I realize not everyone will agree with me, and I am not trying to create a debate. These are just suggestions from MHO.
1. One thing I felt COH could have done better is making missions more adjustable to the single/team level. I was not fond of the idea that some missions were just too much for a single player to handle and we were forced to team. I prefer running solo because I like being more of a tactical player than a chaotic player. Please try to make the missions scalable to the level of heroes/villains.
2. Do not waste time working on PvP for several years to come. Let’s have the solo and team stuff first.
3. Make the zones more standard in size so we do not have to waste time traveling from on end to the other of a long, but narrow zone (like Independence Port). I am not talking about them all being square boxes but they should be similar in the time it takes to travel from one end to the other.
4. Less stress on the occult and more scifi content would be nice. Zombies, ghosts, witches and mummies get old and redundant after a while.
5. Do we need one or two looming bad guy themes or more separate bad guys. Let’s not save the world but save the situations instead.
6. Balance the powers a little better than COH did. A empathy healer had some trouble advancing because they were always so dependent on teams to survive and it seemed they got to XP for healing. They had to participate in the melee to get points. Archers arrows seem to do less damage than other blasters and they seemed to get relegated to trick arrow that were more like a controllers powers.
7. Try hard to keep the smooth movement of the characters and not let them be jerky like a point-and-click movement character.
8. Avoid so many special events that dominate the server’s operation and slow down the movement or action for players with less than state of the art computers. I hated Rikti attacks or zombie attacks because I could barely move when they happened. It could take as long as 15 seconds for my attack to happen in those cases.
9. It would be nice to have a “thief-class” character class that could do things by staff and get XP even if they did not enter into a lot of fights. They would need equal opportunities for XP for stealthy activities. Think of them as information gathers or spys.
10. Consider environmental effects on powers. If an electric blaster fires at a foe standing in water, other foes near-bye should get a shock. If a hero is swimming in the bay, maybe there should be a problem with the fire attacks while immersed in water. Those are just two examples.
11. Let all the classes travel at a similar rate. It is frustrating for a tank to be a lumbering idiot when it comes to movement.
12. Avoid “cut-scenes”. I hated being in the middle of a movement, or entering a fight and a cut-scene stops the action and we were forced to watch it before you could continue.
Tue, 10/08/2013 - 08:12
#1
Suggestions from a 7 year COH Vet
Placeholder for opinions on your suggestions. Trying to study for test ;)
-AlienMafia (Justice Server)
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Personal and unofficial opinion.
On point 2, that's a potential disaster and why PvP didn't work that well in CoH. I'm a PvEer not a PvPer so have no axe to grind, but because CoH was designed as a PvE game, and PvP was bolted on later, that's where many of the issues originated, because the way the game was designed was incompatible with what they wanted to do in PvP. Think about it up front and you stand a chance of it working. Think about it up front and you might as well implement it up front.
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PvE was all fine and dandy when I played for the first few years, but after a while the Pattern of fighting NPCs became very predictable and dull, which I turned my attention to PvP to fight those who stood as a challenge. The only problem was there were other players who hadn't quite exhausted missions and NPCs like I have felt that PvP was pointless.
Minotaur is right in that the game wasn't designed right for there to be PvP. There are so many good features that can come of it, and if you don't like a challenge that's fine, you don't have to participate, but I love having to slap a good team together to fight a rival Super groups pick of fighters.
Keep Low. Move Fast. Kill First. Die Last. One Shot. One Kill. No Luck. Pure Skill.
I'll give it a go :)
I agree, however I think that there were some power sets / archetypes that were easier than others to solo. I think this was designed intentionally to keep a balance between the ability to solo and build community. It got way better towards the end. Although it took a bit longer and took some thinking - I got a dark/dark defender mostly solo'd from 1 to 50. I only teamed for the sake of teaming with him.
I don't know about *years* but I agree... need to have PvE for everyone first. I'm not a PvP guy, but don't want the PvP lovers to be left in the cold for *years*. I'm sure the first year will be fixing/updating/etc. I think it would be fine after that to start in on at least a PvP arena if not a nice Zone or two for them. I just don't know how it works to be honest since I don't PvP.
I kind of agree here, although a lot of the fun in being a Hero is using your travel powers. Instant travel to mission could just be a perk or ability of some sort. I enjoy the travel part personally so I would actually like to see a variety in zone construction. However, IP was ridiculous - there was nothing there! Flying / Jumping forever over a massive body of water is not very interesting. A river or lake I get. Even something pretty huge. But if the entire zone has less land mass than water? Weird.
I agree on leveling it out more - but oh please be sure to include some place like Croatoa. The creepy coolness was just awesome. Plus they got the alternat reality / high fantasy fairyland better than most high fantasy MMOs do!
I'm not entirely sure what you are driving at here... I agree we need more interactive or 'missions' that pop up on the street as it were. However, every city needs it's 'evil genius' as well. If nothing else you have gangs and such to deal with... you've got to have something that is on a hero's level or the town would have no problems with tons of heroes around all the time.
Power balancing is always a pain no matter what. See my response to #1. I think some of the support power sets are meant to be this way to promote community. They are after all a support class. Why would you want to be a healer... with nobody to heal but yourself ALL the time?
I would imagine they would do this automatically. Plus I don't ever remember having this problem in CoH. Did you? It was one of the most fluid games I've played in the MMO Genre honestly. The least amount of rubber-banding for sure. Only time I had problems was during HUGE invasions or task forces when Leagues were going at it.
This has to be early rendition issues or local issues. Unless I was in the middle of one of the invasions and it was a particularly humongous group that had gathered, I never had lag problems when I was actually inside the invasion. As it got bigger, lag was noticeable I agree. I think once a week or twice a month would be fine. People love them or hate them. They have to have them off and on throughout the day of the event for people in all time zones too which I don't think people keep in mind.
I have no idea on this. I don't have an interest in the play style so I couldn't comment on how to begin to classify or support it in game. :)
I like that idea a lot. +1
Sorry, but until you get travel buffs or choose travel bonuses I think that you HAVE to have archetype differences. There are physical tradeoffs to different abilities that have to be given to different characters. It is a pain, but I played several tanks of different types and the travel was not THAT much slower unless you were max Stone tank, and then you could just use Teleport to go around it. Super Jump / Fly / Speed / Run and you're as fast as anyone else.
+1 on this. Cut scenes for story can be cool and all, but put it in the proper place during an entrance or exit or something.
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I would add that I think it would be cool to have some random world objects be more interactive. The random scared citizen might actually have a story to tell you about something she saw that leads you to checking out something that leads you invariably to a mission.
Just small things like that.
I agree with all you said (particularly healer xp) except the last. I enjoy cut scenes.
If there is going to be PvP, then *PLEASE* restrict it to a specific zone, *not* "open world" and in the Name of The Great Mother, *PLEASE* do NOT put *any* non-PvP content in there. As much as I loved CoH, it upset me greatly to go into a PvP zone to finish a set of plaques or get a badge.
Of course, I *still* like the idea of PvPers going to their own server or, at least, being on a tiny island in the farthest corner of the map, enclosed in a massive cage, with prehistoric megalodon-sized sharks infesting the waters. Oh, and, of course, on the PvP island, it's insta-Hardcore. Get a hangnail, it gets infected, and ... your character gets deleted!
*cackles and rubs her forepaws together*
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I'll give it a go.
Speaking as someone who soloed as much or more than I teamed, I found that the difficulty adjuster added in the later years managed this nicely. Early on, some of my alts just could not solo effectively (or in some cases at all) at normal difficulty. This ranged from being beat down if I came across a group of +1s to being able to clear most of the map but unable to take down the main boss. (Often an Elite Boss, once they were introduced.)
However, being able to adjust the difficulty level pretty much resolved this for me. As long as there is a sufficiently versitile difficulty slider, I don't think we'll have any problems with unsoloable missions. (At least, ones that are supposed to be soloable. When I run into a mission that flat out states 'Archvillain. Bring friends.' I expect that soloing may be problematic or will require a lot of effort on my part.)
While I do not PvP much at all, I disagree. In order for PvP not to disrupt PvE, it needs to be accounted for from the very beginning. Adding it later will just result in balancing chaos. Personally, I would like it if every power had a PvE version and a PvP version and each character could have a PvE build and a PvP build. That way PvE and PvP could be balanced separately and balancing changes to one would not affect the other.
I kind of liked the varying sizes. It added to the diverse feel of the various neighborhoods. Of course, since zones aren't going to be instances in CoT, this is pretty much moot.
Variety is good. Plenty of each category and plenty of variety within each category would be nice. Modern-day witches and ancient cabals of sorcerers. Time-travelling commandos and 50's atomic punk mad scientists. Corrupt corporate oligarchs and drug dealing street gangs. And mixtures. Techno-mages and cyborg CEOs.
I think we need a mixture. We need the occasional all-hands-on-deck Save the World scenarios, but the save the city/neighborhood/Eastern Seaboard ones should be more common.
Power balance is always going to be an issue. Although I think your Empathy example is more about teaming versus soloing than power balance. I wouldn't expect an Empathy/Mind defender (like I had) to level as quickly as a scrapper or blaster.
I never had a non-smooth movement problem (aside from the occasional rubberbanding, but that was lag, not animation). I expect that CoT's animations will, if anything, be smoother than CoH was.
I enjoyed these events, although I agree that if at all possible they should be designed to effect-lag people's clients as little as possible. Perhaps a setting in the client to disable excess animation if the screenrate drops below a certain threshold.
A stealth path to leveling would be neat and would fit in with a couple characters I had. They would have to be designed to have the approximately equal leveling rate. For example, if Stealth-Man can on average run 5 stealth missions in the time it takes for Fight-Girl to fight her way through a single mission, then a stealth mission should provide, on average, 1/5th the XP of a fighting mission. This would prevent power-leveling on stealth missions.
Much like the oil slick & fire powers combo in CoH. I would definitely like to see this kind of environmental interaction.
Barring power usage (sprint, etc), I think that the base travel speeds were all the same in CoH. However, the animated gaits were different for different sizes and that often made it feel as if some characters weer traveling slower.
Then of course there were some tank powers which slowed the character down.
Or at least have the cut scene be skippable after you've seen it once. The Mother Mayhem ITF had this ability. One of the things I hate about CO is the constant, unskippable cut scenes.
3. Make the zones more standard in size so we do not have to waste time traveling from on end to the other of a long, but narrow zone (like Independence Port). I am not talking about them all being square boxes but they should be similar in the time it takes to travel from one end to the other.
there is going to be one server one open world not a bunch of closed zones and missons will be flashpoints
Shouldn't be a problem. They are going for a zoneless set up, everything is connected and open. Of course, if you are at city hall and your mission is way out by the docks, it may take you a while to get there.