CR Banana Man

"PvP from now on will be on our priority list. If something isn't working out, we'll be in there tweaking it and making it work, for the entire future of the product, not just Issue 13." -Matt "Positron" Miller

I've been around both zone and arena. I mostly arena, though.

Kyle, stop trolling me lol

I'm glad you guys tried to sign up. I'll do more of these in the future, and we'd love to have you at them. I'll make sure to note in the future that I'll be soft-locking the signups after certain intervals to avoid bye rounds. Are you guys in the PvP discord? We run some other events and PvP nights that you should definitely check out.

Is this last team real? I'm probably gonna hold us to 8 signups for bracketing purposes, unless we can get another 3 for 12 total. (assuming the team above is real). It will save a bunch of time and prevent people from waiting between matches. The last few of these we did went like 5 hours lol.

For the record, it's only organized team arena pvp where taunt is banned/frowned upon. I wouldn't let that discourage you from trying PvP as a whole. In most casual PvP scenarios, it's harder to abuse to power. The issue with taunt is not that it pulls some damage away from squishies and over to characters that are harder to kill - this would be fine. The issue is that it does this too completely, and has no counter-play. Taunt in it's current state doesn't reduce the effect of an offensive player, by forcing them to sometimes attack a "harder to kill" target - it entirely eliminates the offensive effect of that player by forcing them to target an unkillable target. Effects of taunt do not suppress like CCs do after repeated use. They're supposed to break when a player breaks line of sight from the taunter, but they often don't. Even if they do break, taunt is a fairly spammable power with a short cooldown, so they can be reapplied almost instantaneously. Taunt also has a stackable, auto-hit -range debuff (75% for brutes and scrappers, 100% for tanks), so even the target does break line of sight and escape the "taunted" status for a few seconds it's not uncommon for that target to be debuffed with 300% -range. This level of -range efftively turns most ranged attacks into melee attacks - basically, even for the few seconds of a 10 minute game where you break taunt, you still can't really contribute anything to the game. Taunt's required effort is disproportionately low to the high rewards it gives. It is indeed an example of player made balance, as mentioned. And it's not ideal. Melee characters do currently under-perform in 8v8 games with regard to offensive contributions, and that does suck - that's not something lost on me. The issue is melee characters also drastically over-perform with regard to survivability, so a great deal of imbalance arises if you give them a mechanic that takes virtually no skill to use but completely removes another player from the game, indifferent of that player's skill level. The player being perma-taunted basically doesn't get to play, and might as well not even be in the game. In an 8v8, if a team brings two taunters, unless the skill gap between these teams is disproportionately large, the only counter has historically been "bring your own two taunters." The result is 4 players out of 16 perma taunted, running around in circles doing nothing for 10 minutes waiting for the game to end while the other 12 actually PvP. A common joke was "can we just 6v6 without the taunters?" It's not only broken objectively, but it's also a pretty terrible mechanic from a "fun" standpoint. I realize fun is subjective, but this is a pretty extreme case - you basically just don't even get to play the game. There's no level of skill or strategy that will untaunt you or allow you (or you and 5 other people) to get a kill on a tank who has a basic understanding of the PvP system. You can try whatever you want, but it will be completely nullified by a near invincible character hitting F, and then spamming taunt and web grenade for 10 minutes.

The best places for info on PvP builds are these forums: Main PvP discord: https://discord.gg/fH44egF Smol KB discord: https://discord.gg/RVUaCcd (basically a PvP help center aimed at helping out newer players, or players looking to transition into team arena PvP, they also run the smol kb event). Tank viability is really dependent on what you're trying to do. Things like rad armor or invul tanks can be built to levels of near invincibility, but also lack any sort of consistent high damage output. For 8v8/team pvp, tanks really aren't that hot at the moment. Tanks are super hard to kill, but the current consensus among arena teams is that taunt is broken, and typically taunt isn't allowed in this format. For 1v1s, you'll probably never die, but you might struggle to kill more experienced players.

Liedown should be banned, lemme add that. Crey Pistol is fine. Harder to enforce but it is doable if you use demo logs I think.

Electrified net arrow: -jump powers currently have no counter-play. It's possible to permanently prevent one (or several) players from jumping. With things like /trick arrow (non blaster version), or even /devices, this capability, while still annoying and impossible to counter, comes at a cost - by running these things you're sacrificing damage, survivability, and other utility to keep people grounded. These sets also lean heavily on their -jump powers, and there'd be no reason to run them otherwise. Conversely, /Tactical Arrow on blasters, is already a top performing set without the use of electrified net arrow, and from what we saw in earlier KBs on the server when it wasn't banned, matches devolve into 3 people on each team spamming electrified net arrow without consequence between spikes. It's borderline broken and just makes the game really unenjoyable. Stalker Zapp: Ranged attack that can be fired from complete safety which does comparable damage to an AS. Not much else to say on that one. GPB is also suspect, but at least it's melee I guess, lol. Taunt: It's possible to completely lock someone down with this power, with minimal effort. The risk/reward just isn't there, and there's no counter-play. No matter how good a player is, no matter what that player does, if you just follow him spamming taunt, you can limit your target's offensive contribution to zero. You're typically stacking anywhere from 200-300% -range on the person you're taunting, and you're forcing him to target an un-killable character for as long as you do this. It's been pretty hideously broken since live, but even more so now with the increased -range, and the advent of animation cancels. Not only is it objectively the most broken power on this list, but the prospect of people taking time out of their day to show up to an event, then being perma-taunted for entire matches is something I'd like to avoid. It's pretty miserable to play against.

SIGN UP FOR THIS EVENT (it's the same as the last one, kinda) -Sign up with a team of 4 people (you and three friends!) -Randomly pair up with other teams of 4 people and face off against other team combos in 8v8 matches! PRIZES!!! *Members of the winning team will receive AT LEAST 1000 merits each! *Second place finishers will receive at least 750 merits each! *Other finalists will receive at least 500 merits each! *Those who don't win anything above will qualify for raffle prizes! This event will take place on the INDOMITABLE server on SATURDAY, JULY 11th, at 6:00 PM EASTERN time! NOTE THAT THIS IS 6 EST AND NOT 9. Expect this event to take a few hours from start to finish. Please be on time or early to minimize delays! All experience levels welcome, obviously! See you there! Signing up -Sign up by posting your teams here, or pming me your team (@S) on the PvP discord (which I will then post here). -Sign ups should contain the most commonly known alias of the player, maybe a commonly used global or two, or your PvP discord alias. If you're not in the PvP discord, it's a great place to be! Here's the join link: https://discord.gg/ACfXPxK -Feel free to advertise in this thread or on the discord (or almost anywhere) as a free agent if you don't have partners. Example signup: Team WyOWNing, a collection of the finest Wyoming based CoH PvPers -hot dogger -Iron Cabbage -blazingbob55 -WhyOhming Shocker Rule-set: -Matches will be 10 minutes, 8v8 -No heal decay, no travel suppression, small insps only -Alpha incarnate only -Minimum xp level 50 -No "barcode" names -animation canceling methods that use emotes and do not cause the player to drop targets (ie /em liedown) are not allowed -Banned powers: --Telekinesis --Electrified Net Arrow --Stalker Zapp --All variations of taunt, not to include the passive taunt applied by tanker attacks -ARCHETYPE LIMITS: --Once in the match, your team of 8 may have no more than 3 each of the following ATs: Blaster, Dominator, Mastermind, Stalker, Tanker, Brute --Poison is limited to one per team (your combined 8 person team) Map Pool: Randomly selected and announced at the start of each round robin round. Outbreak Steel Skyway Atlas Striga Eden Industrial

Beam animations are also bugged and not rooting for as long as they should. Probably something to do with redraw?

What's the update on ski races being added to the mini competitions?

hype

Congrats to the winners! Thanks to everyone for coming out! Be on the lookout for the next one!

As I recall night widows are really broken and probably even ban worthy. Arch mages should probably be limited... haven't done gladiators in a while though lol