To quote "Nature Boy" Rick Flair: "To be the man, you gotta BEAT the man." For what it's worth, I think he might have been onto something CoT can use. What if there were some form of Badge-like thing, and I'm going to call it a "Title Belt" just out of deference to the aforementioned pro wrestling legend, that you could get, like say "Completed the Kessle Run in Less than 12 Parsecs" that represents the BEST score or time or number of bosses defeated, or whatever in the entire game. And what if you had that Title Belt, then someone else overtook you and thus took that particular feather out of your cap, so to speak. You could have any number of different "Title Belts" for all sorts of things like most Infl earned, most defeats of Pirate Bosses, fastest time through a particular mission, most damage resisted, healed, etc. The idea being that the game is constantly checking these stats (say once a day) and if you're in the lead, you get the wear the belt for that day, and the belt (not a costume piece, per se, but maybe could be) gives you some kind of minor buff or temp power, etc. It would be a little like a Badge Hunter thing, but with actual buffs at stake. I think it would be fun. Maybe a lot of mission farming/grinding for some people, but totally optional insofar as that goes.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
All for it, as long as it isn't too obnoxious in appearance.
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Avatar by MikeNovember
This could tie into the concept of faction adherence that was floated a while ago (not sure if it's still on the table). Each in-game NPC faction could award temporary titles to the players who had best served that faction recently (by destroying their enemies, completing their missions, winning zone events that serve their interests, etc). Of course they'd have a fairly short memory, so any player who wanted to maintain their honorary status with a NPC faction would need to remain in their good graces... perhaps after doing so for a sufficent duration, a permanent version of the title could be awarded.
Any titles should be optional to the player and hideable by other players so as to avoid the obnoxiousness factor. For extra bragging rights, some kind of in-game display of names of those who have the top positions of honor with each faction might be displayed somewhere around the NPC factions' headquarters.
Just as historical reference CoH had two features related to this suggestion.
First it had the "temporary gold titles" that would float under your name that could be awarded either during special events or even granted to you manually via a GM. This kind of thing could be an easier alternative to an actual costume item "belt" especially if you're envisioning these particular recognitions are only going to last as little as one day.
CoH also launched with a global "leaderboard" system attached to kiosks spread around the city. The idea was that you could check them for various listings like you're talking about (most kills, most INF earned, etc.). The problem with them is that they ultimately never really worked well and were effectively "abandoned in place". Now whatever problems CoH had with leaderboard tracking might be fixable by CoT and this could be a non-issue. Still it's worth noting that it was tried in CoH and didn't really amount to much.
The idea Scott Jackson had for making leaderboarding faction-centric might be a cooler idea and doing it that way might avoid whatever problems CoH had with the idea. Also it would provide further "significance" to the faction system and motivate people to stick to their allegiance choices roleplay-wise. Maybe heroic factions could care about "most victims saved/healed" while more villainous factions could care about things like "most banks robbed" and the like.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Okay, just to clarify, I wasn't envisioning it as an actual costume piece per se, just like badges aren't literally badges on your costume. That said, I think it might be cool if each "Title Belt" did actually unlock and actual costume piece of some kind. They could look different. Some could be crowns or tiaras or diadems or trophies you can wield or scepters, or funny hats, rescue the most Boy Scouts in the "Nature Trail to HELL!" mission and unlock the Merit Badge Sash piece, etc.
But more to my original point, yeah I don't know which stats are easy to track like this and which are hard, and I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea what kind of resources we're talking about to implement it, but CoH did actually track a lot of this stuff on a toon by toon basis. There were oodles of Badges you unlocked by number of defeats, amount of damage healed, etc. If that stuff can be tracked for each toon, I would expect the game can check each person's current score once in a while in order to award Title Belts to the characters who've done the most in each category. It might not be feasible to make sure it's up to date in real time all the time, but even checking the scores once a week would be good enough. I think the pro tennis rankings only change every week or so, so that's not a terribly long time to have to wait for updates, plus it means the current Title Holder get's to show it off for a whole week after earning it, which is nice.
I never was terribly competitive and am still not. I like creating characters and RPing them, I like getting in a team or league and having cooperative fun in trials etc. Some people in know on the other hand were HARDCORE Badge Hunters and PVPers. I don't personally understand it, but they HAD to prove publicly and unequivocally that they were THE BEST. This would give people like that a whole bunch of different categories in which they can try to be THE BEST.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I just realized that this system would tend to favor veterans who were on the game from day 1 over new comers. We might need to "push the reset button" every so often (like maybe once a year, around New Years or something) so that it's competitive for everyone. Then you could award some kind of annual prize (store credit or infl or something) to the person who finished the year with the Title Belt, or spent the most weeks at number 1 during the past year or something, along with a descriptive Badge like "2016 Champion: Damage Healed". This would give vets who'd won these badges in the past a permanent sense of accomplishment and newbs some hope of standing a chance, plus it would provide both with a reason to compete.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Do it as a weekly or monthly update. It takes the tally for the past month and then gives out the titles to the high scores for those people. You would have use of that title till the current week or month is over and then it does a new tally. Sounds like a fun little system.
I don't have a clear idea whether CoT will have a "badge" system exactly like the one in CoH. But I can provide some insight for you as a previous Badge Hunter (I had two hero characters who were continuously in the "top 10" of total number of badges earned on the Virtue server for years).
My insight would be this: If they were to have a series of permanent badges that were along the lines of your "2016 Champion: Damage Healed" where only one person could ever have it there would be badge hunters out there who would scream [color=red]BLOODY MURDER[/color] about that.
One of the things that made CoH's badge system "mostly" fair was that roughly 99.5% of the badges had no "windows of opportunity" or functional limits on when they could be earned by anyone. The only handful of badges that were ever truly controversial were the ones like the Anniversary badges (which could only be earned during a given game anniversary and then never again) or Bug Hunter (which had the dubious distinction of being the only badge that relied on the whims of a human GM to be awarded). Basically what made those badges "not good" was that they discriminated against newer players or players who weren't "deemed worthy" by a human. The vast majority of the rest of the badges were completely deterministic and could be earned by any player at any time via a fixed method.
So the very idea of having "one time badges that (worse) would only be earnable by one person ever" would hyperly piss off many badge collectors because the badge leaderboards would become permanently fixed with no chance to ever change who would have the most badges at any given time. I'm not against your leaderboard suggestions in general and I like your annual "reset" idea as well - I'm just saying the part about attaching permanent badges to the concept would probably not be a good idea.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
What about, instead of it being a costume piece that appends to the character, there is an actual "leaderboard" somewhere, like a billboard, that displays some of the "top earners". Doesn't Champions have some kind of billboard thingy like that?
Not sure about CO because it's been a few years since I played it, but we do know that CoT is introducing the idea of the "holo-statues" for those who opted for that via the Kickstarter. Maybe they could come up with another place in-game that would display different holo-statues for the current top leaderboard type people. That would be preferable to creating unique costume items or badges that only the top earners could get.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I like the leader board idea. I was thinking that should either exist in game or on the official game website someplace. Rankings and total scores of the ranked toons, so people know where they stand, how close they are, etc.
On the subject of what we should or should not have badges for, I'm not a Badge Hunter, so I'll let the experts figure that out. On a personal note though, I think even if you made the Annual Title Belt Championship Awards something other than badges per se, there will still be people who get competitive about getting the most of THOSE, whatever they are, and then we're right back where we started, aren't we?
I suppose you could make two different types of badges. Badges that are available to everyone, and badges that are not available to everyone, for whatever reason (only given out once, or given by devs, or gotten annually like the "2016 Champion: Damage Healed" example I gave before, etc). In that case the Badge Hunters, one would assume, should all agree that, out of fairness, the "available to all" type should be the only ones that count towards any Badge Hunting activities or rankings, but then human nature would kick in and the toon with the most "non-available" badges would spout off about how THEY are the REAL Badge Champ and giving anyone else any any credit in that regard is totally BS and a loser's cop out for losing.
In my opinion it's impossible to satisfy a group of 2 or more people all of whom want the undisputed, exclusive title of "Best". So for that reason, "satisfying the competitive playerS, as a group" is a paradox. You can only REALLY satisfy, at most, one of them, and in doing so you frustrate the rest.
This whole line of thought reminds me of the Illiad. Zeus holds a banquet in celebration of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. He decides not to invite Eris, the goddess of discord, for fear that doing such would be tantamount to inviting disaster. Eris get's wind of the party snub and get's even by writing one word, "kallistei" which means "for the most beautiful" on a golden apple from the garden of Hesperides, a trophy to be had by one worthy of it, and brings it to the banquet. Three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite eventually lay claim to it and they petition Zeus to settle the argument of who is the most beautiful and thus worthy of the apple. Zeus, knowing that to award the apple to one of them would make enemies of the other two want's none of that so he tells them that he is not fit to judge such things and that they should seek the judgement of Paris, the prince of Persia, and let him decide. Each of the goddesses tries to bribe Paris. Hera offers to make him ruler of Europe and Asia, Athena offers to give him skill in war and also wisdom. Aphrodite offers him the true love of the most beautiful mortal woman on Earth, which he accepts and then awards the apple to Aphrodite. Unfortunately, the most beautiful mortal woman was, at that time, Helen of Sparta, who was already married to King Menelaus. Undaunted, Paris visits Helen and absconds with her back to Persia, thus starting the Tojan War.
Maybe CoT should have some kind of Olympiad in it....
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Not really. As a former Badge Hunter I wouldn't really care if people "got competitive" about who had the most annual Championship awards in CoT - as long as they're specifically not "badges". Trust me: your idea would avoid a huge amount of angst and grief if you completely forgot about associating "badges" with anything you're suggesting here. Your leaderboard idea could easily come up with an entirely new class of "one-time only annual rewards" that had nothing to do with badges at all.
Welcome to the badge debates back on the CoH forums as early as the 2005-2006 timeframe. ;)
I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything - just pointing out that people have been arguing about badges that "should count" for leaderboard lists versus ones that shouldn't for years.
Even Matt Miller (a.k.a. Positron) initially tried to convince the CoH badging community that the Gladiator badges shouldn't really be considered "real" badges for the sake of the Badge Tracking websites. But that lasted about 10 seconds before everyone tossed his idea out the window and started counting the Gladiators just like every other badge for overall totals. It may seem silly to most non-badgers, but it was what it was.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]