Some Random User

Yes. Yes we do. We are using the Teleportation Pool for a different reason. In regards to the second part, let's look at the way other Travel options are laid out and discuss them: A utility effect. [Hover]/[Combat Jumping]/[Haste] - Available at level 4. No other prerequisites. An attack. [Air Superiority]/[Jump Kick]/[Flurry] - Available at level 4. No other prerequisites. A Travel effect. [Fly]/[Super Jump]/[Super Speed] - These used to require level 14 and any other option from the same group. Now available at level 4. No other prerequisites. Something very over the top that is related to the concept of the group. - These used to require level 20 and any two other options from the same group. Something very over the top that is related to the concept of the group. - These were added later. You'll notice they're all "more worth taking" than their older counterpart. Easy to see what we should do. Let's totally revamp all five of the existing Travel options, top to bottom, soup to nuts. Hell, I wouldn't be against bringing up a special additional screen before level up at level 4 and forcing every toon to select one of the five options for free ([Fly], [Teleport], [Super Jump], [Super Speed], or [Mystic Flight]). At least then we'd know that everyone has a Travel option available to them. Here is what the Teleportation Pool was "meant" to look like: A utility effect. [Recall Friend] An attack. [Teleport Foe] A Travel effect. [Teleport] Something very over the top that is related to the concept of the group. [Group Teleport]/[Long Range Teleport] Let's fix that: I feel like [Recall Friend] is... fine as a concept? We can mess with the numbers so players feel better about playing a "support" toon. You're all right that [Teleport Foe] sucks. Let's make [Teleport Foe] worth having but not overpowered. That means tinkering with numbers. We can make this a cool effect that's worth taking, we just have to play around with the numbers. Can't have this be a entry-tier effect that is super good, so maybe demote this to T5 and make up an actual attack here? Maybe Super Boy punching the dimensional barrier or something. I'm curious about your thoughts on this. You're all right that [Teleport] needs a buff, but... what do we do? The [Super Speed] kiting problem still exists. We haven't addressed that. Any fix has to take that into consideration. The old T4s? [Group Teleport], [Group Fly], and [Whirlwind] all need more than buffed... They need super buffed. To paraphrase something I heard someone else say, if you want me to take a T4 from the Pool groups, I want them to reach through my screen and ¡@¢% 0≠≠ my eyeballs. If I'm going past the Travel effect I want the equivalent to something from a Primary Powerset at that point. I do feel that [Long Range Teleport] gives me this (though the cooldown and activation should both be halved). Maybe we could buff [Teleport Foe] so much that we can justify moving that effect all the way up here? More options. We can make [Group Teleport] a great way for Masterminds to love their pets around with them. We can replace [Group Teleport] with [Assemble the Team]. When I was new I thought that's what [Group Teleport] did, so I bet some other new players do as well. We can replace [Group Teleport] with an [Afterburner]-like option. That seems to be a popular idea. The only question is what the proposal would do to the other effects, which is exactly the problem. That's why I have a controversial solution... What if we dropped [Long Range Teleport] all the way down to where [Teleport Foe] is? What if we made [Long Range Teleport] with the existing half hour recharge time a T1 option, and buffed the hell out of [Teleport Foe], which we bring up here to T5?

Just my perspective; you may be showing confirmation bias. To get what I'm trying to show here, I wanted to show you two pieces by Malcolm Gladwell. Basically, in short, what I'm talking about is this tendency human beings have to kind of presume others are going to make their decisions based on the same experiences we personally have. This isn't about being wrong, this is about how two human beings can come to wildly different decisions based on the same set of information. Basically, different players select the Teleport Pool for very different reasons. Some want different things. If the different "camps" aren't each given a chance to shine then someone will get frustrated. I don't jump on the "what a pity" bandwagon very often, but we are screwing with a status quo and when we do that we should at least know who we're ticking off and why they should or shouldn't be listened to. Let's take a minute and discuss the different things we use the Teleport Pool for. 1: Moving [Recall Friend] away from the first few abilities is a bad idea. This is the rare kind of pick someone will dip into the pool for a single pick. Let's talk about why. I used to be a Taxi Bot; We built an entire Supergroup around [Recall Friend]. There were special events where we'd teleport players around the zone in seconds to get them all of that zone's exploration badges. We really pushed [Recall Friend] to the limits. I have played a lot of Teleport-using toons, and I honestly prefer [Teleport] over any other Travel capability, warts and all. I can also tell you that I know I'm in the minority on that. Most of the players who take [Recall Friend] are doing the same thing the original Taxi Bot (as in the toon named Taxi Bot) intended to do: They're making their teammates (in P.U.G.s) get to the mission faster. As many early players will remember, travel powers used to be gated with a level 14 requirement, and there were no X.P. boosters, only considerable X.P. debt. That doesn't exist anymore. That tanked the number of players taking [Recall Friend] so that teammates can skip directly to the Door Mission (used to be the fastest way to level up). There aren't many Taxi Bots anymore in part because there's no reason to proliferate [Recall Friend] to as many users as is plausible. The idea of summoning you back from a plateau in the Hollows isn't a constant thing now. That having been said, a lot of "support" players still slip [Recall Friend] (and only [Recall Friend]) into their build. The capability is randomly useful in teams, especially when there's a party-wipe. If I'm the last person up I can summon you away from the mobs and you can Awaken. Never mind calling a new player into the back of the Mission when they get in the door, or just summoning them to the door before the Mission. You used to take one of the Travel options because they had a second effect you had to take first as a prerequisite, and with how tight builds were that prerequisite was a big part of balancing the different options. [Haste] was useful for a lot of combat builds, far more so than [Super Speed]. [Hover], and [Combat Jumping] were useful for helping combat builds get closer to caps. [Recall Friend] was useful in a support way, so [Teleport] was taken by many support players. Each of them affected your choice of Travel effect because you had to take one of them (or a crappy attack from their pool) to get your Travel option. Now that you don't have to do that anymore players are still dipping into Teleportation to get [Recall Friend] just like they're still dipping into the Speed Pool to get [Hasten]. Do we want to discourage that? I think we shouldn't discourage that. Moving [Recall Friend] away from the first few abilities is a bad idea. This is the rare kind of pick someone will still dip into the pool for a single pick. 2: [Teleport] is the worst Travel capability, precisely because [Teleport] is inherently broken as $#!+. We're talking about just vanishing from where you are and showing up somewhere else. Ignoring space is fucking amaze-balls. Literally one of the most important concepts in any 3D space is distance, and [Teleport] effectively lets you turn that off. [Teleport] is unique among the Travel options as being by far the most abusable... almost. The live devs saw this way back in closed beta and they attached the unreasonable Endurance cost precisely to keep players from using [Teleport] in combat, just popping all over the battlefields, and easily kiting everything to their heart's content. The reason [Teleport] has a ridiculous activation cost is the same reason [Super Speed] is suppressed when you hit someone. If the game didn't do that you'd have an inherently better capability that just couldn't be rivaled. The flaws were a fix to a real problem that is still going to exist if we roll back the nerf. [Teleport] is the worst Travel capability, precisely because [Teleport] is inherently broken as $#!+. Any changes that we make need to be mindful of these two concerns. They're real, and they're important to address with our solutions. Thank you so much for reading all of that. Tell us what you feel we can do to keep mindful of these considerations while still bringing the Teleportation Pool into line with the Flight Pool and the Leaping Pool.

For some reason I thought the range on [Recall Friend] was set to the maximum value allowable by the engine? Is there such a thing? Can we get confirmation?

False equivalency. Profit and population are not the same goal. You're being belligerent. I'm following the forum guidelines by placing you on ignore.

We already prevent activation and play a sound effect when something doesn't activate. Is this really that different?

We have code to automatically teleport a vector from the toon's current position, so this is easy. (For a human this is ridiculous math but what are computers here for?) Obligatory coding explanation: When an attack fails to trigger due to range you trigger the "Passive Teleport" effect. Then you get the toon and the target's grid coordinates, find the angle (we'll call this our "heading"), run the absolute distance formula, subtract the failed attack's range (already being logged by the client) from the total distance (we'll call this our "distance"), and activate the vector teleport command at the heading and distance. Maybe you subtract less than the attack's range to make certain you account for the foe's movement. In any event, this is trivially easy to code. The hardest part is probably the Endurance cost part. When you activate an attack the game checks for multiple possible issues, such as "are you within range," "how much available Endurance do you have," or for some attacks "are you on the ground?" Depending on what gets checked first there may need to be some code-gymnastics to add the teleportation Endurance cost.

To paraphrase the quoted passage: "Things are good now, so things will always be good and never change." I remember trying to recruit friends and talking about C.o.X. to random fellow video game players. Getting them to try the game was like pulling teeth. On Homecoming I'm having the same difficulty. Attrition is a gradual thing, and when we have an appeal only to such a unique subset of players we need to work that much harder. To keep the game going long term we have to recruit new players. Recruitment is a hell of a lot easier now, when the game is more popular, than when we wish we had been recruiting after a drop in popularity.

Your knowledge of the game's mechanics and how they evolved over time continues to impress. As far as you know, is there any reason we can't modify the ranged Mastermind pets to have a shorter version of their ranged attack animation tied to a ranged version of [Brawl]?

This.

If only I could upvote this post more emphatically.

I guess the real irony isn't that he wants you to find Positron. The real irony is that you have to come back and turn the quest in to Positron after you went somewhere else to find him.

I'm concerned about the longevity of the game. I would like the game to keep pace with more recent games.

Your level of attention to ergonomics is exactly what I expected from someone with that particular signature line.

Sounds like an argument for the devs to data mine how players update their keyboard layouts and change the defaults accordingly.

Depending on your Powerset combination, I beg to differ.

There is a default keyboard layout. What are some things you changed? As M.M.O.s have evolved the way keyboards are laid out by default has also evolved. If there are thing many players adjust those changes should be added to the default layout.

That is not what I meant. I mean adding the bind to the default keyboard layout. I feel like the Rest function is central enough to be worthy of the same level of presumed use as jumping, following, autorun, or a travel ability. Not having the refined attention to things is evidence of when C.o.X. was released, and is something we should address to keep the game current.

I incidentally have experience as a technical writer. I hate many of the tooltips. They are not up to snuff. Someone should do a pass and update all of the tooltips. Consider this an offer.

What if there was a keyboard hotkey that toggled [Rest] without setting up a tray icon? There's probably two or three things that could use this treatment.

I have another idea: If you're out of combat and don't move for eight seconds your toon does the animation from [Rest] and is resting, but if you're attacked or do anything other than chat they stand back up.

That would be sweet.

Is there a way to code [Recall Friend] so that activation without anyone selected instead performs [Assemble the Team] with an appropriate Endurance cost? This would allow [Recall Friend] to retain utility of a single-target teleport while also letting me get everyone to me.

Just chiming in here... Do you want to do something with [Group Fly] as well? The [Team Teleport] is a vestigial relic. I feel there is a larger game design question going on there that has an impact beyond just the Teleport Pool.

These are wonderful, but can you include the names so I know what to save them as?

I am liking the feedback everyone is giving. This is a very good conversation overall. I'm especially interested in three things: (1) Powersets that combine in noteworthy ways, (2) Powersets that are below average (or in need of a rework), and (3) Powersets that are good to the point of feeling like "easy mode" (or in need of a rework).