What if we removed faceplanting?
Off the wall idea here. More of a thought exercise.
What if we removed faceplanting from the game? |
I KID, I KID! =P
Alternate death animations would be cool.
/signed
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That's why I suggest simply skipping a fight you can't win, but also skipping the rewards it would normally bring. I've never had a problem with letting people get on with the story if they simply can't win a specific fight, but the gate remains on the reward. I will never really accept the concept of earning a reward because you could afford to die 20 times in a row to chip away at an enemy's health. If you're reduced to this, you're not succeeding in beating the gate, so you're not being let in. You can move on with the story, but you can't have the "stuff" that's behind the gate.
Say I'm unlucky and I run into a room where three spawns have merged and three Sappers are aiming their guns at my head. Say I feel I can't beat that. Then I say "skip it" and all three spawns disappear. I earn nothing from them and I take a hit on the final mission reward because of it. It hasn't stopped me from completing the mission so it hasn't caused me to "fail." I've simply chosen to forfeit the reward for a victory I couldn't achieve. This is from the mentality that you don't HAVE to win every fight in order to proceed, but being able to do so rewards you with more "stuff." You're not penalised for defeat since you can always just try again with nothing lost, and you're only rewarded if you manage to succeed. |
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.
And that's the problem - these kinds of games are not for every type of audience. As the game market expands and video games become a more widely-accepted form of entertainment, they start attracting people who aren't at all consistent with the hardcore competitive gamers of old, but are instead those looking for relaxing entertainment.
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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.
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I suppose one of the reasons why I want some harder material and turn up the difficulty on all of my runs in the game is because the death penalty in this game is so low. The game I'm playing right now is runescape, and if CoX had a punishment similar to RS (lose all of your enhancements), then I would put the game at -1/x1 and never move from that difficulty setting. Even RS is loosening it's death penalties significantly, because they have eventually discovered that in an economy based off of extremely rare takes-months-to-afford items having those items be easily lost due to the unforgiving random number generator or shoddy servers is a horrible game model.
The closest thing that CoX has to that are Purple and PVP IOs, and even then it doesn't take months to earn the cash needed to buy them. Why, with a few trial runs you can get enough astrals in a day to buy several in-demand sets to give yourself several hundred mil so you can buy a purple IO enhancement or two, and the benefits of these enhancements are only marginally better than the lower tiers. Most of the wealth that I earn in the game is happenstance earnings since the gameplay isn't based upon wealth.
The difficulty itself isn't too punishing, either. In worst case scenarios where you come across a merger of 3 groups with annoying things like sappers or S.W.A.T., you can buy a couple of inspirations (4 purples, for example) that will let you become all but invincible for half a minute. A few more, and your damage output increases greatly. Should things be too hard you can lower the difficulty and restart the mission, or continue on afterward if you are in a TF/SF. There are very few moments in the game where you are truly stuck where you are at that cannot be solved without better coordination or planning, and most of the content can be accomplished by a team consisting of any ATs and Powersets given that the player isn't incompetent with slotting SO's or higher.
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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".
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
I suppose one of the reasons why I want some harder material and turn up the difficulty on all of my runs in the game is because the death penalty in this game is so low. The game I'm playing right now is runescape, and if CoX had a punishment similar to RS (lose all of your enhancements), then I would put the game at -1/x1 and never move from that difficulty setting. Even RS is loosening it's death penalties significantly, because they have eventually discovered that in an economy based off of extremely rare takes-months-to-afford items having those items be easily lost due to the unforgiving random number generator or shoddy servers is a horrible game model.
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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.
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.
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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. |
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.
Some years ago CoH had two defeat poses. The one, which is still the current, is to faceplant. The second was to end up lying on your back with arms and legs spread somewhat. It was random which defeat pose would come up when your character was defeated. I like this as it gave a little bit of varity for a group of PCs all defeat in battle at the same time.
Why the Devs removed this alternate defeat animation I do not know, but I'd love to see it returned to this game. |
It should be interesting to know if this animation is bugged or if the devs remove it.
Some years ago CoH had two defeat poses. The one, which is still the current, is to faceplant. The second was to end up lying on your back with arms and legs spread somewhat. It was random which defeat pose would come up when your character was defeated. I like this as it gave a little bit of varity for a group of PCs all defeat in battle at the same time.
Why the Devs removed this alternate defeat animation I do not know, but I'd love to see it returned to this game. |
It should be interesting to know if this animation is bugged or if the devs remove it.
I've often wondered about that myself, and thought the same things. i.e. "If I am knocked out, who is pressing my medi-porter?" |
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What I really want is to be ragdolled, just as the NPC's. If my character gets clobbered down it should be as undignified as the rest of the universe.
Here's the problem, though - video games are not a sport.
Run away: Your character becomes scared, then turns around and runs out of the game, leaving targetable defeat marker. Useful for cowards, obviously, as well as characters who don't lose, but rather make tactical retreats.
Suggestions:
Super Packs Done Right
Influence Sink: IO Level Mod/Recrafting
Random Merit Rolls: Scale cost by Toon Level