Restrict Judgment powers during regular play.

[Galaxy Brain]

2 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

In essence, while it gets a lot of talk on the forums among the same couple dozen who regularly post on the matter, the incarnate population is really only on par with the PVP community in terms of numbers and needs to be regarded as such in terms of priorities in creating new content and balancing its effects on other content.

 

I remember the days back on live when powers were constantly being changed around because of their effects on PVP (which was 5% or less of the player base at the time) and how it created problems for the PVE players as a result.

I do not think this is true. We have numbers on the vast amount of lvl 50 character in HC right now, and every single one of them automatically gets Incarnate XP and Loot for everything they do.

 

Are all Lvl 50 characters T4 incarnate in everything? No

 

Do a solid chunk of them probably have all their incarnate slots unlocked and probably slotted with at least t1? I'd say its a fair portion of them.

 

DO a solid chunk also probably not invest in incarnates or shelve the character at 50? Also yes.

 

Given how easy it is, downright passive, to get incarnate unlocks in HC I think it is disingenuous to say they are a small portion of the playerbase. You are correct though in that just because somebody is an Incarnate doesn't mean they are as powerful as can be given you can really push the system.

 

1 hour ago, Troo said:

I agree with this.

I'd also agree some adjustments could be made.

 

Examples of minimal code changes that could have a desired effect:

• Slide the line from 45 to 49.
• On top of that, and allow the use of incarnates as an option for Flashback content at all levels.

I like the flashback idea a lot! That could actually be really really fun, you go through time and get exemplared, but you still get to keep Incarnate Powers. You could attach it to a Flashback-Incarnate difficulty for bonuses too!

[ShardWarrior]

41 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

I think you're taking pie-in-the-sky dreams and assuming they're the most likely result in the real world.

I said nothing of the sort, nor did I ever suggest new content would be cranked out quickly.  I have no idea what the future will bring.  With that said, given what I have seen from the forums here, there is no shortage of people from across many disciplines willing to volunteer their time to help and see the game grow and prosper.  I would rather see this than let the game stagnate and wither away with nothing new ever added.

[ShardWarrior]

13 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I do not think this is true. We have numbers on the vast amount of lvl 50 character in HC right now, and every single one of them automatically gets Incarnate XP and Loot for everything they do.

Agreed.  We do not need to think it is not true, we know it is not based on data the Homecoming staff have provided.

[Chris24601]

23 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I do not think this is true. We have numbers on the vast amount of lvl 50 character in HC right now, and every single one of them automatically gets Incarnate XP and Loot for everything they do.

We DO have numbers. Let's look at them. My source is the "Homecoming Statistics: March 2020" thread in General Discussion;

 

Players have created 1,207,409 characters on Homecoming and there are 115,559 level 50 characters (of which 40,399 are fire aura brutes) if you total up the numbers from the table for number of 50s by AT.

 

That's just 9.6% of all characters created including the farming brutes that are level 50. If you exclude the likely fire-farming brutes the number drops to just 6.2% of all created characters. The number of those 50's with more than the alpha slot (vs. parked shortly after 50 because the Alt-itis is STRONG) is nowhere near 100%. Asking the people who have access to the statistics might be interesting.

 

Reasonably, the number of non-farm judgement+ incarnate characters is less than 5% of the total... right in line with the PvP community numbers back on live. The number with all six slotted with all t4s is probably less than 1%.

[Galaxy Brain]

So the next question is, how many active accounts are there with 50s?

 

The big difference between the "pvp crowd" and the number of Incarnates is that all ~80,000 characters at 50 actively get incarnate content by playing (ignoring the fire farmers, who also definitely go Incarnate) via unlocking the slots at the very least. It could be assumed that every single account in HC that has a lvl 50 character, even if they have a bunch of non 50s, has dabbled in Incarnate content via getting XP for it alone. 

 

Players can choose to PvP or not, and have to go out of their way in order to engage in PvP. Lvl 50 characters conversely have to go out of their way to ignore Incarnates and when that is the case we need to look at how many accounts have 50s and how many have incarnates and how far. That will show how many players are actively using the abilities.

[ShardWarrior]

6 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

We DO have numbers. Let's look at them. My source is the "Homecoming Statistics: March 2020" thread in General Discussion;

 

Players have created 1,207,409 characters on Homecoming and there are 115,559 level 50 characters (of which 40,399 are fire aura brutes) if you total up the numbers from the table for number of 50s by AT.

 

That's just 9.6% of all characters created including the farming brutes that are level 50. If you exclude the likely fire-farming brutes the number drops to just 6.2% of all created characters. The number of those 50's with more than the alpha slot (vs. parked shortly after 50 because the Alt-itis is STRONG) is nowhere near 100%. Asking the people who have access to the statistics might be interesting.

 

Reasonably, the number of non-farm judgement+ incarnate characters is less than 5% of the total... right in line with the PvP community numbers back on live. The number with all six slotted with all t4s is probably less than 1%.

Pay particular note to the "players created" wording.  That means players created 1,207,409 characters.  That does not mean there are that many still around that have not since been deleted and/or people are still actively playing them.  How many of them are alts where people wanted to try out a combo and abandoned it? 

 

STO does this with stats all the time.  It inflates the numbers to make the game population appear larger than it really is.

[Lines]

10 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

That's just 9.6% of all characters created including the farming brutes that are level 50. If you exclude the likely fire-farming brutes the number drops to just 6.2% of all created characters. The number of those 50's with more than the alpha slot (vs. parked shortly after 50 because the Alt-itis is STRONG) is nowhere near 100%. Asking the people who have access to the statistics might be interesting.

 

Still a lot of data missing. A more useful metric would be number of active characters, logged in, lets say, in the last month, that are 50.

 

If I took my own 50s, you'd be right. Most of my 50s don't have alpha unlocked. They just sit and gather dust and occasionally move to another dayjob. But I dunno if that's a common trend.

[MunkiLord]

I like how Judgement and other Incarnate abilities work at the moment. I’m not in favor of adding any additional restrictions/nerfing them. 

[golstat2003]

15 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

If we're cool with it, would we like to instead push Incarnates down even further so you start grabbing them when you get epic pools? 

 

We can exemp down with them anyways and this allows for more Incarnate content by proxy by letting you run 4/8 solo even earlier.

No thanks. I like things the way they are.

[golstat2003]

7 hours ago, MunkiLord said:

I like how Judgement and other Incarnate abilities work at the moment. I’m not in favor of adding any additional restrictions/nerfing them. 

Agreed.

[Uruare]

No.

 

I can play any and every other MMO in existence to get the experience of feeling mediocre and dependent on a group to feel like I'm playing something that's legitimately epic.

 

Judgments are one more tool in the toolbox of options for building something out of a comic book about super-powered beings.  You don't have to use them.  You don't have to use Incarnate powers at all.    You can lock your level at 10 and never leave Atlas or Mercy Isle if you like.    I know people that do all of those, including one that locked her level at 10 and never leaves Mercy Isle for much.     

 

You won't be able to keep up with the people that build finely tuned min-maxed murderhobos if you do any of that.   At no point in this game's history could you slap some concept character together, stick slots wherever they looked good and take theme powers that didn't actually help you kill/not die better and keep up with the murderhobos.   There were always murderhobos.

This isn't any of those other MMO's in which you have no real options and your class guarantees that you can just show up, push your DPS or Tank or Heal buttons and fulfill your obligations to your teammates.    It never actually was.   

 

If you want to be valuable on random teams, you'd better be on a solid build that's actually good at something useful at all times.   You'd better be able to kill fast/kill lots, debuff the important stuff, buff the important stuff and/or know how to taunt and herd mobs.     You have the freedom here to build utter garbage.  You might come up with a concept you adore that doesn't lend well to being reflected in builds that are actually useful at all times, or sometimes at all.

 

Even before incarnate powers existed at all, it was easy to put together various builds for soloing AV's, soloing GM's and soloing +4/x8 missions.     Judgments didn't make anything possible that was't possible before.   Might've made killing large groups of trash faster, but not by so much as that it's all that different from how it was in the first place on a team of well built characters.

 

We were running Family and Freak farms before there were aggro caps or IO's or even diminishing returns on SO stats.   

 

If you build something that thematically pleases you but mechanically sucks, that's on you.   You don't get to nerf everyone else because you want to build a trashfire but somehow also expect it to keep up with finely tuned murderhobos.

 

Judgment powers didn't make murderhobos happen.   Murderhobos have been around since the very beginning.  The recipe has changed over the years as nerfs and buffs and varietal changes came down the pipe, but there were always the builds that were rockstars of murdering the entire screen.

 

Heck. Judgment powers aren't even something I consider anything but flavor on my own murderhobo builds.  They're perks I literally wouldn't miss if they were gone because nobody sane builds a build around a power with a fixed 2m cooldown.   It's token damage that hits a big area in the grand scheme of things.

 

It's a cherry on top of something.  Whether that something is a finely tuned murderhobo build or some 'concept character' that can barely function is up to you.

 

If you find that you're not able to keep up with the teams you join, chances are really good that the problem is you, not them.    You don't have to build a tuned murderhobo to build something that's rock solid and perfectly good.    And if judgment powers are somehow making you feel like you're purposeless, I'd have a lot of questions I don't care to ask about how you've painted yourself into a bizarre niche like that.

 

The moral of this story is this;  here, you have freedom.   You can build for how the game actually plays and what's actually valuable to how the game actually plays, or you can build whatever you like without a care and accept that your theme character won't always be very good for how the game actually plays.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Uruare

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

While it may be true that due to the nearly unlimited character slots many like myself have made pages of alts that are just collecting dust and day job badges until their turn in the Q to be capped comes up, The extremely active, vibrant, lvl 50 pugging scene makes a liar of anyone trying to claim its comparable to the virtually nonexistent PVP scene in terms of active player participation.. I have 7 fully decked out 50s among my roster. They all get plenty of play time alongside whichever of my lowbie alts I feel like leveling atm.

 

My SG is thick with capped and incarnated 50s. And even the more casual players tend to log in a few times a week on them. Many revel in running ITFs and LGTFs. They are seen by many as introductory incarnate content. A good way to test ones limits and work on unlocking their slots. The Shard TFs are treated by many as incarnate content exclusively ime, as a great many hesitate to go there otherwise.

 

I know PVP has always beena  near nonexistent portion of the CoX population. But trying to act like people playing at cap is as rare is insane, as it is well known in literally every MMO the majority of the population prefer playing at cap with fully developed and kitted characters. Its why WoW had to constantly expand the level cap and devalue the current BIS gear, because so much of their active population would have achieved that and need to have the goal post moved to keep them going.

 

In CoH even on live most everyone I knew who had been around for more then a year had at least 1 capped toon well setted. When incarnate stuff hit, TFing blew up in popularity due to the WST mechanic drawing many who had given up on TFs due to a bad experience in the early years. As an active TF leader back then for PUGs I met many during that year who had not touched TFs since year one. Who once they got a taste for smoothly lead TFs became TF junkies, in large part due to the incarnate system and quest for notices and double merits.

[Myrmidon]

“I'll look down and whisper: 'No.”

[Greycat]

20 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

When you have a small volunteer staff capable of only limited new content, you want that content to be as useful to as broad a segment of the players as possible.

 

The problem with “just make more incarnate content” is that every bit of incarnate exclusive content is content that’s of no use to non-incarnates and non-incarnates are, depending how you count the statistics, well over 90+% of the active characters.

 

Arcs that can be accessed starting in the level 20-30 range can be enjoyed by the entire player base. An incarnate-balanced arc can only be enjoyed by the tiny percentage of incarnate toons.*

 

Are you counting characters or players? The two are quite different. I'm one player with several pages of characters - should that give my preferences more weight when it comes to creating content? (Your choices for answer here are "No" or "Hell No.")

 

Want to create some roge/vig content for level 5? Great!

More Incarnate content? Go for it!

New Redside content? Yes, please!

More Blue or gold? Yep!

 

I will not turn more content down, regardless of the range, even if I can't play it yet for whatever reason. The only time "Add more content" has been annoying to me was when Incarnates came out and the devs sounded like they hadn't considered having a non-trial path to build them up.

[Burnt Toast]

17 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

We DO have numbers. Let's look at them. My source is the "Homecoming Statistics: March 2020" thread in General Discussion;

 

Players have created 1,207,409 characters on Homecoming and there are 115,559 level 50 characters (of which 40,399 are fire aura brutes) if you total up the numbers from the table for number of 50s by AT.

 

That's just 9.6% of all characters created including the farming brutes that are level 50. If you exclude the likely fire-farming brutes the number drops to just 6.2% of all created characters. The number of those 50's with more than the alpha slot (vs. parked shortly after 50 because the Alt-itis is STRONG) is nowhere near 100%. Asking the people who have access to the statistics might be interesting.

 

Reasonably, the number of non-farm judgement+ incarnate characters is less than 5% of the total... right in line with the PvP community numbers back on live. The number with all six slotted with all t4s is probably less than 1%.

You are not taking into account -

Characters created just for a name who are low level counting towards that 1.2 mil char count.

How many hours are played on each character pre/post 50. 

 

I have 38 characters - 14 of them are 50 and t3/t4 all incarnates - those are the ones I play. The other characters are future 50's or a few are just name holders or influence mules. Excelsior has seen a dramatic increase in the number of incarnate trials being ran in the past 3-4 months. It used to be difficult to find anything aside from BAF and the occasional LAMBDA. Now you see MoM, DD, Mag, etc being run for hours during the day/evening. 

 

I know plenty of people who have left the game and no longer play with dozens of lowbies on their accounts. Do I think 50's make up the MAJORITY of characters being played at any given time... nah... but I do think they make up a significant 25-33% of the characters being played most of the time. Some of us have been playing since day one and frankly... running lower level content is boring and doesn't exactly make one feel all that heroic. New content for 50+ would do a lot to alleviate the "issue" with incarnate powers as well as offer something new for the majority of players who do have 50+ toons. 

 

(On a side note.. not all those fire brutes just do farming... my Fire/WM Brute can (and does) content on the regular because he has... the build to do pve and farm.) Your viewpoint seems to be very black and white and not take into account the very gray nature of statistics; especially considering the lack of data regarding actual USAGE of characters. 

[Parabola]

15 minutes ago, Burnt Toast said:

running lower level content ... doesn't exactly make one feel all that heroic

Going off on a tangent here but it's funny how subjective everything is. I see the game in many respects the other way around. At low levels I find the threats are more believable and there is more opportunity for heroism due to the lack of overwhelming personal power. Who is acting more heroically, the man off the street who confronts a mugger or superman who is impervious to injury doing the same?

 

I like it when the threats are more down to earth. Disrupting a gang's drug distribution network is just so much more real than closing down the multidimensional portals of cosmic travellers trying to lead the invasion from the planet zog. It's a problem that has infected the superhero movie genre, threats have become more and more overblown and removed from reality. I find myself caring less and less because none of it feels in any way real.

 

Superheroes are obviously fiction but they need the context of living in our world. The superman story would have been meaningless if it hadn't been set on earth and he hadn't been shown living amongst us. He wouldn't have been 'super man', he'd have been 'just another alien'. Too often the real world is just presented as a backdrop to be blown up with flashy special effects while a villain of arbitrary power is defeated by a hero to prove that his arbitrary power level has increased slightly since the last film.

 

Anyway, what were we talking about again?

[Alchemystic]

/rjanger 

 

did I do that right?

[Lines]

2 hours ago, parabola said:

Going off on a tangent here but it's funny how subjective everything is. I see the game in many respects the other way around. At low levels I find the threats are more believable and there is more opportunity for heroism due to the lack of overwhelming personal power. Who is acting more heroically, the man off the street who confronts a mugger or superman who is impervious to injury doing the same?

 

I like it when the threats are more down to earth. Disrupting a gang's drug distribution network is just so much more real than closing down the multidimensional portals of cosmic travellers trying to lead the invasion from the planet zog. It's a problem that has infected the superhero movie genre, threats have become more and more overblown and removed from reality. I find myself caring less and less because none of it feels in any way real.

 

Superheroes are obviously fiction but they need the context of living in our world. The superman story would have been meaningless if it hadn't been set on earth and he hadn't been shown living amongst us. He wouldn't have been 'super man', he'd have been 'just another alien'. Too often the real world is just presented as a backdrop to be blown up with flashy special effects while a villain of arbitrary power is defeated by a hero to prove that his arbitrary power level has increased slightly since the last film.

 

Anyway, what were we talking about again?

10000000% this.

 

I've got such limited patience for the galactic or interdimensional narratives in superhero fiction. Give me a good old fashioned street gang any day.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Lines

[Naraka]

3 hours ago, Burnt Toast said:

Some of us have been playing since day one and frankly... running lower level content is boring and doesn't exactly make one feel all that heroic.

What is this weird post-level cap raise, trans-definitional neo-intentional term of "hero" people are throwing out these days?

 

To me, it's like some fake ad hominem (as if you don't agree then you're against people feeling like "heroes" and all connotation associated with that word!!!) that, when you actually consider the thought through, is more akin to advocating for using nukes against the equivalent of street thugs because they like the feeling of power.  That is *VILLAINOUS*, and as someone who likes their villains, I would nuke the equivalent of a mall cop because fuck you.

 

I would find it weird and inhumane for heroes to be pushing against a bill in congress that advocated for "heroes" to uphold the same ethics as law enforcement and the escalation of force on a situational basis (and taking into consideration their inherent unkillability into that determination).

[Galaxy Brain]

So, circling all the way back I think the question we should really answer is this:

 

Do Incarnate Abilities alter the state of End Game / Near End game content in an unfavorable way?

[Nayeh]

I just think it's obnoxious how the cooldowns are short enough to become a regular part of every other attack chain in addition to granting archetypes that have no business having massive killing potential an instant vaporization ability that carries no consequences of enhancement slotting whilst also bypassing target caps.

 

If anything, I believe the cooldowns should be extended significantly or receive a condition. Take "Trance" mechanics used in some games where a character is under immense pressure and emotions where massive potential can be unleashed temporarily - for example a ratio of fallen teammates could be used to unlock a threshold and how much damage to be delivered.

 

Quite honestly, I think the one thing that could be used to curb these mechanics is removing the Aggro Cap. If defensive measures are still an issue then grant diminishing returns on defenses so X amount of targets will eventually bypass defenses to dangerous levels.

[thunderforce]

I certainly agree with the OP that there's a problem here (and of course the way the characters sidekicked up end up two combat levels below the Incarnates doesn't help). Given that it's going to be very difficult for Homecoming to nerf anything, no matter how absurd it is, the suggestion of having an option to disable Incarnates on TFs (and Trials, Ouro content, etc) seems the most reasonable one.

[Lazarillo]

1 hour ago, Nayeh said:

I just think it's obnoxious how the cooldowns are short enough to become a regular part of every other attack chain in addition to granting archetypes that have no business having massive killing potential an instant vaporization ability that carries no consequences of enhancement slotting whilst also bypassing target caps.

I feel like if you're taking long enough to kill enemies low-level enough relative to you that something with a 2-minute recharge causes "instant vaporization", you might, um, need the crutch?  Judgements do just under the amount needed to defeat an even-level minion at 50 unless you combine them with a Musculature/Intuition Alpha, or hit them with a debuff first.  Criticals can push them over that limit, but only have a 20% chance of hitting.

[Haijinx]

I think most of us probably agree that this game is too easy for high End Builds with Incarnates. 

 

But re-balancing the whole thing seems like it will wreck what we have. 

 

So I'm in the .. add some tricks to enemy groups to make them a little bit harder, and add new high level content that is difficult .. camp. 

[THEDarkTyger]

On 3/25/2020 at 2:04 PM, Darkneblade said:

Seriously they need to restricted on regular play it makes things less fun on groups because someone always using it.

That's your opinion. I think you'll find you're in the minority with that one...