battlewraith

Great job on these!

Sure, but that's not how most people play in my experience at least in zone. You decide you want to go screw around in a zone. You take something you think is going to work reasonably well and pop in. Depending on the conditions, you team up with other people as needed. That's pretty much the entire appeal of zone pvp, it's casual unstructured fights. If there's an organized group in there farming people, then yeah you're going to need to form a team and actually put some thought into what you're playing. But you quickly reach the point where you would be better off doing arena.

Yeah, absolutely. If you get in melee range and land your hard hitting attack, it should hurt bad. Kinetic melee scrappers pre nerf were awesome. That should be the standard. They should be able to hold their own (ie survive) against multiple opponents if played reasonably well. On the other hand, they shouldn't get as much benefit from being buffed on a team as squishies would. Melee characters are the best options for soloists wanting to try pvp. If they don't have a good level of survivability there's no point when you can play a blaster with epic shields and plant shields that can melt targets from a distance. It's also pointless if they can't reasonably drop targets when they do connect.

No not like any of those, which are all zone events, suffer from numerical balance issues and were fairly long and boring even back on live. Who knows, maybe it will resonate with someone who actually wants to avoid that kind of outcome.

IMO there is no way that they will ever balance pvp in a manner that will cause a resurgence of interest along the lines of what people here are hoping for. That ship has sailed. Partly that is also due to age--there are veteran players around that will quickly figure out what the new meta is and make that meta necessary to be competitive. If your pvp has a competitive deathmatch mode and no real ranking or matchmaking system then beginners are going to face a harsh learning curve. Look at something like mez duration. If they make it long enough for an average player to solo someone in an extended battle, that same duration is going to make it ridiculously easy for a skilled team to burn down targets. This game doesn't need a balancing of the current pvp. It needs a new pvp mode. Something that is objective driven rather than rewarding raw kill counts. It could feature a lot of pve elements that make use of different things like mezzes, debuffs, etc. I think this has always been brought up in discussions about pvp from the beginning but never seems to get any traction. Maybe because back in the golden age when nobody had a clue what they were doing, pvp was reasonably successful. Of course someone is going to pop in here and say "I don't like pvp and I don't want the devs to waste precious time catering to the 10 remaining people that pvp blah blah blah." My rebuttal to that is this: This is it. This ancient game is not going to through some sort of rebirth. It doesn't matter if NCSoft transfers the rights or someone buys a Superbowl ad. The extant target audience for it is here. And you're not going to keep their interest by keeping new content trickling in. Their interest is waning (or they are simply dieing off). It's turning into an online retirement home where every so often someone comes in and puts a new VHS tape in the VCR. I think you could put a more appealing pvp mode in that would be enjoyable for pvers and that would improve the overall health of the game.

Imagine if individuals didn't go off on bitter rants about a game community because some offhand comment rankled them. It's easy if you try.

Aside from the issues of grifting and money laundering, I believe there is a general criticism against the tool itself. The resource requirements necessary to support crypto transactions are extremely wasteful and damaging to the environment. Any good that comes out of crypto is unlikely to offset the damage it inflicts.

Lol noooo. I think it's easier to complete the Aeon SF than to be in the position of the noob being ganked, which is why you don't see anything remotely close to that in pve. It's a silly point anyway. A skilled boxer could knock out pretty much any untrained person that walks into their gym. That is not an argument for boxing being somehow easy, or easier than some other sport.

It's not just a matter of opinion. Pvp requires skills and attributes that pve does not. The main thing is that pve is static. The AI is coded and it's always going to behave the same way. Even the hardest pve content is a formula to be solved. Once you solve it, you can repeat those same victory conditions over and over again ad nauseam. Actual players confronted with losing will change their tactics in order to win. That difference is fundamental, relates to things like adaptability, reaction time, etc. and is not a matter of opinion. Even the hilarious Aeon SF vs Ganking Noobs example points to this. Where is it even possible in PvE to risk the prospect of getting ganked?

You're the one forwarding your pet theory that the unofficial pvp designation has made this server repellant to other players and is to blame for the lack of growth. I know you think this obvious and true and whatnot--but it isn't. And pvpers have listened to variations of this line of reasoning throughout the entire history of the game. For me it's the inverse. The guildmates I used to pvp with don't want to come back for a variety of reasons but a common thread is that they don't want to hear crap like this. Pvers can completely avoid pvp if they so choose. The Homecoming devs made improvements, but pvpers still have to pve in order to prepare their characters. Also in the other thread you said that the zone pvpers had gone to Excelsior to find victims. Haha? Pot meet kettle?

He was talking about the current population. You are pointing at the peak population--which actually undermines your point. It suggests that Torchbearer has lost more active players than Indomitable despite the latter having the unofficial pvp designation.

There are many different schools of thought regarding acting. Some are external and focus more on the physical presentation of the actor. Others are based on internal motivation to varying degrees--the most extreme being method actors that stay in character throughout the entire course of production. I don't think it's wise to draw conclusions about anyone's acting craft based on promotional interviews they give. Some actors just hate giving interviews on their work. Some are just trying to earn a paycheck and don't actually like the material they're promoting.

Most other games with pvp? Are these non-gamers who don't have a clue about the difference an MMO and something like COD? Pretty much every other MMO I've played has had more or less the same types of pvp as COH: instanced matches against teams and open world areas where you enter the space and then are flagged for pvp.

Also off topic, but on topic... Many traditional accounts of vampires describe them as having arithmomania--the compulsion to count things. A traditional defense against vampires is to go to the grave of the suspected vampire (during the day) and spill something like a bag of rice on it. When the sun goes down and the vampire emerges, it will stop and start counting each individual grain of rice--hopefully until it retreats the next morning. Perhaps the best modern example of this.....lives on Sesame Street.

When I think of vampires, I generally think of Tobe Hooper's version of Salem's Lot. The vampire is a sort of physical ghost. It's not that they're bullet proof, for example. It's that they aren't real in the sense that bullets meaningfully interact with them--like shooting a mirage. Intellectually, the typical vampire is a sort of parody of the person they were when they were alive. So children will immediately seek to turn their parents. A lover will obsessively track down their partner in order to feast on them. The master is a collection of cultured obsessions, with things like art, wealth, status, etc. All of which is a facade covering the instinct to ruin the natural order.

I don't think a Festivus style airing of the online grievances in this thread would be welcomed by the mods. My question for you is this: when those game devs said horrible things to you, did you quit playing those games?

One disgruntled badger informed me that people like me were "the reason why abortion needed to be legal." Lol.

I think it's reasonable to say this is bullshit. Pvp haters may have cheered the fallout from the I13 changes, which were aimed at making things easier for casual players, but they were just a vocal minority. I was a PVPEC server rep and organizer. I hosted events and training sessions to try to get people involved in pvp. There were several difficulties in doing this. Pvp haters was one of them, but I don't think it was the biggest problem. I was in constant competition with other events--badging, TFs, etc. A related issue was incentives. A lot of people just didn't feel like they got anything material out of the time spent--which is no doubt why the devs put badges and whatnot in the zones. Then there were the issues of building for pvp, dealing with pvp mechanics etc. Despite these issues, we did get pve player participation in PVPEC events. The problem was that the organizers had to do all the groundwork. As long as we scheduled, advertised, and ran these events people would come. If we stopped, they did not continue by organizing their own events. Also the idea that one thing killed pvp is wrong. It was/is a death of a thousand cuts situation. For instance, back in the day there was a lot of pvp activity on test server, including massive server vs. server battles. The devs didn't support this and wouldn't approve any schedule so the events were cancelled. After the arena was introduced, it received no new maps or features for a long time. The interface was confusing from the get go. At some point the arena stopped working altogether and the was no arena pvp for a substantial period of game history. Base raids were introduced, broken, and then just ignored. If pve had had the same lack of development, and history of broken functionality, it would've died as well.

Lol yeah ok. I was fairly frequently verbally berated for attacking people in pvp zones. The funniest one was when I was solo on a brute against a team of eight and they said they were going to petition me for ganking.

Pvp in this game is pretty much deathmatch. The simple objective is to kill other players, which means the most important aspect of the engagement is damage spam. And this leads to a situation where skill in an encounter boils down to finding and locking on to a target with the rest of the team, firing simultaneously, and then cycling on to the next target as quickly as possible while evading any incoming spike launched at you. It's like having several people hammering away at the same whack-a-mole table. There's teamwork and coordination in pve but it's nothing like this sort of activity. What this game needed was some sort of goal oriented pvp. The closest it got was base raids which didn't last very long and wasn't a great example of the idea. I played Battleborn while it was around and there was a popular pvp mode called Incursion. Something like this is what I feel coh needed: There were 2 teams of 5. Each team had a base on one side of the map with a large shielded sentinel robot. At the start of the match, the bases would start manufacturing little minion robots. Left to their own devices, these robots would cross to the other team's base and attack the enemy sentinel. These robots did a lot more damage to the sentinel robot's shields than player attacks. Players would level up during the match by getting xp from destroying enemy players and minion bots. They could also fight for shards that appeared in order to buy turrets, as well as freeing monster npcs that could help taking down the enemy sentinel. The match was over when a sentinel was destroyed or the match timer ran out. If the time ran out, then the game scored your team's overall performance--how many minions did you kill, how many players did you defeat, how many things did you build, etc. Not just one metric. I think a scenario like that would've been awesome for coh, different powersets and ATs would've offered great strategic variety to the match. And it would've appealed to a wider variety of players and playstyles.

The arguments that there is pve content in the pvp zones are equivocating two senses of the phrase "pve". Yes, if you are fighting an npc in a pvp zone there is truth to the description that you are doing player versus environment. Beyond that basic description, the statement is false. While in the zone you are flagged for pvp. The mechanics of the pvp zone differ from the mechanics of pve areas of the game. And the purpose and design of the zone is to facilitate pvp encounters. There is also the strawman being presented here that zone pvp does not also encompass interactions with npcs. The infamous Twixt used to teleport people into clusters of npcs in order to kill them. One way to get rid of something like rad infection used to be jumping into a cluster of npcs and aggroing them onto the enemy player.

Pvp mechanics are applied to your character whether or not anyone else is in the zone, along with the countdown that indicates when you are vulnerable to attack from other players. You know...because it's a pvp zone.

There are tons of things in the game that are not controlled by players, whether in pvp or not. This includes fundamentals like the game engine itself and the various assets that constitute the world. So if we followed this rich vein of logic to its conclusion, pvp would be something like floating in an existential void and using the power of your imagination to pew pew some abstract object that would represent another player,

The lore badge is not in the zone. The plaque is. Everything in the pvp zone IS automatically pvp content. You can split hairs all day, it doesn't change anything.

This is a suggestion thread. I don't think the intent was to give you a platform to complain about 90% of a group of players being childish pricks and trolls, whether you believe that to be true or not. I suggest you stick to the topic. He was referencing open world pvp in other games. This game does not have open world pvp. I suggest he stick to the topic as well. I was basically asking him what he hopes to accomplish with his sweeping generalizations about the overwhelming majority of a certain kind of player. I think that's pretty obviously a bad road to go down.