Yeah, this has already been discussed. Pen and Paper work a lot differently than programming does. It's easier for the GM, or DM, to control how everything balances out doing what you are suggesting than it is for a program. I believe some MMO's have tried to do something like this and removed it, because people found ways to take advantage of it to the point that it was just completely unfair and not fun. Min/Maxers love to get their hands on stuff like this.

Yeah, MMOs are not PnP, and the GM of a PnP game is much more able to ensure that a weakness comes up. This just isn't the case in an MMO. And, if it were to be done anyway, that would just mean "well, I don't do that content, because it impacts my weakness." This leads to both complaints about not enough content/content being designed to "pick on me," and about the game being "too easy" because the min/maxed character is custom-designed for this content that has none of his weaknesses exploited.

The game would wind up being either "Too easy" or balanced around the min/maxed characters at their peak, which then requires a different character build for each scenario. Rather than Superman facing kryptonite, you'd have him just never go into those missions (sending Martian Manhunter instead), while Superman handled the burning buildings. And both cakewalked. Or both were challenged, and Green Arrow (who didn't take a weakness and thus didn't gain extra powers) is overmatched.

I'm going to go against the grain here and suggest a way that a strengths/weaknesses system COULD be introduced into City of Titans that wouldn't necessarily be unbalancing.

Instead of running the vulnerability system on Damage Types ... run it on the equivalent of Origins instead.

Consider ... that in city of Heroes there were five Origins arranged in a circular wheel pattern:
[list][*]Natural
[*]Magic
[*]Mutant
[*]Science
[*]Technology[/list]
All you'd have to do is rule that your character is "strong" against your own Origin, "neutral" against the two adjacent Origins, and "weak" against the two opposing Origins.

Natural strong against Natural, is neutral to Magic and Technology and weak against Mutant and Science.
Magic is strong against Magic, is neutral to Natural and Mutant and weak against Science and Technology.
Mutant is strong against Mutant, is neutral to Magic and Science and weak against Technology and Natural.
Science is strong against Science, is neutral to Mutant and Technology and weak against Natural and Magic.
Technology is strong against Technology, is neutral to Science and Natural and weak against Magic and Mutant.

That sort of thing.

Now when I say "weak" and "strong" I'm talking like +2% strong (you've only got one strength) and -1% weak (you've got two weaknesses), so really not all that much of a difference. But even then, you might (NOT) be surprised at the lengths people will go to in order to only ever deal with that +2% situation while avoiding the +0% and -1% conditions like the plague.

The bottom line is that this kind of consideration is something that works great in a (SCRIPTED!) comic book or movie where there is someone "controlling" everything that happens (either a script writer or an editor or director), as opposed to being something happening in a game where everything is a collaborative effort between the players, the devs and the spirit of the community.

"Carnival of Shadows is Magic Origin and I'm weak to that so I'll never do that content."

Again ... the incessant drive to Min/Max rules everything around you, even if you aren't participating in that mindset yourself.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

And one thing I should make clear is that I have absolutely no interest in preserving someone's delusion of "Game Balance" I'm talking about giving players a wider variety of play options.

Um ... fail?

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
TheMightyPaladin wrote:
And one thing I should make clear is that I have absolutely no interest in preserving someone's delusion of "Game Balance" I'm talking about giving players a wider variety of play options.

Um ... fail?

I made it clear why I consider game balance a delusion by pointing the constant arguments about how things work in PVP. and I don't think anyone is convinced that every character type is equally equipped to solo. Since game balance doesn't work lets quit trying to pretend. There's no reason why all character types should be equal in all situations. Each plays a different role for a reason. And since game balance isn't real, why use it as a reason to limit a player's options in making or playing his character?

No one ever claimed that "game balance" in a MMO is something that's easy to achieve or even 100% achievable to begin with. But if game Devs don't at least make the attempt to work towards that concept/goal then I promise you that virtually any MMO game concept you could think of would utterly fail.

It might be easier to think of MMO balance in the simplistic terms of the classic "rock-paper-scissors" game. No one would expect that a rock would be able to do well against a paper but everyone pretty much relies on the rock being able to defeat a scissors. In a game with no accounting for balance as you describe no one could count on the rock being able to predictably beat anything. You'd have gaming chaos on your hands.

That's why your general notion of "game balance being a delusion" is itself delusional and strikes at the core of why your unoriginal suggestion for having min/maxable damage-based "weaknesses" is highly problematic at the very least. You yourself claimed that you haven't really seen any MMO try something like this - did you ever stop to think the reason for that is because it's a relatively exploitable concept that most everyone else already dismissed as unworkable in the first place?

Giving players a "wider variety of play options" cannot supersede overall game balance. You can't wish that game balance doesn't exist just because it's not perfect or interferes with your ill-conceived ideas about making players happy via overt unbridled tankmagery.

I agree withg Segev, and would reiterate that if the weaknesses are really broad, like "you move slower, always, no getting around it" or "Your total overall damage cap is lower than normal for your class/spec, and you can't re-raise it" then MAYBE weaknesses would work. But what would the payoff then be for those type of weaknesses?

To emphasize Segev and Radiac's points, CoH didn't have much problem with team leaders looking for very specific builds or team makeup for certain missions because not only the AT's and powersets but also the missions themselves were well balanced.

No, not perfectly, but well. And this was one very central reason that teaming was so casual and FUN in CoH.

With no effort to balance and large strengths and weaknesses, we'd end up with leaders looking for very specific builds and team makeups for particular missions-which is what makes a lot of other games a pain in the butt to try to team in.

Another question that I thought up: if I have a tanker with a weakness that makes his damage output even worse, but upps his resistance, that's even more tanky, but if I opt to go the opposite way (less resist for more damage or something) then you may be getting into the problem of making a tanker that feels more like a scrapper, etc.

Anyway, I'm still in favor of "no weaknesses" to be honest.

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/FiveElementsCycleBalanceImbalance.jpg[/img]

Why can't we have it work like this, instead of just a weakness you pick, it's a weakness and other forms of interaction based on choices already made. It's just a thought, I always like the scenes where you have two antitheses fighting one another and the elemental cancelation, or two elements that empower one another fighting and BOTH getting messed up because of whatever.

The thing is its mot actual smart game play if a weakness can always be avoided sufficiently. Than what was the point of choosing a weakness? If it was to get a strength in a particular area that can almost be leveraged than the system is t doing what its intended to do.

Further more including a system that randomly exploits a weakness tends to negatively impact game play and cause frustration with general players whereby only those capable of adapting can manage the extra difficulty sufficiently. Case in point Kheldians and why the special weakness ended up being changed in mitigation.

Our game play And powers design team has discussed this extensively. And one of the major hurdles is developing a system whereby players that arent familiar with the game dont end up inadvertently causing themselves undo frustration which means that every choice must be capable of not only meaning something on both e da of the positive / negative results but that no matter the build choices each possible combination still performs within a given range of expectation.
This means that the time to design and test every weakness / strength choice combo mist be tested with each combination of power sets of each and every classification and eqch and every mastery. This makes the design and testing phase exponentially longer over our current design schema.

Discussion is good and welcome. You never know what may come of it, I only meant to address the concept as its been brought up. There are reasons why we didn't go the route but a weakness / strength system [i]at this time[/i]. Who knows what features may develop later and discussions such as these may lead to new features being a reality. That being said, everything discussed thus far is pretty much ground we've tread upon already, as thus far everything brought up pretty much has not addressed some of the fundamental problems with the basic proposal. Who knows where the discussion may end up, but its current course keeps coming back to the same main ideas. I only meant to point out why those ideas are so difficult to implement.

I'd really rather not have weaknesses for strengths introduced to the game. And I'm also completely against getting rid of XP or slowing XP down. Before the XP curve was fixed in CoH there were a lot of people that absolutely HATED the grind it took to get to 50. I know a lot that quit playing it because of it. They later came back once the curve was fixed and made a lot smoother. As I've said, it works great for pen and paper games where the GM can control it but it's terrible in console and pc games.

DoctorZorka wrote:

Positron wrote in his blog that no matter what you do, there will be some folks who sit at the computer night and day working out the weaknesses of your system. That's the game to them. Rather than trying deny these players their kind of gaming by homogenizing all the builds, give the exploit chasers another angle to worry about. Just be sure to call it 'bonus points for difficulty'.

Positron wasn't the first game designer to figure that out. It's been clear for decades that there will always be people who'll "game" a system (a.k.a. min/maxing) no matter what game you're talking about.

I would agree that "homogenizing all the builds" is a poor solution to combat this issue because again we've just established it'll always happen regardless. But just because it can't be eliminated completely does not mean we must swing the other way and make min/maxing a trivial thing to do. Unfortunately TheMightyPaladin's idea concerning weaknesses is just that - a means to make a certain type of overpowered min/maxing very easy to do. This is why it should not be allowed without a great amount of consideration for overall game balance and even then is likely something that shouldn't be doable regardless.

Nadira wrote:

True FPS games only have three classes generally, and none of the interesting or out of the box ones. But classes conceptualised around e.g. pets, stealth, control or one hit kills are notoriously difficult to get to work in a fun way in a PvP environment and tend to take up an inordinate amount of time and attention from the developers as a result.

+1. :{

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

BTW: a good solution to the PVP conundrum could be to simply admit that game balance is a pipe dream and warn people that some power sets may not be suitable for PVP. What the hell is a defender doing in PVP anyway?

Correction. PvP is rarely a "team" sport, and the way that City of Heroes implemented it was mostly as a soloist engagement (what with the Bounties and everything).

Game balance is NOT a "pipe dream" as you keep asserting at every opportunity. Rather, game balance ... when done properly ... is a [b]Dynamic Equilibrium[/b], as opposed to a Static Equilibrium. Those of you who remember your science and/or math classes will be able to appreciate the distinction ... and what it means ... because it is critically important. The "window" within which a game can be considered to be "balanced" may be narrow, but it is not so small as to only be represented by a single convergent point.

Indeed, I would argue that the larger the "window" of the Dynamic Equilibrium the game system can support, the better/more balanced/more successfully designed the game is.

Well, OP. Do you mind if I ask, what type of character you're trying to make that has a weakness? Like, can you describe his background, his powers and why he has such a weakness and/or strength?

It might be that the game doesn't need to incorporate a direct weakness system for your character to be realized or that the type of weakness policy required might be built into another aspect of character creation.

Another fun skill I learned in CoX was that, the powers and custom options didn't have to be spot on to make an amazing character. Working with the options available to make a truly complex character, mechanically, biographically and aesthetically is part of the fun and challenge, after all.

...oh no, the feels! Nostalgia's choking my heart!

Some of those you can simply roleplay like phobia, alter ego, can't swim and bad rep. What strengths would these award for choosing them?

Well what kind of power? But I think all those weaknesses are a bit cheap for something as nice as a new power.

You don't have to state something that has to work as a granted power in the game. The idea is giving people a scope of what your idea is. Like if you choose can't swim and the type of power you can obtain from it is 'call for a boat' or 'scuba tank', I can't say the system would be all that interesting but if you're expecting something along the scope of the ability to manipulate ice when none of your other powers have anything to deal with ice in return, I feel that's too strong.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I'm just going to withdraw this suggestion. I still think it's a good idea and could have worked very well it's a shame it wont be part of the game.

There's no need to withdraw a suggestion. It's good you put it out there, it fostered good discussion. And you obviously still really believe in this. It has turned out not to be popular, or at least not believed feasible, but putting ideas out there are what this forum is for. I've put out unpopular suggestions that got called down, and sometimes I saw their point, and sometimes we just disagreed.

Ideas need to be put out there for discussion, but don't take disagreement personally. You may or may not be right. Really, really, really believing you're right doesn't make you right. I always assume that I could be wrong about anything I believe, because, well, I'm human. And if I KNEW it were wrong, well, I wouldn't believe that thing. So, I'm not only definitely wrong some times, but I don't know which things I'm wrong about.

So, we discuss.

But there's not need to withdraw something you believe in, and there's no need to argue it forever. Put it out there and good discussion will come of it, and when the discussion starts to spiral, move on.