So Blasters never got fixed?

O.O

So your blasters that need a small luck to function at the top end are objectively worse than scrappers, stalkers and brutes that don't need the insp ?

The devs chose to balance the game, under the pretense they were game developers. They did not decide to follow your game philosophy, under the pretense they are not sociopaths.

This whole thread does beg the question of when is it good design to pitch at a median group and when should outliers be accommodated.

I think that's generally a question of what kind of game you're trying to make, fundamentally. There's no reason for any sort of quantitative balancing at all if the game you want to make is "we're going to throw stuff into the game, and the players are entirely on their own as to what happens." But that is not this game. If it were, there would be no reason to think hard about, or at all about, things like debt management, XP curve balancing, or any of the other things that were done primarily to constrain the average player experience within a specified, if larger than normal for MMOs, range.

In City of Heroes' case specifically, it isn't a question of pitching to the median, its more a case that this game *defines* performance in terms of the median experience in the first place. Its not like a test that if everyone gets Ds you assume everyone is an idiot. In City of Heroes if everyone gets Ds you assume the game's too hard. That's not so much a debatable point as it is an axiom of the game design.

I think you should always *consider* outliers, but I don't think its a good idea in general to "accommodate" them in the literal sense. For me I think if the game design intends to do that, it should do so in a systematic way that makes them no longer actual outliers to the performance band the game targets, except coincidentally (meaning, it only happens to be true at this moment in time that the players cluster on one place, except for a few people; the game would function perfectly fine if tomorrow the players' performance ranged evenly across that entire range).

For example, I've always thought that CoH should have found a way to accommodate the playstyle of people who like to herd up tons of things and people who like to fight just one or two very strong things. But the reward system should have reflected that, so that allowing players to build for and execute the mass case wasn't the overwhelmingly higher reward choice. When it takes roughly the same build effort to kill a couple very strong things as it does to mow down hundreds of weak things but the latter generates far more rewards, that either implies the mechanical design is broken or the reward system is broken in some way. Either alone is not a problem: the combination together is.

In that respect, part of the problem is deciding which outliers to keep and which to bar, because certain combinations of outliers are (for the most part) objectively broken.

LOL

Just another day in blaster land.

Who knows if we do get saved maybe we won't get the snipe changes put in and get something a little more sane.

You speak as if that is the only way to design the units in the game. This is the only type of game I have ever seen where people talk of designing to the statistical performance of the target audience. It's far easier to just design unit character/performance to be a level and let people achieve what they can with them.

Huh?? I built my TW/FA the same way, 32.5% to all positions. And he needs DS to hit 32.5% to melee. Dechs made it pretty popular to build 32.5% s/l/e/n for Dark Armor Brutes. Are his brutes gimpy too? o.o

Haha. I mean, I'm all for other sets being buffed to be as good as Mental. I mean I suggested it, adamantly and frequently. I think game balance is great and theoretically all sets for a given AT should be equally good. But given that they aren't, and now never will be, what I have a problem with people saying an AT as a WHOLE is bad. /Mental is fine. Fire and Archery are fine. The problem isn't with the AT, it's with granted, a fairly large multitude of powersets, within the AT. It doesn't mean that Blasters are unequivocally bad though. Since some Blasters are awesome.

...That wouldn't have been amusing to me or debate inspiring at all.

I would also have a problem with somebody saying that, since obvious counterexamples abound, although I can't recall any specific instances of someone actually claiming that (other than perhaps accidentally while speaking in generalizations). I'm not sure I even agree with saying that a majority of Blasters are bad; I've quite enjoyed and done some pretty awesome things with my Blasters, even the ones with the least impressive powersets. IMX it's still pretty clear that Blasters, for the most part, are not good enough to claim they're balanced against other ATs in any useful sense.

Personally, I think the difference between "Blasters as a whole have issues, but a small subset of builds overcome that and are awesome anyway" and "Blasters as an AT are awesome, it's just that a large majority all of the builds available to Blasters have issues holding them back" is a purely semantic distinction. Framing it one way or the other can lead to different solutions appearing more appropriate (individual fixes for each powerset vs AT-wide changes, for example), though.

All I can advise is "eschew obfuscation."

Because of the focus of the game and the type of playerbase it attracted as a result of that, I consider that to be a smart move. Other games focus on increasing the length of the experience, while City of Heroes has been focused on increasing its width, and has only relatively recently gained a "end game" which most other MMOs are focused on. The game has always been casual/solo friendly. The only times in the game's history where any sort of high end performance was expected from people's characters were the periods after the LRSF and STF were released and before inventions were being well utilized by the player base, and the period in super secret closed beta where we were testing incarnate trials before any incarnate abilities were released. The only true challenges remaining in the game are ones arbitrarily created by the player base, which means they're only relevant to a particular person if they choose to make them so.

That's because there is less discussion about targeted performance for other game types, and because its primarily in MMOs where that design target can be effectively iterated. However, the principle forms the basis for basically all game design. Virtually no one designs games with an abstract target, and then doesn't care how many people can actually play it effectively.

I would be surprised to find a professional game designer anywhere that doesn't believe in some variant of that basic design philosophy.

Not one with a stable audience, anyway.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

I can't think of non MMO, game or sport anywhere that use the philosophy.

re: stable audience, almost every MMO has declining audiences over time. So if the technique was supposed to do something about that it has a high failure rate.

Matter of fact I'll go further thinking about it all the really great games that have stood the test of time pay little to no regard to the low end or average player being able to achieve full potential. Sports, baseball, basketball, golf, standardize the performance of the equipment and that is it. Chess,Checkers, backgammon, poker, krigspiel at most care that people can understand the rules but there has never been a succesfull attempt to make certain everyone can achieve a level of play with them.


Edit: It just occurred to me that the one MMO that has been able to have not just a stable but actively growing audience is EVE online and there is no way you can say the average player gets anywhere near peak performance from their units.

That's irrelevant to the point. No one said anything about the average player achieving peak performance. That doesn't even happen here. The subject was, as even you put it, "designing to the statistical performance of the target audience." Every game, Eve Online included, does that. In fact, Eve Online does that to a higher degree than City of Heroes ever did; they have far stronger design tools to do it with. From the very beginning they were extremely cognizant of what their players were doing across the spectrum of players and they very closely monitor what the playerbase does. In fact, their exploit detection systems are explicitly designed around recognizing what their playerbase is generally doing and looking for anomalous behavior.

It can seem on the surface that Eve Online is a completely lawless game where the devs control nothing and everything is within the control of the players, particularly the economy, but nothing could be further from the turth. The truth is behind the scenes, CCP exerts powerful control over the large scale macro-elements of the Eve economy and other game systems. Their balance criteria is far harsher than City of Heroes ever was, far more quantitative, and just as keyed to their overall player performance.

I have macro programs that get peak performance from my characters in this game. I can't say that for eve. I know people that used to have more complex bots for AE farming. I am pretty sure it wouldn't have been too hard to have bots that ran tfs. I am pretty sure that writing decent bots to handle combat in eve would be an order magnitude harder.

The only thing here that is a block to peak performance is access to IOs. Heck our hardest challenge in the game now, the really hard way badge is more about team composition and access to high end inspirations than anything else.

Although now that I think about it, maybe I could dig up that Russian Chatbot from a few years back that was swindling people might be just right for EvE

I'm not exactly sure if you're agreeing with me or not at this point, but as peak performance was not relevant to the original point, the ability to create bots to achieve peak performance, whatever that's defined to be, would be twice removed from the original point, which was about whether developers target the average capabilities of their intended playerbases or not.