Destiny 2 is a game I'm playing now and despite people saying the game has peaked and now on the decline, it is apparently still pulling almost 1 million players daily worldwide as far as I know. They publish the numbers, last ones I saw mentioned on the forums there are like 500k PvP and 500k PvE or something. Anyway , in that game there's a game play mode you can do that I think might work well in CoT, as a concept. This is not a new idea nor is it my idea, FYI, I'm just mentioning here what it is and how I'd try to adapt it to CoT.
In Destiny 2 the mode I'm referring to is called "Gambit" and it's a PvEvP type of thing. Without getting into the flavor text justification that game uses to explain why it works like it does, let's just forget that and talk about the mechanics first:
1. You get in the queue, and you get teamed up with 3 other players who are roughly your skill level (however the game measures that) and matched against an opposing team of 4.
2. Your team of 4 is then teleported to an instance while the opposing team is teleported to an exact copy of the same instance.
3. While on your instance, you have to fight off waves of badguys and when you defeat them, they drop these things called "motes". Mooks drop one mote, bosses drop more, etc.
4. The guy running the Gambit match (a shady-looking wheeler-dealer type called "The Drifter") instructs you to accumulate motes and then deposit them in the "bank", which is a glowwie in the center of the map.
5. When your team deposits 75 motes in your bank, you summon a big boss spawn and its cohort of lieutenants etc right on top of your bank. The first team to kill their boss wins.
6. While fighting the mobs and depositing the motes, there are some extra rules. If you get defeated, all of the motes you have acquired (but not deposited in the bank yet) are lost.
7. If any one person deposits 5 motes at once, that spawns a "blocker" on the opposing team's side, which is a monster that shuts down their bank until they kill it. If you deposit 10 motes in one shot, you send a bigger blocker and dropping 15 gets you the biggest blocker.
8. At different times (not sure what triggers this) the Drifter opens a portal that will allow one person from your side (any one, whoever goes in first) to cross over to the opposing team's map and wreak havoc on them. You only stay there for like 10 seconds and you can get killed by them as easily as they can get killed by you. When your invader's time is up they teleport back to their own map, or respawn in the home map's spawn area if killed while invading.
The instance maps are set up kind of like a baseball diamond. The place where you spawn is "home plate" the bank is located in the center, so like the pitcher's mound, and the mobs that you have to PvE against spawn on 1st, 2nd and 3rd base, respectively.
Anyway, Gambit mode is reasonably fun for me, as I am a PvE cooperative type player, and there is that aspect of it. If I were trying to implement something like this in CoT, I'd make the justification some sort of "The Beyonder has chosen you to be his pawns in an intergalactic contest of champions" type deal. You could have some kind of enigmatic cosmic entity responsible for this whole business, like Secret Wars or whatever.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I think an issue with transporting a mode like that to CoT, is it largely sounds like a damage race. Killing things as fast as possible to get the currency. In Destiny, where all classes are damage focused and everyone uses guns, that can work, but CoT has melee classes, and those who don't focus on damage at all such as Operator and Guardian. Non-damage classes sound like detriment to the team for this.
That's not to say I'm outright against the idea, I love objective based pvp in my MMOs. I'll take capture the flag and point capture over straight up death match or arena modes every time.
CoT just has a lot more balance concerns. It doesn't need to be 100% balanced, but I'd want each class to at least have a use in any particular mode.
There was another thread that touched on PvPvE too. Lots of concerns balancing it.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Probably the best way to "translate" this to a City of Titans setting would be more of a [b]Test Your (S)Might[/b] kind of arrangement where the competition between the teams is the point, rather than a straight up PvP "kill all the reds" battle.
And yes, the D2 setup is something of a "pure" beatdown/DPS monster construction, because (based on what you're saying about the game) that's something that everyone has in common (because, guns, guns, guns).
The first thing I was thinking of while reading this was that it really sounds like a sort of "Reverse Mayhem Mission" in which it's the NPCs who are the destructive element(s), rather than the PCs like we had in Mayhem Missions. The "contest" then is not just a matter of who can defeat the most NPCs in the shortest amount of time (although, as always, that helps), but rather who can most EFFICIENTLY transport the drops from the NPCs to a location in order to interfere with the opposing team's efforts to do the same thing. So there's not just a DPS component, but also a gathering and movement component to the action. Additionally, there's an element of gambling/risk involved in terms of HOW you transport the motes to the bank, causing an All Eggs In One Basket™ issue where as you increase your collection you also increase the risk of Losing Progress if your PC gets defeated before successfully turning in your haul.
The important point here is that there's a more complex competitive dynamic going on than just a mere US vs THEM direct combat. Instead, you've got more axes of interest than just a mere Kill Counter, since there's "more to do" than just punch the opposing team in the face all the time (until time's up). There's elements of strategy, tactics and tradeoffs involved, turning the whole thing into something more than just a plain old DPS match.
In the context of City of Titans, do NOT discount the power of Buffs, Debuffs and Mez to make what would otherwise be relatively straightforward fights into something far more complex and potentially lopsided than you'd otherwise assume from the start. For one thing, use of [url=https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mass_Confusion][b]Mass Comedy[/b][/url] on a dogpile of enemies can help you dispatch them remarkably quickly, even without much input of DPS from a PC source. Debuff+Drain powers, along with damage auras on aggro magnets can help hostiles "exist to death" in relatively short order, when combined creatively.
In other words, don't overlook the ingenuity of Players when faced with a SET of challenges like this kind of a competition would present.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
One way to try to balance this would be to segregate the team matchups based on team composition. So like, if you want to compete, in the "2 Blasters, a Defender and a Controller" class , you need a team that has exactly that. Like weight classes, but more complex.
We don't know exactly how CoT will actually play right now, so its hard to judge these things, but I think sorting and classifying the matches in terms of level and team compo is a start, and probably necessary.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
That design principle would place a limitation on team composition (something akin to MMO holy trinity), which is the opposite of what I imagine MWM would want. If your team does not fit that mold, they might have to sit in a queue until a counterpart team showed up. Or it could create undesirable matchups in terms of build disparity. Or the system could datamine the characters and classify them based off of how defensive/offensive/supportive they are to create matchups. Any work around they relies on the game system to objectively classify a character will fail.
I believe we would have to live with the creativity of the player base to construct their own teams. If MWM accurately describes the problem that the team will face, the onus should be on the players to construct their teams based on that information or at the very least understand what their deficiencies are so they know where they will be weak.
"Just, well, update your kickstarter email addresses, okay? Make sure they're current?" - warcabbit
I liked the fact that CoH allowed you "brute force" your way through with teams made up of almost any combination of teammates. Obviously if you had a team that was "properly balanced" (with a good mix of offense, defense and support) you would likely excel at whatever you were doing. But CoH still let you get by even with relatively badly mixed PUG teams if you knew how to account for the imbalance. Basically the Holy Trinity was -not- required and that was a -good- thing.
So I would NOT be in favor of any system in CoT that strictly required precise team design like "you must have two Blasters, a Defender and a Controller" for any reason.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'm not saying that the devs would try to pigeon hole anyone into anything. It's not like they, the devs, are going to only offer "all blasters" as the only Gambit option. What I mean is, we, the end users might be able to try to start a new match which has a prescribed team compo (prescribed by the person who created the match, i.e. a player) on both teams, and then other players could see those matches trying to fill and jump into an open slot as desired.
Maybe as different team comps gain popularity you could have queues for those, I wouldn't rule that out either.
I also like the idea of being able to play the game as you wait in the queue. That is, I want to be able to street sweep for fun as I wait in a queue for something else. In CoC you could do that to some extent, I think everyone on the Trial or TF had to be in the same zone to start a TF, but you could still do stuff in that zone, you didn't have to just be in a waiting room or something.
In D2, queue wait times are generally less than 60 sec for everything, so this is a non-issue. But tghen that game has like 500k player logging on per day.
If you're the person creating the match, you might even be able to do imbalanced teams where one team has one comp and the opponents have something different. Or you could have total mayhem where the team comps are not prescribed at all in the "free for all" weight class.
Since this game is not going to have "Action" style targeting, i.e. not like Overwatch or D2, the PvP is going to suffer from that alone. Most PvPers want to be in control of their own fate and want accuracy and the ability to dodge well ect to play a role in wins and losses, and this game is unlikely to have that, as it's more like CoX or GW2 in that sense, i.e. no gun aiming.
Being able to make a new match (an set the team comp parameters for it) that people can hop into might be something subscribers could do that non-sub cannot, perhaps.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Sure I'm fine for whatever "match-ups" players themselves want to do either in direct PvP or competitive PvE, even with teams that are otherwise "unbalanced" against each other.
I just don't think there should be any game system in CoT that would specifically (beyond players' control) require specific classes of characters to accomplish anything. Even the hypothetical idea of a PvE TF that "must have a Controller to finish" is something I'd rather -not- see in CoT.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
One functionality I would prefer not to see in CoT is being teleported to an instance when a queue for something pops. If you want to be involved in an event (PvEvP, an instance or whatever), you should be in the general area where it happens. Getting characters out into the world is what gives the world life. If you want to wander off and do something while you wait, great. But then when the call comes (aka the queue pops), you need to haul ass to wherever you need to be to play the encounter. I do not know exactly how MWM will handle zone transitions (there will be no "war walls"), so queueing for content could get tricky if you stray too far.
The convenience factor of just sitting in one place and queueing for content all day is nice, but it isolates you from participating in making the world lively. That is one factor that made the WoW world feel empty for me.
"Just, well, update your kickstarter email addresses, okay? Make sure they're current?" - warcabbit
One of my favorite features of CoH was that 'one more' on the team, as long as the Player knew what they were doing, could make the difference between success and failure. It didn't matter what AT that 'one more' was, either. Despite some of the team-leaders I've suffered, I learned that we DIDN'T need a 'healor', although some scenarios did work better with a controller-type to slow or lock-down certain mobs.
Be Well!
Fireheart
In response to Planet 10, I hear ya. I fondly remember looking for PUGs while standing around Manticore or Sister Psyche in CoH. Even just looking for groups in Perez Park was fun. Destiny 2 has something like this too. There are open world events that fire off every few minutes and 5 min before the event starts, a banner appears letting you know an event will start soon. If you approach the banner and press and hold down "e" (there's an on-screen prompt fopr this when you get close enough) you "Rally to the banner" and will get an on-screen countdown timer to the event on your HUD. You're in no way obligated to do the event, but the timer lets you know when it'll happen.
There are also user-initiated events you can start on your own in D2. On Mars, there are computer terminal towers in various places, and if you approach them and press and hold "e" (again there's a prompt), you begin an event called "Escalation Protocol" which causes waves of aliens to rush at you. Then after you wipe them out, theres a prompt on screen to go to the next terminal (which appears on your radar minimap) to begin the next wave. There are 7 waves in all, and the last wave has a change of dropping a rare item sometimes.
There is also a sort of "jukebox" event in one planet where you have to do missions and earn loot until you can buy a token from the NPC, then take the token to the "jukebox", deposit the token and that begins an event where you have to defeat waves of shadow monsters until the end where there's a boss and a loot drop, etc.
So that sort of thing exists in D2, but mostly only for open world content, not strikes or raids, which have non-open-world queues. Interestingly, in D2, you can be logged in and playing the game without being physically located anywhere. You get a ship and sometimes you're just "in orbit" which means you're not on a world map of any kind, really. That's not something I think CoT needs, but it's interesting.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising