What if we removed faceplanting?

Video games also don't allow any real form of giving comeuppance. The game ain't care. If you overcome it, it does not know this. You can't get any satisfaction of shoving something in its face. It can affect your emotions, but you can't affect it. That's what can make them all the more frustrating - there's no way of registering your rage.

Or they "must retire from this battle" like Scirocco, or they secure two dozen clasps (seriously, what is he doing?) and teleport away like Pretty Gun Boy.

You'd still complain about tank damage output?

I KID, I KID! =P

Alternate death animations would be cool.


/signed

Or use the defeat emote that robots currently use, have a minor overload and collapse in a small shower of sparks.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

Your idea has some merit... however i do believe that it would involve rewriting how the mission reward system works out, because the bonus stays the same if you stealth it and kill just what needs to be killed, and "kill everything in sight".

Not to mention as well that killing mobs gives XP.

DDO I believe gives very little (if any) XP for defeating mobs in missions, and instead back loads the whole lot onto the mission complete stage.

On the flip side, if you kill just a fair few mobs inside a CoX mission, you normally get the same amount of XP as the reward bonus dishes out.

In the example that you have given, it would actually be quite hard to say "kill X spawn", as it would actually be 3 spawns (and not the singular)... Easy solution is "Kill X mobs in Y radius"... then you get the nice "cheat method" of run up to final boss. Face plant. Kill mobs around you (including the EB/Boss/big bad)... complete the mission.

CoX is *badly* designed to do this... but the idea does have merit (of sorts).

*edit* I would like to believe that this was why the ability to "auto complete" a mission was introduced... to reduce the amount of *downtime* that a player has when they get stuck up against a section that they cannot complete.

The thing is though that the psychology of reward vs aversion isn't just applicable to hard core players, but to everyone. There isn't a dichotomy of hardcore players and everyone else: there is a continuum of players with different thresholds of game play intensity. Eliminating all of the negative feedback from a game (which arguably would no longer make it a game, but that's a different discussion) doesn't make it a game that addresses the concerns of casual players, or even a wider audience: it makes it address a single point at the far extreme left of that continuum.

Consider the games with more players than any conventional MMO: Farmville and its social gaming bretheren. Even they tend to have both negative feedback (crops can die and invested resources lost) and competitive aspects (arguably its revenue comes mainly from players' competitive impulses, either against friends or against themselves). Given the enormous audience for social games such as those, the notion that the widest gaming audience is looking for something with the absolute minimum of either competitive elements or negative feedback seems shaky. Its *different* than those elements in a classic MMO, and channeled differently, but its also clearly very strong components of games with enormously wide audiences.

Well, this is primarily a game design concept than it is a suggestion for City of Heroes. Established games - especially as old as this one - aren't really that malleable to having their basic design philosophy changed years after creation. I'm just speaking in hypothetics.

Then again, that's what the Architect system does, I believe - you get bonus tickets as a mission reward if you defeat more enemies in the mission. I don't really know how it works and I'm pretty sure it's not a percentage thing, but it's a possibility.

The Mission Drop feature was introduced to handle bugged missions and free up Customer Support resources. A lot of City of Heroes mission problems come down to a stuck NPC, a failed objective trigger or the player simply being unable to find what needs to be killed or clicked in order to complete it. GMs would often show up, waste their time for 15 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong, then complete the mission for you anyway. Cryptic Studios at the time decided to give us an option to auto-complete a mission once every three days, figuring these kinds of minor problems were just infrequent enough to where CS would almost never need to be involved with them.

Players have subsequently found other uses for the Mission Drop feature, such as auto-completing difficult or annoying missions. I myself will auto-complete PvP liaison missions and contact introduction missions whenever I can, and have used the feature far more often for this than actual bugs.

You're looking at this in terms of unnecessary absolutes where what I'm referring to is a matter of choice. I recently bought Diablo III, and its death penalty is pretty mild - your gear takes damage and you need to pay to have it repaired. Or you can play on Hardcore mode, where death is permanent. Get taken out once and it's all over. Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had a similar option. When starting the game, you could select an option which allowed you to only save in Bunkers, which are the games between-mission hubs. What this meant was once an actual combat mission had started, you could never save mid-way. You'd have to start the mission all over from the beginning.

Yes, Farmville and the like are popular, but to conclude that they are popular BECAUSE of these aspects seems like a leap of logic that's somewhat uncharacteristic for you. It strikes me as the conclusion that WoW has raids, WoW is popular, therefore anything which has raids will also be popular while ignoring context. For one, Farmville does not give players a choice. Are you as convinced that if players had the choice to make their crops not die and waste resources, they would choose to keep the threat of penalty in the game anyway? Or are you saying players would choose to remove the threat but then the game wouldn't be as popular? Again, it just seems odd for such speculation to be coming from you.

I merely bring up "hardcore" players as the type of player who actually enjoys the threat of penalty as part of the thrill of the game. I oppose this to the "toy" type player who doesn't play games for a sense of thrill or accomplishment but more simply for recreation. MineCraft may be more popular than Jesus, and yet even this received a "Creative" mode with pretty much all the gameplay aspects removed where people could simply build without worrying about survival or resources. Every block breaks in a single hit and the player has access to infinite amounts of every single block type. And I've spent more time in that mode than I have in the regular "Survival" mode.

This is another aspect of games with no or little penalty that I really enjoy - failure is not frightening, therefore the game encourages me to be brave. The thing with players is some of up play games because we're not as awesome in real life as our characters are in-game. That's why we play to begin with. And this isn't limited to matters of physical strength or skill. They can just as easily extend over matters of mental prowess. My character, for instance, may be a brave warrior, but I might be a complete coward too skittish to take risks and capitalise on this character's warrior's skills. My character may be a great detective adept at word puzzles, but because English is a second language to me, I might not be as good at riddles.

Something City of Heroes has don that really very few other games have managed is to make me a lot braver than I am in real life. In life, I'm a cautious individual who insists on being able to know the outcome of an endeavour before I engage in it. In City of Heroes, I really don't care what I fight or where I have to go simply because I know that whatever I may face, I can handle it. Why bother worry about the future when you know you can take care of anything that gets in your way? And more than anything, I get to be this brave because... Well, what's the worst that can happen? So maybe charging in a room with three Sappers isn't the smartest thing to do, I admit that. But so what? It's cool and I might just pull it off. Can't know if I don't try, and try I will because there isn't much to lose.

I don't want the game to allow me to keep tossing my corpse at a problem until it goes away, but I do want it to allow me to keep making mistakes without intentionally working to piss me off.

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.

The AE system gives you tickets for mobs that you kill and i believe also for "mission clickies" as well.

You then get a bonus on top when you complete the mission.

There is however an upper hard cap that you *cannot* exceed in number of AE tickets that you can earn per mission.

I remember this very well. It was realistic, since if our characters died thanks to a knockback, knockdown or knock-up power, dying lying on their back should be the correct animation.

It should be interesting to know if this animation is bugged or if the devs remove it.

I remember this very well. It was realistic, since if our characters died thanks to a knockback, knockdown or knock-up power, dying lying on their back should be the correct animation.

It should be interesting to know if this animation is bugged or if the devs remove it.

Hm, I got the impression that the system monitors the person's vital signs and automatically activates whenever they hit a critical threshold. Though for narrative purposes, I usually just pretend the medi-porters don't exist unless a mission stubbornly insists on talking about them.