Suggestion in brief: Have a low or non-existent curve as regards hard numbers gained from leveling up. Allow the unlocking of powers, ‘class features’, and expanded ability to modify/customize powers (as in increasing enhancement slots in the old system) to be the primary benefit of leveling up.
To expand a bit on this, while CoH did a decent job of making the character ‘feel super’ when compared to even level cannon fodder even from level 1, the same character would feel like tissue paper vs even slightly higher level cannon fodder. This causes a type of conceptual dissonance that is very common to (and usually blindly accepted within) computer role-playing games but is particularly non-genre for something based on comic books.
A new-ish super-hero who could throw fireballs and rescue any endangered citizen in Atlas Park thereby could take the tram to Talos and get stomped into a bloody pulp, with absolutely no chance of success, by some teenaged goon who just joined The Warriors. Our super-hero, praised to the skies in Atlas, is less effective than your normal Talos Island beat cop.
Look, of course you need things to get ‘tougher’ to reflect your hero getting better. Leveling up and being able to do things you couldn’t do before is a huge, possibly central, part of the game. But it doesn’t need to be that steep or automatic.
The CoH system was, in my opinion, the result of taking the model of table-top games (specifically D&D with it’s ‘fighters get 5% better accuracy each level’ advancement system) and extrapolating that over the much greater level-spreads of modern MMO games. 5% per level may not be that bad when 10th level (or maybe as high as 20th in some rare cases) is as high as you go before those numbers stop advancing. But when you stick with 5% per level (or something similar) and go to level 50 and higher then it gets silly fast. I don’t see any reason to do this other than that it’s become somewhat traditional, a mistake that everyone makes.
Thought experiment: What if the accuracy/to-hit and defense/resistance numbers did not change with level? What if the difference between level 1 and level 50 was all about more tricks and powers, and simply the enhancements (or other mechanically similar buffs) themselves? Think about how that would make the game feel, how it would simplify teaming, how it would change what it means to be a low level hero exploring a new higher level zone (or, indeed, a higher level character visiting a ‘safer’ zone). The higher level bad guys might have some built-in ‘enhancement-like’ buffs, it might well be more dangerous than the lower-level place the character may have come from, but the character might have a chance to take on ‘higher level’ minions and win, or at least escape. And as the character levels up, then the difference in how the fight goes is suddenly the cool new power or trick or bit of gear or whatever, not just that the character is higher level (and therefore some invisible numbers went up) and so now can beat those guys just using Brawl (or whatever).
I submit that this would be both more simple and more elegant than the CoH (and general MMO) model, and would be far more reflective of the genre.
What do you think?
I'd be careful with any sort of change like that as it would make for a fundamentally different game than CoH. It might be a change for the better, but it could also be something that loses as much interest as it gains.
In terms of teaming, I think the Super Sidekick system pretty much completely solved any issues in that regards and is an all-but-required part of any CoH-like game going forward.
That said, I think paying at least a little more attention to the lore to help support the effect of level gaps would be productive. If there are street thugs to fight at higher levels then providing some in-world rational for why they can go toe-to-toe with a mid-tier super would save a lot of angst (i.e. "they're imbued with ancient magics" or "they have access to alien tech that's slowly mutating them so no one else dares use it").
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What you are suggesting here, in essence, is to remove levels. There is nothing wrong with this idea in itself, as many RPGs that use a skills/points system have shown. That raises the question of which kind of system you envisioned using in place of levels. (Whether a spiritual successor to CoH can afford to leave levels by the wayside would also need to be considered.)
Another factor is that it remains true that a character with more skills or points is still more powerful than a character with fewer skills or points. If a starting character can go nearly anywhere without all that great a risk the advancement curve must be quite flat because, clearly, the more advanced/powerful NPCs aren't very much stronger. That suggests that the advancement curve for players' characters must be quite flat, as well, meaning little sense of the character gaining in skill or power. If advancement remains noticeable anything "level appropriate" will prove laughably weak in comparison.
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With respect, I don't think I'm suggesting anything this extreme. Level meant a number of things, such as unlocking powers, enhancement slots, new inherent abilities, health increases, etc. It also was used in a couple of calculations involving whether or not a target was hit by an attack, and if it was how much damage or other effect was done. It is ONLY those calculations that my suggestion effects directly.
In CoH there was a feeling of advancement vs even level opponents. At first level a character could take on X number of opponents, by 50th that same character could take on more of the tougher level 50+ opponents. With good power selection and enhancing, a character at 50 might be able to take on even level mobs all day long. That feels like quite a jump from level 1. And that's unaffected by my suggestion entirely. It would only be in the calculations for targets with a higher or lower level where the difference would become apparent.
The one follow-on that would have to change would the the figuring of XP, which might have to look more like D&D 4e than the exponential ramp up of the MMO standard. Other than that, I don't think it knocks over many other dominoes.
If I understand this correctly, what you are suggesting is that a character should be able to stand a chance against a sole opponent of any level but will only be able to take on larger groups of them if the character is close to even level?
Taking into account that in CoH one almost never found standard enemies alone, would such an approach really have any impact on gameplay? Would lieutenant, boss, etc. mobs be excluded from this model?
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I'm only saying that the specific parts of the accuracy and damage calculations that incorporate the difference in level between the attacker and target should be removed. The target's rank, powers and abilities, inherent features, and other such things are outside the scope of this entirely. Nor am I making a statement about what a character 'should' be able to handle (in other words, I'm not attempting to make a 'game balance' suggestion of any sort).
Hmm... try this as another thought experiment which I hope will clarify what I'm aiming at. Lets say you've just respec-ed your level 50 character and dumped all of his/hers/its enhancements. Now go acquire a few training origin enhancements if you like, and run a mission against 50's using only the powers you had at level 1. Do you stand a chance? Maybe. Probably even, with rest breaks, good timing, some luck, smart use of inspirations, and an enemy group that's not too troublesome. Now go get slotted out properly and run the mission again using all the powers at your disposal.
I know it's been quite some time since we've played, but I'm sure you can see the difference in your mind's eye. My contention is that that difference is largely all you need between levels 1 and 50.
The only difference between a power a character has at level 1 and the one he has at level 50 is that at level 50 it will have more enhancement slots, yes? And yet that level 1 power remains viable (if hardly ideal) against level 50 enemies even if unslotted?
To me that says that a fully slotted level 50 character would either be only marginally more impressive than a level 1 character or that fully slotted level 50 character would scarcely need to slow down to defeat even level enemies.
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Against even-level enemies there is no effect from my suggestion at all. It would be exactly as you recall it from CoH. No change whatsoever. I apologize if I've failed to make that clear.
Now I'm quite thoroughly confused. Perhaps if you provided some basic examples with numbers it'd shine some light on the matter (for me, anyway).
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Ok, sure, let me give it a shot.
So when you make an attack on a target there’s a, lets call it a ‘to-hit roll’, that’s made to determine if the attack lands. That roll uses your base accuracy (+ applicable enhancements and other effects such as Tactics or other similar things) and is opposed by the defense value of the target (similarly modified). I’m simplifying a bit but you get the idea I’m sure.
These accuracy and defense values are further modified by a comparison between the level of the attacker and that of the target. A higher level target becomes harder to hit. This change in values is quite steep, to the point that against a target 5 or more levels higher than the attacker the base accuracy of the attack drops to a floor of about 5%. A similar thing happens with damage, so if the attack does land it has considerably less power against that higher level target. I won’t get into the numbers used by the original game and how they changed after the so-called ‘purple patch’, I’m trying to speak in general terms to get the idea across.
This additional modification is done because XP scales in this steep almost geometric way, and if it’s possible to defeat higher level targets then leveling up the character goes too stupid-crazy-fast. It’s also done to ‘gate’ content to specific level-ranges and enforce/encourage (a) certain path(es) through the game from level 1 to 50. It maintains a situation in which, at any given time, most of the game is either impossibly hard or trivially easy (and without reward).
My issue is that the superhero genre doesn’t work like that. Maybe no genre truly does, but I’m focused on ours for now. And, importantly, the CoH team quickly realized that fact! They instituted the most robust sidekick/exemplar (or whatever you choose to call it) system of any MMO then in existence, and made it even more flexible and better over time. That was a good patch of the problem, no argument there.
But why not avoid the problem in the first place? It would be relatively simple to alter XP rewards and progression to avoid the inordinately fast leveling problem. The gate-ing of most content is rendered trivial by the sidekick/exemplar system, and there are plenty of other ways to gate content if that’s desirable. So the reasons for doing things this way are limited at best.
But for those small maybe-benefits, all of which could be gained some other way, we suffer a large amount of cognitive dissonance and end up in a decidedly non-genre world.
a easier fix to fast leveling is to turn xp gain off which was a thing u could do in CoH
Y'know, you highlight a good point. I labeled this thread badly. "leveling curve" is usually associated with "advancement rate", and thats got nothing to do with this suggestion at all.
That said, I'm not really sure how best to describe what I'm after in just a few words. I'll give it some more thought.