Updated Forum Rules and Proposed Forum Changes

It's not the inability to find specific ATs. It's the categories themselves. Many Brutes do not tank. Why are Corruptors ranged and not support? Dominators are support despite not having any buffs? Why? MMs were designed to be the redside Tanker counterpart, going to put them under tanks?

It (intentionally or not) creates an official playstyle for each AT. Considering how very open ended in playstyle each AT can be, this is a very bad thing.

You may want to read the current Message Forum Rules and Guidelines. The ones posted by theOcho in August 2010. That very same section about lobbying is in the existing rules. It's been in the forum rules for quite a long time. I believe it was in the rules back before we went to the vBulletin forums.

Much of what is in the proposed Updated Forum Rules is simply an update. A rewording or re-organization of the various points at times, but mostly just updating a tiny bit.

If you look at the current version of the forum rules and compare it side-by-side with the proposed updates, you'll see that not much has changed. If you could go back and look at the previous forum rules as they were posted over the past several years, you'd find that there's not much new under the sun.

As to whether the Updated Forum Rules will finally have consistent moderation, unlike what we have now and have pretty much always had, that is the real question.

Zwill didn't suggest merging ATs into one parent Forum with AT specific subforums. He suggested just merging Tankers and Brutes into one "Tank" subforum with all the posts for either Tanks or Bruters appearing in it (or I misunderstood)

Thank you for recognizing the support for the individual AT forums! There's a huge difference between "making things simpler" and "dumbing things down."

More guides certainly sounds like a good thing; on the other hand after this thread, I can easily imagine "OMG now we've got too many guides -- how do we consolidate THEM?"

Short answer: don't do it. Slightly longer answer: don't do it, and don't fire Zombie Man as the volunteer editor there unless some redname is prepared to do an even more outstanding job, which probably entails more work and more time than it might look like at first glance.

From using the guide section semi-regularly [and pointing them out to new players regularly] it seems apparent that yes, old dead links should be purged, but active guides shouldn't necessarily be purged simply because they're from, say, Issue 8. While numbers and powers may have changed, basic skills and tips like "gathering aggro" or "avoiding mass aggro if you're a squishie" or "hey, if you're tanking, try turning that Archon around 180 degrees so his rocket launcher AoE doesn't hit everybody" haven't changed all that much.

But if you look at the character creation, the classes themselves are arranged by such playstyles. Brutes ARE listed as a Tanker class. Corruptors are ranged damage. Dominators are support for the same reason Controllers are (Mezzes are support).

While the ATs are indeed flexible (and I won't deny that!) it's obvious NCSoft/Paragon believes that at their core, they have an intended role and/or function. It doesn't mean they can't do other things (I've seen Tankers fulfilling DPS roles and of course there's Blappers and Tankerminds), but they have a role they were meant to fill.

For veterans, yes, it's confusing because we all know this information. But for people either new to CoX or heck, new to MMOs, it would be much easier for them to start with the established roles, and then branch out.

That's three things.

Rule Zero of user interfaces is: clarity trumps all. User interfaces should not require complex explanation: the best interface is one that is self-documenting: it is obvious what it does, and (not the same thing) it is obvious how to do a particular thing with it.

So lets look at it from both directions. Suppose we were to have something like you mention original, or also anything remotely similar to it. I'll use it for example purposes but this applies to any and all suggestions remotely like it:

- Tanks: Brutes and Tankers
- Ranged DPS: Blasters, Corrupters and Dominators (Doms could also go under support)
- Support: Controllers, Defenders and Masterminds
- Melee DPS: Stalkers and Scrappers
- HEATs and VEATs: Peacebringer, Warshade, Soldier, Widow
- Build Sharing/Critique

So a new player is looking at the forums, and is looking specifically at the Melee DPS forum. What does going there do? What content will they see? Question: will they see Brutes in there? Brutes are considered "melee dps" by many players: they nominally have nearly the same melee DPS as Scrappers (and by the way, we don't have DPS classes in City of Heroes in the same way as in other MMOs, so this terminology is not used by the player community in general: encouraging new players to use it will only cause players like me to have to correct them). Suppose we put Brutes in there to fix the problem. Now we look at Tanks. Are Brutes in there? Most people consider Brutes to be a tanking-like class, but if you go to that forum you won't see Brute posts. Or worse, *some* Brute posts will go there and others will go into the Melee DPS forum.

Maybe this would work if all the defensive brute discussions happened in the tanking forum and all the offensive brute discussions happened in the melee DPS forum, but that won't happen. Even if you tell people to do it, discussions are often much more fluid than that.

So even by your own rules, players will now need to use more mouse clicks to get what they want: they will need to read two different forums to search for discussions about what they want.

In any case, because many archetypes fit into multiple common groupings, organizing in this way reduces clarity. It actually increases the amount of work necessary to find what you want. Lets go the other way around: if you want to start a thread or look for a thread about a particular topic, which forum should you pick. As I said, at least in theory if I wanted to I could put all my Brute offensive questions into the melee dps forum and all my Brute defensive questions into the tanking forum. Suppose I have a question about Domination. Where does that go? How long would it take for me to figure out that Domination questions belong in the Ranged DPS forum.


I would just leave it alone myself but suppose I was charged with reducing the number of forum sections, period, in this particular part of the forums. Then what I would do is this: segregate by *powersets* and *special topics.* For example, off the top of my head:

- Damage sets
- Defensive sets
- Buff/Debuff sets
- Epic, Ancillary, and Pool sets
- Min/Max and Build discussions
- Archetype-specific and playstyle discussion.

That at least matches how the game currently works and how discussion about the game currently revolves. Not my first choice, but at least not my last choice either.

I get the sense that both the new character creator and the proposed forum grouping is at least partially intended to map City of Heroes archetypes into common MMO class types, i.e. Melee DPS. But because City of Heroes archetypes are not designed that way, don't play that way, and don't function remotely closely to how they do in other MMOs, that might look like it makes things more approachable on the surface, but you'll simply encourage new players to believe something that is not true: that their preconceived notions about how MMO constructs work in other games is transplantable here. And the existing playerbase will react to that by constantly correcting them. That may be a much more serious turn off to new players than a forum with too many sections will be.

Technically I'm "skirting" the rule. I'm using an image that's significantly smaller than the upper limit. But I'm using multiple images.

What I'd like to see is an increase in the size of text/HTML signatures so that people who post their guides into their sigs can do so in plain hypertext.

Currently it's SEVERELY limiting to try and do with extant size limits, even proxied through URL shorteners like TinyURL.

Right now I'm burning roughly 50KB of images to convey something I could do in less than 1KB of text.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Well, at one time, that may have been the case. In a previous Community Rep administration, they clearly didn't want to spend any time doing forum moderation and the forums were a bit of a wild frontier especially Suggestions which became an argufest. So, it was moved to For Fun to indicate it wasn't sanctioned or watched or much moderated.

However, things have changed. Stronger moderation leads to less junk threads. The Devs have said on multiple occasions that they do indeed read Suggestions. Thus, it should be moved out of the wasteland of For Fun.




Well, there's your problem. That can only lead to disaster.




Funny, the "no lobbying" section of the forum rules was my suggestion to a previous administration to cut out those types of posts, especially the yahoos who post in *every* *single* patch note thread, "Hey, what about <insert their pet peeve not mentioned in the patch notes>?!"



Typical. When you do a revue of a structure to see what's surplus, you wind up also seeing what's missing.

The current way the character creator is organized is terrible. Sorry. Full Stop. Arcanaville above lays out why those classifications don't function that well. What goes in other mmos is NOT completely tranferrable to how ATs function here, with multiple ATs being able to pull multiple roles, as you also mention.

And btw I've NEVER (and I can bet others will chime in on this, especially those who started on COV) though of Brutes as Tanks. EVER.

Also there was once a time where the developers noted that MMs were the ones that were meant to be COV's tanks. NOT BRUTES!

So no, the current character classification in game ARE NOT AT ALL WELCOME. But I'm not going to complain too loudly about them. THEY SHOULD NOT BE BROUGHT TO THE FORUMS. Leave the AT forums as is.

Thankfully Zwill seems to be getting this.
The other suggestions Zwil suggested I'm down for.

Waiting for people posting in this thread to catch up to this...

Understood, but when you began talking about "posting guidelines", that has a strong whiff of

"If you want to post a guide it has to look like:"

[Guide]: Topic: Description/CatchyText

That's the kind of "user organization" I'm talking about. You could mandate this all day, every day, forever. It wouldn't help anything, save driving people off the forums.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

There's also been a few suggestions to add an Incarnates forum and/or a Paragon Market forum. I agree with the Incarnate forum at least.

*catches up*

Sound. Ta to Z (and other Z for shouting it loud enough so I could hear it above the sound of my own pomposity)

As for the rest of the site do what thy will, I've no real preferences or suggestions that haven't already been suggested.

I always, by policy, read an entire thread before posting. Believe me, that rule was a pain for AASQ. However, I believe my post has relevancy because there's no guarantee they won't restructure the archetype forums, or at least revisit the question down the road. I think its important to note that even by Zwill's priorities, and also by general user interface principles, the *methodology* and therefore *mindset* that triggered the thought to merge them in a certain way is problematic. It would be problematic no matter where it was applied, elsewhere in the forums or elsewhere on Earth.

Wrong.

The Player Guides section and Paragon Wiki frequently do NOT have the info that is in the badge section. In some cases the badge information is not even in the Beta sections (which get deleted).

Frequently badge questions get asked that go back 4+ issues.

Your assessment of the section cannot be further from the truth.

Additionally, like the AT sections, it is a focus section, and it has mainly served its purpose: keeping the badge discussions in one section of the forums. If eliminated, then badge discussions would be all over the forums and would be impossible to keep track of.

At most, Gladiators should be removed because no one actually uses the Badges and Gladiators section to talk about gladiators, and haven't for years. I think most people aren't aware they still exist.

This is another reason to keep the badge section.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

While I sorta agree with the idea of a Market forum, I don't think an Incarnate forum would work that well. Yes you could have a place for all discussions about the Incarnate powers and tactics for trials and such. But those discussions already fit into other sections of the board. There are threads in the AT sections on what what Incarnate powers to pick with particular powerset combos, tactic discussions on the Master of badges in the Badge section, and general guides on all of it in the Guides section.

Having it all in one place might seem like it would be easier to find, but the reality is it would be spreading the experts out more. Some folks post all over the boards and are knowledgeable about many areas of the game. But others are more focused and only hit their area of interests. You would lose their knowledge because they are only interested in Incarnate stuff as a peripheral subset of their main focus.

I have to disagree here. Just maintaining a guide to cover all of the Incarnate Trees (Alpha through Omega) and all of the branch variants (when all is said and done; could be almost as large as at least a full AT section) warrants it own thread. Then we add in the iTrials (which will feasibly match the number of Tress available; possibly more), the non-trial Incarnate Taskforces, the non-50 level Incarnate content, the incarnate 'market', Shards (Threads, Astrals, Empyricals and Salvage/Components), etc... it just becomes too big of a behemoth to leave littered at odd spots in the Forums.

It's the Endgame; a large system that warrants its own section... just as PvP, Market/Inventions and Architect warrant their own sections; if not, moreso.

Not saying that player's can't/shouldn't be able to add Incarnate info to their AT guides; but if a player needs to find general or comparative information, they shouldn't have to dig through every player's guide to locate specific information they're trying to find.

Two thoughts:

I think it's a good idea to make this one of the forums Premium players will be able to post to. These are the players which will have a good perspective on playing as non-subscribers, so will be the best source for such guides.

You could put links to selected guides on the CoH site. This would both encourage guide writers, who could get exposed to a larger crowd this way, and provide another method for players to get acquainted with the forums.

I think that just a reogranisation, without removing forums, could help make the forums more accessible.

Eh, whatever. I respect Arcanaville's opinions, and after reading his post, I can see where he's going with it. I guess I'll just be the voice of the minority who liked the idea Zwill had.

Everything else Zwill suggested is meh. I don't use a vast majority of the other forums. I would suggest that either people make new guides for the power sets or that the old ones get taken down. As it stands, several of them are outrageously outdated.

Its worth noting here that at the beginning of time, there was a concerted effort by the CoV team to take the traditional MMO roles, put them in a wood chipper, and recompose them in novel ways.

For example, the traditional "tanker" is a meat shield with aggro control. You'd think those two automatically go hand in hand. But in CoV, the "high hit points" archetype is actually masterminds, with their pets. Its brutes that have the better aggro control, however. In City of Heroes we have a rather traditional support/control class in controllers (even if they do sometimes deal hellacious damage). But in CoV, we took those two components of "support" and gave one to corruptors and one to dominators. Interestingly, buff/debuff went to a ranged offensive class and control went to a melee/ranged balanced offensive class.

In fact, CoV was explicitly designed to have no "DPS" class even in principle: no class doesn't at least *partially* specialize in damage. Brutes and Stalkers both have melee offense and personal defense, Dominators and Corruptors both have powersets that focus on offense, and Mastermind pets are designed to deliver substantial offense.

So who's the traditional tank in CoV? Split up between brutes and masterminds. Who's the traditional support? Split up between Corruptors and Dominators (and Masterminds). Who's the ranged offensive specialist? Corruptors, and Masterminds with ranged pets. And who's the traditional squishy? Nobody.

The reason the roles barely match City of Heroes and don't match City of Villains at all is because only City of Heroes was designed around them, and it was done so badly the whole thing was abandoned by I4. City of Villains was *explicitly* designed to confound those roles so that nothing fits in them by design. The idea behind City of Villains archetypes, and I think the designers did a fairly decent job of it, is that all archetypes can solo, but in different ways, and in teams the traditional MMO roles would arise from *combinations* of CoV archetypes. A corruptor could buff a brute into a tanker. Alternatively a dominator and a mastermind could also control all the aggro of a spawn.

If you want to know just how deliberately and interestingly convoluted City of Villains archetypes are, consider this: a lot of people look at Stalkers as weaker Scrappers. But that's not what Stalkers are. Stalkers are not weaker Scrappers. Stalkers are Single Target Melee Blasters with Defense. Assassin's Strike plus stealth is fundamentally a melee snipe, and that's how Stalkers were conceived.

I'm pretty sure I've been officially exempted from this rule since its inception.

Absolutely. There's no reason for a dedicated client's issues to get lost in the general "tech" section.

Guides will be created as they're created. "Encouragement" is from within the game itself - I'm sure we'll see Guides to Time showing up within a month, for instance, as people wrap their heads around the various ways to use it.

I'd *almost* think that the "official" guide/introduction to Beam Rifle might discourage some writing about it for some people. Others, of course, will completely ignore it.

Writing guides tends to be a fair bit of work - without, honestly, a lot of recognition in 99% of the cases. And part of the lack of recognition is, yes, the guides section is... rather disorganized. Which, in a way, is good - I know if I search the guides section for "Invulnerability," I'm going to get the guides for Invuln for tanks, brutes, etc. as opposed to just a subset for those.

If there were a way to automate the (currently volunteer) "AT Guides" posts in each forum to point TO each appropriate guide... of course, there'd have to be a way to let the guide author mark the guide themselves. Sort of like AE lets you select things... I'd *almost* suggest having them available from within the game with that interface. ("Issue:" "AT" "Powerset" and such as selections or tags... including "No issue" for some guides, like my Kheld backstory or early COH trailer guides.) But I think that all goes beyond the scope of what you're looking for.

As far as builds... this is kind of a personal gripe of mine, in general. When someone asks for a build here, they're generally given a "dream build" - purple/PVPIO'd out to within an inch of its life, multi-billion-INF cost sunk into it for an ideal *end-game* build.

Personally, I find those useless other than intellectual exercises. Interesting, sure, but useless. There are very few builds (or guides) that say "OK, from 1-20, look at doing this. From 20-35, these are really what you want to prioritize on" and the like. (I can think of maybe two guides that do that.) And with free/premium players coming in - well, some of the "old, useless" guides from between ED and I9 can be somewhat useful again. If anything, "Running on SOs" should be an encouraged category.

I don't think, right offhand, that there's anything PS can do to "encourage" that - it's got to be a VIP playerbase mindset shift. (Since, after all, we'll be the ones posting the guides.)

Edit:
As far as sharing "live" builds... if you want that, you need to either make Titan Sentinel an official app or make a "mini" version of it that can export (officially) JUST the build (in a similar format) from right inside the game to at *least* a forum profile page for that character - which can then be linked or displayed. City Vault is dead - but I don't think (just offhand) that this, voluntary usage and display format would be anywhere near as CPU/bandwidth/etc. intensive, and could serve some of the same purpose (without the avatar display, etc.)

See my Guides and Tutorials