PVP is dead, the game is dying

Arent you observent lol

PvP may have been a design intent of the alpha version of City of Heroes, but there is not even a hint of a trace of anyone involved in either the game mechanics or the powers system design thinking about PvP for even one millisecond in the release version of the game. Not only is there no evidence of someone designing things knowing they would one day have to deal with PvP, there is direct evidence all over the place of people doing things that even by extremely generous standards no one in their right minds would do if they knew PvP was coming - and I say that grading on a curve for what the devs were doing with the powers system that early.

They may have thought it was coming, but the devs acted, in the implementation of the game, like they were not obligated to avoid doing things that could severely impact it. So not only did they not design the game with PvP in mind, they actually designed it in a way to explicitly make PvP more difficult to implement.

^ In case anyone needed to find confidence in the development team.

Ahah fail sarcasm (:

True. However, no one is infallible. PvP was a design intent in Alpha and was implemented in only the 4th update to the game. It's a pretty uphill argument to say they launched the game with no knowledge of the impending addition when they have stated they've always managed the game with the next several issues or more already mapped out.

The fact that the state of the game at that time was not ideal for the implementation of PvP is not really a smoking gun. I honestly think they just didn't know and continue to be ignorant of what makes for good PvP. And I don't think there's any malice in that. YMMV.

Agree, and your avatar is kindof hipnotizing lol. also i think you might be giving dev's too much credit...

I know and agree for the most part, the last part seem's kinda sad tho. i know ocho like's pvp. but it always seem's like pvp has been on the back burner and treated like the red headed step child for the most part, alot of people i meet seem like they would love to get into pvp if it wasnt such a different game, hell i'd be perfectly happy if TS and DR where removed...

I don't think the release version of the game is simply suboptimal for PvP. I'm saying I believe I can prove a pattern of behavior where they did things that by their own reckoning they had to either undo or work around to implement PvP, and in some cases they *never* fully figured out how to work around them, but they did not need to be told they were problems.

Its one thing to say the devs were implementing the game while saying "one day there will be PvP, one day there will be PvP." However, I do not believe the devs *ever*, even at the doorstep to introducing PvP, asked themselves "given PvP is coming, should we do X?" I never said, nor cannot prove, that the devs were *ignorant* of the fact that PvP was coming. I'm saying that even knowing that fact, they took zero steps to prepare for it even knowing it.

Here's two statements from the devs from the Issue 4 era:

1. Player defenses are balanced around critters having base 50% tohit.

2. Players have 75% base to hit in PvP.

And yet, they had to be *convinced* to change player base tohit in PvP, when by their own reckoning their own powers system design is broken under that base tohit.


Question: when PvP was first introduced, if a target (player) had a lot of defense, what two things could help you hit that target?

If you answered "Tohit buffs and Accuracy" I apologize, you've tripped over a trick question. Initially, until it was patched with a stealth patch, if your target had more defense than you had overall tohit, the only *one* thing that could help you was tohit buffs. Accuracy would actually make things (unnoticably due to the 5% floor) *worse* due to a bug in tohit mechanics, if target defense was higher than attacker overall tohit.


The devs said, back then, they had thought carefully about how things like endurance drain would affect players in PvP. If you were designing PvP for CoH and were thinking about things like how endurance drain might become problematic, would you take a break, eat some lunch, and then invent the power Elude?


So you know PvP is coming, and you're working on a new pet for the Gravity control powerset called a Singularity. Knowing PvP is coming, do you make all of its attacks completely untyped so no defense works on them? And by the way, they are still all untyped to this day.


So you're a dev, and your actual on-paper design doc for tankers indicates they are designed to take on more aggro, and therefore more damage than any other archetype in existence. Did whoever write that down know PvP was coming and just punt the problem to you, or did they literally just not know that might be an issue? And lets not get into taunt, and whether that even originally worked in PvP.


Its not like this list is short. I can keep typing until the forums truncate my post. I don't think the original designers thought PvP actually *had* any actual design or implementation requirements. Just playtest and tweak it, and as they say in Hollywood we'll just fix it in post. And as a result, they did things that they wouldn't have done if they actually thought they had to be careful, and didn't do things they would have done if they thought PvP had actual requirements they should try to meet before the last minute.


Anybody can say "I intend to X." The devs can say they intended the game to have PvP from the beginning just like I can say I intend to rule the world. What steps have I done to accomplish that task today? None, but I still intend to. The devs took no steps to accomplish their task of adding PvP to the game until they were actually literally adding PvP to the game for I4, and more importantly they took no steps to *prevent* trivially preventable things that became problematic to PvP later.

The above shouldn't be construed as my saying the devs are all bad, or bad at all. Its simply a fact that whatever other statements they made, they were either totally unaware, or unwilling, to take the steps necessary to prepare the game for PvP. Its not like any dev has ever denied that to me.

Its no secret that by MMO standards this game is *horribly* unbalanced. Ironically, that creates a rather unique environment for the PvE game that is, by many players' reckoning, appropriate to the genre so long as they keep it at least minimally under control. But that doesn't fly in PvP: its one thing for all of us players collectively to embarrassingly dominate a bunch of pixels, its quite another to create a game where one group of humans can embarrassingly dominate another bunch of humans in odd or broken ways. That presented a uniquely non-trivial problem for the devs: a majority of players got used to the wild unbalanced powers system prior to I4 and wouldn't accept strict rebalancing for PvP, but without it PvP quickly became a meta-game of best exploiting the broken aspects of the powers system, which is not something to be especially proud of.

Which actually points to the *fundamental* problem with PvP in CoH. You can't (or should not) retrofit PvP to an existing game because PvP is as much about expectations and social acceptance of PvP as it is about numbers and mechanics, and if people aren't innoculated to your PvP from the start its very hard to get them to fully accept it later on, especially when you have to start changing the game to make it work.

Under the best of circumstances the devs left themselves a problem I'm not sure *any* dev team on Earth could have dug themselves out of easily.

Lol pvp as of today, no one plays a non "fotm" unless you have mad cash to trick it out and even then your almost always "out-shinned" by sum "fotm" build...

You try to hard to be a "smart-asss" jus sayin (:

I both agree and disagree with you. I do believe (and I wish I could find the Statesman quote from pre-i4 talking about the subject) that they had intended PvP to be involved with the game from the start, but that they also did nothing in terms of helping the broken systems involved with the combat mechanics to implement it. Not that they didn't want to and weren't planning on it, but rather that they simply weren't competent in their execution of the plan. Something that has remained true when it comes to PvP in this game since the beginning.

Let's face it, PvP aside, the first year of this game had a lot of power decisions that today would make us look back and just shake our heads.

While the edit to my post does indeed make it more accurate I still stand behind what I said. Arcana can say things a bit more eloquently than me though. My point was, I didn't buy this game for PvP and neither did anyone else before Issue 4, a year after launch.
The game was never advertised to have PvP before that time either. That is all.

As far as ingame rewards being kept seperate, that was a bit of a mistake on my part, what I should have said was, nothing you gain in PvP will ever be required for PvE.

They're 'still' implementing changes and tweaks that are 'huh what?' for PvP. That they have been doing that from the start isn't surprising to any of us.

Says the guy who spams posts for attention. Haha.

It isn't just the first year...

I can't find the trailer now, but it was in with the old style power systems. Like what Arcanaville pointed out, it had a presence in the Alpha version.

I guess that depends on your outlook. If you are talking about the game play itself, nothing is required on either side. You can play without PvP IOs, and IOs, and Common IOs, and SOs, and DOs, and TOs. Heck people do that for 'fun!'

If you are talking about advancement in some way, I bet the badgers would disagree with you.

Depite all the brokenness of IOs, powers and so on there is still an element of skill and practice involved. For example, in the defunct Champion ladder you had two teams that were fairly equal and had close games while the rest of the teams lagged behind. It's always going to be so because you can't "code" reflexes, locking, using the right attack chain for maximum damage output, evasion and so on. You *can* code so that attacks have a result (defeat of one character) and discourage evasion, but that really goes contrary to a lot of zone goals...where it's ineffecient and actually disastrous to engage another player if you are getting a Shivan or nukes.

Additionally, there are just so many powers that to balance them all would likely take a whole issue, and if you balance them while ignoring feedback of players that PvP and use said powers for that purpose, you basically end up with Issue 13, Redux. Not sure the Devs want to go there again, or wish to. At this point it might just be better to revisit some of the formulas and ecosystems such as zones and Arena, add more maps to Arena and go from there. Lastly, it's pretty telling that a subset of the Arena population just doesn't want to use Incarnate abilities past Alpha in group settings, whether because of balance issues or a desire to avoid additional grind.

It would likely take a PvP Dev to get things done but given the small (and shrinking) population, not losing any sleep on this happening.

I suppose a set of skills a monkey could learn are still skills...

I just don't understand why you and other PvPers pride yourselves on these skills... d;D