Star Trek Online partially sidesteps this particular issue by not putting Mission Doors at the same spot as the location where you accept the UGC tasking.

The UGC Contact is located at Starfleet Academy:

[img]http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/sto.gamepedia.com/thumb/9/9c/Starfleet_Academy_01_1066x1141.png/561px-Starfleet_Academy_01_1066x1141.png[/img]

But sometimes the Mission Door you need to enter in order to begin the UGC isn't located in this zone. In many cases, you'll need to zone over to Earth Spacedock ...

[img]http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/sto.gamepedia.com/f/f3/Earth_Spacedock_map.png[/img]

... and then go to one of the many many "spare" Mission Doors that are set aside in the area which are otherwise never used for anything but UGC, some of which are on an upper level of the zone which you'd otherwise never have a reason to go to.

My point being that the way Architect Entertainment got set up was as an All In One that never provided a motivation to leave the building. That motivation to NEVER LEAVE then turned into a "comfort zone" that PCs never needed to move out of ... and that was a mistake.

So the obvious counter to that is that while you may have to go to the UGC Contact in a specific building in order to accept a UGC story arc, there's no reason why the Mission Door for that UGC would have to be placed in the same location as that UGC Contact. Which means that if you set up UGC such that the Mission Doors [b][i]have to be[/i][/b] "outside the building" out in the wider/broader world, you've already taken the first step to prevent the kind of insulation that developed as a result of Architect Entertainment's design flaws permitting such insulation to happen in the first place.

The flipside of this problem could be seen in places like the original Faultline ... which had next to no content at all and hardly anything ever sent you there to do anything and the place was a pain to get around in (especially for the vertical mobility challenged). As a result, Cryptic had an entire zone that hardly ever had any PCs in it. The place was just this big void for content, meaning hardly anyone was motivated to go out there since it was at the "far end of town" for anyone at that Level range. So the location took extra work to get to, and once you got there you had almost nothing to do aside from Badge Hunt (a one and done operation) or street sweep ... and there were easier, less annoying places to do street sweeping in. So Faultline was just this big abandoned zone that nobody bothered with because nothing really SENT people there, making it kind of a waste.

Architect Entertainment allowed the same dynamic to happen in reverse. Because there was no reason to HAVE TO leave the AE building in Atlas, the entire rest of the game was essentially "wasted" on those Players.

Solution?
If Architect Entertainment had "sent" PCs out to Mission Doors out in the wider open world (just like regular Missions and regular Contacts did) then PCs wouldn't have been able to spend their entire game playing "lives" inside of one single building and never go anywhere else besides Atlas Park.

So ... I'd prefer it if UGC in City of Titans "pushed" PCs to travel further afield than just a single building or a single neighborhood in order to get at the UGC received from the NPC Contact. I'd like to think that the motivation for WHY I'd like to see that done should be sufficiently obvious ...

Gangrel wrote:

On thing that I *could* see happening is that the Mission builder sends you to a level zone appropriate for the content, and chooses an *appropriate* door as well.
Of course, for those who complain about "travel times for the content"... Suck it up.

The one, and only one, exception I would want to make for this would be when the UGC creator is needing to playtest that content to verify that everything is in proper working order and doesn't need to be adjusted (further). For TESTING purposes only, it would be best to not have to Travel to reach a Mission Door (or Doors in a multi-story arc).

Such Testing ought to be limited to the content creator only, for what should be obvious reasons. Published UGC should still involve the larger open world of the game.

Redlynne wrote:

So ... I'd prefer it if UGC in City of Titans "pushed" PCs to travel further afield than just a single building or a single neighborhood in order to get at the UGC received from the NPC Contact. I'd like to think that the motivation for WHY I'd like to see that done should be sufficiently obvious ...

Color me dense, but I'm not seeing the "why". Seriously.

Why does one playstyle (regardless of which one you pick) have the right to demand other paying customers play the game the same way they do?

I don't like anything that hints at mandatory PvP.
I don't like anything that hints at mandatory roleplay.
I don't like anything that hints at mandatory crafting.
etc.

Now. I'm not opposed to placing mission doors or contacts outside the UGC tools. Heck. I would not oppose having the UGC tools completely outside the game with an upload function once a story arc is thoroughly playtested by the creator with contact and doors then assigned by the game engine once the upload completes.

I'm not opposed to the idea of forcing UGC creators and users outside the tool interface. I just do not understand why some folks are demanding it.

What difference does it make if someone logs in to something like AE and never does anything else? How is that any different from a player who never left Bloody Bay after reaching level 15?

I haven't decided yet just how much I agree or disagree with Red and Straw, but the psychology of empty zones or a game that feels empty does seem like a valid concern. If there are a thousand players holed up in "virtual missions" and only 3 new payers running around a starter zone, the game may feel a little dead to those new players. Luckily there were other mechanisms that brought players together like Liberty and the auction houses. On the other hand there were times I enjoyed an area that was essentially all mine. I suppose it is a balancing act.

On a slightly different note, it seems to me that the "Mission Architect" concept kind of breaks the fourth wall. Perhaps it could be a multi-dimensional research facility that "searches" for parallel universes based upon given "search criteria" (= building the mission) Once such a universe is found the facility attempts to create a portal to that universe, but there's no telling where the portal will be (= Red's go to the mission concept).

"THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!"

Seeing a lot of people hanging around in the game not doing anything in particular, costume contests, hanging out in Pocket D, waiting or looking for a team, constantly seeing the chat window filled with "lft" or "any sewer teams?" etc.... gave me a bad feeling about the game, it made it look like the players couldn't find anything to do and were bored.

In short almost everything you guys say gives you a feeling of an active "community" made me think something was wrong with the game.

What makes the game look good to me, is if people are playing it. That means they're in missions, patrolling the streets or hazard zones or using public utilities like the costume changer, merchants, Auction house, contacts, trainers etc...and above all AE.

Despite the fact that I hated how it was worked into the game I still believe it was one of the best parts of the game and had the potential, if the devs had used it, to improve the whole game by showing exactly what kind of stories people wanted to see more of.

Since I seriously hated Peregrine Island and the Rikti War Zone, it gave me something to do with my high level toons and made the game endless. In fact, until AE came along I really didn't like any of the content for characters above 25th level. In fact I often deleted toons once they made it to around 25th level because that was usually the point where I'd get bored with them. It was almost impossible to solo the higher level content.

Oh, and Mid level zones are always going to have a lot fewer people in them, it's part of "the problem of levels".
Higher level zones are always full of people trying to reach the maximum level or using their maxed out toons because that's when the game really starts. Low level areas will always be crowded because people are always making new toons, but most people people rush through mid level zones on their way to something else.

25, 30 somewhere around there.
It was too long ago.
way too long

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Seeing a lot of people hanging around in the game not doing anything in particular, costume contests, hanging out in Pocket D, waiting or looking for a team, constantly seeing the chat window filled with "lft" or "any sewer teams?" etc.... gave me a bad feeling about the game, it made it look like the players couldn't find anything to do and were bored.
In short almost everything you guys say gives you a feeling of an active "community" made me think something was wrong with the game.
What makes the game look good to me, is if people are playing it. That means they're in missions, patrolling the streets or hazard zones or using public utilities like the costume changer, merchants, Auction house, contacts, trainers etc...and above all AE.
Despite the fact that I hated how it was worked into the game I still believe it was one of the best parts of the game and had the potential, if the devs had used it, to improve the whole game by showing exactly what kind of stories people wanted to see more of.
Since I seriously hated Peregrine Island and the Rikti War Zone, it gave me something to do with my high level toons and made the game endless. In fact, until AE came along I really didn't like any of the content for characters above 25th level. In fact I often deleted toons once they made it to around 25th level because that was usually the point where I'd get bored with them. It was almost impossible to solo the higher level content.
Oh, and Mid level zones are always going to have a lot fewer people in them, it's part of "the problem of levels".
Higher level zones are always full of people trying to reach the maximum level or using their maxed out toons because that's when the game really starts. Low level areas will always be crowded because people are always making new toons, but most people people rush through mid level zones on their way to something else.

Something you have to remember, no matter the server, from the lowest (which I was on victory my first two years on CoH before I switched to Virtue) to highest populated server, lots of people did not like to run teams in CoH.

Maybe that's why we hear lots of complaints about PvP and raid style content?

I remember hearing people complaining they couldn't get a team on Virtue and I was always forming teams for TFs with general ease. Some of them would occaisionally have a hiccup, but most of the time, done!

I'm OK with Farming when:

- player logs in, hops on a PUG, or does some group content, TF and the like.
- after doing that content, hops in a saved mission to do some Farming for the next 2 to 3 hours.
- repeats the same thing the next day.

I'm Not OK with Farming when:

- player bot logs in, hops in a saved mission to do Farming for the next 8-12 hours.
- spam chat, hoping to get players to pay for Experience through Farming.
- repeat the same thing the next day, every day.

To combat this:

- Use CoSined Rewards.. for XP, or other rewards, for redoing the same missions in a 24 hour timeframe.
- CoSined rewards give the Most rewards when doing content for the 1st time.
- CoSined rewards give the Least rewards when constantly repeating content at 12th hour.
- after 12th hour, CoSined rewards gradually return to Most rewards.
- after 24th hour, CoSined rewards give the Most rewards again.
- players that did a TF at 8PM the day before, that does the same TF at 7PM won't really see a big difference in XP, rewards*.

ex:
[img]http://freemat.sourceforge.net/help/cosplot.png[/img]

Blacke4dawn has a good point. It is all in how the devs want to choose how the architect tool is going to be implemented.

Are our created missions going to be as if they were real world missions, or are they going to be treated as simulations like AE was? Since we're in the development stage (mostly) we still have the luxury of debating this point.

It appears as if the OP was trying to make a case for a more open world style of mission instead of simulations in a central holodeck. His reasoning was sound in that it populated the world for the rest of us, promoted engaging the the world the developers created for us play in, and created greater potential opportunities for social interaction; but travel around the world also exposes players to world bosses, invasions, and other emergent content they would not be exposed to if they were hermiting in AE all the time.

But that is purely a design decision, because it could just as easily (one could argue more easily) be implemented in a central holodeck style venue like AE was, which could potentially turn the AE lobby into a vibrant gathering place and players wouldn't need to waste time traveling anywhere to run mission after mission.

I can see the advantages of both, but in my opinion it would be better for the game if they required travel to the mission instances rather than having them all in one place.

Huckleberry wrote:

Blacke4dawn has a good point. It is all in how the devs want to choose how the architect tool is going to be implemented.
Are our created missions going to be as if they were real world missions, or are they going to be treated as simulations like AE was? Since we're in the development stage (mostly) we still have the luxury of debating this point.
It appears as if the OP was trying to make a case for a more open world style of mission instead of simulations in a central holodeck. His reasoning was sound in that it populated the world for the rest of us, promoted engaging the the world the developers created for us play in, and created greater potential opportunities for social interaction; but travel around the world also exposes players to world bosses, invasions, and other emergent content they would not be exposed to if they were hermiting in AE all the time.
But that is purely a design decision, because it could just as easily (one could argue more easily) be implemented in a central holodeck style venue like AE was, which could potentially turn the AE lobby into a vibrant gathering place and players wouldn't need to waste time traveling anywhere to run mission after mission.
I can see the advantages of both, but in my opinion it would be better for the game if they required travel to the mission instances rather than having them all in one place.

Nyxz wrote:

Why not both? You can design "real world" missions with "real world" rewards just like any other game mission, or you can design 'VR' (danger room) missions without the "real world" rewards. Since it is basically designed as a training scenario and is localized in the VR simulator.

So, there is an easy middle ground taken right from classic comic book precedent that could make all of this work--alternate realities vs cannon.

The devs can say that all "AE" type creations are an "alternate reality" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_If_(comics)--which could make them free to travel in the larger world except for what happens inside the actual instanced missions--and the devs could have selections or contests to see which actually become "cannon" missions in the real world.

"AE" type stuff is basically "What If?" that travel through the existing world to "what if" instances", and the devs can make them cannon as desired.

Win/win?

Just to underline the broader point of my previous post--in a Superhero based MMORPG, it might be a good idea to first look at the long and rich tradition of Superhero comics for inspiration, and, if that doesn't work, then look at the broader MMORPG genre in general for solutions.

This appears to be mostly what CoH did--especially considering that CoH came before and many of the current MMORPG conventions and often had better solutions for many game-design problems than games that came after, at least in context to a Superhero game.

TECHNICALLY, modulating the XP/loot rewards would require more like cosine squared, since cosine and sine both go negative, which would equate to taking XP and loot AWAY from the player as they do the content. Whereas cosine squared oscillates between 0 and 1, which is what you probably want. That or 0.5(cosine +1).

But as devs have pointed out in the past (in other threads), most attempts at curbing the loot rewards from repeating UGC mission farms can be circumvented somehow by the makers of such content. Like just making more copies of the farm and giving them different names, etc. Ideally, you'd want the rewards for all forms of content to be set up such that the game isn't really pushing people into one thing or away from another, such that they're all within the same approximate neighborhood in terms of loot and XP. That said, I think such would be more difficult to do than one might expect, and would require tweaking over time, which people will likely rage against when their own personal favorite play style inevitably get's nerfed for balance. Also, even a small, but measurable and/or perceptible advantage in one style or another will likely cause that style to be the thing people do, like WAY more than other things. The Imperious TF got run a lot in CoX since people though it was the most efficient in a lot of ways, etc.

Also,the game world has to look like a world, and as such it has to be pretty vast. I like that street sweeping makes the world look inhabited by real people, but I doubt you'd ever fill a world that vast with people street sweeping all over the place if you tried, and to even try would require you to cut off all of the door missions, for the most part, or else make them far less rewarding. Trick or treating got people out in the streets briefly in CoX every year, to some extent, and maybe more events like that would be good, I don't know.

I don't think that activities like base design, UGC design, PVP, UGC play, badge hunting, crafting, marketeering, etc necessarily need to be as lucrative in terms of XP and loot as doing missions (to completion) or street sweeping or doing raids and/or TFs. Some of those things naturally don't lead to the player getting any XP/loot in some cases, and you're not going to add them in, are you? If the XP/loot for doing UGC or for repeating the same game-cannon mission over and over were nerfed in an attempt to maintain some semblance of parity in terms of tangible rewards you could accrue over time, assuming most efficient play possible from each style, I'd be fine with that, and I'd probably still do as much UGC as I did before, which is to say I'd do the missions and arcs designed by my friends and SG mates.

Izzy wrote:

I was assuming MWM Devs would adjust it to CoSined2, or whatever suits their formula. ;)

I see what you did there. Bravo.

Having played GW2, I can say now that the problem of the game looking like a ghost town because everyone is doing indoor stuff is really not going to be a problem, in all likelihood.

In GW2, there are PVP events, World V World events, TF-like things called "Fractals", and "dungeons", and personal story missions to do, all of which would mostly have you in your own map with yourself and maybe a few others, for the most part not out in the outside world. That game's maps are STILL constantly crawling with people everywhere.

Why? I chalk it up to two things:

1. The game is "one big megaserver" meaning everyone can "see" everyone else. To manage high player counts, the game constantly spawns and collapses instances of the outdoor maps in an effort to try to keep the ones it has running "full-ish" at all times. This means that the game will sometimes move you to a fairly empty-ish instance if you change zones, and it will sometimes ask you to allow yourself to be re-located to a different instance in an effort to manage things. The game gives you a temporary buff for allowing yourself to be re-located as such, which is nice. Also, this re-location can work to your advantage in the sense that you might have just harvested all the harvesting nodes on the map you're on, then when you get re-located, all the nodes are re-randomised and it is as if you never harvested the map, you can essentially go and chop down the same trees again, though their locations are re-randomized (from your perspective) since you're on a different instance than the one you just left.

2. The game has outdoor zones that each have many, many events to do that fire off at regular intervals and give bonus XP and other rewards when you complete them. So like, imagine you're in Brix and some Crey underboss spawns that requires like 20 people to actually defeat it, and when you do defeat it, you get randomized loot drops that are actually pretty good, as well as bonus XP. Now imagine this underboss spawns on a regular clock such that he's going to be there every day at the same time, or every 3 hours, or whatever.

People of all levels have reasons to do these events, not just for XP and loot, but also for badge-type achievements, and because on any given day the event in question or the zone in question might be part of the "daily bonus" suite, which is a set of like 4-5 different things you can do to get bonus rewards. On one day, there might be a bonus for completing events in Ascalon, the next day it might be Kryta, etc. You might get a daily bonus for defeating the Toxic Spider Queen in Kessex hills today, and another for defeating the Megadestroyer in the volcano in Mount Maelstrom tomorrow, etc. They not only have events that happen on differing various time intervals, but they also have "Weekly Strike Target" type rewards that change every day for doing various different things.

I think this is really good and would try to emulate it in some way. I think if they do that, the outside world will not feel so empty. With sidekicking and exemping, you could even allow low level toons into higher level zones to do dailies, which is something GW2 really needs, IMHO. I can't do the daily Tequatl, the Sunless dragon raid with my level 15 toon because you need to be like 65 for that or you just get killed instantly and repeatedly as you try to go from the lowbie zone you started in to that zone where the dragon is. Despite the lack of sidekicking, and the vast amounts of "indoor" stuff you could do, and the constant running of high-level raids like Tequatl and the Octovine raid in Auric Basin (which is level 80 required and gives ridiculous amounts of loot), GW2 is still crawling with people everywhere you go, for the most part, during busier times.

Another thing about GW2, when I was leveling my first character, I did that mostly by exploring the game world map just to open up all the "fog of war" areas to the point that I had been almost everywhere at least once and could thus teleport back to the nearby Waypoints when needed. The act of unlocking the map for that first toon was in effect all I needed to get to level 80, because of the XP bonuses you got from the exploration process, the stuff you had to fight as you made your way through those zones, the various meta events that would pop up right near you as you were exploring, and the Personal Story missions you did to get the low-level loot they gave you, which you wanted. As such, I had not done a lot of events and raids and so forth at all by the time I was 80 and I still haven't done many of the dungeons.

I would prefer to have the map, once fully revealed from one character's travels, fully revealed for all my toons after that, which is something they don't do. That said, those new toons do get the same XP bonuses for exploring different areas still, so you get the bonuses for exploring the same territory with a new toon all over again. Personally I'd rather just level my toons in different ways and just have all the Waypoints unlocked for all toons once a single toon get's them. I'd even settle for "once you've unlocked all the waypoints with a given toon, they stay unlocked for all your toons forever" thus encouraging people to really explore the whole map. They don't even do that. Every toon has to explore the map as if it we all new to them.

In game like CoT, if Recall Friend will be a thing, and if exploring the game map will be a thing, the Recall helps the Exploration a lot, especially if there are hard-to-find areas, etc. Also, I wouldn't expect CoT to have Waypoiunts that everyone can just use for quick teleportation all over the place. I think that is the stuff of Personal Lair Teleporters, SG Base Teleporters, Super Vehicles (even if it's just a cutscene generator, like the Arachnos Flyer or the Longbow Skycycles, etc).

Since nobody in GW2 has travel powers per se, everyonbe needs those Waypoints. In a game like CoT where you might have Fly AND Super Speed, plus public transportation, and maybe eventually a super vehicle or something, and SG base Teleporters, etc, I would think that the Waypoints are definitely not needed.

The need to explore the map with each toon individually might still be a thing though, and a way for you to unlock various things. Definitely a badge. Probably also you'd need to reveal the whole map to get various SG base items unlocked, like teleporters, or whatever. OOH! It would be cool if your SG base or lair had a big monitor screen where you could look at the game map that you have revealed and see what events are happening like everywhere, in real time. Like shen Babbage is up, you'd see a moving Babbage Face icon on your base's monitor map telling you right where it is. Maybe even have notes or visual cues telling you which events will be starting soon in which areas based on known cool-down timers. And like maybe you could even have a total player count number visible for certain areas, so you know how crowded the Hamidon area is right now, like, maybe there's a raid about to start, etc.

You could make that a thing that uses "GPS" and/or "SG Satellites" that you'd have to acquire and maintain, and acts as a IGC sink, maybe.

Surely the point of the simulations is to train people to know the mechanics of monsters, the experience however should be decently lesser to the "real game world" fighting of these monsters but the creator could scale the levels of the creature.

By learning the primary abilities that enemies use they can better fight them in the "real game world".

You're not that far off Redlynne, only it uses a curved scale rather than a linear.

Adding to the conversation (very lately), I agree that we should be mindful of spreading the users out so much that they never see each other. I MOST DEFINITELY want to play solo most of the time and be left alone and not have my play experience affected by others, but I ALSO want to see the cool costume people have, have others to show off to when I have cool bind scripts, have other people around to team with when I need to, see high-level players in low zones.

In the early days, I saw so much cool stuff and it was active. I loved it. Later, there were so many zones (mostly empty) that it was a bit lonely. I think we should not only avoid traps that keep people in one building all day if possible, but we should find ways to encourage people to be around each other. Having high-level content in low zones for example. Stop the "sprawl" that CoH had with adding one zone after another after another and spend that time improving and perfecting the zones we already have.

EDIT: Note that we had the wentworth's stores and I spent a lot of time there just playing the market. I do think it's ok to have people play the game they like, just that we should be cautious how much we encourage people to disappear.

Skyforge has done something interesting that should be considered.

In it, there are mission rewards for every mission and those rewards show up on the map where you select which missions to tackle. Every 40 minutes the rewards offered change and well as many of the available missions available. The interesting thing here, is that the rewards are different for every client.
So if I want more ammunition and see that the Factory 501 mission offers ammunition as a bonus reward I could choose to do that mission. Another person who wants ammunition may see construction supplies as the reward for Factory 501 and instead chooses to go to Port Naori because to them that mission offers ammunition. A third person has a quest that leads to Factory 501 and is in desparate need for energy modules. On their map, however, Factory 501 is offering gifts. They choose to run it to fulfill the quest because they know they could use the gifts anyway and get the energy modules from another mission.

In other words, if the game offers different rewards to different people for accomplishing all the content available, it could help mix up the population. Note that the game is not forcing anyone to do anything, but leaves it up to the players to make their own valuation of the available options. Granted Skyforge is a very grind-oriented game like Dragon Nest and C9, so it lends itself to that reward system.

Other games like Archeage do this with daily quests. Killing 50 enemies in Halcyona might be a daily quest offered to me, but another player might have a daily quest to spend 200 labor on Artistry crafts. These type of individualized rewards that rotate either daily or more often can help diversify the gaming experience and help the population mingle without forcing any playstyle upon the playerbase.

Often, there are extra Dailies for those with Heart of Thorns. There's also a simplified list that is only shown to accounts that don't have higher-level characters.
You can view the Dailies list dynamically, on the Wiki: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daily#Today.27s_achievements

I often check the list before I even start the game, because sometimes they're just 'too much work' and I have other things to do.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Ultimately, this all comes down to motivating Players (and their Characters) to "circulate" through the game, so as to See and Be Seen, rather than rewarding "camping" behavior in which Players effectively park their Characters and never go anywhere else.

Pain wrote:

The ideas of stopping farmers won't work. If I was going to get full do from one arc, half the next play through, then a third, or however the curved scale works, I would either make one arc with 50 farming missions in it or make 50 different arcs. Bam now I can farm with full xp.

The system would track the number of user generated content missions played within a given time frame no matter how many different ones were played regardless of owner as well.

Pain wrote:

I think you guys are over estimating the impact of farming. It was really only bad during the meow farm when ppl could get 1-50 for free in 5 hours. Before and after that the only people who were power leveled were vets who had friends with farming characters, which means it was likely they A) already had a 50 or B) had a RL friend w a 50 who they wanted to run content with. I mean a farm run cost 300 mill on Freedom at the end of the game. A new player's not going to get that from the origin arc killing 10 Hellions.
People are going to farm no matter what. If you make a mission creator where people can get xp farmers are going to try and get the most xp as possible as quickly as possible from it. You pretty much need to give xp or some reward to make the mission creator worth while for anyone.

With UGC being highly customizable it can be used to generated rewards (including xp) at a higher than notmal rate.

Earn rates, if done well, are intentionally designed for the long-term health of the game. Anything that excedes that can be detrimental to the game.

The intent on curbing rewards is to counter-act the highly customizable system which can be leveraged to generate a greater reward rate and bring them within the expected earn range over time.

Pain wrote:

I think you guys are over estimating the impact of farming. It was really only bad during the meow farm...

Nah, all the farming actually really destroyed the economy on the Auction House as well. Even the simplest sets became ridiculously expensive.

Pain wrote:

MeSoSollyWan wrote:
Nah, all the farming actually really destroyed the economy on the Auction House as well. Even the simplest sets became ridiculously expensive.
That's an effect of the unlimited amount of infamy/influence in circulation. Money dropping from respawning enemies causes a huge amount of inflation over time. It's not like if there wasn't farming people wouldn't have influence to spend on those sets. All farming did was transfer money from player to player, not create more than was already in circulation. Probably a topic for another thread though.

Yeah everyone knows that excessive farming can cause inflated prices in a given game's Auction House.

But the problem CoH had with that phenomena was compounded by the fact that the game started off for several years -without- any in-game market at all. There was almost nothing to spend excess INF on so by the time the Auction House was finally added you had a bunch of people who were sitting on billions to spend. It's really no wonder the market prices for the rare enhancements sky-rocketed almost instantly because the currency had practically no value by the time people needed to actually start using it as currency.

If CoT can manage to get its in-game markets going much earlier than CoH did I doubt you'll see the amount of hyper-inflation we saw in the original game.

Farming is only a problem when everyone's doing it... I know a lot of us had bad experiences with the farming crowd when the AE system came out, but if we're smart about this that won't happen again...

TitansCity wrote:

Tannim222 wrote:
Just to be clear, farming itself is not (as viewed by us devs) as a negative behavior. A certain group of players will end up farming for some type of reward.

Just for this case. Creating a mission To farm A certain type of mob. Don't you think this Will participate in deserting some areas ?
Which subject leads To speak about the respawn frequency of mobs. Regarding the previous subject : how Will you manage this ? Will it be dynamic regarding number of players in the area ? (Mobs respawning, deserting areas, few mobs for too much people )

If there is a healthy pkayer popluation, having user-genrated-content should not have a huge impact on the frequency of general players in thee world map.

Keep in mind we are going with a mega-server structure, everyone plays together, nit separate setver "shards".

Spawns will generate dynamically based on the number of players in he area, scaling up or down accordingly.

TitansCity wrote:

So, all the player, regarding their languages will player together ? I love that idea :)
I hope the translation will be integrated :)

How else were we all going to play on a single mega-server? ;)

Your game client will display the game's GUIs in whatever language is supported (i.e. French). The trick of course is that in-game chat will likely be in whatever language people are using. I suppose you could run text chat through a real-time translator, but obviously they usually leave a lot to be desired.

Deathwatch101 wrote:

I think not having a real-time translator would be more interesting, it would make the city feel multinational almost.

I doubt MWM is going to "bake in" a text translator since there are existing third-party ways to do that. Basically "not having a real-time translator" for text chat is probably going to be the default for this game.

Broadcast channels like that were easy for Players to organize in CoH. There were global channels for many different interests. I suspect CoT will be similar. What might make things easier would be for MWM to maintain a Directory of top channels, with Language-based channels highlighted for easy access.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Lothic wrote:

Fireheart wrote:
What might make things easier would be for MWM to maintain a Directory of top channels, with Language-based channels highlighted for easy access.
Yeah something like this should be easy enough for MWM to do considering this would be the main alternative to having entire servers dedicated to specific languages. They could have say a dozen or so of these hardwired language-based channels dedicated to the top dozen or so top-used languages in the world. Presumably anyone would be able to set up their own chat groups as well for any reason, including language used.

You just need to ask the language at creation and then you'll be push in the right channel (for me : francophone / frenchspeaker ) and, if it doesn't exist, just create the channel automatically at first connexion ^^ Or even simple, ask the language at count creation and create it automatically in the DB ^^
By the way, i hope their will be the list of allt he channel so as we could be able to jump from one to another, for instance if i wanted to play some US or Coreen players ^^

One way to make the IGC sinks less necessary is to stop awarding IGC for each and every defeat. CoX gave you like 500 INF for every minion you dropped at level 50. If it was tied to a randomized process, like the INSPs and other item drops, it would cause game play in general to generate far less loose IGC. Guild Wars 2 does this. In that game the times when you get spendable copper/silver/gold from monster defeats are few and far between. You can sell or otherwise process the items you've gotten, but that would involve either the open market (and thus you're getting the IGC from some other player, and there's a transaction fee in there, something like CoX had) or from an NPC vendor, which gives far less than the going rates for most items, and still really low rates for totally worthless garbage.

GW2 also has public-access teleporters called waypoints that you can use to get around quickly, because most of the game is outdoors. I could see makign some form of public transportation viable in CoT, for IGC that's spent when used. CoH had the trains afterall. You could have a temp power that calls Gabby the Cabbie to come pick you up, then you get a cut scene and the game loads you onto your destination map of choice.

Radiac wrote:

For what it's worth, I think the decision made by the devs is "no gear degradation" because people don't like it. I think having really top-end gear ought to come with some form of high-maintenance ongoing costs to keep it all running. It could be argued that low-end gear could be cheaply and easily replaced, were it to degrade, and thus you're making people constantly have to manage their ~100 or so Augments and Refinements, which would be too much tedium, even for me. But if you want to have a few (or even a lot of) uniques, procs, etc in your powers to really tweak it to teh uber, then I don;t think those few (or not so few) items should cause you too much consternation as to be "bad" overall. Also, it could be as easy as "pres a button, all of your gear get's repaired for some IGC no mess, no fuss." instead of individual items being fixed individually.

I think maybe having "Epic" Level equipment or something that is deployed specificly for one time events or some big events where you need things like mech suits etc.

Radiac wrote:

For what it's worth, I think the decision made by the devs is "no gear degradation" because people don't like it. I think having really top-end gear ought to come with some form of high-maintenance ongoing costs to keep it all running. It could be argued that low-end gear could be cheaply and easily replaced, were it to degrade

To draw on a side example that I've mentioned before, Tabula Rasa had gear degradation mechanics in it, and it was just a simple trip to a vendor who could repair everything for you in a single click to take care of. The thing that varied was the IGC cost of doing so. Since Tabula Rasa had color coded gear (grey, green, blue, purple, if I remember rightly) that was keyed to the "rarity" of items, they also keyed multipliers into the cost of repairs for the various items. Grey items had next to no mods on them and the lowest stats for items in their category, so they were the cheapest to repair and maintain. Purple items had the most mods on them and the absolute highest stats available for items in their category, so naturally they cost several organ donations to repair and maintain.

The practical upshot of this, as I'm sure Gangrel can attest to, was a sort of background "economic warfare" where the logistical support of using the very best possible gear could potentially become unsustainable over time, simply due to how voraciously high end items consumed currency for repairs and maintenance. Simply USING items caused item degradation, on top of the expected Death Penalty of all your items taking a Durability loss upon getting KIA and needing to rez at a Hospital. Depending on your cash flow, it was perfectly possible to be barely break even on income versus expenses ... particularly when grouping for team instance content (basically "dungeons") when dealing with a repeating team wipe situation.

So at a time when a lot of people were trying to go All Purple Gear so as to min/max their stats as high as they could possibly go ... I, predictably enough, went in the opposite direction and went with what I called the [b]Grey Ghost[/b]. I deliberately went out and "farmed" to get the absolute WORST gear possible for my characters, the Grey class gear items. I then went to the crafting station, stripped them of all of the modifiers they might have had on them, and then very deliberately loaded them up with the exact (crafted) modifiers I wanted on each and every single item I could equip. Because all of my gear was Grey quality (meaning it was "crap" for stats), it was relatively cheap in terms of resources for me to craft the modifiers I wanted for every item I was going to use, and it was DIRT CHEAP for me to repair any lost Durability rating. Yeah, my damage output and armor rating and so on was "below average" on an individual prowess basis, but it cost me next to nothing to USE that crappy gear [i]and still get the job done[/i] of killing stuff, gathering loot and vendoring everything that dropped for cash.

Before switching to the Grey Ghost build plan, I'd been struggling to "turn a profit" at fighting on the battlefields I roamed. Getting killed was always a big hit when it came to losing cash, and the sheer amount of grinding for drops and "stuff" to upgrade a complete set of Purples to max them out was just ... daunting. Like most of YEAR of grinding level of daunting.

By contrast, I was able to put together a complete Grey Ghost set with everything tuned "just so" in less than 2 weeks. Even better, the Grey Ghost gear was all so cheap to repair that I could get killed more than a dozen times and barely notice the hit to my cash on hand. It was totally a [i]Your Equipment Was Supplied By The Lowest Bidder[/i] move that was entirely in keeping with a distinctly MILITARY campaign and setting.

The game handed me lemons and I just made lemonade. Rather than going for Maximum Performance and all of the logistical costs of supporting that decision, which would have been decidedly onerous, I instead went in the opposite direction and deliberately settled on Minimum Performance for reasons of investment and support costs ... and was able to make it work to my advantage. I didn't need to be [i]The Best Who Ever Was Or Ever Will Be[/i] out on the battlefields, I just needed to be [i]Good Enough To Get The Job Done[/i] ... and with my build plan of picking a very specific set of modifiers to put on my full set of Grey Ghost gear, I was able to achieve that latter goal IN SPADES. Whereas other Players simply "couldn't afford to die" out in the field, I could afford to get killed dozens of times and still come out ahead on cash flow. Other Players had to compete for the most lucrative drops and areas, while I could go literally ANYWHERE in the game and turn a profit just by using my weapons and gathering up the loot. My income might have been lower than that of other Players with higher performance builds, but my costs were next to nothing, meaning almost everything I got was profit.

When I posted my plan to explore the "low end" option of the Grey Ghost build, the response was basically what you could imagine. The mockery was widespread and very nearly universal, since what I was doing was essentially "self-gimping" my characters by deliberately choosing to use vendor bait trash items as the basis for my build. To the min/max crowd, this made NO SENSE WHATSOEVER, and they heaped their derision upon me for even thinking I had something worthwhile to contribute.

But then I got the Grey Ghost build items together, got them all modded up exactly the way I wanted, took them out for a test drive and ... started demonstrating an endurance to punishment that absolutely no one (not even myself!) had expected. Other random Players would see what I was doing, they'd watch my Armor and Health Bars go down and then come [i]right back up[/i] since I'd modded all of my gear to for hugely stacked up regeneration (a mere 11 seconds out of combat status was enough to recover to full health and armor ratings) and I started getting questions. People started asking me what the heck I was using, since the way I fought was essentially like a Regen Scrapper/Blaster combo and THEY couldn't afford to fight like I could or use the combat tactics that I did. I took damage, but was able to recover from it. That which did not kill me only left me colder and more embittered. They took damage, but it took them forever to recover from it, meaning that they were usually "fighting hurt" and at less than full health/armor when in combat. They had to "play it safe" with their expensive gear. I could recklessly "dive into anything" and succumb to Scrapperlock without any worries, and even if I died, it cost me next to nothing to repair and get back in the fight.

I posted my discoveries and experiences in the forums. The mockery (of course) continued, but now there was some new interest in attempting a "low end" rather than a "high end" build strategy, simply because of the economics behind the "low end" strategy that I'd pioneered. Some other Players dared to try out the principles behind the Grey Ghost build and they were astonished by how well it performed. It wasn't Top Of The Line, but it was resilient, durable and exceptionally easy to maintain. All you needed to do was learn your limitations and then work around them. Within a month, some of the other Players who had attempted to replicate my experiences with playing the Grey Ghost were lauding my discovery of the kind of high end performance a decidedly "low end" build could produce [i]without breaking the bank[/i] in order to deliver that performance profile. Soon, I had other people saying in the forums that the Grey Ghost was the best build they'd played yet, in part because it was such a "profitable" way to play the game (until NC$oft killed it).

Anyway, the reason why I bring up this story from a game that's been gone for almost 9 years now is because this sort of low-end versus high-end strategy was only really made possible by the fact that the game had gear degradation in it. Without that economic incentive to even give "low-end" Grey items a second glance, rather than treating them as Vendor Bait not even worth picking up (let alone selling), you basically never provide a counterbalance to the maximalist strategy of the min/max crowd. It's very difficult to engineer a way in which "less than optimal" gear can actually be a better investment decision. It's kind of like how in City of Heroes, MOST of the Invention Sets were considered garbage (mainly because they WERE garbage from a stats and modifiers standpoint), which then "crowded in" just about all of the demand in a handful of Invention Sets in each modifier category. There really was no reason NOT to get "the best stuff" for every single slot you needed to fill, because ... hey ... nothing ever degraded if it was an Invention. This removed an entire dimension of possibility from the permutations of acceptable, let alone successful, gameplay strategies.

However, since City of Titans is not planned to have any gear degradation mechanics included in it, even as a minimalist IGC sink, my entire point and story above is effectively moot.

Tannim's posts always make me happy.