First off, let's zoom out about 10,000 feet and look at this from the metagame perspective.

All of this will be, unfortunately, in CoH terms since we don't have the new terms for CoT yet.

There are 4 possible roles in an MMO.

DPS
Reduced enemy HP

Healer
Replaces friendly/ally HP

Crowd Control (CC)
Mez of all flavors, including but not limited to immob, stun, hold, sleep, confuse. BTW, Tanks fall into this category, controlling the enemy by forcing them to attack himself.

De/Buffer
Improves or disimproves recovery, regeneration, recharge, defense, damage resistance, etc, etc, etc

So the question, to me anyway, boils down to how are the 4 meta roles diversified across the character class types.

I'll follow up on this with a better breakdown of the currently known classes in a later post, have to sign off for now.

JayBezz wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Well, to be fair, why would you want to team in Marvel Heroes?
"YAY! I'm Spider-Man...wait...so are you and you and you and you and you and you...oh hey look 5 hulks!"

People will always enjoy solo ability.
But in Marvel Heroes I have found it entirely difficult to have a social experience. Luckily most of my gaming friends are from IRL and can compensate for their lack of social tools and mechanics.
- -
As a gamer I reject the idea of playing a MMORPG to play myself (although I respect and support peoples desires to play differently)
As a comic book lover I also reject the idea that even Spider-Man (or Punisher, or Spawn or Batman) can work as effective storytelling without the existence of their social circumstance (Aunt May, Other Heroes, etc). I would gladly play with 5 Hulks if it were not so difficult.
But beyond their horrible social UI, the gameplay itself lends itself to players not having any need for teaming. Very little combat benefit. No healers. No ally targeting.
I say this to say that roles are just as important as build diversity when thinking about building content players WANT to team up to do. I've played the "I don't need anyone" games where everyone was a bit of every role with different builds. It's great for soloing but there's so little incentive to make friends.

I don't think it should be too hard to team or find teams for those that want to form one. At the same time though I don't think it should come down to must team because I need others to survive efficiently.

While Spiderman do have the other bit characters, in solo play, those are the contacts. IMO.

But usually Spiderman usually end up having epic battles alone, he is on the cover most of the time, most of the story revolves around him and people he interacts with, and less so much on Spiderman with the Hulk, with Wolverine, with some Weird Due in Green spandex, and the Heal bot vs Venom. Because while teaming can be good and can be social at the same time make the hero feel weak. Like gang members that must find 66-7 buddies to beat up some criminals. Most people don't look at 6 thugs in RL life beating up on one dude and go "Wow those guys are so tough. They have mad skills. Most people that I know look and say, "Well dang, it took 6 of them to fight that one guy? Those 6 must really be some weaklings."

But the social aspect, teaming, for those that find it fun, should be made easier with good UI, but I don't think it shouldn't ever become "because toons need to team" because then on the surface there may be more teaming but in reality it's mostly even less social and mostly just trying to get it done to get it done so they can move on simply because they cant do it alone. Which still leaves the most of the social aspect of it within groups of friends that know each other offline.

I say just let it flow. Make it easy for those that want to team and go the Super friends route to do so. Give them good bases, good chat tools, good UI, powers that mesh with each other. Make it easy for those that want to solo, feel epic, be the star and create their own immersion into a comic book classic character where they fight epic battles and overcome the odds alone. And for people that are in the middle that do both ,Team when they can but don't want their game time to be a no start simply because one friend have to babysit the kid, another got grounded, one died of heart attack, another don't feel like playing, and one busy pvping. Allow them to soldier one effectively too solo or teaming. Because when either one feels forced it usually do not go well, from what I seen, for the social aspect at all.

And sometimes just observation, some players been well known in COX for so long where everyone know their name and have many friends they forget what it is to be like or what it was to be like to be on the outside. So they go to the new game, no one speaks to them in the first few minutes and then they say the game isn't social enough. Give it time and don't be afraid to open up lines of chat. Many times COX channel in CO have 78-100 and while CORP have just as many and yapping away, not a single word goes on in the COX channel for half hour to hours at a time. people on Many new players experienced the same feeling, from what have been said on WoW forum, in CO chat channels, and GW2 boards, that they felt like there was no connection for them in the COX game as far as community. To me some servers did have a pretty tight knit SG and their friends and anyone else was left out and seemed empty to the point that unless a person knew someone that knew someone that knew someone, a team was very hard to come by.

JayBezz wrote:

Ok.. I used Aunt May as a example when I should have said "Robin, Batgirl, and Catwoman" But regardless of the heroic nature of a characters friends.. I hold to my assertion that solo heroes don't have a place in my mythos. This is why DC movies are having to play catch up to Marvel films. Ensemble casts are just more engaging to an audience.
Again I do not speak for anyone but myself.

Indeed. those ensemble movies are the bizzness to watch.

But playing a game, my enjoyment kind of differ from what I enjoy in a movie. Although while those ensemble things have me intrigued the first two watched the usual Batman, Thor, Hulk, CPT America movies where they are by themselves and alone, and fighting their own battles have me truly interested in their character and their story. When they all together smashing stuff, it's ohhh ahhh, cool to watch but no sense of feeling. Like lighting up a fire cracker. It's one hell of a bang but forgotten about and who did what after a few minutes. Hell me personally I prefer to watch a movie alone or maybe one or two other people instead of a theater full of people. My enjoyment for myself is better when it don't revolve around other people's action or , what they find is fun, and what they think I should find fun, and what powers they think I should use, and what missions I should do and at what pace and what costumes they think I should wear. All of that becomes too much of a drag and nullifies my fun and kills the engagement of my creation.

I'm more me personally is engaged more when I can actually play my creation and everyone else with one that want everyone to wait

But yeah I'm only speaking for myself. As I always say, what one find fun and enjoyable, maybe be horrid and torture to another.

Trust me if they made a stand alone game with the expanse and the world of an MMO super hero, that is where I would happily be, but then again I do like chatting with people as I play but teaming, usually it seems more hassle than fun for me and don't seem to me to fit with the super hero lore when most of the origin storys are about them finding themselves and their powers and abilities and having a fight, usually the first time they get smacked, then later come back mono to mono and kick butt and save the day. Maybe with some other character hero in there from time to time but usually it's Superman. Not Superman, Lois, Supergirl Aquaman, CatWoman comic. A few but not the meat and potatoes. Usually it's Superman.

GH wrote:

Col. Kernel wrote:
One doesn't get something without giving something else up.

Is marriage the exception to this?

Bwhahahahahahahahhahahhahhahaaahaaahaahah!

Sorry Fireheart, but you're probably not going to see a Defense/Control AT. Down in the thread with the chart Zombie Man said:

The blank spots with the lines in them are the least likely to ever happen. The totally blank ones are pie-in-the-sky maybe-possibles. But we're looking at years after launch.. possibly... maybe...

summer-heat wrote:

So I assume we're ready to come back down from the 10,000-20,000 ft step back we took?
Which btw, I reread ZM's chart and realized we have a glimpse of what the CoT roles might be:
Melee
Ranged
Support
Control
Defense
Pets
So I'll correct myself on my original expectations since Buffer, Debuffer, and Healer would all be considered Support. I do think the split of Buff/Debuff/Heal is good to not what's expected, since they do very different things to support the team.
What I noticed about the cross-grid usage presents a possibility that eventually we will have two sides of every combination, and no role will be savant in the specific primary they choose like Defenders and Corruptors.

I actually read about the same thing as this. My only hope is that "Control" can be a mixture of Crowd Control and Debuff, and Support can be focused more on the Buffs. In theory then, Control can be a viable option as a secondary powerset because you would be looking at powersets similar in balance to Dark Miasma (some holds, soft controls, and debuffs) instead of just hard lockdown. Mix Cold Domination with Ice Control, Thermal Radiation with Fire Control, Kinetics with Gravity Control etc... to make more interesting power combinations.

While I see the unlikelihood of having a Fiery Aura/Fire Control hero, I could see a Fiery Aura/Thermal Radiation one instead. This playstyle would be vastly different than a buffing set, and I think deserves a distinction. A Force Fields/Energy Aura character would obviously play differently than what I suggested. I thought the names Paragon (for the buff/shields) and renegade (for the debuff/shields) would be cool :)

I absolutely adored my dark defender. She could do a bit of everything and was always useful in any team regardless.
That said, I do not think there should be a separate healer role in the new game. It almost wasn't there in CoH (even the developers admitted that the empathy defender was a mistake) and it was never missed. Each defender could do his or her job just fine with a combination of buffs, debuffs and soft controls. It was the new players who were clamouring for 'lf healer' because they were used to needing a healer.

Controllers are, and pretty much will always be, a problematic role in any game. That is because they are pretty binary in their effect. Either the target is controlled or not. If it is then there is 100pct mitigation, which makes them effectively better tanks than the tanks. If the target is not controlled then the controller is either KO (the usual 'casters have low hp' assumption from developers) or the controller is a minitank capable of taking on their own uncontrolled targets. In PvP they are even worse of a nightmare because -nobody- likes to be chain controlled and whittled to death (*cough* Carnival *cough*). It tends to make for a rather boring playstyle, or one that is frantic button mashing, but again little in between. Not that CoH was high on the tactical ability activations at the best of times of course.

Pets work great in PvP and are pointless in PvP, unless there is some obscure free will overriding mechanism active that forces other players to attack the pet and not the owner. Then again, games that try to mix PvP and PvE generally do only one of those well, and more frequently ending up doing neither at all well. Star Wars TOR is one of the worst offenders recently with both sides of the PvP conflict being exactly identical in everything but colourscheme.

City of Heroes actually had it reasonably well when it came to roles (except for the problematics of controllers that is). With their tanking, melee, ranged dps, defender and controller roles in various combinations, later added with pets. It gave each class the ability to have a primary or secondary role as dps, and thus soloability. And a primary or secondary role for the players to enjoy and to fit into groups. As a system I think that should be preserved. The biggest problem was the power creep that occured and was with difficulty and often temporarily reined in. Tanks could become so sturdy they were able to stuff dozens of higher level enemies in a barrel and let them pound on them till kingdom come. Blasters could alpha all but bosses and a few lieutenants, and those were basically crawling away. And controllers could lock down half an instance and keep it locked down (so I exaggerate a bit, but in the quest to feel super powerful the mooks were made entirely pathetic, and it kind of takes the fun out of it. LotRO has been doing the same thing and it is a bit of a snooze fest where you have to really gimp yourself to feel even remotely challenged with barely any on level equipment against enemies 5 and more levels above you. By the dozen.)

And the existence or lack of healing roles is not why players don't group. SW:TOR does have three healing roles (out of 8) and grouping in that game is something that is done only for the occasional heroic mission, and even then players tend to outlevel and then solo it. The problem is that the default mode for the majority of players is to solo things and not bother to try to get a group together. That takes work and time, and players are no inclined to invest much time in it. CoH was released at the end of the era where games were still developed with the idea that players would form groups for most of the content, and it still, barely, created a playerbase that expected to team up. Games released even only a few years later rarely had that assumption and were basically glorified single player games with a chat facility. If you want to return to a game teaming up is 'normal' you will have to design a significant part of the content that it will require a team, and more so, have the content somewhat adaptive that no 'trinity' is required. If a group of tanks enters an instance, it should shift the tactics so as to challenge tanks and not bother with the anti-controller tactics. That way players can quickly group up and have fun in a challenging instance instead of spending lots of time waiting for that one essential but impopular role.

Nadira wrote:

if you want to get formal there are only two roles at the most basic: dps and mitigation. Because players are used to it, and because they play out differently these two roles are tyipcally split into melee and ranged. This gives 4 key roles: melee dps (scrapper), melee mitigation (tanker), ranged dps (blaster) and ranged mitigation (defender).
Mitigation can be divided into two categories (though it is rare nowadays to have a class in a game that is exclusively one or the other) preventative and restorative. Preventative ensures that damage is not taken in the first place. Tankers fall in this category (they prevent damage to other team members and take reduced damage themselves), most of the defender archetypes in CoH fell in this category as well. Restorative is, as the name indicates, restoring a certain finite resource used by the combat mechanism (usually hitpoints or mana or morale or whatever it is called).
This gives us 6 in theory, but 5 in practices roles (restorative tanking is face tanking by a healer and rarely ends well both in game and balance wise): melee dps, melee mitigation, ranged dps, ranged preventative mitigation, ranged restorative mitigation.
Beyond this you either have a radically different combat system or you have different -methods- of achieving one of the above five roles. CoH has shown that you do not need a dedicated healer in a game if you design around preventing damage rather than restoring it. In modern games this is the trend as being a purely reactive healer is stressful and not particularly fun to most players.
-
The idea of basing gameplay off tactics rather than bashing each others face in is something that has been attempted more than once, but always ran into the problem that this requires that the NPCs to be a lot smarter than is practical. Computing power of servers has gone up considerably since the days of the early MMO games like Everquest and 'IF fn(A) > fn(B) THEN attack(A)' is no longer already too computationally expensive, but anything remotely like NPC behaviour that allows for and requires tactics is beyond computers. At least in the "real time, thousands per second" requirements for an MMO server. You will need some form of priority queue for the NPC to pick who to bash on. Modern computers let you get away with some better weighing of that queue (i.e. it no longer needs to be based purely on dps values and class determined multipliers) so that the NPC can decide to finish off the player who is almost KOed. Emergent AI, though still -very- simple is achievable. Think of NPC spreading out rather than clustering (anti-blaster tactic), switching to ranged attacks when more than a threshold of NPCs is already in melee. Preference to spread out to other targets when the aggro list on the tank is too long. High aggro multiplier on low HP but high threat opponents (anti-healer tactic, though it works against blasters too). If you try to make it more complicated than that you quickly run into the situation where it is not computationally feasible (and thus not financially because you will need more servers per 1000 players).
-
The more 'states' a player and NPC can have, the more varied and tactical combat can be. Of course it also creates more monsters that are unbeatable for certain players. (i.e. it is nice that you will need diamond fists to damage a robot, but if your class does not have those then you are hosed if you encounter. CoH had a few of those, that were near unbeatable to certain classes, intentionally so. Like the infamous Sappers, the KoA or certain types of Nemesis robots. The more complex the combat system the more room for unintended consequences and player frustration. This is not an argument against, but a caution not to expect miracles.
-
The trinity is a problem not because of the method, but because one or more classes are mandatory. Originally the trinity was: Tank + Healer + Control or Tank + Healer + Puller. DPS was so common it was never a bottleneck. This fit into a specific game and combat design with a) high attrition rating (i.e. NPCs dealt a lot of damage that could not be mitigated) and b) adds or linked opponents (i.e. fights lasted long enough that respawns or wanderers were inevitable, or groups of opponents could not be split). To avoid the trinity and to pull in the 'casual gamer' games have been moving in the opposite direction by giving each class so much survivability, dps and soft control that there is no functional difference between them anymore. This is nice for players who drop by for a few minutes or half an hour, but it also all but kills off the social aspect of these games. The same tendency can be seen with raids and groups. Games used to have 70 to 100 man raids, nowadays it is perhaps as much as 16. Group sizes went from 8 to 6 to 4 or even 3.
Whether or not this can be reversed, and if it is worth the attempt is open to debate. Commercial developers seem to cater for the new trend that has games, even as complex as MMOs, on consoles and smart phones.

That is some truth there.

Although I do think social comes into many forms which I think old school MMO players tend to forget. The times are changing but the way they try and "Social" seems to be resisting, which make it seem the social aspect is declining when in reality it do not have to. Sure I nthe day, when holy trinity was needed, one had to join team to survive. That is seems what is called social but in reality it may not be actual socal more than "I'll put up with ya because I need to survive." Now that needing other people to survive seems to be somewhat fading away I nthe game world, people forget that social interactions go beyond forced teaming. You can still run by someone and say hey. If ya team with someone just because they do not need you to survive doesn't mean ya cant be social. IN fact I think not needing someone to survive improved the social aspect because it cut down on the buttholes that knew a person cant survive on their own so they treat people any kind of way knowing if they quit the team, they are the ones inconvenienced. When people can survive on their own, a person quit, and still can accomplish the task. It's that many have no clue how to be social outside of telling people how to play what their role is, and how they are supposed to play and yelling at each other over every little mistake. To some that seem to be what they call being social. When the roles are blurred and people can make all in one toons, then it's hard to bark orders at what people are supposed to do and knowing that the person don't have to put up with crap just to survive, many feel their power over others is lost.

But social aspect can still happen. People can still team to be social even though they do not need each other to survive. People still can hang out and chat. And people even online can act civilized when talking to other people in game believe it or not that do not involve telling other people what to do and what their role is supposed to be or generally being a butthole. The times is changing where people don't have to team and forced to deal with buttholes to get along. And sadly due to past experiences some people are relieved and stick to their close group of friends and look upon outsides with a suspicious eye. Which also make it seem like it's not as social as it used to be. I think that it's just less fake and forced social, which didn't always translate well into true social. Like just because two people are locked into a room doesn't automatically mean they will like each other or becomes friends. Even if their life depended on each other, they may do what they have to do to survive but in reality they want to off each other.

I think it's simply getting to point where social and teaming no longer have it's forced together crutches and incentives and people will have to actually socialize with less of the carrots to do so. AKA, they will have to do it if they want to and not because they have to survive or because they get extra rewards and etc.

I remember when COX first came out and people was like "About time causal gamers of the market got some focus." Well, I think many game makers are realizing there are a lot more casual gamers than previously thought. And thus it probably will be less informal more fluid groups and interactions. And less of the traditional, You get the carrot and team or get beat with the stick if you try to solo." approach of the old games.
Not to mention when a lot of the old games cme out 2006 and prior social media was in it's relative small stage. So it was easy to focus simply only hard core gamers and still be financially success. Now games much compete with a hot social media society on top of people get older and usually cant play as long or hard as they played during their high school and college years once family, job, and other life responsibilities come into play. In the old days, players simply had to hang up the game now and days, companies realize that many still want to play although they may not have 4-6 hours at a time to play and since they do have job they probably have even more disposable income than they had in high school or college.