Time to beat the dead horse... again
By
Acemace,
Posted on: 2012-04-13 09:25 in Suggestions and Ideas
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Interestingly and a good step forward, in the new arcs of I23, when you talk to an in-instance contact, what's in the dialog box pops up as word balloons an also into NPC chat. This means more than the mission holder sees the text.
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Originally Posted by Agent White
Task forces have dialogue?
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Actually they've been doing that since the SSAs started (Or at least since SSA4 when I noticed it). I kind of like it more, it certainly beats sitting there and waiting for the leader to finish while the rest of the team sits in silence.
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Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Interestingly and a good step forward, in the new arcs of I23, when you talk to an in-instance contact, what's in the dialog box pops up as word balloons an also into NPC chat. This means more than the mission holder sees the text.
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It's been applied inconsistently, though. The DA arcs don't do it, and the new low-level arcs that came out in i22 don't do it (at least, redside, but I assume blueside would be the same). The First Ward arcs, which I'm currently re-running, do. I'll be pretty excited if they actually start implementing this across the board.
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Originally Posted by Agent White
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Villains will always be lacking when compared to Heroes- CoV was much akin to a large expansion pack... Granted, with plenty of new, fun stuff to do, an expansion pack, nonetheless.
The zones are what drive people away more than anything- not only are there so fewer zones, but they all blur the line between City and Hazard zones, making it difficult to get accustomed to. Not to mention the dingyness?
Villain ATs are another issue- before Alignment, they had ill-defined roles that most people couldn't get a grasp on. Most people generally equated Brute = Tank, Stalker = Scrapper, Corruptor = Blaster/Defender, Dominator = Controller and Mastermind = ???
The Villain stories are also very lacking. For Heroes, it's good to do the right thing, but Villains most often feel they should be independent, rather than relying on contacts for their source of information, missions and goals. For a Villain, it feels very much like you're just helping a bigger fish along the stream and then have to fight back when it tries to eat you.
I'm not buying this argument that everything has to be for both sides or nobody.
If there's a gap fill it.
And for those of you self-righteous hero lovers, you're honestly going to sit there and tell me that if a new redside SF were added with wicked cool badges and worth 42 merits, you'd not play it because it's against your code of ethics?
Please buff Ice Control.
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Actually, for me it's always been Mastermind = PROFIT!!! Think you may have gotten confused, there. |
Originally Posted by Sigium
Most people generally equated Brute = Tank, Stalker = Scrapper, Corruptor = Blaster/Defender, Dominator = Controller and Mastermind = ???
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Levity aside, as an avid red-sider, I've always wanted... more. Never mind the fictional moral choices involved; I have just wanted more *enviroment* to play in. New redside zones, new SFs, even access to the Shadow Shard would all "fit the bill" as far as I'm concerned. I can agree that the redside zones could do with a bit of clean-up, but they should still feel "grimy", I think. King's Row and Boomtown come to mind; worn and battered, but not necessarily drab. And for me, Grandville is the most annoying, by far. Dark metal floors, walls and walkways, dreary sky at all times. Bleah.
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Just curious, is it possible to demorecord and CHANGE THE SKY shown in zones?
I mean let's see what Grandville with Nova Praetoria's sunny sky would look like or vice versa.
DA with Night Ward's...
Just to see how these zones might appear and feel with minor tweaks to a background image.
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I agree Arbiter Fab, for me it was Nerva Archipelago. The sky in Nerva always seemed a bit off to me...It seems like the place that would have Varying skies like in ouroboros...Mostly Sunny and bright but on the rare occasion dark and cloudy or the Opposite of of Neutropolis...Dark and smoky near the Ferry but Clean, Sunny and Prisitne near the Northern Islands where the COT are located.|
Originally Posted by Equation
Just curious, is it possible to demorecord and CHANGE THE SKY shown in zones?
I mean let's see what Grandville with Nova Praetoria's sunny sky would look like or vice versa. DA with Night Ward's... Just to see how these zones might appear and feel with minor tweaks to a background image. |
St. Martial as well seems like a place that would have verifying skies...I get a more Vegas Feel from St.Martial more than a L.A. Feel and even then it's possible for L.A. to have clear skies.
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It's not an argument. It's the devs stance. They've gone on record multiple times to say that new content is either equal (both sides get something) or co-op. |
Originally Posted by DarkCurrent
I'm not buying this argument that everything has to be for both sides or nobody.
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| And for those of you self-righteous hero lovers, you're honestly going to sit there and tell me that if a new redside SF were added with wicked cool badges and worth 42 merits, you'd not play it because it's against your code of ethics? |
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I concur. I love redside, but if I want to team with my friends, I am forced to take my villains rogue so that I can play blueside with them. Add that to the minimal changes and additions to the Rogue Isles and it is easy to see why so few are playing there. Don't get me wrong, I really like the changes to Mercy, but at least on Champion, it did little to attract players when they got a shiny new Atlas with even bigger changes at the same time. The Rogue Isles need to open up a few more zones, including a red only zone in the Shadow Shards along with a co-op zone in the Shadow Shards.
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Originally Posted by Quasadu
The only thing broken about redside is a relative lack of content. Rather than abandoning it, why not fix it?
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You guys are breaking off on way too many random tangents. Honestly, who cares if people are truly good/evil here? That doesn't have any practical application here. We're just talking about putting more content in a divided game where the division is obviously levied against redside. This was mentioned earlier, but something a lot of people neglect is that players still have redside toons, even if they play blueside more often. The only people who can't enjoy the redside strikeforce are the people who have only blueside toons and have none of them aligned as a vigilante. I'd be so brash to assume that this makes up a very small percentage of the player base. If the devs are still making releases on both sides, it mean that the devs are still concerned enough with redside to bother with it. Redside can't be bad for business if the devs are spending 50% of their time on the updates providing for it.
Now, I do think they should have a 30-35 strike force for Redside; that section of redside is a profound level range in which there isn't a lot of interesting content to do anyway. Whenever I make redside toons, it usually is full of me racing to get through those levels to get to the Mistral/ITF/Patrons. I haven't brought a toon through there since the contact search function was added, however, so this problem may have been remedied. Still, there is an empty range where it is harder to find a team because there isn't anything profound to do in that range.
Making an SF can't be too hard. Each of the signature story arcs released are about as long as a short SF, except with custom enemies and custom maps and custom powers and cutscenes that are more than just centering on a person's face while they talk. Just do half of that, but make it a little longer and put it as a redside SF.
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From the Paragon Wiki:
From level 10 as a starting point to level 40 as an ending point (i.e., no level 40-45 TF/SFs), there are 13 Task Forces and 7 Strike Forces available (not counting co-op events). The number of TF/SFs per level is as follows:
LVL_TF__SF
10___1___0
11___2___0
12___2___0
13___2___0
14___2___0
15___3___1
16___2___1
17___1___1
18___1___1
19___1___1
20___3___3
21___2___2
22___2___2
23___3___2
24___3___2
25___6___4
26___5___3
27___5___3
28___5___3
29___4___3
30___7___4
31___5___3
32___5___3
33___5___3
34___5___3
35___4___3
36___3___3
37___3___3
38___3___3
39___3___3
40___2___2
Looking at the individual TF/SFs, I saw the following:
1) Heroes have standard TFs available in each of the basic level ranges - Positron (10-15; was one, now two TFs in the same range essentially), Synapse (15-20), Sister Psyche (20-25), Citadel (25-30), Manticore (30-35), and Numina (35-40). Villains have SFs in many of the same ranges - Tarikoss (15-20), Silver Mantis (20-25), Renault (25-30), and Ice Mistral (35-40) - but nothing at the 10-15 and 30-35 ranges.
2) Admiral Sutter/Mortimer Kal, Twilight's Son/Mender Tesseract, and Mender Lazarus are (near) matching events for the two sides, covering levels 20-40, 25-34, and 30-39 respectively.
3) Heroes additionally have three TFs in non-hub zones, two in Striga Isle (Moonfire, Hess) and one in Croatoa (Katie).
In my opinion, the two missing level ranges in the standard Strike Forces are the most glaring needs to be filled. The lack of a low-end SF hurts the development of Villains during the DO levels, and having to rely on the locked Mender Lazarus and Mortimer Kal events hurt during the 30-35 grind.
I don't see these as "kind of nice to have things" that would be nice to have, but "fairly essential elements" whose absence has contributed to the protracted decline of redside play. How these SFs would be designed and implemented, I'll leave to better people than myself.
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Excellent analysis and conclusions.
The angering thing is this has existed for 6+ yrs. When will the dev team fill these holes?
Please buff Ice Control.
I don't think they ever will.
Looking at the way things went over the last few years, villains are not allowed to have anything that heroes don't. As I already said, it seems to me that instead, everything cool that villains have got included into hero content.
Can anybody think of a bigger Rogue Isles storyline that is not also part of hero content now?
I remember tagging along with some newer hero content, they took me to [spoiler warning:] the PTS revealing the demon underneath, the shaper cult with the Behemoth, the Arachnoids story, Thorn Tree vines, pretty much any mayor red side plot.
(While I am rather sure pure villains never get to see a lot of hero plotlines, like -correct me where I'm wrong - the Clockwork King, the trolls and Outcast, Faultline plot, the Croatoa story, Shadow Shard / Rularuu, the Praetoria stuff via Portal Corp, Tsoo, Warriors, ...
Not that I need any of that as a viallain, just saying there is imo lots of hero-only stuff, but hardly any villain-only stuff.)
I don't think they'll abandon red side, but getting the hero arcs too, being allowed to save the world too, is all 'villain content' I see in the future.
I's what they did in the past few years, and apparently it worked well for them.
Frankly, sometimes I wonder if anyone runs anything these days but DFB and DiB, over and over.
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That'd require enough players redside to run them. |
Originally Posted by Megajoule
Frankly, sometimes I wonder if anyone runs anything these days but DFB and DiB, over and over.
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Funny story time: Last double xp weekend the all-VEAT event that protector has on saturdays started with a DFB then moved on to a Tarikoss SF. We encountered a few newer players in the DFB and invited them along for the Tarikoss (even though only one was a VEAT |
Originally Posted by Megajoule
Frankly, sometimes I wonder if anyone runs anything these days but DFB and DiB, over and over.
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). About 2 or 3 missions into the strike force they ended up quitting because "the xp wasn't fast enough" and they went back to mercy to run more DFB. I believe all 3 of them were in the 30-40 level range.Now, back on topic. Do you think it would be viable for them to open up all zones to all alignments? I was thinking the contacts would still be restricted to alignments the way it currently is, but say add some phased villain contacts in the paragon city zones to hand out repeatable missions and vise versa for the rogue isles. This wouldn't solve the TF:SF disparity, but it would open up the game to a lot of new opportunities.
I dunno, frankly playing tourist is kind of boring. I finally took my Rogue around to Paragon, I'd love for there to be something to -do- besides teaming with heroes. I mean, we already kind of have repeatables in doing tips and radio/newspaper missions at any level. But those are about as interesting as doing them on your side already.
And all the tangible rewards are just merits, any badge you earn is useless (except as a shiny to a badger) until you actually switch sides completely.
And if all the zones were open, would you be able to freely team? The benefit to the current system, at least, is if you can -see- someone in a non-PVP zone, they can join your team.
It'd also probably break Ouroboros, or Ouro would still just be a massive problem :P
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True, it would probably have a good deal of problems that would need to be worked out. But the bright side is it would probably force them to find a better solution to how Ouro works right now.|
Originally Posted by Agent White
I dunno, frankly playing tourist is kind of boring. I finally took my Rogue around to Paragon, I'd love for there to be something to -do- besides teaming with heroes. I mean, we already kind of have repeatables in doing tips and radio/newspaper missions at any level. But those are about as interesting as doing them on your side already.
And all the tangible rewards are just merits, any badge you earn is useless (except as a shiny to a badger) until you actually switch sides completely. And if all the zones were open, would you be able to freely team? The benefit to the current system, at least, is if you can -see- someone in a non-PVP zone, they can join your team. It'd also probably break Ouroboros, or Ouro would still just be a massive problem :P |
As far as the missions given out, I was thinking things along the lines of the door missions you get in PvP zones where you're raiding an enemy group of the opposite faction for buffs/debuffs in the zone. But now that I've thought about it some more I can see that as being very unpopular. But if they were just regular story arcs it would be a good way to have villains get missions from some of the enemy groups that only exist in paragon city. Maybe even make it so a villain can start in paragon city and never have to live in the shadow of Arachnos, since a lot of people seem to dislike being forced into that.
My preference would be that Paragon City and Rogue Islands would be open to all sides, have side-appropriate content, etc. If Praetoria can do it, why not Primal Earth?
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*ahem*|
Originally Posted by Mystic_Fortune
The OP wants to talk equality?
We can talk about red side getting an exclusive SF when two major signature villains are killed off and removed from the red side zones. |
What about an exclusive SF WHERE we kill off and remove two major signature villains from the red side zones AND TAKE THEIR PLACE.
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No.|
Originally Posted by DarkCurrent
You're saying there's equality. If so, where is the 10-15 SF? Where is the 30-35 SF? It's been 6 yrs since CoV launch and still neither exists. Meanwhile CoH has had them since creation (8 yrs). There have been 17 content updates during that time and still nothing. The WST mechanic highlights the SF vs TF discrepancy every month.
Are you ignoring this? Yes or no? |
Really. A lvl 10-15 TF is bothering you? Those level go by quick.
As for level 30-35 TF, run a Kal.
Note, Im not against redside getting more TFs, I love TFs, and Id love to see a wider range of TFs on the redside WST, but it's not that bad at all.
Blueside will always be more popular, and it's not just because GG is right (partially) that people want to be good, it also has the factor of in the end, when it comes to storylines, you know who has to win...heroes.
Villains lose just by being villains. That's how comics work. You world dominating villain will never take over the world.
Psychotic killer? May never die in the game, but people know, in the back of their head, that in a comic book worlder, they'd be stopped at some point. Cuz villains can't kill off the world.
Heroes however, they can keep on going and going!
Redside has content. though the funny thing about that, is why are people harping for new TFs redside, when there's content to be played.
It's not lack of content, it's "I'd rather have TFs to run than story arcs." which I'll be fair and say, that's how I feel about most of the regular contacts too.
Also, redside doesnt need more zones. Blueside has to many as it is. New zones dont have to equal new content. They can easily put new content in existing zones.
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I don't understand all the rationalizing of Hero side in this thread. Like it's something people continue to actively decide based on story or zones. People shun red side because 'bad guys lose'? lol what?
CoV had a weak launch because of very few new sets (MM's launched with 4 primaries IIRC, and Doms didn't have many secondaries which were mostly copy/pasted old powers anyway.) balance issues, and ugly lumpy starting zones.
Blue side has, and always will be, more popular simply because people want to play where the people are. Do you think Freedom was somehow 'better' than the other servers and that's why it's on top?
WoW is only popular because we all know everyone wanted to look like a bad cartoon back when that came out and the other MMO's were being too realistic!
No... Population = Population, and CoV did not launch well enough to grab it's fair share. The farther general population declines, the greater the difference will be because the difference will be more noticable and the need for people will ever increasingly fuel the decision to go Blue where the people are.
/rant
Actually the CoV launch marked the highest amount of Subscribers in the games history before F2P. That quickly declined due to a lack of support for COV after I7 which came out a year after I6. Now granted there were many justifiable difficulties during that time frame but the huge delay between lvl 40 and lvl 50, and the general lack of content additions for CoV(at the time) started people leaving or switching to blue side. Then the CoV population declined, then it went down to about a 2:1 ratio Blue:Red, which meant it became more practical to focus resources Blueside, which caused a further decline to the red, which stacked up and up and brought us into the Catch 22 we've been in for a long time.
Now I can't say the Devs haven't done the best they could given the stituations. I also have to admit that overall they've been decent about adding stuff to the Redside. I would still like to see the two SF gaps filled in for completeness more than anything else.
This is a problem, in that it just shows how bad things are. Yes in comic books there are times when Villains have to team up with Heroes. Those stories are special in that they are rare. However here it happens too often.
While I understand making co-op content is good financial sense, I'm annoyed by the fact that it is always hero themed content. To me it seems lazy. We all know that it's easier to write stuff with a heroic slant. We also know it's just as easy to create a scenario where Villains have to team with Heroes or be destroyed/loose the planet/dimension/ what have you.
What I would like to see is co-op content where heroes have to team with the Villains because the macguffin/plot device can only be used by the villains or is the villains specialty. Yes it's harder to write that scenario and maintain realistic motivations but I think something like that could do a lot to even out the TF/SF disparity.