So Blasters never got fixed?

Your enjoyment is just as subjective as anyone else's. You just get your enjoyment from trying to manage the highest performance you can get in the game, whereas others do not. That others do not view this in the same way or seek the same fulfillment from the game does not make it unreasonable and pointless, and logic should not lead you to the conclusion that it is unreasonable and pointless since - as it is a subjective measure of enjoyment - you cannot quantify these things through an application of logic, even if you can quantify some of the things in question in numerical or statistical fashion. I would argue that there are many things in the category you've determined is unquantifiable are actually quantifiable as well.

I personally do not care if my character is the most powerful or not. That's not what grants me enjoyment in CoH. What does is having characters who can solo reasonably well and who can contribute measurably on teams. However, not all of them will be able to solo to the same degree of efficiency, nor will all of them be able to contribute the same amount on teams, and these two things do not correlate directly to each other.

At the level of performance it seems most people play at, most missions get rolled over very quickly and efficiently with few defeats. In that context, your build's solo performance is not really all that relevant, and on a team you're contributing to make rolling slightly faster than otherwise. Or, that is, not a sufficient improvement to really justify any claim of superiority.

If you have fun with the way you play, more power to you. But just because you rely on numerical and statistical performance for fun does not make your preference inherently more rational or logical. It does not make your playstyle superior. It does not demonstrate that other playstyles are pointless, especially as fun as a goal in and of itself is a perfectly rational and logical goal, and automatically means that goals other than your own automatically have a point and are automatically reasonable.

Ah, so that's why you keep trying to swing your e-balls around the thread...

(To be fair, I don't have a leg to stand on in this argument... I don't play Blasters. I just wanted to make the testy/teste pun.) >_>

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

When people have accused me in the past of sounding like this, my argument has tended to be that its completely ludicrous to believe anyone would actually intend to sound like this. That a counter-example would volunteer itself is fascinating.

If you follow this to it's logical conclusion you get blasters never needed to be fixed and balance is of zero importance. Seeing as they were the most abandoned AT there is a contradiction here. There are certain levels of performance that just weren't acceptable and people were concerned about overall power.

Back in the I13 beta there were two features that were present that got removed before I bothered to screenshot/document them. One was the subtasks for badges (I am certain for field crafter) were showing as check boxes. The other was you could roll at the level you picked. Letting you roll at your desired would have been great all around it would have also encouraged people to play through content instead pling to 50 then IOing out and complaining there was nothing to do.

I have no interpretation for not being able to roll at a chosen level other than they wanted less than max level IOs tp be rare.

Fun is always going to be a matter of personal taste. My problem was always going from great to gimp because I exemped.

Variety is the spice of life. Blasters are something very different in this game and having them homogenized wasn't going to improve the overall enjoyment of the game. People that wanted to play tank mages had almost every option in the game. People that wanted to play something where performance was much more dependent on skill than build had almost no options in this game. It wasn't even a case of outperforming with skill in the AT, it was just nice to have an AT that when you were at the top of your game you saw it, and when you were phoning it in you saw it.

Sorry, I just... in context and all...

Btw, 2HSpiderman, we should totally talk about aesthetic positivism sometime. It totally works forever for reals.

If you want challenge play with just SOs or no enhancements. I know there is a certain something that is lost doing it that way but it allows you the challenge.

I think nobody is saying that your claims of your characters being strong are incorrect. What's incorrect is your assumption that this is all that matters. In the end, people play video games for fun, and for most people, playing a toon at 90% of its potential isn't much different from playing it at 100%.

Like others here, I am kind of annoyed with your elitist attitude. I think it's pretty clear that you can make good builds, because like you've said, you spent a ridiculous amount of time perfecting them in Mids. But that doesn't necessarily make you a good CoH player. It makes you a good Mids user. The level of power you achieve with your builds trivializes the game to such an extent, you'd be hard pressed to fail, no matter how poorly you played.

I think if you were put on even ground with the vast majority of CoH players, you would not do as well. For example, all these years I played toons with mostly just SO's. I'm used to not being invincible and having to actually perform well to get a result. You, being used to godlike power, would most likely be pretty lost when going against the same content with SO's only. It really is a completely different game at that point.

The point is that it's arguable what is more impressive: making a build that's so powerful, even a monkey could succeed on it....or succeeding on a really bad build. In fact, I think most people would say that the latter is more impressive, because it's accomplished by actually playing the game, not by tinkering with Mids.

Not necessarily. From the point of view of the player, *if* a player is having fun they have no obligation to logically prove it. But from the point of view of the game designer, games don't target individuals, they target audiences and that means counter-balancing lots of different priorities for lots of different people, no one of which is objectively more important. We don't say performance is quantifiable but customization is not, so customization is unimportant.

The point being made, I believe, is that a preference isn't prioritized because its quantitative in nature, not that quantitative preferences are unimportant. They are just no more important for being capable of being put into Excel. Bella was not saying all players should be like her, but rather all players that are like her have equally valid reasons for enjoying the game than all players like THB. And I'm pretty sure all game dev teams would agree, or they wouldn't spend so much time on intangibles.

Well I wouldn't say customization is unquantifiable. Blasters certainly had considerably more customizability than say Epic ATs. You could argue about the specific amount but all of our ATs with the exception of the epics had an incredible degree of customizability. The intangible factors only really come into play when they are desired but unavailable, and others have them. Crabs without the pack would be an example.

I suppose everything is quantifiable if in no other sense than the amount of FTEs it took to implement or the number of options the game presents of that category. But what I meant was that the enjoyment of customization itself wasn't quantifiable, contrasting the poster in question who was arguing that enjoying performance is quantifiable by using the performance numbers themselves as a proxy for quantifying enjoyment. That, I believe, is nonsensical.

^^^ This. The logical conclusion of my argument is not that balance is unnecessary. The logical conclusion is that if you're having fun, you have a logical, rational, pointful explanation as to why you enjoy the game.

I may have liked my Peacebringer fine prior to the buffs, but the buffs were necessary to balance Peacebringers with other ATs. Many people in this thread may enjoy their blasters just fine, but the buffs were necessary because the AT as a whole was suffering and this was statistically and empirically demonstrable even if individuals could manage consistently high performance.

I am sorry but if everybody is satisfied, that is the ultimate reason not to make a change. Even though I was painfully aware of the problems with my blasters and their shortcomings relative to other ATs. I have no idea what the relative sizes of the (Happy but like a buff) vs (Happy and don't dare change it) groups were. The problem group were the (Want something like this but this really isnt it) group.

An individuals enjoyment of anything is going to rather hard to quantify, well unless you have them in a FMRI.

What does "everybody is satisfied" have to do with anything? The problem wasn't in terms of which groups were represented on the forum, the problem was that blasters were the least played and most abandoned AT, that they died more often than other ATs, and took longer to reach level 50 than other ATs.

You're coming out of left field in these responses and I don't see what the connection is. I certainly never said that "everybody is satisfied." All I said was that TwoHeadedBoy's metric for fun was neither objective nor the only rational way to play the game.

Actually, my post had nothing to do with changing anything. It was strictly about THB saying that there's only one logical way to play CoH (his way) and that another way was pointless and illogical. I was trying to explain why this is wrong. You've taken this argument to an extreme interpretation that is not a logical progression from what I posted, and I have no idea why you would want to do that.

That's actually true. But of course, many people do care about performance to some degree, which is what makes performance balancing important. Just not preeminent.

From my viewpoint the only reason to buff a class/at is that it is incapable of performing up to the same level as the rest of the game. This thread demonstrates that there is no universal performance point that people find enjoyable. So if you are going to use enjoyability you have nothing.

This is the fallacy that many "anti-balance" people commit. They believe that game balance is impossible to achieve without all of the players using the exact same playstyle. Unless one's vision of balance is extremely restricting, this is not the case. It is completely possible, and has been done many times before, to make something perform at a similar performance level to its peers without significant changes to its playstyle. In fact, I would say that many of the buffs in the game have greatly -improved- class distinction, variety, and fun. Dominators are the first thing to come to mind.

I was countering the statement that THB's kind of enjoyment was the only objective, rational way to enjoy the game. I was not using it to establish where balance should fall. I think that balance needs to take more into consideration than individuals' satisfaction levels because what I enjoy may not be what you enjoy, what THB enjoys, what Arcana enjoys, what anyone else enjoys.

I enjoyed playing my DM/DA before inventions but I enjoy her a lot more afterward. I enjoyed her a lot with inventions, but I enjoy her more with incarnate powers. Heck, I enjoyed playing her pre stacking armors, but making the armors stack made her more fun.

I do not see why you keep trying to link my argument to balance points, because that's not relevant to the point I was trying to refute, and the arguments I made are not relevant to whether powers and ATs should be balanced.

There's 12 ATs. There was room for easy mode brutes/scrappers,controllers,doms, normal mode veats,corruptors, dominators,controllers, stalkers, tanks, defenders, and hard mode Heats and Blasters.

That's like saying there was room for bugs of different degrees.

The data showed there were two kinds of ATs. Controllers, Defenders, Scrappers, Brutes, Tankers, Stalkers, Corruptors, Masterminds, Peacebringers, Warshades, Soldiers, Widows, and Dominators were the first type. They all had relatively comparable average reward earning rates, leveling rates, solo and teaming performance, when averaged across the entire playerbase.

The second type was composed of Blasters. If Blasters were at one end of a continuous range of performance, that theory might at least have some basis in fact. But in fact, every archetype had powerset combinations that in general clustered around the average while blasters uniquely had all of its powerset combinations clustering far away from the average. The reasons for that are complex, but also completely irrelevant.

Being different isn't a bug.

I am sure you have the numbers down pat, but it's the same way Robert McNamara had the numbers down pat. Which is to say in a way that does no one, any good, at all. You can't measure the enjoyment I got playing my blasters. What I can see is that people stuck with them and played them anyway and got real enjoyment from doing difficult things with them.

In a game where I could fall asleep playing some ATs, blasters never had a dull moment. What's the number for the delight of soloing a pylon with a blaster ? What's the value of soloing an ITF on a blaster ? Soloing the old Positron TF without deaths ?

How much is lost when these challenges are removed from the game or just rendered trivial ? What is the number for the lack of fun.

It doesn't matter of course, your argument about performance gap is really meaningless. There wasn't any task in the game that blasters couldn't handle, prior to the I24 changes. There was a poster way back, who soloed every GM with a blaster without temps or insps. Did they need to be able to take on 2 at a time ? There's posters on this board that have done the scrapper challenges with blasters as well, and I can't think of a TF that has been soloed that hasn't been soloed by a blaster.