Thoughts on Trials after i12.5 - Mob Rule
By
Agent White,
Posted on: 2011-12-09 23:00 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Aw, I wish you hadn't worded that riddle 'trains leave for Town A and Town B every 20 minutes' - I took it to mean the two trains left at the same time, and so was unable to work it out. I thought it was a maths puzzle not a trick of wordplay. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
More specifically, people waiting for Leagueville can always decide to leave for Solotown, but the reverse is never true. So there is an asymmetry in terms of which activity can steal players from the other that is independent of preference.
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Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
Maybe I got spoiled by playing certain types of RPGs (Fallout, ahem!), but I really miss being able to talk my way past certain bosses, and actually getting rewarded by the game for taking that option.
But then again, CoH never really had anything like that. So... I dunno. |
In the Sig Arc part 3 (I think), you go chat to a bank manager guy, and the dialogue options you choose lead either to a fight or to you getting to where you want to go without having to fight. It's pretty basic in comparison to an RPG hat tree, but the tech is there.
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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I considered that, but then I remembered that not every league is composed of the necessary distribution of ATs for The One True Optimal Path to Victory. The benefit of having multiple success vectors is that it allows leagues to adjust their approach to match the abilities present (or absent), or to adjust to another approach if things aren't going according to Plan A. Having viable Plan Bs, Cs, and Ds is never a bad thing, IMO.
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Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan
Even if the devs gave us trials with a dozen different ways to succeed at them, within a few weeks at most, all routes would have been explored by the min-maxers and the one single optimal path through would become the only way it would be done from then on.
Eco |
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Originally Posted by Snow Globe
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Its meaningful if you intend to communicate with the people who can change it, as opposed to the people who can't. If your assertion is the devs are deliberately trying to beat the players, and they aren't, they cannot by definition solve your problem by changing their intent. They cannot solve the problem you are stating exists.
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It doesn't help that, as designed, a trial can fail due entirely to the actions of a few (even 1) player (s) not following the script the developers laid out for the trials:
- Keyes can fail if enough players don't prevent disintegrations. Mixed in with this are the Obliteration Beam, the Time Stop, and the Entanglements. The pulse damage was toned down to keep players on their collective toes, but not to outright kill them.
- Underground can fail in multiple ways due to a variety of ways the rest of the league can't see.
- TPN can fail if enough civilians get hurt/killed or a healer gets turned around in the repetitive twisty corridors of the media buildings and fails to heal HD.
- MoM can fail:
- If enough people use the rez.
- If the healers can't rez the fallen due to the asinine rez prompt to lose the time.
- If the random AV can clobber an entire league with an AoE of 5k -after- defenses.
- To say nothing about a whole room of constant Psi damage in a little room with a PSI-based AV that can pretty much kill anyone it sets its sight on.
Well players need to say why: The developers are acting like bad Game Masters and are clearly not balancing the trials to an appropriate level of difficulty for the player base as a whole. Instead they are balancing the trials to a very select group of players that don't think the developers have gone far enough and will never be satisfied with this game because it will always be "too easy" less than a month after release of any difficult content.
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
In cases where the trial difficulty is linked to limitations of the UI, I think calling that "challenging" is a stretch.
Keye's central challenge is a "meta" one largely unconnected from actual gameplay. The main cause of failure is people being Disintegrated. If the UI showed the person being affected, his or her HP, and let you select them directly from the UI, this trial would be a lot easier in a technical sense, but only because a significant technical hurdle is lessened. I also think explicitly showing the players name would help players understand what is going on a lot better.
In the UG, not being able to see who is Targetted unless it is you, but still being able to die because another player doesn't react, is a similar situation. In a technical sense it would be "easier" if you could tell what was going on, but only because the game is lessening the burden on players to play like organized guilds instead of pick up groups.
Now, a different kind of situation is putting level 54+2 AVs in a mission at all. Reducing this, or changing the way level shifts work so they come much earlier in the process, would make the trials easier in a more literal way. But I think it's necessary; there are a few cardinal rules in this game, and one of them happens to be "fighting anything more than about +4 to you is usually fruitless." This is by design. So color me confused when AVs that are +6 to base level players show up in the same issue where the original intent was to get us to run fewer of the easier trials. Double floor me for it having happened shortly after a statement about the intent to get the LFG tool working so people could join trials blindly. It's a very large disconnect. The only interpretation I have for it is that the developers want to encourage us to play more trials, but only after farming BAF and Lambda for all they are worth to make it worth playing the other trials.
Then there is the MoM rezz penalty mechanic. IMO this thing adds a new level of ugly to what it meant to have anti-PUG mechanics. It is so awful that I think it deserves its own thread, because I never want to see something that terrible make it into the game again.
None of us are ever going to agree on what the perfect balance for trials is. However, I think it is incumbent on the person designing them to look at the history of the game. Task Forces have been changed so that we all run them at the level of the leader. Why, then, are we back square one with level shifts to spread us out dramatically in power?
But more importantly, I think the question needs to be asked about how important it really is that the trials have appreciable fail rates. Because IMO the bottom line is if people have spent twenty to fourty minutes or whatever putting together/waiting for a trial, and it has even a 15% chance of failing (ESPECIALLY a 15% chance linked to a UI or a single player who refuses to/can't cooperate), people are going to treat that trial like a one-off and rely on something more predictable for their advancement. You almost never see people actually fail a Task Force, and when they do, its because they gave up, not because they couldn't get 23 peers to figure out an obscure objective on a 12 minute timer.
Adding one more note to my really long post: City of Heroes' end-game is fundamentally different than the one featured in many other games. IMO it cannot get away with merely appealing to the small fraction of min-maxers who occupy the most competitive factions of the playerbase. I do not think we have a player population large enough to justify that. And with the incarnate system being one of the major draws of recurring revenue post free-to-play, making sure it has wide-spread appeal is extremely important. The very tip-top elements of it, or certain settings and badges might be useful for appeasing the die hard players, but a different set of needs applies to many other groups.
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Which is specifically what I said, and specifically what I said you didn't say. You said, by way of trope, that the devs are deliberately trying to make the players fail. I said that wasn't true, that instead the problem was that they were taking the difficulty level to too high an extreme at times, and judging overall playerbase success by what the best players can accomplish, not what the average player groupings can accomplish.|
Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Well players need to say why: The developers are acting like bad Game Masters and are clearly not balancing the trials to an appropriate level of difficulty for the player base as a whole. Instead they are balancing the trials to a very select group of players that don't think the developers have gone far enough and will never be satisfied with this game because it will always be "too easy" less than a month after release of any difficult content.
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Setting aside the "never be satisfied" comment, I agree completely with that statement above. And its exactly what needs to be focused on, not a most-likely false interpretation of the developer's motives.
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Well, we agree on something at least. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Which is specifically what I said, and specifically what I said you didn't say. You said, by way of trope, that the devs are deliberately trying to make the players fail. I said that wasn't true, that instead the problem was that they were taking the difficulty level to too high an extreme at times, and judging overall playerbase success by what the best players can accomplish, not what the average player groupings can accomplish.
Setting aside the "never be satisfied" comment, I agree completely with that statement above. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
And its exactly what needs to be focused on, not a most-likely false interpretation of the developer's motives.
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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
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Setting that question aside for a moment, there's a related thought I've been thinking about off and on regarding the trials, particularly in light of my presumably well-known general animosity for the design of the Underground trial. I've been thinking about a metric that measures the average number of minutes expended per reward earned for each trial. Basically, you'd keep track of the number of player-minutes each trial takes, and the number of threads, merits, and component drops it awards. Simple enough. We could figure out how many minutes it takes to earn a component drop in Lambda, or Keyes, or the Underground. |
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
But more importantly, I think the question needs to be asked about how important it really is that the trials have appreciable fail rates. Because IMO the bottom line is if people have spent twenty to fourty minutes or whatever putting together/waiting for a trial, and it has even a 15% chance of failing (ESPECIALLY a 15% chance linked to a UI or a single player who refuses to/can't cooperate), people are going to treat that trial like a one-off and rely on something more predictable for their advancement. You almost never see people actually fail a Task Force, and when they do, its because they gave up, not because they couldn't get 23 peers to figure out an obscure objective on a 12 minute timer.
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But what about failures? Well, we could simply add those minutes to the bucket and say they generated no reward. So the average number of minutes per reward would go up. And we can make sure the metric can't be exploited by making sure only player-minutes for players that have full participation scores are counted. If a player doesn't participate, they don't count. So you can't fill a trial with dummy accounts and let the timers run out while doing nothing just to make that trial look bad.
Given both the duration of each trial, and the failure rates, I wonder what the average minutes per thread, per merit (both types), and per component drop would be for all of the trials. I wonder if they are remotely close. And if they are not, I wonder to what degree failures cause one trial to net far less rewards than others (normalizing based on drop types would be an extra bit of complexity for such a metric).
If Lambda was the fastest trial but had a 15% failure rate, that might be acceptable. Players would still run it, because on average they would still come out ahead. But if the longest trials also have the highest failure rates, that basically implies the average length of the trial per reward is even longer than the average successful run, and its entirely reasonable that trials that both offer poor rewards per minute *and* have high failure rates would be less palatable.
But from a computational perspective, I wonder if that is a useful metric to analyze the trials with. Its ok if Underground or TPN offer a lower reward per minute if they are intended to be harder, but does anyone know *how much* lower they are, factoring in both duration and failure rate? Lower is one thing, but are they lower than they need to be?
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Trials have only been in the game for one and a half Issues, and it's already way quieter now than when they were first introduced - they're now a major feature of CoH and are fully integrated into the game - and with a constant stream of new Trials, they're only going to become even more important as time goes on, and the already shrinking group of anti-Trial types will get even smaller.
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Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
*can't wait for more threads about how trials are so horrible and then more threads saying that they're not*
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@Golden Girl
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I am starting to wonder if they care if they drive away paying customers meaning supposed VIP's.
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Originally Posted by rsclark
And each and every one of those things will drive away more paying customers.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
But from a computational perspective, I wonder if that is a useful metric to analyze the trials with. Its ok if Underground or TPN offer a lower reward per minute if they are intended to be harder, but does anyone know *how much* lower they are, factoring in both duration and failure rate? Lower is one thing, but are they lower than they need to be?
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I'm not sure. It's a hard question to answer, because different circumstances yield different failure rates. Playing the trial the way they originally appeared to intend it, with people signing up blindly from the LFG queue, I imagine would have a very high failure rate in the more difficult trials. You have no control over who shows up, and clearly we're not supposed to be fighting level 56 AVs as level 50s. The purple patch is very heavy handed in its insurance of that. But if we assume the opposite case scenario--that we need to recruit high level players for some trials and not others--the time increases even more. In particular, a league that forms for BAF can run Lambda and probably Keyes. But that same league is likely to contain some number of players who add an increasingly high chance of failing the remaining trials and "need" to be replaced if not running with whatever you've got. There is the question of where all these level 53s are supposed to come from. And if we add social factors, like the fact that many players hear mention of TPN or UG and immediately drop out, that conceivably adds even more time.
I have heard some players say the Underground is easy. But I have failed the Underground more times than I have completed it. I think I have done it about 7 times. I've succeeded twice. Every attempt but two of them (not necessarily the unsuccessful ones) featured name calling, screaming, and tempers flaring throughout the War Walker fights because some team members were doing who knows what. Maybe they didn't even speak English.
In any case the thing about trial reward rates and the impact of a failure is that failures cost more than base time. They also often mean the disbanding of a league. And even a trial that doesn't actually fail but gets close brings out flaring tempers. On Virtue at least, prior to all this trial stuff I don't remember many instances of team members completely losing it and screaming at other players. It is now unusual for me to NOT witness this when playing any of the newer trials. The cost, IMO, is more than just the time.
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This was a Fire/Kin Controller?|
Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Let's see, for one run:
Sight Beyond Sight: Yes, had 4 of them. Furious Rage: Yes, had 6 of them. Amazing Luck and Resistant: Yes, 2 each. Back in the Fight: 2. Liberate: N/A as I wasn't held, though I think I had 2. Immortal Recovery: 2. Ultimates: 2. Note: You can only use 1 of these at a time. Mission set to -1: Yes. Envenomed Dagger: Yes. Was I able to kill the clones fast enough? No. Was I able to damage Trapdoor fast enough: no. You can only have 1 shift from Ultimate inspirations at any one time. The game prevents you from using a second one while the first is active. I think I had to finally get Shivans in addition to the above to actually succeed with that character. The next step for that character would have been getting the Warburg Rockets. |
I realize you are a bit lower on ST than most other ATs, but with Imps, kin buffs and T4 insps this should be completely doable.
I've solod the arc on a Fire/Kin corr on SOs with and a tray full of T1 insps. The corr is a different animal, but I'm still kind of stunned at a Fire/Kin Controller not being able to do it.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Its not that simple. Even in the hypothetical case where people liked the trials more than the solo path, there is still the unavoidable situation where the solo path acts to break up the critical mass of players queuing to do a trial (and by queuing I mean waiting for one, in or out of the turnstile).
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
More specifically, people waiting for Leagueville can always decide to leave for Solotown, but the reverse is never true. So there is an asymmetry in terms of which activity can steal players from the other that is independent of preference.
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I have a different perspective.
Right now most leagues form in the RWZ (Virtue) and PD (Freedom), and they are primarily preformed leagues.
Soon we will have an open zone, with nothing but Incarnate level content.
This will be the go-to zone for incarnates.
You can hang out here, even in a group, street sweep on teams and wait for trials to form.
You will probably be able to run solo mishes during lulls when a league has just taken off, and be done before another forms up.
Solotown is less solotown and more the gathering zone for incarnates that people have been asking for.
Now we will have a raid launch point that also allows us to kill stuff and earn incarnate components during downtime.
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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
This was a Fire/Kin Controller?
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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
I realize you are a bit lower on ST than most other ATs, but with Imps, kin buffs and T4 insps this should be completely doable.
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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
I've solod the arc on a Fire/Kin corr on SOs with and a tray full of T1 insps. The corr is a different animal, but I'm still kind of stunned at a Fire/Kin Controller not being able to do it.
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Solo, I couldn't with this character until I had got the crutches out. Several other characters had to call in help as well. A few didn't, but that Ill/Emp controller of mine is sporting a build of (at least) 5 billion (if not much more) in current IO prices. I didn't have to touch inspirations, but then again I trapped Trapdoor in the lava. My Fire/Fire/Fire tanker decided to fight IN the lava (great tactic if you can do it). My Bots/Dark MM had far more firepower than most other characters and breezed through it.
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
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I'm not sure that's true, at least not intrinsically. In fact, here's my current situation and - exaggeration and fabrication notwithstanding - the biggest reason I just don't do Trials: I don't play my 50s. Why would I? When the only way I have of progressing them is Trials and I have to sit on my hands and wait for a Trial to form (which I won't), what reason do I have to even log in a 50? What reason, I mean, that I didn't have prior to I19? Because I didn't play my 50s before that, and I don't play them since.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
More specifically, people waiting for Leagueville can always decide to leave for Solotown, but the reverse is never true. So there is an asymmetry in terms of which activity can steal players from the other that is independent of preference.
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Now consider a solo Incarnate path. All of a sudden, I DO have a reason to log in and play my 50s, because I can make progress on them even if the rest of the world went to sleep that day. Moreover, if they make the LFG Queue work from within an instance, the exact reverse of what you postulate will happen. People might (and probably will) play the solo Incarnate path as a first choice, but will do so always queued and look out for a Trial. Whenever one of those shows up either in the queue or over Global, they will do that, instead, because it's a faster, easier source of progress (I assume).
The biggest mechanical reason that turns people like me off Trials is not having anything to do when one isn't being formed. Give us something to do, and we just might elect to do trials just as a change of pace, in much the same way I run TFs now. These days, I'll be playing solo missions when I get a tell or see a Global call recruiting for a TF. I think... "Hmm... I haven't run this TF in a while. Why not?" So I ditch my instance (it'll be there when I come back) and join up with the TF. The trick is to keep me interested when I'm NOT doing forced teaming, because you first have to get me to log into a character capable of running this content before you have a shadow of a hope of getting me to run it.
And, no, I will not switch characters if I heard a call. I play what I want, when I want to play it. The game does not dictate when I swap characters.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Sam, your point about being queued for trial LFG whilst running solo instances in DA made me consider my own probable attitude to this. If I'm running solo content, I'll try out LFGing too, but when I get added and get the 'enter trial?' popup, it will depend on what I'm actually doing at that moment wether or nit I click 'yes'. If I'm between missions, I'll Be more inclined to enter a trial than if I'm in an instance, and the further advanced in the instance I am, the less likely I'm be to abandon it for a trial. I know I can always start it again later, but i'll probably want to finish the instance first.
I don't know what effect this will have on Leagues, however. Currently, if I'm waiting in Pocket D, it's a very rare occasion that I click 'no' and leave the league. If I have the option to choose to continur doig something I'm enjoying, however, I'm going to be opting out of the trial queue more often.
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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Did I miss something? There is a story other than gettings acids, nades and then dogpiling each and every AV?|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
There's plenty of story in the Trials - they're all story-driven, and are a direct follow-up to the Praetorian content in GR.
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I must have missed it.
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Well, I imagine I'll do what my friend did in WoW - queue up for a zillion different things, and if one shows up when I'm unavailable, I'll let the prompt time out or refuse it, and then wait for the next one in the list. Then again, I've never been shy of abandoning instances when I'm alone. Like you said - the instance will be there when I come back, and I'm usually solo so who gives a toss about the instance if I don't?|
Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan
I don't know what effect this will have on Leagues, however. Currently, if I'm waiting in Pocket D, it's a very rare occasion that I click 'no' and leave the league. If I have the option to choose to continur doig something I'm enjoying, however, I'm going to be opting out of the trial queue more often.
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My general point is that if you can get people engaged into Incarnate-applicable characters and playing them at the time, you have a MUCH higher chance of getting even the stout dissenters to join Trials from time to time. A lot of people - myself included - complain about Trials, but the bulk of this is because Trials are seen as the status quo. If you allow us to turn Trials into the exception to the rule, which is "my own stuff at my own pace," then I WILL run them as a change of pace.
Few things in this game are so bad I will NEVER run them at all, but a lot of things I don't want to run very often.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Fixing the LFG so you can run missions while you wait ought to be a big improvement, but I wonder if it isn't too late. Players are already in the habit of pre-forming leagues, and there's still the problem that randomly-assembled PuGs are prone to failure in the trickier Trials.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The biggest mechanical reason that turns people like me off Trials is not having anything to do when one isn't being formed. Give us something to do, and we just might elect to do trials just as a change of pace, in much the same way I run TFs now.
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Let me put it this way - if there's no real downside to queueing up for a Trial, I'd queue up for it. The worst that can happen is I never get on one, but if I have something else to do, I'll do that and just keep on queueing till the cows come home. Sooner or later people will catch on to the "no downsides" thing and start queueing, and we'll eventually start seeing Trials formed out of the queue. It's far easier to click a button and go about your business than it is to monitor channels, lemme' tell ya!|
Originally Posted by JKCarrier
Fixing the LFG so you can run missions while you wait ought to be a big improvement, but I wonder if it isn't too late. Players are already in the habit of pre-forming leagues, and there's still the problem that randomly-assembled PuGs are prone to failure in the trickier Trials.
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As for PuG raids failing... Yeah, that I can see, but I personally consider it a flaw of raid design, at least for most of them. To my mind, designing raids which are only accessible through a random game joining feature and then going ahead to make them require strict coordination, leadership and prior training is just awkward planning. If they're supposed to require this kind of rigorous micromanagement and preparation, then don't put them in a LFG queue. If you put them in a LFG queue, then ensure that people who join a raid from it actually have a snwoball's chance in hell of succeeding.
If need be, raid instructions need to be included in some kind of easy-to-access guide somewhere on the US. Maybe make Prometheus able to be called from inside the raid instance so that he can provide point-for-point instructions and tactical suggestions in case people are setting foot in a raid for the very first time. Automating the team-building process also requires automating the instruction process, because you very well could have an entire league made up of first-timers, and you NEED to inform those of how to play your obtuse Trial.
Personally, I hate tasks that you're supposed to fail a dozen times before you trip over backwards into even the faintest idea of how to succeed or - much more commonly - read about how to succeed on a fansite. That's either "guide dang it" or "nintendo hard," depending on how you see it, and I consider nether to be good design.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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The trial instructions need to be condensed into the 'Obliteration beam readying!' - style popups we alrwsdy have, and they need to be very clear on what you need to do when they appear.
'You are marked for death-BREAK LoS WITH MAELSTROM!'
'Avoid Pink Circles!'
'Use Pacification Grenade on Maurader'
Etc.
We already have some of these of course but we need idiot-proofing. Also, on trials where different teams split up to do different objectives at the same time, there need to be different popups for different teams, selectable by the leader. On the TPN, eg, team 1 can have 'Defeat telepaths! Do not harm civikians!' whilat team 2 members get 'Protect HD!' instead etc. Then the leader can put single target guys in team 1 and healers in team 2 or whatever.
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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While that kind of alert text would certainly help, I think that is just masking the real problem; treating the symptom and not the disease, so to speak. Sure, the immediate problem is players not knowing exactly what to do, when, and most importantly, why. But the root cause of this is a poorly conceptualized trial system. Rather than make trials "idiot-proof", it is better I think for trials to cultivate non-idiot (i.e., informed) players in the first place. Moreover, a properly devised trial mission should be such that players should be capable of arriving at their own tactics for victory, and not utterly dependent on the Macguffin-like glowies and temp powers that are required in order to make the AVs damageable. There isn't a single success vector that allows players to take down AVs by means other than direct damage.|
Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan
The trial instructions need to be condensed into the 'Obliteration beam readying!' - style popups we alrwsdy have, and they need to be very clear on what you need to do when they appear.
'You are marked for death-BREAK LoS WITH MAELSTROM!' 'Avoid Pink Circles!' 'Use Pacification Grenade on Maurader' Etc. We already have some of these of course but we need idiot-proofing. Also, on trials where different teams split up to do different objectives at the same time, there need to be different popups for different teams, selectable by the leader. On the TPN, eg, team 1 can have 'Defeat telepaths! Do not harm civikians!' whilat team 2 members get 'Protect HD!' instead etc. Then the leader can put single target guys in team 1 and healers in team 2 or whatever. Eco |
Take the acids and grenades, for instance. You aren't told until after you acquire them what purpose they serve, and so there is no logical reason to go after them. In fact, I contend that players wouldn't even bother to do so if Lambda's phase two wasn't entirely based on mindlessly acquiring them, giving you nothing to do but watch a timer expire otherwise. However, if a pre-trial "briefing" was available that explained the acids and grenades, then players would go in already knowing that acquiring them had benefits that they could fold into their attack strategies. But as it is, the whole thing is just a big set of rail tracks that the league rolls along without any room/opportunity for deviation. This is only fun if you like figuring out puzzles with but one solution, or you like seeing lots of DirectDraw visual fx fly around on screen. But it isn't particularly fun if you enjoy collaborative creative problem solving.
It makes me wonder if there is a perception at Paragon Studios that lots of CoX players are former WoW players who willingly spend 6 hours running a single raid instance in the hopes of getting that one piece of armor to drop, where one false mouse click and the whole team gets wiped in short order, goes off to spend hundreds in gold for gear repair, and then goes back in for another try. I mean, by the standards of WoW raids, 60-minute UGTs that fail, leaving no component rewards for anyone, are hardly worth even a squeak of protest.
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Except that is a hypothetical assuming a change to the turnstile that I'm currently unaware of any plans to implement. *If* that occurs at the same time the solo incarnate path is introduced, *then* the asymmetry I mentioned would not exist in the form I described. But its the very fact that trials have to be organized at the moment - or rather they almost always are - while the solo path can be started at any time that generates the strong asymmetry I mentioned.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Now consider a solo Incarnate path. All of a sudden, I DO have a reason to log in and play my 50s, because I can make progress on them even if the rest of the world went to sleep that day. Moreover, if they make the LFG Queue work from within an instance, the exact reverse of what you postulate will happen. People might (and probably will) play the solo Incarnate path as a first choice, but will do so always queued and look out for a Trial. Whenever one of those shows up either in the queue or over Global, they will do that, instead, because it's a faster, easier source of progress (I assume).
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However, even if that change occurs, its not clear what happens then. People can now leave their solo path for the trials, but if the solo missions take significant time, it isn't necessarily very likely that someone would bail out of it near the end to join a trial. A significant percentage of players would commit to the solo missions once they started them, and may not be willing to exit them to join a trial at a random time.
Keep in mind why we can't queue in missions in the first place. There is the belief that if you don't want to join because you're busy, you don't have to. But if too many people do that, it could disrupt a trial trying to start if too many people drop or fail to join. The attitude of "I'll queue, because its entirely optional if I join or not" is precisely the mindset the devs are trying to avoid. They want people to commit to the league or the queue, so when it does launch they are far more likely to agree to go.
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Originally Posted by Nyx
Did I miss something? There is a story other than gettings acids, nades and then dogpiling each and every AV?
I must have missed it. |
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The Honoree/Holtz is the other gate: It's a test of environmental awareness and spawn manipulation (with some performance gating on the side).
After all that, Minos is simply a test of endurance: Can you survive long enough to knock him down?
If you've passed the first two tests, then you'll know how to ensure you pass the last one.
But then again, CoH never really had anything like that. So... I dunno.