Thoughts on Trials after i12.5 - Mob Rule

Yep; you hit the nail on the head.

I even brought this up when I was playing AC2 (on a fan site's forums)...people complaining about missions/etc being too "easy"....well, how can anyone make content that is hard for the "min/maxers" but not impossible for those "I just felt like taking all the heals in the game and no attack powers" toons?


At some point, I think, there will have to be some sort of dynamic where once you accept a mission (or whatever) it "scans you/your toon" and sees that you have all heal powers and 1-2 weak attack powers...maybe then you'll get either less enemies or maybe you'll get more "heal/rescue" type of missions/quests.

Whereas, if it sees that you have a lot of debuffs/buffs/control you'll get a diff. type of mission and/or more mobs (or higher lvl mobs/etc...).

Who knows if and when it will ever happen but...I think that would be nice.

I can see a conflict between game design philosophies possibly arising from this. One philosophy says that the content is the content and it is up to the players to formulate teams with the necessary resources to accomplish all the goals. This is certainly true for the Incarnate Trials. But I think that philosophy can fail utterly for solo play.

The other philosophy is to tailor the content to the composition/abilities of the team, even if it is a team of one. Some will dislike this as it smacks of a game system deliberately making everything equally "doable", with the danger that nothing would ever be a challenge unless some key set of abilities is missing and players must be forced to find tactical workarounds.

But I think the only long-term hope for making content that is both usable for soloists and large teams alike is to have a sophisticated system for generating enemies based on the abilities brought in to face them. I'm not saying it would be easy to implement; in fact, it is probably very hard. Improved mob AI is hard to code too, but that is not reason alone to stop researching it, IMO.

That's not the only problem. Suppose you find you don't quite have the aggro control you want, perhaps because of player skill or build efficiency or whatever. So you recruit another tanker. The problem is that this sort of system would then scale the mission to require another tanker. There would be no obvious way to fill a deficiency, and no obvious way to improve relative to the content in the general case. Even if the system worked perfectly, its that very perfection that would permanently lock you at a very specific threat balance relative to the team. And you can't easily work around that with linear difficulty scalers.

This is really not even an easy problem to express the desired behavior for, much less create a system capable of delivering it.

Honoree mission: Autocomplete is the trick.

I think they're very fun, thank you very much.

That being said, you do make a couple of good points for improvements, especially concerning accesibility.

The DA content is 50-54.

We'll always have enemies that we'll struggle against, who'll need a lot of us combined to be able to defeat them.
One of the most frequent complaints about Superman is that he's "boring" because he's basically a god - Kryptonite is the only way to give him challenges - and the same rule applies for us - no matter how powerful we become, we're always going to come up against enemeis who are even more powerful.
Whn the Incarnate system started, we were getting thrown into fights at 50 against 54s - but then we got a level shift - then another, then another - we were now 53s fighting 54s - but along came the 54+1s and 54+2s, to keep up a high challenge level.
And if an altered Goliath War Walker is 54+1. and Mother Mayhem is 54+2, then there's a pretty good chance that Tyrant is going to be at least 54+3 - and then we'll be getting the Battalion, who are even more powerful than the loyalists - but there's also the next 5 slots to come, so we'll be growing in power too - but we'll never get to the point where there's no longer any challenging content for us - even if we get another couple fo level shifts in the next 5 slots to make us 50+5, we'll end up with 54+5 enemies.
The Incarnate system never ends - we'll always be chasing the next big thing, and we'll always have enemies who are more powerful than us.

Indeed, and this is my last post about this since it's a bit off-topic, and I know you're much better at the math than I but...

Maybe a possible solution (to your issue that you bring up) is to have NPCs that you can add to your team (like Guild Wars/etc); when you add an NPC (and you chose the "tank" NPC); it knows not to continue to increase the difficulty? *shrugs*


I know there are tons of variables but...I was mainly thinking of what I said in regards to solo play...in teams...meh, "deal with it" like all MMOs do now.

Which means repeating same all 3 trials to make incarnate (4 if we are lucky to get UG) so we can do next two trials, then probably repeat new 2 trials, so we can get to next level... It still isn't fun. Instead of feeling like Super I feel like Farmer. And I believe that new "solo" path will be repeating same thing all over.
I like trials. I don't mind them being more difficult then rest of the game. Only thing I mind is having to repeat them over and over again to get to the next phase. And adding harder enemies to new trial, just give new characters on incarnate path less option. That is not fun.
If Incarnates were the only thing that I need subscription for, I would be the Premium from the first day Freedom begun.

- Il Numero Uno (The Number One)

May I ask do you (did you) have a leader that knew what to do and was communicating that to others?


I know I don't fully understand all the mechanics as far as the AV attacks go but...it's "not that hard." (not trying to belittle you/others)...

I will say, when leading a UG; I have all taunters (tankers/brutes/etc) go and taunt the AV and everyone else attack the AV from behind. Works 99% of the time really well.

Although the last UG I ran; for some reason we were having lots of issues with the 2 AVs after the trap room. Finally I just asked everyone to attack from behind while only 1 of the Tankers taunting the AV(s).

Once I said that, it seemed like the 1 Tanker was able to position the AV (mainly the 2nd one, Lichen-Infested War Walker) so that it wasn't using Lethal Force Authorized on the whole league. When all the taunters were taunting it; it seemed to be stuck in the back corner of the wall and was facing everyone.

We barely beat the 2 AVs (had like 20 or 30 seconds left on the timer heh!).

I will say that the Avatar (UG in general) is a bit binary still...you either have enough Clarion/Tactics or you don't...

His picture is on the box and his mom thinks he's cool.

Well if they didn't want us to have egos they should have thought of that before they started giving us badges like "Saved the World" and "Weapon of Mass Destruction" and called the game City of Heroes.

I've had mostly nothing but good leaders. In some cases frustrated ones who spammed League chat in all caps, but overall pretty good. But EVERY time I have run this thing there are multiple sections of people shouting at each other, calling each other idiots, someone running ahead and blowing the bombs up, a person who has Desdemona and doesn't know what to do, people who don't understand when or how or why to pick up and use temporary powers, or whatever.

And IMO there is only so much blame that can be put in players for all of this. Some players are not very good, sure. But to me that's not the whole of the problem.

By way of addressing this, I believe the way around the problem is the general principle of allowing players to become more powerful the longer a task lasts, rather than become less powerful through attrition.

This general principle is designed to ensure that when you make something difficult, the difficulty curve is tied to the reward curve. MMOs are balanced around reward rates not rewards. That means it doesn't matter how much rewards something gives, what matters is how long it takes.

The penalty for lower combat performance doesn't have to be failure, it can be a lower reward rate. Literal failure could be the absolute worst case failure mode, but it doesn't have to be the primary one.

Recognizing that, rather than scale difficulty to the player, you could let the player scale their capability upward by trading time for buff. MMO tasks can be designed so that they are intrinsically difficult, but contain within them enough assistance to neutralize that difficulty. That assistance would come at the cost of extra time to get it, and would have its own lower difficulty curve.

NPC allies you rescue or otherwise co-opt could be one way to implement this, but its not the only way. The important thing is to make sure the side tasks themselves do not have a high reward rate themselves, otherwise the best earning rate will come from doing them whether you need to do them or not. There's no penalty for doing them, and therefore no benefit to being capable of doing the tasks without them.

The trick is to wrap the assistance in a way that doesn't trivialize the core capabilities of the player, or dilute their overall contribution to the completion of the task. But this allows players to tune their own scaling rather than have the game have to do this dynamically and differently for each team of players.

Capability-aware difficulty scaling is an enormously difficult thing to do. This sort of thing is far easier, and only requires clever mission design.

I wouldn't mind the level shifting at all, thats not the issue, the issue is that with the MoM we're now at around the 9th trial boss who is completely invincible but free to attack us unless we do something complicated and continue doing that complicated task throught the fight dividing our attention 5 ways in a situation that the slightest slip will kill everyone. Which is another issue, there is almost no way to rebound at all in any of the trials, if everyone gets killed thats it, you're done, game over, a loser is you. By the time you claw your way out of the hospitial past that stupid timer either you'll be so low on time that you can't beat the boss who almost instantly regened thanks to a gimmick, the thing/person you needed to protect has been beaten into a paste or the boss is now surrounded by 500 adds. The MoM is even worse in fact since you can't go to the hospitial so when everyone dies you have to rez en masse and maybe if you're lucky some outlying players might make it up, your defenseless tanks and scrappers all dead around malaise/mayhem/a monster won't even get to their feet before they're all ripped to shreds though. In the second stage even far off players will probably be dead from the storm before they regain control of their character. In other games and even most of this game a wipe rarely means total and absolute failure, if they do then the entire encounter usually just consists of a single boss you automatically go to so it takes about 15 seconds to get back to where you were, in any of the trials even up till the last seconds there can be a total wipe if the RNG decides to be fickle or someone does the wrong thing at the wrong time, then it's back to start. How often would you want to play a board game if one of the rules said that anytime someone rolled a 1 the whole game board had to be thrown against the wall, reassembled and restarted?

Actually, it doesn't seem that bad to me at all. At the current time, MoM is the ONLY trial for which I have not been on a failed run. It can be a little rough, depending on what nightmares Malaise summons, but it's not bad.

The one that really annoys me is TPN, specifically when Maelstrom starts one-shotting you as a 'special effect', rather than walking up to you and smacking you. The nightmares are a fight. The purple patches can be avoided and don't kill you instantly. Maelstrom one-shots you with no warning. And his attack was split into two parts specifically to NEGATE the one-shot code. Cheesy design.

It reminds of something from the April Fool's issue of a gaming magazine - might have been Dragon Magazine - the Wandering Damage Table. It bypassed the hassle of writing up wandering monsters - you just rolled the dice and the players took damage. One of the items on the table was "Roll every die you own and take that much damage." Yeah, that's Maelstrom.

I'm sorry, but I don't know what that means. What is autocomplete?

Well, they've already confirmed that DA will have repeatable contacts

Most missions can be auto-competed by talking to the contact - it can be done once every 3 days.

Watson's got nothing on W.O.P.R..

What I liked about CoH was that it wasn't a treadmill. There are treadmills out there that CoH has no hope of competing with, yet that is what they are trying to do. CoH's strength was the fact it was 1 - 50. Period. Full stop. Do not pass go. Now there's 50+1, 50+2, 50+3, .... If that other treadmill with its massive amount of manpower can't keep up with customers and CoH is going to try it with a handful of people it will not end well.

Raiders aren't nice customers. They'll devour everything at a rate that makes locusts envious and then scream for more new content in a week and if the devs give in to them the rest of the game suffers.

That's what's so great about the Incarnate system - it's impossible to ever properly finish an avatar now - not only can they keep giving us more slots, they can also keep adding more trees to them - and level shifts for us and the NPCs means that there's no cap now on how high we can go - plus we've got a regular stream of new Trials giving us rolling multi-Issue cosmic-level storylines.
And with Incarnate content coming in each Issue, the Incarnate system is starting to evolve into a game within a game - once I22 is live, we'll have an Incarnate zone, several Incarnate story arcs, seveal repeatable Incarnate mission contacts, 2 Incarnate TFs and 7 Incarnate Trials - and still only 5 Incarnate slots open so far.
1-50 is now more like phase one of your career, and the Incarnate content is the open-ended phase two - it's endless endgame content.

Level shifts were a bad idea. A very bad idea. The content should have been balanced around what a +3 experiences right now. We've reached an end point here; one more level shift and this whole thing is going to come crashing down on our heads, because level shifts undo everything the sidekick system was set up to do (specifically: keep characters close together in level so one person isn't bored while another gets slaughtered). I hope we never see another level shift in the game again. Or at least level shifts that only apply in specific segments of the incarnate content and don't stack infinitely.

'attractive' is utterly subjective. You mean quantifiable numbers of merits, iXP, rewards. And even then, the attractiveness of those differs widely for players. They could double the rewards offered by the UG, but it wouldn't double my desire to do it.

Eco

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."