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I was on an LGTF a couple of months ago where the leader set it to +0 with no indication beforehand that would be the case. We were steamrolling the first mission, so someone asked if we could increase the difficulty. The team was in agreement, but the leader refused to. Not even with a reason, that's just the way it was going to be. It got prickly. Two people left the TF. I stayed in because I never leave TFs, but I really do regret that I didn't. It was boring, the encounter between players hung in the air and nobody was talking to each other. That was a totally unique encounter, though, but it stuck with me for how uncomfortable the whole rest of the taskforce was. I think we can all agree that proper etiquette would have been to at least acknowledge what the team was saying, be open to discussing it and be fair with the expectations of the people you're playing with.

To those who want more challenge: I hear you. But there are good, well meaning suggestions coming from folks on how you might spend your game time. Please do discuss them, explore them, reason with what might and might not mesh with you. Give serious time to the ideas around how you could challenge yourself in the current circumstances of the game and try it. It will not be the path of least resistance and you will be in opposition with the nature of the game, but that's kind of the point. There are examples of challenge within the game. Challenge and Difficulty are nebulous subjects and are hard to put into words, but take the time to reflect on whether your feelings are well communicated. I personally make each character fund themselves (Except for a small loan of 1 million influence), buy only recipes and salvage or use merits to extend the progression of characters for longer. I try not to repeat content on one character, so I make sure it counts when I do. These things do work to help you sustain your interest, but it often means ignoring conventional wisdom and staying away from the status quo. To others: Please assume that those suggesting that there be more challenge are coming from somewhere well-meaning. Difficulty of the game is an impossibly intricate and incomprehensible topic to understand in its entirety, so please do not take the ways it might affect you personally. It may well be that the ease of the game is unsustainable to maintain a playerbase, as suggested. Or possibly not: we don't have the kind of data to conclude this. But nonetheless, it's a perspective, coming from peoples' experience that is worth taking seriously. Imagine the tables were turned for a moment and CoH was a ubiquitously difficult game (it shouldn't be - but bear with me). You ask on the forums how you can have a more casual time to suit you, but you are just told that it isn't that sort of game, to get good and that if you want a casual experience, run synapse - that's nice and easy. That kind of answer will do very little to nourish you. Surely there are other players like you who would benefit from more casual content. The game should aim to appeal to a wide range of tastes. Please don't assume the motivations of others in this subject. It may come from wanting a sense of superiority, sure. Maybe. But I doubt it. Rock climbers don't train hard to climb impossible cliffs to feel like they're better than people. Nobody plays tough cryptic crosswords or sudoku puzzles to feel like they're better than other people. And certainly few people play goddamn MMOs to feel superior to other people. That's not what challenge and difficulty is about, it comes from somewhere much more intrapersonal and much more humane than that. Games are somewhere we often expect to find challenge and difficulty, so surely it is understandable to get discontent when a game doesn't apparently deliver. I think it's far more likely that it comes from the experience of levelling, progressing and outfitting a character only to find that there is very little to do of value for the character. At least that's what I found and it is a disappointing discovery. I mostly play 1-35ish and I fantasise about what the game could do to make me want to bother progressing onward. If that experience is endemic to many players (again, no data to prove nor disprove this), then it could be something worth developing.

I'd like it if the medicine pool has a less 'devicey' option. Something distinct from empathy, but could be suited for magical or less technological powers.

I just sat down with my bots/FF mm. It's so good to be able to strategise without my henchmen hurling themselves out of safety. Best time I've had with them. Thanks Devs!

Since that topic was locked, let's not bring the discussion of who is trolling who to here. Having said that, definitions of challenge are significant and welcome. We're bound to disagree on the nature and appropriateness of challenge in this game, but it should all be good discussion.

I'm always disappointed if I find a TF is +0. Even more true if it is a longer one. The time is quite a big commitment, and it feels like a waste if there's no substance to play. +2 is a better sweet spot for game and time for me. I've been on LRSF speedruns - actual speedruns - that weren't advertised as such. I think that was a bit rude.

Take a look at some of the individual ideas that have come up in the thread. Granted there have been a few NIMBY posts, which is fair. There is still a lot of discussion about how we can achieve teamwork, strategy, and challenge in the context of the game's current state. I agree that the game - at least the endgame - makes every character either generic or substandard, which is entirely against the grain of how it should feel. Simplicity in the circumstance calls for simplicity in the characters. But I am not at all pessimistic that the opportunities for the game to feel diverse again are possible and I don't think it need be done by going backwards. It's also something that will take a lot of solutions rather than one silver bullet. I do not think that powerfulness and challenge are opposed goals. I also believe that challenge can be increased by altering or redesigning factors external to the players. A large part of this, however, is risk:reward. With both inf and exp lacking in much meaning, the incentive to increase risk even is quite flat. This is a tricky balancing act - How to provide sustainable reward to higher challenges without alienating those who want/need an easier, casual game.

I think this thread has largely been very well behaved. The topic is quite a prickly one by nature, and can easily meander into territories thay make people uneasy about the ways the game could change. It's good that those boundaries are clarified. We definitely don't need to try to assess the psychological state of other posters, though. A forum post does not provide anywhere near enough resolution to intricately understand the poster.

I know the design goal is for Sentinels to be sustained DPS rather than burst, but this would be pretty sweet. Opportunity definitely needs another look at. I say this as a Sentinel main. I totally ignore the mechanic.

I was under the impression that you obsessively hang on to every word I say.

I think dramatic rebalances to players is way too deadly to the ecosystem to change. I stay well away from those sorts of conversations. Maybe in hindsight, the game could have had different player values in the first place, but it's way too late to change them. I voted for the option "feel that only certain parts of the game need to be looked at (IOs, Incarnates, etc)", but thinking neither IOs nor Incarnates should be changed. More in that 'etc' bit. And for a lot of it, adding challenge just means bringing the elements that totally lack challenge or reward up to standard, rather than excessively difficult. Like streetsweeping. I'd also like to draw a distinction between challenge and difficulty, where difficulty is the balance and the relative level difference between enemies and players, which is set by notoriety. The game is difficult enough for me. Heck, I usually play on +2 for the sake of speed. Challenges are more like unusual encounters, need for strategy, making clever use of powers, obstacles or even just storytelling gimmicks. The older content of the game sucked at this and has aged badly. So it's finding ways to make some of that old content feel more interesting via challenge and reward. This is also where finding opportunities for control and support classes comes into it, though that's still quite a nebulous aspiration.

Nothing. I'm not in the corner of radical changes to the existing game, even less so from reading this thread. But there are underplayed, outdated or even obsolete parts of the game that could have a lot more value. Grind ≠ difficulty Grind ≠ challenge I've seen very few people, if any, back the corner of more grinding. I think that's a very narrow idea of what is meant by challenges.

Conversely yet still, incentive - from active enjoyment to reward - is part of this discussion. If we go by the idea that (let's say - I doubt this is true) because the majority plays AE farms, there should be more AE farms, we just end up playing into an echo chamber. Opportunity lies where there is nothing, not where there is already a satisfied playerbase.

The SG exits into the tower. Ouro spits you out right by the ferry. Both very convenient.

Tanks. I just didn't get them at first. I'm one of nature's scrappers. I want big hits, debt be damned. Now I love my tanks more than my scrappers. Nature versus nurture at work.

What even is this thread?

That Kheld hunter idea is making me think, and it would be a big'un and unrealistic'un. What about a nemesis system where players could create one or more nemeses AE-style. That nemesis and their gang would appear randomly in missions every now and again when you least expect them (perhaps with the exception of missions that already have an AV, so as not to interrupt). They level up with you and are scaled to you, being an incarnate as you become an incarnate. If they win the fight, they gloat and run off and despawn, so they don't become an insurmountable obstacle, but are a looming threat. I think it could have hilarious results.

I don't know if the current devs have any tricks up their sleeves, but historically this has been labelled impossible. But damn if it wouldn't be the best change to ever come to CoH.

Oh boy did I ever. In fact, of the nine characters I've rebuilt, only my Bots/FF MM, Machinesmith, has stayed the same. In the dark days of no CoH, I had a lot of time to redecide how I felt about those characters. They've had their Mary Sueness cut away for more interesting personas. My old main, Reep the Barbarian, is gone. Partly because he belongs to another time of my life and partly because I can't stomach the idea of BS/Dark again. He has now become a Nictus, devoid of his own identity, called Eidolon. He has the old costume as one of his alternatives, which was a nice nostalgia hit to do. But he's very much his own thing now. My main villain was Naazkorath, who was a... um... Dark/Fire brute maybe? He had a Pharaoh vibe to him. He's now an elusive, reality bending, Thugs/Time mastermind, Mister Grim, the immortal, faceless CEO of Grimcorp, a metahuman organisation that pretends to better humanity but has a dark secret agenda. It's been so good to be able to have these old characters back, and to have the opportunity to refine how I feel about them.

The command is /t <their name>, <message> but as frostbiter says, clicking their name in the chat window is a little speedier. Backspace will reply to the last person who sent you a tell.

I guess this got posted to Reddit. Really good to hear a wider range of thoughts on the subject. I'm definitely getting the vibe that leaving the balance of the player characters themselves should be left more-or-less alone. Difficulty should be (1) extrinsic to the character and (2) not ubiquitous. The tweaking that's happening is good, because it done with the intention of bringing more life into certain ATs/Powersets rather than making things any more difficult for them. I'm very pro adding more difficulty, but in the form of variety, unique encounters and improving opportunities where the game is currently neither challenging nor rewarding and are largely underplayed bits of content. Adding +5x16 only really makes things slower. Having done Synapse a couple of times this week (which is in dire need of the Posi/Yin treatment anyway), it's so underwhelming that the Clockwork King is just some matey boi stood in a corner at the end. I think this is an opportunity to add some drama to the game. There are several examples like this, but that's a familiar one. Streetsweeping, too, is an opportunity for more varied encounters, for interesting gameplay and for new rewards. There could be a lot more life and action in the streets. But I'm like a broken record at this point bringing this up. A big goal for difficulty is giving value to support/control powers towards the endgame, particularly in that lvl 50/pre-incarnate valley. For control, I think smarter AI is part of the solution here, where there's value in someone keeping the enemies locked down and unable to spread out to mitigate AoEs, run for help, get to cover, etc. I'm interested to know how folks feel about difficulty : reward.

I'm always talking about how streetsweeping is one of the weakest parts of the game. But it could be one of the best bits. It definitely needs a looking at.

I think Sailboat is making an absolutely fair point and significant contribution to the idea. This thing does have the potential to shape the game culture, possibly in negative ways. So it's valuable to discuss those circumstances and how this idea could mesh as well as possible with the current culture of game.

My guess would be it isn't included because it isn't in itself an arc. The badge is awarded for a series of loose missions. At least as I understand it. The missions could be tied together into an arc (even though there is no story connecting them) and the badge awarded for the arc's completion. The big change would be that the missions would no longer be granted in a random order. Can't see that being an issue.

Just checked on AH and found some for sale, so apparently so.