The Myth of "Hard" raids.
By
Acemace,
Posted on: 2012-02-23 07:26 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Quote:
Actually, after running it on Beta, the only so called tricky part to the new trial is the purple patch. As long as the bulk of the team has all three level shifts, it's pretty much relegated to BAF/LAM difficulty out of the gate.|
Originally Posted by Major_T
The new Death trial will be "hard" right up until the players figure out the challenges and leagues are prepared to overcome them. Then it'll be "easy" just like the other trials.
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Although, I would like to point out, since this is as good a place as any for this comment on the live servers, that the new trial does have quite a bit of story spoilers for the new DA arcs. If anyone has been avoiding Beta to avoid spoilers, or if they know someone that's been avoiding the forums completely for the same reason, may want to make sure they know that they want to hold off on the Trial until after they get through the story.
The Abrams is one of the most effective war machines on the planet. - R. Lee Ermy.
Q: How do you wreck an Abrams?
A: You crash into another one.
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I have to agree.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
I've posted before about how "hard" in CoH is mostly about not knowing the script, and having to figure it out, with a dash of character attribute comparison to the enemies.
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And furthermore, even absent the incarnate slotting and quantitative-power issues, I don't understand why some people are proud of being able, after mind-numbingly extensive practice, to follow a script to complete a task.
Especially since, in those rare instances something actually goes wildly wrong, you can't hardly get them to -stop- following the now broken script, even just to regroup and restart it from a prior checkpoint.
I feel the complexity of these tasks is very low, only masquerading as difficult or hard by having been chained together in longer sequences or by having a few of their intermediate states overlapped. I don't consider this hard so much as tedious. I've had some players try to convince me in-game that these are interesting and hard and make players think for a change, and that those who don't like them or who are not adept at completing them efficiently must be less skilled players unwilling to think through this new content which demand so much more than mindlessly power spamming through normal content. The new content can demand some alertness to messages and instructions, and being somewhat attentive to detail in what one does next.
There is some mark of talent on the part of those who, after examining and playing through the trials on release, devise the scripts which make them readily completable by others, but that's essentially a one-time accomplishment, and to me, on the face of the gimmickry they devise responses for, not especially impressive.
Running such a team can be an accomplishment too; some people have a talent for providing instruction with clarity and timeliness, and having deep tolerance for the chaos that often occurs on leagues.
And yet, I feel the play that we're rewarding for these is the opposite of skillful and talented. It's rote, almost Pavlovian, and seems to me to be more similar to working a menial factory task, than being a thinking, reasoning, planning, adapting superhero.
I blame all this on the absence of any real capability of the combat heuristics controlling the enemies to operate on a tactical level with players and the current spawn, or on an operational level over the current map. This game, and MMO's in general for that matter, have very shallow tactical depth to them. As long as the enemies stand there and wait for players to come to them, and fight as disorganized individuals tasked through a simple aggression-level stacks, then any challenge can only be imposed through the sort of gimmickry we see on the trials, and the natural response to those is not "observe, orient, decide, act" on the spot, but to devise a script in advance, and then beat it into the community's virtual muscle-memory through sheer repetition.
It may be an accomplishment of sorts to do the trials this way, and some may even find it fun, but I just don't see how it's operationally or tactically interesting, especially after the massive repetition the script training requires to make typical trials runs commonly successful. Maybe it's all we as a whole are capable of dealing with, but if so, I find that saddening.
There are very few MMOs that require 'player skill' over 'knowing the script'.
Most of these are either the scrolling beat'em ups (Rusty Hearts, Dungeon Fighter Online, Vindictus) or purely PvP based (Eve online, Mortals online and Darkfall) since these require reflexes to dodge and see the 'tells' the enemy give off just before an attack or merely the 'knowing your enemy' level and begin able to gauge 'at a glance' whether you can take that other player (is that mining ship really unguarded? etc.).
Badge Earned: Wing Clipper
A real showstopper!
in CoX the higher level you get the easier the game is. Which seems to be why so many people skip the lower levels. They don't want a challenge, they want easy mode.
If you want hard, go run FF at level 13 with actual level 13's.
If you want easy, play level 50 content
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Originally Posted by DumpleBerry
This is a thank you to all your teammates who know what they're doing and are buffed to the gills with high-tier Incarnate stuff, right?
Try running the new Death trial the day it comes out. |
Have you run the DD trial?
Its the most straightforward trial out there Its a simple "fight your way through" trial which unlike all the previous trials when they were in beta, was completed with far too much ease DD trial = the bafs of +3.
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
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Have you really seen a thread recently complaining that BAF and Lambda are too difficult?
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Originally Posted by Major_T
He didn't mention that other MMO. He only addressed the perceived difficulty of the iTrials. I have seen threads and posts about the difficulty some people experienced completing them, and I believe this thread was in response to those comments.
Of course the OP would be best suited to respond to this, I can only offer my interpretation. |
_________
@Inquisitor
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I have seen threads that complain of that difficulty of Keyes, TPN, MoM, and UG. I have seen comments in global channels about the difficulty of the BAF and Lambda. This is within the last 3 months.
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Originally Posted by Mr_Morbid
Have you really seen a thread recently complaining that BAF and Lambda are too difficult?
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"Goodbye, Jean-Luc. I'm gonna miss you... you had such potential. But then again, all good things must come to an end..." -- Q
I have never done a Raid on WoW could not stand the game.
I am a very long time gamer - literally from the day of 300 baud modems. I played text adventures, Elite, Dungeon Master, Half Life, TFC, Soldier of Fortune 1&2 and a ton of games in between.
I have a squad of cheerleaders constantly reminding me that the reason DA solo missions have terrible rewards is because Trials are HARD.
In the Baf in 20 seconds I figured out how to slow the prisoners to a crawl and I had never set foot in the zone. I figured out that getting on the boxes means I am away from the blue AoE splash and never died - I was spamming my attacks as a good blaster should and only needed 3 greens to heal even though I was outside of the healing shield area.
In the Lam I mostly had to battle the lag inside and died when I froze in the middle of a large group. I again reply these are NOT hard. They require an orchestration that says do this now - and in fact they scream at you in huge letters what to do. I was there the first time on Champion that 150 of us defeated Hamidon.
I help plan and work for MONTHS to figure him out. Marut was the genius and we were the grunts. I died literally hundreds of times on my tank as we studied Hamidon. It was research and it was HARD.
The untyped damage and no protection from it.
The monster spawns and our SG - Sin - running monster duty.
The sniper squads.
The healing shields.
Learning the order of defeat and the damage required to overcome the Mitos.
On the day we defeated Hamidon without gimmicks in a straight in your face fight - I became Incarnate. The game can hand that out now if they want to but when me and 149 of my friends kicked Hamidons *** after months of planning - that was hard.
Marut, Dynamite, Acemace, CC, Addie, Zarok and so many others who worked so hard for so long - on that day we became gods. I didn't need a level shift to know it and those first Hami O's - even though I gave away my first one because of the poor delivery system and some were shorted - was sweet.
So please when you tell me something is hard - have a little perspective. These trials are trivial. I ran with our Sin SG a nightly Respec team that would Guarantee anyone they would get a Respec even when it was bugged and could randomly spawn +6 Freaks in the reactor room.
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Awww did you read everyone response? lol they also said they are trivial.
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
I have never done a Raid on WoW could not stand the game.
I am a very long time gamer - literally from the day of 300 baud modems. I played text adventures, Elite, Dungeon Master, Half Life, TFC, Soldier of Fortune 1&2 and a ton of games in between. I have a squad of cheerleaders constantly reminding me that the reason DA solo missions have terrible rewards is because Trials are HARD. In the Baf in 20 seconds I figured out how to slow the prisoners to a crawl and I had never set foot in the zone. I figured out that getting on the boxes means I am away from the blue AoE splash and never died - I was spamming my attacks as a good blaster should and only needed 3 greens to heal even though I was outside of the healing shield area. In the Lam I mostly had to battle the lag inside and died when I froze in the middle of a large group. I again reply these are NOT hard. They require an orchestration that says do this now - and in fact they scream at you in huge letters what to do. I was there the first time on Champion that 150 of us defeated Hamidon. I help plan and work for MONTHS to figure him out. Marut was the genius and we were the grunts. I died literally hundreds of times on my tank as we studied Hamidon. It was research and it was HARD. The untyped damage and no protection from it. The monster spawns and our SG - Sin - running monster duty. The sniper squads. The healing shields. Learning the order of defeat and the damage required to overcome the Mitos. On the day we defeated Hamidon without gimmicks in a straight in your face fight - I became Incarnate. The game can hand that out now if they want to but when me and 149 of my friends kicked Hamidons *** after months of planning - that was hard. Marut, Dynamite, Acemace, CC, Addie, Zarok and so many others who worked so hard for so long - on that day we became gods. I didn't need a level shift to know it and those first Hami O's - even though I gave away my first one because of the poor delivery system and some were shorted - was sweet. So please when you tell me something is hard - have a little perspective. These trials are trivial. I ran with our Sin SG a nightly Respec team that would Guarantee anyone they would get a Respec even when it was bugged and could randomly spawn +6 Freaks in the reactor room. |
And Hamidon raids became easier once people worked out what to do 
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Agree with all this.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
I've posted before about how "hard" in CoH is mostly about not knowing the script, and having to figure it out, with a dash of character attribute comparison to the enemies.
You're coming into these trials long after they have been introduced. Pretty much everyone else knows the "script" by now, and can execute the counter steps by rote. Moreover, lots of players have characters with stats now elevated by previous successes at the trials. So you have (probably lots of) people on league who are much stronger in the stats contest who mostly know what to do by rote. Of course that's easy. All CoH content is easy in that scenario. Yes, even the MoM trial. I know TPN was mentioned, but TPN is very much about knowing the script. Once you know its script, TPN isn't hard at all, IMO. Some individuals may get creamed by the AV while moving from building to building, but the league overall rarely suffers much because of that. (That's one reason I find that mechanic annoying - it's no fun for the people getting killed, and it really adds nothing to the league's overall experience of challenge.) UGT and MoM are "harder" than the others because (a) their stats challenges can be rather severe, and (b) parts of their scripts are harder to learn from replay than most others. |
I'd add (or reinforce) a lot of the gimmicks are more annoying than hard. I find TPN very tedious as you do the same gimmicks again and again and again. Seems the repitition is simply to make a trial fit a dev-determined amount of time
I don't suffer from altitis, I enjoy every minute of it.
Thank you Devs & Community people for a great game.
So sad to be ending ):
The myth is that there is a widespread myth about "hard" trials. This is a strawman thread if ever I saw one.
Unless you mean "hard to justify playing in the volumes demanded by the game" or "hard to consider successful in achieving its original design goals."
I don't care whether you call UG trial "hard," "gimmicky," or just "based almost entirely on planning ahead to counter the high magnitude Confuse the end boss throws at you." It's just an unremarkable experience, not that different than other weak boss fights in other games.
Also, in regards to Hamidon: [Link bleeped]
EDIT: Link won't work due to bleeped word in the title, so just get there by clicking the first link in this Google search:
Golden Girl, Agent White and several other filled 30+ pages with posts on how the trials are harder and deserve a larger reward than solo content.
Trial content is NOT hard.
Thus my point of it and Golden Girl comes here and says its not hard and so contradicts dozens if not hundreds of her own posts. The reward for the iTrials is far out of whack compared to solo content.
This is my point and is not a straw man arguement. I explained how I have NEVER done one and yet died once to lag and figured out how to aid completion in minutes. Ignorance is not stupidity and being ignorant of the "script" doesn't make something hard.
A few short runs and people have the trick employed and it is simple. I showed how there was content that WAS hard. Then GG falls exactly into my point - saying well once we figure it out its not hard.
So iTrials are hard for a week.
Then they are completed at a high rate of success and very fast. Yet because you can stealth one arc on the solo content she and others feel all rewards should be balanced by that metric.
They become easier once players realize they need to concentrate a bit more than in non-Trial content - but they still remain the most challenging content in the game.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
Golden Girl, Agent White and several other filled 30+ pages with posts on how the trials are harder and deserve a larger reward than solo content.
Trial content is NOT hard. Thus my point of it and Golden Girl comes here and says its not hard and so contradicts dozens if not hundreds of her own posts. The reward for the iTrials is far out of whack compared to solo content. This is my point and is not a straw man arguement. I explained how I have NEVER done one and yet died once to lag and figured out how to aid completion in minutes. Ignorance is not stupidity and being ignorant of the "script" doesn't make something hard. A few short runs and people have the trick employed and it is simple. I showed how there was content that WAS hard. Then GG falls exactly into my point - saying well once we figure it out its not hard. So iTrials are hard for a week. Then they are completed at a high rate of success and very fast. Yet because you can stealth one arc on the solo content she and others feel all rewards should be balanced by that metric. |
Bluntly: you are in over your head and need to give more weight to other people's opinions before talking about a subject you know very little about. Golden Girl and I have very divergent views on the topic but I can at least respect her opinion because I know her and other's opinions are based on actual experience.
It's not worth my time debating this again. Don't put words in my mouth and overgeneralize my stance.
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I don't know who your cheerleaders are but they haven't posted in this thread. Not one single response here has argued that BAF and Lambda are hard. And don't bother telling us that Golden Girl contradicted what she said here in a different thread. Golden Girl does that.|
Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
I have a squad of cheerleaders constantly reminding me that the reason DA solo missions have terrible rewards is because Trials are HARD.
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| In the Baf in 20 seconds I figured out how to slow the prisoners to a crawl and I had never set foot in the zone. |
If your real point is that the new Dark Astoria's rewards are too low compared to trials based on the Astoria content being harder, then that's what you should have said from the beginning. That's a valid point and a view I share. But Paragon has fallen into the typical MMO mentality that more people=harder=better rewards.
There are plenty of people that think the "solo path" for incarnate rewards should be more viable. I'm one of them. But simply ranting about the lack of difficulty in trials doesn't add much to the discussion.
_________
@Inquisitor
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The Minds of Mayhem trial has no such reward structure. I've finally been able to get on successful MoM trials and have had common rewards most of the time from it.
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Originally Posted by Dr_MechanoEU
The harder Trials DO give better rewards. Keyes and TPN have a higher chance of a rare or very rare as a reward, Underground and I believe the Mother Mayhem trial awards one rare or very rare upon completion and the Underground gives a substantial amount of threads.
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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
I'm not sure even I would call them "hard". I find them very tedious, dull, and annoying. And, as someone else pointed out, at least part of that dull, annoying tedium is the pre-iTrial portion.
Goodbye may seem forever
Farewell is like the end
But in my heart's the memory
And there you'll always be
-- The Fox and the Hound
I lol'd!
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
I have never done a Raid on WoW could not stand the game.
I am a very long time gamer - literally from the day of 300 baud modems. I played text adventures, Elite, Dungeon Master, Half Life, TFC, Soldier of Fortune 1&2 and a ton of games in between. I have a squad of cheerleaders constantly reminding me that the reason DA solo missions have terrible rewards is because Trials are HARD. In the Baf in 20 seconds I figured out how to slow the prisoners to a crawl and I had never set foot in the zone. I figured out that getting on the boxes means I am away from the blue AoE splash and never died - I was spamming my attacks as a good blaster should and only needed 3 greens to heal even though I was outside of the healing shield area. In the Lam I mostly had to battle the lag inside and died when I froze in the middle of a large group. I again reply these are NOT hard. They require an orchestration that says do this now - and in fact they scream at you in huge letters what to do. I was there the first time on Champion that 150 of us defeated Hamidon. I help plan and work for MONTHS to figure him out. Marut was the genius and we were the grunts. I died literally hundreds of times on my tank as we studied Hamidon. It was research and it was HARD. The untyped damage and no protection from it. The monster spawns and our SG - Sin - running monster duty. The sniper squads. The healing shields. Learning the order of defeat and the damage required to overcome the Mitos. On the day we defeated Hamidon without gimmicks in a straight in your face fight - I became Incarnate. The game can hand that out now if they want to but when me and 149 of my friends kicked Hamidons *** after months of planning - that was hard. Marut, Dynamite, Acemace, CC, Addie, Zarok and so many others who worked so hard for so long - on that day we became gods. I didn't need a level shift to know it and those first Hami O's - even though I gave away my first one because of the poor delivery system and some were shorted - was sweet. So please when you tell me something is hard - have a little perspective. These trials are trivial. I ran with our Sin SG a nightly Respec team that would Guarantee anyone they would get a Respec even when it was bugged and could randomly spawn +6 Freaks in the reactor room. |
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Originally Posted by Paladiamors
I love you, I Burnt the Toast!
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So you play the raids months after they're introduced, once everyone has powered up, learned the scripts and put them on farm and say they're easy?|
Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
I decided to run a few Raids as the solo content is not out yet and I wanted to get my 50 Blaster up to tier 4 Alpha.
First of all the raids aren't Hard. They have some gimmicks that if you have run the Apex trial you have seen before. Glowing spots on the ground - check - unresisted damage DoTing you to death - check. The BaF I ran last night and the prisoner escape sequence is flatout silly. I found within 20 seconds they ran a pre-determined path. I stood at the end of the path where they turned - with Chilling Embrace on and using Shiver and Shockwave and not a single prisoner escaped. It wasn't even close. Then the hard part take down 2 AV's at the same time. Well since we herded them together and we were spamming them with AoE's it wasn't until they had 25% health left we even had to worry about it. Then it was figure out which one we were killing easier and kill the other one first. Bingo - done in less than 15 minutes. Then a nice stroll on a Lam - in which the only threat was lag - I died once due to a lag death otherwise we had zero problems - except due to not enough debuffs we had to use a couple grenades. So no badge since we used 3. If you can read - the trials are easy. It says in big letters - this is now happening - then it happens. I was actually interested in seeing what everyone found so hard, I don't see it. They were not even in the same realm as trying to solo a Purple level Proton. He is far harder and requires some planning. Color me not impressed. I would prefer a larger critter with a few effects that make the fight interesting to power spamming. |
The same thing happens in every MMO. New raids are hard at first, get downed, learned, geared up for and then get turned into loot pinatas. Then the next set is introduced and the cycle restarts.
That's how MMO raiding works.
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And yet, once the script was determined, all that challenge basically went away.|
Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
I help plan and work for MONTHS to figure him out. Marut was the genius and we were the grunts. I died literally hundreds of times on my tank as we studied Hamidon. It was research and it was HARD.
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I know folks who prefer the old Hamidon raid to the new one. I only personally know the reason a few people liked the old Hami, but it's the same thing for every one of them - it was a slow process we could do on autopilot and be social while it played out.* That's right, they liked the old Hamidon because, once the strategy was understood, it was about three people actually doing something and about 100 people on follow with ranged attacks or PBAoE heals on auto-fire.
That ought to be listed somewhere under the definition of "not hard".
Hamidon was no different than iTrials in this regard. It just took a lot more digging around to find a good strategy. Why'd it take so long? Well, part of it was that the devs themselves weren't sure what would work. They had a strat in mind, but if I recall correctly, they never actually carried it out. (As far as I know, no one "in the wild" ever tried it the dev way.)
*At the I9+ version of Hamidon it's hard for most true participants (i.e., folks who aren't leeching) to be that inactive, so it's not as easy to socialize there during the actual execution.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
"Goodbye, Jean-Luc. I'm gonna miss you... you had such potential. But then again, all good things must come to an end..." -- Q