Endgames are backwards

I have experience with endgame, and without exception it has been the most boring, demotivational experience of my life every single time. But that's not the point. Let me explain.

I don't doubt that the CONTENT behind the endgame is designed to be fun. The various artists worked hard to make the visuals and presentation exciting, the writers tried hard to make the experience memorable (whether they succeeded is irrelevant), the power balance guys did their best to make the experience challenging yet possible. No developer sits down to design and thinks: "Today, I'm gonna' create ****!" Everyone does what he can to make a good game.

It's where gameplay meets time sink that the disconnect ultimately takes place. See, the various artists work hard to make a fun piece of content, but then this is taken and slotted into a SYSTEM that's designed to keep people addicted and conditioned to repeat the same tasks over and over again and never even think of asking for more. That's precisely what Matt Miller wanted - "a system." He was well aware that Incarnate content by itself would be insufficient to keep people's attention, even if it came with further character progression. The solution? Time sinks, Skinner boxes and clever tricks to keep player "activity levels" artificially high.

Read any article on the science of this kind of design and you'll see people constantly use terms like "activity levels," "stopping points" and suchforth. It's hard science, but the one aspect that this hard science never takes into account is whether what's being designed is actually fun to play through. Because "fun" is not the point. The point is to keep people playing. Whether they play for fun, through psychological manipulation or peer pressure is irrelevant. The point is to keep people playing.

I dislike large-scale raids, obviously, but that doesn't make large-scale raids inherently bad or unfun. It's easily provable that there are plenty of people who enjoy that. I'm sure the actual act of playing those raids is fun for them. What I'm saying is that the system behind them is not intended to entertain them, but rather it's intended to, as the Freedom trailer says, "Play for free! FOREVER!" That's really a necessity in this case, because large-scale raids require large-scale participation, and there really isn't any one thing in this game that has a large number of fans. Consequently, the only way to support large-scale raids with any consistency is to rope people who don't really like them but are open to doing them if the reward is right into the mix to serve as population.

Why I find endgame as a concept to be "backwards," however, runs deeper than this. I have no special hate for raids that isn't shared by a whole bunch of other team content which I have a policy of "live and let live" with. It exists for people who like it, but alternatives exist for people who don't. Diversity is a win for everyone. Why I find endgame to be "backwards" is that it usurps this concept to use it as a time sink, because large-scale raids ARE a time sink. They take time to organise, time to coordinate, time to run, they can fail and their rewards can vary. All this does is diminish the actual raids themselves for the people who run them while at the same time both roping in unwilling participants AND using perverting content into something that PREVENTS people from having fun.

Time sinks hurt a game's entertainment value, that's what it comes down to. By turning raids into both a time sink and a bottleneck, it breeds exactly the kind of cynicism that sees people hate raids as a concept, and hate people who run raids by association. It breeds contempt, for the sole reason of keeping people playing even when they're not having fun.

It's postulated that if people could just "beat" the game, they'd stop playing, so you have to mire them and not let them progress so they'd play forever. This completely undermines the concept of replayability not just by ignoring it as a factor, but also by making the game into such a chore that it's not worth playing over again. When I end a game, look back and think "Man, that was fun! I want to do it again!" then I will. Over and over and over again. When I look at a game and think "I never want to do this again!" then you're not going to keep me playing much longer. I didn't spend seven years in this game spinning my wheels at level 50. I spent seven years making some 50-odd characters, getting 10-15 of them to 50, getting a whole bunch to 40 and even more to 30 and continue to make new ones when a new and great idea strikes my fancy.

Every time I play another game I like, I'm compelled to come back to City of Heroes and remake my character from that game into this one. Because every other game makes itself such a nuisance that by the time I'm done, I don't want to start over. Because every other game is about finding "the one." City of Heroes is the only game I've ever seen which was about making my own fictional universe of characters, and an endgame which bogs me down to such an extent that I HAVE to pick a "main" and focus on simply takes a big bite out of my motivation to replay the game.

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.

That's not the assumption I'm making, however. My assumption there is that there isn't enough interest in multi-team raids to sustain raiding as a concept. You need to involve other people, people who aren't explicitly motivated by the act of raiding itself, and those people you need to "bribe." Look at one of the chief concerns behind Dark Astoria - if you give people a solo path with a similar pacing to iTrials, then there's every reason to believe iTrial participation could reduce to such an extent that populations crash below the minimum critical level, and raiding effectively becomes impossible to run with any consistency. The mere fact that this concern exists is strong evidence that raiding alone is not self-sustaining and it needs not just extra incentive, but other content needs to expressly not have too much incentive.

Essentially, I'm not allowed to have too much fun outside of a raid, or else I'd never raid.

The subject of pacing is entirely separate from the subject of raiding. That's something I've been trying to beat into people's heads since I18. You can have raids without them being end game and you can have end game without it being raids. At this point, this is a fact, and evidence to this fact is, again, Dark Astoria. That's end game without the raiding. Well, almost entirely without the raiding - there's that Trial at the end, but it doesn't preclude one from playing the rest of the content up to that point. Additionally, the Winter Lord's Realm raid is a pristine example of raid content that's not end game, and people seemed to play it quite freqently despite it not offering Incarnate progress.

But as to the concept of pacing itself, you are correct that that's an important issue. If the game progresses too slowly, people get bored. If the game progresses too quickly, then its progress gets devalued and you can't enjoy your gains before they become obsolete. But there's an important distinction to make here about rewards. There are, at the very least, two ways to view rewards. You can either view rewards as progress, or you can view them as payment. Let me explain the distinction.

If you view rewards as progress, then you use them as milestones to move a player along through a game that the player wanted to play anyway. It's a lot like that peasant in that village offering me 100 gold to go kill the Kobold King I was going to go kill anyway, but that 100 gold will help buy me better gear IN ADDITION to the gear and experience I'll get off the Kobold. Rewards as progress infers that people intrinsically enjoy the experience, thus the rewards are there to provide novelty and keep it from getting stale. I may enjoy punching Skulls, but only for so long. Before I get bored of it, I'm shuttled along to punch Trolls, instead, and the game remains fun.

Viewing rewards as payment, however, is where I run afoul of the system. This recognises that players intrinsically DO NOT want to play the game, or at the very least do not want to play that particular content, but they do anyway because they want the rewards. This is where the game turns into a job and where people start to grumble. Again, it's the old argument people made about Hamidon farms. Out of one corner of their mouths, they claimed they just wanted to raid and would do that even if there were no rewards. Out of the other corner, they insisted they'd stop raiding if the rewards were reduced. Ideally, a game should never ask a person to do something he doesn't want to do in order to get something he wants to have. That's why games are escapism - we can have what we want without working for it.

Obviously, WHERE this pacing stands is up for debate and obviously, wherever it stands, SOMEONE will be left out in the cold. My concern is more one of development ideology. Recently, a lot of our reward structure has been designed such as to funnel people into content the developers want to be played, whether or not players actually want to play this content. When I say I want to just run story arcs and no farm for merits or tickets or what have you, I'm told this is the least productive way to progress. Because story arcs are old, and developers want me to play their new stuff, because I need to pay them to play it. When I say that I want to kill everything in my missions, I'm told that that's a bad idea and I should instead stealth Dark Astoria repeatable missions for the mission reward.

It's a reward structure designed to keep people playing even after they're no longer enjoying themselves that I find to be "backwards." And that's exactly where I see the Incarnate system. Because, really, there is NO WAY to design a system that's going to keep people playing forever. Either they'll reach the end, or they'll walk out, and the longer you try to stretch it out, the worse it becomes. There is no such thing as endless content. The sooner players and developers accept this fact, the better.

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.

Perhaps you should find out what people who play the Incarnate trials think of them, how long they take to run, how long they take to organize, and how often people fail them. Or how many are unwillingly roped into participating. How do you even pull that last one off? Everyone I've ever known who hated raiding either stopped or wouldn't start. No one could force them to do it, or rope them into it.

I am fairly suspicious of your argument because you're making how people view and interact with the contentin practical, empirical terms irrelevant in favor of theory about what endgame content is supposed to be as you describe it here. As long as people who participate in it and the ways they do so aren't a factor, it's not hard to use theory to propose all kinds of things about it, but all of this is irrelevant if the people involved only matter insofar as they can be made to fit what you're saying.

So what you're saying is that it makes people who don't really have much experience with raids and who don't understand them hate them for all kinds of arbitrary reasons that practical experience might easily debunk, depending on the game?

Except endgame raiding is all about progress, so you can handle the next tier of raids. Yes, that's something of a treadmill, but it also means people aren't expected to simply run the same raids over and over and over again forever, but to run a particular raid until the next raid is released and they're able to handle it.


This is super bizarre. I raid and I have as much altitis as anyone else. Right now I'm playing probably a dozen characters over two separate MMOs and participating in that endgame content in one of them. When I get tired of a game, I stop playing it until I decide I want to give it a go again. I know hardcore raiders who had filled up every server slot with characters at the level cap, who not only did their guild's/SG's raids, but also did PUG raids with their other characters. I have no frame of reference for understanding this statement.
In other MMOs, the only reason I've had to pick a main was for the sake of raiding, because raiding is much more focused and time-intensive than it is here. But even when I was raiding regularly, nearly all of my actual playing time outside of raids was leveling alts. I was never forced to exclusively play one character all the time. The current game I play other than CoH lends itself fairly handily to altitis by giving each character type its own storyline.

I feel like we're arguing over an idea of what an endgame represents, rather than the reality of what endgames are, at least in many American MMOs. Nothing you've argued here really resembles anything I've done in the trials I've done here. When I log into CoH, sometimes I do trials. Sometimes I do tip missions. Sometimes I run SSA missions. Sometimes I hang out in Ouro and chat with global friends. Sometimes I log into a sub-50 character and get them through about 2-5 levels. None of these things is particularly more difficult, time-consuming, etc. than any of the others.

How people interact with content in practical, empirical terms is completely irrelevant. The actual Incarnate content is just fine. Perhaps not to my liking, exactly, but that's really not the point. It's not about content, it's about the system behind it, the system which dictates which content you can run at which point after how much effort and, moreover, what subtle psychological cues you're fed to condition you to want to keep going.

It would be pointless of me to criticise specific raids for specific reasons, or even to criticise raids in general. I don't like them, but I don't like a great many things and that doesn't stop me from progressing through the rest of the game. I don't like Task Forces but no-one cares. I can progress through other means. I don't like large teams, but no-one cares. I can progress by myself. I don't like complex stat systems, but no-one cares. I can progress with a less optimised build. What content I like is not relevant, because content is not at fault here.

In a sense, that's precisely what I'm saying - because of how the end game system is designed, raids bear the brunt of player complaints, and it starts to seem like even having raids is an affront to some. That's not at all the case. Raids are merely an expression of the deeper problem, and the deeper problem is that the system thus far only manifesting through those raids is designed first and foremost to impede people.

You can argue this angle from a player's perspective, yes. But from a development perspective, you do indeed need to be impeded forever, because if you're not, you'll get to the end. And then what? It's unreasonable to assume that this system can be extended into infinity. Yes, they've said they could work on adding more slots beyond Omega, but all this does is spread out the Incarnate "level range" even farther while not providing much substance to the journey. The benefit of having a game with an end is that you have a static range in which to add content. By constantly moving the goal posts, you end up with a game so "wide" that it's functionally unmanageable.

Let me give you an example with my character roster. Back in the day when I had, say, 6-8 characters, they all levelled up fairly fast. If I wasn't playing one, there was a very small number of others I could be playing. Today, I have right around 50 characters. What this means is that some of them have not been touched in years. Samuel Tow himself has not done anything meaningful since I10, Xandra hasn't been played since before Energy Transfer got its slower attack animation.

It's not feasible to have an "infinite" game, thus your end game has to be either slow or hard or repetitive or, very often, all three. And all of those are ways to keep players away from the end, lest they peer over the edge of the world and realise the Earth is flat, then leave. What content you fill this doorstop with isn't the issue. It could be the game's best content by far, but it's the system of stops and time sinks that serves to ruin it.

And if you have any illusions that Dark Astoria will be any different because it's not raid content, you're in for a rude surprise. Not only is Dark Astoria the very same time sink, it's actually considerably worse for fear of it stealing population from raids. Again, that's not an unreasonable fear, but it serves to diminish the impact on the content it impacts.

"Altitis" is a condition involving creating characters and not really playing them. This is the very antithesis of replayability. Not only are you not experiencing much of the game, you're actually hurting your own replayability by overfocusing on the beginning content until you can quote it in your sleep. I know a thing or two about that.

But how many of those characters are you actually planning to get a decent way into the Incarnate system? Two? Ten? Twenty? At what point does it become evident that the time sink is simply too great?

In a sense, though, having the Incarnate system be this huge, obvious time sink actually DOES encourage altitis to a great extent. I've found myself making new characters more often since I19 than I did ever before, to a large extent because every time I think about how long it would take me to get anything done on my 50s, I think "Screw it. I can play something else."

It's easy to talk about the game's replayability if you don't include the Incarnate system in it. Not so easy when you do.

That's because we ARE arguing over the concept of an end game. There's nothing wrong with the content itself. Like them or dislike them, raids are more or less exactly what they should be - huge team clusterhugs that come down to organisation, communication and preparation. There really isn't anything more one could ask of them. Not only that, but I'm sure everyone who made them did their bests to make the best of an inherently boring, grindy, repetitive basic system - the actual endgame.

See, "endgame" is not the same as raids. Endgame is a concept, a combination of systems designed to give people reasons, at least theoretical ones, to keep playing the game even when the game can't really offer much in the form of new content. Raids are just what MMOs use more often than not, but other games use timed challenges, survival modes, trinket collection, hidden objectives... Resident Evil 2 required you to complete the game four times in a row under 2 hours each without using a single healing item and without saving a single time to unlock "Hank," a 10-minute no-dialogue challenge course with a masked SWAT guy. All of that's "endgame," because it's stuff the game gives you to do after you've officially beaten it, and the requirements for those are always ridiculous, because their point is to keep you playing.

I'm honestly not sure if raids really can exist without being tied to an end-game system. They require degrees of participation that aren't easy to achieve, and the people who really, truly love them aren't as many as they seem. It's a lot like the Abandoned Sewers Trial - plenty of people will say they like the Trial, but when's the last time you saw one forming? Because I haven't in five, maybe six years. The last one I did, I did because I tossed the idea to Zamuel and he put a team together through Search. And that's a Trial that takes only 8 people.

Honestly, if I thought we could scrounge up enough participation for raiding without having it be tied to the Incarnate system, then I'd be all in favour of non-Incarnate raids. I'm just not sure the team requirements would be realistic without the strong incentive that's Incarnate progression.

And again, because it needs to be said multiple times - there is nothing wrong with raids in this game. It's what they're used for that I have a problem with.

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.

This is also probably due to the fact that those MMO's also put a lock on how often you can *complete* a raid and get the reward per week.

Going from the MMO that I know, Rift, you had daily lockouts for the T1/2 dungeons (you could run normal mode as often as you wanted), whilst the actual "raids" were on a weekly timer.

Hell, from my RP guild over there, we had people who would run part of the raid with one character, and the other half of the raid with an Alt.

I do agree with you in that "Raiding" gets bit of a bad rap for how much time is spent dedicated to it, but I would believe that it is more due to the "levelling up gearing up alts/new players" treadmill.

If everyone stuck to a single main, the treadmill becomes manageable with lockouts. As soon as you chuck in alts, the time commitment to help out others/your alts gets much higher.

This is one of the *few* reasons why I don't alt. I hate rerunning content on multiple characters whilst I have no problems running the *same* content over and over again with a singular character (alts take time away from my main character....) Illogical i know, but it makes sense to me.

Side note: Considering how fast it takes for people to hit cap nowadays in most MMO's alting is now a fast and *relatively* painless experience. I know i would never spend 700+ hours hitting cap on an alt, especially if i played the same now as i did at launch.

I did get to the end in another MMO. I got to the final boss, downed him, and, uh, then what? I was geared up well enough to do all available content and trivialize most of it. I did all the fights. I was done. I wasn't impeded from getting to that point. At some point the level cap was raised, more content and more raids were added, but that wasn't an impediment. It was an extension, and eventually people hit the final boss for that expansion.

If players are irrelevant to this discussion, however, then there's no point to the discussion at all. Given that players are central to the point of an endgame.

I have the suspicion you're assigning arguments to me here. I also have the suspicion that a lot of the complaints about soloing speed for incarnate stuff in DA is exaggerated.

Why are you throwing out new definitions of words that they don't have? Altitis doesn't mean "Creating them and not really playing them." It just means creating a lot of characters. So when I say I have a lot of characters I like to play, you assign a different meaning to the word than I used and then tell me what my playstyle is from your reinterpretation of the word. This kind of thing is one of the reasons I find your posts in this thread so incomprehensible: "Endgame isn't fun, except when it is. And players are irrelevant to discussions of the endgame, only how it's designed which isn't fun except the designers want it to be fun."

I can't untangle what you're saying to make sense of it. I'm not saying whether that's your fault or my fault, but something like telling me how I play the game based on how you use a word without taking a moment to consider that not only do I not use the word that way, I have never heard it used that way. How can you base an argument on such a thing? It's like we're not even speaking the same language.

I have no idea what you mean. It took me two nights of doing trials to reach +2 on my scrapper (T3 in Alpha and Destiny) and T2 in Judgement and Interface. Another night, I will have +3 and at least T3 in every slot. I have a second character just getting started and she won't be any slower. You're using the words "time sink" to mean something that simply doesn't apply.

But see, this isn't because getting your incarnate filled out to T4 is hard or time-consuming, it's because you don't want to participate in the content in which it's accessible. You've developed this interpretation of what the content is like that does not reflect the reality of said content. I am not saying you should like it or want to team, but what I am saying is that if you do not want to team, that's a choice with consequences.

Dark Astoria does take much longer, but the time it takes to get your most substantial rewards on one character isn't really much, and they're on a 20-hour cooldown. So you can probably work on multiple characters without investing a lot of time per character to gain some incarnate advancement.

And here you're speaking another language again: CoH's replayability to me is basically the same whether you include the Incarnate system or not. Actually, the Incarnate system makes it more fun for me, as it gives me more options. I have more fun playing my incarnate than I did before she was an incarnate. Not that I didn't have fun before, but there's something satisfying about having a nuke on a two minute timer.

The actual endgame tends to be stuff you do when you're at the level cap. For me, that's doing the SSAs once a week for the rewards, doing incarnate trials when I feel up to it (which is not every night), doing tip missions for merits and drops, and playing my characters that aren't 50 yet. And I have characters scattered from 16 to 43 outside of my 50s.

Trials don't come down to massive organization, communication, and preparation. They're not even a blip in comparison to raids as far as complexity or need for organization. Basically, you need 12+ people (depending on trial) who have enough level shifts to actually fight the mobs in the trial, who can listen to basic instructions (like "mez Mother Mayhem and pull giant monsters onto her"), and who know how to play their characters. There is nothing in City of Heroes that is approaches other games' raid difficulties, nor does anything take nearly as much time.

Given that you were complaining about endgame and trials in this thread, I don't see why it should be surprising that I have focused on the concept of raids.

I'm sort of gobsmacked that you keep describing systems that I've found to be relatively painless and fun in the MMOs I've played as boring, but again that comes back to I feel like at this point we're speaking different languages.

Trials that aren't level 50 in CoH were a mistake when they were introduced. The Eden Trial had such a narrow level range, for example, that getting 8 people who could do it was not easy. I remember having to call one off because the 8th person we could find was 38.

I made sure on my first character (the same one I currently take on incarnate trials now, actually) to do all of the task forces and trials as they were level appropriate (and of course this was prior to exemplaring). It was a pain, but the trials were much worse than the Task Forces. I also got into a Sewer Trial by virtue of organizing one on the forum, and I don't see them forming either.

On the Champion server, I seem to recall that a couple of years ago that Hamidon and mothership raids were fairly common, twice a month each I think. I certainly recall the latter I was usually on the leader/organizer's team, and in the former I ended up leading the ranged teams a few times. I don't know if people still do them (I haven't bothered to look) but you can get incarnate stuff (at least shards) from them.

But they're not time-consuming treadmill grinds that require you to waste your life away doing nothing but trials. I don't understand what your complaint about what they're used for is because it's at odds with what I see when I actually join one.

Actually, this was due to the fact that my guild only raided three days out of the week because they didn't want to burn out. There was certainly enough content to raid all week if we really wanted to, but there was no need.

Well, I've leveled up and geared alts and the process was fairly quick and painless. Some games are not quick and painless.

Actually, I've found a lot of people enjoy doing that. I've also noticed that in some guilds sometimes people will hit the same level band and be able to do a lot of group quests together, which makes helping mutually beneficial.

I don't find playing alts to be unmanageable.

This statement makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't mind running the same content, unless I dislike it (I am so glad that Atlas Park was revamped - the prior content was not that good).

Indeed. This is the perspective I'm coming from: What games are like now.

Quality of life seems to be a big thing for a lot of (not all) MMORPG designers these days, so pointless and frustrating roadblocks aren't left all over the place. They're more likely to add ways to funnel you into the fun stuff.

Your first idea is worthy. If I could run Posi and all other TF commander accolade TFs at 50 and get 50 rewards I would run them a lot more. Yes, make them harder, after all we will be incarnated and mean. (Please no instant death patches and iTrial cheat mechanics). Just dial them up to +3x8 for all runs at 50th level and let us at them.

Your second idea is hampered by the fact that PvP is almost irretrievably broken in the city and will not be fixed. The last Dev that worked on revising it was killed, the body desecrated, and no one mentions his name anymore upon pain of death.

Oh, you mean Castle?

Actually, he's a pretty nice guy.

I really don't know about this argument.

I mean, folks love Skyrim, and many adventure games/RPGs tout the massive hours of content available in the game.

Maybe it's just that I hang out with MMO players more, but I see more people complain about MMO grind than single-player grind.

The "massive number of hours" is normally just in *edit*60-100* hours to completion (you will quite possibly spend more time reloading the game than making progress sometimes) */edit*... I remember reading about one game (i forget which, it was a "big title" though, possibly Fallout 3) was proudly touting the figure of "80 hours of gameplay"... which just staggered my mind.

Christ, the old school RPG's never used to tout the number of hours that it took to complete it... you just assumed that you would get something that lasted for more than a few days of playing the game... quite possibly a few months (Secret of Mana took me 3 months to complete 1st time around, Links Awakening on the Gameboy took me 2 months or so, LoZ on the N64 was 6 weeks).

Right now, i am playing FF13 (late to the game, just got a console), and roughly 60 hours in, i am almost at the end of the game. True, there are side quests/collections that i can do once i have done the main part of the game... but it isnt essential to do it. Infact some of them *only* become completable once you have completed the game.

I have only been playing a couple of weeks!

In the PS2/original XBox era, most games released with the standard expectation of 40-60 hours of "original gameplay." This was measured 'time to complete' all the content once, with no repetition and no reloads. Oftentimes the "main quest" could be completed much faster, but to "cover all the content provided" that was the magic number. Several games, notably Bethesda's, often shipped with more than double that.

In the PS3/360 era, most games admit to having well under 20 hours of original gameplay. They may have better replayability (playing the same stuff over and over) but they have less overall content. There are serveral reasons for this trend:

1) Game content is much more expensive to produce on these more powerful platforms. This encourages developers to economize.
2) Game reviewers actually started to become critical of large games that they couldn't complete in one review session. Since so many games rely on game reviews, losing a few hours to appease the reviewer gods is a good thing.
3) Players' attention spans are lower. There are more games produced NOW than there were back then, and they're more heavily marketed and hyped, meaning that players WANT to move from title to title faster to see the next new shiny. Market studies showed that many players didn't complete games that they LIKED just because a new title came out, so longer titles didn't seem to be as much of an incentive.

Granted, some developers have built reputations on bucking that trend (Bethesda).

snip

Wut?

Seriously this is how the entire game works. Want to do a Positron TF gotta be 11+. So the game dictates you must level up this high to do this. Same with every other TF and story content in the game. Your grips just sound like hollow attempts to bash mutli team raid content.