Too many tankmages.

Look, I play this game to be a hero. I ENJOY hovering up to a massive group of bad guys and unleashing with my assault rifle and actually being able to cutall of them down, bosses included, with a little tricky moving and shooting.

It's fun. Blasters are not invulnerable even as incarnates.

Can't speak for scrappers. Will let you know in a month.

I will say that being able to crush legions of foes is a well earned reward after 50 levels of play. HK-Alpha made level 50 several years ago. It used to be that once you hit that point, you got bored with the character.

Not any more. I play HK-Alpha more than any other character and I really enjoy it.

Also, I have not heard anyone mention Ogre since I was in high school twenty years ago. Nice.

All this talk of Ogre, is making me want to play The creature that ate Sheybogan

Many moons ago, there was a computer sim version of Ogre, not licensed. I think originally they banned it but eventually they said "oh, go ahead and share it, it's sorta cool".

The computer played the ogre, and wasn't very good at it.

But yeah, that is a classic example of a very, very, interesting bit of game balance and design. And it sort of highlights the problems you face. Imagine that you were to look at an army design that was particularly good at beating ogres, and you introduced a point system for reconfiguring ogres. Now you can change the ogre to suit the army, and you can maybe beat that army by hitting its weaknesses.

Now add 10 other teams each of which can do that.

Now you have something that is much, much, much simpler to balance than CoH.

In the really early version of Ogre when GEVs were 4/4 movement. It turned out that no one considered an all GEV force. Now they are 4/3.

So there is still a GEV scatter phase, but at least Ogre has a chance now

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Although I don't have first hand experience buying recent re-releases and such, my understanding is most versions of Ogre use the same basic rules. Also keep in mind I'm talking about Ogre the hex-board wargame, not GURPS Ogre the RPG or the miniature system Ogre which is based on the hex-board version but I'm much less familiar with. In my opinion, if you're a student of game design and game balance, Ogre is your first point of call. You could spend years thinking about how and why Ogre works. There's even a *hint*, albeit only a hint, of the kind of thinking that should go into open powers systems design. I suspect that might be where Another_Fan is coming from by mentioning wargames. In a sense, you could analogize an army as being a set of powers, and the assembly of an army as a form of open powers selection. However, that analogy doesn't hold strongly enough for it to be a model for open powers design in an MMO for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that there's no good evidence that any wargame like that cared about constant-point balance. It was all about making a better or more effective force than your opponent, and the balance was due to both sides having similar options or being put into static situations that themselves were engineered with balancing forces. Ogre is interesting in that it has a stronger hint of open powers balance than most wargames, because one side is very strongly fixed: it takes the Ogre. For Ogre (the game) to work, of all possible counter-army constructions there cannot be lots of combinations that are obviously more powerful than the Ogre, but there must be a wide rage of combinations that are nominally as powerful as the Ogre. Which meets some of the requirements I set forth as mandatory in a balanced open powers system. Why its just a hint of the problem is because the strength of the counter-army is difficult to fully assess because its partially based on the tactics used to drive it. Its hard to say if the Ogre is exactly balanced with the intrinsic power of the counter-army, or if the Ogre is easier to tactically deploy and the counter-army much harder to get maximum effectiveness out of, which acts to handicap the counter-army. In other words, I don't know if in a computer vs computer match, if the Ogre has a significant advantage or the opposing army does, eliminating human factors. It would be an interesting problem to study, though.

Now that Incarnate powers are becoming more common among level 50 characters, I do think they can create a strange discontinuity in play as people start teaming with level 50s. Other than possibly there being a higher concentration of folks near level 50 who had heavily IO'd characters, there wasn't a special discontinuity in power between level someone who was level 49 (and perhaps not IO'd) and someone who was level 50. Now, even just with the Alpha slot's level shift, there can be a noticeable increase in the power of someone who's level 50. If there's just one such person on a team, they might stand out, but probably wouldn't dramatically change the whole dynamic. Get half or more of the team to have Incarnate goodies, and things can change dramatically.

Now, it doesn't really bother me, but I can grasp that people might not like that power shift in non-Incarnate content. If nothing else, it moves their cheese further and more suddenly than most other additions to the game have. However, I think the point Dechs and CrazyJerseyan may be getting at is that playing near level 50 (or teamed with level 50s) isn't the whole game. I'm not advocating that people artificially avoid playing at level 50 (unless they wanted to already), but I'm not sure how Incarnate stuff could ruin the whole game.

I do agree the Incarnate content itself is terribly grindy. You can avoid the iTrials, but I understand why that's an annoying "solution" if you still hear the siren's call of new abilities. IMO, we at least really need more content for iProgress, and the devs need to try and make sure the stuff they add is stuff enough people will enjoy that it won't be sidelined the way the community seems to have sidelined Keyes.

* Technically, if they're exemplared down, that discontinuity can drift down to levels 44 and 45, but that probably doesn't come up much.

You have to remember, rsclark, that there seems to be a non-trivial number of players who do things like stop playing characters in the 30s. I have many times over the years seen the sentiment that it feels like characters don't progress significantly above that level, so getting them there is "good enough". Then there are folks who get stuff to 50, shelf it, and start something new.

Those playstyles are alien to me personally, but they definitely exist, and I don't think they're the approach of an ignorable percentage of players.

I think you covered two subsets there at different points in that description.

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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison There's yet another group: The ones that get to 50 with about four characters and do nothing but play those four characters.

Change the number to 10, and that's me. I have a ton of lowbies languishing in the teens and twenties, and 10 level 50 characters who I lavish tons of playtime on. I'm currently working on my 10th and last 50 who has at least 3 Very Rare I20 incarnate abilities slotted. (Most of them only got T3 Lore.) All of them had the Alpha at very Rare by the time I20 launched.

Quote:

These people make heavy use of exemplaring, and even optimize their builds to maintain functionality at all levels. These people join their friends at whatever level they happen to be playing at that day as well as enjoy starting lower level TFs. They get all their incarnate powers by running WTFs and converting shards.

This, though, is not really me. I pay attention to how my 50s will exemplar, because I like badges and running TFs and such, but I don't specifically optimize for it, because I much prefer to play at level 50, or at least 45+.

So I think you're right, there's probably a subset of people who get to 50 and then spend lots of time exemplared. I'm not sure they specifically overlap with the subset of people who play a (relatively) small number of 50s all the time, exemplared or not.

I should probably update my sig to include my link to l2p, noob!, the site I'm working on to help people get over MMO burnout.

Here's the thing:

If you want to play a game, you have to get away from concepts like "the endgame" and "the option for future advancement". Set goals, pursue your goals, but always remember that if you're not enjoying working on a goal, it's probably not a good goal; having stuff isn't fun, getting stuff is.

I'm hoping for a level bump on the beta server so I can see whether a stone/elec tanker is fun at 38. If it is, then I'm going to level one 1-38, because I enjoy playing the game -- I just want to know whether my idea that LR and Granite will be complimentary pays off.

But mostly, I log in and look for people I know who are doing stuff, and ask them if they want help. If they are dying too much, I bring a defender or tank. If they are bored waiting for things to die, I bring a blaster. If they are finding navigation too easy, I roll a /kin MM so I can speedboost them and block doorways with my pets. Whatever the team needs.