Ralathar44

Why would you play an MM over anything else other than "cool factor"? They can't solo as well as half the ATs. They lose out on both damage and survivability once you start hitting late levels to all melee. Their support is lackluster. Their damage attacks cost hella endo for little return. AOE and CC wreck them. They are more cumbersome to play. ETC. They pretty much peak at 35 and then just feel weaker and weaker as you continue to level wheras most other ATs only continue to grow in power. Pets die at the drop of a hate and you can too if you're pets are out of body guard mode and you get hit a few times. There was a time frame where MM was one of the strongest solo classes in the game who other solo classes only caught up to after tons of grinding. But with the power creep, way faster progression, and more accessible IOs MMs are so outclassed today it isn't even funny. And they didn't even get any weaker, everyone else got stronger. And heck, it's hard enough to land a few hits on most teams with mobs dying in literal seconds, now try doing that with pet delay and if you send your pets in first they all die leaving you resummoning or dying to aggro...meanwhile even the blaster can take alphas. MMs lost their place in the game and everything else has power creeped so much that to give them that place back would require the devs to deliberately overpower them and I just don't see that happening since even Mercs has not received love.

It's more than that. Like 50% of all playtime is on a Spine/FA brute. Arguably City of Heroes is a game more about farming on a Spines/FA brute than it is about everything else.

TBH it's an unsovleable problem. Content/Progression takes over 10 times longer to make than it does to play through. Folks that run out of progression typically get bored and wander off to play other things. Currently "end game" content/loot in an MMORPG will always be trickled out because it has to be. City of Heroes is a game extends the time it takes poeple to get bored and wander off by giving good reasons to roll a bunch of alts but even then those of us still playing the game today are a very small self selected group of die hard fans and not representative of the average COH player, much less the average MMORPG player. People say those time gated systems are crap but the MMORPGs people play the most thrive on those systems and outside of a few rare PVP centric MMOs that's always been the case. That's no accident, people say they hate it but it's very compelling to most folks. Other designs HAVE been tried, they just don't have the same pull/staying power. Non-gated loot progression is the equivalent of niche flavor Ice Cream. It's not the most popular flavor but its still good. However calling chocolate ice cream crap because you don't personally like it is pretty short sighted. And for the record I like raiding and I like boss mechanics and etc but I hate super RNG laden progression. But I also like public quests a la Warhammer Online that's basically "casual raiding" and I also like the leveling process too. The super RNG progression where you can raid continuously and get little back is one of the few MMORPG things I decidedly dislike.

But that's not a problem with raids as content for progression, that's a problem with imbalanced rewards. And we had a similar problem WITHOUT the game being raid focused on live with IOs. The content didn't change, the reward rates did. This is also why most later MMORPGs introduced some form of token systems. That way RNG was still important but yo could never be completely screwed because if bad RNG hit you'd still get your gear via tokens.

Yeah but people enjoy the raids, the raids are content. Some MMORPGs do them well, some don't but when done well raids are magnificent. I'd rather "work" playing the actual game and raiding or grinding than "work" monotonously going through bad UI for hours on end.

I agree in that possibility. But unless it's utilized it doesn't mean much unfortunately. And the failing of utilization doesn't necessarily mean devs, wouldn't be the first time amazing systems have existed that gamers have utterly ignored and then complained about the issue those systems would solve. Though to be fair there are usually valid reasons behind why they don't use it. I use it, I enjoy the systems for the most part, but without a doubt IOs are a giant PITA in terms of usability. The IOs themselves are quite compelling and great, the process of getting the recipes, the ingredients, crafting them, looking up what does what, and etc is ALOT of work. I've spent many hours of time just staring at auction houses or crafting screens or set bonuses or etc. And even little QOL features are missing. Your storage for salvage and enhancements has definitive limits AND its not global storage so you have to memorize each individual rack and micromanage between them. Mass deposit and withdraw of enhancements is not a thing. Salvage can only be sold in 10x chunks, enhancements must be solid individually, etc. It all just takes so much time and effort of not very compelling WORK. I blame nobody for failing to take advantage of the IO system. City of Heroes holds up vs modern MMORPGs in alot of ways but these kind of systems are where it really shows its age.

Player demographics have everything to do with difficulty, balancing, and game design. How you design and balance your game is influenced by the playerbase you have or influenced by the playerbase you want to attract. And to understand player demographics you need to have a firm grasp of what the different terms mean in actual practice and not just on paper. You shouldn't sacrifice your core vision for the game for this, but neither should you be ignorant of it since it is highly important. A single game usually tries to appeal to multiple different types of player, as evidenced by the Magic the Gathering playertypes I've linked. Relevant difficulty scaling, different types of content, etc are how this is normally achieved. For example City of Heroes is in a weird spot. It's always been a more casual focused MMORPG, even after ED and GDN and etc it was still more casual than normal even if it had a bit of a better balance of what player types it appealed to. Post Homecoming however it's lost alot of that broader appeal and created a sharp division between player types. While the game has become more casual again, the whole IO system being easy to achieve now has attracted "efficiency gamers", which is like a weird breed of power gamer who's focused on optimizing any challenge out of the game and focuses on grinding through any progression as quickly and easily as possible. (IE wanting high difficulty for max rewards but also wanting an easy game for swift progression and to feel the results of their optimizations "feel like a god") I want to be clear that this is a valid playstyle, however it does potentially serve as a problem as well because that typically isn't a playstyle with a long "tail" because those gamers tend to exhaust the content your game has very fast relative to other player types. If a "normal" player takes 500 hours to exhaust content and get bored and efficiency gamer will prolly do it in like 100 hours. COH fortunately has a crapton of content, especially if you roll alot of alts, but it is not immune to content getting exhausted. Also fortunately the sunset and then Homecoming relaunch essentially made the game "fresh" again for most players due to the extreme time lapse. As well with the difficulty options at high end essentially essentially compressed in their relevance we've lost the content to appeal to power gamers who wish to have a legitimate challenge so we're stuck in the situation of "nerf things to bring back challenge" vs "make new difficulty levels" vs "lose that segment of the playerbase due to no longer having much content to appeal to them". Power gamers wishing to face a challenge have alot longer tail because instead of going out of their way to blow through content as easy and fast as possible like efficiency gamers, they'll intentionally try to create new and interesting challenges for themselves. IE if they end up "mastering" the challenges on one alt they may intentionally roll a different character just for the sake of challenging themselves in a new way. They'll jump through alot of hoops to achieve that sense of challenge and mastery, but they do have limits on how far they will go and currently you'd have to radically change every aspect of how you play the game to try and pursue that challenge at end game because even if you set everything up for yourself a single team mate not doing so invalidates all of that. So then you've got to run teams to try and avoid this. I'll touch on this later. I have some markers of the challenge oriented power gamer in me and it informs my ethos in what I wish out of the game. The old game pre-sunset used to serve me well and now it serves me extremely poorly high end and thus my feedback in that regard caters towards that in large part. And that's the crux of end game balance right now. Efficiency gamers are happy with the shifts HC has created by making IOs far more achievable and making leveling much faster because it lets them optimize and grind through the content (until they exhaust it) more efficiently and feel like they have achieved something with their optimizations. Casual gamers are still pretty happy because they'll spend most of their time in low end content and high end content still scares them away, previously it was a grind wall that discouraged them and now it's the barrier of needing to figure out IOs and compete with efficiency gamers that makes them feel irrelevant by comparison. Running your own team at all times is not something most people want to do at all. Often isn't even feasible with the amount of people online and already in other teams. Our population is not high enough to just run a team at the drop of a hat at any time. Sometimes you can form a team quickly, sometimes it takes 30 minutes to put a team together (and you don't always have or want to spend that time), sometimes it won't happen at all. This is using all tools available including the various chats and discord and in game search and direct tells and etc. Running teams also appeals to different playertype, and while I have some of those markers too it satisfies different aspects of play. I enjoy running good teams and catering to the members to deliver a happy experience to all, but it's often directly opposed to other ethos I enjoy too so I don't want to do it all the time. Players with power gamer markers like me who enjoyed a challenge however have been negatively impacted by the changes to HC. The lack of grind is appreciated, and I like playing with the much more available IOs since I enjoy the character building aspect. However the much more available IOs and the power creep has removed the compelling aspect for my (and others) ethos from the end game: the challenge. End game content is now a complete cakewalk outside of very very limited amounts of specific content. The average 50 is simply way more powerful on HC than they were on live and the difficulty does not scale up enough to be able to compensate. And we're not talking just facing council either, Malta is the only enemy group I don't like facing, I don't mind damage or threat but sappers are not enjoyable to play against and they are very binary in that you're either fine or you're instantly zero endurance so the sense of mastery of play and counterplay is not really satisfying vs them. I enjoy stuff more like the Tsoo Sorcerers that can be a significant impediment and cause wipes if you can't counter them or power through them (depending on your team comp) but have a rich amount of impact vs counterplay and also makes different ATs all feel valuable.

It started with the idea of what the high level balance was like, whether the average person had SOs/IOs/Sets, and how many people had 50s at all. Then the idea that folks at 50 were power gamers was seeded by golstat2003 and Haijinx rightly countered that leveling to 50 is actually pretty trivial in this game in it's current state on Homecoming. Much easier than most other MMORPGs that have a ton of non-power gamers doing PUG raids, much to the consternation of the power gamers they end up teamed with sometimes. I did not partcipate in the early replies of this and only joined like 4 replies into the conversation. My original response was pretty balanced/nuanced and it only became more in depth when people challenged it (which is fine) or intentionally twisted it out of context (which is not) because this is an area I'm pretty well informed of since I grew up and lived through it and also researched it a few different times quite thoroughly. This was all present in the thread and you could have read the context yourself, but if you were willing to do that you would have. So I have provided you the context. Or at least the bulk of it. If you want the rest go read the last 2-3 pages. The irony is that your response implies concerns about adding to the discussion but your reply itself added no value to the discussion and did not provide a constructive framework to build on. Why did you make your response?

I said as much and I've been very consistent about it. Non-gamer and gamer have become gamer and "core gamer". However when people talk and interact socially clear divisions are still drawn. Mom's playing Farmville are playing a game, therefore they should be considered gamers by what you say. And yet they are not. People who only play very casual games or only play games very casually (like only playing games at parties and stuff when they happen to be around it) were once NOT considered gamers but today they ARE considered gamers. But all we've done is change the terms for the same concepts. People who feel like they were excluded from the club before are now told they are part of the club, but they are still not included because they have nothing to add to the conversation. When people are looking forwards to Cyberpunk 2077 or talking about Ghost of Tsushima or Mortal Kombat 11 or Red Dead Redemption 2 or Resident Evil 3 Remake or Call of Duty Modern Warfare DBZ Kakarot people won't actively try to snub those folks, but they'll basically avoid talking to them about it because again...they've got nothing to add . So all the fighting to be called "gamer" was pointless. They got the term but they never got the status because the status is based on knowledge they don't have/are not interested in and social involvement that requires said knowledge to participate in sustainably. If you want to be part of a conversation about Star Citizen for example you need to know at least a little about Star Citizen...and most casual players won't even know it exists but most gamers will. Or in today's terms most gamers won't know about it but most "core gamers" will. But when used in common parlance gamer in reality refers to core gamers. Dictionary's change to match how people use words, not the other way around :). Folks need to learn eventually you cannot language politic your way into a group. You'll only be left with a hollow victory. Instead they should accept themselves and their level of interest as fine without needing the approval of others. I'll tell anyone who wants to hear it that they are a gamer, but giving them that term won't close the distance between them and "core gamers" in any way. They'll still be the odd person out when everyone else wants to talk to other people about games.

I like all of the games mentioned and there is nothing wrong with liking casual games, which I've said many times. But casual games are to other games like Curling is to Football. Yes, it's still a sport but when people say sports they don't mean Curling :D. There is nothing wrong with Curling either. Just like I like some of my mobile games like numerous Idle Games and Burrito Bison and etc but I really wouldn't consider those representative of gaming either. Alter Ego for example is actually a nice little idle game with a definitive story and ending that's based heavily around literature and philosophy, was a nice little game and surprisingly endearing. Not "omg thees ez so deep" but definitely deep enough to make you think and maybe take a step back mentally. I know this is a weird concept for some folks, but just because someone puts things in a different category doesn't mean they think less of those things or hate them. This ain't Twitter, other doesn't mean automatically worse or evil :D. But definitions exist for a reason and no matter how much ad hominem you try and throw into why I treat things as separate categories this is literally how the science on it is being done as well. Because without those guidelines the statistics essentially get completely invalidated. If you want to develop games or understand how games are developed you need to understand demographics and what games work with which demographics. The delineation between "casual" and "hardcore", which is today's "gamer" and "power gamer" are a large part of that. The rules and data bhind this is well established and well studied. Magic the Gathering is prolly the first official codifying of it I saw within the larger gaming sphere with player types. You can argue it all you want but this is part of the core of the industry and the knowledge has been refined and tested and retested for 15+ years. - A simple 5 hour a week requirement radically changes the face of what "gamer" means on it's own and that's not an unreasonable bar regardless. - Casual games are literally an official gaming term used by the industry actually making the games and studying their audiences. It's impossible to argue that it's not codified within our definitions of gaming. Regardless of whether you talk to developers or you're just an end user browing tags on steam. Fall Guys is a perfect example of a casual game. Low stakes, low pressure, low barrier to entry, low commitment, easy shallow fun. Still a great game. Same with Among Us. These two games aimed heavily at casual player are two massive successes and they deserve that success. Nobody who plays them is lesser. But if someone ONLY played a few games like Fall Guys and Among Us very few people would consider them a "gamer" because people subconsciously know there is more to it than just "they played some games". Games don't have to be AAA or large to be more core games to the gamer identity. Minecraft is a perfect example of a game that is not a casual game (though technically any game can be played "casually"). It's a small indie game that gained a level of popularity that defined an entire generation of gamers. And that''s actually a good comparison because you can look from Animal Crossing to Minecraft and see pretty clearly what sets the two apart as far as appealing to a casual gamer vs a regular gamer at basically every level of mechanics/progression. And I'd say neither is the better game, both are top tier games in their own right in their own design space. They just occupy different spaces in gaming and gaming demographics, though (as always) there is some overlap.

Irregardless language is only as good as what people use and understand and indeed a great deal of the words we use today mean different things than they used to mean in the past. Examples: - Nice used to mean silly or foolish. - Silly used to mean worthy or blessed. - Awful used to mean worthy of awe or awe inspiring. - Fizzle used to mean farting. (yes lol) - Wench actually used to mean female child and then meant female servant and then became the pejorative we have today. - Fathom went from meaning to encircle with ones arms or huge to it's current meanings. - Clue was a ball of yarn. - Myriad meant a specific amount of things, 10,000 to be precise. - Naughty meant you had naught or nothing. - Spinster was just a woman who spun, IE their occupation at a spinning wheel. Today it means unmarried woman. - Bachelor was a young knight, usually unmarried. - Flirt was making a flicking motion with something. - Guy literally just stood for Guy Fawkes and was a reference to them. Now it just means men in general. - Hussy was housewife or mistress of the household (a reputable position), not the current meaning of immoral woman. The list stretches on to infinity. You can fight the march of vocabulary, but you're just going to lose because you're not any more capable of stopping the changes than generations before you. That's why I keep in mind the context of where our current idea of gamers and power gamers and core gamers and etc came from. I've accepted vocabulary will change, I make sure I understand why, and I keep the concepts of what applies to what straight. The vocabulary may change, but the concepts we express rarely do. We just use different words for them or different methodologies for expressing them.

That is technically correct, the best kind of correct, but not correct in common parlance, IE socially. If someone plays a few games of hoops or plays basketball with friends sometimes they don't call themselves basketball players. Gaming is the same way. Technically I'm an artists, a musician, a programmer, a sports fan, a poker player, a history buff, an anime nerd, a power gamer, a comic book nerf, a furry, a cyberpunk nerd, a music nerd, a film buff, a mathematician, etc, etc, etc. But realistically the only things I really do as a hobby are gaming, anime, and furry stuff. So socially those are what both I and society at large would identify me as. If you're going to merriam webster to get accurate summations of social groups you've made a pretty serious error in your estimation of what merriam webster is good for :). For example most everyone on the internet knows what a brony is but merriam webster doesn't even know it exists. That dictionary is a good resource for old concrete terms of a non-social nature. Don't use it beyond what it's useful for. You could start a few small wars with how it defines the various areas of identity politics 😛 (which we will NOT go into), merriam webster is not website good at handling social terms.

With as active as you are on these forums someone would be pretty hard pressed to say you're not a gamer 😄. Part of the qualification of "core gamer" or "power gamer" is involvement beyond just playing games. You participate in discussions online/off about games, read news about games, look up guides/information about games, etc. IE it's more than just entertainment, it's a hobby. Most of us here, prolly darn near close to all, have markers of being a power gamer. That's the power of self selection and the internet 90-9-1 rule. Most of us are likely part of the top 10% invested in at least this game if not gaming as a whole. Because most people either don't follow online much/at all or merely lurk and were are active participants discussing minor details and major mechanics of a very VERY old game until we beat it into glue, resurrect it, then beat it into glue again 😄 Everyone falls somewhere slightly different on that scale, there may be a few casuals here and a good handful of gamers and then mostly different levels of power gamer.

You have to draw a line somewhere or every mom who played Farmville is now a "real gamer". Like it or not those games have a large tendency to grab people who don't otherwise game. That is reality. The amount of people who played alot of Animal Crossing or Candy Crush or Bejeweled but never really got into gaming beyond that is much larger than say, Halo or Call of Duty. And This is true of games like Mario Party and Jackbox and Madden and Smash Brothers and stuff too. There are plenty of people who have only gamed via a few specific titles like those but don't really game as a hobby and those folks fall under the same umbrella. They've played games, maybe they even play regularly for awhile, but they really are not "gamers" because that's about as far as they go. Women are also represented in much higher amounts than their statistical normal in MMORPGs and those women DO tend to be "gamers" :D. If a definition is to mean anything then you have to draw a line somewhere. Sometimes that line is going to exclude you. I've played alot of musical instruments in my past but I'm not a musician. I've done my share of drawing but I'm not an artist. I've watched a ridiculous amount of sports in my life but I'm not a sports fan. I have a crapton of comic book knowledge but I'm not a comic book nerd. I've enjoyed the heck out of watching it on TV and played some poker here and there but I'm not a poker player. I like medieval weapons and historical warfare but I'm not a history buff. This is not hard when you can set aside your own ego. There is a different level of commitment between people who choose something as a primary hobby vs those who engage in an area sporadically or in very focused subcategories. There are many things I'm on the fringe of that I like, but I would never identify as part of the "in group" of because it'd be disingenuous. My worth is not defined by me being part of X/Y groups, me being part of X/Y groups as a label is useful only insomuch as it accurate describes my level of interest in an area to other people. My worth is determined by my actions and my achievements, not my insecurities regarding the judgements of others and whether or not I belong to any specific group.

NP :). Alot of folks on the fringes just wanted to be "part of the group" and so their insecurity has muddled the language over the years. There is nothing wrong with liking something casually or playing it casually. The solution to some folks being elitist butts (because they are also insecure) isn't to lower the bar across the board though. Every pastime definition has an understood threshold, in spirit if not in technicality. Perfect example: that person who is only a "fan" of their sports team when they are doing really well. Realistically we know they are not really a "fan" and even calling them a "casual fan" feels like a bit of a stretch, they are really more of a "fake fan". If you only follow the team when successful then you're being a fan of success, not a fan of the team. A "casual fan" would be better represented by someone who doesn't catch every game but still watches and keeps track of the team even when they suck, who's watching/following habits increase as their team is more successful, but they never actually stopped like the previously mentioned "fake fan". I think it's pretty telling that simply drawing a 5 hours a week cutoff for being considered a gamer radically changes the statistics on what the average gamer plays and how much they play a week. That's how watered down the base term has gotten and that's why they've come up with some simple definition like "core gamer" that to differentiate between people who play casual games or play games rarely vs those who use it as their primary past time and tend to get much more involved. The language shenanigans is a pretty noticeable problem in the dating world. Less so than it used to be, but still a noticeable and relatively common problem. Girl gamers are not rare these days, there are tons of them and I love it, but there is still a not insignificant section of ladies who want to be part of the group but who don't really game. So when they call themselves a gamer they mean, in their own head, I play games therefore I must be a gamer. Whereas most of us from the gaming mentality think of it more like "I want someone who understands my hobby and shares it, who also doesn't treat it as a threat for their attention". So when those different definitions collide in the dating world bad things happen to otherwise well meaning people, be they male or female. Ironically both sides will feel slighted in those situations. Guys feels lied to and betrayed and women feel discriminated against (kept out of a "boys club") and betrayed. Because one side is approaching it as a serious hobby and the other is approaching it as a "I wanna be considered part of the group so as not to feel lesser". Now ofc that's a broad generalization, that can happen with the genders reversed/mixed/penguins, but since ladies have some significant emotional baggage in that area men tend not to AND statistically women are much more likely to play casual games it does tend to unfold across gendered lines like that when the disconnect in expectations occurs. Realistically women who don't treat it as a real hobby or mainly play casual games should not be so insecure and should understand that they are talking about a different thing. It's not a discrimination thing, it's a real difference in how they approach and engage in things. And for their part men should be more aware of that difference and help explain the disconnect in what they want out of a "gamer" in a relationship rather than taking the bait of getting into fights over the definition. It is absolutely not "mansplaining" to explain you own feelings about your pasttime and what you are looking for when you say you want someone that shares that pastime and anyone getting offended at you being clear, without being rude, about what you are looking for is a toxic person caught up in their own personal baggage.