Please dont let this game turn into a RP'er paradise only.
The one thing I feel CoH did perfectly was they balanced the game for everyone.
Speaking only for myself, I love to farm. I can do it for countless hours on end. I did do the content as it came out too, but i was a massive altiholic, 250+ lvl 50 toons, all built to the max. I loved CoH because it gave me the freedom to lvl toons however i wished, either naturally, or by farming....Yes they did watch for extreme exploits and made sure to fix them quickly, (the lvl 1 MM farm.. 1-50 in 10 mins) But they never took the ability to power lvl away from us.... we PAY to play this game, we should be able to decide what we want to do.
I beg of you please follow in the footsteps of Paragon on this one 100%
"8 years.... What a ride"
As long as it doesnt infringe on other peoples rights of Fun! ;)
I see no reason why farming would not be feasible as a play-style. Our goals "against" farming mostly revolve around avoiding making it the one optimal way to get ahead in the game. But those who enjoy it should be able to do so just fine.
Heck, one of our tools for decreasing the professional gold farmers' reason to be in the game will also increase the potential rewards for those who farm out of a love of playing the game.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Gotta say, this is a cool thing to read, especially since other designers don't always respect how some players actually enjoy playing the game, within reasonable constraints. Freedom of playstyle for the win :) Heck, I farmed a few times because I made a character I wanted to get high level quickly, by concept he was suposed to be awesome. Never got full 50, but got to 45 or so?
Others I farmed through content I already played with friends who all had fifties ahead of me, hit fifty with my team though and on something I hadn't done before, somehow that made me feel better about it, now I don't see a problem. It should exist, and shouldn't be like the black market, it has a function sometimes. Especially if CoT has as much replayability as CoH did, which I'm not doubting.
Would be kind of cool if there were even certain facilitating features, I don't like match making systems, but a channel or something where you can talk and negotiate PL prices or open groups. I don't think it should be everyones go to, but there are meta-communities within the community, farming also serves a market by providing 'cheaper' goods, someone who does it a lot will still put it up for a profit but they have more drops, so they can get more stuff, in theory.
Though again, avoiding single uber builds would be nice, rock paper scissory deals are good too. It was scary watching someone on a fire/fire/fire, I never built one myself, not the sometimes legendary Fire/Kin, though they were still something I wanted around. Flooding though is obviously bad, probably need NPC's that give reasonable prices for undervalued purples and such, or broke them down. I dunno, just hypotheticals.
Heck I farmed sometimes just for the sake of bashing a bunch of goons for the sake of it. Didn't want to go and do missions, didn't want to socialize, didn't want to RP, just wanted to see NPCs go flying when I blasted them. On top of that the final build design I was aiming for Rotten Luck had a lot of those costly Purple Enhancements people sold on the Auction House for millions. Only way I could build up the funds was Farming and selling what I didn't need on the AH.
I did it all, Roleplay, Solo mission running, Team Pug, Task force runs, Speed runs, and farming. Even Powered Level lowbies for the sake of it.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Same. ;D
I would also hop on my fire/kin and SB everyone in sight! ;D
Make my way from the Tram to the Hollows Gates and SB as they were about to pass through.
And then head to the Sewers Entrance.. and just SB players going in. ;)
Rinse and repeat.. ;)
And if i saw the chat forming a old Sewers team.. sometimes even tag along Buffing them while they made their way through the sewers. ;)
My healer characters often followed some lowbie teem into those sewers. Just turn on the Healing aura on auto and let them soak up the life.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
One of my favorite pasttimes (in the days before the Hollows) was to zoom around Perez Park on my Empathy defender and just heal and buff the low-level heroes in their quest to Kill Skuls and the like.
Just another example of how CoH had the right Mix and style to make random acts of kindness fun. I can't even think of any other game where spending time healing lowbies is something you do for a pastime.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
I did that too on my few healing characters, I liked some of them, others lss, it was more fun, sometimes I did it to see what an aura looked like on people passing by... I also had a tendency to literally just fly around... I don't know why but looking at some of the zones was just fun to me, kinda relaxing... >< I loved flight control in CoH, bound to the mouse it felt so natural somehow. ::Shrug:: My scrapper healed too, I would do stuff like that, go to a neat looking zone and just stalk lower levels and heal them while they're doing missions, it was also nice you got badges for that stuff. Higher badges might even need that much healing if you want to be the dedicated healorz.
This thread is brilliant. Genius. Don't block fun.
Fun is the point of the game. Yes, there has to be some oversight, but if it's fun and it doesn't hurt anyone, even if it's unintentional--hell, ESPECIALLY if it's unintentional--let it ride!
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
From the MWM Devs I heard and read.
They are well aware of trying to make it fun for everyone. There was talks of making sure Farms work like Segev said. As well as making sure the game is Solo and Team play accessible. I remember talks of making sure player Hubs were scattered about in order to avoid dead zones, as well as provide RP as well as easy use. Vending machines with Boosts in them near hospitals for example.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Well said, Budweiser4! Now where are they hiding the THANK YOU button?
Capt Odee, saving the city one click at a time.
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I dunno. Sounds like a bunch of idealism to me.
I mean most mmos out there try to implement measures to cull farming in some way and despite that, their in game economies still get spoiled and exploited. Not sure what examples exist today that pretty much sells you fanning tools for their game from the get go. . . Or maybe I'm just over analyzing the concept of farming brought up by the op? If you just mean mindlessly bashing masses of easy prey over and over, I would hope it's not as rewarding as some sort of active play that is more challenging.
I think MWM has the right idea by trying to find ways to encourage farming. In doing so it will, in my opinion, cut out some of the Gold Farmers that try to take advantage of people. I don't think you'll see quite so many fake accounts sending shouts out in Chat for "1,000,000,000 inf for $14.99. Go to (insertwebsitenameaddresshere).com.". I like that MWM is wanting to encourage it. By doing so, it might not make farming really the most optimal way of obtaining things, but for those that do enjoy that play style they won't have to worry about getting in trouble for doing it.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Why not?
If both play styles are enjoyed by different players, and both are having fun and getting roughly equal rewards, where's the harm?
Is the goal of a game to be active and challenging, or to be fun?
And if the goal is to be fun and some people find mindless bashing fun and others find active challenge fun, aren't you doing a better job by making both equally viable so more people have fun?
And, if you could do actively challenging content, but choose to do mindless bashing because they reward equally, which one do you really like?
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I doubt it.
It depends. If there is group content that relies on coordinating with a team and isn't easy, you think it should have the same rewards as solo farming?
Which do you think is more costly to develop, challenging team content or solo farm content? If they grant the same rewards, do you think people would often run the tougher content that requires a group as often as the solo content? Would the investment into developing that group content be as worthwhile?
Most mmos incentivize group play. Doling out the same rewards if you solo is more incentivizing solo. Think of the incarnate content of CoH. You could solo the threads/ect to get your incarnate powers but grouping for them was much faster. I would wager if was because the trials weren't soloable and wasn't cheap to develop so the devs wanted you to run them to get their investments worth of those trials.
I don't. If it is more encouraged and easier to do, why would you want to pay someone else to do it?
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
You overestimate player integrity and underestimate their laziness. MWM could outright offer top sell in game currency for cheap yet there will still be people buying from gold farmers.
If they try to do something to make one side balanced with the other, Solo period, vs grouping, it would mean that these farm missions would be interspersed, to weight the drop odds that group content has. More drops over time equates to the same, that said even over done if they don't attempt to include it there's going to be the black market for it already mentioned. There will always be content flawed in design to allow exploiting, so that's what they would be doing, then you're punishing people who have fun, for the behavior of rapacious and malignant entities.
Change the dynamic and make it something anyone could find, have the PL and Farming channels there for them to communicate what missions are best intended for farming, easily repeatable, challenging, etc. This doesn't make the player into a bad person for their style of fun, and even lazy people who want to find someone to farm can go on that channel and offer something for PLing, items, stars, etc.
One more thing I'd like to mention and it's merely a philosophical point, some think from certain evidence that our expectations make reality react to create them. Too much will or intent or obsession on a bad outcome will lead to it, so I'm open-minded, I give them the benefit of the doubt, I don't know the depth and capability of the staff. I did play that game for a long time and very few days did I rage quit because some jerk wad, most were friendly, intelligent and had interesting knowledge, useful and not. You don't know what their potential to create is, they could pull it off.
This being the ability for players to sell items to other players for STARS right?
Yeah, not necessarily a "new" idea, but one that most of the CoX players might not have experienced. It can work well, but one thing it can lead to as well is the *percieved* perception of P2W, and that somehow MWM are the ones who dictate the exchange rate of items.
Of course, when some items that are obtainable in game are ALSO obtainable via the market, it does lead to a case where the ingame drop might not be able to be sold for as much as other in game items (due to this perceived equivalence). A way around this is to make any Store bought items "Account bound" (notable exceptions being possible account upgrades) and the ingame items being non BOE (Bind On Equip) / BOP (Bind on Pickup) so they are easily tradable/sellable for STARS to another player.
Regarding the last statements, they could also *not* pull it off, or at least not to their initial intent. Questioning and focusing on bad outcomes indeed can come with negative outcomes (some call them thinking traps), but so too can bad things occur when one is too focused on just positive outcomes and I see far more of the latter on these forums. But one doesn't have to focus on a particular outcome to acknowledge them. . .
As far as punishing players for the actions of the few, these are laws. Laws have a purpose too. I'm questioning what kind would suit the game. No law sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Again, why not? I'm not just being argumentative, I'm really asking. You seem to be placing value on group play and challenge as what a game should reward. Does that mean that these should be the main or only criteria for rewards? And if so, why?
But, IF--if--the goal of a game is fun, and team play of challenge doesn't exactly = fun for all players, is this the right way to look at it?
I'll just put forward that in CoH I did plenty of solo and team play and plenty of Hulk smash and challenging content, depending on my mood at the time, and was glad that it all had worthwhile rewards.
And even if a player does nothing but solos and mindlessly smashes and has fun doing it and pays for the game and doesn't bother anyone, why shouldn't they want his/her money too? And why should that be disincentivized?
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Well for one, you have character specs that, at least from first glance, have higher solo potential than others. Risk vs reward is an old mantra but perhaps it's out of place here.
For two, I get the initial understanding that trials would be more costly to create than regular missions you can group or not on. So there's incentivizing that content but hopefully it is also fun as well.
Thirdly, basing rewards on just fun seems faulty at its core. Players might find it fun reading the lore so put a reward behind reading equal to a farmer? People will just exploit it and click over all the dialog to get to the rewards.
I'm just questioning if solo would or should be as lucrative as other harder content. Or they could offer partly different types of rewards all together.
People will ALWAYS find a way to farm. Regardless of how much you try to stop it. My idea that I stated in a separate thread discussing this very same thing, was to make it something encouraged through the Mission Creator. Now comes the catch. You can farm for XP, but not drops or money. Why? Think about it. It's a holographic mission that is created by the user. It will give you experience in fighting enemies, but they can't generate actual money or drops for you to collect. I believe that is the usual thing most people farm for anyways. They just want to get that character leveled up as quickly as they can. Now there will be some that will try to farm for drops and money, so for those they will have to play the content to find out which mission will be the most lucrative for that. As far as farming for drops go, well RNG is Random! Farming for Money, hopefully MWM can curb that issue a little better.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
I think up thread hit one of the biggies, the variety of ways one could have fun. I could log on and due a task force, I could log on and just explore a zone or zones, I could hang out in my SG base chatting on any of numerous channels, I could solo stuff - my scrapper could work on soloing AV's or my emp/sonic could work towards soloing a level 54 Rikti mob or just solo missions with any character. I could PUG it or join a SG team doing "something". I could work on learning something about a critters power (yeah for either the Power Analyzer or Surveillance), badge hunt, or join a friend trying some other stunt (taking a level 1 from AP to get the badge Rikti Gone Wild without dying).
The chat system and interface.
The exemplar and sidekicking system.
I tend to agree with XxBudweiser4xX on this. I am not one for farming (I believe that's best done by people wearing overalls). I always enjoyed following the story arcs, crafting back-stories for my various heroes and assigning costumes and powers that complemented those back-stories even if that meant not having the ideal min-max power builds. That being said I always appreciated that players like XxBudweiser4xX could eschew the stories and RP elements and farm or PL or PvP as they saw fit. We could all play in the game the way each of us wanted to. Hopefully CoT will allow similar flexibility so that players of all types can enjoy and play the game the way they want to.
I think we are getting farming and exploiting a little mixed up. The two are often used synonymously but not the same. Farming is repeating content one can easily manage over and over. For fun. loot, experience or just to pass the time until your friend comes online. It offers reward and when you are good at it and a very patient person, it offers a lot of reward. Farmers rarely are a danger to the ingame economy. Exploiting is when someone uses bugs or security holes to get an advantage. Something like an NPC that respawns instantly when killed. An easily gained item, that sells for far to much. Or the game code has a weak point that allows people to program bots that do the farming for them. It offers high reward for little or no effort. And that does a lot of harm.
And I do not think you could build a MMO without a bonus reward for teaming up. Missions get harder and reward goes up. Not so much to be unfair towards the solo- player but enough to be noticable. It is not essential to make teamplay fun, but it is a nice positive encouragement. People seem to expect it too, it has been established in most games (including City of Heroes) now and is something that would disappoint many if taken away. If done well it does not devalue solo- playing and helps to bring players together. And when I say more reward, I mean more experience, more currency and a little better chance for loot. The same loot the solo- player can find, only at slightly better rates.
Content so hard that you have to do it with a team should definitly offer higher rewards. Going through all the trouble of finding a team that is willing to participate, fighting much harder mobs and an endboss on top of it without getting more out of it than beating up street punks for an hour would just feel wrong. Even if the content is much more fun and so well written that the story brings tears to your eyes, it would not be enough. You have done something special, so you would expect a special reward for it.
I agree we need to be cautious, about thought traps but resulting in two opposite extremes doesn't work anywhere, sunshine and rainbows and doom and gloom are usually incompatible. I honestly don't see far too much of the latter, I see quite a bit of healthy skepticism and realistic assumptions. ::shrug::
As for the matter about law, again, you're basically saying well behaved players, players who farm a legitimately working map, and the gold farmers who screw the game economy, tax the servers and generally leech, should be lumped together and treated as malign. This is kind of short sighted and knee jerking, I'm pretty sure this would also lose player numbers...
Offering the service to exchange in game currency for out of game currency can be made solely the right of the game manufacturer. If the gold spammers attempt to sell gold, they're essentially attempting to violate the trademark by encroaching on MWM's right to regulate their gold markets. This isn't life and death and it's not game breaking, unless we're talking about exploits, we're just talking about changing the dynamic of their place in the community both from dev and player perspective. There's no need for such opposition, as long as it's not ruining the game.:shrug:
Perhaps we're reading different threads then because the ones I've read are mostly nods and back patting. Not enough people are asking questions, pushing the envelope and being open with their expectations. It gives the vibe that most suggesters are walking on egg shells, possibly leaving out needed criticism.
Heck, most of this thread is just reminiscing with nary a mention of the points CoH had to implement to control farming or how such measures could be improved.
Generalizations aside, you would likely lose players if you had to implement limits after the fact to attempt to preserve the idealistic notion of "make everyone's fun matter", which is a good hearted goal, but again, where's that skepticism you talked about? Surely you aren't just looking through rose tinned glasses at how you farmed in the old game and aren't ignoring how those markets got played by the elite farmers and gold sellers who hold the currency to do so?
Something shouldn't have to be life or death to question it and how do you know it won't ruin something for the game? Are you making that statement from your perspective or maybe the non-farmers that have limited to no control over how the game economy might be affected?
One of the things I see is that MWM is trying to embrace this idea. Like you've said, pretty much all other MMO's out there try to stop this from happening. So a lot of people are optimistic about it because it's something that most MMO's do not usually do. Also, as I've said, people will farm. I don't care what game it is, somebody will find a way somehow. Usually when that happens the Devs swoop in and do something drastic to stop it. In some cases it can have a detrimental effect. It might alter the game in such a way that it reduces the amount of fun, changes the development of your character, makes things more difficult to do, etc.
So I feel by MWM trying to encourage it, it will help to control it better. Think of it in a different way, and no I'm not trying to open up a debate about this, think of it like the ongoing legalization of Marijuana trend right now. People are growing it, smoking it, and selling it. Nothing anybody has done to stop it has worked. So now people are trying to legalize it in hopes that it will help to control it better. Will this work? Who knows. Time will tell. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
I know a lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth about farming. But is that because it's a bad thing, or because we've been told it's a bad thing? Now I'm not trying to advocate exploiting the game, that is completely different. Finding exploits and taking advantage of them is bad, and let's face it anybody who does find one will definitely do it because that's just the way people are. Those, however, do need to be handled differently and the exploit needs to be stopped.
Again, let's try to think of a way to encourage farming in such a way that it doesn't hurt the game instead of trying to stop it from happening. Which we both know won't happen. I think my idea is a step in the right direction in regards to this. Make XP farms, but they don't give out any drops. A person can farm their character up to max level in a matter of hours, but will have no money to buy enhancements for it. That means they'll have to get the money for it somehow, whether that is through the Auction House or by just running missions after missions.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Is that Power Leveling? Or Farming? ;)
Isn't it one and the same? You are farming experience points to level up.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
o0static0o, I think you're approaching the discussion a bit skewed. In other mmos, I don't particularly think most try to stop farming, it's just they aim to limit it. You're blending inhibit with prohibit. It was mentioned that the devs didn't want farming to seem necessary to progresses or it not being the only optimal way. The problem I see is, there really can only be one "optimal" way and if farming isn't going to be limited in some fashion (improve on the limits CoH put about) i dont really see many ways their ideals can be realized.
When i see mass farming, i remember how when the difficulty slider made it possible to max team size alone. It was great but it also put a shadow over the effectiveness of single target power sets. Aoe was King in teams but now made King of solo and Farming as well. Or what if you got more fun out of strategically choosing your fights rabbet than kill alls? Will I get some other sort of benefit from playing a theoretical stalker type?
In CoH, farming was something you pretty much had to do, or else you needs to play the market to make inf. Things changed later so you could simply buy enhancements with real money but is that what will be resorted to? Because stating CoH farm mentality was perfect, to me, implies you want mandatory farming (top a decent degree) for this game too.
I think the idea is to give us as many options to do as many things as we can. From what I've garnered from many of the Devs' talks is that everything that is in the game that you can earn can also be purchased through the cash store. So will there be enhancements in the cash store, I think so. You will have the option to buy them with Stars, game money, trade, maybe they'll even have a mission creator that you can purchase things through tickets, a Merit system, and possibly a Hero Merit system. Who knows?
With that in mind, doing missions should be something that people have choices on as well. Some want to start a story arc and complete that arc. Some want to just jump around and do random missions. Some may want to do only user created missions. Some may want to run Task Force missions only. Some may like to find one mission and repeat it over and over and over and over and......
In CoH, before the market was introduced, I had built up millions of inf just by continuously running my level 50 character through TF's or helping my friends complete missions. I didn't have to play the market to get money. I did, but that is because I found that fun and enjoyable as well. I knew a lot of people that would randomly dish out millions of inf just because they had so much of it just by playing regularly. Farming for Inf wasn't the only way to get inf. You just had to be patient enough and play enough.
And yes, I do want farming to be included in this game. I have my days where I'm bored, none of my friends are on, I don't really feel like teaming with random strangers, and I just want to run missions and make money so I can keep tweaking my characters until I have them just right.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
So then mandatory farms or dish out cash?
Yeah it's a generic general statement, but you didn't actually brought up with the initial post.
There's a difference between farming and exploiting. If I am running around an area in an isolated portion of the map, repeating the same path over and over because I've figured out that this path lets me constantly fight group X mobs, which respawn soon enough so that by the time I return to that part of the path they're waiting and I am moving from one spawn group to another with no downtime, that would be farming. But it's not exploiting anything, I'm not getting extra rewards from the foes or insta-killing a foe due to a bugged ability, and so forth.
If I find that I can pile 50 bad guys into a corner and take them out in a single blast due to a bug in the power or take advantage of an AI pathing issue to defeat groups of foes without their being able to engage in return, that's an exploit.
Okay, so in regards to your concerns about farming and the Market.
CoH's market was bad. The History for the market was a joke. All it showed was the last five transactions. So anybody with enough money could easily go in and manipulate it to make more money off of it. I'm hoping MWM learned from that, and I think they have, so that that will not be so much of an issue. There has been talks already about ideas on how to improve upon the market system in other threads.
Farming and Gold Marketers.
If we encourage farming in such a way that it is beneficial to the players that "should" cut out the middle man that would end up taking money away from MWM. It would also allow MWM to be able to monitor the farming and see if people are getting an unfair advantage. If so, MWM can then go in and make alterations so that it isn't.
Now as for the OP.
Farming is fun for some people. It's not fun for others. The object is to make the game as fun as possible for as many people as possible. If you don't like farming, then don't farm. Nobody is saying that you have to. You are suggesting that it is the only way to make money. It's not. You can run regular missions and still make money. You can sell your Stars on the Auction house for money. You can sell your drops on the Auction House for money. You can use your Stipend, if you subscribe, for money. You can even offer your services from your character for money (will anybody pay you to team with them? Maybe, maybe not). I'm sure there are plenty of ways to make money in the game besides just farming.
I sense that you just really do not like farming, and you really do not want it to be included in any way, shape, or form possible.
I hate to burst your bubble about that, but it will happen.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Sadly, farming for cash can become a necessity if crafting becomes essential to character advancement and other people who do farm for cash are driving up market prices.
This is especially troubling in a superhero game because superheroes (with a few notable exceptions) aren't supposed to be in it for the cash. How do we even get cash for fighting criminals? Are we robbing them? What the Hell, Man?!
Anyone have Ideas for how to solve this problem?
The only thing that comes to my mind is don't make crafting essential to character advancement like it was in COH (If you don't know what I'm talking about: I mean making enhancements especially the special ones for really high level toons)
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
No Mids Hero Builder? :(
Well you would be totally wrong. I did a lot of stuff in CoH, including farming and the ever reviled PvP. I did farming out of fun and necessity. The only things you list that isn't technically farming is selling stars (which might be more valuable than money) and selling your service (which sounds repugnant, although it just might be more applicable in CoT due to the non combat system). I think the point I'm getting across and one you already understand due to the above quoted, it's that farming doesn't need to be *made* viable because it's already an optional tactic to obtain in game rewards at an accelerated rate. So the where or how will this *not* be the optimal method of getting ahead?
Another poster mention the difference between farming and exploiting. In fact the lane between the two is far less black and white that he's describing.
That being said, I don't dislike farming, but the principal of it is one of the humongous flaws of CoH which had always been repetitiveness. Aiming to design repetitiveness to be profitable is unnecessary as farmers will find a way on their own to accomplish that. If anything, we should be encouraging variety.
Although i find it interesting you're pointing fingers just for questioning farming yet the op comment on rp (which harms no one) is left untouched (and rp'ers will find a way so long as they have a bio, chat and emotes).
Lord, I hope nothing like that will be necessary.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
Mids was never necessary, but dinkering around with a Mids build was as much of a fun time sink for me as dinkering around with the costume creator.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
+1
I loved crafting and Mids.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Once again, I'm not saying do away with it I'm saying make sure it's optional.
if you have to craft to advance, then prices of crafting materials will jump. Then people who are farming for cash will drive prices even higher, forcing others to farm if they ever want to advance.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
Unless there are more than one way to get all the materials needed.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Oh, I definitely agree it should be optional. It was in CoH and I would think should be in any spiritual successor. I ran into plenty of people who didn't craft in CoH and I think most people I talked to had never heard of Mids.
But boy could you become a force of nature if you tweaked a build.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
See now you are making me miss my Electric Armor/Titan Weapons Tank that had 90% S/L, En, Psi, 80% F/C, and 58% Neg En resists............
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
I guess the feeling that it really wasn't optional came from the kind of players I was hanging around with.
They'd make fun of you if you didn't have a toon that could easily solo any 50th level mission on the highest difficulty setting.
Their farming made old McDonald look like a city slicker.
They were the ones who got me to farm even though I found it super boring.
I'd just watch TV while I was door sitting.
later they got hard core into badge hunting and when they had all of them they just quit playing.
I still liked the game and played it almost to the end.
The last year I had to quit because of money problems, went without internet that year. I found out the game was dead when I got back online. Made me sick.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
I think that right there explains a lot, to be honest with you. Hanging around the right people in a game makes a whole world of difference. It can impact your views quite a bit. If you hang around the wrong ones all the time it leads you to be resentful and have more of an urge or desire to play solo because you just don't want to deal with all the crap from others. They can make it feel more like a task than fun when it comes to playing the game. You HAVE to have a certain build. You HAVE to farm in order to make money. You HAVE to do this or you just aren't any good.
Being around people that just want to play and have fun, makes things much more enjoyable. I was feeling very similar to the way you were when I first started playing. People made fun of me for not playing the build of the month. They made fun of me for blasting instead of healing on my Empathy Defender. It almost ruined me for CoH. Luckily I had a friend suggest that I check out the Repeat Offenders on the Freedom Server. I tell you, I never knew how much fun playing a game could be until I joined them. They thought outside of the box and did some really crazy, fun things. Nobody cared how you played, or what you played. The motto was, "Just bring whatever you want, we'll make it work.". They had all kinds of players in there, and pretty much everybody got along with each other. Everybody was willing to help each other out as much as they could. If you were hard up on cash, somebody would send you what you needed. If you needed a specific enhancement, somebody would send it to you. If you wanted to test a build in PvP, somebody would help you in the Arena. If you needed help defeating a boss, somebody would jump on an appropriate character and help you take it down.
The right people make a huge difference.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Hehe.. reminds me of those times when i was playing a tank and Leader wanted me to Herd.. but a blaster kept attacking before they came around the corner.. and took half the Aggro. ;D
Hehehehehhehe.. I tried to taunt, but it was almost always Too Late! ;)
Well, this thread started unfocused and is now careening uncontrollably, so I'll bite :P.
This was mentioned on another thread, but Tanking in CoH was easy--and that was what was AWESOME about it!
Instead of it taking all of your concentration just to aggro-bot, you could really control the situation and significantly contribute in other ways like damage, support, or control. Never half as much as a primary damage, support or control, but enough to matter and be fun.
Also because if this, I got very good at allowing people who stubbornly did team-wiping actions to self-wipe instead. I always tried to keep everyone alive, but, when that was just not an option due to someone's behavior, I could make sure that person was the one who wiped while I kept everyone else safe.
I mean, seriously, how awesome WAS CoH that it was the most powerful, effective tanking I've ever encountered in a game and you still didn't even need a tank on a team?
Man, I miss that game.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Actually I played with the "farm machine" because despite making fun of my characters for not being optimized, they were a lot less bossy than most other players I ever tried to play with. I quickly learned to never team while playing a scrapper because anything you do will piss off the tank. I almost always played either tanks or scrappers because that's my style, I experimented a bit with blasters and defenders but there was no way I would ever play a controler.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
I mostly played Tanks/Brutes/Scrappers...
...but i did once roll a defender. I believe it was a Radiation Emission / Ice Blast set... and called her Officer Spanks. Green and White Officers outfit in a skirt though, and Hat. Shmexy like. ;)
I had no plans to really play that toon for too long... just trying something else out. Before i knew it, I was returning to her each day 'till level 50. :)
I was very fun actually, as long as i didnt try to Solo anything.
I actually TRIED to Solo some +2 content one day while i was still around 40+ (i forget the levels).
Anywaysssss, IT DID NOT GO WELL! :<
I Slotted everything to be Support... Hold, Slow, -DeBuffs, etc... and No Damage. So, even though I was Surviving mobs at +2, i was getting nowhere FAST! ( or rather FOREVER! :< )
But, majority of the time, my defender would get picked as the main Support toon. And my toon was very effective with all the macros and keybinds to the numberpad numbers for selecting the right teammate in the list and then buffing/healing/etc.. them all. This was still when you had to apply SB to each person individually. Not just to one person and it AoE to the rest. ;) Fun times. :P
RO had an all Scrapper project called Offensive Line. So much chaos. So much fun.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Scrappers could usually take care of themselves, it was Blasters I had trouble with. If one of them premature AOEjaculated damage all over the baddies before I had a chance to run in and get aggro first it could make it so I had to say "sorry dude, I'm going to keep these other six folks alive, good luck and see ya on the flippety flop."
But that didn't pissed me off. If they had fun ackin cray cray and dyin over and over, as long as everyone else was happy so was I. I had a Brute that I played pretty scrappylock fresh, and if the Tank or Healer ever apologized for me dying, I just always told them "nah, my fault, just keep everyone else alive, I'm a goober."
Or, if they yelled at me, I just said "I like to play a little crazy on this one, you can just let me get what I deserve, or I'll move along no hard feelings if it buggs you."
Hakuna matata/mayo wenti/all good bra goes a long way when playing a game :P
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I never considered it the Tank's job to keep me alive, and as a tank I wasn't concerned about keeping anyone else alive. (not one of my toons ever took any taunt abilities) I expected healing defenders to do their best, or Rez me if they couldn't save me, but other than that I was not a team player. Strategy makes the game dull.
That's probably why team leaders got so bossy but heck I don't have time to spend 30 minutes on one mission. Especially when I can power through the same mission in half the time, solo.
As a defender I stayed alive by never attacking, which is the only way I could watch everyone's Heath bars and know who to heal. If I was also fighting I just couldn't keep up.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
Well, I have to say, not considering it a Tank's job to keep people alive when a Tank's intentionally designed role is... to take aggro to keep people alive so that they can do their job, is definitely a non-standard view of... reality.
Strategy being something that makes the game dull is another interesting notion...
And yet as a Defender you never attacked and only healed, which is one of the oldest MMORPG cliches and the single one that has the least precedent in actual comic books--the Heal-bot.
You are a true quasi-original, Paladin :P.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
And all Tanks, and all Blaster and at least one project or sg dedicated to All "fill in the archetype" ... or so it seemed :D
It was the only way I could play a defender. I couldn't keep up with everyone's health and try to fight. Pluss as a defender my attacks pretty much sucked anyway.
As for precedent in the comics that didn't bother me. The comics need more healers.
My 3 Defenders were Father William, a Priest; Lady Dove, who had a super cool look based on the Virgin Mary with a circle of stars as her chest emblem. (I always thought she should fly by turning into a dove but there was no way to do that in the game) and a all arrows guy called Robin Hood (super Original) who didn't heal.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
Tanker Tuesdays!
Tanks A Lot
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
No Tank You! ;D
Well this thread has certainly gone off topic. . .
That's one of the (many) things which I loved about CoH. Different ATs, and sometimes different power combinations within each AT, played so completely different it kept the game feeling fresher longer, by having to change up my tactics.
My Fire/Fire blaster was a straight up ranged-damage dealer.
My Electric/Electric blaster was a sapper/blapper.
My TA/A Defender was a sort of Swiss Army Knife that didn't really excel at any one thing, but did a lot of things pretty well.
My Gravity/Kin controller was just plain fun. Not only could I lock down pretty much anything below an AV but had a lot of cool team-oriented tools with which I whiled away many hours around the Hollows and AP speed-boosting and healing lowbies or letting them hone their piñata skills.
My Kinetic Melee/ SR scrapper was awesome when I wanted to solo.
I could go on and on.
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
Philosophically, a lot of my attention has been on seeing what players [i]do[/i] in other games, and trying to identify [i]why[/i], then coming up with suggestions and proposals that seek to exploit what players inevitably do in order to strengthen the game and its fun experience for all. Fighting human nature just doesn't work; constructing the system - whether a government, economy, company, game, or anything else - such that it makes the activities and goals humans have work WITH the system to improve it is the best way to go.
That doesn't mean it's easy, or that any of our ideas will do exactly what we hope. But that's the philosophy with which we're approaching things, as much as we can. We may make mistakes. We aim to learn from them as well as from the successes and failures of those who've come before, guided by this philosophy to attempt to make a game wherein even those who seek to "exploit" the system will generally be helping everybody else have a better game experience.
Again, that's the philosophy. It's the ideal. Ideals and real world practicalities don't always mesh, but it's the goal towards which I hope to see us always striving.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
+1
As a cheesy poster in my high school math teacher's room said, "ideals are like stars. Even if you can't reach them, you can chart your course by them" .
People will do as they always do. Trying to find a way to make that fun within the context of a Superhero MMORPG rather than fight it is just... awesome.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Ah, that brings back memories of the joys of playing 'skull soccer' in Perez park.
Which also would make for a good temporary villain power: A big knockback without any damage component :) Ideal to kick a few do-gooders and lesser crooks around the zone. Or into the next zone
Uhm ... I played a dark-psi defender. Not doing much healing most of the time (even though she had a single heal). It was after all much more effective to AoE Rez+Stun ...
And I have had the joy of seeing the Repeat Offenders in action. Not much healing going on there either, but a lot of mayhem (before that idea was stolen by those villains)
I can see this. Those players who farm for drops will stick with 'real' content while those that just want the 50 can do AE missions. In both cases there will be advantages and limitations.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
The goal, wrt playstyles and rewards for behaviors, is to avoid having one method be unambiguously [i]better rewarded[/i] than any other. That is, if you like spamming AE missions, that's fine! More power to you; have fun. But we want to avoid that being the One True Way to level up and grind gear, based on it somehow creating more rewards than any other sort of play. Similarly, we dont want to force those who really love the AE style "build-a-grind" missions to play through what is, to them, boring story and tedious map exploration by rendering it impossible for them to get "good" stuff (XP, drops, whatever) without enduring tedium.
This doesn't mean all things must be available to all playstyles, but it does mean that things available only through one playstyle should not grossly outshine things available through the others. We can use the player-to-player market to mitigate any problems with somebody playing one way desiring things obtained only via another, but only if, again, the rewards are not coming faster and more furiously through one means over another.
All of that to say, it's a tricky balance, but we're aware of it and we seek to support people in whatever style of play (insofar as an MMO can cater to multiple styles of play) they like. We're doing our best to be aware of the causes of human behaviors and the effects our choices in designing aspects of the game will have on them. Again, so we can design this such that engaging in normal human behaviors is not a "bad" thing. It's how the game is designed. Rather than exploiting the game to get what you want, getting what you want is exploited by the game to make it a more fun experience for you and those around you.
My dream - and I know this is a lofty and perhaps unrealistic one - would be to transform "bad citizens" into "good citizens" by virtue of making the self-motivated behaviors constructive to everyone.
(Obviously, this won't prevent trolls from being bad things, but deliberate anti-social behavior, as opposed to self-motivated happens-to-be anti-social behavior, will always have to be curtailed. I, at least, cant' think of a way to turn it into a positive without changing the motivations of the trolls into something other than "make other people unhpapy.")
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
For me the big thing is leveling speed and the rate at which drops are earned. If one way (the AE) is only a little better I won't complain. Some players will level faster than me no matter how we play so if the AE is a bit quicker then that's fine. True balance is impossible. I agree that if we can avoid the 'one true way' then that would be great.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
That's actually a very good way of thinking about designing an MMO. I find that alot of MMO designers out there forget that there is a major diffrence between a regular video game and an MMO that comes from all sorts of players, rather than one player or a group of his friends in an instance at once that there is quite a bit more sociology to the equation for it to work. Alot of people when designing an MMO forget that with such a large community playing the game at once that even an extremely small percentage of trolls can be a big problem when given the chance and they rarely try to solve these problems before hand and usually have to cramm something in after the game is launched just to make it so the minority doesn't keep ruining it for the rest of us.
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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