Draconian character creation power set availability due to balance issues?

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@Zethustra

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It may be your opinion, but when opinions are based on quantitative statements, they can and should be assessed as such.

It's really simple to count the number of MMOs that have done better, and count the number of MMOs that have done worse. Even without looking at which ones had much bigger development budgets, built in fanbases, and advertising dollars.

Count up the games. The number of titles that didn't reach as high, and didn't last as long is far greater than the number of titles that did the same or better.

I'm not sure what color the sky is in your world, but to most people around here, that kind of simple assessment means it IS a stretch to say the game hasn't done well, and it ISN'T wrong to point out your error in judgment when forming your sainted opinion.

Did you really just try to cite UnSub as a valid opinion? That guy has been one of the game's biggest detractors since about 6months after he started playing. He only started writing those "articles" because it lent a false credence to his ramblings that years of forums posts couldn't.

Opinions are great, but not when they're biased. Bringing one of the most biased opinionators out there in to shore you up doesn't help you.

<sarcasm>Thank you *ever* so much for the permission, Your Grace.</sarcasm>

I note you have nothing to say in actual *response* to those, though, even to illustrate where YOU'RE trying to come from. Even when I flat out ask a question, and give you the point I'm answering from (first point on meeting expectations.) Or the third, where there's a very simple "So what?" to the "Sub-100k" comment, with an explanation on why it does not matter at this point. Yet you don't give your OWN idea of what would define "successful" or even "meeting expectations."

Is that saying I *wouldn't* like there to be more people? No. But it is (a) pointing out flaws in the argument I quoted (as the rest of the post you made had nothing to do with it,) and (b) showing you where I'm standing to make the counterargument.

Now, are you interested in actual discussion, or just doing your best to emulate Golden Girl, but without the smilies? Because, quite frankly, your position that "City of Heroes has not done well" is a *very* hard one to defend - just from the fact that it's *still here* after all this time when the MMO landscape around it is cratered with bigger titles that crashed and burned spectacularly. That's not an opinion. That's a verifiable fact - proven by the fact I can fire up the NC launcher and log in right now, just like I could back in Issue 3 when I started.

And before you throw me in with anyone - to use your earlier terms - "Cheerleading" or "Defending it to the death," I'll point out I'm *highly* critical of the developers. My usual comparison is of the dev team to a hyper little dog in a room full of Superballs, getting excited over one that bounces in front of it, catching it, and then turning to the next one that catches its attention, leaving nothing but a sad, slobbery ball with a few tooth marks behind (see also AE, PVP, "Don't want to bring old up to speed, just want new" comments, and last but not least - bases.) That's not the sort of thing you're going to hear from someone blindly defending the dev team or the game.

THOSE problems, though, more than powerset respecs (which, honestly, isn't going to get new people in or many - if any - old back) are what needs to be dealt with. They need to stop abandoning systems and keep the *entire game* polished and at the same level. They can't "raise the bar," to use Melissa's overused phrase, in one area and leave it lying around rusting in another. It looks sloppy and unprofessional.

As for you? The only thing like a position I've seen from you is that "they haven't brought in subscribers." And that's, quite honestly, false. I've seen new people continually (and I do mean on a fairly regular basis, not "I saw one this year." I seem to be answering basic "how to" questions continually on the help channel.) - and I tend to play on medium-to-low population servers. (I tend to toss them a recipe or two to sell or some INF, if I'm not on a lowbie.) Could they have brought in more? Absolutely. But I place that *squarely* on the feet of the piss-poor advertising this game gets. Really, when's the last time you saw one of the seemingly hundreds of comic book or superhero-inspired movies with a COH ad? Or even a comic book? Last ones I can think of that had a COH ad were - the COH comic books. (See also "Preaching to the choir.") And given our rather mild slope downward over *years,* we're bringing in people to replace those that leave for various reasons... even in a hostile economic climate.

Some of it, honestly, is also all the *differences* between this game and World of ConanRingiage. We don't have "gear" - the enhancement system is quite different. There's no "Turn in the Sword of Somewhat Damp Paper for the Sword of Mildly Stiff Cardboard at level 3, then get the Armor of Aluminum Foil at 5... oh, that changes your appearance, by the way." Our ATs are generally *not* like other games classes - running in Aion, for instance, I had a fair expectation of what I could expect from a Ranger, Assassin, Chanter, etc. You could swap them out like swapping socks. But here - is that Blaster going to stack holds and a nasty placed AOE (Ice) or do nothing but damage (fire) to me? Is that Defender going to be a Stormy, Empathy, Sonic, Cold - all of which are *vastly* different. How about that Controller? Honestly, the most predictable are (IMHO) Stalkers and Masterminds - you know what they're bringing. And that's a serious culture shock compared to many other games. There's no "one" (or two) "true ways" to build a certain AT - and some people don't like that.

(The other issue with those highest pop games, of course, is... Asia. The way they count "subscriptions" over there is - odd, to say the least. And City Of's gameplay doesn't mesh well with what they seem to like - large (and I don't mean 12-20 people) coordinated group raid-loot-fests. We've only recently gotten anything close, really, besides Hami and the Mothership, and those by comparison are... not rough. If you want to say COH crashed and burned *at all,* you can honestly say it about the Asian launch.)

So, go ahead - expand on *your* position. Because in all this thread, you really haven't. I'm curious to see if you'll provide your reasoning, or just snipe away.

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I think you have just found common ground with the rest of the forum.

Because you could PL to 50 with an easy combination eg FA/SS Brute, or Claws/Electric (c'mon 6-8hrs to 50) and then Respec to something else. Which would trivialise much of the content.

Please do. As long as you continue to post on the forums you are paying a subscription to support the character creation process.

We win.

And when Freedom launches if you should choose to drop to a Premium account you will lose the ability to post on the forums, and your ability to rant in game will be curtailed to the Local, Team, Tells, and Help channels. And if you try to abuse those channels with your rants, they will quickly be moderated by the GM's.

We still win.

... Something like this I could get behind, actually. It would need a bit of tweaking to fit more thematically into our game; For some reason I keep thinking this could be tied in with the incarnate "quick path" that we cannot currently take... flying too close to the sun with wax wings, as it were.

Not sure about how to spin it in this game. Personally I'd take it as an in character reroll thing. Something I've done many times on characters that I don't care for eg:

Grendel was my first ever character Dark/Dark scrapper (i3, no stamina) impossible to complete a respec because in those days it was actually hard. Eventually I re-rolled as Dark/Regen and renamed her Lost Ninja. Kept the name and once I hit 50 made a WS called Grendel whose back story was that she got caught in a freak accident in the reactor and the only way to allow her to survive was to meld her with a Nictus (yeah I know it doesn't follow how WS are actually made... but...).

Nowadays Grendel is a Dark/Dark tank who will be re-rolled once more into a BS/Nrg Brute (thought I might splash out on a new back story).

Lost Ninja is my Dark/Regen, she's been at fifty since shortly before (IIRC) i5 (a long time anyway), and because I went off regen I hardly play her. Yet she is still my favourite character. If some mechanism was added to the game where I could reroll her without losing all her badges, costum unlocks... dare I say it history. I'd love to do so. Even if by doing so it takes me longer to level her back up to fifty.

Hell on some of my characters I'd do this just for the back story, never mind keeping stuff earned prior to their 'reincarnation'. Though ofc Incarnate Salvage should be kept...

But - and I want to make this clear - this is about rerolling an existing character keeping the history of a character )badges etc) and the re-levelling them from either level 1 or some low level. At an increased difficulty. Not re-rolling at 50 into another 50 which IMO is a bad idea however it is implemented.

I am intrigued by your idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

You really should put that on the Suggestions forum. Some folks there will hate it, but I like the idea.

IMO the cases where it does happen, uncommon as it may be, seems to be a point where the character jumps the shark and gets ridiculous.

Right, so you are not actually interested in discussion. Gotcha.


The restrictions exist because people were ******* up thier toons making them unplayable. People making tankmages they could have probably balanced around, but people making pure buff/debuff toons ensured they wouldn't be able to successfully balance the 1 hero = 3 mobs equation.

Also, not sure how long you were around, or when you first started, but they were VERY hessitant allowing us to respec our powers at all. The main reason they did allow it was because people were still messing up their toons bad. (How much of that is because the playerbase were idiots, or that the powers were not actually balanced to begin with is impossible to determine cough*smokebomb*cough.)

I have already made my argument why I believe that powersets should not be allowed to be switched, and stick by it.

Please keep in mind that this is the player questions sub forum. The questions you are asking seem better posed to an actual developer.

Well ironically I was going to post something to the effect of "you've pointed out a problem(in your opinion), now make a useful and thought out suggestion on a possible solution". But luckily for you Lost Ninja did it for you. I think that system would be interesting, but because of the ease of leveling and support of alt creating, I don't know if it would work as well in this game. The biggest issue is it is honestly SO much easier to create a new toon. If you want to have a high toon in short order look to the many many ways of getting one there. They are all over the forums.

Green, actually, if you're going by the proportions of visible-light wavelengths present in solar radiation.

And when someone does, you'll come back with statements such as:

and not bother expanding.

/golfclap.

Nothing I said was "Forum PVP" or "Deriding your opinion," unless you're one of those who think "Disagreement = derision." At least until your non-reply quoted just above - and even then, only the first line of my reply, which was far *nicer* than you're proving yourself of deserving.

So, thanks for answering the last statement:

where you prove you AREN'T interested in discussion, just sniping, and that Fulmens has precisely the way of dealing with you.

Goodbye, from someone who *did* want to see just where you were getting the various impressions you were arguing from. Borrowing your own phrase, I'm no longer silly enough to believe YOU may actually want to discuss the matter.

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This idea is far superior to my own. Fantastic IMO.

Fair enough. I actually thought you made a good argument against.

Fair enough.

It's a two part question, so I'll give you a two part answer.

The first one, why the restrictions, is to prevent players from creating extremely overpowered combinations and/or so gimped they're unplayable combinations.

Complete freedom of choice was allowed in the very first Alpha version of the game, and one guy created a character who was invulnerable and could fly. That was ALL he could do, he had zero ability to actually defeat anything. That particular character would be completely unplayable.

On the other side of it, you'd have tankmages. Characters with nearly impenetrable defenses and overwhelming offensive capability. Characters with the defenses of a tank and the damage output of a blaster would be overpowered in this game by quite a bit.

Your second question, why we can't change our powersets when we respec is related, but different.

Powersets are balanced against other ATs and against other powersets in the same AT.

Lets look at two Tanker primaries; Stone Armor and Willpower. Stone Armor gets a power at level 32 that will allow it to be nearly invincible to all damage types for as long as it can keep that toggle active (pretty much indefinitely). It has drawbacks, but it is almost imnpossible to kill a Stone tank in Granite if an experienced player is controlling it. The price the set as a whole pays for that survivability is that it is relatively weak before getting that power.

On the other side, you have Willpower. Willpower is an easy set to level up as. It doesn't lose any survivability at high levels, but it still isn't going to touch Granite Armor levels of survivability.

If you could change powersets in a respec, you could level as a Willpower tank and switch to Stone at some point after Granite Armor is available. You have juts gotten to the good part of the most survivable set without having to play that set through the levels where it is weak. Being able to do that would destroy the balance between the sets, and Stone Armor would be considered extremely overpowered because you could switch to it when it gets good and ignore the squishier early levels.

There are sets in every AT that follow the same pattern. Radiation Emission and Kinetics as used by a controller would be another good example. Kinetics gets it's key power at level 38, while Radiation gets it's good powers mostly before level 20. If you could level as a Plant/Rad controller (which gets it's good powers early) and switch to a Fire/Kin after level 38, you've skipped the levels in which Fire/Kin isn't particularly great.

It's all about balance between the power sets. The sets that get good later in the game aren't that good in the beginning of the game. In that way it is fair for the sets that peak early and never get much better.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Because people pick a power set they like and too Match a theme or too tell a story, why would anyone change that?, you can always make another toon. People want too try other stuff and make a new toon too match the power set, Fire Blaster can be a dragon that Summon fire or a mutant that control fire. Every game I no has a Support class, Tanking class, range class and pet class.

You going need to make a couple of toons just to have all Arctypes, why change that and make a free form class, that class will be Messy and uncontrollable. You see we need restrictions, it's a good thing and next time you make a toon think hard about what theme, Arctype and Origin before you make your toon.

Remember this been done once with Champions Online with making a Free form Builds, did not work out so well, couldn't tell who was a tanker and who was a Support toon, also you can gimp you build very easy, I this is another example why we need restrictions.

Both certainly good points. My counter was that you have the ability to choose sets within certain restrictions when creating the character, and they could restrict to those choices...for instance if you had chosen the wrong secondary, or even the supplemental pool set.

Others have mentioned, naturally, that folks could level with one secondary and then change it to make it easier, cheat or simply grab the set without learning how to play it, but I contend that if you allow it early it has little to no impact.

Of course the alternative is to delete and reroll. I expect this is not a popular choice with most players.

I think if you spend any time here in this community, you'll find that more the opposite tends to be true -- I've rarely seen anyone (in-game or on the forums) wail and gnash their teeth about re-rolling. Some keep the previous toon, others delete, but leveling is SO easy and fast in this game that there's really no point in decrying "having" to try out a new powerset and/or AT combo.

Well...I can't deny the wisdom of your point. I would have to agree that is likely. But would a new player look at it that way, or would they simply power through the lousy combo like they do in most games?

Speculation, sure, but my guess would be most players do not like to delete and reroll and are resistant to the idea...which could weight against the game, fair or not.

Consider the first ten levels to be the "transition" period between other games and this one. There is no doubt that this game presents a very unique system.

I have to think that everyone is unique, and some would react one way, and others a different way. So really, it's something we just can't know.

But I will point out that this game offers its subscribers a plethora of character slots over quite a few servers. That suggests an environment that is particularly alt-friendly (in fact, actually encourages the creation of many toons). Hopefully newer players will either realize this, or have it pointed out to them if need be. All we can do is try.