages and disadvantages. The current CoH playerbase is primed to oppose power disadvantages so it would be controversial here. But it would be a relatively trivial design detail in a game built from scratch.
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Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
But you admit that a free-form power selection system could be done in CoH. The technical and balancing problems are solvable.
The next step is giving such a system useful choices so that players have to make decisions, and you hit it on the head; selecting some powers should exclude other powers. Ranged attacks could exclude strong defenses. Buff and debuff powers could exclude melee attacks. Strong defenses could exclude control powers. The CoH power system could be organized not as a tree, but as a type system like Magic: The Gathering where some power types oppose other power types and cannot be mixed. In this way you would have meaningful choices that lead to the exact same archetypes we currently have but with more player customization. It's doable. I can understand them not wanting to put the resources into it, because now they're all about getting new players rather than improving play experience for veterans. But it is within the realm of possibility, and it's a feature that some players desire. |
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The trick, and its a very difficult trick to pull off, is to not attempt to value those powers based on a pure numerical effectiveness equation. Instead, you qualitatively value them with something I'll call "flair points" for now. Each of these powers would have some base cost, but also have a certain predefined limit on the number of them you could take, in effect by giving them an additional cost that is more limited than the individual costs of the power.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
There isn't any system I can think of that could normalize powers as varied as Ice Slick, Flashfire, Mass Confusion, Telekinesis, and Phantom Army.
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Just like most melee sets have a tier 9 that is difficult to fully quantify, just like Nova is a difficult power to value, every powerset would have an opportunity to get a certain number of these. Just making up examples, if you take Fulcrum shift, that's likely to be the only "flair" power you'll have. On the other hand, you might have enough discretion to take Voltaic Sentinel *and* Thunderous Blast. That sort of thing.
In reality, such open powersets are likely to be more restricted than the ones we have now. Its too dangerous to allow people to literally make Kinetics or even Illusion Control, not specifically because those powersets are overpowered, but rather because any power system that can create those two sets can likely create far more problematic ones.
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Concept wise, I'm not really sure what more would be accomplished with free-form building.
Sure, I'd like to have a sorcerer that can cast ice spells, fire spells, lightning spells, etc. And actually, that's something that the Incarnate powers have afforded me. Secular Energy got to 50, ran a number of trials and is now capable of casting Cone of Cold, Fireball, and Chain Lightning. Why I have to be level 50 to be able to cast level 5, level 3, and level 6 spells (respectively) I don't know, but I understand that, I wasn't able to cast Magic Missile until level 47, and that's a first level spell. That said, I wouldn't mind being able to make a character with Energy Blasts, Ice Blasts, Fire blasts, and Lightning blasts, with each of those being available prior to 50. But I don't need free form building for that to happen, that would just take a new blast set.
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To be honest, when I performed this thought experiment the last time, I wasn't specifically thinking about players. I was thinking about a way to autogenerate thematic critters.|
Originally Posted by MajorDecoy
Concept wise, I'm not really sure what more would be accomplished with free-form building.
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The idea was if I wanted a pseudo-individualistic boss, I would randomly generate a theme, say fire (or fire/ice, or energy/dark, or sword) from a table, then a melee/ranged preference, and then a set of numbers specifying weights for a set of parameters: control, offense, defense, support, movement. Based on those weights and the theme, the system would then autogenerate a critter to match, and bingo: one fire themed boss.
Its actually a slightly *harder* problem than making a free form player powerset creator in numerical design, so you sort of get that for free.
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It's not really a case of what other people have that I don't. I have almost all the Veteran Reward powers and every Booster Power ever released, just about. I have these powers, so it isn't really a case of me wanting something I don't have. It's the mentality and politics behind these powers that bothers me. Right now, the people who have these powers just kind of have them, they're veteran rewards. But if these start being sold for real money... That becomes a problem.|
Originally Posted by Emberly
Can you give an example of how your gameplay or game experience might be negatively affected if (for example) a character joins your team possessing a power that isn't available to you for whatever reason? Of course, I don't mean that the Scrapper has Headsplitter and your Peacebringer doesn't; I mean something like you not being able to take the nem staff while the other character can. Is there a situation where someone else having access to these powers might deny you some reward in game? If so, I can understand being frustrated, because that would mean these powers are in fact an unfair advantage. I don't think it's the case, though.
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I really hate "no-brainer" solutions for real money. Anything I can buy that gives me an advantage with no downside is problematic. Why? Because every time I run a mission without it and run into a serious problem of performance, I think: "Why am I torturing myself? Why not just BUY my way out of this situation?" Why? Because paying my way out of a hard spot is BAD GAMING.
I'll give you another example: You sit down to play an old-style point-and-click adventure. You meet a situation of bizarre logic, you spend a day wondering what to do, and finally figure out that you just had to arrange the soup cans on the floor. Doh! Of course! Then the next day a friend of yours comes over and leaves you a printed walkthrough of the entire game. You play some more, and reach another weird, bizarre puzzle you just don't know how to solve. It looks like it'll take you another day to solve, and it might be very hard to do. All of a sudden that walkthrough on the table looks oh so attractive. Do you resist using it and keep beating your head against a wall or do you check it "just this once?" Because try as I might not to, I usually check the walkthrough when the game pisses me off enough. But "just this once" is never just this once. Before long, every time I meet a puzzle I can't solve immediately, I go back to the walkthrough and simply read how to solve it.
Games should not allow us to cheat because even just having the ability to do so is a bane on the gaming experience. Even if I had the divine self-control and never resorted to using these advantages (and I don't use vet powers almost at all), I'm still going to feel like a complete idiot when I reach a point for which these advantages are PERFECT but I choose not to use them. An enemy runs away from me with a sliver of health, but my powersets have no ranged attacks. And so I sit and watch him run away into another spawn, unable to chase him, cursing the running AI and cursing the decision I made to not use the Nemesis Staff. Or, I whip out the Staff and end the problem right there.
"Pay to win" is, ironically enough, a no-win situation. If you pay to win, you ruin the game, if you don't pay to win, you feel like a sucker. For this reason, I do not want the opportunity to even exist. Sure, it might earn the company some extra cash, but it will also earn them at least one customer lost forever - me.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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That's actually one of the strongest arguments against such a system - what's the point? I'm sure everyone has the one or two things they'd like to make which the current system really can't, like Gun Fu, all elements, tank-mage and so forth, but what we have right now is... Surprisingly versatile. If you need multiple themes, you have a choice primary, secondary and epic, plus now Incarnate powers. It's not PERFECT, granted, but an Energy/Fire/Ice Blaster with a Dark Judgement and... I don't even know what the rest of the powers are... That's a pretty broad range of powers.|
Originally Posted by MajorDecoy
Concept wise, I'm not really sure what more would be accomplished with free-form building.
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In my experience, almost all of the concepts people are after that seem to fall in-between ATs and powersets right now can be achieved trough the addition of new epics, patron pools, power pools and weapon/costume options. If I want, for instance, a character who uses a sword and a pair of handguns ala Dante, this can be achieved via adding a pistols epic to Scrappers/Brutes/Stalkers or a sword epic to Blasters/Defenders/Corrupters. If I want a character who uses elemental weapons, then we can add elemental weapons to the existing weapons sets. In fact, a fire sword and an ice sword for Dual Blades is already more expansive than most concepts out there.
As far as I'm concerned, free-form character building is all too often just too complicated, cumbersome and prone to making me gimp myself if I'm not Arcanaville, and it very rarely gives me anything too interesting that a class-based system like City of Heroes couldn't.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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How about an area-of-effect focused Defender? Gimme a blast secondary filled with cones and fireballs. Don't tell me it would be overpowered, since it's effectively what Crab VEATs have now, and it's not that far from Corruptors' Fire Blast.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
That's actually one of the strongest arguments against such a system - what's the point? I'm sure everyone has the one or two things they'd like to make which the current system really can't, like Gun Fu, all elements, tank-mage and so forth, but what we have right now is... Surprisingly versatile.
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How about a melee Controller -- a true Scraptroller? For that you'd need a secondary with at least a little defense and status protection, and a primary that mixed controls with melee attacks. Would that be overpowered? I doubt it has to be; surely there's some level of weak defense and soft controls that would function.
How about a ranged Tank? Yes, yes, tankmage, yadda yadda. With weak ranged damage modifiers attached to hard defense powers, there's no reason you couldn't balance a defense primary and a ranged secondary, and it's an archetype you see in the comics all the time.
How about melee + support, with no defense? How about ranged damage plus pets? How about all support with no offense? Stalker assassinations plus ranged damage? Melee sets with a controller pet at the end of them? Themed defenses paired with blaster secondaries, like electric armor and electricity manipulation?
Look, this game is geared for explorers. Most people like to explore the content, but some of us like to explore the game mechanics. The mechanics in this game have an enormous amount of design space that is unused. I'm not looking for power combinations that are overpowered; I'm looking for combinations that are new, and that give me new ways to play.
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| In my experience, almost all of the concepts people are after that seem to fall in-between ATs and powersets right now can be achieved trough the addition of new epics, patron pools, power pools and weapon/costume options. If I want, for instance, a character who uses a sword and a pair of handguns ala Dante, this can be achieved via adding a pistols epic to Scrappers/Brutes/Stalkers or a sword epic to Blasters/Defenders/Corrupters. |
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<ahem>|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Games should not allow us to cheat because even just having the ability to do so is a bane on the gaming experience. Even if I had the divine self-control and never resorted to using these advantages (and I don't use vet powers almost at all), I'm still going to feel like a complete idiot when I reach a point for which these advantages are PERFECT but I choose not to use them. An enemy runs away from me with a sliver of health, but my powersets have no ranged attacks. And so I sit and watch him run away into another spawn, unable to chase him, cursing the running AI and cursing the decision I made to not use the Nemesis Staff. Or, I whip out the Staff and end the problem right there.
"Pay to win" is, ironically enough, a no-win situation. If you pay to win, you ruin the game, if you don't pay to win, you feel like a sucker. For this reason, I do not want the opportunity to even exist. Sure, it might earn the company some extra cash, but it will also earn them at least one customer lost forever - me. |
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you forgot the "in my opinion", "I feel", and "I think", in that paragraph.
I loved playing Doom II. I would work my way through, level by level, "enjoying" cursing the fact that I was down to pistol-bullets and 4% health, retrying levels again and again. I got pretty good at the game.
And on other days, I'd IDKFA and slaughter demons like ... things, that get slaughtered, but that it's politically correct to do so to.
The game with <only> the "cheat" option wouldn't have been as much fun. But the game <without> the "cheat" option wouldn't have been much fun, either.
Edit - Although for the record, any "design your own powers" system sounds like a disaster in the making. Alternate dev designed-and-balanced powers / powersets, I'm fine with.
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Sam, I know that "trust the devs" feels like an inadequate answer but it's the only reasonable answer there is.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I
"Pay to win" is, ironically enough, a no-win situation. If you pay to win, you ruin the game, if you don't pay to win, you feel like a sucker. For this reason, I do not want the opportunity to even exist. Sure, it might earn the company some extra cash, but it will also earn them at least one customer lost forever - me. |
They have had plenty of opportunities to sell "I Win" buttons in the past. The first time that a booster pack arrived with a bonus power in it, the door was opened to "pay to win". The only difference now is that you don't have to be a subscriber in order to have the opportunity to pay for something.
At any time in the past 3-4 years, the devs could have made a booster pack of ultra-godlike-powers available for purchase with dollars. There's no reason to believe that they are going to change their design philosophy simply because of a change in the revenue model.
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Thank you for summing up something I've been thinking / feeling, and unable to verbalize.
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Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
At any time in the past 3-4 years, the devs could have made a booster pack of ultra-godlike-powers available for purchase with dollars. There's no reason to believe that they are going to change their design philosophy simply because of a change in the revenue model.
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There you go! It's my ultimate "Freedom" in this game. It's worded "ultimate" for a reason because it will be super hard to achieve but if they can do it right through "cash shop", I can't imagine why it won't be profitable. I know I would pay to create my own set. It doesn't have to be overpowered. In fact, I find some of the most powerful sets very boring (ie: /Radiation). |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
And that reason was that they had no way to balance this, and no easy way to warn players they were doing something dumb.
Not to get anyone's hope up, but I thought about this problem about two years ago, in a serious (and not just musing) fashion. I came to the conclusion it was possible to do, but would require a significant amount of restructuring of how the powers system worked to really do it right. It would take me about six months to set the system up properly, which translates into about eighteen months of total development time. Maybe more including playtesting. But I believe every technical and balance barrier has a solution that would work in practice. You'd probably start with the easy stuff, and allow the construction of melee and ranged offensive sets, then dominator assault sets, manipulation sets, and defensive sets. The hard ones would be the buff/debuff sets, the control sets to some degree, and the mastermind primaries would be a nightmare. Theoretically speaking, by the way, mitigation sets would actually be one of the easier ones to balance (easier, not easy), because for most power mechanics we have ways to calculate mitigation strength to within a high degree of accuracy. Its not as simple as allowing players to mix and match powers from different sets indiscriminantly, but its calculable. And if its calculable, its balanceable. Pure offense is actually even easier to value. The AE custom critter system has an extremely primitive system for doing so, and it gets surprisingly close to doing it well enough for custom powerset construction. Valuing buff and foe debuff powers and sets, now that's the really hard one. |
The only game that is "similar" to creating your own set is Champions. Well, I don't think that game is doing well now... so.
Hey, at least that game may give the dev an idea on "what not to do". hehe
Edited: After reading through most posts, I do notice that when I created my powers in Champions, there wasn't much of "choice limitation" and yes, you could gimp yourself by picking all Martial Arts powers with little to no defensve, healing, support. And guess what people do after they found out they suck? They re-create until they are somewhat satisfied. I don't anticipate CoX's version of "Creative Set" is going to be that "Free" because if it's a cash item, you don't want customers to pick something that totally just don't make sense (ie: 9 x Build Ups). Each choice should bring you to certain "direction" (more debuff, more buff, more controls, etc) and each choice has a meaningful consequence.
In reality, I was only imagining Create Your Own Set within AT. I wasn't really imagining creating your own set with every power in the game. That seems too much work to me. A simple example is: I want Gravity control but I hate Dimension Shift with a passion. I will pay to get rid of it and pick something what the dev would consider "a similar value" like... Spirit Tree. That power is more meaningful to me than an extreme Situational Power. Spirit Tree isn't that great but at least it has its use whenever it's used.
What's left is to normalize all Assassin Strikes and improve Stalker's old sets (Claw, MA and EM)! You don't need to bring back the missing PbAoE attack. You just need to make the existing ones better! For example, make Slice a WIDER and LONGER cone.
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