So Blasters never got fixed?

That may be true, but it is completely irrelevant. Game designers balance games for the human beings that play them. The data showed that whatever blasters could do when we all weren't around, when they were forced to be controlled by human beings, there were lots of things they were not doing, like staying alive and leveling at the same rate as everyone else.

That's what matters. That's the only thing that matters.

If you can reject numbers that casually, your subjective opinion of the situation should matter even less to anyone else but you.

Actually, the statistics say Blasters were the most-abandoned AT: they are the most popular at level 1, and drop off steadily from there. People are less likely to stick with a Blaster and play it anyway than any other AT; the concept of a glass cannon is clearly attractive to players, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

And, yes, there is room for "hard mode" Blasters. There is also room for "hard mode" Blasters that aren't straight-up inferior. And this is what the i24 changes actually did.

But moreover, you keep waving your hands vaguely towards some unspecified properties of Blasters that make them unique and interesting but rely specifically on traits that i24 was going to remove, and as far as I can tell, those properties do not actually exist. i23 Blasters are glass cannons; i24 Blasters are also glass cannons. i23 Blasters rely heavily on burst damage and neutralizing threats quickly, i24 Blasters rely even more heavily on burst damage and neutralizing threats quickly. i23 Blasters must be careful in avoiding and working around mez, i24 Blasters must still do that.

i23 Blasters can have a lot of downtime between fights, but I find it difficult to believe that is specifically attractive to you as a gameplay feature.

You can use numbers to describe how easy or hard a task is, how much effort it takes to complete, how often people manage to complete it, you can't capture the joy people get from success, let alone predict it.

If you want to think about it numerically getting rid of the outlying elements just narrows the appeal of the game.

When you're finishing having whatever conversation you seem to be having inside your own head, let me know, because some of it is leaking out onto the internet and into an exchange that is about something completely different.

So why are you claiming you can predict that the changes will make you enjoy Blasters less (not to mention projecting that onto other players)? That seems rather hypocritical.

Habanero peppers aren't for everyone.

I'd like to reply to the rest of your post but it's pretty much you saying things about how other people play.

Sad. But expected, I suppose you would like me to say something equally insulting to you ?

Uhmm BETA ??? Uhmm I am not the only poster who has posted objections.

I would settle for something relevant. No one is claiming you can quantify fun. That's completely irrelevant to the question of whether blasters underperformed, and whether that underperformance was extraordinary relative to everything else in the game.

If you believe fun isn't quantifiable, then you can't possibly know whether blasters were as fun to play as any other archetype. The thing is, game designers have to make real decisions about real game design, and its specifically *because* they can't "quantify fun" that they don't try to. They presume, in a silly crazy sort of naive way, that if something performs much worse than anything else, and is abandoned more often than most things, and very obviously has gameplay issues when played by most of the paying customers of the game, that they should operate on the assumption that's a problem worth fixing, as opposed to speculating that perhaps the playerbase is comprised primarily of masochists.

That's separate from the more general issue of simply being impervious to reality:

The fact that blasters performed badly is meaningless because they could have performed better. That's your game design philosophy?

There have always been players who held opinions that the game should be developed and managed in a manner that both caters to their personal playstyles and is bad for the game overall.

My reaction is similar to Arcana's - you don't seem to be participating in the same conversation as Arcana, despite quoting her post.

*Golf Clap* I laughed should have been doing that to him/her for years.

I get what you are saying., let me make a counter argument. Blasters are for some reason or another the most popular AT pick at creation. Making the not necessarily justified assumption that this implies more people start making blasters than any other shouldn't either A) The at represent the broader tastes of the game playing populace or B) There should be a more honest assessment of the AT when people create it so less experienced players don't play it.

I'd like that

Wait a minute... Do you think I like, fly around Atlas Park on my decked out characters, jumping on DFB runs and then going, "ERROR: YOUR BUILD APPROACH IS ILLOGICAL?"

No. When I play the game I pal around with my friends, talk to people about their characters and my characters, and do otherwise completely normal COH stuff.

The AT boards are here for the purposes of discussing AT's. That's a part of the game that I happen to find the most interesting (I've already explained why it's the most important part of the game to me, earlier in the thread.) This is where people come to talk about builds, to talk about max performance, that kind of stuff.

I just don't see anything condescending or out of line about talking about using max possible character performance as the strongest and ultimately most important point of reference on a subsidiary of the forums that's designated for discussion of character performance.

And being good at making builds goes hand in hand with being good at the game. Iron Man wouldn't be a good super hero if he couldn't even put his suit together.

And to elaborate:

The good thing about being awesome at COH is that anyone can do it, as long as they pay their sub fee and play the game... Which I think everyone should've done anyways, but that's besides the point.

When people say to me, "Oh THB, your builds are great, but they're so expensive! I don't have that much inf!" What I do is link them to the market forums. Seriously. This isn't the US economy in game. It's ridiculously easy to make money for builds in COH. I can cite examples if you'd like, but in the meantime let's assume the "expensive" point is ticked off. If you're not willing to put the work into collecting the resources for your build, how is it fair for your character to be as good as someone else's, when they worked for a month on their character getting the best stuff and you spent two days?

The next thing people say is, "Oh THB, not everyone plays the same sets as you do! Not everyone picks the best possible combinations that you lay out for them!"

The response to this is pretty easy. If you know that there's a best combination, that you could not possibly, in any way perform at the same level as on a different combination, and you willingly and voluntarily play a known underperforming character, that's your fault. It's like saying, "Help me! I knew the beach was wet, but I built my house here anyways!" Maybe you have fun living on the beach, and you have a right to have fun. Your fun is your choice. But when the tide knocks your house over, don't start blaming the inland houses for it.

Now, you might find under performing fun, and that's your prerogative.

But when it can be empirically proven to you that, for example, Mental Manipulation achieves the highest possible performance of any Blaster secondary, but you still play sets besides mental Manipulation, that's on you.

Now, the Devs attempted to buff the other sets in order to vaguely mirror Mental's performance. That's fine. The dev's chose to reward you for playing suboptimal sets, probably under the pretense that other people didn't know any better.

And you can still have fun with your alts. I know I do. The difference is that I don't expect AT's or sets that I know for a fact will under perform to be as good as my mains, who I know for a fact will perform to the highest possible standard.

That isn't what you said. What you said was that how you play the game is objective and logical and that Hopeling's playstyle was subjective and unprovable by logic and reason, making it unreasonable and pointless by nature. You also said that by comparison, your approach to the game can be explained and understood in a reasonable manner. You also said "I have to say that if we're attempting to establish which of our approaches makes sense and which doesn't, it has to be advantage: me."

I don't think you're being condescending here. I think you're simply not looking at this from any perspective but your own. This is a common human failing, and one that frequently happens on gaming forums.

Your premise is unreasonable and illogical, however. That is the assumption that the only reasonable method through which you can determine whether a playstyle is worthwhile is through whether it has the highest possible performance. This is not a falsifiable claim, and is highly subjective. In this case, the subjectivity is in terms of your criteria for what you find enjoyable. You naturally perceive this as logical and reasonable because it is a motivation you find understandable. Which is not surprising, given that it is your motivation.

Other motivations are just as rational, logical, understandable, or reasonable. They may not rely on a strictly empirical degree of performance as you seem to prefer, but not everyone is fixated on or enjoys such things, and not enjoying those things is just as rational as enjoying them.

I also said that not making sense was ok if it was fun for you. But this part of the forums is for things that make sense. We have a roleplaying section too, ya know.

Actually, its the developers' responsibility for designing the powersets and game mechanics as they did.

But, that's beside the point: Every combination that is not the "best" combination is not an underperforming combination. Some do underperform, but the performance metric that matters is not the "best possible performance in the entire game" but rather "performance that is sufficient to function in the game." A character that can do iTrials, task forces, not suffer excessive defeats, and solo reasonably well is not underperforming for that player - although statistics may indicate that particular AT/powerset combination is underperforming. It could also be argued that the strongest performing powersets are actually overperforming and should be brought in line with the powersets that fit closer to the devs' intentions for gameplay. That is, where the performance bar should be set is mostly subjective. For you, it's the maximum possible. For others, it may not be set so high.

If you insist that your metric for fun is the only objective metric for fun, people will continue to take your statements as condescending and possibly insulting.

As if anyone needs permission to play the way they want? That's not the point. The point is that you're factually incorrect about other playstyles not making sense. They make sense, they have a point, they're logical, and they're reasonable. They're just different from how you choose to play.

The problem isn't whether or not you're really condescending. I already agree that you're not being condescending. The problem is that you're calling people irrational because they do not play like you do.

See, when you say 'playstyle' I immediately think the way that someone goes about playing their character in an active game environment. Everything will inevitably play differently, and some things that are intended for the same purpose will play better than others.

Look, I can't sit here and tell someone how to be awesome at hanging out in Pocket D. I can't export the formula to be awesome at costume making. It's just not possible. No one can, because there's no measurable way to be good at those things. They are a means to their own end, and completely subjective by nature.

What I can do is point out that certain powerset combos are glaringly deficient when compared to others. I can tell you what I play, and why I play it. I can communicate to you why what I play is top tier with indisputable evidence.

You cannot communicate to me why your costume is good, and why your story rules. Sure, you can explain why you like it. But no matter how many people agree with you, or how right you think you are, I can still think it sucks. And you can't prove to me that I'm wrong in a logical, unbiased way. That's where we differ.

But this is not the same thing as enjoyment, nor does preferring to play this way in a relatively casual environment mean that your playstyle is objective or unbiased. By definition, your preference must be biased and subjective, as it is strictly determined from your point of view and what you enjoy doing. It does not matter if you can quantify what you enjoy because the enjoyment itself is something derived from personal bias.

This has no bearing on whether something is logical, reasonable, or has a point, nor does it mean - as I noted above - that your preferences are any more logical or unbiased than anyone else's. Basing it on math just means you enjoy doing the math and the rewards for doing the math. Basing it on which powersets perform the best after you've spent billions of influence just shows what you like and prefer to play vs. what you do not.

There's also no particular point in trying to establish one objective, logical, unbiased way to do things vs. subjective, illogical, biased ways to do things. If you fail to acknowledge your own personal bias, it means you're just falling victim to confirmation bias, possibly over and over again.

This was what spawned the whole conversation we're having. Context is important.
Now, let's look at where that came from.

So now we have context. We were strictly discussing build performance. Hopeling intentionally diverted the conversation onto subjective ground, and so here we are. The entire conversation was about game mechanics, and I made the statement about 'fun' because I was addressing the angle that subjective fun had anything to do with what we were talking about at ALL.

I felt that the whole idea of fun was silly and illogical because it was brought up in the context of a conversation about build mechanics.

If you showed me your costume in game, or we teamed together and enjoyed each other's company, it'd be a completely different story. But this part of the forums, and the part of the conversation I intended to engage in, was about game mechanics, which are the most important and enjoyable part of this game to me.

Do you not know what "handicap" means?