Reiska

I'd believe it. The most egregious one anyway is Malaise (who I'm almost positive should be an EB) having four copies of himself, but I think that mission might have carried a warning. 😛

There's barely any aligned language to remove anyway, all it amounted to was a couple replacements of the word "hero" and removing "sadistic" from the description of Dominator's inherent. None of the other villain ATs' descriptions clearly align them. In general I think the villain descriptions were much better written than the hero ones, but if someone were going to do a fuller rewrite it should be someone with broader experience than me. A good AT description at character creation should clearly and unambiguously communicate to the player: The expected role of that AT in general terms, e.g. Blasters are damage specialists How that AT differs from other ATs that share similar power sets, e.g. the varying niches of Scrapper/Tanker/Brute/Stalker/Sentinel, Controller vs. Dominator, Corruptor vs. Defender Some sense of how difficult the AT is to play for a new player, especially in a solo context (e.g. Controller and Defender have limited damage output, EATs should absolutely have a "not recommended for new players" tag) And no, I would absolutely argue against renaming any ATs at this point.

Yes, I would say they should. Since I'm bored I took a stab at doing a light rewrite of all of them to clean up both gendered and aligned language without changing the substance of the descriptions too much, which I'll stick behind a spoiler tag since it's long. I kept most of the substantive text unaltered, but removed aligned language in a few instances (except from EATs) and shifted all of the descriptions to second-person (I chose second-person because most villain descriptions were written this way and they were written later). Anyone can feel free to use these as a starting point for further cleanup/rewrites 🙂

It also means you lose access to your alignment power for a week of real time, however much that matters.

I'm going to preface this report by saying that I'm aware some of the missions in the Night Ward arcs give the player a warning about them being higher than normal difficulty and recommending that you form a team for them. Generally CoH gives that warning when a mission contains one or more Elite Bosses, which sometimes (but not always) downgrade to Bosses (not Lieutenants) when you have solo bosses disabled. That's not what I'm referring to; the missions with that message can be left alone. However - and I apologize that I can't name specific missions as I ran all the arcs over the course of about a week and didn't take notes - there are a number of missions that don't give that warning and still spawn Bosses, sometimes multiples at once, regardless of your notoriety. It isn't clear if these would all be EBs when run with bosses enabled or not; I didn't think to reset the missions to check that. Most of the missions affected by this also give you NPC allies, which I suspect were maybe intended to compensate for the increased enemy difficulty... except the "No Bosses" setting does successfully cap your NPC allies as being lieutenants, and so when you get to the bosses, they pretty much melt.

Checking in as someone else who also has this bug, yes I have saved my settings, and I usually have to reload them when I zone into a mission because of this bug. Without knowing the underlying code I'd wonder if it's a symptom of CoH being originally designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio.

These are not mutually exclusive positions, it can be possible for both Plant Control to be overpowered and Mind Control to be underpowered. I definitely remember Mind Control being considered as being pretty bad on live as far back as my memory of live goes (issue 4), and I also definitely remember Plant Control being considered to be the best control set basically from the moment it went live and people being surprised it didn't get nerfed when it got proliferated to Controller. I assume people like playing Mind Control because to someone who doesn't know the game, it's the most obviously thematic controller primary.

Yeah, it would not have surprised me at all if in the hypothetical universe where CoH didn't shut down, Paragon would have progressively revamped some issue 0 content to have more of this stuff over time; they were doing little revamps to older content all the time, like The Hollows in issue 16 for instance. I do think it'd be a good stretch goal for Homecoming to go through and clean up issue 0 content still, streamlining out some filler and maybe introducing a little more map variety without actually changing the overall plot of those arcs.

I had a long elaborate reply typed up and then crashed my browser and lost it, so I'll just retype the tl;dr version of what I was going to say: If new players are expected to interact with the AH to sustain their influence flow (and I think they should be), then fixing the massive problems with the AH UI needs to be a higher development priority The game used to obliquely hint at the connections between certain villain groups and certain origins through the issue 0 hero contacts' biases in what villain groups were involved in their arcs and what enhancements they would sell after you did enough missions for them, but this link was broken when they were made to no longer sell enhancements New players don't have the institutional knowledge to know that it is a bad idea for them to give up all influence gain from defeats in exchange for double experience; you can argue that this should be intuitive or obvious, but the value of specific amounts of currency is not immediately apparent until you've played for a while Regarding confusion of the system, "Should we even keep enhancements tied to origin?" is a question that I think needs to be asked, but one I don't have an opinion about, nor does it have an obvious correct answer; if enhancements were no longer tied to origin it would be even more of a vestigial mechanic than it already is An idea I saw no one in this thread suggest is extending the usable level range of DOs and SOs beyond the current +3 to -3 range; if it were up to me I'd suggest +3 to -5 instead, and also reducing the bonus degradation per level from 10% to 5%

Interpreting what Jimmy said in this way is taking his words in bad faith IMO. What they're actually saying is that feedback on features which are no longer part of the build is noise. I do agree that they could do a better job of formally stating, for example, why they decided on particular changes between builds or why certain things are off the table (like, for instance, the AoE immobilize arguments in the Assault Control thread). In this case the people making those comments are upset that the original bonus with the aether *isn't* making it live, so from their point of view they *are* worse off. But yes. In 20 years of playing MMORPGs I have yet to see a single game update in any MMO that I have been 100% pleased with. Every single change will have both fans and detractors.

I remember feeling that redside story arc merits were undertuned even back in the Live days, and it's compounded further by the fact that they don't have expansion zones like the Hollows, Faultline, Croatoa, or (until I27 Page 7, anyway) Striga Isle, all of which give a bonus pack of merits for completing all the zone's arcs. So I'd be inclined to agree that villain story arcs should give more merits than their content length would otherwise justify.

Penny Yin more likely I'd bet, and in sheer cash value, 1 aether is currently worth somewhere in the ballpark of 11-12 merits. Anyway I would have preferred a solution that retained the aether reward while removing the incentive for dark patterns in team formation, to be clear. But at least you removed the incentive for dark patterns in team formation.

I was operating on the assumption that the power description text is static text and designed in a way that it *can't* show level-scaled damage figures. Other posters have already noted that the in-game power details window is often misleading, inaccurate, or simply information overload. Either way, I'm not married to Damage Scale as a unit either; *any* consistent unit is fine.

Yeah, immediately directing newcomers to Mids would be information overload. But I think you could do a lot better than the current disclosure without overwhelming players. Simply disclosing the damage scales and base cooldowns of powers in game in place of the "Damage: Moderate" etc. tags would go a long way. (Never mind that some sets are missing even those; Battle Axe, for example.) Something like, taking Broadsword/Hack as an example: Before: You Hack your opponent for a high amount of damage. This attack can reduce a target's Defense, making him easier to hit. Damage: Moderate. Recharge: Moderate. After: You Hack your opponent with your Broad Sword. This attack can reduce a target's Defense, making them easier to hit. Damage Scale: 1.64. Base Recharge: 8 seconds. You'd need to edit the tutorial a little bit somewhere to explain what a damage scale actually *means*; most current MMOs express the power of special abilities as a comparison to auto-attack damage, but we don't have autoattacks here to use. Still, the basic idea of "higher damage scale = stronger" is intuitive. FFXIV actually uses a similar concept as Damage Scale in how it presents ability information to players; they call it potency there, and at least for physical abilities, potency 100 is equal to 3 seconds' worth of autoattack damage. Note that you don't necessarily have to present the numbers in the same decimal form as they're used internally; if you think it'd be easier for players to digest, you could just as easily say "Damage Scale: 164" instead of 1.64 - at the end of the day it's an arbitrary number that lets you compare powers across sets. You could just as easily revive the old player measure of Brawl Index and use it as the basis, but given that the current devs typically use Damage Scale in patch notes, it's probably best to just present that.

+1 to both of these. I don't see any real reason why we can't (or shouldn't) replace the vague descriptors with the numerical Damage Scale, or a number derived from it but made more player-friendly somehow. As for Mids Reborn, well... it's a great tool built on extremely legacy code that runs very sluggishly.

Something that came to mind from in-game conversation: I think the game inconsistently uses the terms "stun" and "disorient" to mean the same thing in various contexts, and feel like we should standardize them to one or the other.

Agreed, really; the biggest challenge would be making sure that the initial 3 zones have enough XP in them to *get* you past 20 when not using any multipliers. I think covering 1-30 with them is probably a very big stretch, but 1-25 is probably vaguely doable (might necessitate larger arc completion rewards maybe. Or teaming.) I'd probably then extend FW out to 35 and make NW 35-50. You could also examine whether it's possible to let Praetorians go directly to and from Cimerora (without being able to "backdoor" into Primal Earth this way, of course) - Cimerora is well before the historical divergence point so there's no logical reason they shouldn't be able to go there if you can come up with a reason for Praetoria to have time travel in the first place. You probably have to limit them to only the repeatable missions there though, or create a set of Cimerora arcs specifically for Praetorian characters (remember, after all, while the ITF is co-op, the zone arcs in Cimerora are actually aligned). Easier suggestion IMO: rewrite the first bits of Habashy's arc to simply not assume the player is coming from the Galaxy City tutorial. Issue 21 was a long time ago, we can treat it more like legacy content now rather than current lore. /chat_save 🙂 At the very least Task Force contacts should have a more prominent warning when starting the task force that doing the content with less than whatever the minimum number of players for the TF was on live (and why). I'm not against requiring you to visit Null the Gull to unlock the ability to solo TFs, though.

Honestly, I could dig this as a reasonable compromise solution. As others have noted I don't think this is actually an intentional effect, but rather just a product of the fact that the devs wanted it designed such that a team featuring all of the original aligned archetypes together fills the bonus, but villain ATs (having been intentionally designed to hybridize roles rather than specialize) complicate the matter. You could just about as well argue that Masterminds should be classified under ranged damage rather than support (after all, Corruptor support values are stronger than MM's). Regardless of anything else, if the roles defined at character creation don't match the roles given by this system, you're sending mixed messages, which is bad. As to the original question at the end of the quote: the fact that those ATs do less damage. The min-max "meta" is to bring the exact minimum amount of tanking, control, and support necessary for an efficient clear, then load up the rest of the slots with pure DPS. If you don't have enough tanking or support, you'll have to slow down to compensate. Control in general has a pretty low value in most 8-man team scenarios, but especially at level 45+, as most enemies will simply die way too fast to ever apply it and the few that won't (AVs/Heroes) are hard-coded to not be possible to fully control (purple triangles).

I can't speak for others, but I'm not "mad" about it at all; I'm with you in that it's not going to change my behavior in joining or forming TFs if it goes live as is. I'm just concerned that it's going to incentivize behavior I consider to be bad for the game. Even if the number of people who decide to drop from a forming TF team before it starts because it won't earn the PA is small, I am extremely confident that it won't be zero, and it will make the process of getting a TF started just a little bit more annoying, especially for TFs that are already annoying to get people to want to run anyway (e.g. Shadow Shard TFs). Having reflected on it more, I suspect this may actually be more of an issue long term than team leaders being picky about recruitment.

Serious question: how feasible (and how controversial) would it be to look at fixing the tuning of low-level goldside to be less hostile to new players?

GL would be general liability

Would it be possible to make the 5th Column guy's arc optional/skippable and allow players to just jump in at the second step? Seems like that'd resolve a bunch of people's concerns. Could even implement it with an alternate single-mission "arc" where your villain essentially just does the "sorry, I don't work with your kind" speech and bashes the fash. I can understand that this wouldn't be able to make it in for this page most likely, but figured the suggestion would be valuable. EDIT: because some people apparently didn't understand me correctly, I'm not saying the first arc should be removed, I'm saying players who aren't comfortable doing it should have the option of skipping it without being locked out of the rest of the zone's content. That's all.

I have literally never seen anyone forming a team for HM 1 and I don't feel comfortable forming one myself with no experience. So, yes, I have not done HM 1. But again, I am not complaining about the addition of additional PA vectors. I think there needs to be more of them! I am complaining about adding a specific vector which I believe will likely incentivize bad behavior. Because we know that many people will not treat them as optional, because we have seen them not do so over and over and over again in many games including this one. The path of least resistance + most reward is almost always taken. That's why so much of high end teaming that isn't AE farming is +4x8 Council/CoT farms in PI; why would you *choose* to fight Arachnos or Carnies when you can fight those easier opponents for the same reward? Why do you think people are complaining so much about those two specific villain groups getting buffed in this very same patch? Why would you choose to form a team that gives you less rewards when you quite easily can choose not to do so? Literal decades of history of game design has taught us that player psychology always sees the best possible result as the expected baseline and complains whenever they get less. The devs can intend it as a bonus and call it a bonus all they want; it will not be treated as one. This sums it up pretty well, I think. If scenario 1 happens, I think all of us can agree it's a bad outcome, yes? (I'm not addressing the likelihood of that scenario, because it isn't relevant to my point.) If scenario 2 happens, nothing changes except a small increase in PA flow, probably smaller than is actually needed. So I really have to ask the devs: What is the actual primary intent of this change? Is it a purposeful attempt to influence the way players form teams? Is it a purposeful attempt to increase the flow of PA into the game? Is it both? Because right now, the core intent is unclear, and without knowing that core intent, it's difficult to give meaningful, directed feedback on the change's efficacy. If the primary goal is to influence the way players form teams, I think it will be reasonably successful at doing so, but I question if that is something we *want* to do and I agree with some of the other voices around here that it would make me less excited about attempting to team with people in general. If the primary goal is to increase the flow of PA into the game, I think there are other suggestions already in this thread that would do so more effectively while not being nearly as contentious or controversial, and I think this is a worthy goal that should be pursued. What I want to see is an unstated scenario 3: a better feature goes into the game that doesn't divide players and achieves the intended goal of the designers. So what is that goal?

Okay. I don't like this in its current form for the reasons broadly expressed by Doc_Scorpion. I do think there should be additional vectors for PAs over what we currently have. I don't think this specific one is a good idea. Several other posters in this thread have all made good suggestions for alternatives like Andreah, Dispari, and Bastille Boy. I would add to that pile that I think it would be a good additional fungible reward for joining additional WST runs beyond the one that gives you double merits in a week. Yes, I realize you already get a badge for that. Badges aren't fungible, a fungible reward will be a stronger incentive. (Not that people have issues getting WST runs generally, just, if there needs to be more PA vectors - and I think there does - this seems like an easy vector for them!) Unfortunately, as some others have noted, there isn't much to actually test on Brainstorm about this change beyond the sheer fact of whether it awards correctly or not - the psychological effects of it on the playerbase at large are not ever going to be testable in a beta environment because it's simply not a useful sample.

For what it's worth, this isn't my concern at all; I'm all for additional vectors for aether in general. My concerns are about the methodology, not the substance. I'm old. I've been playing online games for a long time, including this one. I'd like to think I have a pretty good intuition for how this will affect player behavior. That said, I'd honestly be overjoyed to be proven wrong in this case! As best as I can tell, the people against it are overwhelmingly concerned about points 1 and 3. I have not actually seen point 2 brought up by anyone criticizing the system; every post I have seen about point 2 is from a supporter who appears to be misreading people's concerns from skimming the thread rather than reading the arguments in detail. (It's possible I've missed some posts myself, or that posts in that vein have been hidden/deleted by the moderators.) I fully agree with this, but having the game incentivize this behavior - even if extremely lightly - is likely to amplify it and produce negative vibes where they don't currently exist. In case I haven't been clear enough, I think the overall goal of "add more aether vectors" is a worthy one. But I can't help be concerned that this particular vector is going to introduce a layer of friction to team formation where one currently exists. And, to be clear, I fear this friction has the potential to be two-sided; while everyone in the thread (including myself) has focused on the hypothetical situation of a tyrannical team leader refusing invites to people for being the wrong ATs to get the bonus, there's also the equally possible bad situation of a wholesome and friendly team leader having increased difficulty filling their team because of individual players refusing to stick around unless the leader ensures the bonus is earned. (See the quote below) I couldn't agree with this more. I think this particular issue has generated so much controversy and noise because it's one that gets to the heart of community psychology and overall vibes. CoH's community and friendly vibes have always been one of the game's strongest draws for people, and as a result, people are deeply fearful of any kind of change that they feel has the possibility to change those vibes. This isn't new, nor is it unique to Homecoming; similarly strong reactions happened during the Paragon Studios era over the introduction of inventions, the introduction of "Master of TF" badges, the introduction of CoH Freedom (and the chat restrictions placed on free accounts), and the introduction of the Incarnate system, too. In complete fairness, the good news is that in most of those cases, people's fears turned out to be unfounded: I never heard of people being kicked from teams on live for not using IO sets. People who attempted Master runs were largely okay with the possibility that they might fail and have wasted their time, and in all the attempts I was ever part of, we either re-formed and started over if the failure was early, or simply finished the TF for the normal rewards if it was late I also never heard of people being kicked from teams on live for not having incarnates. The one counterexample I can raise is that I did occasionally see people's tempers get heated when attempts at the ITrial badges (which had bonus merits attached to their success) failed because of mistakes or, rarely, intentional griefing. And, of course, the common thread there is that there was a tangible reward for succeeding at the task (as opposed to a fully intangible one such as a badge) like there is here (albeit a small one). I'm honestly less worried in the long run about "not getting teams" than I am about people seeing me as "the bad guy" because I'm not personally inclined to drag out the process of forming a team and reject people because they're the wrong ATs for the bonus. It doesn't matter that much to me; I pretty much "no-life" games. I do worry it'll be more problematic for more casual players who might only log on long enough to run a single short TF then be done for the night.