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So lets say when an event is triggered the affected area gets blocked of. NPC cops and cars could be placed to block of traffic like in a real emergency. Like Syntax said marked clearly on the map of the affected area. So you don't want to join in you can just leave the area and watch from the side lines. No event should be city wide. Heck each area we know is leveled ranged so the hard Zombie outbreak in NERD area wouldn't happen in Phoenix Park.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
I would remind everyone that these zone events would be basically optional (fun and popular in many cases I hope, but not mandatory). You COULD just fly over it, walk by ignoring it, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
exactly, the option
more options = maturity
look at wow, they really dumbed it down, imo
to appeal to the younger audience, afaik
i would suggest the opposite direction, appeal to the older audience
younger players would have certain options disabled or not defaulted, of course
OPTIONS = maturity
\`|'/
Personally I think City of Heroes' system of XP debt and long cooldown rez powers / rez hospital was a decent one,
I think the best way to address this in an easy manner is through the way missions are written.
One of the core concepts of spandex clad superheroes is they fight supervillains. The question is why? Because said villains are doing something villanous, that's why. So when it comes time to create the mission content, build it around this concept, so a mission change might go as follows:
Stop the Sons of Surtr, the fire wielding biker gang is harassing citizens in Alphaville, do something about it.
Primary Objective: Defeat 15 gang members in 15 minutes
Secondary Objective: Defeat 5 gang lieutenants in 15 minutes
Successfully completing the mission grants you completion of the mission, access to the second mission in the chain, XP, and a reward roll (some in game item). Additional objectives then give you another roll on the reward roll and more XP.
This opens the next mission:
The Sons of Surtr were looking for descendants of the Aesr to complete a magical ritual to summon the fire Giant Surtr
Primary Objective: Rescue the captured civilians
Secondary Objective: Capture Jacob Jotnar
Same deal as before, except now you fight the gang leader, and its a tough fight, if you get the upperhand he will attempt to flee, if he defeats you he will then leave. Defeating Jacob gets you a special badge and bonus XP.
A lot of people have mentioned the reactor trial, and this can be handled the same way by creating multiple separate objectives in the same event. This way if you fail, you can fail by degrees, and it adds replay value to missions and trials by pushing players to replay the mission and achieve greater successes.
That same concept can be applied to a whole plethora of missions, especially if content is built around scaling, so you can run it at any level. A big challenge of any game is to attract new players and keep old players. The best way to do this is to create high quality content that can be played initially, and then is enticing enough to be replayed later. By creating missions with degrees of success you can expand the replay value of missions and have one piece of content provide many times the play time for senior players.
This gave me the idea of taking things in a slightly different direction. If some mission is failed, then the hero needs to go do some street sweeping to find some clue, or some suspicious character to follow, that will lead them to the next mission. Otherwise they find the necessary information in that mission and can keep right on truckin'.
Even the impression that mission failure means that the player cannot finish that story arc will do a lot of damage. This remains true even if there is some kind of Portal Corp. / Ouroboros feature in place that allows players to go back to experience missions. One must keep in mind that even the most competent player could trigger a failure event as a result of lag or other connection problems, such as computer or server crashes.
Two more points: One, heroes must always be allowed to recover from a defeat. Two, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative]ludonarrative dissonance[/url] is a fact of life in video games, in particular in MMOs.
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One significant difference that we will be facing, if I'm correctly extrapolating what I've heard, is that there will be only one "zone" (A single expansive map) and a single server. "Zone wide" events would then, presumably, affect everyone. If every player is playing the same server, I'd expect Task Forces to be happening a lot more frequently. In which case, big all-encompassing events triggered by them lose their flavor and are just annoyances.
If the Event that's triggered is localized and contained in some way, the well and good. I'm surprised to learn that the Rikti invasions were triggered by the TF. Was Lady Gray done that infrequently? I only saw the Rikti like once a week or so. It was still annoying to be waiting while a group formed up, and have Rikti TPing in around us.
My understanding is that there will still be zones, but they will be seamless so that Titan City will appear to be one contiguous area. Each zone will have one or more instances, depending on how many people are in that zone (this is a technological limitation since allowing hundreds of people to gather in a single area tends to do bad things to the server(s)). This could allow for such triggered events to be announced and spawn in new instances, so that whoever wants to go beat on the giant marshmallow man can pop over to Central Park (5) while everyone continues to go about their business undisturbed.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Well, by zone I meant "given named area of the city". That does not change the fact that I wouldn't want all of say Alexandria engaged in the event, rather a smaller section of the area. Sure your mission door might still end up smack dab in the middle of the event, but people doing things in the area who want to avoid the event should be able to.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
I think the idea of creating a gate between failure and retry is a bad idea.
On of the big elements that I believe needs to exist in the game straight from the getgo is the ability to replay content. There are multiple ways to address this, in CoH originally the way to replay content was by creating an alt, and then later through a special mission content addon. There is also a thirdway, instant replay, where any mission already played can be replayed.
Simply put, not having mission replay is an egregious misuse of resources. Each mission represents a financial investment, even accounting for reuse of assets, you still have somebody spending time writing dialogue, choosing maps/props, setup in game doorways and mission giver details. If you leave alting as the only method you create a major gate to your playerbase in accessing that content. This especially creates a problem when you have badge collecting portion of your game and tie badges to that content.
You mention not finding a clue in a mission, and this forcing you to then street sweep to find the clue. This isn't a bad idea, it creates a decent illusion of branching storylines. However, it also creates the problem of "What content did I miss." But then this brings us back to mission replays, and actually works in our (or the developers) favor.
It caters to two groups:
It gives the those with Altitis a reason to replay content beyond just leveling a new toon.
It gives the completionists a reason to replay that mission to see the other half (and maybe get a badge for doing so) of the tree branch
The only risk here is in creating storylines that then veer off from each seperate branch, then you risk adding a whole lot of content that a large portion (the one and done'rs) of your playerbase misses out on.
So, to summarize, you're arguing that allowing for failure in certain missions is a bad idea and should not be allowed?
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I like this idea a lot. Failure that makes something different happen, but that doesn't derail the arc.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Not necessarily, more that when choosing if a mission is failable there needs to be consideration how that effects the gameplay of the player and what happens after the mission has been failed.
If I fail can I immediately restart the mission? Does that cutoff the chain? Does failure open up new content? If it does once I have completed a quest chain can I go back and replay that chain to make different decisions later?
This also relates into the levelling ladder. If content branches it encourages both replay and alting, which is good because both keep players in the game. However, if you have a long distance between level 1 and max level you then make it harder to reaccess content by creating alts, and if you level gate replay you make it even harder.
But of course this all ties into even more game design/story decisions. How are missions written? Mostly chains or mostly stand alones? When I replay a mission can I replay a single mission or must I replay the entire chain? How does leveling work? What's the difference in power between a level 1 and a level 10? Is there an inherent Stat boost between levels, or is it just more powers and boost slots? How large is the stat boost if it exists? What's the difference in power between a level 1 and a level 10?
Just a lot of different things to think about when planning for how mission content, replay, and failure works.
As I had said in the original post, my thinking is that not all content should be really challenging, but some content should be really challenging. Street Sweeping and other more or less mindless activities can be "unfailable" and you should be able to not do or otherwise skip a mission (not accepting it would be the preferred move there, but dropping a mission was something CoH had so I would expect to be able to do that in CoT).
For things where failing can create other paths through the content, I'm now envisioning that as a Task Force type of thing. In the original Wing Commander game, the mission you got next (and the wingman you got saddled with) was dependent on which branch of the "pass/fail" mission tree you were on. If you kept failing missions you had Maniac os your wingman for some hard misions, if you kept kicking axe you got Iceman, if you were in the middle you got Knight. You could have a TF where your success or failure in certain missions early on alters the course of the TF such that you get different missions/badguys later. I remember there was an urban legend about how clicking the glowwies on the early parts of the Respec trial would affect the last mission, but it didn't. You could make it so that stuff like that does affect stuff later on, including failing the first mission or what have you.
I feel like it would be nice if there was a difficulty setting for TFs and Trials and a separate "risk/reward" setting where you could put in things like "kick from TF upon defeat" where every hero on the TF get's captured or otherwise forced off of the TF when they get defeated. Or you could have "Random Enhancement loss on Defeat" or "Team debuff on mission failure" or "no stealth" etc. And for each of these "risks" you choose to use at the beginning of the TF, you'd get some kind of better reward(s) for finishing/succeeding the TF at the end.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I agree. Planning for defeat or failure, so to speak, is considerably more challenging than the common 'keep trying until you succeed' approach. If the mission designer does not hit the sweet spot for the cut-off between success and failure, it can easily prove to be very jarring.
There are options to make the whole experience easier, such as specifically tagged missions or story arcs that are designed to have the option to be replayed. This could even be used to spice up dailies a bit, if these are used.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
A few have said that not all missions have to have a failure option just some. Why not make the fail missions smaller and more personal and the result of failing be more along the lines of street chatter. In CoX random citizens would talk about your recent missions...'Hero A just brought down Big Bad' for example. That system could also include 'Hero A just got his but handed to him by Big Bad'.
I think City of Heroes actually did that.
They did for victory not failure. I don't think there were that many missions to 'fail' in CoX.
I don't know about anybody else, but I know for a fact that I, for one, definitely want to hear random passers by say to me "YOU SUCK, Radiac!!!" if I've recently failed a mission. That would be hilarious. Also, the nurses in the auto-TP hospitals should give you verbal abuse while they're putting you back together.
:)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
NPC Nurse: "Back again $target? Maybe you should get some help"
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
LMAO! I definitely want to see this now.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Top 10 things Nurse's should say to you in the CoT hospitals when you respawn there:
10. "Have you ever considered a career in the food service industry?"
9. "Your 'sidekick' isn't here this much., just sayin...."
8. "Maybe you could just pay the ransom, it might be cheaper than the doctor's bill."
7. "Is the little 8-foot tall green-skinned mutant special ops agent gunna cry?"
6. "Does 'Justice Incarnate' need a fresh bedpan? *snicker*"
5. "Where DOESN'T it hurt, Captain Invincible?"
4. "Seriously, did you REALLY get defeated 10 times in 20 minutes, or are you just a morphine addict?"
3. "Every time I see you here I want to invest in the company that sells Inspirations"
2. "See what getting power-leveled to 50 get's you?"
1. "Roll up your sleeve and make a fist, if you know how to do that..."
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
When you die in Wildstar and rez at the "grave yard".... you get mocked *verbally* for it.
"Back again so soon? Maybe you should build your home here" (and stuff along those lines)
I think the hospital staff should definitely have different behavior toward frequent customers, but why does it have to be negative? I say make them even more familiar in how they address you, more jokey, more friendly even! After all you have been hanging around there a lot.
"Hey, $name, got a dollar I can use for the machine? I'll pay you back your next time through."
"Catch ya later, $name!"
"Well, you should get going, I guess. I'll finish the story when you are back."
"Ha! We need to stop meeting like this... people are starting to talk!"
"Hey, $name! I need to tell you something about the concert tonight, but I have an appointment... I should be free by the time you are back, though..."
"Hey, everybody, it's $name! How ya doin'?"
In many ways, it would be more embarrassing, I think >_>
Global: @Second Chances
SG: Fusion Force
"And it's not what I wanted
Oh no, it's not what I planned
See it's not where I thought I'd be
It's just where I am"
I agree with Wanders. A more joking playful comments rather then insulting.
"Tough one huh? Well I'm sure you put plenty of those guys behind bars."
"Well taking a beating all part of being a Hero. Remember Heroes never give up! I keep the bed open for you."
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
As a Villain, I would like to be insulted.
Thank you.
Playful jabs from robotic nurses, supplemented by the sarcastic wit of mildly-sapient medical equipment, please.
I strongly suspect that there's already a line item for it in the billing system...might as well get our money's worth.
Some really great ideas here, bravo all!
I really love the thought of failure to complete a mission would trigger a zone event, at this point I have to say that an old SG friend always wanted the statues in Atlas park to come to life (props to Captain Fallout), it would have made for a wicked animator villian event.
But I digress, maybe the failure of a mission could mean a simple loss of status, which would in turn make the character ineligible to access certain missions or other contacts like stores, and the only way to get back into their good books would be to do a mission or two for them.
Do anything that would build the character of the game but don't debuff players for failing...that's just wrong and lazy.
Hmm.. I dont think i would respect the game anymore if that was possible. Its just TOO much of a stretch for me. :P
For me having a Zone event trigger from a Task Force/Strike Force would be one way that makes them different from solo content. Having the Evil Doctor Baddie Robot army spawn in the city because the Task Force didn't upload the computer virus in time makes sense. As well as have NPC's make comments like "Way to go, thanks to one of those robots I'm forced to take public transportation."
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
This kind of zone event is interesting but as has been pointed out how do you implement it.
You would have to consider things like :
multiple groups doing the same TF
the opposite goals this would create in a group (some want to see the baddie robot some what to complete the TF)
how special something like this would really be (weekends might see a permanent spawn of this big bad)
how hard to code it would be
the list goes on.
I do like a way for players to create zone events I just don't see the trial or TF failure as the best way to do it.
None of the issues you state here are unsolvable though, they're just details that need to be worked out and problems that need solving which I believe do in fact have have workable solutions. I don't expect the devs to have something like this ready on day 1, but I also don't expect them to just cop a lazy attitude, throw their hands up in the air and say "That's too hard, because you have to think about it and stuff, to hell with it.."
The "TF fail causes robot attack" mechanic proposed is not the same thing as insisting that EVERY failure creates THE SAME exact huge-scale robot attack every time, without exception. You can modulate and regulate stuff like this in a number of ways. for starters, you could put a cooldown timer on it. Also, they could use the same "rising force" mechanics that the zombie apocalypses and Nemesis invasions had: You trigger a robot attack, the game spawns some robots near the secret robot factory , if people defeat them, they cause more and better robots to appear. If the first set get's largely ignored, they stay there and eventually disappear a few minutes later. No big deal.
Giant monsters are even easier. Every Synapse TF spawned Babbage outdoors in a public zone, as part of the TF. The problem of multiple Babbages having to be defeated somehow never seemed to be a problem. When Nemesis invasions happened in Talos they were generally confined to that dirt hill next to the monorail station. They didn't take up the ENTIRE zone to the point that nobody could navigate around or through them. They were actually quite small in terms of the fraction of the zone they took up, but still big enough to feel like events. Even the farther-ranging Rikti invasions didn't totally overwhelm the zone to the point of being unavoidable. In fact some times FINDING the Rikti was the hard part. The most annoying part of those the fact that the regular mobs despawned when they were in progress and didn't start respawning again until after. This made kill quotas a pain for many a Numina TF as I recall. That part we can do without.
As for opposite goals. Did you ever do a TF and some guy stealthed to the boss then TPed the team there, bypassing the lead-in? Or intentionally fail parts of the Lady Grey TF to make it go faster? Or do an incarnate trial less efficiently on purpose because there was a badge for doing it that way? I did. It was fun and made the content more replayable. It's not a bad thing. When you form a team, you tell people "We're going for the Hard Way badge, so don't do the thing unless you're one of the people specifically designated to do the thing, okay, ?" etc.
How special does it feel? The answer to that varies from person to person and depends on each person's perception. If there have been 6 robot attacks in the last 6 hours, that might sound like a lot, but then I wasn't logged on for the first 5 so I don't notice that or care. People who want to get the badge for robot kills probably love it, and each robot attack was probably started by at least one team who actually wanted to do it again, so let them. If other people want to join in, great, if they don't, they don't have to. That's the beauty of these things.
How hard would it be to code? I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea. I don't believe it's prohibitively difficult though.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If you allow failure, be careful with how you reward failure. For example, the Anchorage waypoint event in GW2 a short time ago scaled with more players. However it was better to fail for more rewards than to complete it. The community was toxic during the event if anyone tried to do it as intended by blocking people, reporting for botting or abuse. I think if you do have failure and success trees for events, the rewards must be weighted for success and also discourage or at least put off the dark side of mmo players.
I didn't actually say they were insurmountable. I said those factors have to be considered. I did say I liked player influenced events, just not tied to a TF.
Again, I did not say these were inherently good or bad things, just something to consider. Incidently, I agreed with your original post but had nothing to add until the focus started to shift to zone events from a TF. I'm all for options in gameplay as you well know from the other thread.
The point I was trying to make was that if its always there then why have a mechanic for it. Take Babbage as an example (a single example not to imply the only example). After one mission in the TF you are supposed to be ambushed by Babbage (didn't exactly work that way, but was supposed to). Now its supposed to be a surprise event that draws in other heroes that are not part of your team to help, at least that was the intended effect. If Babbage is always in Skyway ambushing someone (due to multiple instances of the Synapse TF) they how is it interesting. Basically he stops being an "event' and becomes another 'zone mob'.
This is why I agreed with others that this kind of 'event' (not just this specific example but any TF 'event') should strongly consider how to implement it. Saying 'join in or don't' also speaks to its value. If its an easily avoided event then why have it cover the zone or even a part of the zone. If it impacts those not in the TF, like your example of the rikti replacing other mobs (which I agree is a bad thing) now a few people can change a large number of peoples game experience.
While I do like the idea of players influencing 'events' I just don't think a TF is the right way to trigger a zone event simply because a TF is constant and repeatable content and would make a zone event a too common occurance. I would prefer some other mechanic for this.
No, why not? You're dealing with things that can happen in comic books here, it's hardly a MMO based on classical literature.
Besides, weren't there Giant Snowmen in CoH? I'd go as far as saying that those were a little bit more insane than animated statues...but that's just me.
Speaking specifically of Babbage. First, he spawned in Boomtown just as that zone's "Big Monster" like old Dark Astoria had Adamastor, or Crey's Folly had Jurassik. So that made him less "special" too, and nobody cared. Second, and maybe this is because I was on Triumph, which as a low pop server, but the problem of people constantly spawning Babbages all over the place never seemed to be a problem in the sense you're saying it should have been. This means either you're wrong about the whole "it has to be rare to be cool" theory, or the fact that every TF can spawn a Babbage simply doesn't cause the problems you're saying it causes. Again, low pop server, just my point of view on that, but it just wasn't a problem, and even if there were like 4 Babbages at the same time, I don't care. Assuming there's a TF for each Babbage actually interacting with it and having fun, there's no problem there as far as I can see. 4 Babbages in the same zone, four different groups fighting them... so what? You could REDO the Synapse TF as many times as you wanted with the same toon if you wanted to as well, that never harshed anyone's suspension of disbelief either, at least not cataclysmically so. I say it ain't broke, so don't try to fix it. Just my opinion.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If you are going to put words in my mouth then yes I agree with you.
If you look a bit deeper (just a bit) you might see the hypothetical point I was making. A TF that is popular and run at an almost constant rate (think ITF) COULD diminish the impact of the special event to the point of irrelevance. And since there is no hard and fast way to gauge how popular a TF will be before its made I stress strong consideration on how a TF triggered event would be implemented. I am not arguing HOW to implement it.
Whenever I was team leader (often), I made it a strict policy that if nobody's dying, we're cranking up the difficulty. I want people to put down their cheetos, stop browsing amazon in the second monitor during combat, and pay attention! We're gonna bleed, and we're gonna be capable of failing each engagement. Fasten your seatbelt, it's time for some serious heroics!
The adjustable difficulty settings in CoH were profoundly useful, and immensely better than the way other MMO's handle things.
The only problem was that many groups would kinda be timid virgins about the combat, and avoid cranking the difficulty up to "Fun".
Easily fixable in CoH though, just form your own group!
I did. worked great!
A lot of people who never usually played on harder difficulties actually liked it very much :-)
Which is to say that "I think failure should be an OPTION"... if you catch my angle on the word option. ;-)
I recall ALLOT of the TF's, from POSI 1/2 to ITF's, that were run by my group, not an SG or part of a Coalition, but a group of wild child rag tags called the Short Bus Syndicate which i was a part of on Virtue, would run on +4 x8 EVERY single TF. We would run them for hours longer than they needed to have been completed, but it was a challenge we were after.
This also pushed me to come up with a 3+ BILLION Influence build and compare it with each other, always citing why we chose to go that route and others would/could point out a better way. Not only did we share suggestions for Builds, but better ways to attack the +4 enemies as a team using whatever AT we had... and only rarely did anyone ALT to a different toon unless we saw no progress was being made against a certain AV when doing mishes in PI.
Fail Faster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjrOaoHz9s
whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich
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