So Blasters never got fixed?

How many prospective players did we lose by making the game be about superheroes? How many by not making it Linux-native? How many by requiring keyboards? How many by not making the game a text-adventure?

Its easy to reference hypothetical losses outside the context of the fact that all design decisions cost players.

The reason all video games obey design rules is that only people who obey design rules end up being designers.

If you want to make a game where every archetype except one is balanced in a particular way, change the design rules to say that and convince everyone else that a set of design rules that says that isn't completely ludicrous, or write your own game that doesn't require anyone else in the design loop.

The situations aren't comparable. In one case you have people who are here and enjoying the game as a whole. In the other you have people who might have come for a feature, and then not been discouraged by the rest of the game.

If you want to go the hypothetical loss route, where is the hypothetical gain from this ?

The concrete benefit of addressing blaster issues is that the game attracted a particular subset of MMO players and those players were overwhelmingly represented by the players that were comfortable with a particular level of performance as delivered by every archetype but blasters. Fixing blasters would make them just as mechanically attractive from a performance perspective as any other archetype, which is almost certainly a better situation than for blasters to be the lone massive detrimental outlier.

If this game presented itself as a game where every archetype had completely different performance, and that performance encompassed a wide range, and archetype choice was a proxy for performance choice, and the intent was variety, then there would be no specific problem with blasters being on the bottom and controllers or brutes, say, being on the top and everyone else in between. The design intent would be satisfied by the game implementation: provide a wide variety of performance levels and skill set challenges, with each archetype being different in those regards.

But that's not the case. The game is designed around the intent that archetype and powerset choice affects gameplay options but not overall performance. And everything performs roughly the same except blasters. That makes blasters the unjustified outlier and falls outside the intent of the game. The default position is to fix it to bring it into line with the rest of the archetypes.

This is not just a question of quantitative balance. There were severe restrictions on blasters that no other archetype faced for which the quantitative performance numbers were one side effect. The other was that those design limits constrained blasters to a very narrow set of gameplay options relative to all other archetypes, something the current developers recognized. Arbiter Hawk, in particular, wasn't so much concerned with the numerical performance problem except as a symptom of a larger problem: when every archetype has been adjusted or revisited, there was a certain latitude the developers had in adding new or interesting capabilities to those archetypes. Dominators, for example, were actually reconfigured as primary damage dealers in their last rebalancing, with damage dealer-class damage modifiers, while retaining their massive control and pets.

I think it became obvious to many at that point that every archetype had significant latitude to both increase and widen their capabilities *except* blasters. Blasters were defined in terms of what they could not have. They could not have significant personal defenses. They could not have significant control. They could not have significant ally buff or widespread enemy debuff. They were focused on damage, but they were also limited in the degree to which that damage could be increased, and non-damage dealers were buffed to approach them very closely.

That made it obvious that it should have come as no surprise that blasters were the unique lone exception in performance, because they had always been the unique lone exception when it came to design latitude, and that limitation caused them to far further behind other archetypes over time.

The changes to blasters were not just a matter of increasing their reward earning. Giving them a permanent reward boost wouldn't solve the root problem, which was that even the devs realized that they had been too confined in what they allowed blasters to be over the evolution of the game. The I24 changes were an attempt to begin to reverse that, by exploring options for things blasters had always been barred from having by default.

Some people think the Sustain changes were going to make a huge difference. To them I say that was the intent: to grant blasters a large archetypal-based survivability boost that they had always been denied. Some people think the Sustain changes would have been immaterial. To them I say that as immaterial as they were, they were still denied to blasters for years. If they think blasters needed more, its important to note they would have never even gotten the I24 sustain changes until recently because that was explicitly denied to blasters.

The design mindset of blasters is: blasters die. That's what their design ultimately dictates. Even if you think Blasters are supposed to be some skill test section of the game, the players that got them to work were the exception. The players who died constantly and abandoned them were actually seeing blasters working as intended. Because although this wasn't directly intended, it was indirectly desired for blasters to be under higher risk. And "higher risk" is a meaningless statement if that risk doesn't occasionally trigger bad results.

Dying and giving up was the inevitable consequence of blaster implementation. That fact simply wasn't confronted head on until the I24 changes, when the devs realized there was no way around that without allowing blasters to be buffed in ways previously disallowed.


What was the hypothetical benefit? There was no hypothetical benefit. The long term benefit of treating blasters like they were not second class citizens of the game is making a better game. Its allowing the players who enjoy every other archetype from not having to accept a performance penalty for playing blasters. Its allowing the developers to have more options when it came to the future development of blasters. Its providing for more options when it came to future powersets down the road, and it allows for more options when it comes to designing content that doesn't have to treat blasters as the constant special case when it came to tuning standard difficulty.

Those were the certain benefits of addressing blaster issues. And it might have taken more than I24 to realize that, but most players don't appreciate that I24 was the major hurdle. With the I24 changes, all of the reasons for not doing things that could help blasters basically vanished. No change to blasters would ever be as difficult to justify and implement ever again, because after I24 Blasters would no longer be the exception to every rule.

If a handful of players decided to quit because blasters got too easy to play, that would be unfortunate, but I would be ok with that.

This is an excellent post. Would read again.

O.o



That's amazing, shocking, over the top ?

I don't know what is more stunning, that someone could say something like that so offhandedly and with such certainty, or someone else accepting it without question. With the ongoing events it seems complete insanity.

Why?

I was ok with people quitting because of the introduction of the invention system, I was ok with people quitting because dominators were buffed, I was ok with people quitting when the XP curve was rebalanced. Every good thing caused some players to quit. There is no such thing as a change everyone likes. If you're going to agonize over every change, lets unwind to launch when there were content gaps. Some people liked the gaps. Are you *sure* it was the right thing to add more content? Can you prove it?

People quit when the level cap was increased to 50. People quit when it wasn't increased to 60.

I'm certain the invention system was a good addition to the game. I'm certain adding content was the right choice. I'm certain XP rebalancing was the right choice. I'm equally certain correctly balancing Blasters was the right choice. Especially because rebalancing Blasters (the fact of it, separate from the method of doing it) was far less controversial than any of those other changes. I would and will bet real money we lost more players due to the introduction of the invention system than we would have ever lost to Blaster buffing if the game survived another hundred years.

I accept it because, as Arcana pointed out, every decision can cost players. However, that is not the crux of her post. Her post is, overall, a logical explanation as to why blasters needed to be buffed. I simply quoted the last line as a random choice, not because of what the last line said.

I do not see how comparing the statement to ongoing events makes the statement or agreement into complete insanity. I think that it would be hard to argue that buffing blasters is in any way responsible for the end of CoH, since the buffing never actually happened in any official capacity.

If anything, I would argue that the resistance to buffing blasters in the first place may have already cost many players. This doesn't mean I think that said resistance killed the game. It does, however, mean that I see no point to not providing a more satisfactory and above all consistent with the rest of the game playing experience. And I think that such a buff would make more players happier than the number of players it would upset or chase away. I do not even think that every player who likes blasters being some kind of "hard mode" would have left after issue 24 had it gone live.

My feeling was we needed more complex NPC behavior after all the ATs were brought in line. Think what the Cimerorans would be like if the surgeons played more intelligently.

There would have been a player revolt, but I've always wanted the NPCs to play much smarter. And I'm pretty certain that could have been done within the current CPU budget of the critter brains, given what I know about how the AI worked generally.

If you fail to stop everyone, you have let someone escape, if you let someone escape you lose the astral. Is that so hard to understand ?

Prior to the announcement and even after while Itrials were still happening, not getting the bonus was a 1 in 6 to 1 in 8 event.

I can't recall a single time where a league has let just 1 prisoner get past.

Not every spawn would need it. Just every so often and maybe toss in bonuses of some sort for the spawns that are harder.

If it was activated and scaled by the difficulty scaler, that might be more palatable. But the catch is that the rewards for its presence would have to be commensurate with the fact that the spawns would potentially take longer to kill (or almost no one would use it), and balancing that so that it isn't exploitable would add significant complexity to the system.

I've seen it. Sometimes the first escape causes a league to realize where the weak link is and they rebalance forces well enough that no one else gets past.

In general, making the critters smarter would take a lot of horsepower. But making them *look* like they were smarter is not the same thing. I'm speaking from a small amount of practical experience.

Of those where at least one prisoner escapes, I would estimate between 10% and 20% of BAFs on Justice let just one escape. After one gets away, the "skilled" players or those with more "plussed" characters move to reinforce the area where something escaped.

I could probably pull stats from my own logs. I already have a trial parser. I just need it to look for an Astral reward after the last prisoner defeat message and before the first message defeating anything else. I've been on well over 1000 BAFs, so it wouldn't be a terrible sample size.

It happens enough that I've commented to people about how it's frustrating to miss the Astral by just one prisoner - especially when it happens near the end. If five or ten get away, you're so not even close don't even worry about it. (Of course, much more than 10 and you start to worry about failing.)

Why?

Consider that players who played and kept playing other characters, but who abandoned Blasters, might have been compelled to keep playing blasters, giving them more interest in playing. And there are strong indications that there were more of these players out there than people who loved Blasters being "hard mode".

Also, imagine players who enjoyed blasters and not much else, but who abandoned blasters, would therefore have abandoned the game. Had Blasters not been "hard mode" compared to other ATs, such players might instead stick around. Retired players who had abandoned Blasters might have come back to play them. While this sounds like a very niche set of conditions, there being players who preferred Blasters being "hard mode", at least to the degree they have been so far, is definitely a niche group. Which would win out on net player change?

Even in the absolute worst case scenario of only losing players over such a change, I have absolute confidence that the number of people who would have left over such changes would have been exceedingly an small percentage of even CoH's relatively small player base. I'm not eager to see anyone leave, but I think causing a very small percentage of people to leave by making a change most of the remaining players will enjoy is worth the cost.

And in any case, I really don't see what our current circumstances have to do with this, because I do think any hypothetical loss of players here would have been invisible in the normal churn and loss already in play.

I have only done BAFs on protector so I can't talk about the general situation. For us, when we had an escape the league would take it as a reason to relax. We wouldn't try for extra effort unless there were ongoing escapes.

What all of you are seeing, might just be the result of your particular server's culture as well.

Those are all hard questions. I don't want to be one of those people that are pointing at a graph and shouting AHA, I am right. On the other hand, all I can talk about with certainty is my own experience in the game. If blasters weren't the way they are I would have stopped playing long ago. PvP might have been fun but from the few fights I tried ours didn't seem to be that great.

In the case of blasters no one did that and no one needed to do that. The developers in particular considered the quantitative performance issues one small piece of the much larger picture that *all* pointed to justifying Blaster buffs. The case I made and the case the developers agreed with was that there was no valid reason not to buff them, and tons of reasons to buff them. More specifically, buffing wasn't the issue: the issue was evolving Blasters to the modern game like every other archetype has been over time.

I can and will point to a bunch of numbers and say "you're wrong" to anyone who tries to claim that Blasters were doing just fine. But those numbers alone aren't proof Blasters needed a buff, nor are they the reason they were getting buffs in I24. They are proof that one of the long-standing excuses for why Blasters have never been properly revisited is and has always been false.

Wasn't pointing fingers at anyone but me.