[b]Gaining and losing morale[/b]
So you're playing a hero off doing good deeds such as beating up the bad guys, saving a turtle (yes turtles because turtles are awesome and kittens are so yesterday) stopping a bankrobbery etc. Lets just call them deeds and while you're doing good deeds you feel great.
Ok, so something goes wrong and you fail to save someone or get killed by a bad guy. Getting defeated hurts your morale and slowly makes you less effective; so lets say we add a visual health meter for this and call it morale bar. Each time you get defeated this bar drops but defeating villains or completing missions will put the bar back up to maximum. Perhaps saving people during the mission or completing the mission puts the bar to maximum quicker?
We can reverse all this for villains and say they gain morale by destroying property, killing the hero that shows up, etc
[b]Morale boosting[/b]
So lets say we're having an extremely terrible time staying alive and can't get that bar back up in a reasonable amount of time. I have some ideas here and I'm essentially borrowing some of this idea as a whole from an earlier version of SWG. Sometimes you need someone to cheer you up so what if your friend or team mate starts doing emotes such as dance and cheer and you stop to interact with them either to /em dance, cheer, smile etc. This bit of social activity can help boost your morale quickly during a time of need.
For the less social hero or the solo player how about listening to some tunes on your cd player or calling someone on your cellphone or meditating, flipping a coin, chewing some tasty bubblegum?
For those that never played swg we had a very nice death penalty and it was solved simply by doing similar activites I mentioned above or paying ingame currency which was the later added system. Most of the time players that played the entertainer class would hangout near a hospital or spawn point and play music / dance and you could watch them to restore your "mind bar" if I recall the name correctly. The mind bar would diminish from non social activity, dying or long term combat without rest. I'm thinking we could do something similar here for our death penalty instead of doing the same thing every other game does which is damaged gear, xp debuffs or lost money / items. You could even make a use of social points such as bars and restaurants as a place to get a buff while there or a logout buff for increase morale.
I had some other points to add to this but its kinda late. If I can remember more, I'll add later on.
If they give me a morale boost because I'm watching dance emotes I will leave the game...
How about simply teaming with someone provides a morale boost (strength in numbers and all that)? I like the Morale idea (because death is too final and being medi-ported to the hospital has been done to death). So if loss of Morale is the main punishment for being defeated (plus the end of mission bonus) then getting it back will be important.
Good way to promote teaming IMHO.
The other thing...just no. I saw way too many boom boxes in CoH...no desire to see them arranged for a remake of Thriller to prep for a mission.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I'd twisted this into another post about downtime, but some possibilities would be to apply such "recovery" modifiers to anything that's not directly related to combat xp.
Spider man would go swinging on webs to clear his mind- so travel powers are appropriate.
Batman may beat the crap out of a training dummy, so time in a dojo/danger room may be appropriate.
some may immerse themselves in their work, so crafting may be appropriate
dancing & partying at the bar, again, great to recover some morale.
Champions Online has something like this with their 5-star system.
"Getting defeated hurts your morale and slowly makes you less effective"
Man, I dunno, I used to see PUG-team members drop without a word if we suffered a team-wipe, I'd hate to encourage more of that.
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I was going to suggest "Getting defeated makes you want to try harder" and give you a boost to dissuade team break-ups after a team wipe.
But then I remembered our playerbase... they'd purposely die for that boost.
And if anyone doubts that, I have one word for you: Vengeance.
:P
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I remember more than once being on a team with someone who wasn't a team players. The leader would explain: Vengebait.
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Yea, I dun feel like I want my hero to have to sit down and watch someone dance. For SWG it worked. I think mainly due to its theme. Cantina's are famous in the starwars universe. Although, having some kind of battle fatique or morale system does interest me. I just would hate for it to have a heavy impact or force me to have spend an hour just waiting for it to build up again. The BF and mind Wounds in SWG kind of basically created a downtime. And it was a good amount of down time if you had a ton of it and had to sit there waiting for it to heal up from watching the dancer. Now I dunno about other players. But me personally, I'm not a big fan of heavy down time due to penalties. Specially if they force me to have a downtime and wait before I can get back to playing again.
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Indeed. Vengeance, Teleport Friend, and the sacrificial teammate.
I'm a bit leary of this mechanic. It sounds like it would have similar effect to the destructible gear system that I detest. That is; you take on a bad guy, he kicks your butt and blows up your armor, thereby making it even harder to come back and try again, or forcing you to leave the story to repair it. I like the idea of maybe getting some kind of "rugged determination" boost that only lasts for a short time/duration of mission. Vengeance was okay, but only worked if someone on the team had it, and then they had to die to use it.
What about this? On missions where there is a Big Boss type finale, if an individual character gets "killed" when fighting the Boss he has a choice:
1) After a brief cool-down, he respawns fairly nearby with a small power boost. However, this comes at some cost in XP.
- this supports a team player, but allows solos to push their story ahead more quickly.
2) Go to hospital (or wherever, essentially out-of-mission) to rethink his build/enhance his powers/etc. and retry the Mission from a given spawn point. He retains what XP he got from the earlier try.
- if the team looks like its gonna wipe, this would allow them to gather and strategize, and let solos decide if they really need to team this one after all.
I can see ways to game this, of course. It's possible to find a flaw in any system. But I think some sort of balance could be figured out. Maybe there's another solution that's true to the genre, and helps us maintain the feeling that we're involved in a story and less like we're trapped in some artificial and over-familiar game mechanism.
I would take umbrage with this comment, but, well, Amerikatt *is* a Silver-Age heroine!
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In some of the more recent WoW raids in Mists of Pandaria, if the raid wipes, the members get a slight boost to health, damage output, healing output.
And it can stack (up to 10 times i believe). There is no extra penalty for this beyond what you would normally get for dying.
I kind of like this. The team gets stuffed and regroups to try again. They have a small buff (basically getting really determined) with a timer. This discourages them from stopping for an hour to chat, switch out toons etc. Say 15 minutes for the buff. The buff also ends upon successful completion of the mission to prevent gaming the system for a buff 2 minutes before mission end than riding the buff for 12 minutes in a new, harder mission.
Soloists have the same option of course. The buff does not apply to anyone who leaves the team to promote giving it one more try. Same for soloists...no buff unless they re-enter the mission to try again.
Best part with this is that it can be adjustable. If the Devs have a really tough fight for the end of a TF they can reward a small buff for defeating the previous fight's boss. Testing can determine how high the buff should be without unbalancing the mission. If we use a Rating system to tell New players from vets, then they can tweak this too.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Watching someone dance was just one of many possibilities. You know when you're feeling down and a friend helps cheer you up. Even if its something as stupid as the dance of joy ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzOU2YnJd8 ) or your friend telling you something funny. I figured using the emotes system would be one of many ways to do this. Dances are in the emotes so maybe just any form of social emote would help to restore the morale bar.
And its not like I'm saying you die a mere 3 times and you gotta do something special to get it back. Most games you gotta die many many times to really feel any form of punishment from a death penalty such as your gear getting broken. And here you could do the social stuff such as emotes or just beating up bad guys would slowly restore it (kinda like building up a rage bar)
Instead of the usual fix your broken gear, get an xp debuff, run back to your corpse, etc.
edit: my god these forums are so buggy and broken.
I don't recall being on a team where people really died on purpose to activate vengeance - although on occasion with really tough missions I do recall Heroes staying dead longer because of it.
I always figured it was because you'd want a team with at least two or three vengeance users on it.
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It was done a lot before auto-sidekicking and autorezzing-on-level because it was very easy to set up and the lowbie players weren't valuable enough to the team.
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Putting an "adversity" mechanic into the game as a "response" to being defeated by an Arch Villain or a Giant Monster in a Task Force might be appropriate ... so as to deal with problems like bringing a team that simply can't get quite ENOUGH oomph to win against Imperius or against Recluse or against Statesman, or whatever. Basically, something appropriate to giving a wiped team "a little something" to help them complete content for reward, rather than being forced to abandon simply because they can't make it happen without more help. That might be wise. I don't know how many times I fought with a team to the end of Imperius and we just couldn't take him down for one reason or another and wound up abandoning after wiping too many times.
The flipside of this is of course the notion of a Death Penalty, and on this subject I think that Cryptic Studios might have done something rather clever in their Star Trek Online game, where when you "die" ... either in space or on the ground ... a persistent debuff gets applied to your ship (space) or character (ground). This also applies to your NPC Followers (your Bridge Officers) if they get dropped in ground combat too. These debuffs can stack up, so getting killed a lot on a mission can actually be costly (although each debuff itself is pretty minor, in the 2-3% range). These debuffs can be cleared (for free!) by going to a medical NPC (think Hospital visit) or can be removed by an appropriately keyed item from your inventory (which are random drops). The death debuffs come in 3 stages (minor, major, critical) as do the counter items for them, and there are different ones for space and ground ... making for a total of 6 types and thus 6 different item drops for them. Furthermore, at the game's default difficulty level (ie. Normal), these Death Penalties simply don't apply, and instead only get applied in higher difficulty content (including the Elite PvE queue missions).
So rather than applying a Death Penalty to your XP or currencies, Star Trek Online assess "performance" penalties assigned as self debuffs which can be cleared by consumable drops. To translate that into City of Heroes terms, this would be akin to needing to spend an Inspiration to counter a Death Penalty Debuff of that type (minor level needs a minor Inspiration, critical level needs a huge Inspiration) ... so it would be something which could induce you to drain your consumables, rather than being a "debt" you need to work off. And of course, you could just simply go to a hospital to get them all cleared "for free" without needing to pay currency, if that's what you want to do.
Another thing that Star Trek Online does, which I've learned to appreciate more and more as I've played, is that another Death Penalty is being forced to take a "time out" before you can rez. This starts at being a 15 second timer before being allowed to respawn, but if you keep dying "too quickly" the timer for this keeps getting longer in 15 second increments. However, if you *haven't* died in a while, the counter on the timer drops back down, so it isn't a one way ratchet. Furthermore, in ground combat, it's perfectly possible for another player to come along and rez you before your timer is up, which of course brings you back right where you fell, so you don't have to run back from the respawn point to get back into the action. This entire structure for how to handle defeats then has implications for building "locked rooms" involving Boss Fights, where if you release to Rez, you respawn [i]outside the locked room[/i] and the room won't unlock again until everyone has died and respawned outside the room. That then means that anyone who gets killed in the boss room "needs" to be rezzed by another player [i]inside the room[/i] if that player is to continue contributing to the Boss Fight ... which then makes for a very different (and immediate and interesting) reward structure in terms of gameplay in those battles, as far as being able to participate and contribute goes.
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One of the things I liked about debt in CoX was it never took anything away from you. It slowed your leveling, yes, but no debuffs were applied, no lost inf, no enhancements damaged or destroyed, and most of all no earned XP lost. What I though the game needed was a way to avoid or at least lessen the death penalty, and I don't mean via patrol XP or those silly debt reduction bonuses.
Another defeated mechanic I like is from GW2, with being downed and defeated. For those not familiar, when your HP reaches 0, you enter a downed state with it's own HP bar, starting at less than full. Overtime this goes down as you bleed out, you can also be hit by other damaging effects. If the down bar reaches 0 you are defeated and are assessed the death penalty (in this case armor damage). While downed you have access to 4 skills, one of which is bandage wounds, and the other 3 desperation skills tied to class. If you manage to heal your own wounds, get healed by another player (or even an NPC in some cases), or manage to defeat an enemy you "rally" and return with a portion of your HP and no death penalty. The catch to this system is, each time you are downed in rapid succession (there is a timer that eventually resets) you have less life in your downed bar. Too many downs in a time span and you are instantly defeated.
On the healing by another player; this is not achieved via their other group healing skills (if even owned) but by kneeling down and tending to the downed ally. This is also how a defeated character is raised without having to respawn. The healing is noticeably faster when out of combat, and multiple players can heal also increasing the speed.
I like how this system allows you to skirt the death penalty for little mistakes, but if you are careless enough (or just plain unlucky) the reaper gets his due. It gives a tangible bonus for running with the team, but does not leave the solo player high and dry. I think there could still be a place for rez powers, perhaps instantly healing the player with full health, and maybe reducing the death penalty if the player was already defeated.
As for what the death penalty should be, as long as I do not loose anything I have earned (cash, xp, salvage) I can accept it. As I said, I was fine with debt in CoX, and the debuff Redlynne's post mentioned wouldn't bother me either.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
I had forgotten all about Venge! Man I loved using that back in the day,,,
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No mention of Fallout? Corpsebomb FTW
Long as we're talking "defeat" penalties.. I don't think you should be able to turn in a mission for credit if you are defeated before turning it in.
I definitely exploited stealth to get to objectives kill what i needed as single target then dye to re-spawn and still get full credit. Or flying through to the end of an instanced mission.. I much preferred it when the objectives were such that I needed to actually complete the content.
Being defeated should not be the "teleport me out" power. LOL.
With each player being able to mez (PLEASE don't make players "buy" mez powers.. ) the defeat penalty can be greater
Crowd Control Enthusiast
If my character gets defeated during a mission I get no credit for doing the mission? Well, that'll kill missions quicker than quick.
Yeah I agree, if you get defeated and then say you don't get credit if that happens, then guess what happens? Any even remotely difficult mission/content will be skipped, as people aren't going to want to risk essentially wasting time on a mission where there's a good chance they won't receive any credit for it
Loss of Mission Complete reward after being Defeated ONCE? At that point being Defeated equates to Mission Failed. Might be an interesting OPTION for some sort of Hardcore Mode, but that's just about the only excuse I can come up with for wanting to pull that option.
As far as Mission Rewards go, I'd structure it instead to grant bonuses to Mission Complete if certain "standard victory conditions" are also met. Things like:
[list][*]Received ZERO Damage during mission (ie. Total Control Victory)
[*]Completed mission with zero Defeats of any member of Team (ie. Last One(s) Standing Victory)
[*]Completed mission without Defeating any NPC Foes (ie. Stealth Victory)[/list]
Now, obviously, some of those would need to have "Anti-AFK" considerations built into them, or make the bonus so small as to make "playing AFK" on a Team less of a leeching opportunity, but aside from that ...
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