nzer

I don't think anyone really cares. There are always a million people in LFG advertising farms, PI teams, or asking to sit. I personally wouldn't do it, just because exemplaring significantly below 32 destroys your enhancement bonuses. Depending on your powersets it can make going back for that content later pretty painful. But if you like doing it, more power to you.

At no point have I said or implied that you did. But I'm talking about the hypothetical scenario of it being added, and you're talking about the hypothetical scenario of it being added, so why on earth are you so surprised that I'm responding in the context of whether or not the AT should added? 90% of the posts in this topic are talking about why the AT should or shouldn't be added. It's okay for us to just... have the conversation we're very clearly having. The world isn't going to explode if you don't argue pointlessly with me about the exact nature of the conversation, I promise.

Yes, to which I responded that something already being broken doesn't make it okay to break it further. IOs and incarnates already shift the game's difficulty balance away from where it arguably should be, which is a bad thing, and adding this new AT would make that problem even worse. And IOs and incarnates are tempered in ways this new AT wouldn't be (they require significant buy-in that any random character isn't likely to have, whereas anyone can just create a character of this new AT), and IOs at least have positives this new AT wouldn't (they enable deep buildcrafting and a player economy). I'm not really understanding what your problem is with that logic.

I feel like I've noticed this in the past as well, but I just came back to the game after a break and it jumped out at me immediately. There appears to be fairly aggressive smoothing or lerp applied to mouse look, and the sensitivity can vary noticeably depending on the frame rate. It's very minor, as CoH isn't exactly a twitchy game requiring precise camera control, but I think tightening this up could be a nice quality of life improvement.

Pretending a few instances of bad behavior you've seen in pugs is an accurate reflection of any of the people posting here in this topic is way more insulting. That isn't how this topic reads to me, I don't see anyone clamoring for this new AT so they can make more powerful characters. The split is between "you could make some cool character concepts with this" and "that's extremely unbalanced."

You said this in response to me saying I don't think this AT should be added because it would be overpowered, so I don't know how else you expected me to interpret it. I know you personally are not saying the AT should be added here, but that's what I'm talking about, and you're responding to me. More because of incarnates than IOs, surely, given they were added at the exact same time as IOs.

I mean, you didn't actually disagree with my point, which is that IOs add a lot to the game mechanically even if they aren't in line with its general balancing. Again, it's easy to justify their existence in spite of their balance issues because they enable deep buildcrafting and a robust player economy. I also just don't find "it's already broken, therefore it's fine if we break it more" to be a terribly compelling argument. Maybe we could unbreak things instead? Just to be clear, MLTF, the current form of the Hami raid, and IOs were all added in issue 9.

The difference is that IOs are a well designed system that adds a ton of depth in places the game was sorely missing it. It's easy to justify their existence in spite of the balance issues they cause, because their value is more substantive than "hey wouldn't it be cool if...". The same can't be said of this hypothetical AT, IMO.

You don't have to, but having the option at all would destroy the experience for a lot of people. The point of having the restrictions is that they're designed to create the kind of experience the devs want to create, and people play the game because they want to engage with that experience. Allowing people to define their own restrictions is, in essence, off-loading a gigantic part of the game's design from the devs onto the players. Most people aren't going to enjoy that; partly because they don't have any experience with game design and will not be able to craft an enjoyable experience for themselves, but mostly because they simply do not have any interest in doing it. Someone who wants to play City of Heroes wants to play City of Heroes, not design their own pseudo-City of Heroes and then play that. This concept also just fundamentally does not work with multiplayer games at all. You might not take all the OP powers and make yourself omnipotent, but other people will, and they'll end up in your teams wrecking whatever experience you're trying to create for yourself. You can't even solve this by being more selective in who you team with, because everyone is going to have different ideas of what is and isn't appropriately balanced. In theory if this is restricted to just a single AT you could just refuse to invite the new AT to your teams and refuse to join teams with the new AT, but that adds a ton of friction to how most people play the game, and realistically most people are going to accept the OP characters anyway because they make missions faster even if it's less fun. People tend to be really, really bad about self-policing that sort of thing. I'm not going to deny that there are some people for whom this is a fun concept that adds to the experience, but for the vast majority of people it's not, and I don't think it has any place in Homecoming, or really in any serious project where things like difficulty and balance are relevant in basically any way.

I'm not in favor of increasing inf rewards as a solution to this problem, but I do very much doubt changes in low level inf rewards would move the needle at all on inflation. A single fire farmer probably makes more in ten minutes than a new player's first character would make in its entire journey to 50.

That would only be the case if you couldn't level out of them. Because you can, whether they became more or less affordable depends on the ratio of the increases. If XP was increased more then inf gain, for example, they would become less affordable because you would level out of them more quickly.

I'm not saying you said the devs were infallible. I'm saying the argument you're making requires them to have been infallible, otherwise it's not a sound argument. There are like four different comments immediately above this one demonstrating that your reasoning is unfounded. Where's your proof?

No, they're not. Their argument was that the devs intended for players to be able to fill their enhancement slots at level 20+, and that is still their argument. They categorically can't be moving the goalposts if their argument isn't changing. You're trying to use the fact that the devs set the rates and never changed them as evidence that all the results of those particular rates were intentional. That's a reasonable argument, but it's still just a supposition, because the original devs were not infallible. So it is also reasonable for someone to disagree with that based on other pieces of evidence, which is exactly what's happening.

They're not moving the goalposts, your argument is genuinely fallacious. The original devs were not infallible, so you can't assume something being the way it is is concrete proof it was intended to be that way. Charitably, the disagreement is indeed just a difference of opinion.

Good thing their argument doesn't rely on that then.

This is such a ridiculous reason to oppose potential improvements. The game is not perfect, not even at what it's trying to be. And Homecoming is already different from live in a lot of fairly major ways, so this ship has sailed. If you're looking at Homecoming and having this thought, you're failing to recognize what "the game" even is.

This is a slippery slope fallacy, no one is suggesting removing all challenge from the game. In fact I don't see anyone talking about challenge at all, except the people trying to dismiss the suggestion. Again, the root of the issue here is the expectation among new players that they'll be able to fill the slots the game keeps giving them. It has nothing to do with difficulty.

Getting multiple warnings over this kind of thing when the issue being brought up is so completely uncontroversial, especially when it was ostensibly caused by a change you yourself disagreed with, should probably be cause for some amount of self-reflection. If it was me, at least.

Clearly not, based on the consistent stream of posts about this. If you're going to continue refusing to acknowledge any kind of criticism of the game at all on the grounds that the original devs could do no wrong and the game is perfect the way it is, we're done talking. We're also apparently going to just ignore that TOs are a thing that existed in the original game and were only removed here on Homecoming. Why exactly are we pretending that not being able to fill your enhancement slots is how the game was meant to be when it is only the case because the cheapest enhancements were removed?

Rudra, what on earth are you talking about? The problem here is that when the game gives the player enhancement slots to assign to their powers the player expects to be able to use those slots, while the game is (allegedly, according to you) actually designed around the player not using all of those slots. As I already said literally just minutes ago, misalignment between player expectation and design intent is a player experience issue. And both of the links you posted confirm this. So can you please not be aggressively contrarian about everything? It isn't productive for anyone in this thread.

That's irrelevant, because, as I've said multiple times now, this is not about effectiveness. It's about the player experience.

You have to realize it's obvious you couldn't have had time to actually read those articles in the 30 seconds between our posts, right? Take a few minutes and try actually doing that, and you'll see that misalignment between the player's perception of a mechanic and the design intent of the mechanic is a textbook player experience issue. Not that this is even relevant, since the point I'm making is obvious even if you don't know exactly what the term "player experience" means, but clearly you need something to be contrarian about. Yes, exactly. This kind of thing is poor design, which is why, more than a decade ago, spells in WoW were changed to be automatically unlocked at no charge when you reached the required level. And prior to that they were changed to not have multiple ranks, which made unlocking them immediately feasible with just the gold acquired from leveling.

Then you don't have a correct understanding of what the term "player experience" means, and I suggest you look it up. Equipment slots in WoW are inherent, you have all of them at level one. A better comparison would be if WoW required an exorbitant amount of gold to slot each talent point, far in excess of what you could actually afford by the level the talent point was earned.

Irrelevant, as the concern here is not about balance. It's a poor player experience to award things the player is not intended to use. This has already been brought up and addressed. Even with DOs, it's not feasible for a player to fill their slots without special knowledge about inf-making and the AH. If this is true, the expectation is ill-conceived and should be reevaluated. Players should not have to make use of an auction house to make use of basic game features.

Players shouldn't need to ask other players for money making strategies to be able to use basic game features. We're not talking about affording full builds of IO sets here, just keeping your slots filled with enhancements of any kind. I like this idea as well. Yes, they do. They might not need to be enhanced just to play the game, but enhancement is a fundamental game feature, and players should be able to make use of it. It is poor design to give the player tons of slots that they can't use without reading forum guides about how to make inf. Again, if the goal is to have a sliding scale of power, the right solution is to have several tiers of enhancements. And there's no reason why players should not be able to fill all their slots with the lowest tier with just the inf they make from leveling.