Free-form power selection suggestion

I can also see their lvl 40+ ability being the ability to also mix and match powers from different sets WITHOUT having to get prereqs first. (There is a vet power, which I have but can't remember the month, that allows you to choose superspeed without choosing hasten, or fly without first picking up air sup; so I know it's possible to be done for pool powers at least).

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I did not say it wasn't worth doing, I said it may not be worth doing (technically I said, "The concept of a more limited version of freeform I still think is worth exploring and discussing, even if it's not worth actually doing." How you read the "if" in that sentence could change its meaning, I guess. Consider this clarification). Ideas for expansion of the game are worth looking at more deeply, rather than dismissing with an /unsigned (not to say some ideas need a lot of discussion, some are more simple). I do not discuss it just to argue, but because I find it an interesting topic. The ability to perfectly tailor a character to my imagination would be fabulous. The variety that it could produce in game would be great. The potential pitfalls are real, which mean discussion and research are vital during any planning stage. Throwing your hands up in the air without seriously thinking about how to overcome the problems is repulsive.

One can argue both the pros and cons of an idea. I do not have to just argue the benefits of the freeform system and feel that it must be placed into the game and those who disagree are just reactionary. Nor do I just need to discuss just the negatives and say the idea could never be workable and insult those who desire change. Just because I like the current system, doesn't mean I would not like a new system. Just because a new system has real benefits, doesn't mean the drawbacks are worth those benefits.

Finally, whose time am I wasting? We are on a discussion forum about a game. Specifically we are in the Suggestion forum in a topic whose sole purpose is to discuss the idea of potential freeform character creation. So I discuss the concept of freeform character creation and advancement systems. But I am somehow wrong because I do not clearly park myself in one camp or the other and instead discuss the idea neutrally?

Indeed. And it is possible that continuing down the line of creating new powersets is the correct choice. But in the past new powersets have been slow in coming, because they take a lot of developer time (yes, I realize they were holding a lot back for this fall, but that also indicates that most forum-goers do not really have any idea what the studio is actually capable of producing, looking at what we are likely going to be getting in a few months on top of what we got the last year, I think some people underestimate their potential just a bit). It is possible that in the long run a freeform system of some kind could save developer time, freeing them to create more powers than they currently are able to. A freeform system would also allow them to create powers without feeling pressure to make sure they have enough to fill an entire powerset. the fact that they only have 3 Whip powers would not prevent dominators or blasters (if ATs were maintained) from getting access to those attacks.

Very true. This one of the reasons I would strongly lean towards freeform as an additional method of creation/advancement instead of a replacement. It is one of the reasons I keep saying I would have the goal that a freeform character and a current character would be able to exist side-by-side in the game without either feeling more or less than the other. They did not remove SOs, when IOs were added to the game, as an example.

OK. You may be right. OTOH, it does seem plausible that they could put a team on the planning stages (code time is locked up for several months, but likely would not be needed on this idea for several months anyway), without much impact on regular releases. When I look at from a man hours PoV, I likely wouldn't even want a team working on it full-time, at least not at first. All that being said, why are we the players even bothering to discuss the labor aspect? So many cases where players think something is plausible turn out not to happen and very many cases where players said nothing would ever happen have come to fruition.

The devs would have to spend time doing it is a pointless discussion, since it is out of our realm of knowledge. Most everything brought up in the suggestion forum will take Dev time to do; should we shutdown this section of the forums? Should we only suggest stuff that will take 30 man hours or less? What is the limit on Dev time where we are allowed to weigh the pros and cons of an idea outside of manhours to accomplish?

For the last time, I completely understand and acknowledge that time to implement is a huge negative against a freeform system. There is no more reason to discuss that point, because it was conceded in the VERY FIRST POST in this thread.
People who continue to bring it up like they are the only people to realize this baffle me.

I keep bringing it up because some folks stated (during the Power Cust debate) that they'd be willing to take no updates for however long it would take. Just nipping that in the bud early before it rears its head again.

I'm not saying that folks shouldn't suggest it. What I'm saying is if it's a choice between that and everything else or even 30% of everything else, I'd pass on a freeform system wholesale.

Just stated my preference as a player. We're allowed to do that here in the suggestion forums. Just making it clear to which dev is reading (if they are) that choosing to do this over power cust, FINALLY looking at pvp and bases, and anything else, I'd pass on a freeform system.

It is not up to him to find evidence. If you want to disprove someones statement, it falls on the disprovee to provide said evidence.

Also, for someone talking about 'insults', you might do well to heed your own advice and examine the quoted post? Also also, not automatically agreeing with a suggestion does not qualify as 'negativity and inanity'. Finally, there is no way for drool to be detected over the internet.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

The part I was objecting to was the part where you said:

Ignoring MMO limitations completely, the HERO system is *not* even remotely balanced if you actually make any serious attempt to min/max it. And I'm not talking about weird tricky rule-bending exploits that all PnP game systems have, I'm talking about something simple like just taking all the defensive powers, or just focusing on a couple point-focused killing attacks. HERO's "disadvantages" were only interesting if both the players and the GMs played them straight. Even if you eliminate players picking lactose intolerance and coulrophibia quantitative disadvantages tend to be too easy to game, even for non-exploitive players.

But mostly, the problem is that the points system is a little too simplified to make a balanced game as focused on the kinds of combat that MMOs have, even if you had a human GM in the driver's seat. Its not a good starting place to make an MMO powers system, and there isn't even anything interesting to learn from it except what not to do.

I can see adapting something like HERO for a single-player game in theory, with some guardrails. But not an MMO.

You understand that if I'm the one designing the powers, and I have no obligation to explain my design to the devs I just have to submit it for review, the odds of me getting really interesting things in there that only I fully appreciate are incredibly high. For them to not specifically ban me from such submissions, the devs would themselves have to be incredibly high.

Hmm. Perhaps you went even a step further than I was thinking, which is nifty as well. When you say, "designing the powers", are you specifically referring to creating your own powers and not just mixing dev designed powers? I did say the whole shebang and when I speak of needing to use current animations and FX, I can see how that could also imply creating whole new powers, but I wasn't actually thinking of going that far. I just meant combining existing powers in new ways.

But even still, I think many players would likely be able to figure out ways to utilize any powers and characters you would create.

I need to figure out how to find more monkeys to bang on keyboards so I can get another /Fire Manipulation made.

In order to demonstrate how wrong the above assertion is I offer you the following statement.
The devs are working on creating a freeform system. We will likely see it released late 2012.

There are a lot more people capable of looking over my shoulder so to speak, if I was restricted to only doing remixes. Still, suppose I were to give myself all of Singularities attacks in a new powerset called pseudo-gravity. How many people would know I was doing that because all those attacks are untyped?

Just giving me the ability to make my own powersets from existing powers - provided I could use powers from anywhere in the power database - would not be a good idea. I could give myself a broken brawl from somewhere with an interruptable attack animation, or a pair of powers that would leave me unrooted when used in sequence, or a power that is supposed to do smashing damage but actually does psionic damage. I could ask for powers with decimal point errors or improper combat modifier flags or all kinds of stuff. It would probably be safer to let Castle come back as a regular player and make his own powersets.

There are still dragons in the power databases, even among just player accessible powers. Far less than in the past, but still things that should be fixed, will eventually be fixed, but until then could cause all kinds of joy for someone who could leverage them.

And that doesn't count the fact that I, and probably other players even better than I, could use Mids to craft ingenious invention builds that require just the right set of powers, and then craft powersets with those. Without the rosetta stone of that build, you might never know why those powers were assembled in that specific fashion, and it might take a while to figure out. If I was going to do that, I wouldn't just submit one powerset suggestion: I would submit twenty, and nineteen would be innocuous. The twentieth would be the blockbuster, and it would be hidden in plain sight.

Really? The only example you could think of was to make stuff up? If your going to lie at least try to make it believable. The best recipes is 3 parts truth to 1 part lie.

How people know your statement is false.

1. You aren't an NCSoft employee so you have no idea what they are developing.
2. The devs have not given any type of indication that they were working on a drastic change in game mechanics.
3. There hasn't been a peep from marketing that something big like that was in the works.

Do you think it was just a coincidence that the same time they started working on the F2P business model that we also saw a strict crackdown and increased enforcement on discussions about other games? Especially the ones that were F2P.

The F2P clues were there and several people figured it out even tho the rest of us (myself included) tried to ignore them.

The problem with only responding to PART of a person's post is that it makes you look like you don't have a solid handle on what you're talking about.

If you had bothered to read the rest of my post you would have seen that I already accounted for the fact that even though the HERO system CAN in fact be an effective free-form gaming system you have to be willing to be mature enough to accept significant character disadvantages (apart from lactose intolerance and coulrophibia) as a major way the game balances its free-form nature. I think even you will have to agree with my conclusion that the typical MMO crowd would never be able to accept that. Again I'll cite the example of how vehemently everyone balked at Kheldians' vulnerability to quants/voids for proof of that.

Thus my main point, which apparently continues to elude you, is that even if you were to apply one of the most arguably successful free-form RPG systems that has ever been published to a MMO setting you STILL could not get a game that would actually work the way people want. To me a free-form powers selection system for a MMO is sort of like Communism - it sort of sounds like a good idea on paper but in practice the min/maxing ultimately never lets it work in real life. Even your renowned game theory skills couldn't mitigate the fundamental player desire to push a MMO's system to the breaking point. This is why a certain degree of class/AT structure will probably always be needed in MMOs, at least for the foreseeable future.

That's not evidence. I see no quoted source or links. Something you were calling for only a page or so ago.

This argument hath no ground to stand on, methinks.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

This is correct in 2011. But again for the sake of academic completeness I'm willing to accept this may change after the Technological Singularity arrives. Imagine how cool MMOs will be once the PvE can be as flexibly ruthless as PvP can be now. Maybe even free-form power systems on a MMO scale will be realistic at that point.

I understand what you're saying completely. You're saying even though HERO is a well balanced system, its not well balanced enough for MMOs. I'm telling you HERO is not a well-balanced system period. And its years of success have nothing to do with it being a well-balanced system in spite of many of its supporters making that claim. This isn't just true relative to the requirements of MMOs, this is true within the scope of PnP games: its success has never been reliant on its numerical balance, of which it doesn't have much.

And maybe the horse will learn to sing.

I think you missed my point, while amazingly getting my point at the same time.

Apparently, I do not need facts to support my statement. Someone told me, "if you want to disprove someones statement, it falls on the disprovee to provide said evidence."

To take this point in a serious direction, the difference between MMOs and PnP games isn't just the question of GM control. Its also that MMOs are shared consensus realities with a single set of rules while PnP games are really frameworks that thousands of small groups of players customize to some extent to generate a unique experience. Its unclear if the two are compatible with any level of technology, because there may be irreconcilable differences in culture. In PnP games, there is only a loose sense of being part of a larger world that encompasses all players playing campaigns in the same system. But in MMOs, there is a sense that everyone is playing in the same world with the same rules. It may actually be improper to compare a PnP "ruleset" with an MMO one because a PnP ruleset is really the sum total of a PnP framework and all of the collective (and sometimes unspoken) house rules that make up a gaming session. Those individual PnP rulesets may be too focused on the specific needs of its target group to be generalizable to an MMO.

In other words, the very things that make PnP game frameworks successful might make them impossible to translate into MMO mechanical systems and vice versa simply due to the scale. Its more likely that with infinite technology PnP games can evolve directly into interactive custom simulations still focused on a small number of people, while MMOs evolve into more generalized simulations of large scale environments with less customized and more generalized physics.

Or to put it another way, it may be that the fundamental difference between PnP games and MMOs is not the human GM or the rules or the computer technology, its that in PnP games the players and the GM ultimately craft the experience in conjunction, whereas in an MMO because of the sheer number of players all of them submit to the will of a singular authority to dictate the experience. These are two logically incompatible experiences, driven by scale. An MMO played with PnP-like participation fragments into many small experiences rather than one consensus one. A PnP game played with MMO-like participation becomes too authoritarian within small groups. That's a difference in psychology not technology and may not be ultimately resolvable by technology.

No that's actually the opposite of what everyone has told you, but as usual you either dismiss and ignore anything that you don't want to hear, or you try to misinterpret what was actually said.

I'd like to point out a third example: Organized PnP play. A few years ago, I participated in the RPGA Living Greyhawk, and this effectively produced a D&D "MMO", where the same adventures were played by players in different locations, an ongoing (shared) storyline, and ... GMs were expected to adhere to the rules in the same way as all other GMs. There were no houserules, there were not "Well, sure, we'll go with that."

GMs were expected to go by the Rules As Written, except where the organized play notes for the campaign explicitly stated otherwise (so these were really just revisions to the core rules, for the purposes of play).

That said, it WAS still PnP, so there was flexibility in how players could approach things, within the character construction and scenario limits.

It was a fairly effective and enjoyable middle ground between MMO and traditional PnP play. I enjoyed it quite a lot until the release of 4E forced discontinuation of the campaign I was participating in.

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

Sigh. Such a sad tangent we have gone down together. You took exception to my examples of things that so many people thought would never happen and yet did happen. Apparently, this thing that is not ever going to happen is different enough in your mind as to make those other things that were never going to happen not similar enough. Fine, we diagree. You asked me for a quote. I asked you for one. Neither of us are capable of producing that quote, which is of course why we both challenged each other with the absurd request (my challenge was to demonstrate that your request was absurd, but so many failed to realize that and seemed to take the request as real).

Then I got annoyed that you suggested I was ignoring points made by others, when I am actually CONCEDING those points. I never argued against the fact that this would be difficult and time consuming. NO ONE HAS. I completely agree. Why is it so difficult for you to grasp that? I am not dismissing or ignoring what others are saying, I am agreeing with their points. My only disagreement is that I do not think those points mean we should just shut up and not even think about or discuss the idea. I think the concept is well worth exploring in theory, at the least. Despite the truth that the idea would be difficult to work out and likely time-consuming to implement, I think it is interesting to discuss and has many positives,

Then Techbot Alpha suggested that if I were trying to disprove something you said (and I am not actually clear on what it is I am trying to disprove, perhaps the idea that the current devs have thoroughly investigated this concept and discarded it as unworkable), that it was up to me to find proof you were mistaken. He actually stated a principle that is fundamentally wrong when he said:
In order to demonstrate how ridiculous his principle was, I made a statement. One which could very well be false, but is actually quite difficult to disprove. No definitive statement by a dev existed at the time of my statement (and none exists at the time of this post either). If I really cared, I could even make a strong circumstantial case in support of that statement. But the statement itself was never the point. The point was simply that the burden of proof is more often on a person making a claim than it is on a person challenging a claim. And ironically, Techbot Alpha seems to agree since after I made that statement he said:
So when I ask you for proof that the devs have looked at this concept significantly more recently than 2 years before launch, I am being unreasonable. When I make a statement without any proof, I am being unreasonable. When you make a statement without any proof, you are being reasonable.

I am going to go drool in the corner now while I think of more problems and benefits of a more freeform system of character creation than we currently have (and I think the current system already is massively freeform).

1. Exactly where does it say that anything the devs has said or done has an expiration date? For example anything posted by the devs over 3 months old isn't valid anymore.

The devs don't have to constantly waste time on the forums repeatedly explaining and justifying their decisions to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that doesn't like the answers he's being given. If they did that they'd never get anything done.

2. I didn't make a statement without any proof. That the devs tested free-form power sets and discarded them is a fact.