Power Creep video
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2012-06-28 17:14 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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Well that was unexpected. (no not really)
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Originally Posted by Reppu
Sales lower over time?! SAY IT ISN'T SO!
No, seriously. I don't see anything out of the normal here. |
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I just double checked your figures.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Well that was unexpected. (no not really)
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Incarnates released on 05 April 2011, so the sales figures from that count in the large boom of 2011, then the sales figures go down to less than they were before that, and stay pretty steady at that level.
So basically incarnates drove away almost half a million dollars per quarter of sales?
Am I the only one seeing that?
Edit: At the very least that shows there was huge interest in incarnate stuff, and it failed quite dramatically to hold anyones additional attention.
Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
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Originally Posted by Aggelakis
PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"
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as are you, me, this planet and the entire universe.|
Originally Posted by Vel_Overload
This game is slowly dying.... |
But your penetrating insight is greatly appreciated.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Your wit, it seems is the only thing bucking that trend.
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
as are you, me, this planet and the entire universe.
But your penetrating insight is greatly appreciated. |
Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
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Originally Posted by Aggelakis
PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"
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No, they've nerfed the ticket rewards beyond the exploitable stuff like ambushes. Say you have a mission filled with enemies. It takes more enemies to kill to get the same amount of tickets than it did a year ago. It's not really worth it, anymore.
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Originally Posted by Clave_Dark_5
I imagine you mean the exploits, not the farms, those are still alive and well for those who like them.
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But it was too easy to get tickets in the first place.|
Originally Posted by Stone Daemon
No, they've nerfed the ticket rewards beyond the exploitable stuff like ambushes. Say you have a mission filled with enemies. It takes more enemies to kill to get the same amount of tickets than it did a year ago. It's not really worth it, anymore.
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Would have been better off with no rewards at all.
Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
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Originally Posted by Aggelakis
PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"
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good lord, not this again.|
Originally Posted by PrincessDarkstar
Whenever I log on I only see 2 servers with more than 1 dot, and it was never like that before.
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one: they've upgraded the server system many times over the past few years. Dots do *not* measure population, they measure server load. More powerful servers = less server load.
two: there have been periods of mass free server transfers in the not to distant past and these days server transfers are available on the market as well as being a free perk for VIPs. While my oldest characters are still on Triumph, I did shuffle a bunch of alts on various servers to Freedom & Virtue for increased teaming opportunities. It isn't crazy to suppose other players have done the same.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Wrong, for reasons explained previously.|
Originally Posted by PrincessDarkstar
Freedom and Virtue aren't any more populated than they once were though, or they would be red all the time considering the amount of people Union and other servers seem to have lost.
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| Edit: I also don't know a single person who has moved servers, but I do know at least 50-60 people that have left or severely cut down on game time. |
See, I can whip up baseless anecdotal evidence just as well as the next guy!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Well done on being able to make stuff up (From your posts I would be surprised if you ever had enough friends to know if they were leaving or not, do you ever say anything nice?). I can do the same but I can also say what I see.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
See, I can whip up baseless anecdotal evidence just as well as the next guy!
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Hell I can even use facts!
Check back to the sales figures above. Then remember that Freedom was launched in August 2011 so that are actually now making more money per person than they were before (From what some people say they buy it seems significantly more), yet still managing to make less money overall.
That means there are less people spending money, and thus less people playing.
Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
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Originally Posted by Aggelakis
PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"
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I wouldn't make that conclusion. There was considerably more going on. I think its pretty safe to say that going rogue and f2p didn't result in a net influx of players into the game.|
Originally Posted by PrincessDarkstar
I just double checked your figures.
Incarnates released on 05 April 2011, so the sales figures from that count in the large boom of 2011, then the sales figures go down to less than they were before that, and stay pretty steady at that level. So basically incarnates drove away almost half a million dollars per quarter of sales? Am I the only one seeing that? Edit: At the very least that shows there was huge interest in incarnate stuff, and it failed quite dramatically to hold anyones additional attention. |
My own thought is that I18 further fragmenting a game with an already declining population was a bad idea.
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I think GR was probably the start of it, it looks like both GR and incarnates got lots of people back to test them, and both times they didn't stay long.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I wouldn't make that conclusion. There was considerably more going on. I think its pretty safe to say that going rogue and f2p didn't result in a net influx of players into the game.
My own thought is that I18 further fragmenting a game with an already declining population was a bad idea. |
Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!
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Originally Posted by Aggelakis
PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"
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Like those other games that died. Chess, checkers, poker, Monopoly, Yahtzee, tennis, baseball, cricket, Battleship, D&D...so many great games that only lasted a few years before people flitted off to other interests.|
Originally Posted by Vel_Overload
Want evidence? Look up -any- game in history. Slowly, games die. I didn't say it would just shut down tomorrow.. but in a few years.. yeah.
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(No, I don't seriously think COH will last as long as Chess, or even Monopoly. But the concept that people stop playing a particular game seems to have originated with computer games, and it might not yet turn out to be the case with all computer games. Our sample range is pretty small.)
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
For 14 years I have been playing Magic. I still play Magic to this day and I can tell you there is nothing balanced or free of power creep in the Standard format. I dislike the format because it creates a limited metagame that forces you to either play the best deck or metagame against it. Going back this has been the problem that has plagued the game for the last few years...(that and a few broken powerful cards and mechanics). Even MTG suffers from power creep. Going back even the last ten years there has been little diversity in Standard. You can find an unbalance and power creep in the several periods during the game in MTG's Standard format.
While I agree that power creep is a problem for every game designer, I completely disagree that MTG is good example of how to combat power creep. If anything, especially recently, Wizards of the Coast completely failed in this aspect.
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Originally Posted by Clave_Dark_5
I imagine you mean the exploits, not the farms, those are still alive and well for those who like them.
In other words, yes, "reward creep", just as I was pointing out. |
technically ambush farms were not exploits, that was just leveraging the tools given to us (i never liked ambush farms though, they werent friendly to lowbies)
now loading a map full of buff bots was borderline exploitation since you could cap most of your stats and farm with pretty much no fear of dying regardless which AT you were
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I give posts all the respect they deserve.|
Originally Posted by PrincessDarkstar
Well done on being able to make stuff up (From your posts I would be surprised if you ever had enough friends to know if they were leaving or not, do you ever say anything nice?).
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Which makes me quite popular in certain circles, less so in others.
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Check back to the sales figures above. Then remember that Freedom was launched in August 2011 so that are actually now making more money per person than they were before (From what some people say they buy it seems significantly more), yet still managing to make less money overall. That means there are less people spending money, and thus less people playing. |
I log in, I see as many players as ever, finding teams is so easy I've played more TFs in the last few weeks than in the previous 8 years combined, and the game is getting more development attention than it *ever* has in the entire time I've been playing.
If this is death and failure, I'll take a second helping TYVM.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Huh. So I finally got around to watching the video.
Incomparables. Anyone who's been around long enough to have heard my shpiel on game design for eight years will know I have dents in my forehead from all the nodding. The only place I disagree slightly is that its always been my contention that if you treat powers design as an engineering problem, which it properly is, the "crazy web of numbers" that is daunting to the average game designer would be just par for the course for a good systems engineer.
The big question is, can you create a numerical framework for so-called incomparables that is also easy to balance. And I believe it is. I believe, and have believed since '04, that the way to do that is to exploit the techniques behind zero-knowledge proofs. We make a framework that is very easy to compare a whole bunch of different things quantitatively, and then we translate it into a framework for which that is provably intractable. The system still has to make lots of qualitative judgments about how to compare non-scalar and non-ordinal things, so there's still design wizardry involved, but those qualitative to quantitative translations are both hidden from the players, and hidden in a way that only prize-winning mathematicians can hope to uncover.
Even in an apples to apples comparison, you can make life difficult for the min/maxers and eliminate easy ways to compare things in any way but qualitatively. What's better: an SR passive-like scaling resistance that goes from 0-60%, or 16.5% resistance flat? Anyone that wants to attempt a *proof* of which is better, can PM it to me for review, but if your proof is anything less than six pages long, I can already tell you its wrong.
The biggest problem with CoH is that while its focused on combat, that's not properly capturing the problem. Its that its focused on kills which is not the same thing. So long as that is true, the many dimensions of incomparables possible winnow down to just a few. You can still do good things with the few that are left, but you've also voluntarily placed yourself into a phone booth. It doesn't have to be that way.
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People have been saying this since 2006. Since that was six years ago, it would be more proper to say this game is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly dying.
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Originally Posted by Vel_Overload
This game is slowly dying and anyone who disagrees is in denial and the best way to keep it around for even just alittle while longer is to some how halt powercreep.
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It doesn't make the old content useless. You still have to level up to level 50. I still play all the old task forces. ATO's are nice, but they haven't replace the other enhancements and IO's I've used since they came out.|
Originally Posted by BunnyAnomaly
Incarnates aren't power creep? 54+5 final bosses? I consider the new ATO enhancements to be a case of power creep too, and depending on how far you look back the purples were quite significant in their own right.
On the other hand, their continued revamp and creation of lower level content makes me very happy  I have an interest in the >50 content but have really enjoyed levelling my new stalker through the new low level stuff |
I think this game is doing a nice job increasing the top end stuff while still keeping the lower level stuff relevant, by mixing new upper level content with new lower level content, while revamping some of the older content.
I've been playing for over six years straight, and I'm fairly certain I would have quit by now had they not advanced the game with incarnate content. They must be doing something right, how many games have lasted this long?
The only concern I have is how long it takes to get a character to that new top level - it could discourage some players from making new toons if it feels like too much of a grind to get there. I think it would be better if the incarnate stuff was less of a grind, especially the solo path. But overall I'm not sure you could do it much better than the designers of this game have done it over the years.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
It doesn't have to be that way.
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So, how else? I'm curious to hear your alternatives.
Note: As I glanced back at this, I re-read it and it sounded sarcastic to me. It's definitely not intended that way. I am really quite interested to hear some examples of alternatives you seem to have in mind, and suspect I'd not be alone in that.
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I think your choice of terminology is bad. Either you don't understand idiomatic speech and like to state the patently obvious, or you are (intentionally or not) playing semantic games here.|
Originally Posted by Vel_Overload
Anyone else wanna argue that any game doesn't slowly 'die' ?
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If you state that something is slowing dying, at least in English to a fluent speaker (and I say this because for all I know in certain languages, there may not be the same idiomatic meanings applied to a literal translation of the 'slowly dying'), it implies quite strongly that the thing in question is close to death. It is not generally taken to mean that the universal rules of entropy haven't specifically suspended with regard to the thing in question.
So, while your statement is technically correct, the same statement applies to literally everything known, so it's a pretty valueless statement if we read it as you claim to have meant it.
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Lets take very simple examples just to prove the point. We have missions where we have to kill stuff. We don't really have missions where the primary reward-generating goal is to clear an area of critters, which would open the door to knocking them away, repelling them away, teleporting them away, or killing them. That's focusing on combat without directly focusing on kills. Hero respec partially illustrates the point by making the goal protecting a target, but that's still ultimately a temporary measure to buy time to defeat everything. To a certain extent you can also do this in Keyes, to a point, but that's also very limited.|
Originally Posted by Madadh
So, how else? I'm curious to hear your alternatives.
Note: As I glanced back at this, I re-read it and it sounded sarcastic to me. It's definitely not intended that way. I am really quite interested to hear some examples of alternatives you seem to have in mind, and suspect I'd not be alone in that. |
We get XP, influence, and drops for kills. Every other aspect of combat is a means to an end to generate kills. It can be helpful to debuff, hold, knock, immobilize, or terrorize critters, but rarely are you actually rewarded for it. It would be pretty wild if there was a villain side mission where the goal was to terrorize everyone out of a building. Players with actual terrorize powers would have an advantage, just like players with cold powers have an advantage putting out fires. But in the absence of those powers you could simply start smashing the crap out of the building and its contents to frighten people (I am presuming that for the purposes of this mission terrorize powers would act as desired, and not as they ordinarily do, against civilian targets).
There's lots of potential opportunities, but many of them are hampered by the fact that the current powers system strongly devalues anything other than killing and surviving damage specifically because there are no rewards for doing anything else. A previous thread talked about the SSOCS or the skills system. Why must non-kill focused mechanics be "out of combat?" Why can't endurance drain help players in one way, while fire does so in a different way, to satisfy mission objectives? We can't completely redo how powers work and who has what effects globally, but we can take what players have and try to leverage that beyond killing targets. Maybe endurance drain could knock out a security system in a mission, making it easier. Maybe fire could set the building ablaze, and force all the critters in the building to make for the exit - which you could be standing next to, or you could be stealthing to the objective in the meantime. "Combat" would still be the main mechanism for doing things in the game, but that combat would not always be necessarily focused on kills.
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Those are some interesting thoughts Arcanaville.
Maybe they need to look at comics more, because that's what I thought of as I read. Combat is not the end all be all, but it is there as part of the whole. I hope I interpreted what you said correctly.
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About 50-60 people disagreed with you but yet another 50-60 ended up agreeing. |
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
I give posts all the respect they deserve.
Which makes me quite popular in certain circles, less so in others. |
Man I want to be the teacher in some college teaching power creeping.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Well that was unexpected. (no not really)
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1. Why Soft Cap is Important : http://dechskaison.blogspot.com/2011...important.html
2. Limits: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Limits
3. Attack Mechanics: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Attack_Mechanics
4. Rule of Five: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Rule_o...e_Law_of_Fives
Actually that brings up another point. Once we get to Omega, do we want to simplify the path to tier 4 all of those - or is it better to always have a goal that is far out of reach, for those that want to invest the time with their character?
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Since Bunny made a good point here, I thought I'd respond to it. You could certainly make a case for purples being an instance of power creep, though I'd argue they're a fairly minor one overall because their impact really isn't all that huge for most builds. They're good, especially for exemplaring, yes, but not so good that it's obvious to me when someone else on my team is using purples versus otherwise. I would argue that they don't trivialize lower level content in the way that you see with true power creep, though I concede others might argue the contrary.
On the matter of Incarnates, however, I actually think there's deliberate attempts to curtail power creep right there in the design. The alpha level shift is the only one that works in non-incarnate content, and the incarnate content is very deliberately gated to keep it from making lower level content overly trivial. There's a crossover period for normal level 50 content and incarnate powers are making that former endgame content increasingly easy (a clear case of power creep), but the game below level 45 is untouched by this process and in fact the Devs are continuing to add new content to the lower levels of the game. I think a certain amount of power creep is unavoidable - the guys at Extra Credits all but said as much - but so far I'm very happy with how it's been handled.
We've also got some great incomparables (I would argue for badges and costumes as both being good examples of this, though of course not everyone cares about these things).
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