Devs called I24 "Fix Everything" in Coffee Talk... Lets hope that doesn't include nerfs

It used to be said that the game was balanced for the 'Heroic' difficulty level. That is, +0x1 IIRC.

At +0x1, I have a hard time believing Scrappers and Brutes are dieing way more than Tankers, especially by the SO levels. And if they are, it's due to the the fact either AT outnumbers Tankers. Or because a majority of people playing Tankers are die hard Tanker enthusiasts who know how to build better and that's coloring the data.


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I would also say that at +0/x1 that Tankers aren't soloing that much slower than Brutes or Scrappers, either, even at SO levels. If we're looking at "effective" damage levels (meaning that excess damage doesn't matter), then leveling speeds are probably pretty close.

I am pretty close to being in your camp here.

I wish there was a way to customize build instead of choose a hard AT... If you want to be a def/ranged or a buff/melee or a melee/buff then make those initial choices at the front screen, let some logical scale/cap balancing be set in the background accordingly along with some power selection filters (say specific power choices vary depending upon choices - similar to the stalker differences with armor sets now..). Balance issues would make this challenging, but it would be incredibly dynamic and fun.

I know, I know, not a new idea. But I like it.

...My FA/IM has chomping a tray of red skittles as part of his attack chain.

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

It prevents us from becoming CO at launch. In other words, broken.

CO at launch didn't do a very good job of representing superheroes either, IMO, regardless of any apparent freedom to mix and match powers. As weak as I find characters over here to be, I found it to be even worse in CO. Maybe it's gotten better, but I'm to soured on the game to give it another chance.

Since you brought it up, I wouldn't mind one bit if T9 VIPs here got "Freeforms" to play with.


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I would be trapped in the character creator for *days*. Slots would have to be cleared up. Fingernails would become several feet long.

More to the point, it prevents Tankmages at level 1. Most of the MMO design community still seems deathly afraid of this. If they designed a better game system to begin with, then they would have nothing to fear from giving players more freedom. Open power selection only results in a broken game when the game as a whole isn't designed properly.

I would love to see an actual example of of a free-form game that is also balanced.

That wasn't the problem. The problem is that ironically, when you give people the freedom to choose anything, they will gravitate to the best combination of choices. Archetypes are one way to in effect say you can have this, but then you can't have that. Open this door, that one closes.

When you don't do that, and you don't have an extremely solid power tree system, you end up with what CO ended up with at launch. Everyone becomes ranged scrappers. Why take melee attacks over ranged attacks when the only difference is range? Why take anything but a defensive passive when staying alive is the most important thing in combat? Once you have a full attack chain, why not take the strongest controls and heals you can get?

They have slowly taken steps to improve that situation over time, but I don't think they've fully addressed it.

Me too. Maybe one day I'll make one.

I don't see how one could exist. If it was balanced, it would just be another AT system.

I remember Ultima Online it was a free form system yet also broken.

Actually IMO what most game designers believe is that power balance is more of an issue of balance over time than an issue of balance at the flood gates. Or, if they don't believe that at first, they eventually believe it once the game has existed for a while.

Creating balance isn't necessarily difficult. Maintaining it takes a serious, dedicated effort though. Every member of staff has to be on board and continually maintain not just the powers themselves, but the monsters, the gear/enhancements, the potions/inspirations, the encounters, what happens when two or more power sets collide, enemy AI, and dozens of other factors.

This is basically why while it is possible to theorize about a perfectly balanced MMO, no one has ever actually seen one.

In the case of City of Heroes, had I been asked to work on this game 10 years ago, and saw in the plans that we intended to have players capable of flying during combat, I would almost certainly have blundered into many of the issues we now identify as mistakes. What I hope most people realize, though, is that in a slightly different set of circumstances flying characters could easily have been game breaking. Even seemingly innocuous factors like how fast players can move and whether to allow resurrection during combat can swing the balance of a game in surprisingly drastic ways.

This is my belief, as well. It's utterly shocking to me how almost no game I can think of has anything even remotely close to the diversity we enjoy here. I've played a LOT of F2P MMOs out there since those became a thing, and it always catches me by surprise when I go to make a character and realise there really are only five characters in that game. Oh, sure, there are five "classes," but there are no further choices in that class beyond... Well, class. A warrior is a warrior is a warrior. You can sometimes pick different weapons to fight with, but this rarely makes a difference, and some games (say, Tera) actually limit a "class" to using only one type of weapon.

Here, I play all of four "classes" - Scrappers, Stalkers, Brutes and Masterminds. I've repeated a character point-for-point only once so far (I have two SS/Inv Brutes), but beyond that, I have easily 60 characters from those four classes and none of those have the same powers or the same build. It just seems to me that breaking a class into two or three subsections and then giving a handful of options per subsection leads to a lot of variety without having to make a lot of classes, yet so few games actually do that.

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.

If you're saying a balanced freeform system will have tradeoffs, and all tradeoff systems are archetype systems in disguise, it will be an archetype system in disguise as you define it. But not as I define it, since it would be impossible to create an archetype system which mirrored its behavior, which is how I define archetype system in disguise.

Here's a tradeoff system that reformats the tradeoffs so that instead of advantages and disadvantages, you have a continuum of options. Suppose you were to create a bunch of attributes, lets call them A, B, and C, and suppose you allowed players to allocate points to these three in any way they wanted. These would be dials that would set three different parameters of their character.

The thing is, these three things don't directly affect anything. Instead, a different set of attributes is calculated from them. V, W, X, Y, and Z are all functions of A, B, and C. Perhaps V is the sum of A and B. W is the product of A and B. X is A/B. You have to choose how to allocate points to A, B, and C, but doing so affects lots of different things.

This is pretty abstract, so it appears confusing, but that's a separate issue. I could call A, B, and C Resilience, Strength, and Endurance. You the player get to choose how much to strengthen each base attribute. But that will affect your derived attributes in different ways. Resilience times Strength might be your Offensive Power. Resilience plus Strength might be your Survivability. Strength/Resilience might be your Speed. Ground the relationships in conceptual touchstones and you can make it intuitive in theory.

But that's a side issue. The design balance issue is that you can embed tradeoffs without needing to invoke actual tradeoffs by simply engineering the actual game mechanics to enforce tradeoffs which the players have full control of, but cannot multilaterally optimize. The players never "give up" anything. They simply can't gain in all directions simultaneously.

What's more, you design the game so that every strength *is* a weakness. The more resistant you are to other things pushing you around, the more resistant you are to moving as well: you're slower. Shields that block incoming damage also partially reduce your damage. Ranged attacks are easier to use on distant targets, but harder to use when someone is standing next to you interfering with your aim. You don't ask the players to give up something to get something, you just make sure nothing is universally good.

There's only one real requirement, and its unfortunately for the MMO industry a doozy. The mechanics and the abilities system *must* be tuned to each other. They cannot be designed independently of each other.

But that's not how MMOs are typically created. And without extremely strong synchronicity, it doesn't work.

I don't buy that line of thinking. Otherwise, everyone would only ever play the best AT and the best power sets since there is no such thing as perfect balance, and if there is, we sure as shooting don't have it here.

We have ATs and power sets and combos in this game that are perceived as clearly better and ones that are regarded as lame ducks. Yet the lame ducks still get play and people play stuff other than the optimal power set combos with the best synergy.

With a Freeform system, the people who roll Stone/Stone for concept now would be rolling whatever they want for concept and the people who only play Crabs now would still only be playing whatever Franken-Freeform build they deem optimal. Nothing really would change from what we have now in that respect.

And, again I'm reminded of what I suggested before about loosening some of the constraints we have now in the spirit of a more freeform system without tossing the system we have entirely out. Such as making the Epic pools available much earlier and greatly expanding on their number and depth. So a Tanker could pick up some basic gun attacks or a Blaster/Scrapper could build towards something closer to Iron Man (although granted, that's as much about beam and power armor-like attacks not existing as it is Blasters/Scrappers being able to pursue damage mitigation powers/ranged attacks earlier respectively).



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Here, there is no universally best choice.

You're talking theoretical. There's no reason to talk theoretical. We know what happens here. We know what happened in CO. Case closed.

I actually feel that the Warhammer 40 000: Space Marine game does almost exactly this, though in a somewhat simpler and more obscure way. It does have classes, yes, but within each class, you are allowed to pick two perks from two sets of 8. You can take any two, and almost all of them have a MASSIVE effect. For instance, when the game says "Markedly increases armour strength." it means it, because armour (shields, really) gain something like three or four times the capacity. When the game says "Grenades deal significantly more damage." it means that, too. Grenades have a larger radius and about three times the damage. Things like that.

This is, in practice, an "advantage/disadvantage" system, but there are SO MANY advantages you're never really in a position to think of it in terms of what you're not taking, because you're not taking the great majority of the perks. Instead, you're put in a position of picking a role for a specific loadout, picking the weapons you're most comfortable with serving that role, and then picking the perks that best fit the resulting playstyle. I can't say that it's ever an obvious choice (OK, almost), and it is kind of hard to pick, but at the end of the day, it's still a surprisingly versatile system with what amounts to a very limited class selection.

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Sidways of that, it's becoming more and more obvious to me that the more "action-oriented" a game is, the easier it is to introduce diversity to it, because the actual gameplay of it involves so many more variables, so many more unique situations and so much variety, most of which really comes down to muscle memory. The difference between a slow hammer and a fast sword becomes much greater, as does the difference between an AoE cannon and a sniper rifle and an autocannon.

In a traditional click-n-kill RPG, the numbers may vary, but what you do does not - you click on enemies and click on skills. The order changes, but the the basic gameplay is so limited there's very little you can do to shake it up. Sure, you can jumble the numbers around, but what you're changing is the math, and math can be figured out. And not necessarily by the player using it, either. The more you try to obfuscate the math, the more you just put artificial obstacles in the player's way.

Why I find action games have more variety is because, to a very large extent, they don't come down to what you know or how well you plan. They can't be "figured out" because no matter everything else, it all comes down to what you actually do when it comes time to do it, and if you make the game tricky enough, then there's always the "challenge" of whether you'll succeed or you'll fail. A math-driven game, even as random and obfuscated as it may be, is still predictable because nearly every fight is decided long before you enter it. If you have the numbers on your side, the only way to win is essentially by means of random chance, and that just doesn't add anything to the experience.

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.

If you're going to play the min/max metagame against your players, you have to be better mathematicians. And that ain't hard for real mathematicians. We're still discussing the true benefit of Scourge years later, and the only credible answer anyone has to how strong the SR passive resistances are is "I think Arcanaville said something like 15% a few years ago**." And yet, there's nothing difficult to explain when it comes to how either works. They are just difficult to min/max around without complex math.

If you play this meta game for real, its actually easier to design a game difficult to min/max than it is to analyze a game made difficult to analyze. The advantage is with the system designer. But only if they actually play the game to win.

From a game design perspective, the problem isn't math. The problem is moves. CoH is designed for combat to resolve itself in a small number of moves (i.e. attacks). And that reduces the level of complexity of combat substantially. That puts the designers in a whole in terms of the maximum complexity horizon they can introduce. But its not impossible to still make a highly complex and unpredictable game within those limits.

Unfortunately, the main area we see this in CoH is in scaling stacking debuffs. A critter group that is a pushover at +0x2 suddenly becomes a nightmare at +0x6 when their debuffs start self-amplifying and the speed at which they can suddenly kill you rises exponentially.


** Closer to 24%, actually