Announcements

Join the ongoing conversation on Discord: https://discord.gg/w6Tpkp2

Please read the current update for instructions on downloading the latest update. Players with Mac versions of the game will not be affected, but you will have a slightly longer wait for your version of the new maps. Please make a copy of your character folder before running the new update, just to make sure you don't lose any of your custom work.

It looks like we can give everyone a list of minimum specs for running City of Titans. Please keep in mind that this is 'for now' until we are able to add more graphics and other system refinements. Currently you will need :
Windows 10 or later required; no Intel integrated graphics like UHD, must have AMD or NVIDIA card or discrete chipset with 4Gb or more of VRAM
At least 16GB of main DRAM.
These stats may change as we continue to test.

To purchase your copy of the City of Titans Launcher, visit our store at https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/ A purchase of $50 or more will give you a link to download the Launcher for Windows or Mac based machines.

Things that made COH fun for you that you'd like to see again.

92 posts / 0 new
Last post
Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Things that made COH fun for you that you'd like to see again.

I know this isn't a direct suggestion, but alot of these individual ideas could be considered suggestions of their own. I'd like everyone to come up with the things that made COH fun for you that you'd like to see again, either in general or specific.

I'll start out:

1. Core combat/enemy philosophy

It's core combat philosophy could be broken down into more enemies of more classes. Fighting a battle against horses of opponents of varying strengths went a long way towards making the game feel more epic. It allowed you to have ranks of bad guys affected by control differently, capable of dealing different kinds of damage, had differing amounts of health and defenses etc. In fact unlike other games enemies who were merely bags of hit points were the minority of enemies instead of the general team fodder. You were not facing "trash mobs" you were facing swarms of enemies and enjoyed thoroughly vaporizing them after a hard fight.

Furthermore on top of this these ranks of enemies got subdivided into different types at each rank. For example everyone knows the difference between the normal minion of a certain group, and the sapper. This adds variety and prioritization to targets within the throng which helps keep the combat not only epic but interesting.

Alot of people called the combat slow, and by some standards it is, but it always managed to feel epic and satisfying. Regardless of the speed that is the important part. One only needs to travel as far as DC Universe online to see what happens if the powers are unique and the combat is good, but lacks that satisfying and epic feel to it. Like getting beat down by a couple flunkies you should be able to handle in your sleep.

2. Flexible team makeup. ("Bring the player, not the class")

One of the biggest strengths of COX was because of it's enemy design philosophy (many foes instead of few), variable difficulty missions, and careful design on making each role valuable without overlapping too much you could make a team out of darn near anything and have fun playing with other people even on pick up teams.

3. Support not healers

Another of it's biggest strengths is that they designed a much wider variety of support than basically any other MMORPG I know of. You could make it through difficult missions with buffs or debuffs alone because buffs and debuffs were actually powerful. Late in the games life span when they made the buffs team wide this even made buffing a roll that was not tedious and allowed someone to be a support character and actively play as a variety of roles.

You could buff everyone, debuff everything, control things, and have various levels of healing thrown in. But even in Empathy the buffs were incredibly important and the game was never heal dominant. Just look at the diversity of support power sets that this enabled in defenders, corrupter, controllers, and dominators. This even extended to tanks, blasters, scrappers, etc that had minor amounts of support as part of their power sets.

4. Inspirations

These little gems really helped you just play the game. If you ran into an unforseen difficulty spike you had a better recourse than trying and dying till you got it or getting help. If the scrapper *shakes fist* aggrod another group you could adjust on the fly. It was far from invulnerability but it allowed you to take on epic odds for short amounts of time, lending a more epic feel to the game and a smoother and more fun play experience.

It also encouraged team work. We've all traded inspirations, carried wakies, or gave just the right color inspiration to someone so they could combine and rez. Just the mere presence of an inspiration that let you self rez in severely helpless format assisted the games flow alot both solo and in teams and created many fun moments.

5. Cooldowns

WOAH!!! Controversy, but hear me out.

Cooldowns serve one incredibly valuable purpose. They prevent a single power of even a small group of powers from completely dominating your play. Wanna know what i mean? Go play Champions Online and roll a munitions hero. You are faced with overlapping choices all over the place and you end up using perhaps a few powers regularly. Granted I LOVED the feel of assault rifle in that game, liked it better than assault rifle in COH to be honest. But the rest of munitions was full of sad choices. Get sub-machine gun and shotgun both? Lose effectiveness or only end up using one because it's better most of the time. With cooldowns you could have both be viable parts of your lineup.

That's not to say that EVERYTHING should be a cooldown or even restricted. For example, using that same example I mentioned I LOVED Assault Rifle in Champions Online, however I had to use a pistol to get power back which broke the magic.

You want to keep a set flow in combat. You should have options that keep things from taking over but keep the desired feel of the set intact. For example in Champions Online the assault rifle should have been the mainstay without any real reason to stop using it, yet be balanced for that. While in City of Heros your basic lineup of attacks serves that same purpose of general flow, fell, and effective maintained dps.

Where Champions online makes you choose between submachine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, gatling guns, and strafing runs to serve the purpose of AOE damage, City of Hero's would have allowed you to use ALL OF THOSE as part of your lineup instead of forcing you to give up on the fun of having all those powers and using only 1-2.

THAT is what cooldowns do. Cooldowns are not needed on everything and they are not even needed to be severely long, but they allow you to utilize strings of epic powers in situations which would be dominated by a single power or two, making the experience feel vastly more satisfying and varied.

Betcha never thought cooldowns were anything but a frustration eh?

6. Travel in Super Style.

City of Hero's was the only game that nailed travel powers. Champions online did a pretty good job but they felt much slower and more importantly less epic. It's teleporation power was much more usable, but didn't feel like teleportation as well. That being said there are things to learn from CO. They did grapple travel right even if it made no sense, having options like hover disks, jetpacks, wings, flying earth and ice. These things were very nice additions. Tunneling would have also been great, if you didn't get stuck everywhere.

Heck I was even one of those nutters who ran around in COH with no travel powers pre-inherent fitness days. just sprint and swiftness. It was slower yes, but still entirely possible one you learned the lay of the land and helped keep your character feeling more "natural". If there was a really tough zone to travese in, you had your extremely limited fuel jet packs of the day or a friendly teleport!!

7. Costume creator (from what I know COT is looking to nail this!!)

City of Heroes really brought the variety. You could make mostof the things your mind desired and this kept on expanding. Major additions like the beast packs, added costume sets, and then later power customization allowed you to run with untold thousands of different concepts and have it look "RIGHT". You could color your darkness powers and make them poison, you could color your energy beams to be plasma, laser, fire, etc. It was so open that your mind was the canvas that painted the picture of your hero or villain.

Champions Online did some of this better, but ultimately after much trying I was never able to get the same flexibility and satisfaction of design out of their creator that I was out of the COH creator. That might just be me. But CO deifnitely has some costume things to learn from too!!

8. Class Variety (from what I know COT is looking to nail this!!)

Unlike a traditional MMORPG where you may have 16, 12, or even 6 classes that may or may not have multiple USEFUL ways they could be built, City of Hero's had 14 in the end. Of those there were as many as 9 primary power sets and as many as 7 secondary power sets for each that could be mixed and matched. Not everything was considered "the best" but it was rare, if even possible, to find any combination that could not pull their weight on a team. That, is, phenomenal and combined with the costume creator is the reason that game lasted for so long.

9. User Generated missions.

Developers will never, ever be able to compete with the community on creating large amount of good content. Even the CEO of Valve entertainment admitted that when it came to that they would compete with anyone out there, be they EA or blizzard or what, but they would lose every time to the player base.

Architect Entertainment was an important step forwards for MMORPG's. It created experiences people liked and desired. Some very quality experiences like Night comes for the Weaver (or something very close, great mission, good story!), and fufills designs the devs themselves won't put their stamp on that people also desire. (fire farm, invulnerability farm, etc. These are still happy people!!)

If this was further expanded upon to be not just missions but costume pieces as well the community could very well sustain the game and take a great burden off of the developers. Though for missions there really needs to be better sorting and categories if it's implemented. Not just ratings, ids, and searches :).

It's important to note that this should include being able to deign the geography and props inside the mission (from the available pool of game resources) as well as enemies, spawn sizes, patrols, friendlies, allies, etc. Essentially it needs to have all of the functional freedom that Architect entertainment provided.

This also provides for all the builder framework needed for either player housing or guild/group bases. That way this additional system could be added at a later time with minimal effort.

10. LFG system.

For it's time the lfg system in COX was phenomenal. I could find the role, level, even archetype and zone of recruits I wanted or teams that might need me in record time. It still had a few bumps and flaws, but it's amazing how many MMORPG's can't live up to the usefulness of the COH lfg system.

11A. How it handled loot

I don't mean in specifics, I mean in the way that loot was kind of there, but it wasn't critical. Originally you got to the level of SO's and you could be competitive in the game. No need for super rares and etc just to participate in things.

11B. The invention sytem

This gets a new wrinkle in the invention system, which was amazing. The invention system peformed two big services. It handled inflation and it let you customize your character, within limitations.

From the economic standpoint I could have come into the game new in the last issue and got drops I could sell on the market that would fund a set of basic IO's for everything very quickly. Just like that at level 20 you could be set for "gear" of an effective level for the rest of your characters life.

From the character loot standpoint it allowed you to even more thoroughly build the character you wanted and it single handedly made soloing possible on a few builds and even good :). Allowed people to further play their way and gave them shinies to pursue in a relatively balanced fashion.

Even more appealing was that loot was not class restrictive and all of it could be traded. No more of the rolling for loot or the getting the item that only a tank could use but you were a defender. If it increased defense and you had defense increasing powers you could use it. Less limited and more universal loot not fought over by rolls is a definite plus.

On a down note, if an invention like system comes along again the buying, selling, and crafting process could use some streamlining :P.

12. Pool powers (including Patron and Ancillary powers)

Pool powers as an option mind you. Travel powers in any modern MMO should never cost you points you would spend on combat UNLESS it is an enhancement of a travel power specifically meant for combat.

But pool powers themselves give you the option to further customize your character slightly outside of your specific super powers. This enables you to give them a last personal touch, a bit more flavor, and can be used to help mitigate some weaknesses or strengthen some of your strong points. While never being quite as effective as equivalent power from other sets of course.

13. Story telling

Early and mid life COH had some decent stories, a bunch of excuses to pound things, and a handful of really good stories. The closer you got to the end of the games life however the more the story quality improved. By the time First Ward and Dark Astoria came out the story telling had become a strong point of the game. This is worth having and mentioning.

Edit: 1/25/2014 added some more as well as some bolding organization

14. Masterminds!!

No other game has come up with a pet class as...masterful :P, as mastermind. Unique, original, fun, effective, and good at both teams and solo play.

15. The dev team was passionate and gamers!! (so is the City of Titans dev team!!)

They were passionate and it showed. They cared about the game. They played it themselves and they wanted it to be even more cool. They wanted every little nifty touch. They wanted all the things we wanted. They were real people who behaved like real people. and worked hard towards the same type of enjoyment we wanted because it was the enjoyment they wanted. Ultimately this is alot of why the game ended up so great for it's playerbase.

There were even some LOL moments as we caught the devs out of sorts being real people. *wipes on new content on test server, teleports people to one single place for rez, casts oil slick arrow in the middle of them, uses Howling Twilight on oil slick arrow target to rez everyone at once* "WTF, Oil Slick Arrow!!??" - Back Alley Brawler

16. Costume Contests

Really this is just the natural result of the rather great costume creator and power customization system but nonetheless costume contests became a core community even and you could always oooo and ahhhh at the cool and neat stuff other people did. Which made you want to go and do them yourself.

CO has costume contests from time to time, but it never really felt the same and not near as frequently.

Edit: 01/26/2013

17. The ability to rise and fall between hero and villain.

Not only did being able to go back and forth (or style middling) in the hero/villain scale add immensely to your character feel but it also allowed you to choose the little touches you wanted but play with the people you wanted and in the morality you wanted.

Even if only for a thematic touch this HAS to be in any serious super hero game.

18. Cone Attacks.

City of Heros had a large amount of cone attacks and these helped with both AOE and to keep you involved in combat. For example:

Melee: You couldn't just LAWL and PBAOE + single target smash away. You had to jockey your position to get the most out of your cone attacks by hitting the most targets. With a few in specific like Crowd Control you also needed to aim the knockback. This all kept you more involved and mobile than you may have otherwise been.

Ranged: Not only did ranged need to adjust for the angle to fit the most enemies in possible but they also had to adjust the range because you could get more in at close to max range. In either case the cone was alot of time shorter than your actual single targets or even AOE attacks. This forced a ranged character using cone attacks to be very fluid in their positioning to get the most out of their cone attacks as well as made them play some risk/reward on how close they were to the enemies.

19. High damage closed ranged attacks for ranged archetypes.

This is straight risk vs reward. With a blaster or dominator you could do much more damage up close but you could not take damage very well. This led to some interesting gameplay choices during fights. It also meant that when enemies closed in on you if nothing else you had a last ditch effort burst of damage to kill them.

Compare this system to other games where your ranged DPS always does damage from range and if an enemy closes in they root/stun, run like a girl, and then DPS from range again. It's significantly more interesting to have that risk vs reward involved and opens up unique team based opportunities, like holding a boss so the blaster/dominator can safely close in and max DPS them, dropping bombs on the enemy like they are Annie from League of Legends. (Have you seen my bear Tibbers?)

Or maybe you just feel a little awesome when a tough foes closes in on you at low health and you slum dunk his face into the dumpster. Even if you know he would have torn you to pieces if your melee burst didn't kill him quickly you still feel kind of awesome.

Edit: 02/28/2014 added #18. cone attacks and #19 high damage close range attacks for ranged archetypes.

Well that was quite a bit, I've gathered this in my head through alot of thought over a long time. I've likely forgotten a few things, which you might remind me. You may disagree with some things, feel free to share. You might have things of your own to add. Fire away.

But this is just my contribution of some of the design, mechanics, gameplay, variety, execution, and capabilities that made COH the game that inspired so many and was dear to them. Still to this day held as the best super hero MMORPG. (debatable of course, some prefer Champions Online).

EDIT: 02/17/2014

Forums Suggestions: Things missed that others pointed out:

1. Effective Mentoring and Sidekicking system. (Mentioned by Shadowsmith)

I can play with my friends anytime I want and while not be full power sidekicked up I can be useful and not just die. MMORPG's live and die on their community and allowing everyone to play together without division is key to the experience and one of the prime areas City of Villains failed at. Dual purpose content, allow people to play all content, do not separate out and exclude from content or the ability to play together whenever possible.

2. Community (Various Mentions)

Many people mention the community. But the community IMO was because of good game design that enabled people to play together with many comps and level ranged involved. It's because the game was designed to be inclusive and fun with few restrictions that such a close knit community happened. This must happen again if such a passionate community is wished for.

Still this community included alot of selfless acts. Instead of walking by you went out of your way to buff people, save them, debuff their mobs, clear the group and rez them, etc. People trained other people patiently on the game. People actually camped out permanently in the hollows just to offer speed boosts and teleports to help people get around.

This type of friendly community is exactly what you get when you design your game to be inclusive and friendly rather than competitive and exclusive. It's what you get when you add various abilities that let us help each other in all sorts of ways. It's what you get when you encourage us to mingle of our own free will rather than try and force it.

Friendly design is wonderful :D. It should be noted that the team exp mechanics were a good part of this too.

3. Enemies that didn't just wander around. They were doing things (simple emote setups), making it feel more like a world and less like EXP pinatas. (mentioned by Kriegson)

4. No need to compete with other to complete your own quests. (Mentioned by Cinnder)

Because alot of the game was instanced you didn't have to worry about alot of the pitfalls of open world questing and you could tailor slightly more personalized experiences. This also meant that you had alot less respawn issues :D.

5. Ability to solo. (Mentioned by Cinnder)

Most Archetypes could solo pretty well, initially. When inventions came out ALL archetypes were able to solo well. So when you didn't feel like teaming you could just go play around and have fun. This means alot especially for night players with more limited populations or people without alot of time to spend in one go.

6. Tongue in cheek humor (mentioned by Cinnder)

Humor was delivered throughout the game and numerous references were made. But the developers seemed to asume that you would just pick up on the jokes and references. They didn't make it too overt and *wink wink nudge nudge* at you. So instead of feeling like they were trying to hard they just felt like little cool things added for flavor. Also, Kill more skullz.

7. A sense of power through normal play which increased with your level. (mentioned by Cinnder)

This was touched on lightly during the combat point but it deserves to be re-iterated. Taking on multitudes of bad guys, the stories, the way your powers executed and felt, your overall character designs, your travel powers. All of these things made you actually FEEL super. Not invincible, but super.

Just as importantly, this sense of power started out satisfying but much smaller and grew as the game went on so that you actually felt like you had progressed. That you were more powerful. You started out facing street gangs and ended up facing powerful world threatening syndicates with massive technology and equally dire threats. You started out trashing those street gangs with a feeling of outmatching them, even if you power was nothing of what it would be. End game you felt like you could do and take on so much even against vastly more powerful opponents.

Too many games make the start and the finish both feel very similar in terms of fighting enemies. You get some new skills and better gear but it feels very samish. This is very much not true in the COH universe because starting, mid-game, and end game heros or villains could feel and even play drastically differently. This really helped make it feel much more satisfying.

Guild Wars 2 shows that it is effective in other games too, but though that game is generally friendly due to it's exp sharing mechanics and lack of competing with other people it still doesn't offer near the abiltity to really help out and include each other as COH did.

Though, City of Titans could learn form Guild Wars 2 and some of their loot, collectable, and exp mechanics. These are friendly mechanics I think would fit right in to a tight community. Being able to deposit things in a bank without going back to it, being able to get exp and loot from the same mobs an ungrouped player got exp and loot from. Little changes like these change it from "don't touch my exp/loot" to "thanks for the help bud, appreciate it" "no problem". If there is a resource node type system in City of Titans again look to Guild Wars 2 and client specific harvesting meaning no competing for nodes.

These allowed you to continue having fun without competing with other players, even when hitting the same open world content and mobs. Even as far as questing goes :D.

8. Null the Gull (Mentioned by Jaq40)

Have aspects of your game that affect your enjoyment of the game, seem relatively baked into the game? Still allows you to turn them off for your enjoyment. Win sauce?

9. Cool powers that had personality and immersive effects that brought them to life. (various mentions)

COH had alot of cool powers no other game seems to execute right. Whether it be ice patches that really make enemies slip and fall hilariously, gun drones, proximity mines that are effective at what they do, oil slicks that can be lit on fire, stomps that launch enemies, an uppercut that hilariously launches weaker foes.

General if you expected a power to have cool effect such as launches, burning, highly damaging explosions, electrical palayzation, etc then it tended to have those things in style and in spades. The power execution just gave them the proper feel you would expect from hitting someone with fire, mines, ice, or a giant rock sledgehammer.

Too many MMORPG's out there have you deliver colossal blows to even the weakest enemies and they don't even react. Too many MMORPG's let you hit an enemy with fire, ice, lightning, smoke, etc and it doesn't have ANY effect except damage. When is the last time in that Fantasy or Sci Fi MMORPG you hit something with an explosion and it didn't even flinch? In COH enemies would be set on fire, some would be knocked down/back, stunned, power drained, or chilled from the same explosion. Not just lifeless damage, but immerse effects.

COH was not one of those, each power had personality. Whether it be handclap or gust for knockbacks, fire for burning, ice for chill, electricity for power drain and paralyzation, earth for defense lowering, etc. Everything had personality, flavor, and impact. Quicksand > Stalactite > Quartz Crystals yo.

10. Ability to feel like you accomplished something with just a short play session. (mentioned by JefA)

It was highly possible to log on, play a single mission, and log off all within 30 minutes. Allowing you to get your super fix in a very short amount of time. But the game was still fun for hours upon hours on end. This flexibility allowed people from all varieties of time constraints to enjoy the game, many times together.

11. Enemy and player biographies (mentioned by various players)

This really is an immerse part of the COH game world. Enemy biographies were informative, provided flavor, and were many times humorous or clever. Sometimes dark. Player biographies in combination with their costumes were sometimes just draw dropping. This really added a nice and subtle, but powerful, immersive undertone to the game.

But they need to allow longer bios next time. Lets say twice as long :D. Player bios were so easy to overrun the space given because, well, we as a player base really came up with alot of bios. Deep ones with alot of backstory and personal information.

12. Newspaper and Radio missions (various mentions)

Feel like just messing around, want a quickie mission for the area you are in with a loose, vague objective and some touch of humor? Look no further. Waiting for someone to return to the team and need quick time killer mission to keep people entertained? It's there. Want to just run around a zone rampaging but want a more structured format either solo or teamed? Eureaka!!

Newspaper and Radio missions were a great boon to both casual and "hardcore" solo and team based gameplay. It allowed light and continuous on demand action NOW without worrying about alot of the other stuff, just the joy of playing.

13. The game was just fun to play without massive goals, crazy grinding, or ERMAGHERD loot. (Various mentions)

People rolled a million alts and played the game forever because the combat and the experience was where the fun was at. You go to other games and people will grind instances forever for gold, items, to get to the next raid, etc. That is almost 100% of their game time.

You went to COH and the majority of people just enjoyed playing. The combat system, creating their own personalized and unique heros, trying out new builds, making their own missions, experiencing great stories, and tweaking that deeply personal hero of theirs to have the capabilities they want via inventions kept people coming back to the same gameplay because it was still fun.

It was amazing. Very much like Dynasty Warriors in the sense that you could play the game for so long with so many characters and even after years it was somehow still fun, every time.

14. Temporary powers!! (Mentioned by Consultant)

City of Heros had an enormous amount of temporary powers which varied considerably in effectiveness and longevity. These little touches allowed the game to do alot of things without losing balance, add immersion, and give your hero the ability to have that plan B sometimes when things just were not going well. Kind of like how just because I have the ability to blow up things doesn't mean that a flashbang grenade might not save my butt if I get in over my head.

This also added alot of flavor to the game and allowed some missions to reward you in a meaningful way without it just being "loot".

15. Zone wide events such as Zombies and the Rikti Invasion! (Mentioned by Consultant)

These things were awesome and if you had no idea what was going on they prompted you to ask and through the power of tangential learning it hooked you into the story. There was nothing quite like hearing alarms and knowing that **** was about to go down. These were also balanced in such a way that lower level characters were weaker, but not just totally hosed. You could still help, team up with people, and assist the groups and have fun with the big boys.

16. Prefixs and Suffixs in names (mentioned by Pleonast)

While a small touch this adds subtly to that "super" feel to the game. It also makes the character feel slightly more personal. I'm not Stupendous Man, I'm The Amazing Stupendous Man!! Yes, I delivered that out loud in my house in full corny super hero delivery. THAT is the power of that tiny addition.

17. Adjustable mission difficulty. (Various mentions)

Want harder but more rewarding content? You got it. Want Easier content thats less rewarding? You got it. Want less enemies or more enemies? You got it.

You could play your missions your way and face the challenges you wanted to face. This went a long way to making your gameplay much more fun :D. No longer were preset mission difficulties hosing X or Y class, you could customize the enemy group sizes and strength to your hero and be rewarded appropriately :D.

So people good at single target damage could take on less numerous and tougher foes while people good at AOE's could take on more numerous and weaker foes.

18. 8 Player Teams (Mentioned by Mendicant)

This is something big I can't believe I didn't mention!! Large team sizes allowed more chaos and more fun. COH exceled at fun chaos and 8 memebers also gave you a larger chance at a mix of classes. It also lessened the impact of any one bad player while still letting good players carry the team.

It was friendly, fun, chaotic, and only helped boost the community. It just feels alot more fun than the 4 or 5 man teams in other games. More likely to fit alot of your friends in it too!!

19. Badges (Various mentions)

Badge hunting was a really nifty way to reward exploration. It wasn't just "oh you saw X zone" which feels very souless. You found unique locations, plaques, and rewards with their own back story that just added to the story and impressiveness of the world.

Plus, it prevent negative possibility space by rewarding people for doing things. For example, how many of us were soooooo excited to get a badge just by setting foot on top of the Atlas Globe for the first time? Rather than you getting up there and being just like "this is pretty cool to be up here" it was the games way of saying "hey, I noticed you are a pretty cool dude who found this hidden spot, here, have a shiny!!". And that, felt, AWESOME.

19. The world acknowledging you and your accomplishments in tiny unimportant ways (mentioned by Redlynne)

This is just one of those nice little touches that gives the illusion that the world knows about the things you have done without changing anything. It's so small, it doesn't change anything at all, but it makes us feel that much better about what we have just done. It was just a guy walking down the street who said a few lines mentioning a my hero and a mission I just completed. But it made me grin and feel good.

Sometimes it doesn't take big things to make us feel awesome and epic. Sometimes it just takes a little nod, a tiny acknowledgement, that the world we are in realizes that we did X or Y thing. This includes people you saved running back up to you, thanking you, and giving you a tiny bit of influence or inspiration. To make you feel as if you just accomplished something. That some tiny tiny part of this world cares about and acknowledges what you just did, and is impressed and thankful.

20. Unique zones with personality (various mentions)

Unique zones were not limited to "oh ice, oh desert, oh mountains, oh volcanoes, oh grasslands, oh beaches". Each city zone and area had it's own design, it's own feel, it's own enemy groups with personalities, and it's own atmosphere.

Croatia felt completely different than Perez Park despite both being grassland, forests, and some buildings. Steel Canyon felt massively different from Kings Row though both were just city areas. Each zone had personality. You won't see that much in even modern MMORPGs where each zone is just a generic biome containing generic mobs.

It got even better later and really hit it's stride at the end where the First Ward and Dark Astoria Zones really showcased this. The atmosphere, area design, enemy design, NPC's, and stories came together in a seriously epic fashion that showed everything that is missing in other MMORPGs when it comes to making a zone.

21. The level up ding and full restore/buffs (various mentions)

A small touch but leveling up felt alot more epic with the combination of sound effects, full heal, power restore, and a sudden surge of power. It really made the simple act of hitting the next level that much more enjoyable. Instead of being a "yay" moment it was suddenly a "WOHOO, yeah ***** come get some. Don't worry, I got this guys....oh crap..buffs running out....HALP!!". It made for many epic, unique, and humorous twists in combat :D.

22. Streakbreaker code (various mentions)

Such a small touch but it allows % based combat without letting negative streaks completely hose you. Really reeled in the frustration that bad luck streaks could have. More games that use % based effects could use this.

23. The incarnate system (various mentions)

The incarnate systems was a pretty brilliant alternative end game progression system. It still allowed you to get more powerful. It allowed for big team challenges. But it also allowed you to solo your way there as well. For an end game system THAT is something that doesn't happen enough.

It did all of this without being carrot on a stick loot centric and still being focused on fun. Allowing you to play normal end game content with friends for fun and still progress :D.

Edit: 1/26/2014

24. Mayhem Missions (mentioned by grouchyguy)

I've not played the equivalent of these wonderfully fun missions on any other MMORPG to date. You got to go on a rampage and smash the city and destory the local defense/police force and heros. Mega fun as a villain.

25. Giant Monsters (mentioned by Falconstriker)

The game providing gigantic monsters for entire zones to team up and pile upon made for some epic fights. From lusca to adamastor to Babbage it provided alot of personality and a unique experience for its time. Even better the giant monsters were the earliest known example (to me) of code that let one single monster scale to the the individual level of every player in an MMORPG open world zone. This impressed me quite a bit.

26. The ability to choose your origin (mentioned by Radiac)

In COH the ability to choose your origin was just one more small personalization touch. It really didn't do much and I feel they should have taken more advantage of it by having an epic story arc based on each origin and some nods to your origin throughout the game, but it was still a nice small personalization touch.

Hopefully City of Titans will build origins into their framework so that they can give you small acknowledgements and perhaps some custom content to your origin. Enough to make it feel like the world and the game knew that you were a mutant, or magic based hero/villain, but little enough to not put too much development pressure on them.

27. Shared hero/villain content. (mentioned by Radiac)

Radiac put cooperative hero/villain content meaning places that both could team together and play together and I agree with this completely. This is what enables you to have two sides and still a close knit community. It also plays on that common comic book trope of "bigger threat than each other, heros and villains stand together".

But I think City of Titans, if they can think their way around it, should go further. I think they should endeavor to have the exact same zone for both sides if at all possible, with the possible exception of the beginner area in each side. This would give more returns from any new content and lower development costs and if done right will stay in the comic book mythos. When have you seen the arch nemisis of the various major comic book heros hide out multiple towns away? Like Crey Lex Luthor was always legally protected. Joker and others always broke out of Arkham, etc.

If City of Titans can pull it off right, it'll allow people to experience the same content in a meaningful way without completely separating them. Sure there will be people who say "but he's right there!!!" but that's present in numerous comics as well. In fact if City of Titans can come up with a clever system this would be an interesting choice system for vigilantes, possible putting villains in jail, possible villains breaking out of jail (or paying for lawyers) missions for villains, etc. But it would have to be done right.

*Personal thoughts on shared zones and PVP*
My gut is telling me, instanced content. If you want to cause havoc you create an instance that has only you as the villain and 2-3 heros can join to stop you if you do not escape in time. If you want to pull massive chaos and bring multiple villains I'd say allow the villains a full team, but allow the heros multiple full teams. Yes, I'm biasing this against the villains. I want them to be able to cause a commotion in the middle of the heroic area, but it'll be risky if you do not bail fast enough. Defeated villains would be forced into a jailbreak mission or to pay an amount that scales on your level to be freed via lawyers.

Now, the exact opposite would apply in an areas of the map that had a dominant villain influence. Heros would be putting a stop to things, but risk being swarmed by more villains than they can handle. You do what good you can before being forced back. Hero's would be captured and held if defeated and could either bust out on their own (escape missions vs jailbreak mission) or be forced to spend money to call in some sort of outside assistance to get them out of there. After all villains are notorious for being a little egotistical and not finishing off their heros fast enough.

Neutral Terf? Oh yeah, battle royale. Even sides of both teams, objectives both sides. Ability to capture for both sides.

I figure with such a system you could allow PVP content that isn't necessarily based 100% around PVP. If your design doesn't work well for straight PVP you can focus on objective competition, if you are in enemy territory even if you are in a superior build you will be outnumbered. If you are in friendly territory woe to the foes who oppose you. If you are in neutral territory then it becomes a capture or objective race.

I'd say doing enough objectives should be an alternative victory condition to capturing, just to keep PVP from completely dying if the game mechanics are not suited for it. Something a bit more thematic and heroic or villainish depending on which side has the objectives :P.

But again all of this should be optional instanced content. We don't want villains and heros blowing up all over the world unless we get enough interest to have a PVP server, and that is going to be a long way down the line.

28. The ability to write individual macros and use them as normal buttons. IE the use of a program like LUA to make this easier and more effective. (Mentioned by Lutan, LUA mentioned by Redlynne)

This allowed anything from RPing easier, to looking for groups and inviting easier, to being able to tie powers together somewhat, to being able to order around all the mastermind minions for gameplay and RP purposes.

The goal is not so much to make your play more effective with macros, but to allow people to do alot of non-gameplay things and add playability in the case of Masterminds.

29. A useful, stylish, and extremely flexible/functional chat system. (Mentioned by Olivia Dennings)

Through these of filters and tabs you could get the information you wanted to be displayed, where you wanted it to be displayed. It looked great, it was easy to mess with and tweak, linking worked well and it it was directly comaptible with the macro buttons you could make. Every mastermind remembers making their pets talk/dance/etc. Emotes were also easy to get to and categorized so that you could find the appropriate emote easily.

30. A slick UI that was scalable, adjustable, stylish, and clear. (Inspired by Olivia Dennings)

Their UI quite simply was clean, functional, looked good and you could adjust it as you wished. Colors, bars, buttons, sizes/scale. These were things you could easily tweak. Even small touches like red interface default for villains and a cool blue for heroes was appreciated.

EDIT: 11/25/2014

I just want to be clear that these are merely ideas. Things we liked that mad COH the fun game that it was. City of Titans will be it's own game and while I hope it does alot of these things I understand it is not going to be COH 2, nor should it be. I'm just providing some small amount of building blocks to work with.

Darth Fez
Darth Fez's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/20/2013 - 07:53
I see your points and raise

I see your points and raise you this thread.

- - - - -
Hail Beard!

Support trap clowns for CoT!

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Darth Fez wrote:
Darth Fez wrote:

I see your points and raise you this thread.

Haha I went through all of that and added alot. I'm trying to get as much as possible in one place so that the devs have an easy and fleshed out list of points to look at. I don't expect them to do everything of course, City if Titans will be it's own game, but it's points to consider as they design and tack down their own vision.

I've thought about all of this a very long time now and am something of a hopeful that one day I'll help make my mark on the game industry as a future career, so I've paid attention to alot of things. Hopefully, I've learned a few things along the way and my tiny little opinion and perspective can be of some use to the fine men and women who are working so hard and passionately to create this game. How could I not do my best to help them when I feel as strongly as they do?

I'd offer more, but I'm really not sure what else I have to offer them than the money I could spare and my opinion/time on some of these things. I really wish I could do more, COH did many things right other MMORPGs have not replicated on the strictest of mechanical and design senses. Much less narrative, atmosphere, feel, personalization, story, etc. The MMORPG genre needs this to continuing progressing as a genre and as a player I really miss alot of this stuff that wasn't available anywhere else.

jag40
Offline
Last seen: 7 years 8 months ago
Joined: 09/17/2013 - 10:51
Good points there.

Good points there.

And I agree about cooldowns. They can be useful, but I think between COX and CO they are one the opposite extreme tips. Yeah I wished CO fleshed out rifle and munitions were fleshed out like pistols could be a complete set (note: I actually use all my powers that I choose on munitions not just a few but many people I seen don't. And while I think more power to them if they choose to play that way, I think some things make sense to have cool downs.) On the other end of the scale COX got too cooldown happy. Which kind of resulted in the same thing as CO with relatively few powers being used on the regular and the rest every blue moon. In CO due to other powers overshadowing in COX due everything having a cool down, some were absurdly long, and even more of a pain when facing the many enemies with -recharge powers. Although I do love the energy builder idea that CO have.

20 the zones, in COX some were different, but most were just variation of a city, Kings row, steel canyon, skyway, all basically felt the same besides the enemies encountered. Croatoa was good stuff, Boomtown was a bit different, a destroyed city but there was ever hardly a reason to go there. Glad they redid DA and wouldn't be surprised if they had more plans for Boomtown. Now the mission maps definitely could use some variety, especially in an instance mission heavy game. CO, a open world mission heavy game definitely could use more zone variety. It's like they are crossed.

22 streakbreaker. man. Sometimes I suspect the RNG in COX was wonky. Streakbreaker good idea, but unless I'm simply the unluckiest cat I nthe entire world, I seen way too many streakbreakers while having 90-95% supposedly chance to hit. Last time I looked at my data, my hit rate was around 65-70% in reality. I think I seen somewhere once an interesting analogy. If say a doctor said a treatment had 95% chance of working and five percent chance of the body rejecting it and causing harm, and when the math is done in reality only about 60% of people took to it and 40% died, that probably would cause the doctor to get sued. One thing I do like about CO, I can fight without worrying about hit roll. I have nothing against hit roll, but simply wished that if it says 90-95% chance to hit, I end up actually hitting at least somewhere near that number, at least in the mid 80s or better.

23 The Incarnate solo section could use a bit tweaking. It was tooo slow progress compared to simply farming the iTFs. The carrot and stick seemed to be the iTFs. I think if they do an incarnate like system, the solo way should be beefed up a bit, not saying it should be the exact same speed as doing the incarnate trials, but it shouldn't have been as slow progress in comparison for the solo. Besides to see the story arcs storylines, which were well written IMO, it really wasn't anywhere near efficient way relatively to going up the incarnate ladder. I figured they did it that way in the same vein as the usual end game that is big in MMO where it's dungeon centric. But times are changing.

29 badges, never was too much into badge hunting but it seemed like a cool feature.

18 8 man team, man was that an awesome feature. More people, less, usually, one have to be uber to make a difference. They just had to participate and could get by. Downside, those dang on TFs that required 8 man team when the population pickings were slim. That sucked. Those were times where I wished it was only 4 to 5 man teams.

17 Difficulty scale oh yeah. Want an easy day, slide it down to -1/0 and go at it. Feeling froggy, slide it up to X4/8 and go at it. Yet I couldn't help but chuckle when a toon I have have went through 8 man team setting only to be told by a TF contact that I cant do their mission because I need 5-8 players.

15) zone events. good and annoying at times. Man they are fun, but at times sometimes they straight went overboard with them when it zone event back to back to back and due to zone events, anyone with an outdoor mish at the time in that zone is SOL. Basically having to do the zone event even if they just did it once again, or in the case of that one with the totem things, simply wait till it passed again due to lack of interest. Kind of killed the pace at times. I thin kif they have zone event, they shouldn't despawn all the mobs, especially ones that may be tied to missions. Because it sucks having to stand around for ten minutes (sometimes more if they follow it up immediately with another zone event) just to complete one mission. AKA zone events sometimes messed around with point number 10 severely. I like how CO did it. Zone events (when they have them) but didn't effect the spawning of the other mobs. Now I know if CO can do it with that old butt engine, the new engine should be able to handle it easily.

Out of all, number 11 enemy bios. In many games it's one oft over looked thing. Seriously now, Create a mob consider the bio part of the creation process. Who are they, what they are doing, what are their goals, why are they so angry, and maybe even how did one move up the ladder in their faction. COX was decently good with this, some weak spots but over all very good. CO, It's like they did a few mobs bios and gave up.

I love dynasty warriors, especially 4 and 5.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
jag40 wrote:
jag40 wrote:

Good points there.
And I agree about cooldowns. They can be useful, but I think between COX and CO they are one the opposite extreme tips. Yeah I wished CO fleshed out rifle and munitions were fleshed out like pistols could be a complete set (note: I actually use all my powers that I choose on munitions not just a few but many people I seen don't. And while I think more power to them if they choose to play that way, I think some things make sense to have cool downs.) On the other end of the scale COX got too cooldown happy. Which kind of resulted in the same thing as CO with relatively few powers being used on the regular and the rest every blue moon. In CO due to other powers overshadowing in COX due everything having a cool down, some were absurdly long, and even more of a pain when facing the many enemies with -recharge powers. Although I do love the energy builder idea that CO have.

Name 5 power sets in City of Heros that didn't use all of their powers on a regular basis :D. It was actually seen as an advantage if a powerset had a less useful power because it made room in very tight builds for another power :D.

Now I know some were on long cooldowns, but this is also what allowed them to be more powerful. To keep things relatively balanced extremely powerful abilities need to be very limited in supply, otherwise they supersede all other options.

Your choice in COX was limiting it with cooldowns. I'll be the first to admit that it sucked when you ran into -recharge enemies, but -recharge enemies was the only way to challenge some power combos. While sappers were the only way to challenge some other combos. My claw/Super Reflexs scrapper would laugh at -recharge. However my Trick Arrow/Archery Defender HATED it :D. On the other hand my Trick Arrow/Archery defender laughed at sappers, but my Claws/Super Reflexs scrapper HATED them. You always hate things that counter your build :D.

Your choice in CO was limiting it with power requirements. Though to be honest because you could absolutely center a build around power generation and reserves in CO, while still maintaining a ton of damage, you could game this fairly effectively to the point you could almost ignore it completely. A good exmple being gatling gun where you could easily get a full maintain of it off with the right stats. With further specialization you almost never needed to fire your pistol even while using mainly the gatling gun.

Because you could game their limitation system so heavily you'll notice alot of the abilities in CO really don't have the same OOMPH as some of the abilities in COH with long cooldowns. Compare the blaster nuke with their equivalents in CO for example. Build-up + reds + nuke = nothing standing, but long cooldown. Orbital bombardment in CO = heavy AOE damage and things still killing you.

Ironically even with those limitations the impossibility of balancing their free form system created numerous broken builds that utterly broke the game, and in the end those builds severely hurt customer retention and utterly killed the zombie PVP, which was insanely fun until a broken build showed up. Without free to play people and lifetime subscribers I highly suspect that game would have much less population atm or would have even died completely.

Quote:

20 the zones, in COX some were different, but most were just variation of a city, Kings row, steel canyon, skyway, all basically felt the same besides the enemies encountered.

*scratches head*. Kings row were run down slums that slowly got renovated to look less run down over time and generally very short buildings except the NW side, Steel Canyon was like the central city metroplex and was full o skyscrapers and much more densely urbanized, While Skyway city had alot of overpasses and ups and downs. They were all cities but the zones looked and functioned completely differently. As someone who spent alot of his time on foot using swiftness/sprint/hurdle/combat jumping as a travel power trust me on this. I had to know them intimately to get around and not hold up my team. People were usually surprised that they didn't have to wait on me :D.

Quote:

Now the mission maps definitely could use some variety, especially in an instance mission heavy game.

HAHA you nailed that one right on the head. It's my hopes that City of Titans makes use of a robust random level generator at some point with specific levels for specific missions. COH indoor level variety was just as bad as the outdoor level variety of your average MMORPG, which is to say terrible :D. Layer cake of doom caves *shiver*

Quote:

22 streakbreaker. man. Sometimes I suspect the RNG in COX was wonky. Streakbreaker good idea, but unless I'm simply the unluckiest cat I nthe entire world, I seen way too many streakbreakers while having 90-95% supposedly chance to hit. Last time I looked at my data, my hit rate was around 65-70% in reality.

Weird, I never had an issue hitting but even when people went 2 acc 4 damage back in the days of SO I still used 3 acc. I always overkilled slightly for accuracy because I'd rather lose a few % damage and be reliable. Even if the enemy started using force fields or something.

Quote:

23 The Incarnate solo section could use a bit tweaking. It was tooo slow progress compared to simply farming the iTFs. The carrot and stick seemed to be the iTFs. I think if they do an incarnate like system, the solo way should be beefed up a bit, not saying it should be the exact same speed as doing the incarnate trials, but it shouldn't have been as slow progress in comparison for the solo. Besides to see the story arcs storylines, which were well written IMO, it really wasn't anywhere near efficient way relatively to going up the incarnate ladder. I figured they did it that way in the same vein as the usual end game that is big in MMO where it's dungeon centric. But times are changing.

That's really difficult from a design perspective. Because if you don't incentivize group play being much more rewarding you end up with mostly soloers and that is NOT good for the community. Group play pretty much HAS to be more rewarding to make sure that it is the dominant play style. Group ties and communities are what keep MMORPG's rolling. WOW is excellent proof of that, it would have died long long ago without those group ties preventing people who are done with the game from leaving.

It's definitely not a bad system as it was. COH was the only MMORPG I knew of that let you make realistic and steady process on your end game solo to start with. I got prety much all of my mains stuff via solo, I only did a few ITF's. I didn't even have to do some boring dumb quest I could only do X often like other MMORPG make you do solo to earn group rewards at a far slower pace. I got to earn progress just by having fun :).

Unless we can come up with something better that won't sabotage group play then I see it as a good system that we'll keep trying to think up ways to improve. But to come up with something better we'd really have to think outside of the box.

Quote:

18 8 man team, man was that an awesome feature. More people, less, usually, one have to be uber to make a difference. They just had to participate and could get by. Downside, those dang on TFs that required 8 man team when the population pickings were slim. That sucked. Those were times where I wished it was only 4 to 5 man teams.

/cry dang legacy tech. I'm sure that City of Titans will allow you to sub someone in and continue the TF equivalent. They'd have to scale the rewards of the new join by the remaining missions of course, but with a friendly community I'm sure people would be glad to help out :D.

Quote:

15) zone events. good and annoying at times. Man they are fun, but at times sometimes they straight went overboard with them when it zone event back to back to back and due to zone events, anyone with an outdoor mish at the time in that zone is SOL. Basically having to do the zone event even if they just did it once again, or in the case of that one with the totem things, simply wait till it passed again due to lack of interest. Kind of killed the pace at times. I thin kif they have zone event, they shouldn't despawn all the mobs, especially ones that may be tied to missions. Because it sucks having to stand around for ten minutes (sometimes more if they follow it up immediately with another zone event) just to complete one mission.

I'm sure the fine folks designing City of Titans will take those frustrations in mind when they design their own zone events. To be honest I can't think of a better reference of how to do zone events than Guild Wars 2 atm. If they did interfere with a quest area then they were short lived or had a fail state that would make the zone a bit more hostile, but you could still do your quests.

To be honest Guild Wars 2 is likely a game to check out for a lot of smart changes. While I wouldn't say use their quest system for everything, quest heart equivalents would make a fantastic way to work with police chiefs and other things here and there. It was also nice that you used multiple methods to help a certain amount rather than 25 of this 15 of that and etc. This allowed you to do what you enjoyed more and pick up other stuff casually along the way.

You could also still have your normal quests with the kill 25 thugs (with spawns in the appropriate areas assured to be sufficient this time!!!!, I'm looking at you COH), and then immediately call in and continue the missions :P.

A combination of questing methods would likely be most immersive and could better be tailored to the feel and style of each story arc while still having plenty of content for people looking for a more casual way to brawl through a few levels.

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
A brilliant summarising list.

A brilliant summarising list!

I agree completely on cooldowns. They make combat interesting by encouraging you to use a variety of powers. I find combat in many other MMOs to be boring, because everyone seems to be spamming one or two powers constantly. Also, I really hate games that let you learn a variety of powers but allow you access to only a handful at a time. In CoX, if you learned it it was available to you at any time.

I think 11A was one of those design features that contributed hugely to your second #2: Community. Loot (and by association, costumes) never became competitive, which encouraged the helpful, cooperative atmosphere you describe so well. I believe this was a key point in attracting the community we have today.

Also, I never thought about your point in #1 regarding enemy variety. I never even heard the term "trash mob" till I played other MMOs. At first I thought it was just because the CoX community was more mature, but I realise from your comments that it was because in CoX even minions were interesting.

Spurn all ye kindle.

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Ralathar44 wrote:
Ralathar44 wrote:

That's really difficult from a design perspective. Because if you don't incentivize group play being much more rewarding you end up with mostly soloers and that is NOT good for the community. Group play pretty much HAS to be more rewarding to make sure that it is the dominant play style. Group ties and communities are what keep MMORPG's rolling. WOW is excellent proof of that, it would have died long long ago without those group ties preventing people who are done with the game from leaving.

You know, as someone who plays solo about 80% of the time, I used to feel the same as jag, especially as I was going through new DA for the 20th time with the same character. But you make a very good point. I wish the devs had said what you said instead of always rolling out the old chestnut of "reward commensurate with risk." That never made any sense to me, because I was far more likely to fail when I was by myself than when I was on a team or league. The bigger the group, the less difference my actions made overall, and I could make a mistake or even die without affecting the overall outcome much. In my book, that is a lot less risk. If they had just said, "OK, we'll give you a solo path because we value solo players, but it won't be as fast as the group content because grouping keeps this game alive," I think I would have been much more content with the decision.

Spurn all ye kindle.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Cinnder wrote:
Cinnder wrote:

Ralathar44 wrote:
That's really difficult from a design perspective. Because if you don't incentivize group play being much more rewarding you end up with mostly soloers and that is NOT good for the community. Group play pretty much HAS to be more rewarding to make sure that it is the dominant play style. Group ties and communities are what keep MMORPG's rolling. WOW is excellent proof of that, it would have died long long ago without those group ties preventing people who are done with the game from leaving.

You know, as someone who plays solo about 80% of the time, I used to feel the same as jag, especially as I was going through new DA for the 20th time with the same character. But you make a very good point. I wish the devs had said what you said instead of always rolling out the old chestnut of "reward commensurate with risk." That never made any sense to me, because I was far more likely to fail when I was by myself than when I was on a team or league. The bigger the group, the less difference my actions made overall, and I could make a mistake or even die without affecting the overall outcome much. In my book, that is a lot less risk. If they had just said, "OK, we'll give you a solo path because we value solo players, but it won't be as fast as the group content because grouping keeps this game alive," I think I would have been much more content with the decision.

*blush* thank you for the praise of some of your compliments. I've only picked this up after playing MMORPGs, and having a passion for games and MMORPG's for over a decade. I've played likely a dozen MMORPG's at this point for a great many hours, sometimes more than was likely entirely healthy :D. It's only through time, experience, and being able to contrast the many MMORPG's out there with an interest in WHY and HOW they did what they did that I have managed to realize some of this stuff.

There is, also, a second tremendous concern in designing challenging content for solo players to scale the risk/reward appropriately for them. Some combos or classes will undeniably solo better than others. So some solo players will be better rewarded and have a significantly better risk/reward curve than the weaker solo combos/classes. This can range rather wildly. However, groups tend to have a much more stable power curve and reward everyone on the group evenly. Group power fluctuates but even in a varied game like COH one group did not have near as much power variation from another as the power variation of a tanker/mastermind/scrapper/stalker vs a defender/corruptor/controller.

IE one group might be able to manage finishing something twice as fast as another. But the right solo AT/powerset could complete their equivalent group tasks in excess of even 10 times faster than one of the group oriented AT/powersets.

*clears throat for "design theory?"
This actually sets the stage for something that is very important in life as a whole and especially so in organization, process design, any other type of design, or code. Before you change anything you must try and understand in depth everything that you will affect and how those part already affect everything and collectively define the capabilities and characteristics of the thing you are changes...and the impact of those characteristics and capabilities on the intended purpose. Basically you need to know what may change or break, even in the most insignificant way that might make a difference.

Once you have a solid understanding of that, then you can try new ideas on for size. Assume that each idea you come up with is bad and do everything within your mental power to break it, see how it would fail, try to paint it out as a bad idea. If you can get past that stage THEN you are ready to show someone else. It is that person's job to to then try to break your idea in as many ways as badly as possible.

Once you get to the point where you've tweaked enough that you can't think of any further ways to break it...step back, take a break. Leave it be. The come back and look at it asking if it still serves the intended purposes it was supposed to. Does it have the intended feel and usability? Did you break any feature that may be needed. Now, try and break it one final time with a clear mind that has rested from when it was a great idea.

IF you and those helping you then pass the idea at that point you get to release the idea to a much larger pool of people who will break your precious idea in ways you never dreamed were possible lol. They will find ways to break it lol. Trust me. So try to design your process, organization, or change to be redundant upon failure and easily tweaked if needed without losing efficiency.

This is the reality of successful changes to organization, design, process, etc and has similarities to problems in code :D. It's pretty tough to improve on existing design sometimes. Other times it's as simple as having a common sense idea of "uh, hey guys...you know how people always carry a blanket around when it's cold and have to keep it tucked around them and stuff. What if we made a person sized blanket and put two sleeves on it?"

Kind of unfair isn't it. The people who designed and implemented netflix prolly are not all that better off than the inventors of the snuggy. But that's how we progress haha. Through new people, new ideas, alot of making sure the ideas are good, and the occasional bout of common sense that NOBODY thought of somehow.

Important Note:
Keep in mind when I speak like this it may sound like I think I know it all or something. Far from it. Each and every person who reads this thread will have good ideas that I never will. It's only through our collective intelligence that we are able to keep improving what we have and come up with alot of new good ideas. I just have a bit of an experience, nothing more. It's a hard line to walk to speak confidently about something you have a good deal of experience in and not seem arrogant or a know it all :/. Harder still when you have to make sure that you are personally aware that any of your ideas, experience or not, could still be wrong :D.

Ahhh, sometimes I hate....SCIENCE!! Nobody likes to admit they could be wrong at any time and the more knowledgeable you are about something the less you wish to believe you are wrong. That is why I rely on you, other players, to make sure I'm not full of bull hahaha.

P.S. **** I'm full of words.....I wish I knew how to express this all more concisely. My apologies.

jag40
Offline
Last seen: 7 years 8 months ago
Joined: 09/17/2013 - 10:51
Ralathar44 wrote:
Ralathar44 wrote:

jag40 wrote:
Good points there.
And I agree about cooldowns. They can be useful, but I think between COX and CO they are one the opposite extreme tips. Yeah I wished CO fleshed out rifle and munitions were fleshed out like pistols could be a complete set (note: I actually use all my powers that I choose on munitions not just a few but many people I seen don't. And while I think more power to them if they choose to play that way, I think some things make sense to have cool downs.) On the other end of the scale COX got too cooldown happy. Which kind of resulted in the same thing as CO with relatively few powers being used on the regular and the rest every blue moon. In CO due to other powers overshadowing in COX due everything having a cool down, some were absurdly long, and even more of a pain when facing the many enemies with -recharge powers. Although I do love the energy builder idea that CO have.
Name 5 power sets in City of Heros that didn't use all of their powers on a regular basis :D. It was actually seen as an advantage if a powerset had a less useful power because it made room in very tight builds for another power :D.
Now I know some were on long cooldowns, but this is also what allowed them to be more powerful. To keep things relatively balanced extremely powerful abilities need to be very limited in supply. Your choice in COX was limiting it with cooldowns. I'll be the first to admit that it sucked when you ran into -recharge enemies, but -recharge enemies was the only way to challenge some power combos. While sappers were the only way to challenge some other combos. My claw/Super Reflexs scrapper would laugh at -recharge. However my Trick Arrow/Archery Defender HATED it :D. On the other hand my Trick Arrow/Archery defender laughed at sappers, but my Claws/Super Reflexs scrapper HATED them. You always hate things that counter your build :D.
Your choice in CO was limiting it with power requirements. Though to be honest because you could absolutely center a build around power generation and reserves in CO, while still maintaining a ton of damage, you could game this fairly effectively. A good exmple being gatling gun where you could easily get a full maintain of it off with the right stats.
Ironically even with those limitations the impossibility of balancing their free form system created numerous broken builds that utterly broke the game, and in the end those builds severely hurt customer retention and utterly killed the zombie PVP, which was insanely fun until a broken build showed up. Without free to play people and lifetime subscribers I highly suspect that game would have much less population atm or would have even died completely.
Quote:
20 the zones, in COX some were different, but most were just variation of a city, Kings row, steel canyon, skyway, all basically felt the same besides the enemies encountered.
*scratches head*. Kings row were run down slums that slowly got renovated to look less run down over time and generally very short buildings except the NW side, Steel Canyon was like the central city metroplex and was full o skyscrapers and much more densely urbanized, While Skyway city had alot of overpasses and ups and downs. They were all cities but the zones looked and functioned completely differently. As someone who spent alot of his time on foot using swiftness/sprint/hurdle/combat jumping as a travel power trust me on this. I had to know them intimately to get around and not hold up my team. People were usually surprised that they didn't have to wait on me :D.

Quote:
Now the mission maps definitely could use some variety, especially in an instance mission heavy game.
HAHA you nailed that one right on the head. It's my hopes that City of Titans makes use of a robust random level generator at some point with specific levels for specific missions. COH indoor level variety was just as bad as the outdoor level variety of your average MMORPG, which is to say terrible :D. Layer cake of doom caves *shiver*
Quote:
22 streakbreaker. man. Sometimes I suspect the RNG in COX was wonky. Streakbreaker good idea, but unless I'm simply the unluckiest cat I nthe entire world, I seen way too many streakbreakers while having 90-95% supposedly chance to hit. Last time I looked at my data, my hit rate was around 65-70% in reality.
Weird, I never had an issue hitting but even when people went 2 acc 4 damage back in the days of SO I still used 3 acc. I always overkilled slightly for accuracy because I'd rather lose a few % damage and be reliable. Even if the enemy started using force fields or something.
Quote:
23 The Incarnate solo section could use a bit tweaking. It was tooo slow progress compared to simply farming the iTFs. The carrot and stick seemed to be the iTFs. I think if they do an incarnate like system, the solo way should be beefed up a bit, not saying it should be the exact same speed as doing the incarnate trials, but it shouldn't have been as slow progress in comparison for the solo. Besides to see the story arcs storylines, which were well written IMO, it really wasn't anywhere near efficient way relatively to going up the incarnate ladder. I figured they did it that way in the same vein as the usual end game that is big in MMO where it's dungeon centric. But times are changing.
That's really difficult from a design perspective. Because if you don't incentivize group play being much more rewarding you end up with mostly soloers and that is NOT good for the community. Group play pretty much HAS to be more rewarding to make sure that it is the dominant play style. Group ties and communities are what keep MMORPG's rolling. WOW is excellent proof of that, it would have died long long ago without those group ties preventing people who are done with the game from leaving.
It's definitely not a bad system as it was. COH was the only MMORPG I knew of that let you make realistic and steady process on your end game solo to start with. I got prety much all of my mains stuff via solo, I only did a few ITF's. I didn't even have to do some boring dumb quest I could only do X often like other MMORPG make you do solo to earn group rewards at a far slower pace. I got to earn progress just by having fun :).
Unless we can come up with something better that won't sabotage group play then I see it as a good system that we'll keep trying to think up ways to improve. But to come up with something better we'd really have to think outside of the box.
Quote:
18 8 man team, man was that an awesome feature. More people, less, usually, one have to be uber to make a difference. They just had to participate and could get by. Downside, those dang on TFs that required 8 man team when the population pickings were slim. That sucked. Those were times where I wished it was only 4 to 5 man teams.
/cry dang legacy tech. I'm sure that City of Titans will allow you to sub someone in and continue the TF equivalent. They'd have to scale the rewards of the new join by the remaining missions of course, but with a friendly community I'm sure people would be glad to help out :D.
Quote:
15) zone events. good and annoying at times. Man they are fun, but at times sometimes they straight went overboard with them when it zone event back to back to back and due to zone events, anyone with an outdoor mish at the time in that zone is SOL. Basically having to do the zone event even if they just did it once again, or in the case of that one with the totem things, simply wait till it passed again due to lack of interest. Kind of killed the pace at times. I thin kif they have zone event, they shouldn't despawn all the mobs, especially ones that may be tied to missions. Because it sucks having to stand around for ten minutes (sometimes more if they follow it up immediately with another zone event) just to complete one mission.
I'm sure the fine folks designing City of Titans will take those frustrations in mind when they design their own zone events. To be honest I can't think of a better reference of how to do zone events than Guild Wars 2 atm. If they did interfere with a quest area then they were short lived or had a fail state that would make the zone a bit more hostile, but you could still do your quests.
To be honest Guild Wars 2 is likely a game to check out for a lot of smart changes. While I wouldn't say use their quest system for everything, quest heart equivalents would make a fantastic way to work with police chiefs and other things here and there. It was also nice that you used multiple methods to help a certain amount rather than 25 of this 15 of that and etc. This allowed you to do what you enjoyed more and pick up other stuff casually along the way.
You could also still have your normal quests with the kill 25 thugs (with spawns in the appropriate areas assured to be sufficient this time!!!!, I'm looking at you COH), and then immediately call in and continue the missions :P.
A combination of questing methods would likely be most immersive and could better be tailored to the feel and style of each story arc while still having plenty of content for people looking for a more casual way to brawl through a few levels.

1) Probably easier by ATs, Controllers, Blasters, defenders, outside TA, MMs, All one needed was an AOE, control heal or hold depending on AT, a quick fire power and use those two until the big nuke recharges, and maybe one other one in between to have in case. But I guess it largely depends on playstyle in CO I find it easier and more compelling to use all my powers there, while others seems to find it, "Well all I have to do is use one or two powers." while I feel that way about COX and they feel it's variety of useful powers.
PVP, well just about any game with PVP have your PvP and powers that is near expected for all PVP builds to take, and the rest of the sets. Even COX. Walk into cox pvp without ss/sj and jousting and people will call you gimped. Just like in CO, if ya don't pick, actually I'm not sure what people pick because I came across many varieties of powers but then again I haven't yet pvp extensively in CO as much as I did in COX yet. But I hear TGM and some ebon ruin or something is usually the common FoTM stuff.

2) meh, maybe my threshold for difference is just ahigher. It all felt the same to me. Half the time I couldn't tell the difference until I ran into a mob, or hear the Blyde's square music without opening my map to see.

5) no no, I'm not saying take away the incentive. Just up the incentive for solo a little bit. Because I found out, what happened with incarnate trial, many times, not many people on to fill those large teams, or only two or three TFs are farmed the rest are put on the back burner so in some cases the choice is simply farm the popular farm TF like the crowd or go solo which requires farming the mission arcs there and it wasn't that many of them for the incarnate content. Thing in WoW is that there are vast amount of people and just about anytime any day one can find a group that is willing to do what the yare interested in. In COX, not so much all the time. Many days, not many people was itching to do say, UG, or MoM, or the likes, or well any incarnate trial outside the one with siege/that female robot who's name I keep forgetting for some reason, Maurader, and ever so often the Keyes Reactor one. There was teams forming for the Cole one but 98% of them was simply farms just doing the first part and reset. That can be just as damaging. Because then it kind of nullify the effect that group encouraging is supposed to do. But seriously, the solo route of incarnate leveling up was so slow it might as not even been there. Like I said I'm not saying get rid of the advantage, just up the progress rate a bit for the missions there. If one is going to advertise it as a way to solo incarnate make it seem at least somewhat efficient. The solo incarnate route seemed so slow that it felt more like the devs were saying "Well we put this in here so no one can say we didn't give a solo route but we really want the progress to be through the itrials.". The trials can be the most efficient although I think depending on population they should adjust group size requirement, because eventually naturally especially wit ha small population people will pool to a few of the trials and farm the hell of them, leaving it very difficult for any one to form team to do anything outside the FoTM farming trial. WoW do not have that problem due to sheer amount of people they have. So group play work very well there. But adjusting the requirement, if they have one at all, which I hope they don't really but never know, leads into the next one.

6) yeah that too, but I was more talking about starting up one. Sometimes not enough people interested. Kind of same effect as described above about the few FoTM TFs coupled with relatively low population. And in theory people would be glad to help out. In reality, not so much because it seemed most people were interested in speed runs farming ITFs. Which is good good encourage group play, but when it affects other abilty to to play sometimes, group play or the requirement to group play loses it's sheen, especially when the choice is "Well fellas, looks like we wont get enough people for this TF. I'm sure if we want to do the ITF for the umpteenth time, we can gather a few more, but looks like this is all we can get. We been at this for an hour and a half, want to call it?" New people come in especially when they trying to experience the game, and like to group probably potentially could be put off and leave, which hurt retention. Now I'm not saying stop farming. No no let people play how they want to choose is what I'm saying. Maybe they cant get enough or a group of four want to not go the FoTM farming route, let them be able to start the task and go for it. Or maybe a task is very unpopular and a few people want to do it to see what the story is like, have a way for them to do it.

7) Oh man I hope so. and hope it stays casual but while teaming is cool, in low population, part of that casual feel is the ability to solo. Spending an hour and half trying to build a team because it's not the FoTM farming TF, is no fun and a bit of a grind before even starting the TF that may take another hour or 1.5, assuming that the 1.5 hour spent building the team didn't eat up much of a team mate play time and they got to go. Casual to me means being able to log on, hey there's a team doing something I'm interested in, hop on that team, do the tasks hey everyone have to go, ok, still able to get tasks I want to get done. Log off, next day, well it seems people are busy farming today, done that TF 300 times, I want to try this task out over here, that I haven't ever done or not in a while, who's with me? NO one? Ok, and still being able to go do it. Flexibility.

Oh yeah speaking of WoW a lot of stuff is not team based anymore in WoW. You can go in and try ya hand solo, although not highly recommended but they let you try. Same with CO. Times are changing. Games are getting more causal with the understanding that not everyone have the same interest, some people just want to farm their favorite TF, others just want to explore the story, some want all the badges, some switch from day to day, some peole have time to team for hours, some may half hour, some are not social party animals and take a while to warm up to people, others jump right in and instant celebrity, others rather go their own pace, some rather have someone to talk to, some find constant talking distracting, some love company of others, some it's hindrance putting up with people, some people had great experience with people, some seem to have attracted every single troll/jerk/flamer/butthole in the entire game and have bitter taste in mouth from teaming. And more and more games are spreading their wings and reach to causal players. Reason WoW survived so long because they know how to adapt. They do it more at a deliberate evolving pace instead of all at once. Also the fact that other games set up like WoW wit hthe big end game raids and stuff but not enough population to support it and thus it looks empty and tedious to form a team. In WoW for anything I ever done never took me more than 10 minutes even in the dead of morning on a Tuesday during a school year. In COX for a similar TF, it takes average of 30-35 minutes on a supposedly peak day weekend (counting only successful ones. Usually find a few people patient enough to keep trying to get enough people for 1.5-2 hours. Anymore than that it seems like a disservice to expect them to wait around. That's two hours of game time standing around. weekend outside peak hours, about 50 minutes (again only counting success in getting enough people), any other day besides Friday night or sat. school year or not, about a bit over 1 hour to 1.5 hour. But most of the time never end up with enough people for the task. Now the FoTM ones, yeah it's like clockwork. But me, I can only do ITF so many times, before I prefer to do something else. Now with WoW level of population, I'm sure my time and success would have been a lot less time and greater success because that is larger pool of interested people. In COX, with the server thing, it's possible there was one interested that left about ten minutes before I logged on, one that wasn't monitoring the channel, three interested on another server, and two log on interested after we disband after lack of interest, but who knows. No one joins or respond, then cant really count them as being interested in that TF at that particular time.
Which is one reason I do like CO, no team gated stuff. Not because I'm anti-social or do not want to team but the reality of the matter is that sometimes, with not many players to begin with, different interests, different play times, and the other factors it decreases the chance of finding 4-7 other people that are interested in that same task at that same particular time period on that same server.

Of course I'm not sure how they will balance or their plan on balance or what not or the expected number of player they expect to draw yet. Because sometimes interest or what people will flock to is hard to predict. I do not think they added ITF knowing that in a couple of years that would go from the scorn of TFs to the FoTM farm favorite. But even as the population changed besides Positron TF, they really didn't make any changes to the legacy stuff as the population changed over the years. When there was nearly 200,000 player running around, it was decent. When it became half that or less, with on one side most of the high levels busy farming Incarnate trials, and the other end you have a large group farming ITF (Imp. TF), then anything outside that circle became a bit of a chore to build teams for.Although granted it may be because they didn't get a chance to get around to it

Will that same effect happen in CoT? Maybe maybe not, but hopefully they studied and taken into consideration of those effects and realizing sometimes the call for the ability to solo or do stuff with smaller teams isn't always about anti-social people that want to solo everything and not interact. Sometimes it's people would love to interact and be social but really don't find farming the same few incarnate trials or ITF over and over a fun way to be social and team.

Because looking at the "wish what you did before closing" and other things, one thing that comes up often about COX is the storyline and the enjoyment players got from experiencing. So why hinder them with team gated stuff, or not making any sort of adjustment or paying attention when it's noticed that due to large group of people farming the same stuff over and over kind of make it harder for those that do want to experience the content and storyline but cant because it locked behind a team gated requirement that may be hard to achieve at the time. Then look quizzical when some of them turn bitter against teaming. I'm not saying stop the farming I'm saying maybe team gating requirement was not such a bright idea to begin with. Good idea when plenty of people running around, but consider when there isn't as many. And many of the regrets posted were not being able to many of the TFs. Showing there was interest but like I said with the factor of time gameply time ability, servers, and being in the same place at the same time looking at the same channels and hopefully not AFK at the time it is advertise about forming, it can becomes like the chance of being in a Wyoming airport and just so happening to be sitting next to Bill gates, and Warren Buffet with Bush (the band) all at the same all of you craving eating a philly cheesesteak at the same time.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
*sigh* You officially made

*sigh* You officially made me engage rant mode. Because some of this stuff is seriously off base and undeserved.

jag40 wrote:

1) Probably easier by ATs, Controllers, Blasters, defenders, outside TA, MMs, All one needed was an AOE, control heal or hold depending on AT, a quick fire power and use those two until the big nuke recharges, and maybe one other one in between to have in case. But I guess it largely depends on playstyle in CO I find it easier and more compelling to use all my powers there, while others seems to find it, "Well all I have to do is use one or two powers." while I feel that way about COX and they feel it's variety of useful powers.

You are going to have to list a concrete example. I'll even make it easier. List 1 single power set combo that fits what you just described. Because I played a veritable legion of alts and I can't think of any. Meanwhile I can just start listing examples from CO and it would take me a very long time to finish that list. The game has it's strengths, most powers being useful without overlapping half the stuff even in the same set is not one of them.

Which is one reason I do like CO, no team gated stuff. Not because I'm anti-social or do not want to team but the reality of the matter is that sometimes, with not many players to begin with, different interests, different play times, and the other factors it decreases the chance of finding 4-7 other people that are interested in that same task at that same particular time period on that same server.

To be fair there is little team stuff at all in CO that anyone cares about. It's mostly just people doing alerts to level and failing them repeatedly at that. The teaming and aggro mechanics in CO are effectively broken lol. Great game for many things, teaming is not one of them :D.

Of course it also helps that CO crams most of it's people into a few zones though. Go to some of the less traveled zones and try and experience content to get a more accurate parallel. You'll find population falls off DRASTICALLY. (I play CO from time to time still :D)

Also, I've played WOW and I've stayed familiar with it. Even with all the tools they have now (they did not have dungeon finder for a long long time and yes you did have to wait, sometimes alot) they had to release an entirely new cross server zone system to alleviate the exact TF finding problems you mentioned as part of Mists of Panderia. Because of all the dead zones nobody was in and all the dead raids nobody could do. To bring some decrepit semblance of life back to 90% of their game's content because it never saw people other than the flash of power leveling, which they also made faster.

I had no problem doing any TF that wasn't avoided because it was overly annoying in some way. But then again I have a significant advantage in that I was a regular team leader and COH had a great LFG system. I could recruit players via the LFG system, and if I didn't have enough broadcast in a few populated zones to get a TF shortly under way. Off peak hours? Yeah it could be a different story but as mentioned earlier that was the same way with WOW before MOP for most of it's raids and most of it's zones.

Quote:

Because looking at the "wish what you did before closing" and other things, one thing that comes up often about COX is the storyline and the enjoyment players got from experiencing. So why hinder them with team gated stuff, or not making any sort of adjustment or paying attention when it's noticed that due to large group of people farming the same stuff over and over kind of make it harder for those that do want to experience the content and storyline but cant because it locked behind a team gated requirement that may be hard to achieve at the time. Then look quizzical when some of them turn bitter against teaming. I'm not saying stop the farming I'm saying maybe team gating requirement was not such a bright idea to begin with. Good idea when plenty of people running around, but consider when there isn't as many. And many of the regrets posted were not being able to many of the TFs.

I'm about to be extremely direct with you. City of Heros did a phenomenal job when it came to teaming and team mechanics. It is the reason that game survived and was still profitable at the time of it's shut down. It released competing with WOW and EQ II amongst other MMORPG and never died, always maintained in the relatively same area of subs for many years. The ONLY reason it was able to do that was it's great teaming mechanics building a strong and friendly community.

Paragon Studios even whipped the original creators (Cryptic) who sold their old game and then opened a direct competitor (which is kind of understandable but still kind of uncool). This considering they had all the experience of making, running, and updating the original to learn from.

Paragon Studios then added a proper end game onto COH and even provided the ability for people to acquire that end game solo in reasonable time. Something that no other MMORPG, including WOW, does. You don't raid? Their end game content just dies.

If every game company did as good of a job as Paragon Studios did when they got COH the gaming industry as a whole would be a much better place. Companies like EA and Activision wouldn't exist, because they are fricken evil. I mean I could literally just sit here and list all the great things that Paragon Studios did that people desperately wanted. From the proper end game you could solo to power customization to sidekick and difficulty changes to power sets that people had been asking for since release.

I've been playing MMORPG's since I was 16, 13 1/2 years ago and I have never...I repeat NEVER seen any MMORPG be supported in that major of a fashion without requiring you to buy a million expansion packs. Free updates they could have bundled into like 5 expansion packs and sold. The fact that NCsoft shut them down is nothing short of a travesty against their good work and support of their game and an affront to the genre as a whole IMO. That would be like shutting down Old School Bioware before they got bought by EA. Cryptic didn't do a bad job, and I dunno exactly what all changed, but man Paragon Studios played for keeps and they really really went above and beyond.

Guild Wars 2 takes care of it's playerbase pretty decently and its the closest thing I've seen but even that PALES in comparison. Without a single micro-transaction ever needed, because I bought every new power with my stipend from my sub once it went free to play and even then half of those were released free.

I'm really sorry but your complaints just seem selfish and petty because I've been both routes, I know the speed it was. I've solo'd and teamed. I solo'd out almost the entirety of my incarnate stuff on my Staff/Willpower Tanker. I even solo'd some of my Trick Arrow/Archery. I got most of it via just teaming with friends with no ITF. I think I did a couple ITF's on him. But then I didn't expect it to be something that just happened in a week when I was spending on a modicum of time on it so that I could then ask them "why does this game not have more end game content?".

To be honest, I was too busy having fun with the new toys and the great ability to customize what you got that they gave me instead of "oh hey, new crap better stats and it's shiny too!". It wasn't empy soulless gear, that would completely cease to matter the next release they had. It was fun and severely customizable powers to personalize my character with.

I say this not because I'm trying to be mean, but because I really think you are worsening your own experience with your perspective. The thought of even holding WOW above City of Heros when it comes to end game when you are complaining about soloing is...mind blowing.

Because if you don't change the way you look at some things, you'll never be happy and it'll always be someone else's fault. Whilst I'm over here seeing and understanding the exact same situation having a great time.

Nittix
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/26/2014 - 05:28
I would also like to mention

I would also like to mention that as much as I loved the IO System it could be quite a lame duck if you were chasing a set of purples. Auction houses listed them for gazillions of money that a person would never (short of buying obscene amounts of currency from COH cash farmers) be able to purchase. Don't get me wrong I am all about earning things in these awesome games as it gives me an excuse to keep going... BUT. Sometimes it felt like too much I never would have had a life if I had to stay in for months on end trying to earn mission cash to afford these extortionate prices.

In my opinion if you are planning on keeping the auction house as an option to sell IO's amongst other things I think you should create a cash limit that a seller can ask for. Hell I wouldn't mind if it was a bidding system where it started low but demand could cause it to go higher. I think a time stamp should be there... That way the seller has a chance to get a lot of money but the buyer also has a chance to actually afford the item.

Some auction house IOs were going for 25, 000, 000 I mean it was completely insane... From this I always thought that any person who stumbles onto a rare enhance thought they could stick a ridiculous price tag on it just to see if anyone would pay it. I never did. I put an enhance on the auction and if it didn't sell immediately Id lower the price.

You give people the chance to put a ridiculous price tag on an item and they will even if they have no real reason to. That's why I don't think the cost of the item should be defined by the seller or the buyer... By creating a bidding situation in the auction house you are allowing things to start small and go as high as a person or persons can afford... The winner gets the item end of... It just seems like a much fairer system then some guy asking a price that is simply insane....

I'll write up more as I think of them but that one was a real big issue when I was playing... I never got the bloody healing set :(

grouchyguy
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/10/2013 - 17:32
Nittix wrote:
Nittix wrote:

I would also like to mention that as much as I loved the IO System it could be quite a lame duck if you were chasing a set of purples. Auction houses listed them for gazillions of money that a person would never (short of buying obscene amounts of currency from COH cash farmers) be able to purchase.

Cash poor? Buy them with merits or a-merits.

grouchyguy
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/10/2013 - 17:32
Mayhem mishes!

Mayhem mishes!

Nittix
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/26/2014 - 05:28
But then why have money?

But then why have money? Besides the places that I saw with Merits for trade never had the sets I was after anyway... Just orange grade IO's never purples

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
Nittix wrote:
Nittix wrote:

I would also like to mention that as much as I loved the IO System it could be quite a lame duck if you were chasing a set of purples. Auction houses listed them for gazillions of money that a person would never (short of buying obscene amounts of currency from COH cash farmers) be able to purchase. Don't get me wrong I am all about earning things in these awesome games as it gives me an excuse to keep going... BUT. Sometimes it felt like too much I never would have had a life if I had to stay in for months on end trying to earn mission cash to afford these extortionate prices.
In my opinion if you are planning on keeping the auction house as an option to sell IO's amongst other things I think you should create a cash limit that a seller can ask for. Hell I wouldn't mind if it was a bidding system where it started low but demand could cause it to go higher. I think a time stamp should be there... That way the seller has a chance to get a lot of money but the buyer also has a chance to actually afford the item.
Some auction house IOs were going for 25, 000, 000 I mean it was completely insane... From this I always thought that any person who stumbles onto a rare enhance thought they could stick a ridiculous price tag on it just to see if anyone would pay it. I never did. I put an enhance on the auction and if it didn't sell immediately Id lower the price.
You give people the chance to put a ridiculous price tag on an item and they will even if they have no real reason to. That's why I don't think the cost of the item should be defined by the seller or the buyer... By creating a bidding situation in the auction house you are allowing things to start small and go as high as a person or persons can afford... The winner gets the item end of... It just seems like a much fairer system then some guy asking a price that is simply insane....
I'll write up more as I think of them but that one was a real big issue when I was playing... I never got the bloody healing set :(

Get your own purple drop and sell it to afford the one you wanted?

Nittix
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/26/2014 - 05:28
I gotta be honest though I

I gotta be honest though I never saw the point of the Merit's not only because they never afforded me an IO that was purple but also because I didn't get merit drops often... Maybe I was doing something wrong I don't know...

Nittix
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/26/2014 - 05:28
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

Nittix wrote:
I would also like to mention that as much as I loved the IO System it could be quite a lame duck if you were chasing a set of purples. Auction houses listed them for gazillions of money that a person would never (short of buying obscene amounts of currency from COH cash farmers) be able to purchase. Don't get me wrong I am all about earning things in these awesome games as it gives me an excuse to keep going... BUT. Sometimes it felt like too much I never would have had a life if I had to stay in for months on end trying to earn mission cash to afford these extortionate prices.
In my opinion if you are planning on keeping the auction house as an option to sell IO's amongst other things I think you should create a cash limit that a seller can ask for. Hell I wouldn't mind if it was a bidding system where it started low but demand could cause it to go higher. I think a time stamp should be there... That way the seller has a chance to get a lot of money but the buyer also has a chance to actually afford the item.
Some auction house IOs were going for 25, 000, 000 I mean it was completely insane... From this I always thought that any person who stumbles onto a rare enhance thought they could stick a ridiculous price tag on it just to see if anyone would pay it. I never did. I put an enhance on the auction and if it didn't sell immediately Id lower the price.
You give people the chance to put a ridiculous price tag on an item and they will even if they have no real reason to. That's why I don't think the cost of the item should be defined by the seller or the buyer... By creating a bidding situation in the auction house you are allowing things to start small and go as high as a person or persons can afford... The winner gets the item end of... It just seems like a much fairer system then some guy asking a price that is simply insane....
I'll write up more as I think of them but that one was a real big issue when I was playing... I never got the bloody healing set :(

Get your own purple drop and sell it to afford the one you wanted?

When I did a purple to sell (which was hardly ever) I didn't get as much for it...

Nittix
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/26/2014 - 05:28
I didn't mind paying for the

I didn't mind paying for the IO's if I had to but the point is to get the money for them would take forever. Purple IO's were so rare I hardly saw any, except as recipe's in the auction house window... I think since they announced them I only had ever naturally found 1 or 2 purple recipes in my entire COH experience

FalconStriker
FalconStriker's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 2 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/18/2013 - 17:40
Don't forget about the

Don't forget about the difficulty slider for missions that rewarded you based on what difficulty you complete each mission on, which also effected grouping, based on what the group leader set for difficulty, really nice feature.

I forget the name of it, but I also loved the zone outdoor bosses that would show up, like the kraken, and some how it was able to adjust accordingly for all levels so level 20's could stand shoulder to shoulder with level 50's and provide a great challenge for all and then when you pull it off you get a badge that said you did it and to add flair to your bio.

So many great features.

grouchyguy
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/10/2013 - 17:32
Nittix wrote:
Nittix wrote:

But then why have money? Besides the places that I saw with Merits for trade never had the sets I was after anyway... Just orange grade IO's never purples

Buy LotGs with merits, sell for cash, buy purps.

a-merits could be redeemed for purps directly, but often it was more efficient to use them for other IOs and then sell 'em.

Irrelevant now of course, but as long as CoT offers 2 or 3 different ways to obtain the top-tier stuff it should satisfy most players.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
I never did this, but a

I never did this, but a friend of mine told me the best way to make influence in CoH was to farm AE missions for as many random Blessing of the Zephyr KB protect +4 recipes as possible (which dropped more often, since there were fewer different things at level 1-10 that could drop at all). I don't know if that involved tickets, merits, or just random recipe drops that were more easy to get given the level of the missions, but that was how he said he did it.

That said, once I got my demon/fire mastermind, Manservant Hecubus ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rADdKqPNdaM ), up to level 50, I found I was getting like 5million a day on him just doing 5-6 alignment missions for the Hero Merits and that influence was mostly in the form of totally useless unwanted common and uncommon recipes. The fact that a level 50 damage IO recipe was like 200k was totally out of line with other set-based recipe prices on the market, but was legacy-ed in because of the vendor prices for SOs, so you could sell the really common, crappy stuff for hundreds of thousands of infl to NPC vendors. The MM in general could solo missions with more and more difficult baddies too, and I only had Hecubus up to like +1/x8 to try to cut down on time so I could play other toons more. I spend summer of 2012 soloing Hecubus by day for swag and doing iTrials by night with all of my toons. Good times. By the time they shut the game down I finally had over 2 billion infl one one toon and about ~10-50 million on most of the others.

Hecubus also averaged about a purple a month this way, btw. I mostly hoarded them. Then they shut the game down :(

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
FalconStriker wrote:
FalconStriker wrote:

Don't forget about the difficulty slider for missions that rewarded you based on what difficulty you complete each mission on, which also effected grouping, based on what the group leader set for difficulty, really nice feature.
I forget the name of it, but I also loved the zone outdoor bosses that would show up, like the kraken, and some how it was able to adjust accordingly for all levels so level 20's could stand shoulder to shoulder with level 50's and provide a great challenge for all and then when you pull it off you get a badge that said you did it and to add flair to your bio.
So many great features.

Haha, the difficulty is mentioned at 17. of the forum suggested items list :D. (Second list)

Good Catch on the Giant Monsters though, adding that one!!

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Nittix wrote:
Nittix wrote:

I would also like to mention that as much as I loved the IO System it could be quite a lame duck if you were chasing a set of purples. Auction houses listed them for gazillions of money that a person would never (short of buying obscene amounts of currency from COH cash farmers) be able to purchase. Don't get me wrong I am all about earning things in these awesome games as it gives me an excuse to keep going... BUT. Sometimes it felt like too much I never would have had a life if I had to stay in for months on end trying to earn mission cash to afford these extortionate prices.
In my opinion if you are planning on keeping the auction house as an option to sell IO's amongst other things I think you should create a cash limit that a seller can ask for. Hell I wouldn't mind if it was a bidding system where it started low but demand could cause it to go higher. I think a time stamp should be there... That way the seller has a chance to get a lot of money but the buyer also has a chance to actually afford the item.
Some auction house IOs were going for 25, 000, 000 I mean it was completely insane... From this I always thought that any person who stumbles onto a rare enhance thought they could stick a ridiculous price tag on it just to see if anyone would pay it. I never did. I put an enhance on the auction and if it didn't sell immediately Id lower the price.
You give people the chance to put a ridiculous price tag on an item and they will even if they have no real reason to. That's why I don't think the cost of the item should be defined by the seller or the buyer... By creating a bidding situation in the auction house you are allowing things to start small and go as high as a person or persons can afford... The winner gets the item end of... It just seems like a much fairer system then some guy asking a price that is simply insane....
I'll write up more as I think of them but that one was a real big issue when I was playing... I never got the bloody healing set :(

If your biggest complaint was that it took too long to get the most powerful end game items that were completely optional and the game wasn't even balanced around...at all....is the worst you've got then you truly had a very enjoyable playing experience.

I'd say here the fault is on your expectations and perspective. It's an important thing to remember that how you view something and your expectations will actually make an extremely large difference on how it feels to you. Many times this can be as big as or even bigger than the reality of the situation.

I viewed purples as a nice little celebratory bonus and when I got one, even if it was a cheap one, it was like OMG OMG OMG PURPLE!! And Grats all around. Meanwhile you viewed it from a different angle of "why don't I have this stuff yet, I should have it." and it bothered you greatly. All from a simple difference in perspective and expectations.

It took me years to really learn my expectations, preferences, and what is really important to me in a game. It's increased my enjoyment and understanding of games as a whole massively however.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
Things I liked (you might

Things I liked (you might want to add some of these to your list above):

1. The Weekly Strike Targets. For those of us who did TFs galore, it made it easier to plan when to do which ones, and it gave everyone reason to do them again.

2. Origins While it was true that they didn;t really mean anything except in flavor, I liked that they were there, despite the confusion it added in choosing a DO when you needed one. They could probably have gotten away with just 2 tho, Science and Magic.

3. Co-operative hero-villain content and competitive (PVPVE) content. When I say PVPVE, I mean things like Warburg, Bloody Bay, Siren's Call, Recluse's Victory. Co-op would be iTrials, The Crash Site, etc.

4. Merits. You got a fair (or close to it) reward for each TF or whatever which wasn't random and could be used to get you whatever you wanted (with obvious exceptions).

5. VIP by paid subscription. I'm not sure I like this system the best (I think "everyone pays a sub" might be the best, for getting rid of trolls) but I definitly like the ability to pay more for more status in-game. I think founding/maintaining an SG should probably require this.

6. RL swag. In reality, CoH didn't have enough of this. I wanted to be able to buy a CoH t-shirt, mouse pad, lunchbox (YES lunchbox, I keep my DnD dice in one!) etc.

7. Content that got you limited use temp powers and other cool stuff, like Vanguard Heavies, jellomen, warburg nukes, etc.

8. A community virtually free of trolls and jerks calling people noob, victimizing the newbs, giving you crap about your slotting or powers, etc.

9. Being able to truly fly in three spatial dimensions.

10. People who wrote the awesome wiki sites that were out there.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 3 hours 33 min ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
There were T-Shirts to buy

There were T-Shirts to buy from the NCsoft store (at least at one point in time...), and I do have a CoV mouse pad and a Going Rogue mousepad (Going Rogue one was Razer branded).

*edit* I forgot about the Lord Recluse statue...

It was out there, but whilst it might not have been on the Bricks and Mortar store shelves, it was around.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Things I liked (you might want to add some of these to your list above):
1. The Weekly Strike Targets. For those of us who did TFs galore, it made it easier to plan when to do which ones, and it gave everyone reason to do them again.
2. Origins While it was true that they didn;t really mean anything except in flavor, I liked that they were there, despite the confusion it added in choosing a DO when you needed one. They could probably have gotten away with just 2 tho, Science and Magic.
3. Co-operative hero-villain content and competitive (PVPVE) content. When I say PVPVE, I mean things like Warburg, Bloody Bay, Siren's Call, Recluse's Victory. Co-op would be iTrials, The Crash Site, etc.
4. Merits. You got a fair (or close to it) reward for each TF or whatever which wasn't random and could be used to get you whatever you wanted (with obvious exceptions).
5. VIP by paid subscription. I'm not sure I like this system the best (I think "everyone pays a sub" might be the best, for getting rid of trolls) but I definitly like the ability to pay more for more status in-game. I think founding/maintaining an SG should probably require this.
6. RL swag. In reality, CoH didn't have enough of this. I wanted to be able to buy a CoH t-shirt, mouse pad, lunchbox (YES lunchbox, I keep my DnD dice in one!) etc.
7. Content that got you limited use temp powers and other cool stuff, like Vanguard Heavies, jellomen, warburg nukes, etc.
8. A community virtually free of trolls and jerks calling people noob, victimizing the newbs, giving you crap about your slotting or powers, etc.
9. Being able to truly fly in three spatial dimensions.
10. People who wrote the awesome wiki sites that were out there.

I've got most of these but I'm not going to add weekly strike force, merits, VIP, etc. Because I don't really consider these things anything that really embody COH, but rather are a sign of the modernization of MMORPG's in general that happened in the last handful of years.

While no doubt these type things should be in game, IMO they should just be standard fare for modern MMORPGs. Having reliable rewards for raids, bonuses for doing X or Y random raid each week, and a good monetization strategy really are just core elements of modern MMORPGs.

Adding the origin though :D. That's something that could be done better in new superhero MMORPG. I love the fact COX used 5 origins but I hated that it only made the most superficial of differences. It felt like they missed out on the opportunity to make a great custom story arc or contact out of that one.

Also adding cooperative hero/villain content. It's important that people still be able to play together. It's my hope that instead of having totally separate zones we will eb able to mostly share the same zones. After all, did Lex Luthor have to live somewhere else? The Joker? ETC? You see my point. and it lowers development costs.

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Ralathar44 wrote:
Ralathar44 wrote:

Also adding cooperative hero/villain content. It's important that people still be able to play together. It's my hope that instead of having totally separate zones we will eb able to mostly share the same zones. After all, did Lex Luthor have to live somewhere else? The Joker? ETC? You see my point. and it lowers development costs.

However, one of the things I hated (which probably came about because of what you mention in your last sentence) was the lame story attention they gave to these co-op zones as far as villains were concerned.

"OK, so we've got this cool new zone where aliens/ancient soldiers/a world-devouring spirit are perpetrating all sorts of mayhem, so we need you all to go in there and save the day."

"Excuse me? Dr. Malicious here. Why exactly do I, as a villain, want to help? Will I gain a relic of power? Will I make new evil allies? Will I find untold riches?"

"Ummmmmm..... Yeah. Well.... Uh, you, um, have to save the day exactly in the same fashion as a hero or else... uh... the world will end. Yeah, that's the ticket. The world will end and you won't be able to do your villainy stuff anymore. How's that?"

"But I'm a psychotic villain who WANTS to bring about the end of the world..."

"LA LA LA any other questions? Nope? Good, well, good luck saving all of us heroically-- er, I mean co-operatively!"

Spurn all ye kindle.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Cinnder wrote:
Cinnder wrote:

Ralathar44 wrote:
Also adding cooperative hero/villain content. It's important that people still be able to play together. It's my hope that instead of having totally separate zones we will eb able to mostly share the same zones. After all, did Lex Luthor have to live somewhere else? The Joker? ETC? You see my point. and it lowers development costs.

However, one of the things I hated (which probably came about because of what you mention in your last sentence) was the lame story attention they gave to these co-op zones as far as villains were concerned.
"OK, so we've got this cool new zone where aliens/ancient soldiers/a world-devouring spirit are perpetrating all sorts of mayhem, so we need you all to go in there and save the day."
"Excuse me? Dr. Malicious here. Why exactly do I, as a villain, want to help? Will I gain a relic of power? Will I make new evil allies? Will I find untold riches?"
"Ummmmmm..... Yeah. Well.... Uh, you, um, have to save the day exactly in the same fashion as a hero or else... uh... the world will end. Yeah, that's the ticket. The world will end and you won't be able to do your villainy stuff anymore. How's that?"
"But I'm a psychotic villain who WANTS to bring about the end of the world..."
"LA LA LA any other questions? Nope? Good, well, good luck saving all of us heroically-- er, I mean co-operatively!"

Fortunately nearly every villain wants to rule the world, wants riches, or wants to continue being an ***. Heck even the guys that want to end the world are typically like "Oh heck no, YOU ain't ending the world, that MY job.". Finding villains in comic history who just want to destroy the world that they live on is very very rare. Then you have to disqualify villains who wish to destroy earth that come from elsewhere because its not their world they are destroying, it's someone else's.

It's that way for a reason because it's much easier to create more depth and contention within the villain himself. That being said there are still some cases of good villains who wish to legitimately destroy the world. There is also the wrinkle that even exceptionally talented psychotic villains bent on destroying the world are typically not stable enough and rational enough to do so. They simply have their psychosis exploited or they are outsmarted more often than not :D.

Lists of 20 major comic book villains who do not want to destroy the world and may even have views you would sympathize with (depth).

1. Magneto
2. The Joker (sadistic yes, maniacal yes, but he wants to continue to have fun)
3. Doctor Doom
4. Lex Luthor
5. Darkseid
6. Ra's Al Ghul
7. Loki
8. Kingpin
9. Catwomen
10. Two Face
11. Green Gaoblin
12. Red Skull
13. Sinestro
14. Mystique
15. Juggernaut
16. Ozymandias
17. Venom
18. Doctor Octopus
19. Bane
20. Clayface
21. Poison Ivy (because even on a list of 20 you can't forget poison ivy)
22. Harley Quinn (this goes double for the girl that loves her puddin)
23. Scarecrow (because it caused me physical pain to attempt to leave him off the list lol)

Now, I challenge you to come up with a list of 5 compelling villains who want to destroy the very world that they live on. If you are able to do this, I concede defeat and think there should be a "destroy the world" mission arc in game similar to the "rule the world" one they have discussed. However if you cannot it shows you how little that concept resonates with people.

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Ralathar44 wrote:
Ralathar44 wrote:

Lists of 20 major comic book villains who do not want to destroy the world and may even have views you would sympathize with (depth).

Well to begin with there are few if any "villains" who would actually call themselves evil. They may see themselves as "misunderstood" or "destined for greatness" that justifies them being able to do things beyond the laws of little people. But regardless of how they rationalize their actions they rarely see themselves as "bad" people. So I see nothing wrong with the pretense of villains being motivated to help heroes "save the world" when absolutely necessary. Afterall that's where they keep their stuff...

But I would agree that CoH did overuse the trope far too often. Villains working with heroes for the "greater good" is the kind of plotline that should be reserved for a one-of-a-kind grand climax to a story, not the constant first-option you use 5 or 6 times in a row.

Hopefully CoT will handle that kind of thing better with its new alignment system. That way they won't have to come up with some earth-shattering "save the world" excuse every time they want to allow heroes and villains to stand next to each other without having to be in a PvP zone.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

But I would agree that CoH did overuse the trope far too often. Villains working with heroes for the "greater good" is the kind of plotline that should be reserved for a one-of-a-kind grand climax to a story, not the constant first-option you use 5 or 6 times in a row.

Yeah, that was really my point. My complaint was that the new zones were clearly designed for blueside and then every single time they just used the "save the world" excuse to include redside. I bought it with the new RWZ, but each time after that it became more difficult to swallow. How hard would it have been for them to -- if nothing else -- simply change the text so that the missions were the same but you were doing them for a different, more evil or selfish reason redside? I was never a dedicated role player, but every time I ran a villain through the co-op stuff, it just felt like my character was being shoehorned into a hero's role.

Lothic wrote:

Hopefully CoT will handle that kind of thing better with its new alignment system. That way they won't have to come up with some earth-shattering "save the world" excuse every time they want to allow heroes and villains to stand next to each other without having to be in a PvP zone.

Good point. We won't have 2 polarised sides, but a whole spectrum. But will this make it even harder to write in differing objectives and make the "save the world" trope even more likely as a panacea? Fingers crossed that it won't!

Spurn all ye kindle.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Cinnder wrote:
Cinnder wrote:

Yeah, that was really my point. My complaint was that the new zones were clearly designed for blueside and then every single time they just used the "save the world" excuse to include redside. I bought it with the new RWZ, but each time after that it became more difficult to swallow. How hard would it have been for them to -- if nothing else -- simply change the text so that the missions were the same but you were doing them for a different, more evil or selfish reason redside? I was never a dedicated role player, but every time I ran a villain through the co-op stuff, it just felt like my character was being shoehorned into a hero's role.

Now this I agree wholeheartedly with. Or lets up the ante one more notch. What if the villain had 1 additional mission at the end to complete only with other villains and heros only with other hero's. The missions before effectively remain the same or very similar but you get to choose a way to double cross the hero's or do something selfish with the results.

This could be in addition to the slight flavor text. That way it won't matter in the slightest, but not only will they be saying you're doing it for villainous reasons but you'll actually get to ACT on it too :D.

For instance maybe you gathered information on a bunch of heros during the mission you sold off to the highest bidder or a criminal outfit. (heros could do similar!!) Maybe you took advantage of heros celebrating your mutual victory to pull some caper or even attack the heros themselves.

Even a very generic mission for each choice giving you the illusion of choice or villainy would go a long way to alleviate the concerns you have and I'm with you on that. This would be even better if the heros had an extra missions that drove a villain or villains off. Heck if we got really fancy heros and villains taking the missions would be put in a small pool of perhaps 20 names. Those heros or villains and their general power setups would appear AI controlled in the opposite factions mission :P. For the heros the villain would be driven off, for the villain the heros would be beaten back enough to allow an escape after accomplishing your objective (which of course the heros wouldn't know till after driving you off). You could have the exact same scripted result from both sides and add that nice little touch of "hey, I just teamed with that ***hat. Freakin villains."

Shoot if you did it smartly you could use one map for every choice hero and villain side and just change the spawns/objective :D.

I'm just not with you on the psychotic villain angle :D.

Fireheart
Fireheart's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 6 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/05/2013 - 13:45
I played CoV and had a few

I played CoV and had a few red-side characters, but all they wanted was to get off the island. I'm a 'good-guy', so I never supported any Villains. I don't anticipate doing so in CoT, either.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Ralathar44 wrote:
Ralathar44 wrote:

I'm just not with you on the psychotic villain angle :D.

Yeah, in my little scene I probably should have had Dr. Malicious grudgingly agree while mumbling about being railroaded into being a hero, then -- after the main speaker tried to wrap things up -- have had Kid Chaos say in a small voice, "But I WANT the world to be destroyed..." as everyone was leaving.

Spurn all ye kindle.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
While I agree that most

While I agree that most villains are usually the heroes of their own stories, on the other hand, comicbookdom has had it's share of " I'm EEEEEEVIL!!!" types too. I mean the Avengers regularly fought the Masters of Evil, the X-Men fought The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, etc. That aside, I think you need to tread very carefully as to how "evil" you let the villain side content ever become. Stealing large sums of money, building doomsday devices, etc are one thing, but things like rape, serial killing, prostitution, illicit drug abuse, etc are very adult content.

Also, can anyone give me some examples of different reasons for groups of 8-16 heroes and villains (combined) to team up that DON'T involve the impending end of the world scenario? I mean, you have to look at the "should we team up?" question from BOTH sides and come up with a reason why the villain wants the team up AND a reason why the hero is willing to agree to it too. In situation comedies, this generally happens because the two characters involved are handcuffed to each other or something. In a superhero context, the mission at hand has to be A) something that requires more than 2 or 3 people and B) something so important that the hero is willing to take the risk that the villain would double cross him or just flee when the going get's tough and C) something that the villain (many of whom are pretty egotistical) feels he can't handle alone.

Sometimes being a villain means acting in an incredibly cruel, sadistic manner, and sometimes it doesn't. It's like people who want to make Chaotic Evil characters in DnD. They think that it grants them the ability to just kill their fellow party members over loot or whatever. In many cases that is simply not good role playing, it's not necessarily what the character WOULD do in the given situation, and in any event it doesn't add to the overall fun and playability of the game for anyone (in DnD it usually kills the PCs and breaks up the gaming group).

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Also, can anyone give me some examples of different reasons for groups of 8-16 heroes and villains (combined) to team up that DON'T involve the impending end of the world scenario? I mean, you have to look at the "should we team up?" question from BOTH sides and come up with a reason why the villain wants the team up AND a reason why the hero is willing to agree to it too. In situation comedies, this generally happens because the two characters involved are handcuffed to each other or something. In a superhero context, the mission at hand has to be A) something that requires more than 2 or 3 people and B) something so important that the hero is willing to take the risk that the villain would double cross him or just flee when the going get's tough and C) something that the villain (many of whom are pretty egotistical) feels he can't handle alone.

I'll agree that the "heroes and villains having to team up to save the world" scenario is probably the simplest pretense to get superpowered adversaries to work together and that's probably why it got so overused in CoH.

But another idea that comes to mind is the classic "heroes and villains are thrown together against their will in a situation where they have to work together to survive/ecsape" plotline. Excellent Sci-Fi examples of that kind of storyline would be the TOS Star Trek episode Day of the Dove or the movie Enemy Mine (which got a trope named after it). I'm sure there are comic book examples of that kind of thing as well. For CoT this could be expressed as a special trial that "traps" a group of Heroes and Villains together and it requires every member of that group to help each other to escape the trap.

Given enough time the Devs could probably come up with a bunch of related ideas for CoT that didn't directly involve "saving the world".

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
I'd be satisfied with even

I'd be satisfied with even something as simple as the villain going along with the heroes, but expecting to get something for themselves along the way -- possibly without the knowledge of the heroes. Ralathar's idea of one extra mission at the end (even if it were only the type of extra mish we had in new DA) could be one way of implementing this.

Spurn all ye kindle.

Darth Fez
Darth Fez's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/20/2013 - 07:53
Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

I'll agree that the "heroes and villains having to team up to save the world" scenario is probably the simplest pretense to get superpowered adversaries to work together and that's probably why it got so overused in CoH.

Any invading force that had done its homework could be very likely to attack the villains, first. While the villains may not be stronger than the heroes, the villains tend to have greater numbers and/or larger organizations (foot soldiers, minions, mooks, etc.) and they often don't play by any rules. Removing this (seemingly) greater threat first appears logical. The heroes would help because a) they tend to have the foresight to realize and understand that the villains aren't likely to remain the only victims (even assuming that collateral damage is somehow kept to a minimum) and because b) they're heroes, it's what they do. It's a simple twist to explain why the villains are fighting just as hard as the heroes.

Best of all is still to keep the whole, "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!" plot lines to a minimum. A plot line or two which has the heroes and villains working in parallel, rather than together, would be nice. Those still leave some room for clashes over methods, means, and even intermediate goals.

- - - - -
Hail Beard!

Support trap clowns for CoT!

Fireheart
Fireheart's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 6 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/05/2013 - 13:45
I've recently learned that

I've recently learned that evil, soul-destroying Mad Scientists are into ergonomic chairs.

That said, I've been thinking of ways for 'indirect PvP' to happen, between heroes and villains. Mostly, this might take the form of parallel missions, where the action in one mission instance affects events in the other. In a scenario like this, a team of heroes and villains might engage in a Task Force with a... well, a 'split personality'. As mentioned before, it could feed the different alignments vastly different information in the same space. It might even split the party and feed them different Content.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

I've recently learned that evil, soul-destroying Mad Scientists are into ergonomic chairs.

Of course. Ones with extra support for the cat-petting arm.

Fireheart wrote:

That said, I've been thinking of ways for 'indirect PvP' to happen, between heroes and villains. Mostly, this might take the form of parallel missions, where the action in one mission instance affects events in the other. In a scenario like this, a team of heroes and villains might engage in a Task Force with a... well, a 'split personality'. As mentioned before, it could feed the different alignments vastly different information in the same space. It might even split the party and feed them different Content.

Intriguing... Have you started a separate thread on this? Sounds kinda like a next-gen version of the zone buff mechanic that CoX's PVP zones had from completing missions.

Spurn all ye kindle.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Also, can anyone give me some examples of different reasons for groups of 8-16 heroes and villains (combined) to team up that DON'T involve the impending end of the world scenario?

Getting rid of rivals, tricking hero's, luring them into traps, gathering information on them in a neutral setting., setting hero against hero, testing out your newest recruit/sidekick, testing out new weapons, using said heros to draw yet other hero into your trap, etc. Also there could be an unknown interest for you, say this other villain group is attacking a company that you run from the shadows. Or there is a guy there you need dead. Or there is information there you need to get. The hero's don't need to know everything.

Lets also not forget that villain doesn't mean inhuman. Alot of villains, in fact most of the best ones, have scruples. Maybe you want to take over the world, but you are still not ok with people being murdered in cold blood in the street. Maybe you're ok with murdering people in cold blood but still protect children.

Best of all, 90% of the content is shared when using any of those reasons. So you may need a few unique touches for each side, maybe even a special mission or two (or an entire arc if you are REALLY looking to get into it) but for the most part it's joint content.

But lets be honest, wouldn't it be great if hero's and villains teamed up to take down a villain group, but at the end of the arc the heros learn the villains did something nefarious right under their nose? Even better if you then make each side have a followup story arc where the villains continue their nefarious plans and the heros try and foil it. You could have a good arc or two of joint content that then splits up into an individualized hero arc and a villain arc.

Lets say for extra special fun you still give people the option to team. The hero (most likely vigilante) kind of plays along and covertly sabotages the mission which culminates in their own person arc ending mission. The villain plays along with the heroes and sabotages their mission (playing off that X is a threat to him to) ensuring that whatever plan is being thwarted does not completely fail.

Getting things right to where it flows well in gameplay will be the challenge. In the theater of the mind however there are countless ways to bring about the desired events :D.

Heck as some flavor text you could add a few dialog option style choices within the missions that would be seen by the team. Maybe something where the villains and heroes could vocally disagree on something and then be interrupted or forced into a completely seperate choice. Maybe an act of "heroism" by a villain such as protecting one of the heros...all for the sake of the later nefarious plan.

Maybe some popup text only the heros or villains see as they do things out of sight or unbeknownst to the other side.

Lutan
Lutan's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 2 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 02/02/2014 - 15:08
I haertily support all of the

I haertily support all of the above and would like to add one tiny thing, but it was very important to me:

The ability to write individual macros. I used that a lot to do little things as writing one for my dual pistol char that combined the changing of ammo with a custume change (with fitting animation) and him chanting a spell. Or letting all your Minions train while waiting for someone who was afk. They did not add much to gameplay itself (except maybe keybinding the Teleport power which made using it a lot easier), but they were fun to play with and gave me more ways to make every character unique, without having to write long commands evertime.

Redlynne
Redlynne's picture
Offline
Last seen: 12 hours 1 min ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/28/2013 - 21:15
Lutan wrote:
Lutan wrote:

The ability to write individual macros.

* cough *

LUA

* cough *

It's not just good for Players to use, since it also lets Developers script controlling actions too.


Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.
Lutan
Lutan's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 2 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 02/02/2014 - 15:08
I'm sorry, what does LUA mean

I'm sorry, what does LUA mean? English is not my native tongue and I'm still having some problems with acronyms...

Darth Fez
Darth Fez's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/20/2013 - 07:53
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org

Lua is a name, not an acronym. Programming thing and whatnot.

- - - - -
Hail Beard!

Support trap clowns for CoT!

Scourge
Scourge's picture
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
Joined: 02/14/2014 - 08:33
For me, everything listed

For me, everything listed above save for my personal interest in the Supergroup base editor... especially once the deadzones were eliminated and items could be stacked within one another. While I always wanted more items to play with, you still were able to create phenomenal structures and that is something that is missing from most MMO's. I hear RIFT has a lair generator that resembles features from CoH's with some improvements in regards to mass item selection.

GO GO DANGER RANGERS!!!
"It's only after you've lost everything, that you're free to do anything..."

Lutan
Lutan's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 2 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 02/02/2014 - 15:08
Thank you very much. :)

Thank you very much. :)

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Updated with the macros/UI

Updated with the macros/UI comments with mentions by both Lutan and Redlynne :D.

Scourge wrote:

For me, everything listed above save for my personal interest in the Supergroup base editor... especially once the deadzones were eliminated and items could be stacked within one another. While I always wanted more items to play with, you still were able to create phenomenal structures and that is something that is missing from most MMO's. I hear RIFT has a lair generator that resembles features from CoH's with some improvements in regards to mass item selection.

The reason I do not add that into the list is if there is truly user generated missions the ability to make bases should have all the building blocks in place. I did however specifically edit #9 of my original self generated list to mention that user generated missions done right adds the capability for user housing guild/group bases.

Thanks for reminding me so I could reference it :D.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
The speed of the game... If

The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Most notably in PvP, one of the things that made CoX PvP different to other games was its speed, here are some random videos to illustrate what I mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQcMqYf7wmQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzmMo_5eFs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gv1JB_xvZM

grouchyguy
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/10/2013 - 17:32
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
grouchyguy wrote:
grouchyguy wrote:

Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

grouchyguy wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

I've never played another game be it MMO or otherwise besides CoX, but from seeing PvP videos (and PvE) of other games their combat seems slow and sluggish, possibly in practice its not, but on the eye it is.

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

Brand X wrote:
grouchyguy wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

I've never played another game be it MMO or otherwise besides CoX, but from seeing PvP videos (and PvE) of other games their combat seems slow and sluggish, possibly in practice its not, but on the eye it is.

I felt TERA was much faster and looked much faster in PvP than CoH.

CoH PvP wasn't fast, so much as HEY RUNAWAY or KILL THE DEFENDER IGNORE THE TANK OR SCRAPPER!

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 3 hours 33 min ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).
Most notably in PvP, one of the things that made CoX PvP different to other games was its speed, here are some random videos to illustrate what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQcMqYf7wmQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzmMo_5eFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gv1JB_xvZM

is that because everyone in CoX PvP generally took superspeed/superjump combos because they were the most beneficial (and fastest) to use in CoX PvP?

To me, it seemed like a whole lot of "cat and mouse" chasing going on there.... which is no real bad thing (if that is your kind of style of game play).

My experience of PvP in CoX was markedly different to what you showed there (I am thinking back to the EU S4 PvP tournament that happened soon after I4 was introduced. Travel powers were not used as much, and I tended to experience the "3 hits and dead" syndrome (unlucky encounters on my server maybe? Who knows).

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
grouchyguy wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

I've never played another game be it MMO or otherwise besides CoX, but from seeing PvP videos (and PvE) of other games their combat seems slow and sluggish, possibly in practice its not, but on the eye it is.

I felt TERA was much faster and looked much faster in PvP than CoH.
CoH PvP wasn't fast, so much as HEY RUNAWAY or KILL THE DEFENDER IGNORE THE TANK OR SCRAPPER!

I've never seen or heard of TERA, so i can't comment, you're probably right... saying that though... what server did you PvP on? between what issues? what leagues/ladders did you compete on? Are you just joining the PvE choir in regards to their negative outlook on City's PvP, or are you talking from extensive experience?

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).
Most notably in PvP, one of the things that made CoX PvP different to other games was its speed, here are some random videos to illustrate what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQcMqYf7wmQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzmMo_5eFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gv1JB_xvZM

is that because everyone in CoX PvP generally took superspeed/superjump combos because they were the most beneficial (and fastest) to use in CoX PvP?
To me, it seemed like a whole lot of "cat and mouse" chasing going on there.... which is no real bad thing (if that is your kind of style of game play).
My experience of PvP in CoX was markedly different to what you showed there (I am thinking back to the EU S4 PvP tournament that happened soon after I4 was introduced. Travel powers were not used as much, and I tended to experience the "3 hits and dead" syndrome (unlucky encounters on my server maybe? Who knows).

I suppose that is my point, I liked how SS/SJ became basically mandatory in the established PvP scene (not melee fightclub) I assume I'm not alone in that, if we take into account the mass exodus of players leaving soon after the introduction of TS in PvP.. (amongst many other horrible implements)

I participated in a 'big' 4v4 tournament on the EU servers before I moved to US in 2007, i'm not sure if thats the one you're referencing but that one certainly did make use of travel powers, as does every single actual competitive tournaments/leagues that good players participated in, in that game.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

CoH PvP wasn't fast, so much as HEY RUNAWAY or KILL THE DEFENDER IGNORE THE TANK OR SCRAPPER!

Did you watch the first video? Granted that team was miles ahead better than others, If thats not fast damage, requiring quick thinking and fast reaction to negate the spike then i'm not sure what is.

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 3 hours 33 min ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).
Most notably in PvP, one of the things that made CoX PvP different to other games was its speed, here are some random videos to illustrate what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQcMqYf7wmQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzmMo_5eFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gv1JB_xvZM

is that because everyone in CoX PvP generally took superspeed/superjump combos because they were the most beneficial (and fastest) to use in CoX PvP?
To me, it seemed like a whole lot of "cat and mouse" chasing going on there.... which is no real bad thing (if that is your kind of style of game play).
My experience of PvP in CoX was markedly different to what you showed there (I am thinking back to the EU S4 PvP tournament that happened soon after I4 was introduced. Travel powers were not used as much, and I tended to experience the "3 hits and dead" syndrome (unlucky encounters on my server maybe? Who knows).

I suppose that is my point, I liked how SS/SJ became basically mandatory in the established PvP scene (not melee fightclub) I assume I'm not alone in that, if we take into account the mass exodus of players leaving soon after the introduction of TS in PvP.. (amongst many other horrible implements)
I participated in a 'big' 4v4 tournament on the EU servers before I moved to US in 2007, i'm not sure if thats the one you're referencing but that one certainly did make use of travel powers, as does every single actual competitive tournaments/leagues that good players participated in, in that game.

The tournament that I was referring to was the one organised by the EU Community team. A medal was given out to the winners and runner up (I got one but later on, and for a different reason).

Hell, I am trying to remember stuff from 9 years back now so my exact memories are hazy (It didn't help in that I was blind drunk in the matches so the only thing I remember was me and the controller on the other team were brawling each other for a while in one match... oh and that in one match we basically won it with trip mines/TP Foe combo).

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
grouchyguy wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

I've never played another game be it MMO or otherwise besides CoX, but from seeing PvP videos (and PvE) of other games their combat seems slow and sluggish, possibly in practice its not, but on the eye it is.

I felt TERA was much faster and looked much faster in PvP than CoH.
CoH PvP wasn't fast, so much as HEY RUNAWAY or KILL THE DEFENDER IGNORE THE TANK OR SCRAPPER!

I've never seen or heard of TERA, so i can't comment, you're probably right... saying that though... what server did you PvP on? between what issues? what leagues/ladders did you compete on? Are you just joining the PvE choir in regards to their negative outlook on City's PvP, or are you talking from extensive experience?

Virtue. PvPed less when my WP/EM got gutted. I had one build, it worked for both PvE and PvP and then ruined.

Though, after that, I still PvPed the way I always PvPed, just less often. I liked the open zone PvP, I hated the duelers who whined in the open zones if their duels got interrupted.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
grouchyguy wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

I've never played another game be it MMO or otherwise besides CoX, but from seeing PvP videos (and PvE) of other games their combat seems slow and sluggish, possibly in practice its not, but on the eye it is.

I felt TERA was much faster and looked much faster in PvP than CoH.
CoH PvP wasn't fast, so much as HEY RUNAWAY or KILL THE DEFENDER IGNORE THE TANK OR SCRAPPER!

I've never seen or heard of TERA, so i can't comment, you're probably right... saying that though... what server did you PvP on? between what issues? what leagues/ladders did you compete on? Are you just joining the PvE choir in regards to their negative outlook on City's PvP, or are you talking from extensive experience?

Virtue. PvPed less when my WP/EM got gutted. I had one build, it worked for both PvE and PvP and then ruined.
Though, after that, I still PvPed the way I always PvPed, just less often. I liked the open zone PvP, I hated the duelers who whined in the open zones if their duels got interrupted.

Melee PvP, especially in the form of fightclub (not saying you) has always been regarded as slow paced, insanely boring and lacking much team co-ordination and just plain bad.

But fair enough, though judging by this I can only assume you never participated in any organised, and to a certain degree competitive team PvP which explains why you think CoH PvP wasn't fast, or was just 'hey runaway' etc etc...

Like I said, watch the first video, and i'd imagine you'd struggle to stand by your comments. (and thats even post i13, the competitive scene was much larger, and far less spaced out in terms of skill prior to i13)

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
grouchyguy wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
The speed of the game... If this game is to 'capture the feel' of CoX then it should replicate the speed of combat (largely effected by use of travel powers).

Absolutely, other games feel like I'm wading quicksand trying to get around!

Wow. Really? I found TERA and Final Fantasy to be pretty quick in travel.

I've never played another game be it MMO or otherwise besides CoX, but from seeing PvP videos (and PvE) of other games their combat seems slow and sluggish, possibly in practice its not, but on the eye it is.

I felt TERA was much faster and looked much faster in PvP than CoH.
CoH PvP wasn't fast, so much as HEY RUNAWAY or KILL THE DEFENDER IGNORE THE TANK OR SCRAPPER!

I've never seen or heard of TERA, so i can't comment, you're probably right... saying that though... what server did you PvP on? between what issues? what leagues/ladders did you compete on? Are you just joining the PvE choir in regards to their negative outlook on City's PvP, or are you talking from extensive experience?

Virtue. PvPed less when my WP/EM got gutted. I had one build, it worked for both PvE and PvP and then ruined.
Though, after that, I still PvPed the way I always PvPed, just less often. I liked the open zone PvP, I hated the duelers who whined in the open zones if their duels got interrupted.

Melee PvP, especially in the form of fightclub (not saying you) has always been regarded as slow paced, insanely boring and lacking much team co-ordination and just plain bad.
But fair enough, though judging by this I can only assume you never participated in any organised, and to a certain degree competitive team PvP which explains why you think CoH PvP wasn't fast, or was just 'hey runaway' etc etc...
Like I said, watch the first video, and i'd imagine you'd struggle to stand by your comments. (and thats even post i13, the competitive scene was much larger, and far less spaced out in terms of skill prior to i13)

Yes, I watched it. It was fast because you had almost everyone around using super speed and super jump. The player barely attacking anyone as they run and jump around to fast paced music. \o/

Talk about cookie cutters.

And yes, I did team PvP, I've used ranged builds. No, I didn't do organized PvP, and judging by the video I can only say that's a good thing "Oh hey everyone! Don't worry! I have the same build as all of you! Whooot!"

I attacked more and moved around just as much in TERA with my Slayer (well constantly moved, I didn't have a super speed/jump).

Nothing like team pvp, where the other team has their tank keep you taunted and out of the fight the whole time. Oh, yeah, I remember that team PvP, made for a boring and slow game.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

Yes, I watched it. It was fast because you had almost everyone around using super speed and super jump. The player barely attacking anyone as they run and jump around to fast paced music. \o/
.

Your lack of knowledge on CoH PvP has just been highlighted again, thank you, you're wrong. Bye :)

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Yes, I watched it. It was fast because you had almost everyone around using super speed and super jump. The player barely attacking anyone as they run and jump around to fast paced music. \o/
.

Your lack of knowledge on CoH PvP has just been highlighted again, thank you, you're wrong. Bye :)

o.O You think I didn't play CoH PvP? Or you think I'm wrong that I'm not seeing cookie cutter builds with everyone around using SuperJump/SuperSpeed?

Had a whole team of Dom/Con (couldn't quite make out the symbols enough) and one Defender and what looked to be mostly jousting.

Psycho Jas
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 10 months ago
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 04:18
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
Yes, I watched it. It was fast because you had almost everyone around using super speed and super jump. The player barely attacking anyone as they run and jump around to fast paced music. \o/
.

Your lack of knowledge on CoH PvP has just been highlighted again, thank you, you're wrong. Bye :)

o.O You think I didn't play CoH PvP? Or you think I'm wrong that I'm not seeing cookie cutter builds with everyone around using SuperJump/SuperSpeed?
Had a whole team of Dom/Con (couldn't quite make out the symbols enough) and one Defender and what looked to be mostly jousting.

Your claim that the guy who filmed the video and the other players 'barely attacked anything' while 'jumping around' just really translates that you have no idea what you're talking about.

I think you've lost track of any point you're trying to make, or argue against mine? I stated that for CoT to capture the feel of CoH in regards to PvP they should replicate the speed of the game which made it unique (in my opinion) which was done partially (not entirely) through the use of unpenalised travel powers in combat (when TS is turned off, a design that never should have been placed in the first place)

You then said really? other games bla bla bla where far faster, CoH PvP was not fast, I presented you with some random videos (there are many others if you want to search for yourself) that would suggest otherwise, contrary to your statement. If after watching the first video you still don't think that the spike damage presented by that team, and the speed of which they cycle through their targets shows that CoH DID in fact have fast paced PvP (in some areas, not all) then you're just plain wrong. Which doesn't surprise me considering you're obviously not someone with much PvP experience at all, besides a WP/EM melee which you yourself stated as a main.

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
Psycho Jas wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Psycho Jas wrote:
Brand X wrote:
Yes, I watched it. It was fast because you had almost everyone around using super speed and super jump. The player barely attacking anyone as they run and jump around to fast paced music. \o/
.

Your lack of knowledge on CoH PvP has just been highlighted again, thank you, you're wrong. Bye :)

o.O You think I didn't play CoH PvP? Or you think I'm wrong that I'm not seeing cookie cutter builds with everyone around using SuperJump/SuperSpeed?
Had a whole team of Dom/Con (couldn't quite make out the symbols enough) and one Defender and what looked to be mostly jousting.

Your claim that the guy who filmed the video and the other players 'barely attacked anything' while 'jumping around' just really translates that you have no idea what you're talking about.
I think you've lost track of any point you're trying to make, or argue against mine? I stated that for CoT to capture the feel of CoH in regards to PvP they should replicate the speed of the game which made it unique (in my opinion) which was done partially (not entirely) through the use of unpenalised travel powers in combat (when TS is turned off, a design that never should have been placed in the first place)
You then said really? other games bla bla bla where far faster, CoH PvP was not fast, I presented you with some random videos (there are many others if you want to search for yourself) that would suggest otherwise, contrary to your statement. If after watching the first video you still don't think that the spike damage presented by that team, and the speed of which they cycle through their targets shows that CoH DID in fact have fast paced PvP (in some areas, not all) then you're just plain wrong. Which doesn't surprise me considering you're obviously not someone with much PvP experience at all, besides a WP/EM melee which you yourself stated as a main.

WP/EM was my main, and I used it often when I PvPed a lot more. It wasn't the only one I PvPed with. :p Katana/Regen, DB/WP, Elec/Thermal, Cold/Dark, Dark/Cold.

But you're right, I wasn't a serious PvPer, I was in it for the fun. Serious PvPers have a tendency to whine...A LOT.

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
As I floated on the fumes of

As I floated on the fumes of wakefulness I realized 2 important things that needed to be added and so I fight the dream demons to bring them forth into this thread where they can have substance and being.

Added 18. and 19. on the original lineup. Cone attacks and Ranged AT's having really high damage close options.

Basically it all makes combat more active, makes you worry about your positioning and aim, and gives risk vs reward. I find in alot of MMORPG's, especially WOW clones, you hardly ever see any cone attacks and Ranged DPS basically relies on CC to get range again if enemies close in. Cone attacks and ranged DPS having some close ranged high damage options adds more choice and make the dance of PVE much more interesting.

I'm not talking about the "more active" of pushing more buttons per minute. I mean more active as in I have to more actively and consider what I am doing. I have to think about it more.

City of Heros was known for slower combat. But some of my Characters played almost as actively as my elementalist from guild wars 2, which is pretty fricken busy. I still smile every time I think about how my archer would jump around and fire mid air to remain mobile and manage positioning :D. With combat jumping and hurdle my TA/A was NEVER still and always throwing out something else that was decided in that split second of "what should I do now?" :D. Then stopping to use aid other on someone haha.

AmbiDreamer
Offline
Last seen: 7 months 3 weeks ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/07/2013 - 22:49
Did I ever mention how much I

Did I ever mention how much I love this list?

And while I'm on questions, did anyone else like the Super Inspiration options you could get at the store? I loved the fact they lasted longer maybe more than I loved the fact each one offered two types of boosts. (Basically, two inspirations in one- but they'd last longer than regular inspirations.)

I got the definite feeling I was in the minority in that case. I'm curious if anyone else here liked them. (I liked being able to get them at the store, including from grab bags, as well.)

Also: I love rereading this list. I will say the first response to a bio being too short should be to try to edit it if possible. Longer bios would still be nice though.

Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Haha, thanks for the love. I

Haha, thanks for the love. I just wanted to get a whole lot of things in one place for the devs to look at and consider when they were making the new game. So they could decide more easily some of the things that made the old game work and see what they wanted to include in the new game :D.

That may be some, most, or even all of this list depending on their vision.

Empyrean
Empyrean's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 6 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 03/16/2014 - 07:51
I loved most everything

EDIT: After reading around the forums a bit something occurred to me that I just had to mention.

Because I had only ever played CoH until they shut it down, I didn't realize that I don't really like general online gaming until after I'd played CO and DCUO--games which lean more towards established gaming conventions than CoH.

What I mean is that there seem to be established conventions from fantasy MMO's--armor, repairing armor, queing (though we got that later), lockout if you are defeated, difficulty grouping with significantly different level people, gear grinding, trash mobs, rage timers, etc.--that really have no place in a Superhero paradigm and for me really detract from my ability to just enjoy the game.

I think the single thing that I loved about CoH now that I have played other games is that they really STARTED FRESH.

They said "new genre, new rules", and it was genius. Brilliant. Epic. And I didn't even know it--except I knew I was having a ball playing.

I think what CoH really did right, that the other games missed, is RE-THINKING everything in the new context of what makes sense for a Superhero game.

CoH came up with a new paradigm for a new genra, and then the later games, instead of focusing on developing it further, largely drifted away from it towards conventions for other genre that don't fit nearly as well--I guess to reach a wider audience of "gamers"?

Anyway, since MWM are people STEEPED in CoH and committed to developing THIS paradigm, I think if anyone CAN do it, it's them :D.

That's my optimism and I'm sticking to it!

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
Empyrean wrote:
Empyrean wrote:

EDIT: After reading around the forums a bit something occurred to me that I just had to mention.
Because I had only ever played CoH until they shut it down, I didn't realize that I don't really like general online gaming until after I'd played CO and DCUO--games which lean more towards established gaming conventions than CoH.
What I mean is that there seem to be established conventions from fantasy MMO's--armor, repairing armor, queing (though we got that later), lockout if you are defeated, difficulty grouping with significantly different level people, gear grinding, trash mobs, rage timers, etc.--that really have no place in a Superhero paradigm and for me really detract from my ability to just enjoy the game.
I think the single thing that I loved about CoH now that I have played other games is that they really STARTED FRESH.
They said "new genre, new rules", and it was genius. Brilliant. Epic. And I didn't even know it--except I knew I was having a ball playing.
I think what CoH really did right, that the other games missed, is RE-THINKING everything in the new context of what makes sense for a Superhero game.
CoH came up with a new paradigm for a new genra, and then the later games, instead of focusing on developing it further, largely drifted away from it towards conventions for other genre that don't fit nearly as well--I guess to reach a wider audience of "gamers"?
Anyway, since MWM are people STEEPED in CoH and committed to developing THIS paradigm, I think if anyone CAN do it, it's them :D.
That's my optimism and I'm sticking to it!

That's not something new for the gaming industry unfortunately. People try to copy what works for other games without understanding WHY it works for those other games. There are alot of design considerations for making those choices and they must be in the same spirit as the design considerations AND feel of your game.

Another good example of what you stated is when IO's and Incarnates happened. It was City of hero's answer to loot and end game. They realized that traditional loot and end game would not work well with their game so they did something different.

Take another look at loot as well. It was minor but the enhancements were all flavored to your origin. Natural characters received training, tech characters got gadgets, science characters had scientific exposure, etc. This felt alot better than "you're a walking mutant of crazy power but get owned unless you wear a +4 jacket of shielding.

It's not about if it does the same general stuff, but don't make the human torch or the thing wear kevlar even as a generic invisible item.

edgrbishop
edgrbishop's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 6 months ago
Joined: 05/18/2014 - 21:39
You basically hit everything

You basically hit everything on the head (with only a few minor hits to your thumb). :)

What I loved was that it was the first and for the most part last MMO that made me feel like I was in control.

The UI was perfect, the compass and map did not get in the way like it does in CO.
The powers were easy to setup and use, loved the 2 and 3 row view.
I loved the rest feature, kind of forgot about that. No need to go to hospital, just find a safe area, rest up... then continue with the mission.

Why I love CoH in memory, I would not doubt there were one or two things I probably did not like.
But would I deal with them if someone made it available again, Oh H@## yeah!!! In an instant.

Playing Co right now makes me miss CoH more and more. I keep getting flashbacks. I miss seeing that monorail system.
I miss being able to call a well known contact, instead of traveling back to see them on another map.
I miss the simplicity of enhancements.
I miss the events, and Task Force events.
I miss leaving a group, and switching to my other character if we needed a special character type (even if I needed to be side-kicked)

I miss the simplicity of CoH, before CoV... I hate worrying about crafting and trading. It takes away from the fun and fantasy. Just go to a special shop, sell what you do not need, buy what you need. If you have magic items, go to a magic shop to sell for better deals. Buy from Magic shop if you need magic item to get better deal (family discount). :P

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 2 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Another thing I would add is

Another thing I would add is that there was always something more to achieve, and those achievements were significant improvements to your character.

I'm playing Skyrim right now and -- as much as I love it -- I'm starting to get a bit bored because there doesn't seem to be much to achieve anymore. I'm level 45 with more gold than I will ever be able to spend, such that I don't even bother searching bodies much at this point. I can craft better equipment than I can find in any dungeon. My character is a simple Nord barbarian and he's maxed out smithing, heavy armour, and 2-handed weapons. None of the other skill trees is appropriate for his character concept and I don't want to nerf him by resetting these key skills to 0 in order to continue level progression with them. All I have left now is the story, which is good, but I realise without a meaningful ability growth path, my sessions have become shorter because I don't have that feeling of "I just need to get this next power" or "if I can save up enough to complete this IO set."

Spurn all ye kindle.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
I have to admit, after

I have to admit, after talking about this on another thread, I've officially changed my position on Origins. I still like the idea of a toon having a concept and backstory, but officially categorized origin types are probably not needed, from what I can tell. If you want your toon to be an evil robot driving instructor who traveled back in time.... for some reason, you should totally be able to do that without having to choose "robot" as an origin. I guess what I'm saying is, Origins can exist in spirit without them having any tangible effect on your build, and that's probably a better way to handle it anyway. If the powers, animations, and costume options are there you've got what you need.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Power Play
Power Play's picture
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 5 months ago
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 20:55
I have to admit...before the

I have to admit...before the advent of the inventions system, CoX was just about perfect for me. Then, the inventions system, IOs, and having to equip "sets" for set bonuses totally destroyed the game for me. I had finally found my perfect game...no crafting...then it was ruined.

The devs said the inventions system was entirely optional, but it wasn't. I could no longer spar with my SG mates in the arena. I could no longer take my characters into PvP. They were too gimped to do anything but lose.

PLEASE, devs... If you want to do something with non-combat skills such as computer specialist, detective, et cetera...that would be great. Please don't force the players back into a grinding crafting game.

Thanks!

Izzy
Izzy's picture
Offline
Last seen: 6 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/09/2013 - 11:09
Power Play wrote:
Power Play wrote:

...before the advent of the inventions system, CoX was just about perfect for me. Then, the inventions system, IOs, and having to equip "sets" for set bonuses totally destroyed the game for me. I had finally found my perfect game...no crafting...then it was ruined. ...
I could no longer spar with my SG mates in the arena. I could no longer take my characters into PvP. They were too gimped to do anything but lose. ...

Yea, I keep coming back to this in my mind, on how to make the PvP playing-field between each archetype more of a Small Slope rather than a Mountain Peak. I have an answer, but you wont like it. :/

- Start with One vs. One match-ups, and go from there.

- Just dont allow the PvE AT's into PvP.. and have everyone use a PvP Specific AT / Power-sets. PvP Specific Power-sets might have Different animations, but do allot of things very much the same (tiny exceptions for variety) like the other PvP power-sets. Alternate animations for one power will be limited to 2, if even that. (read rest 1st)

- No More HOLDS, just Command Grabs (powers that Grab and do DMG in one shot), etc... ;)

- Some sort of Dodge Mechanic. In some games like Virtua Fighter you can tap left 2 times to roll to the side and punish the other player. Something close to that. Doesnt have to just be left or right.. Could be double tab Backwards and back-dash... or double tap forward and forward-dash. etc...

- Change the mechanics slightly so that fighting someone in PvP becomes more of a Mind Game, rather than Crafting Know-how. By Mind Games I mean.. will they dodge, will the other person hit from Above, will they hit from Below. More guessing, more Predicting, more Strategy, in your attacks. :D

- If you learned how to play PvP before, and re-roll starting from 1, you can still come Close to winning a PvP math-up. Enhancements Might work slightly differently, and only certain things can be enhanced for... things like Regeneration, etc... (not sure what else to put here, but it should make the Other PvP want to chase you down and not run away. If you Stop your attack, Regen starts restoring other PvP'ers HP. Stuff like that.)

I know this sounds a tad like Street Fighter, but I dont really see a better game out there to mimic. :/

The more and more we flatten the playing field and remove unfair advantages that exist between PvE AT's, the more and more Fun PvP becomes for All.
Forget the Grief'ers! I want PvE'ers to once again say "YAY, This is awesome. I beat him/her with my wits alone."
And not say, "Man.. he won because the fight was never in my favor".
And even say "Wow... PvP is like a TOTALLY 2nd Game. It's Different then what I'm use to in PvE, but sure is Allot More FUN now!". :)

Any thoughts?

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
The "PVP issues" you raise

The "PVP issues" you raise remind me of another Magic: The Gathering story. When my one college friend first showed me the game, I was hooked right away. He had a red/blue deck and a black/white deck and some extra cards (the green part of his collection) that were being unused. I immediately tried to make a workable deck out of those cards and my love of the color green began. Now, it should be noted that green, in the mid 1990s, was the weakest color. Also, most single color decks had vulnerabilities. You could play mono black or mono blue and have a really good deck. There were mono white decks that could hold their own in some matchups and not others, and there were mono red decks that were like that too (good or bad depending on the opponent). But mono green was just terrible. That didn't cause me to stop wanting green to be good, and I didn't just start playing blue and black because you could win with them, and that's why I'm not a tournament Magic player at heart. I fell in love with the flavor and art of green as a color in Magic despite the fact that it wasn't a "good" color to play in terms of winning and losing.

Throughout Magic's history since then deck types and strategies have come and gone and green has been good, bad, and everything in between, as have the other colors. The difference between me and a good tournament player is that the good tourny player will play whatever cards he or she feels will win the tournament at hand. To them, the tourny pros, everything is a tool to achieve victory and though you might favor some tools over others, winning is the only important thing.

In PVP in an MMO there's a similar thing going on. If you want to win, you have to make winning the only important thing. You can't get emotionally attached with your toon, you have to think of it as merely a vehicle you will pilot to victory. There will usually be a small number of "best" builds in any given time span, and with new powers, tweaking, etc that might change for time to time, but if you really want to win, you have to stop wanting your toon whom you love to be good and start playing whatever IS good. I either can't or don't want to do that, in Magic or in CoX when it existed. I rather like writing origin stories for my toons and RPing them a little and trying to make them the best they can be for me in terms of fun and playability. If they're not going to win any PVP fights, I don't care. I think the only really reliable way TO win PVP fights is to STOP caring about all that fluff which I like so much and start caring only about the end goal, the win. Not something I want to do, but something one needs to do to win in PVP.

That, to me, is the problem of PVP in a game like this. I'm not saying I don't think we should have it, but I am saying that in PVP you're playing an entirely different game, really. If one archetype or powerset is 1% better than all the others, people will find it and play it to the exclusion of everything else. Then soon, people will learn to expect their opponents to be playing that and they'll build whatever beats it. Thus the metagame happens. I think all you can hope for is a metagame that's rich enough that you have strengths and weaknesses that provide some checks and balances. Some builds will beat others, but will in turn lose to OTHER others. But through all of that, the love of the character get's lost in the chess game of PVP which rewards cold, detached adherence to whatever works best at the time. This kind of play can still be fun, and some people prefer it. Just not me.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Izzy
Izzy's picture
Offline
Last seen: 6 years 4 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/09/2013 - 11:09
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

... If one archetype or power-set is 1% better than all the others, people will find it and play it to the exclusion of everything else. Then soon, people will learn to expect their opponents to be playing that and they'll build whatever beats it. Thus the metagame happens. I think all you can hope for is a metagame that's rich enough that you have strengths and weaknesses that provide some checks and balances. Some builds will beat others, but will in turn lose to OTHER others. But through all of that, the love of the character get's lost in the chess game of PVP which rewards cold, detached adherence to whatever works best at the time. This kind of play can still be fun, and some people prefer it. Just not me.

Agreed. But, just like in Street Fighter, I can decide to switch from Ryu to Fei Long, even if I main a character, or love them or whatever... i switch to another because it has a slightly better chance at defeating my opponent power-set. That's not a bad thing actually. It just means that you would have to create an ALT that is capable of standing up to him/her using a different power-set. :)

Another interesting approach could be Auto-Max Levels for PvP AT's.. so if 30 is MAX, make them level 30 from the start.. and the XP or whatever else they get can be used to enhance the existing powers?!? I'm not quite sure if this is the best approach, as it might make it tougher to balance the PvP AT out between the different power-sets.

I'm kinda with Radiac on "No Unbalanced Advantages From Enhancements" approach, but I'm also concerned that hard core PvP'ers will complain that they cant enhance the existing powers. And if the game mechanics are not unique enough to allow VETS to beat someone with just their Wits Alone, they will want to do it Another Way.

As long as VET's have the ability to out-duel n00bs on an even playing field, that's very much acceptable.

Also, I would like to have Pro PvP'ers rely primarily on a game-pad, just because competitive play will demand it. And i really want to see One vs. One.. Pro Matches someday being streamed on Twitch. ;D

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
I think the problem of having

I think the problem of having to alt as a "change of tactics" choice is fine even if you DO have to level your alts, as long as leveling them in PVP is a real possibility. If people want to win and or get good at the game, making them PLAY the game from level 1 to the cap (even just in PVP) isn't a bad thing. You ought to be able to PVP at a sidekicked/exemplared level anyway. If my Scrapper is only level 15, we ought to be able to get him a PVP match set at an exemped level cap at level 15 or lower so that it's a fair fight for everyone, or else sidekick him up to the level of the fight if it's higher, whatever is needed to make fights occur at a reasonably close combat effectiveness level. At that point the only things you have to worry about are which powers you have or don't have and gear. As for powers, well, you agreed to sidekick up, so you have to deal with the fact that you don't have your best attack yet, or when you exemp down, you lose some attacks, etc. Your problem, you deal with it, this is the cold cruel world of PVP afterall. As for gear, I think one idea that has been floated (and is apparently being done in Wildstar) is that you let people use all kinds of gear in PVE and PVP, but make sure that on the high end, the PVE gear is the best there is best for PVEing and the PVP gear is the best for PVPing. I think you might have to find a way to make gear drop in PVP in some way other than defeating opponents though, or else the rich only get richer and the rest suffer. Maybe have random drops happen such that when someone defeats someone else, they BOTH get a random drop roll. On teams this could apply to the entire team. If my teammate get's defeated by your teammate, all members of BOTH teams get random drop rolls. Something like that might work, I don't know. Exploits might be possible though. That said, differentiating honest to goodness PVP from gear farming PVP is no easier or harder than doing the same in PVE.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
I would also caution that in

I would also caution that in any system where there are different options available, there are bound to be bad options. It is a mathematically inescapable truth that if two or more different options exists, and you must choose one of them, you will somehow either find the better one or prove that they are equivalent, and thus there is no real choice and the options themselves aren't really options, they're just the same thing in different disguises. So don't expect every possible build to have some merit to it in PVP, there will be totally awful builds. Some archetypes will be really weak and others really strong. That's life. The most I expect the devs to do is eliminate unfair comboes that warp the PVP environment too much, which is a daunting enough task as it is.

The Magic people (Mark Rosewater again) have written extensively on the absolute necessity for printing "bad cards" even at higher rarities. People back in the day (and now...) complained that there should be parity among cards, especially rares, and that every rare you pull out of a pack should be about as useful to you as any other one you might have pulled. Because otherwise it's "not fair" that you might buy a pack and get a really powerful card and someone else might pay the same money and get poop. This sort of "fairness" people say they want is, as it turns out, impossible, and unwanted anyway because it would lead to people not caring what cards they pulled out of a pack, and thus not caring about the cards and thus not buying cards. The card collecting, as a part of the hobby, becomes so easy that nobody does it and it no longer exists as a thing at that point. It would kill the game, quite frankly.

I feel the same way about making various parts of CoT too easy to get, like being able to level your guy without having to spend time and effort in PVE and/or PVP to do so. Free respecs, free costume pieces, free temp powers, free anything essentially is bad, you should either charge people real life money for some of that stuff or else make it an unlock or an XP grind, or something. I like the idea of making some stuff unlock upon doing appropriate content. Like the halloween trick or treating thing that you needed to do to get the 5th costume slot unlock, or the Katie Hannon TF unlocking the Witch Hat piece and giving you the "Summon Amy Jonsson" power. I did NOT like the random recipe drops as a way to distribute costume pieces, especially since they were so infrequent and random. you should be able to predictably get things like costume pieces you want by doing similar looking content. Instead of a random "Rocket Boots" recipe drop,. it should have been a thing you got for fighting the Sky Raiders, or doing a Longbow mission arc or something. Random drops are great for boosts/enhancements, recipes, salvage, and all types of gear. If you want the costume piece unlock to be something people can buy and sell in the game, then make it a recipe drop or something but not a random one.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Comicsluvr
Comicsluvr's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 3 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/07/2013 - 03:39
I agree with some of what you

I agree with some of what you've said Radiac but I have to disagree with some of it.

Much of what you said comes from a competitive angle. I don't play CoH competitively...I played to have fun. While I had a grand total of four PvP experiences, One was great, one was ok and two were terrible. Based on that math I stopped it altogether.

Anything with the word Grind attached to it I consider bad. We've been doing electronic games since the 70s...can't we PLEASE try and work out something that's not a grind or at least doesn't feel like one?

Some of the things that you don't like as free, Respecs, costume pieces and so forth, I EXPECT as loyalty perks for being a subscriber. Especially the Respecs. Think of all the times you wanted a Respec. Now think of what would have happened if you'd had to gather a team, on a potentially low-pop server, to GET a Respec.

I don't want to have to compete against another player for ANYTHING in CoT except PvP Defeat badges which I will gladly pass on if the PvP is not fun for me.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

Empyrean
Empyrean's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 6 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 03/16/2014 - 07:51
Comicsluvr wrote:
Comicsluvr wrote:

I agree with some of what you've said Radiac but I have to disagree with some of it.
Much of what you said comes from a competitive angle. I don't play CoH competitively...I played to have fun. While I had a grand total of four PvP experiences, One was great, one was ok and two were terrible. Based on that math I stopped it altogether.
Anything with the word Grind attached to it I consider bad. We've been doing electronic games since the 70s...can't we PLEASE try and work out something that's not a grind or at least doesn't feel like one?
Some of the things that you don't like as free, Respecs, costume pieces and so forth, I EXPECT as loyalty perks for being a subscriber. Especially the Respecs. Think of all the times you wanted a Respec. Now think of what would have happened if you'd had to gather a team, on a potentially low-pop server, to GET a Respec.
I don't want to have to compete against another player for ANYTHING in CoT except PvP Defeat badges which I will gladly pass on if the PvP is not fun for me.

I agree with the general spirit of this.

Having played Champions and DCUO after CoH, I have to say that what kept me from being able to really get into those games the way I got onto CoH was that they regressed towards hackneyed gaming mechanics and concepts rather than building on the unique Supehero MMORPG genre that CoH pioneered.

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 4 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
I agree that the respec trial

I agree that the respec trial (as a team of 4 minimum, and a thing you had to have a good enough toon to be able to do ) was bad. But remember there are more options than just "free" and "do a 4-person minimum trial". Cash shop money, in game influence, collecting exploration badges, reading history plaques, etc can all be a way to gate content so that it isn't simply given to people. I also dislike the vet rewards "time spent having an account since launch" as a way to dole out player-bound respecs. On CoH I had like a million freespecs on every new toon I created for this reason and newbies who began playing in like 2011 had none. That's wasting the respecs on the people who don't need them, and I couldn't even sell them to people for infl (or give them away) if I wanted to.

So when I say "free" I don't mean "free for subscribers who've accumulated enough points or whatever". That's not what "free" is to me, "free" to me, means "everyone can have this, no charge" Paying a sub is a charge. I agree that it SHOULD buy you something, and a respec sounds good as an option there. What I would like is the ability to take my veteran points or whatever and convert that into some combination of cash shop credit, in-game influence, or something my toons can actually either use or trade to other people who need it. So like make a respec token that I can spend my vet points on, I take it, I sell it on Wentworths, and I get some infl while someone else get's the respec they need.

Edit: I've officially changed my mind on "tradeable respec tokens", sorry about that. I now think they should be "bind to toon on acquire".

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Gorgon
Gorgon's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 05/15/2014 - 11:46
Add my voice to some previous

Add my voice to some previous points:

Grouping An LFG window is less important (though useful) than the sidekicking-type system. Just join a group, auto-sidekicked, end of story. No problem.

Make mission sharing easy, too, including "joining in in the middle" of an arc. Maybe the end reward is reduced for not being there the whole time, but at least something. Tera Online is abysmal in this, with most (!!!) mundane missions in an area being part of a chain where you must do the whole chain to get rewards, which included the lion's share of the xp for the mission completion itself. This was terrible, terrible design because, unless you happened to arrive in a new area at the exact same moment as some other characters, you couldn't do missions together. Terrible. What bonehead there decided this?

__________________

The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.

Darth Fez
Darth Fez's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/20/2013 - 07:53
There are potential drawbacks

There are potential drawbacks to allowing people to join and complete mission arcs at any point during the arc. If someone is unaware of this or did not pay attention before being invited, or was not told, they could be quite put out to discover that they have only seen half the arc. Similarly, how would the game handle someone who joins for one mission of an arc and then leaves? If it is possible to repeat the content to experience the missed missions, and perhaps even gain the XP and rewards that had been 'lost', this is obviously less of a problem.

Tera is something of a special case since, as Gorgon said, each zone is essentially its own mission/story arc. There is no option to skip one quest hub and get back to it later. However, one would do well to remember that it is a Korean game.

- - - - -
Hail Beard!

Support trap clowns for CoT!

Gorgon
Gorgon's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 4 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 05/15/2014 - 11:46
16. Prefixs and Suffixs in

16. Prefixs and Suffixs in names (mentioned by Pleonast)

While a small touch this adds subtly to that "super" feel to the game. It also makes the character feel slightly more personal. I'm not Stupendous Man, I'm The Amazing Stupendous Man!! Yes, I delivered that out loud in my house in full corny super hero delivery. THAT is the power of that tiny addition.

I need my "The" without having to make it literally part of the name. It's almost as important as hot pants, heels, and belly Ts.

__________________

The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.

Es Trella
Es Trella's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 6 months ago
Joined: 06/01/2014 - 14:34
I think we need to include

I think we need to include super groups, the editing of power colors, and town intro songs. But we should, (if it's possible) add vehicles, eye better (COH was PHENOMENAL) face editing, being able to view other character's descriptions, places only cetrtain levels can go (like a party room for 50's ONLY!!!!), and a more variety of pets.

~Es

Mind-Freeze
Mind-Freeze's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 10 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 04:28
I always enjoyed playing the

I always enjoyed playing the healer in any mmo I have played but COH was always fun in buffing teammates I always enjoyed casting both auras fortitude and adrenaline boost on a player and just watching them go ape **** That alone just made my day

Es Trella
Es Trella's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 6 months ago
Joined: 06/01/2014 - 14:34
Also inspirations and

Also inspirations and enhancements should stay, and there should be a larger variety and they should be more common.

~Es

Empyrean
Empyrean's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 6 months ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 03/16/2014 - 07:51
Mind-Freeze wrote:
Mind-Freeze wrote:

I always enjoyed playing the healer in any mmo I have played but COH was always fun in buffing teammates I always enjoyed casting both auras fortitude and adrenaline boost on a player and just watching them go ape **** That alone just made my day

Bless players like you. After trying many play styles, I found I was just happiest punching the boss in the face and swimming in taunted minions, but players like you keeping us all alive and letting me punch harder and faster made MY day. And I always tipped my support.

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

Mind-Freeze
Mind-Freeze's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 10 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 04:28
Lol every see a hero fully

Lol every see a hero fully buffed with a defenders full buffs it's pretty scary almost feel bad for villains ....almost :-)

Es Trella
Es Trella's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 6 months ago
Joined: 06/01/2014 - 14:34
Yeah, the last guy I made, S

Yeah, the last guy I made, S-Mace, who's part of my homemade comics group, "S-Men Comics (you should google them) was a tanker who went around with my cousin's healer that was so small compared to S-Mace, that she was usually unnoticed.

~Es

Ralathar44
Ralathar44's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 7 months ago
kickstarter
Joined: 01/20/2014 - 20:46
*casts Howling Twilight on a

*casts Howling Twilight on a nearby mob*

Pages