macskull

PvP is by nature a competitive environment and there is always going to be some amount of talk back and forth. That's true in this game and that's true in any MMO, MOBA, FPS, or anywhere competition exists. Your analogy doesn't really work - I think everyone who is even a little bit interested in PvP understands it's a competitive environment and there's going to be some trash talk but they can also completely eliminate that with tools they have available and they're still left with a fun game. If I went to a restaurant like you described, as long as the service was good and the food was good, I couldn't care less what the other people were saying if I literally didn't have to hear them. EDIT: There have been a variety of answers to the OP's initial question. To the people who simply say "I don't like PvP" or "there are no rewards" - those are perfectly legitimate answers and at least you're being upfront about it. Many of the other answers regarding difficulty of building a character, or having to build a character in the first place, or not liking the players... meh. The tools exist to solve all those problems, the only real barrier to entry at that point is your own motivation to do something about them.

The arena PvP community actively looks for new players, forms teams, and holds organized events. That being said, with very few exceptions PvPers are not GMs and have no way to police or stop the behavior you're describing. It should be pointed out that sort of behavior is mostly found in zone PvP and you can disable chat from the opposite faction and /ignore those you don't want to hear from. Getting rid of the broadcast chatter solves a pretty big part of it. It is incredibly disingenuous to argue the PvP community insults those who are interested in learning while ignoring the efforts of that same community to get new players interested in PvP.

I think Discord is commonly used even for the beginner-oriented events because it's just easier to put out information that way. If you're not inclined to listen or talk in voice chat that's okay and as long as you make that known to whomever is calling on your team they should be able to work with that. If I know I have people on my team in those events that don't have voice chat I'll call targets in team chat with a bind and I'd expect the player without voice chat to have an identical bind to show when they're on a target. You don't need voice chat, but it does make it easier.

It also says it's an AoE with 255 target cap - the heal and other buffs are applied to all targets within the listed radius, even to the defeated leaguemate you activated the power from - but since they're defeated they can get any buffs except rezzes so nothing happens to them.

When HC first launched and AE XP was actually full value (and you had to pay for XP boosters) my first few 50s were something around 45 minutes. It's a little less than twice that now, but I haven't actively sat down and knocked out a 50 in one go in quite a while. Still pales to those 15-minute 50s back on live though...

I mean, yeah, that's always been true. In a competitive environment there are going to be some powers or sets that are better in certain scenarios than other ones. That's true in this game, that's true in almost every other MMO, and that's true in pretty much every competitive video game. I think it's fair to say "I don't like PvP because I don't like things that are competitive," but trying to blame that on the game's mechanics seems a bit disingenuous. I can be competitive on a character that isn't "meta," I'm just making it a little bit more of an uphill battle.

"I don't PvP because only certain powersets are good at PvP" != "I don't PvP because the powersets that are good don't interest me." Besides, it's not really true. I've seen some pretty wacky builds be somewhat successful in PvP. Success in PvP still has a lot to do with the person at the keyboard. That being said, the things you mentioned can be competitive - what build can clear X farm fastest, or what build can solo Y AV fastest, or what build can solo Z task force the fastest. There's always going to be one singular answer for those. There isn't one singular answer for "what build is best at PvP" because PvP doesn't work that way. Besides, aside from 1v1 scenarios (which have always been sort of rock/paper/scissors) you can always call for help from friends. If you're just hopping around a PvP zone trying to get badges and you run into problems, grab some extra people. Even with PvE builds a larger group of coordinated people will have some success.

Is this a joke?

I don't think I've ever spent close to even half that on any of my PvP builds. Enhancement converters, lowball bids, and patience are your friends. EDIT: To clarify, I meant relative to live. Most of my characters now have builds I would have never had on live simply because everything is much more affordable and it's even easier to make inf. A build that might cost me 300-400 million here would have been 5+ billion on live, easy, probably even higher.

Nothing, really. People have hosted PvP events in zones before but they're not particularly popular. It's hard to balance sides when people will naturally want to gravitate toward the side that already has more players. It seems at this point that players prefer to play at level 50 anyways, which pretty much leaves Recluse's Victory. Zone PvP on its own has quite a few issues which I doubt will ever be seriously addressed. (Emphasis mine) I hear this a lot but I don't really buy it, especially with how trivial it is to level/IO/accolade a new character on Homecoming. Yes, you'll be more successful at PvP with certain powersets and builds, but that's true for pretty much everything in this game. If I want to make a +4x8 fire farmer I'm not going to roll a Mercs/Kin Mastermind. If I want to build a character to solo AVs and GMs I'm not going to use a FF/AR Defender. PvP is the same way - anything can do it but you'll be way more successful if you're built for it. The biggest difference there is that the NPC AI in this game is relatively dumb and the powers enemies get is pretty limited, compared with PvP where you're actually encountering other players who have (usually) put some thought into what they're doing.

Neither target caps nor ED had anything to do with PvP, so I'm not sure why you brought those up in response to my statement. Also not sure why you keep bringing up Blaster damage in particular as if it was the only difference between PvE and PvP. For what it's worth, the percentage of Blaster damage that was unresisted did get tweaked for balance at least once.

PvP travel suppression is disabled in zones and off by default in the arena.

PvP does have a pretty steep learning curve. I don't think you can remove that without fundamentally changing how PvP works, and the last time that was tried it didn't go over well. At this point the biggest influencer of getting new players involved in PvP is the community as a whole, and I think the community has been doing a pretty good job of that. The population of players active in at least somewhat routine arena PvP has only grown over the last few months because of the efforts of a few key players. Turns out there's still a lot of interest in PvP if it's presented as an event that is specifically geared toward being friendly to new players. Yes, some of the players who show up to the events play a few matches and decide it's not for them, but that's okay.

You know there were arenas before PvP zones, right? Constant balance tweaks and changes are the nature of the beast in any PvP environment because they mix things up and respond to combinations/powers that are too good. Part of the problem is that PvEers will immediately jump into a PvP-related thread and blame PvP for nerfs or changes when in reality there's only been one power in the entire history of this game that's been nerfed solely for PvP reasons. I'd be willing to bet there's not more than one poster in this thread who knows what that power is. Objective-based PvP is something the PvP community has been asking for for a long time - and I think the Shivan temp power and Warburg nuke temp powers were the team's original attempt to make something like that happen. Like, you'd have a team going in to collect meteor samples, or escort scientists, and the other side's players would be trying to stop that so it would be up to your team to keep those players alive. As with pretty much everything else in this game the developers' vision ended up being nothing like what the players actually did. I disagree with your second paragraph though, because that is exactly the sort of situation the Issue 13 PvP changes tried to create. The implementation of those changes ended up seriously lowering the skill ceiling while making PvP more confusing to new players since nothing worked like they were used to, and it seriously lessened the effectiveness of many support powersets. XP and inf are extremely easy to come by on Homecoming with a bit of effort so it's not really a stretch to be able to afford a PvP build on a character if that's something you're really interested in.

The arena crowd has been pretty good about getting involvement going. There are 4 active "competitive" teams right now and 3-4 more "starter" teams full of players that are newer to PvP and want to learn. Attendance at the beginner-friendly PvP events has been pretty good. Zone, on the other hand... obviously the only zone with any regular activity is Recluse's Victory on Indomitable (and very rarely on other servers, usually when a team wanders in for badges). The arena community has been self-policing pretty heavily in terms of regulating or banning powers in the interest of balance and fun - for example the 8v8 "rules" right now are Alpha only, limit of 3 of any AT per team, one Poison per team, and most teams have agreed to not use 4-second-base-duration mezzes. This results in a more balanced and competitive environment than the "anything goes" environment of zone PvP. The unfortunate reality is that because this game is so easy and so casual-friendly it tends to attract the type of player who is not at all competitive and therefore is not at all interested in PvP. Sure, there are some who are interested in PvP, but here's how that plays out. Those players' first experience with PvP is probably going to be in a PvP zone where the sides aren't balanced to begin with and they're going to be going up against either a bunch of melee characters with T4 Barrier and the base TP macro or a bunch of Blasters with T4 Incandescence, a tray of T3 greens that heal for like 1500HP each, the base TP macro, and a team of support buffers sitting in their spawn waiting to recall them back to the base if they get so much as looked at funny. To top it all off, the players that tend to frequent the PvP zones while ignoring the other aspects of PvP tend to be some of the worst PvPers in the game, not only in skill level, but also in their ability to interact with people in general. So now these new players have all this going against them, and they're either going to decide within the first five minutes that PvP sucks and all PvPers are assholes without bothering to figure out why they're getting beat up, or they're going to to ask why, ask questions, and get better. That second type of player is pretty rare. EDIT: Realistically, to get more people interested in PvP, the mechanics need to make more sense and there need to be more tangible and meaningful rewards. PvP recipes dropping from NPCs kind of killed the rewards bit, but the mechanics bit might be fixable. It'd just take a lot of work.

This is because Vengeance does two things: Heals you and your allies Puts you and your allies into "vengeance" mode by granting a second power. It's that second power that provides the defense, tohit, damage, and mez resist/protection and makes Veng unable to be stacked - the Vengeance click power itself isn't what actually provides those buffs so that info doesn't show up in the power info window. Lots of weird stuff like that in this game.

No, I think they still have the base pathing requirements in place, but I'm not 100% sure. I tend to just barely keep up with what they're doing over there because a server with no XP in AE missions and questionable-at-best powers balancing doesn't at all appeal to me.

I think that's something Thunderspy was looking at doing. They re-enabled base raiding (lol) but IIRC they haven't fixed things like mez durations and other broken powers so it'd be a shitshow.

When page 4 was on the test server I ran a few arcs with a Rad/Fire Brute and Fire/Rad Tanker with essentially identical builds and my results showed that even with the radius and target cap buffs for the Tanker, the Brute was still faster, though not by as much as previously. The higher Brute damage cap still outweighs the increased radius/target cap. The earlier versions of the page 4 changes (double radius, 600% cap) had the Tanker pulling ahead but those got reined in (1.5x radius, 500% cap) before it went live.

Gauntlet radius/arc buffs do not apply to all powers - as a general rule the buffs do not affect armor set or pool powers and even in melee sets there are powers which specifically ignore the mechanic (Spine Burst and Footstomp are two I can think of off the top of my head). The fact that leadership toggles are getting the buff is probably a bug.

Gauntlet is a 1.5x multiplier, which would make 60ft Leadership toggles into 90ft. That being said, I don't think anything other than Gauntlet currently affects radius and arc. Range bonuses only buff range, not radius or arc (though you can make the argument that the longer range on cones makes their effective area larger, it's still the same arc).

If it is getting buffed from Gauntlet it wouldn't show in the power attributes for individual powers since Gauntlet's bonus is a global "proc" that is applied after the fact (this also helps out Tankers because proc calculations continue to use the non-boosted radius).

Seems like it's because the +range is flagged to not affect the caster: If not (target.entref == source.entref) Where the "not" should not be there. It's supposed to be a 15% range bonus which works out to an extra 9 feet. Also it seems like that effect is flagged as PvE-only which seems weird and incorrect.

This game is extremely easy/casual-friendly and as such attracts the type of player who is just not interested in PvP.

I think the issue with this is that open-world PvP would further dilute the PvP population which is already only really managing to keep one zone on one server active (granted, this is aside from the very active arena community). Additionally because of the PvE/PvP powers separation implementing this would take a lot of work because at least some of the PvP-specific differences are triggered by the map the character is on.