[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

15 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Thinking about what all I've read here, level capping people in zone feels like trying to get a square pegs through a round hole.  Just drop in a couple of contacts with actual arcs related to the zone for level-appropriate players, that's really all you need.  You can go bigger with TFs too, if you want to get adventurous, which is basically the same thing, just with merits at the end (think Kalisti Wharf with Market Crash).

Adding content (arcs, TFs) is a lot of effort.  Adding a level cap would be a much smaller amount of effort - and for the sake of argument; assuming it is an improvement, would improve all hazard zones with one change.  Think of how much content we've had added vs code changes, and we can guess the HC team is much more developer heavy vs content creators.

[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

 

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My method in no way impedes badge hunting.

Would it be as "safe" to farm for badges in a "hazard" zone? 

My question is :: Why should it be safe to farm for badges in a hazard zone?

Yes, you're right, I suppose fighting even con mobs for badges is actually still quite easy.  Maybe it's even more fun.  It's probably even still safe, just less fast.  Then again, badges should be earned, I suppose, so a little more effort probably would be not a big deal.

 

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Make the lower level character team lead and that is solved.

This is not the solution to the problem I want to solve.  If a lower level char is the team lead, they will still rise to the level cap in a very short period of time, and hence make it time to leave the hazard zone, hence defeating the goal of revitalizing the hazard zones by making it attractive to spend more time in them.  Yes, you could maybe have the team lead disable xp, but that's still not a solution.  The goal is for everyone, team leader and the entire team, get great xp.

 

I seem to recall the principle behind the hazard zones was - greater risk, greater reward.  Well, they don't provide greater reward anymore, and they don't feel particularly risky - I'm not sure why but maybe because we level up so fast.  What I'm looking for is a way to bring them back to greater risk, greater reward.  I think being able to set it such that you see permanent +4s (or higher), and also perhaps maybe making spawns even bigger and more dense, might do the trick.

 

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I haven't seen this on Homecoming, but I did see it on live.

Say a level 20-30 AV/EB mission. Level 50 on the team leaves the team, is now level 50, is still in the mission, and beats down the level 20-30 AV/EB by themselves with their level 50 powers.

I don't intend that to give anyone ideas, but it happened, it is an exploit, I'm not sure if it was fixed, and, if development can avoid it, making more situations where this kind of thing can occur should be eliminated.

This is kind of my point (HC vs live), you don't see these kinds of things on Homecoming because XP/inf/merits/incarnate stuff is basically quite easy to acquire, so it's not worth the effort to do anything that's slightly exploitative or abusive.  Live was different, without double xp, AE probably(?) not as rewarding, markets that automatically transform enhancements from any level to any level and even attune them for you, etc - you had more incentive to try to take shortcuts.  But also as I said, it's fairly easily avoided by enforcing either a 5s delay after changing, being unable to change while in combat, or only allowing change while in a rest state, or only allowing change at some NPC at the entry to the zone, or any other similar fairly easy adjustments.  It's more of a question of which is better big picture.  I still would argue for making it an opt-in, and more particularly being able to set your level below the level cap so you can see +4s (or higher).

[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

10 hours ago, Techwright said:

How would a GW2 dynamic event play out? I have never played it and have no reference point.  Some of your description reminded me of the Fifth Column / Council war which played out in the streets for a short while, before the Council dominated.  

This sounds pretty similar.  I didn't play GW2 enough to really get all the dynamics, though it is documented here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event
 

The first paragraph is a great summary:
 

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Dynamic events are cyclical in nature and the events are generally chained together. Events do not necessarily follow a fixed schedule, and may only trigger if certain conditions are met - for example, if a snow storm strikes an area, or if night falls on a graveyard. Many events are triggered by the presence of a player entering their immediate areas. Once an event has triggered, it will continue to progress whether or not players participate in that event. Although the repetitive nature of events means that consequences are ultimately temporary, the state of some events can persist for days, or until the next server reset or update, unless a player comes along and does something to progress the event or chain of events.[1] Each event has an NPC associated with it with whom the player can talk to learn more about the story and lore behind the event.

 

And yes, the Fifth Column/Council war you described seems like it would have some similarities.  In the GW2 system, maybe the Fifth Column would make another attempt.  Or maybe players could defeat the Council in certain neighborhoods, and the Fifth Column would take over after the players left.  And then there would be a fight again.  Or I also remember in GW2, sometimes you would clear out an enemy camp, and then some friendly NPCs would spawn after that event was concluded (say maybe some PPD show up).  They would guard the location for a while, but then some enemies would come.  And if no players were around to support, then the enemies would win.

[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

I've seen several hints at another idea I also like, or maybe I'm just reading in to it.  A couple MMOs have implemented dynamic events, I'm thinking of Guild Wars 2 in particular (though I also have seen it in FFXIV and I'm sure there's many others). I think that was one of the cooler unique elements to that game.  I guess we do have a couple things a little similar in CoH, like the Rikti Invasions, and the zombies.  Maybe this system can be evolved a bit more, with a look at how some other games implement them.  As it is now, the rikti invasions and zombies feel like what they are, repeats of one time events that weren't necessarily ever intended to be a cohesive and permanent system.  But there's some potential there.

[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

19 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

I used the wrong wording apparently and maybe should have thought it through a bit more as I have a more detailed take on it.

I didn't intend to imply that a level 1 that goes into a Hazard Zone should suddenly be the level of the Hazard Zone while they are in there.

 

Current rewriting::

While in a Hazard Zone, Team lead/Solo player would be ::

1) their level if below the Hazard Zone level cap

2) capped to the highest level able to get missions in the Hazard Zone

3) possibly capped to the highest level of the contact for a mission arc in a Hazard Zone if they have a related mission selected ... so they don't out level it.

 

I think if they change it that it would be "always on".

I think it would be a headache to make it a character based switch that could be turned on and off by a player - which would allow a player to suddenly make content easier by turning it off <--- which seem to me to be a foreseeable exploit.

Thanks for expanding on your point.  However, I still think it would be preferable to make it user selectable.  A few reasons:

 

1) Someone mentioned farming low lvl hazard zones for badges.  I can imagine people still do this, and if this is an actual use for the hazard zones, the last thing we need is to take this away so that they become even more dead.  Plus it was kind of cool back in the day to occasionally see a high level player come by and help you when you were otherwise going to die a grisly death.
2) Maybe I don't want to be capped to the hazard zone level cap, because maybe I want to fight all purples along with my teammates/etc.  Missions being an easy source of purple mobs are probably the reason they are the most common xp grind method now, whereas hazards were once great for this purpose.

 

It should be easy to make it a switch, just like the ability to set notoriety.  As for the ability to exploit, it's not much different from the fact that you can exemp and sidekick simply by joining a team, and un-exemp/un-sidekick simply by quitting the team.  To make it less prone to exploit, you could just disable switching it while in combat, and maybe it's a 5s "activation period" while you change, or you can only change while using the "rest" power  You don't really see people attempting to exploit the exemp/sidekick behavior because it's so easy to get xp/rewards in a normal fashion, it's not even worth the effort to exploit, so I don't see this as a big problem either.

[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

I think it would be easier mechanically to level down a player to the hazard zone versus leveling up an entire zone to a player.

Isn't that what I said? Sidekick brings up player level, exemp brings down player level, so how could I mean otherwise? But I think it should be optional, just like setting notoriety, except that the setting is specific to a zone and resets when changing zones.

[Hazard Zones: what might revitalize these?]

On 2/18/2021 at 9:16 AM, UltraAlt said:

This is a good one. Kind of like the hazard zones sidekicking you.

Building on this, I think it could make sense to simply also manual exemplar to any level within the range of the zone you are currently in (hazard or not). I could see hazard zones becoming a lot more fun by allowing this - and this should be quite low effort to implement. In the olden days, I seem to remember the hazard zones were popular enough that the devs wanted to discourage players from staying in there too long, and there was an XP penalty if you farmed the same mobs for maybe an hour. This probably still exists but no one ever farms this way in hazard zones anymore. Maybe allowing exemplar down would bring it back a bit. It's far too easy to just pass the level where it's might have been fun to go to Perez park, or whatever, but being able to go back when you're level 40 and see them as red or purple might actually be pretty fun.

[How the Auction House Works]

Thanks for your reply.  Yes, have done a lot of reading then, learned so much. 😉

[How the Auction House Works]

I know this is an old post, but I had a question.  When looking at crafted set IOs, it seems like all the levels share history, as well as bid/offer count.  I'm not even sure how people are able to buy and sell, as you can't tell if it's a lvl 25 or a lvl 50 one being sold..  This can't be intentional, can it?