Reiraku

And you nuked Ghost Widow

The article is real, but the text has been edited. Most of the content is the same, but the edit closer reflects the reality of what happened.

Hi Boomie! Are you talking about the PvP interview Positron did that was edited? Because I have that one too.

A few were mine too. Then we got things like this:

Here's a screen of the beta boards for i13. Notice the post counts for each feature

Sadly, it was an all too common thing to see on the forums.

Dragging out some OLLLLLD screens from back in the day. Don't mind me. I'm just feeling nostalgic is all.

As a PvP regular, I can promise you it was awful. The things I've seen said about PvP and PvPers from PvE players was far worse than anything I ever saw from a PvP player. Everything from tasteless comparisons to AIDS, wishing terminal diseases on people who PvP'd, and general vitriol from a genuine Nazi apologist (yeah, you read that right). It got pretty sickening.

i13 killed PvP. During beta, a huge number of the PvP community tested the changes and pointed out everything busted/bad with them. People who weren't into PvP looked at the patch notes and said, "yeah, that looks great!" and never bothered to PvP anyways. Then when the devs decided to keep the changes rather than rework them, the majority of PvPers left and no one came to replace them. Ultimately, you can't fix the core of the problem, which is people (as was previously stated). Some people simply don't want to, and this game doesn't give them a reason to. There's little variety, unwieldy systems, and everyone who is playing already has cemented their opinion of it.

In this case, it would be because of me and Castle talking about it. I won't go much further into the topic as to not derail the conversation, but a lot of these details came about around when Blasters got Psychic Blast proliferated to them. Back to the PvE side of things, enemy AI actually was changed relatively early on when it came to aggro and player proximity. If you look now, enemies will delay slightly (very slightly, but noticeable) when they notice you to when they attack. Before, they were quicker on the draw and would fire just as you could attack them within their aggro range. Before travel suppression, it was pretty easy to lock an enemy into "melee" mode by getting close enough to trigger that change in the AI, but never let them get close enough to actually attack. You could just run a mob in a circle while blasting away freely. The check to target ranges cycles a lot quicker now, I believe. This change coupled with travel suppression, solved a vast majority of the problem.

Outside of Hurricane, there wasn't a power changed with PvP in mind as the primary reason. Even after they changed Hurricane, Castle still thought it was too good but left it alone. This is evident as after i13, when PvP was given its own set of rules for how powers were balanced, the devs didn't go back and rebalance powers in PvE. It's because the balance was done for PvE to begin with. PvP has been, and would always be, an afterthought to the devs.

Funny you should mention that. Before we had Travel Suppression as we know it, the devs implemented a to-hit penalty when SS, SJ, Fly were toggled on. It was hugely unpopular and lasted about one week before we got the travel suppression we know today. There were other reasons they implemented it (eight total from the conversation I had with Castle about it), but I wasn't privvy to all the details. PvP factored into about 3 of the 8. Enemy AI had something else to do with it.

Just clipping this part as opposed to quoting the whole thing for space purposes. What you're talking about is often referred to as "tiering" in the FGC. People will always gravitate to the "best" or most effective, that's just the nature of the game. What we mean by homogeny in this case is every set playing the exact same. Same damage, cool down, and same properties with almost no variation. Similar to how Champions' does their power sets. To that, I agree with your overall point. We are very fortunate for the diversity in gameplay that we have in the sets. Popularity or not, we have to choice of other playstyles if we so choose.

I'm kinda mad I missed the PvP discussion in that other thread. That said, hey @macskull, I know what that one power is! As per the current discussion, PvE balance matters to a degree, but not a ton. At least, not to HC where revenue and such are affected. In PvP, it matters more, but that's still not a huge single player priority. The fighting game comparison is even more focused on balance, because that's the entire game as single player competition (except for those few SFxT tag tournaments that ran 2 on 2). Even in the FGC, there's a voice against making things TOO balanced, as it can homogenize a game and make characters feel too "samey". The Tekken community has fears over this and work to keep as many characters viable without over balancing the cast.

ET's animation change really had nothing to do with PvP. It's just that PvP gets made the scapegoat for any unpopular power change that happened in the game. While it was live, only one power was changed because of PvP, and that was Hurricane due to how it could REALLY break base raids. The animation change to ET came from Castle reviewing the powers/damage formula and balancing it based on cast time rather than cast+recharge, since recharge was VERY easy to get now. ET was grossly outside of that formula, so he brought it in line, then tweaked the damage up in trade for the self damage. The problem with EM is that it's a set with very few tools. It's just a big bag of hammers that's slightly different than each other, when other sets have different tools other than hammers.

Dark/Dark can be amazingly effective for stalkers. Put the Theft of Essence proc in Dark Regeneration and build for soft capped Smashing and Lethal damage. Just doing those two things alone will make you an absolute monster.

"Get moar phase. Ho ho"

Yo Syn! How ya been?