I have been looking for a good superhero MMO for a while now.
But I am not an easy person to impress.
I am naturally analytical, so I will always end up picking things out that could have/should have been done better.
So when I play games like CO, DCUO, or COH (well... First 15 levels of COH anyway. Why did they close it down so soon after I joined?) I will quickly formulate a list of things that they did right... and a list of things they did wrong. (or just sloppy)
The phoenix project has caught my interest, and I have high hopes for what it could be.
But one thing pokes out at me...
Selecting your abilities.
Classes are fine for most games, but for a game like this it's severely lacking.
In a perfect world you would be able to pick your abilities individually from the full list of powers.
But that, as I think you know, has its own problems.
People will inevitably end up trying to pick the best of everything.
Don't get me wrong dualism should be a viable route that players can take.
But in a free power picking environment it is easy for dualism and best-of-everything builds to become completely dominate.
And that is very bad, because if a full team of dualists is better then a balanced team, then the game will quickly lose all party roles (healing, tanking, damage, etc) and a lack of a party roles leads to selfish behavior and chaos.
And that, as I think we can all agree, is NOT what we want from this kind of game.
So what should we do?
Make classes?
I say, no thank you.
In a superhero game I want to have the freedom to make whoever I want!
I was really disappointed when I tried to make Levi Athan on city of heroes.
I was ecstatic that I managed to make someone who looked vaguely like him, (he is not an easy character to replicate) but when I got to powers my hopes were crushed, because in order for me to get shocking touch, I would first have to get a plethora of other unwanted electric themed skills that just flat out did not match my character.
Similar scenarios occurred as I tried to create the likes of chameleon, hacker, whiteout, inertia, and others.
So I ended up scraping the idea of making one of my many imaginary superheroes, and I just went with some floaty cloaked guy that I came up with on the spot.
I don't want history to repeat itself in that respect, so please let us have free skill choice.
It would be possible to have a free power system without destroying the game, if you implement two systems that work in unison to break up best-of-everything builds.
They are the efficiency tree, and the role system.
All powers are available in the efficiency tree, and they are not locked by level nor do they require you to purchase other powers as prerequisites.
All powers would be relatively equal to each other, and they would all have the option to be upgraded to have greater effects, but higher energy costs, cooldown times, cast time, etc.
Every level of upgrading would further increase the point investment for the skill.
You would have to keep that in mind when balancing the cost and effects of leveling up powers, you'd want to allow people to go the route of a button masher with lots of skills, but you would also want to allow for builds with fewer more powerful skills.
The idea here is to make a flexible system.
Say you have two skills, fire ball and fire rain.
Players should be able to make fire rain an incredibly powerful skill, that they keep in reserve, and fire ball as their average just-toss-whenever skill, or if they want they can level up fire ball instead, and have it vice versa.
Now for the interesting part...
In the efficiency tree, powers are locked behind an unfairly large cost wall.
Players at level 1 are given a large amount of points to purchase a couple of skills with.
Every skill that they purchase would decrease the point costs of other related skills by a percentage.
So let's say a player buys fire ball, and that decreases the cost of ring of fire by 15%, then they buy acid rain and the cost goes down by an additional 5% bringing to total efficiency to 20%.
These bonuses could keep stacking until they reach a max point that is listed on the skill in question.
So let say that ring of fire has a max efficiency of 50%, after that point additional efficiency won't matter.
The cost of leveling a skill should not tie into its efficiency.
This would allow a wolverine like brawler, to grab an over priced self heal and level it, with out taking a hit to his viability.
Efficiency would be applied retroactively to prevent people from sabotaging them selves by purchasing their skills in the wrong order.
So let's say a player buys fire ball for 100 points, then they latter buy ring of fire.
Ring of fire gives fire ball, let's say, 10% efficiency.
So they would get 10 more points to spend because the retroactive cost for fire ball would be brought down to only 90 points.
All powers would have their own unique efficiencies, depending on how similar they are to each other.
Factors such as, elemental theme, role in combat, method of distributing damage, or combinations of such, would determine what gives what.
Now the efficiency tree won't solve all of the problems that a free skill choice system creates, and that's why it's so important that it's coupled with the role system.
The role system idea was originally just a simple cosmetic tool for defining oneself as one thing or a another in a open skill choice environment, but the idea has evolved since then.
Essentially you have 7 roles to choose from.
Assassins: deal incredibly high damage to single targets.
Devastators: deal wide AoE damage to massive crowds.
Healers: keep their team fighting.
Supports: provide their team with powerful buffs.
Defenders: draw enemy fire from their weaker allies.
Controllers: lockdown enemies with CC and apply powerful debuffs
Masters: control pets of all sizes, shapes, and numbers.
When applied, these roles would enhance a player's viability in certain areas of combat.
A player's currently selected role(s) will be displayed to other players.
Players can reassign their role(s) if they have been out of combat for more than (maybe) 30 seconds, but this has a small cooldown. (maybe 30 seconds?)
Almost every ability in the game would have at least 1 possible role bonus.
Role bonuses would enhance certain aspects of a given skill if the correct role is in play.
Some abilities would have multiple possible role bonuses that would all effect different aspects of the skill.
So, say a player has an ability that damages and stuns a target, healing them for a percentage of the damage done.
This kind of ability would probably have 3 possible bonuses, assassin, healer, and control.
If the player's primary role is assassin then the skill would deal a lot more damage, if it is healing then the percentage of health they get from the skill would be increased drastically, and if their role is control then the stun would last much longer.
Each role would have 2 functions, the primary function would only unlock role bonuses for a player's skills, but the secondary function would give players straight up bonuses, like 20% more healing, or 20% more health.
If a player wants to, they could select a secondary role.
Secondary roles wouldn't unlock role bonuses, they would simply switch out the secondary effect of a player's primary role, for the secondary effect of one of the other 6 role options.
So a healer/defender would have the role bonus of a healer, but the 20% extra health that defenders get.
If a player removes both their secondary and their primary role then they would be labeled as a dualist.
Dualists would get (possibly watered down versions of) all the benefits provided by the secondary roles, but there wouldn't be any skills with a dualist role bonus.
Now, you might ask yourself "But wait... Isn't the goal supposed to be stopping dualism? Why give dualists any benefits at all?"
Well I don't think we want to completely remove the possibility of being an affective dualist, because dualists are actually a very healthy and engaging role to play, when balanced correctly.
Now the rule system would have to be set up in percentages and the such like, so as to encourage people to play on their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
If anyone has any questions, ask me and I'll elaborate.
If any devs read this and like the idea then maybe you could pass it around.
I do not want to end up with the just out of reach character creator that COH had.
I don't want to get soooooo close to actually making an accurate depiction of someone who I already had in mind, only to find out that there is no possible way to get there.
If you don't allow for free skill choice!... Then I'll live, and I will probably still play the game ...But I will be severely disappointed.
But this game looks like has lots of potential!
And I would love to see it reach that potential!
Am I the only one who thinks humans are freaky looking?
I think everyone would agree that a "holy grail" goal of any superhero MMO would be to allow a player to create a character with any combination of powers they want and still have that be balanced and playable. I'm not going to assume that goal is impossible, but I do accept the fact that it’s something that has yet to happen and in all fairness to CoT might not happen for a long time.
That said I will admit you seem to have some interesting ideas here but I really don't see how your "efficiency trees" and "role system" prevent the classic problem of Tank-magery, especially when taking your point that you would be able to switch roles so relatively easily. In a nutshell all you seem to be doing here is allowing for various types of bonuses with no real disadvantages/weaknesses to balance it out.
How does your system stop people from finding the exact combination of efficiencies/roles that are clearly the "best"? How does your system prevent min/maxing to the point where there is no diversity among the playerbase because if you're not playing with the one obvious perfect build then you're gimping yourself compared to everyone else?
You say having classes "are fine for most games" but in a superhero game they are "severely lacking". The problem with that statement is that no one has really come up with a truly better alternative, or at the very least I'm not convinced your alternative actually solves the problem at hand.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
To be perfectly fair this is always going to be a risk you run trying to port a character into a system instead of creating a character within a system. It doesn't matter whether it is PnP or a video game. You end up either accepting the limitations of the mechanics and setting and go for the best fit, or you leave that character alone and make someone designed within the mechanics and setting. I'm not saying it is imposable to find a perfect fit for your character, but one really needs to set expectations.
I am not against free-form games (for supers or otherwise), but there has yet to be a MMO that could pull off completely free form without being broken as hell. Maybe there will be someday, it really is the holy grail of MMOs. But as for today, set your expectations accordingly.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Ya I agree
The efficiency tree is mostly there to encourage people to build towards the classics, (healing, fire mage, tank, etc) but the main limiter is the role system.
The role bonuses would need be quite extreme, some times doubling, or even tripling a skill's effect.
To give you and example say that there is a skill that deals 100 damage to a target, and stuns them for 2 seconds.
Being an assassin could buff the damage all the way up to 200 or even 500 damage, and a control role could extend the stun to 5 or even 10 seconds.
Without help from a role, skills would be pretty weak in general which is why people would want to have as many of their skills match the same role, a mentality that is reinforced by the efficiency tree.
If switching roles on the street is to much, then maybe players need to visit a special reassignment station to do it.
The disadvantage/weakness is that without these bonuses skills are outclassed and unable to keep up.
Thus preventing people from taking the best of everything.
It would require a ton of time and energy to keep things balanced, but I strongly believe that if the devs don't shy way from vigorously taking away the OP paths and improving the UP paths, with extensive nerffs/buffs/rebalances then they could do it.
The set up I proposed is not meant to make balance easy, it's meant to make balance possible.
I don't see a problem with that statement.
Whenever I see classes in a superhero MMO I find it to be lacking.
I'm not saying that they are being lazy for doing it that way.
I'm saying that we should try our very best to make it work!
Ambition can make or break a game before it even launches.
Am I the only one who thinks humans are freaky looking?
How painfully true that is :C
It can be done! I know it can.
Not without restrictions but less restrictions would be so deeply appreciated.
Am I the only one who thinks humans are freaky looking?
I admire your enthusiasm with all this but I just can't help feeling you've got a lot of hand-waving and wishful thinking going on here. Game designers better than you and me have been tackling this fundamental issue for literally decades - I'm sorry if I don't see what you're talking about as being the silver bullet that's going to solve the overall problem. *shrugs*
Until you can explain how your system would prevent people from figuring out (via Min/Maxing) what the "best" build possible would be and discourage everyone from copying it so that everyone is effectively cookie-cutter identical then you might begin to convince me you've got something here worth looking at.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I have not read this. I saw "Two ways to make free skill choice work" and instantly decided that the only comment I had was to say how much I don't WANT free skill choice to work.
That is all.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Trenggiling,
I appreciate the desire. We will be doing power sets. We will not be doing freeform power selection. This will not change. I suspect that having freeform would make powers bland and uninteresting.
Felix
Know thy users, for they are not you.
"Preliminary optimization is the root of all evil." -Knuth
[color=#FF0000]Coding Lead[/color]
a.k.a. Mr Sigma, Mr. Stochastic, Balancing Act, The Oncoming Storm
Sigh... I understand.
(was still worth a try)
Am I the only one who thinks humans are freaky looking?
Good sport, Treng. And I think we all feel you to some extent, but pulling off the next gen in the spirit of CoH is HUGE enough. The grand experiment you're proposing is for another game.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
City of Three!
Be Well!
Fireheart
Trenggiling ... the pen & paper Champions/Hero System tried to do this using a Point System. It is broken as all get out, and for Min/Max people is one of the easiest things to take advantage of.
Knowledge is Power
Power Corrupts.
Learn 2 Ebil.
The only thing that keeps Champions (not the online game) from getting out of hand entirely is the Game Master making decisions on what they will (or won't!) allow into the game. You can't DO that sort of Sanity Checking in an MMO. Everything has to run on automagick.
True Free Form is a license to Exploit. There's a reason why it doesn't work all that well where it gets tried.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Early on when we were exploring the basic concept of the power design system we discussed, at great, great length a free form system and a more structured-limited system. Realize that even a structured-limited system like we intend to use, with classifications providing play-style roles which in turn govern what types of powers are available to choose, and those powers are in turn built as tiered sets, is a vastly complex system to design, implement, balance, and keep balanced with every itineration.
That is not to say that a free-form system isn't possible for a game like ours. When designing the game all of the possible player character combinations need to be tested, the encounters the player characters are meant to face need to be balanced against what you expect minimum performance to be and maximum performance to be. When you have a true-free-form system for an MMO, to make it truly workable in all aspects of the game, the design - testing - redesign cycle becomes exponentially greater whenever something new is added to the game - be that a power or new encounter.
Red's statement about knowledge and power is so very true. Players knowing what to do can create extremely potent power combinations, and the inverse is then also possible, players unaware of the system can end up with very difficult to play characters. The players that know what to do will extol the virtues of the game, the players with 'broken' characters will bemoan the poor design of the game.
Let's then say a free-form power system is theoretically possible, but we don't what broken things on the upper and lower ends. The system would require a great series of checks which help conform decisions players make in what types of powers, and how those powers are then also individually parted out. A really simple example would be: the more defense powers taken, the higher defense values go, the fewer ranged offense or lower ranged offense powers can be made (there would be a lot more to that, but its the most basic precept). Put enough checks into the system in order that every possible combination falls within the bounds of minimum and maximum expected performance and and what you wind up with is essentially, something very close to a structured-limited system and less free form.
For the above and other reasons, we went with a more structured but limited system. Yet, because we also understand the desire to have more flexible builds within the structured classification system we want to expand upon the concept of Power Pools from Cityof, thus our Tertiary Sets are going to be designed from the Primary Sets without any Classification restrictions. Yes, a Protection / Melee Offense can end up taking some powers from a Control Tertiary and a Support Tertiary. Take into account our power custoimzation is something along the lines of a costume creator for powers and even two of the same classifications with the exact same powers can end up looking very different in what their powers do.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
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[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Free power choices ends up with "tank mages" where people pick one high offense and one high defense. Ultima Onlinr only let you max out two skills, IIRC, and people still did it.
Star Wars Galaxies had a hybrid system called "onion" layers, which in later games would be many different skill trees, each a full classic class in itself.
People still did it, raiding the low-level defense powers from many trees, and maxing out one offense. They had to add a hack to limit max D to max of all trees selected (which included and usually ended up being from the un-Star Warsy Teras Kai (?) tree AKA monk from other games.)
Champions has free select (p2p only) but limited active slots for powerful defense, offense, and passive powers, so stacking is effectively limited (and thus not really as free choice as one might imagine.)
I'd just as soon have classic classes with choices within the class and a number of alternate pools like CoH. Massive customization but the classic classes are balanced, and the pools open to everybody.
You can gimp yourself, but can't overpower in the free-select way.
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The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
Agreed, plus CoH went beyond the "classic classes" anyway with a legitimate control class, pet class, and melee damage class plus all the nooks and crannies in between while retaining the balance with a class for each of these.
It was kind of a "lots of classes" rather than a "no classes" approach--and it was genius. As close to the best of both worlds as I've seen.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Err, Melee Damage is a basic class in most MMO's...
Or are you saying that the "best" Melee in games is Ranged?
I was thinking mainly of the holy trinity of tank/damage/healer and how I've never played another game where a melee damage felt as truly viable as it did in CoH, even if it existed as a class. But then I haven't played every game.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Fair enough, because for me in WoW, I felt that the Melee DPS was a viable class... mainly because the ranged classes were glass cannon.. just like our blasters were.
I do agree with how the "feel" of a class can change the play style as well. For me, I can play a warrior/rogue class in WoW.. and yet the melee damage in Rift/City of Heroes felt off to me. But that is not to say that it didn't have a role.. I just didn't fulfill YOUR definition of it.
Wildstar made it valid as well, because the Stalker is high spike damage... and also one of the tanker classes (Stalker is a medium armour wearer as well). Hell, even their healing classes differ as well (one is more ranged, one is more targeted, one is more melee range). Kinda bugs me when I see the stalker out damage my spellslinger in Raids (Both are high burst DPS classes...the spellslinger is Ranged).
As you said, you hadn't played all the games out there, but for me the "holy trinity" was more of "Tank/Damage/Support" where if you overloaded on one aspect of it, you could cut down on other area's by a certain amount. Unfortunately with this definition, CoX did become "holy trinity", but that is just to show how flexible it could be (and also to show how that tactics in CoX were really not all that different from other games[1]...)
[1] There were some unique ones (vengence/bomb bait) but they were generally few/far between and tended to have some limited usage.
That was probably my favorite thing about CoH. You could eliminate 2 out of the three "Holy Trinity" and still have a successful team. All Tank ITF? Sure, let me grab my Ice/SS. All Defender Sewer Trial, no problem. All Storm team, bring on the chaos. The fastest moving team I remember being on was an all Empathy Defender team ripping through Unai Kemen's arc.
I'm hoping that CoT gives me the opportunity to tell potential teammates "Bring what you want to run, we'll make it work". I truly miss that.
I can't wait to say the same thing to my friends.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I almost think the game could be good enough to make such a statement assumed ;)
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Avatar by MikeNovember
Enemy AI might need be smart... when and how aggressive it should become. In missions? Is it based off the team makeup? How does the Enemy AI quantify the Aggression level? Does Mission Difficulty play a part? How much? how little? etc...
What consequences arise from a Very High Enemy Aggression state? Do more scouts roam the halls? If you aggro a scout group, and one of the scouts manages to summon a beacon drone, does a whole new group of enemies rush to their aid? etc...
It always did feel a little silly having a huge fight with a group of baddies and using earthshaking novas and such while a another group right in line of sight 20 yards away doesn't even notice.
But then, you don't want a whole building full of mobs to dogpile you the first time you pop off a big, loud nova attack, so whatch gonna do?
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Honestly, I like the idea of these games - but have yet to find one that brings to an MMO what I want - Active Teaming. CO had this and everybody solo'd nearly everything - no need to team and teaming was only for end-game or event-oriented content. A recent game, ArcheAge, also does this and also has no teaming. Although, ArcheAge has a nice balance to allow players to fill the roles of the traditional MMO trinity and it is successful from that perspective - but it does not seem legitimate that an archetype should be able to learn/develop every skill possible.
Now, there are other reasons that lend themselves to a lack of teaming, which is not part of this thread and that is storyline content and shared quest/mission reward. City had the best teaming/content of any game I have played and rewarded players more actively to team than any game I have played. Games now seem designed for soloers that want to rush to end-game where the only teaming exists. Why play an MMO if you are going to solo...
But, ultimately, Power Sets (back to the original intent) should allow flexibility/balance between the traditional MMO trinity, solo play, and team play. I remember Defenders being a nightmare to solo play in City until around lvl 32. That is a little ridiculous.
"it's a long road to wisdom, but it's a short one to being ignored." The Lumineers