Reiska

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...)

I was going to report this one today, but searched first, but just wanted to note that this one is still live as of 1/10/24.

I think it's because with the new system for how speed boosts stack, they can no longer put a speed boost on Shinobi-Iri because, as it is a toggle power not flagged as a Sprint, it will no longer stack with any true travel power, so putting it on Kuji-In Rin is the only way it can be made to still stack with a true travel power.

Most of this looks good, although I'm disappointed by no re-evaluation of the overly high endurance cost on Energy Melee's cone compared to other similar melee cones.

Aha! Yes, that makes sense, I forgot the Stalker version was different from the others and the patch notes didn't clarify.

Huh, this is way higher than most other melee set cones - is there a particular reason for it being set so high? For instance, this is a higher cost than Battle Axe's Pendulum (which hits considerably harder). For that matter, it's also higher than Whirling Hands, which does similar damage in a better AoE.

When I customize the colors of my various Energy Melee attacks on a Scrapper to all have different colored fist pom-poms, in actual play, the fist pom-poms don't change color and instead stay whatever color is assigned to the first attack I used. Everything otherwise works fine; the hit effects on the targets are the right color and such.