Reiska

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.

Apologies for the double post; Jack posted while I was writing the last one and had good points I wanted to respond to. Yeah; the inconsistency here is a problem, to say the least. Nitpick: Nothing in Homecoming forces a minimum team size. Plenty of TFs did force a minimum team size on the Paragon-era servers, usually at least 4 but sometimes more. A valid concern; it also won't mean anything to returning veterans because it's a new currency and there isn't really much in-game tutorialization on what the heck a PA is. When I first came back again after being away from the game for about 2 years, it took me a little while to figure out what they were on my own research. For what it's worth, way back in the Paragon days, I usually needed to seed my new alts with around 2 million influence to afford SOs at levels 25 and 30, but by the time they were due for level 35 SOs (or generic IOs) they were earning more influence from defeats and selling useless drops than maintaining the SOs was costing. Obviously, that's no longer really the case on Homecoming, since most players run with double XP from the P2W vendor and thus are gaining 0 influence from defeats. I still find that if I run story arcs or TFs, cash in the merits for converters or unslotters (whichever happens to be selling better that day), I can sustain a character on their own earnings, but it takes more seed money to get them going than it used to; I typically seed my alts with at least 5 million now. All this is absolutely a problem. I *do* agree with the decision to remove TOs (the values on them were so negligible that they were never actually worth buying), and I'm skeptical that even DOs are worthwhile to have in the game, but I'm not sure reducing a major influence sink (which enhancements are) is healthy. I'm also not sure increasing the influence flow (by reducing the Inf* penalties on XP boosters) again is a good idea either, although the thought of tweaking the penalties there did cross my mind (my thought was reducing the inf* penalties by 25%, multiplicative, so instead of -25%/-50%/-100% you'd have -18.75%/-37.5%/-75% for 1.25x/1.5x/2x XP). Otherwise the next best solution that comes to mind would be something like making every door mission clear drop a random +3 SO from a pool determined by AT that matches your origin. This would be a superficial break to the fiction of SO drops corresponding to the origin of the enemies you're fighting, but could be reconciled with the headcanon that your contact is giving it to you.

I've not shared anecdotes from other games of similar player psychology out of a desire to tightly stay on topic, but the closest analogue immediately coming to mind is the way players often behaved in FFXIV: A Realm Reborn's endgame story dungeons (which you were strongly incentivized to run daily with a large once-per-day reward bonus) until the devs made the cutscenes unskippable. Or, for an anecdote from this game, a substantial part of the reason we have cooldowns on merit rewards from repeating the same TF over and over again in a short period of time is because once upon a time, the most efficient way to farm reward merits was to repeatedly speedrun Katie Hannon's TF in Croatoa, because at the time it was the shortest TF in the game. (And before that, Paragon made it deliberately give too few merits for its time metrics to try to discourage it, as I recall.) If this change does go live, I would expect team composition toxicity to disproportionately hit extremely short TFs (like Katie Hannon and Penelope Yin), as people will be most likely to form them first thing in the day to get the bonus before moving on to longer form content.

I think there's overwhelmingly adequate evidence from the live servers - given the way a lot of people already act about forming 4* Advanced Mode groups - that this sort of thing will happen, because people's psychology just works that way, unfortunately. Players at large *never* regard a "bonus" as a bonus; they regard missing out on it as a penalty, every time. I've seen it over and over and over in other games, and as much as I think our community is nebulously better than other games' communities I don't think we're *that* much better. *gestures vaguely at Sentinel discourse* It probably won't be widespread. But I guarantee you that it will happen to someone, sometime, somewhere. And it never ever should. That's the problem to me: if even a single team leader ever kicks someone from a team a single time over this, it is a problem. Can you guarantee that it will never ever happen? Because if you can't, then I don't think this is a good idea.

Thinking on it more, I would worry not only about team leaders rejecting people because they won't contribute to a bonus prismatic, but also worry about people bailing on TF teams before they start because the team has the wrong archetypes. I get that there's a desire to add another reward vector for PAs; what if we made it a reward for running a WST more than once in a week (still on an 18 hour cooldown)?

I think the concept comes from a good place, but I'm old enough to worry that it'll lead to a measurable increase in toxic behavior on the part of team leaders. So I think it's best that it not go live in this form. It's basically impossible to keep players from optimizing the fun out of games, sadly. No, that would be demonstrated by a mass of thumbs up reactions. The mass of thumbs down reactions emphasizes how transparently you making that argument was in bad faith. No, they were arguing that if the diversity bonus goes live as is and then was *removed* the community would scream. Which they would. You're missing that there will inevitably be some people who form teams and reject people because they don't have the right AT to get the bonus PA.

Oh, is it? Well, color me the fool then. Awesome! 🙂

Not to nitpick, but this isn't quite accurate; the split is still much closer to 80/20 on Homecoming. (For instance, at the time of this post across all shards, there are 2672 heroes and 569 villains in game, a total of 3241 characters, of which 17.55% are villains. As for substantive points, everything I thought of has already been said by other people.

Considering that running a story arc through Ouroboros works through the same mechanism as Task Forces (which give merits to all participants), IMO, running story arcs as a de facto TF through Ouroboros with a team should do the same. Might open up a lot more variety in what content gets run by teams.

IMO, oldbies will adjust, and having 2 or 3 different names for what is essentially the same epic pool is confusing for new players (and, surprisingly enough, we *do* have new players coming in who didn't play during the Paragon Studios era). There's a clear enough intent behind this change that it's not "change for change's sake", it's just a change you don't like. Which is fair. 1. Strictly speaking, this isn't a violation of the cottage rule as originally stated by Castle (although it's straddling the line, sure, since if I did my math correctly the damage has been cut by about 44% for defenders, 53% for controllers, and 35% for corruptors); it retains the core functionality of doing AoE damage, albeit at altered strength, and the cottage rule never ruled out adding or removing secondary effects. [EDIT: I did not, in fact, do my math correctly, the correct numbers are 66% for controllers, 60% for defenders and 54% for corruptors] 2. The cottage rule was never a "hard" rule even during the Paragon Studios era; it was explicitly stated to be a guideline, not a mandate, and I'm pretty sure there were a fair few instances when Paragon "broke" it or was preparing to break it (e.g. issue 24 blaster secondary revamp). 3. That all said... HC's not Paragon, and they've shown themselves to be a little less conservative when it comes to power tweaks. Game design evolves; for all we know, Paragon Studios would have become more daring with power tweaks over time too in responding to trends in game design. Castle's cottage rule was never intended to be a straitjacket to enforce design stagnation; it was a tool to ensure that changes to powers were adequately justified against any disruption they might cause.

It's trash talk. Sentinels were fun before they got the buff (don't get me wrong, they did need it). They're more fun now. The only issue I think they have now is that due to the way their inherent functions, they don't stack well in teams with multiples (like the old Brute problem, but not as severe).

I suspect the actual core motivation here is "APP Soul Drain should not be better than Dark Melee Soul Drain". Which I agree with, on principle.

I'm betting the Kings Row image was posted specifically calling attention to Paragon City's motto: "The Birthplace of Tomorrow". My prediction is that now that the license stuff is worked out, issue 28 is going to actually advance the overall setting metaplot from the effective I24 stasis it's been in.

Hence "if anything", yeah. I don't think there's enough interest in PvP to justify the effort, and fracturing the population is already a problem with four PvP zones, let alone five; we barely have the PvP-interested population for one.

With as fast as you level in modern CoH, I actually think this is a pretty good idea overall. Usability issues can be addressed by just clearly indicating (perhaps in "Ask about this contact") what level range a contact's missions are.

I think it would be a better idea, if anything, to somehow introduce a fourth PvP zone specifically for incarnates rather than to make Recluse's Victory unplayable for the people who enjoy it as it is.

A lot of it also is just that the landscape has changed in the intervening years. CoH was very new player friendly compared to other MMOs in 2004, and still pretty new player friendly compared to other MMOs even in 2010 (when Going Rogue released), but the market has moved a fair bit forward by 2023 and it's now competing with the onboarding experiences of games like FFXIV which themselves probably learned a lot of lessons from CoH's onboarding experiences and the aforementioned general tendency of most modern games to much more explicitly point things out to the player. Some comments, nonetheless: Praetoria, just like City of Villains before it, suffers from the fact that the early-level content in Praetoria was overtuned compared to the low-level blueside content everyone was used to. I don't know that addressing this for Praetoria at least is desirable *now*, but it's probably not a bad thing to warn people of in general. It *might* be desirable to poke at it for redside. As noted previously in the thread EATs used to require you had a level 50 of their respective faction in a non-epic AT first. While I wouldn't advocate for re-locking them, they probably should have some kind of "WARNING: This archetype is more complex than most and is not recommended for inexperienced City of Heroes players" thing in their description for this reason. Likewise, a tweak to the tutorial prompt noting that it's recommended for people who have never played *this game* even if they're generally familiar with MMOs might be a good idea, considering that this game broke a lot of MMO standards in 2004 already and still does. (Most prominently still evidenced by how many players don't get that CoH is a game about the journey, not the destination; it's not a game that sequesters all of its real content to max level and that *still* really throws people because every other MMO still does that.) You didn't mention it, but the P2W vendor on Homecoming could probably be better signposted to new players (or returning players from Live). In general, a good step for issue 28 would be to step up the onboarding on changes that aren't immediately obvious from Live's issue 24 specifically - the P2W vendors and how they relate to the removal of the old Paragon Market cash shop, transit consolidation, the changes to the backend functioning of Wentworth's/the Black Market with respect to crafted IO level pooling and salvage pooling, etc. The introduction to the "con system" is in the tutorial that was skipped, IIRC.

Aha, so it is a market manipulation then. Some people have way too much time on their hands. 😛

Leveling too fast also actually breaks the progression of goldside; on the event that I level a character through there I usually forgo 2XP until 20.

Currently, the drop rates for invention salvage (when any such salvage drops) are 22/28 for common, 5/28 for uncommon and 1/28 for rare. Looking at the number of extant buy orders for each rarity of salvage on Wentworth's though, something sticks out like a sore thumb: either the drop rate for uncommon salvage is too low relative to the amount of uncommon salvage that is consumed by crafting IOs, or someone's trying to do some intense market PvP on uncommon salvage. (My reference point on this is how many buy orders are currently open on each salvage rarity. As of this writing, commons have 11,044 buy orders; rares have 14,350; and uncommons have a whopping 107,902. *Something* is out of whack there...)