McNum wrote:

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution for this. But mission objectives and gimmicks should probably have a spot on the UI where you know where to find them.

Keeping track of mission objectives in STO, CO can be a nightmare sometimes. There's often too much (and occasionally not enough) information so you get a scroll-able window. This wouldn't be so bad if it stayed where you put it but the thing keeps changing as you play.
Maybe, in those games, it's just a problem of the interface not being set up in such a way it can be taken in at a glance,
I think it would be nice if, when you open your mission window, there were check boxes you could select so you can decide for yourself what information you want displayed in the objectives on screen. You could set a default so you wouldn't have to micromanage it unless you want to, like only display the next objective in a mission or all of them or let me pick and choose like display the next primary objective and also a counter of secondary items or enemies I have to collect or deal with. Also, to only display the active mission or all of them.
It's been a while since I played TSW but their objectives are listed in a much more concise manner and you can collapse or expand things right on the screen, but I seem to recall it would change itself occasionally without warning, too.

Huckleberry wrote:

Rigel, you just reminded me of something I think we should all weigh in on before implementation:
Reputation effects of mission decisions.
If your decisions during a mission have ramifications on your reputation, would you want to know, quantitatively, what they are, or do you just want to play in character and let the reputation fall where it may?
SWTOR handled this two different ways. First, with light side and dark side points. When you make a dialogue choice, the game game tells you what the impact of that choice has upon your light side and dark side points, because you can't take back the choice.
Second, your reputation with your various companions did not tell you what effect your dialogue choices have upon them until after the conversation is over. Granted, if you escape out of the conversation in time you can play it over again until you get the effect you want. Furthermore, you can make up for unpopular choices with particular companions by giving them gifts.
How will CoT deal with notifying you of reputation effects? Will it tell you that if you keep the villian's stolen diamond your reputation with the law and order faction will drop by x-amount, or will it just tell you that your reputation suffers? Will your reputation effects just show up as some sort of flying mission pop-up text after you've made the decision, or will the game just let you find out for yourself what effect that had on your reputation?
Where do you, fellow Titans, feel the game should be? Do you want to know before you make your choice what the quantitative effect of that choice will be upon your various reputations? If so, how will this affect your gameplay?

My Search Fu™ isn't very good this morning but this came up a couple of years ago and it was one of the things that TheMightyPalladin was especially passionate about. It seems like I remember one of the Devs saying that they planned to make it very clear when particular decisions would affect alignment but I can't find the thread.
It was suggested having a way to toggle those notifications on and off so that players who chose to could make their decisions more naturally and the alignment would just handle itself while others who are more concerned with never getting a single point of bad karma could avoid it easily.

Good find.
Also, I'm feeling a little foolish, now.

The reason I couldn't find it is because I was trying to spell alignment as "allignment".

Huckleberry wrote:

@Rigel, thanks. Knowing it is out there will cause me to conduct a more thorough search for that discussion.
In my experience, when a developer determines what the quantitative impacts are, it may not mesh well with the player's own understanding of the issues involved. This then results in surprise and potential disappointment/frustration on the part of the player due to the seeming arbitrariness of it. So foreknowledge of the effects would allow players to make the educated choices ncessary to prevent unwanted surprises from the game.
Edit: Looks like I found it here:http://cityoftitans.com/forum/question-devs-sides-vs-alignment-matrix
Here is a salient post from the discussion:
Doctor Tyche wrote:
In all of this, nobody's ever considered a third option:
That both 1 and 2 can exist.
Let me refine what I said earlier through example.
You are the Big Red Cheese (no affiliation with any Fawcett character implied) who is lawful and honest to the extreme. He is invited onto a team which is running a bank robbery mission. A warning box pops up, telling him "if you do this mission, you will lose lawful status rating points. Are you sure?" Now, the same team is later running a "Bust up a drug lab" mission, no warning label.
This can even apply per-faction. You run missions against the Unforgiven, but you have a high rating with them, it warns you.
As for being a "Hero" or "Villain" that depends on which side has a higher ranking. That's why the three-axis, instead of 2 or 4. Whichever side has 2 or 3 is your side. And again, warning when you hit that tipping point. "If you do this action, you will be labelled a Hero/Villain and treated accordingly." There are some travel restrictions, you go in to villain dominated areas as a hero, you will get rebuffed, same as a villain going into hero areas. But these areas are planned to be small, not the dramatic split as there was in CoH.

An option visible at the bottom of the dialog to Suspend / Turn Off alignment status points, before entering a mission, might be acceptable as well.

Since we're talking about turning things off, there's also a feature I wish more games implemented: The ability to turn off gaining experience.

The reason for this is to prevent outleveling the content. One of the things I really don't like in a game is when you outlevel the content, but you still want to do the story and side missions for the enjoyment. So you end up in areas that no longer hold a challenge to you, and unavoidably start to lose interest as a result of the lack of challenge. (can you say SWTOR since 2015? and AION) This happens a lot in games that offer free xp bonus time and events.

Some people are just wired to want to race to max level and would probably have a hard time comprehending this suggestion. I, on the other hand, am wired to want to play around and let the levels just happpen as a reward for my enjoyment; and I have a hard time comprehending why anyone would want to blow past it. As long as we acknowledge that both styles of player will be playing, I would like the ability to toggle off or adjust the amount of experience gained.

One game out there I have played that actually had something like this is Dofus. In it, you can donate the experience you would have gained to your guild to level it instead of your character. It was a slider so you could donate just a little or all of it. Something like that would be acceptable to me. I could even see donating some experience to "charities" or other causes in the gameworld also, in return for reputation, or influence of some sort, or just to see that faction's influence increase if the game includes something like that. This latter suggestion would also help the reputation grinders out there who would want to race to max rep by donating all their exp for a short time.

I'm going to go off into a brainstorm with that last idea for a moment here. Imagine wearing sponsor logos on your costume like a NASCAR automobile. Every sponsor logo you wear gives you a combination of reputation with that sponsor and some additional cash. I don't know what the game would do with cash, so maybe we could just make it any fungible in-game currency, or maybe tokens to be used in a giftshop just for people who do this. I can see an "Up-N-Away Burgers new-hero starter-kit" specially designed to give lowbies a sponsor to get them on their feet, with missions and the ability to get special gear (read: gadgets or temp powers) until they make a reputation for themselves and branch off into their own careers, kind of like how the Mickey Mouse Club started off so many celebrities.

We could even do something like this with guild logos and costumes. Every guild logo or piece of guild uniform you wear donates influence to your guild and gives you some sort of guild-only currency that can only be spent in a certain shop for cool knicknacks, decorations for your lair, or a batmobile/invisible jet.

Somebody stop me... when I get to brainstorming, there's no telling where I'll end up.

Rigel wrote:

blacke4dawn wrote:
Izzy wrote:
An option visible at the bottom of the dialog to Suspend / Turn Off alignment status points, before entering a mission, might be acceptable as well.
Personally I don't think so since it will remove the notion of making meaningful choices in which missions to actually do. I mean, what is the point of having an alignment system if you can selective turn it off and do things that would be "opposite" to your current alignment?
I don't think he meant suspending the impact of making alignment choices but rather turning off the notifications that you're about to make a choice.
In one of the threads someone mentioned they'd rather make their choices more naturally, as they would in real life.

Well, if your not the Mission Holder of the currently set mission, and the current mission might affect your alignment points, I actually rather have the option, and stay with that PUG. They might be a fun bunch. Or just helping out a lower level SG team complete a hard mission with my higher level ALT.
Point being, Don't make Helping/Teaming with others more difficult via Mechanics in game! :(

Rigel wrote:

I can see that being a good reason to suspend the alignment choice's impact.

I don't mind game content that could affect my character's alignment as long as there's always some method to "reset" my alignment position back to the way I'd want it to be.

So for example if some mission made my hero do something "evil" then as long as there are other permanently available missions that would let me "atone" for my mistakes then that's fine. Frankly the idea of having a "perfect" character that never has an "alignment-oriented crisis" seems relatively boring to me regardless.

Rigel wrote:

I can't see one's actions in a single mission having such an impact it would be really difficult to reverse.

Actually I can. The schadenfreude of the general public is such that the more highly someone is esteemed, the greater the fall. Just look at how everyone turned on Rhonda Rousey when she lost, and at what happened to Subway's Jared.

So the farther you are along one axis of reputation, the greater the impact should be if you go the other way. Unfortunately, the converse is also true: the farther along one axis of reputation you are, the smaller your contributions become to push you further along. This works at the other end of the spectrum for negative values as well.

I actually hope the developers put this phenomenon into the game, making it harder to build and maintain a reputation than it is to lose a reputation.

Rigel wrote:

I don't want to have to break out a spreadsheet and chart a graph before deciding if I want to play with someone.

Any attempt to apply mandatory reputation effects upon people is going to affect their decision to play with someone, regardless of the realism or complexity of the math behind the effects.

SWTOR did it right. In that game, group content includes morality decision points. When a decision point comes up, each player in the party makes his or her own independent moral decision. Then the game picks one of the players' decisions at random and the mission continues down that chosen path. Regardless of the direction the mission takes, the game gives you morality credit for the independent decision your character made. So your righteous Jedi can run a mission that ends up murdering all the crewmwmbers yet still increasing her light-side points as if she had saved them instead; because she chose not to murder them when the decision choice came up, even if the game did not pick her choice. In other words, the game realizes that morality choices can tear a team apart and has figured out a way to give people their free will without sacrificing the team. (it also gives you achievements for being part of a team that chooses some specific morality paths, leading to some interesting replays)

Lothic wrote:

What's the point of having an alignment system in the first place if it's too easy to avoid negative effects?

I agree with just about everything you said. Especially this. An extreme reputation should be something players cultivate and nurture and should be proud of. I'm sure Batman has wanted to kill once or twice, but his strict no-kill policy is something he sticks with despite all the times when it would seem justified.

Redlynne wrote:

Simplest way I can think of to implement Huckleberry's notion of diminishing returns on Alignment movement would be to do this.
You use an integer to express the actual recorded alignment "number" for database purposes.
What the Player sees is the square root of that recorded integer.
So on a 0-100% scale you use integer values ranging from 0 to 10,000.
Going from 0% to 1% requires adding +1 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 1% to 2% requires adding +3 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 2% to 3% requires adding +5 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 3% to 4% requires adding +7 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 4% to 5% requires adding +9 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 5% to 10% requires adding +75 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 10% to 20% requires adding +300 to the integer value recorded in the database.
Going from 20% to 30% requires adding +500 to the integer value recorded in the database.
... and so on and so forth. That then gets you the basic "shape" of the math you want to be using under the hood and results in a behavior where the more you're "known" for a particular alignment, the more you have "do" in accordance with that alignment to keep moving deeper and deeper into that alignment direction. Built in diminishing returns.
However, if you go "against" that alignment, you don't subtract a straight integer in the inverse of adding ... instead you subtract -1%.
This means that if your alignment integer value is "low" you "lose less" by acting against your chosen alignment, thanks to the diminishing returns formula of the square root function. This then means that a "little deviation" every now and then goes a long way towards "ruining" your reputation on a particular alignment axis.
So that makes for a relatively easy/simple set of Rules for how to govern things like Huckleberry was describing, in which the gains/losses of axis alignment/reputation can be structured in a way that is asymmetric. That way, over time, you have to do A LOT to achieve the "squeaky clean" max alignment value, and it doesn't take all that much to "wreck" that and take things the other way. The dynamic then becomes one in which there's a sort of "gravity pull" towards Neutrality at the center of the alignment axis because it's "easy to fall but takes effort to raise" and ... there you go.
Now, all of that said, for simple sanity purposes, it might be best to go with a 0-10 scale for the alignment axes, meaning integer values of 0-100 under the hood (instead of 0-10,000) getting plugged into the square root formula. At that point, you might as well just build a Look Up Table containing all the numbers you'll need to be making use of for the UI, and what to change the integer value to when "failing" to live up to your alignment reputation that you can then just plug in the underlying database integer value into to generate all of the player side UI stuff so there's no "computations" required for all that stuff.

This all sounds reasonable. I like your notion of a "gravity pull" towards the alignment neutral points because ultimately most "civilians" in this world are going to be completely average in every way, even when it comes to alignment. Only the truly exceptional (i.e. player characters) should ever be able to approach an extreme on any alignment scale.

I also favor a system that keeps most of its serious math "under the hood". I wouldn't have a problem with alignment ranges based on say a 0-100 integer/percent scale, but I wouldn't want to have wonder if mission X would give me a 0.547% or 0.548% boost. Any "user interface" numbers should be kept relatively simple.

McNum wrote:

As for alignment, I think CoH did it right with it. You would never, ever change alignment category due to the actions of another player. I'd prefer it if to change categories, you build up points like in CoH, and when you have enough, you can do whatever it is you need to lock in a new alignment. So if you play a super good boyscout, but your friend plays a brooding anti-hero, you may team up and you'll get points for both tracks, assuming you play both characters' missions, but until you cash them in, it doesn't matter.

Sure, it breaks realism a bit, but it makes for some very friendly team mechanics. And in that dilemma, I'd pick friendly team mechanics every time. I mean the opposite effect is that brooding loner characters team up with everyone, and paragons of truth and justice have to play solo to not ruin their alignment.

Well first you'd have to be a player that even cares about what the effects of the new CoT alignment system will do to your character. Remember the alignment system in CoT will work fairly differently compared to CoH - there's going to be a lot of grey/in-between characters by default.

And while I would again concede there might be a few players who would "avoid" a teaming situation because they care more about the ramifications of an alignment shift than the benefits of teaming I would argue that the vast majority of players would simply alt over to another character. As I recall people used to alt to other characters all the time depending on the needs of a mission. Consider that if someone invited you to a team for a mission that benefits more "villainous" characters you likely wouldn't want run that with a "hyper-heroic" character regardless - you'd switch over to one of your "less moral" alts to do that.

For the CoT alignment system to actually "mean" something they really shouldn't allow it to be something that you can disregard whenever you wanted. That'd be like playing a Paladin in D&D and being able to periodically get away with doing non Lawful Good things whenever you'd want without jeopardizing your alignment. Remember the reason why your Captain SuperGuy character has become so "famously heroic" is because he never does anything bad - teaming with a team that's going to do some questionably bad things should be something Captain SuperGuy would WANT to avoid. If you want to have characters who are more "flexible" with who they associate with then simply allow their alignments to reflect their more neutral outlooks on life. Critical alignment shifts should only really affect anyone who's trying to be extremely hyper-good or extremely hyper-bad... and those kinds of people are usually insufferably annoying by definition. ;)

McNum wrote:

And thus pick up groups never become a thing and the game dies a slow death before it takes off.
[...]
This does seem like a bit of a tangent to UI wishes, I'll admit. Maybe split it off to another thread? It's a good discussion to have.

It may be a "good discussion to have" but we already have a working idea (based on what little the Devs have actually told us so far) that the alignment system of CoT will be based on several inter-related sliding scales. We will not technically be black-n-white "heroes" or "villains" like we were in CoH as much as characters who always inhabit the "grey areas" of those scales.

The main thing we don't know yet is exactly what players can or can't do to actually shift our alignments back-n-forth along those scales. For all we know the Devs have already devised the game mechanics that will make it something that can never be accidentally changed or something that can't be directly changed based on teaming with other people. Basically it's far too early to worry about the fear that "alignment maintenance will make teaming undesirable and/or impossible". I'm reasonably sure the Devs of this game will ultimately design the alignment system so that it does NOT become a de facto roadblock to teaming.

Bottomline it's good to be mindful of these things but I wouldn't be too alarmist about them either, at least until we learn far more about the game than we currently know at this point. *shrugs*

McNum wrote:

Having rebound missions, where someone is worried about the hero, or a moral choice has to be made confirming their downwards slide, or rejecting it and redeeming themselves would be a good safety valve to have to make sure the alignment stays exactly where the player wants it to be, no matter who they've teamed with recently.

This was the [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/109158#comment-109158]main point of my original post[/url] in this thread. As long as the game has plenty of permanently available ways (i.e. rebound missions) for a character to readjust their alignment scales in any direction they want then the impact of any "unintended" shifts (that might happen for whatever reasons) can be mitigated.

Fireheart wrote:

In SWTOR, there are Light/Dark choice points and Everyone on the team gets to make a choice. That choice is applied to the character. And then the game picks one of the team choices and applies it to the story-line. So, you can make the Light choice and get the Light points, but still (sometimes distressingly) have the story go down the Dark path.
Sometimes that feels like, 'I made all the right choices, but sh... er, Stuff still happens'. Sometimes that feels like, 'So this is how the other side lives' and it's entertaining. Through replay, it is possible to see all of the branches in the story and learn the value of the choices being made. At least, for those stories that can be replayed.
I'm interested to learn what model(s) the Devs choose for CoT.

So it makes some sense if everybody on a team chooses All Light or All Dark then the mission defaults that way. But frankly it seems a bit weird have a given mission be able to "randomly" choose its own path if the team is mixed. I realize that probably helps to keep things "fair" for the mixed alignment team, but it still seems strange.

I could accept having a few "random path" missions like that in CoT but it just doesn't seem feasible to allow most/all missions to work like that. For one thing it would be a huge amount of Dev effort to make every mission flexible enough to work out as either a "heroic" mission or a "villainous" mission. Sure some plotlines could bend that way but it just doesn't seem like a "universal" solution for CoT. Also it would seem strange to be able to make the individual choice to get hero credit for a mission that turns out to be villain-oriented and vice versa. Why should someone be able to get "hero points" for ultimately doing evil things?

Maybe when an individual finds themselves on a mission that's turned opposite of their own mission alignment choice they could be offered a few other side choices during the mission that would lessen the alignment shift impact of the mission overall. Perhaps the individual could be allowed to actively sacrifice other rewards (like a temporarily reduced INF or XP rate during the mission) as an alternative to taking an alignment hit. In effect you could take a hit in INF or XP earnings instead of suffering an unwanted alignment shift. In roleplay terms it'd be like if a hero unwittingly hooked up with some villains on an evil mission he/she could decide to lose out on some INF (that had to be retroactively paid to some civilians' hospital bills as a mea culpa) instead of taking a negative hit to his/her alignment.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Honestly, to me it seems like most here who think there needs to be explicit choice in alignment shifts have the vision that one or two missions will make you go from Superman to Apocalypse (or other way).
The impression I have gotten from MWM is that to make such a "long" alignment shift you would need to be essentially full time on the other side, and if you want to play a "super good" toon then you better not only play "supper bad" missions. Personally I don't see the big point of an alignment system if you can choose to not be affected by it.

For the sake of discussion let's assume the alignment scales will range from 0 to 100. Also let's assume it'll be relatively hard to get to one extreme (the 0-5 range) or the other (the 95-100 range). I figure if you actually make it to one of those extremes it should probably take you at least several dozen missions (or maybe even 50+) to go all the way from one end to the other.

I'll obviously leave the exact details for that to the Devs but I actually suspect that most characters will see (through the course of normal play) their alignment values fluctuate + or - 5 or 10 points from play session to play session - I seriously think it will be (and even should be) impossible to keep your alignment values maintained perfectly static for any extended length of time. People have "good days" and "bad days" and your characters' current alignment values should reflect those ups and downs.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Besides what makes you think that "mixed alignment" teams will be the only ones forming, I'm sure there will be people who'll form "pure" teams. As for the grieving potential, well community reputations will handle that in the long run.

I'm sure there will be plenty of "very strongly heroic" teams and "very strongly villainous" teams out there. But essentially unless you have a tight group of friends/co-players who all decide to stick very closely to one alignment extreme or the other then basically every generic team playing in the game will be some version of a "mixed" team just by the very nature of the relative degrees of grey of the alignment scales. Remember that it'll likely be almost impossible to be a strictly "binary" 100% hero or villain like you used to be back in CoH. Everyone is going to be at least a little bit "grey" in CoT.

With that the idea that there will be a bunch of "alignment griefing" going on seems very dubious to me. Think about it: If you're going to be the type of player who's going to be very worried about maintaining your alignment positions at all costs then you're likely only going to play with like-minded people who basically never play PUGs regardless. It's just like back in the day where some people were strongly locked into doing "supergroup only" activities and more or less never did anything outside of their tight-knit groups. Now in CoT we'll likely have supergroups who'll choose to pursue certain alignment positions and those groups can choose to be as exclusive or inclusive as they want to be. *shrugs*

I get the feeling that missions will have alignment prerequisites.

First of all I've heard that rather than a simple good-evil alignment we will have reputation along several axes (did I hear someone say 3?). So if your reputation with a faction fits within a certain window, then you are eligible for the mission. I imagine that some missions might need a certain reputation with more than one faction, be it positive or negative.

During the course of the mission, you have some choices to make that will change your reputation and thereby make you eligible for more missions. I expect that, like in real life, if more than one character is running the mission as a team, then the team leader will make the decisions. How the leader comes to the decision is up to him or her. Vote, flip a coin, or just make the choice unilaterally. This would be no different than a pen and paper RPG, now that I think about it. So that's good.

Will there be alignment griefers? You betcha. If I wanted to form a party and advertised that I was working toward improving my reputation with the law and order faction, I guarantee there will be someone out there who will say they do too, but then do the opposite. That's a fact of life, but with a community like ours, I expect those people will be identified before long; and besides, they will only be eligible for the same missions as me for a short time as I continue to take missions available for people with a high reputation with the law and order faction while the griefer makes himself ineligible for them.

The situation kind of takes care of itself.

Another reason I think missions will have reputation prerequisites is for the simple reason that they will be easier to write. It would be far easier for the mission author to create a mission for a few possible choices than to write one with with all choices possible, including everything from total mayhem to a no-kill policy.

So while a team of good heroes has traced the arms shipment into the warehouse and a team of bad villians has traced the arms shipment into the warehouse, their respective missions will be completely different within the warehouse.
The heroes will probably still have the choice to confiscate the arms for their own use, they might also have the option of capturing the bad guys for the police instead of kiling them.
Whereas the villians might have the option of confiscating the arms for themselves instead of for the mob boss who hired them and also the option of capturing the bad guys for the mob boss instead of killing them.
So you see the mission mechanics might actually be similar for the heroes as for the villians, but the mission dialogue would be much more appropriate to the participants based upon the prerequisites they met before the mission started.

Huckleberry wrote:

First of all I've heard that rather than a simple good-evil alignment we will have reputation along several axes (did I hear someone say 3?). So if your reputation with a faction fits within a certain window, then you are eligible for the mission. I imagine that some missions might need a certain reputation with more than one faction, be it positive or negative.

Yes the alignment system of CoT is actually going to be using 3 inter-related alignment scales. I didn't really bring that detail up in my earlier posts just for the sake of simplicity. They talked about it a long time ago in the Kickstarter information. Your characters' actions will directly affect your position on all 3 of those scales in an overall combined fashion.

Huckleberry wrote:

I get the feeling that missions will have alignment prerequisites.
The situation kind of takes care of itself.

Which as you say would make mission writing easier and mitigate any potential "alignment griefing" quite a bit.[/quote]

Fireheart wrote:

I had only brought up SWTOR in this discussion because of its alignment-choice mechanism and the model of choice-application, when team choices collide. My expectation is that, IF alignment choices have some 'mechanical' effect on mission structure (ie, they trigger changes in how the mission plays out), then it will be the mission-owner's choice that happens, and anyone else that has the same mission can choose whether or not they want that choice to apply to their own story-arc, or if they want to play it differently, at a later time.

Yeah I'd agree that the mission owner(s) should have full control over how any "alignment oriented plot" issues are played out in a given CoT mission. Between the mission owner controlling what he/she can control and the missions themselves being "preordained" to provide well defined alignment shift outcomes (based on the alignment prerequisites Huckleberry was talking about) I believe the fears of "alignment griefing" would be effectively eliminated.

The real key towards mitigating any alignment griefing is to make it so that any "overtly on-purpose" failure of a mission only has negative alignment ramifications for the individual who caused the failure, not the entire team. For example let's say you're running a hero oriented mission to rescue some hostages within 10 minutes. If the team fails to save the hostages within 10 minutes the TEAM fails but if some ass-hat griefer on the team decides to directly kill the hostages themselves (in an attempt to actively fail the mission) then only that INDIVIDUAL takes the negative alignment consequences. I honestly believe most missions can be designed to be able to tell the difference between a "legitimate team failure" and a "malicious individual attempt" to ruin a mission.

Regardless if for some reason you find yourself on a team/mission you don't control and it isn't heading towards the alignment goals you want you can always leave the team before the end of the mission. Conversely if you own the mission then there would be nothing any other teammate could do to "sabotage" the mission against you. Sure a griefer could fail the mission but that failure would not negatively affect the mission owner's alignment status in any way.

Izzy wrote:

Also, i would very much like the Player (mission holder) to restrict certain missions from being selected by the Team Leader. (certain missions being set to Private)

Yeah that'd be a useful feature to protect a mission holder's mission from getting run by a team leader against his/her wishes. But ironically something like that could be used by a mission holder to grief the rest of a team depending on how it worked.

Let's assume a player had the ability to toggle his/her missions between being "public" and "private" at will. Then let's say that player joined a team and set one of their missions to "public" so that the team leader could run it. Then what would happen if that player decided (as a form of griefing) to reset that mission back to "private" after the team had finished like 90% of it? Would the game suddenly kick the team out of the mission and ruin it for everyone? Conversely maybe the game would "lock" that mission in once the team leader started it so the original mission owner couldn't grief the team. But then what if the mission owner had it set to "public" by accident and the team leader wouldn't stop the mission? We'd be back at square one where the mission owner has lost control of his/her mission.

I guess we'll have to see how the Devs handle these circular issues in CoT.

You have to scroll WAAAY up to read this, but up there somewhere someone mentioned being able to turn "XP gain upon mob defeat" on and off. I'm not against that as a thing to have per se, but it probably isn't necessary if the game works like it could. In GW2, which I recently started paying, everywhere you go, whatever you do, you are auto-exemped to a level such that the environment you're in is a challenge, but a doable one, for you. You don't lose any powers, but your effective combat level is reduced to make the local monsters a real threat. Nothing ever "cons grey" to anyone. My toon is level 80 with good gear now and I routinely still get killed in lowbie zones for this reason. Because of this, there are no level ceilings on content in the sense that you'd ever out-level content. You might be too low to do certain dungeons, or you might need a bigger team, but you'll never be prevented from doing a mission based on the fact that you're already too high of a level for it. That doesn't happen. In fact, you can redo everything as many times as you want, as far as I can tell. That said, some things are dynamic events that you have to wait for them to respawn before you can do them again.

Also, some NPCs only have one mission for you, and once you complete it, you can never get credit for completing it again with that character, but that said, most of those missions are "defeat 20 lizards" type stuff anyway. Also, those missions from those contacts probably don't NEED to be unrepeatable per se, they just are. It think they do that so that people will actually do a variety of missions instead of just spamming the single most lucrative one over and over to maximize reward profit. They apparently didn't get the memo that doing the same mission umpteen times instead of trying out a variety of them is my Preferred Play Style (TM). I should rage quit for that reason, I suppose, but for some strange reason I haven't done that yet. :)

Radiac wrote:

You have to scroll WAAAY up to read this, but up there somewhere someone mentioned being able to turn "XP gain upon mob defeat" on and off. I'm not against that as a thing to have per se, but it probably isn't necessary if the game works like it could. In GW2, which I recently started paying, everywhere you go, whatever you do, you are auto-exemped to a level such that the environment you're in is a challenge, but a doable one, for you. You don't lose any powers, but your effective combat level is reduced to make the local monsters a real threat. Nothing ever "cons grey" to anyone. My toon is level 80 with good gear now and I routinely still get killed in lowbie zones for this reason. Because of this, there are no level ceilings on content in the sense that you'd ever out-level content. You might be too low to do certain dungeons, or you might need a bigger team, but you'll never be prevented from doing a mission based on the fact that you're already too high of a level for it. That doesn't happen. In fact, you can redo everything as many times as you want, as far as I can tell. That said, some things are dynamic events that you have to wait for them to respawn before you can do them again.

I'd agree that the overwhelming usefulness of having a manual XP toggle might be reduced if a given game is "designed correctly" as you suggest. But even if CoT worked like GW2 in this regard I'd probably still want a manual toggle switch just to be "absolutely sure" I didn't earn any XP if I didn't want to.

I could understand being against a XP toggle switch if such a thing represented a huge amount of Dev time and effort to implement. But since creating such a simple switch would likely be almost one of the easiest types of "QoL features" the Devs could provide I really don't see any legitimate reason NOT to have it in the game regardless of anything else they do with any auto-exempt scheme. At the very least once CoH provided a switch like this I don't recall anyone being "specifically upset" that it was in the game.

Radiac wrote:

Also, some NPCs only have one mission for you, and once you complete it, you can never get credit for completing it again with that character, but that said, most of those missions are "defeat 20 lizards" type stuff anyway. Also, those missions from those contacts probably don't NEED to be unrepeatable per se, they just are. It think they do that so that people will actually do a variety of missions instead of just spamming the single most lucrative one over and over to maximize reward profit. They apparently didn't get the memo that doing the same mission umpteen times instead of trying out a variety of them is my Preferred Play Style (TM). I should rage quit for that reason, I suppose, but for some strange reason I haven't done that yet. :)

As you imply the Devs might not want people to repeat this type of content if for no other reason than to restrict farming. But unless the specific type of thing you want to repeat makes farming "too easy" I don't think there should be any reason to prevent players from repeating anything. You've got to remember that most Devs don't actually hate all farming; they just don't like it when players find scenarios that make farming too "profitable" per unit time. So unless your "lizard" example granted you like a level per kill there should be no reason to keep players from killing millions of them even if the Devs thought that might be "boring" to some players.

This brings up the ages-old "Pay to Play" versus "Pay to Win" problem. You can gate content itself, which a monthly fee is the ultimate example of, or you can gate other things and "nickel and dime" players to death.

I think it's entirely possible that game companies have now conceded that the only money you'll get from people with any reliability is the "Buy to Make an Account" up-front money, and everything after that is gravy. GW2 cost me $25 to start playing and nothing since. My predication is that this may well pay for a game long enough for the company to make a decent profit off of up-front sales and then sunset it a few years later and move on to a new game that they try to get you to buy. I mean, people seem to like "pay to buy it once, own it and never have to pay another dime" sales approach, so maybe you just have to do that in series over and over as you make better-looking and different games to get people to buy over the years. Maybe CoT will do this, and maybe that means CoT will only last 4-5 years before they scrap it and make a different game for us to all buy once and own forever, then only get to play for like 4-5 years.

Monetization is a tough, divisive issue, any way to couch it.