As every CoH pvper knows there were diminishing returns for pvp instances and zones. I really didn't start getting deep into CoH pvp until after the i13 changes, so I am a little biased in saying that I thought they were actually pretty good, but especially the diminishing returns aspect. As CoT is not going to be designed for pvp, I'm wondering if there are any plans for DR or if it will even be an issue with the mechanics.
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Task Forces and PvP
CoH vet from Easter 2004 to shutdown
Been in scrapperlock since 2012
I was a huge PVPer but I cant, for the life of me remember what DR was.
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Player_vs_Player#Diminishing_Returns
Yep. Im at work and game sites are blocked lol. Ill check it out when I get home. Thanks
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
In a nutshell DR imposed a sort of maximum power effect on other players in PvP so that you could never, for instance, perma-hold someone or buff them up so high that they'd be unkillable. Each near-term casting of a power would have less effect than the last - thus the diminishing part. The net effect made it so that theoretically if a gang was constantly going after a single target the single target would always continue to have a slim chance to react because the groups' combined powers could never 100% overwhelm him/her.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Oh the whole heal decay thing, right? That was horrible at first, but I got used to it after a while, switched tactics, and made it work.
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
It also imposed a curve on returns from dmage bonus, resistance, defense, tohit, etc so, for instance, you wouldnt see a tanker running around with capped resistances and capped defenses. The returns from additional points in these stats made it so you could really *at most* have like 65-70% resistance or ~55-60% defense. Not much fun/fruitful to fight somebody with 99.5% damage mitigation.
Task Forces and PvP
CoH vet from Easter 2004 to shutdown
Been in scrapperlock since 2012
That's the beauty of being in a PVP zone. If you're on a team, and a tanker is super buffed, it takes the whole team to take him down.
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
Who said CoT is not going to be designed for pvp?
There is going to be dedicated phase of the entire city map for pvp. We use pvp metrics within our design for pve to reduce issues where we have to make separate rule systems for the two.
Most effects in the game experience a form of dimishing returns. Some don't because their mechanics don't require it.
It is kind of necessary in the long run when looking at stacking buffs and certain types of debuffs so it doesn't become trivial to reach caps (when caps exist). Our DR system makes it so we don't becessarily have to enforce a hard cap on stacked effects, it just gets really, really hard to gain improvement the stronger an effect gets.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I believe I was remembering a very old post which was probably more highlighting that players will never be forced to play pvp. I know you're putting in a lot of time and effort to make pvp enjoyable and believe me it's very appreciated.
Thanks, that clears things up a bit. To edit my question, I should have asked if there was a difference between effect stacking in pvp vs pve. I don't think the CoH devs put any thought into how the two would interact, thus the eventual changes and alienation of a lot of players. Cool to hear you guys are.
Task Forces and PvP
CoH vet from Easter 2004 to shutdown
Been in scrapperlock since 2012
Does it mean we'll be "forced" To evolve in a pvp zone or Will we be able To go around these pvp zones To not be forced To cross them ?
As i'm not found of pvp 'cause i'm bad at it and i always loose my fight ^^ i hope these zone are crossable (or the pvp really really balanced) ^^
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A phase is a duplicated map. There in essence will be "multiple Titan Cities". One where there is only pve and one where there is pvp combat enabled.
You are never forced to enter a pvp phase. It is always elective and clearly designated as such in the menu selection and we plan to include a warning in case someone accidentally clicks the pvp selection.
The old game had pvp balance issues because pvp was added later. The initial systems and mechanics were never designed with pvp in mind.
We have designed with pvp in mind. As such there will be as little difference as possible between how the two function. This js why we include pvp performance metrics in our pve design.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Actually without DR it was real easy to get into situations where one group/team was so amazingly well buffed that it was effectively impossible for them to lose and effectively impossible for anyone else to beat them. Basically it allowed PvP prior to those changes to be either super boring (if you were on the always-win team) or super annoying (if you were on the always-losing side). Why do -you- think PvP always had a relatively bad reputation in CoH and why so few people were willing to try it until changes were made?
DR actually made PVP worth trying again in CoH because there were no longer situations where people could be infinitely healed or where other people could be perma-held and so on. PvP that allows for situations where one side has practically no chance to succeed is doomed to failure (or at very least to be boring as hell). Hopefully the PvP in CoT will have some version of DR built in from the very beginning.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I am still not convinced that doing things like DR, designing with PvP in mind up front or stressing that PvP is optional in and of itself is going to make PvP a particularly desirable activity in CoT. There seems to be a whole lot of emphasis by MWM on the mechanics of PvP and not enough on the fun. The two are not the same thing. For example, for a brief time in CoH we had base raids. Mechanically, they were such a nightmare that they had to be removed from the game in short order. But I tell you what, many people found this aspect of the game to be an absolute hoot. There was something about defending your turf or heading off into the great unknown to raid someone else's that really raised the fun factor. It was the opposite of a "grind". Every situation was different, chaotic, and meaningful. You felt like although you were not an "expert" in the details of PvP you were doing your part for your group.
Anyway, I am not arguing that mechanics like DR are unimportant. Of course they are. But I wish the developers would take a step back and look at the bigger picture... you know... game, good times etc.. I especially believe this since they essentially have a blank slate and do just about "anything". If I am Joe Average player what my motivation for running around the same areas a PvE acting like a gangbanger or worse getting stomped on by a gang? This idea that "hero" or "villain" is just whatever you personally define it to be in your own state of mind seems to be a weak excuse to justify questionable behaviors.
Perhaps it's too late to change the direction of this initial PvP offering. But I hope that there is a next iteration later in time that has more appeal.
When it comes to mechanics, you have to focus on details and the bigger picture at the same time. Don't miss the forest for the trees, don't stare at your finger pointing out in front of you or you'll miss all that wonderous beauty.
The example givin of how poor mechanics doesn't define fun is true, but limited.
My father grew up poor in Greece, he and fellow kids couldn't afford a soccer ball. They each took off their socks, filling one full of rocks in the rough shape of a ball and tied the other socks around the center until it was about the size if a ball. Did have fun! Yes. Is this a successful soccer game? Not really.
The rest of the soccor playkng world would not play soccer like they did.
In mu view, it was much the same with CoH and many pvp mechanics. Things were mostly a mess mechanically. Some stuff was a rough approximation of what the mechanics were suppossed to be, the rest at its core was a sock full of rocks. Players managed to have fun with it because they made their own fun with the brokenness, but it wasn't necessarily conducive to a larger group of people enjoying it.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
The fundamental problem with having PvP in a MMO is the core question of whether the PvP is going to rely on real life player skill or in-game character stats.
The reason "PvP" works in a first person shooter is that typically each player's avatar in the game is 100% equal. Each person usually gets to use the exact same in-game weapons/armor and same game controllers. The only thing that makes the difference is player skill - the player with the faster physical reflexes (IRL) tends to win.
On the other hand with a MMO you have characters with in-game stats that can never be 100% equal unless you decide to play two characters against each other that are built to be 100% identical. Because characters in MMOs are typically class/powers based you are NEVER going to have a situation where a player playing a character of one class is going to be 100% balanced against a player playing a character of a different class. PvP in MMOs therefore devolves into a grandiose game of "rock, paper, scissors" where a given character is ALWAYS going to have the combat advantage over certain builds while also ALWAYS suffering a disadvantage versus other builds. With this a person could argue that one-on-one PvP in a MMO is an inherently dubious activity because (again unless the builds are 100% identical) one player will always have the de facto game stat advantage over the other.
The only "fair" way (and I use that term in its most relative sense) to play PvP in a MMO is to play it Team vs Team. This is the only time when the members of your team can counterbalance the strengths/weaknesses of the other team and thus gain as close to true PvP balance as possible in a MMO.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I agree with Tannim222's post above, and would add that the flow of fun works both ways too. You can have a game, like soccer, which is more or less "perfect" in terms of game design and people can still suck all the fun out of it by trying to build a team that specializes in defense and makes every game less fun, in my opinion. Gamers are like that in general. You can make a well-designed game WAY less fun in the strategy you choose to employ (or the one your opponent employs). It's only when those "non-fun" strategies actually produce more wins than the fun strategies that the game design should be looked at, I feel. They added the 24-second shot clock into basketball when they realized that a team with a one-point lead and the ball had no reason to ever shoot it. As a basketballer, I doublt I would ever want to be called for a 24-second violation should I ever commit one and would feel angry about it at the time, but that's temporary and the GOOD result of the shot clock is that my opponent wasn't able to just get the first basket, steal the ball back, and then sit on the ball for the next hour. I mean, it's called "playing basketball" not "intentionally not playing basketball" so we ought to take away any incentive players or teams have to shut down completely and just turtle up for long periods of time.
To make an analogy in the card game Magic, the most efficient "I counter your spell" cards they print in sets anymore are left intentionally inefficient for the sake of fun. That is, the mana needed to cast Cancel (which is the garden-variety counterspell) is 3, when you really want more like 1-2. This is because game play of the past (when there were counterspells for 2 or even 0 mana) has demonstrated that if you have enough "good" counterspells, people end up quickly stampeding towards the simplistic idea of "I'll counter all of their spells and just try to win by denying them their whole deck, one card at a time.", which is a popular strategy when it works, but leads to long, drawn-out games that take forever and have one person frustratedly trying to get a spell to actually happen through the wall of counters. So by leaving the counterspells intentionally "bad", they keep the metagame more fun because you're not forced to either play the all-counterspell deck or figure out how to beat it. Printing more powerful cards of any kind would seem to be a thing that makes the people playing those cards happy, but the problem is that the playerbase as a whole suffers when the metagame descends into a warped hell of frustrating opponent decks which are technically fair, but take all the fun out of the game for everyone when they get good enough.
So as far as CoT and the combat mechanics, I'm in favor of whatever makes the ebb and flow of the game work best. Move, counter move, counter-counter-move, etc. Not just "Ha ha, you can't hit me, ever." or "I'm completely undetectible, unhittable, and can one-shot anything. All the fun is mine, you get zero fun. Hey, where're you going? I thought we were going to play superhero PvP for fun?"
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The issue is "FUN" is so subjective, Fun in PvP is just that its an issue of something that will never be able to please everyone.
Ill give the best example is a case from Elite: Dangerous - Im part of a gaming community called - Time of Chaos, who managed through not completely by our own actions get a bit of renown one way or the other.
A number of our ex-members were very "extreme" hardcore PvPers and were very heavily on the minmax spectrum.
My later background, while facing off against these guys I was always known for doing "stupid" builds. Well the common tactic in Elite is to bring shield generator destroying torpedo's to destroy the heavy large ships shield gen's to negate their shields or to overheat them to death - my speciality was extreme durability, little damage, harassment basicly a space hulk - Now to me this was fun having a number of torpedo's plough into me after gunning a number out of the sky with (at the time heavily unused point defence and ECM) even though they landed a number they couldn't drop my shields (this changed when they started logging half their wing with torpedo's which left them combat ineffective).
They tried heat weaponry but against an efficient cool running turret tank, that didn't work.
The only way they could effectively route, a turret tank was to use a bugged weapon modification (a specific type of cannon shell that overheats ships) this weapon stated not working as intended was the only weapon that can push my ship into overheating (people claim that you can avoid being overheated by these, thats a lie I was one of the early adopters of cool running large builds and faced that firepower)
- At the end of the day the lesson learned here is that fun is highly subjective, some people only have fun if they can stomp on people (Meaning, they will use anything they can push to the very maximum to win). You will have your element that are there to have some fun be it win or lose alongside their mates. Those that will play "fair" or play the game they want and will keep going to the end. PvP can never please everyone at the end of the day but likewise neither can PvE.
You have to find the middle ground or go towards the element you want to inspired the most, however you will always find some sort of toxicity in both PvE or PvP because competitiveness causes that, after all I was one of the players that got pushed out of fielding in a tournament and got replaced by non-members of my group because I wasn't minmaxed enough.
Since the devs are designing the entire game to play using the same or similar mechanics in both pve and pvp, I don't think there will be much of a balance issue. Just as in pve, a team with a mix of ATs that give buffs, do damage, and control will be better than a team that is one dimensional. Even more than in pve, careful thought should be put into min-maxing a whole team for pvp purposes. A team with a lot of buffs should massacre a poorly built team without them.
The difficulty is managing 1v1, as Lothic stated, which as has been described as a rock-paper-scissors game of sorts. I don't think it should be/is that way at all. It's my opinion that a character min-maxed character with good sets should be competetive against any AT so that a well built and well played rock has a chance against a well built paper. As a 1v1 player in CoH I had some very successful characters, including scrappers, tankers, brutes, masterminds, and defenders. I fought extremely good players and can attest that every AT was able to put up extremely good matches against all of mine. Obviously some sets were more geared towards team buffs over debuffs, or aoe damage over single target, but each AT had a few primary/secondaries which made me nervous to go into the arena against, no matter what I was playing.
What the matches came down to was who had the strongest build and who could play it most effectively. The definition of 'strongest' varried by AT, but I wouldn't say any was gimped against another. If I were playing a scrapper and a defender was able to get its debuffs on me and space effectively, they had a serious shot of taking me down. Obviously standing toe-to-toe would be a massacre for them, but if they played well it would shift in their favor. This is where some skill comes into play in the form of timing, spacing, and knowing the strengths/weaknesses of the opponent.
Task Forces and PvP
CoH vet from Easter 2004 to shutdown
Been in scrapperlock since 2012
Obviously player skill is always going to be a component of how well PvP works regardless if it's based on a player's physical twitch dexterity (which is more important in a FPS) or strategic character build planning (which is the way most MMO PvP leans towards).
For MMO PvP to effectively work players must be able to "accept the reality" that when you strip away all the player-added skill/knowledge that deep down at its core the classes in the game fundamentally work on a "rock, paper, scissors" mechanic. There's no getting around that. I think the problem most people have is they don't want to accept that reality. They still think that somehow, in some magical way, all player classes can be balanced to be "equal" to each other as far a PvP goes. It's like if you had a bowl with an apple, an orange, a banana, a grapefruit and a peach and you desperately wanted to try to make them all pineapples. It's just not going to happen.
If you can willing accept that whatever character class(es) you play in PvP will always have fundamental built-in advantages against some classes and disadvantages versus other classes then everything would be fine. I think it's the "disadvantages versus other classes" part that drives some people crazy. It's a failure to understand the true nature of the game they are playing.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
This may well be the case, but I don't think it can be taken as an axiom. I don't believe it was true in CoH; for a lot of content the most powerful teams were ones that stacked force multipliers. The first case in point that comes to mind is a Fire/Rad superteam, but I'm sure there are many others. That being said almost any team composition could work through most content, which was definitely part of the appeal for me and I'm sure a lot of others. I recall being on a team in the teen levels that consisted of an empathy defender (myself) and 7 blasters. Super hero health bar whack-a-mole...but pretty fun!
Makes me wonder just how this will play out in CoT.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/compilation-information-city-titans](Unofficial) Compilation of Information on City of Titans[/url]
Even if a particular strategy is totally legal under the rules now, the devs decide what the rules are and can change them if they feel there's a good reason. They have the ability and responsibility to rework the rules to make some strategies non-viable in some way (make something crucial to it illega, or nerf something it absolutely needs, etc), if they feel that the status quo is not creating the kind of fun experiences they want to engender. That's always a judgement call. Magic sometimes has to ban card they just printed because they didn't at first realize how good some card were at time of printing, etc.
Again, nobody likes being called for a 24-second violation in a game when it matters, but by the same token, that game might have ended 12-10 in favor of your opponent after 40 min if the shot clock didn't exist. Did the people who were using the "pass the ball around for 40 min and don't shoot it" strategy WANT their "preferred play style" to get nerfed? Probably not, but the people responsible for putting on basketball games for the fans to watch didn't want their game to be that boring because of a rule loophole that was obviously in need of rectification, so they added it. The sport of basketball would suck were it not for the shot clock, despite the fact that players hate getting called for shot clock violations and feel like it would be better for them (in the moment) if the rule didn't exist.
People will optimize the game based on the rules they have to work under and nothing else. You can't assume that nobody will ever try to gain a permanent mez on someone in PvP, you have to prevent that being possible at all if you want to make sure it never happens. If tankers can ever be so tanky as to be invulnerable, or if controllers can ever gain a hard mez lock on you, then I think you've found your 24-second shot clock.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising