How could we get you to try

[macskull]

PvP does have a pretty steep learning curve. I don't think you can remove that without fundamentally changing how PvP works, and the last time that was tried it didn't go over well.  At this point the biggest influencer of getting new players involved in PvP is the community as a whole, and I think the community has been doing a pretty good job of that. The population of players active in at least somewhat routine arena PvP has only grown over the last few months because of the efforts of a few key players. Turns out there's still a lot of interest in PvP if it's presented as an event that is specifically geared toward being friendly to new players. Yes, some of the players who show up to the events play a few matches and decide it's not for them, but that's okay.

[HelenCarnate]

I would say roll back I13 changes but I don't think that will ever happen.  Figuring out a way to have your offensive toggles suppress while held instead of detoggling and getting rid of travel suppression would be a good start though.  What else, getting rid of the quick base TP in pvp zones and disabling email would be another improvement.

Edited September 12, 2020 by HelenCarnate

[gamingglen]

to the OP: You can't.

[Luminara]

24 minutes ago, macskull said:

Objective-based PvP is something the PvP community has been asking for for a long time - and I think the Shivan temp power and Warburg nuke temp powers were the team's original attempt to make something like that happen. Like, you'd have a team going in to collect meteor samples, or escort scientists, and the other side's players would be trying to stop that so it would be up to your team to keep those players alive. As with pretty much everything else in this game the developers' vision ended up being nothing like what the players actually did.

If they'd had a vision of how PvP should or could work, we might've followed it.  They didn't.  You can't follow someone's lead if they aren't leading.

[macskull]

35 minutes ago, HelenCarnate said:

I would say roll back I13 changes but I don't think that will ever happen.  Figuring out a way to have your offensive toggles suppress while held instead of detoggling and getting rid of travel suppression would be a good start though.  What else, getting rid of the quick base TP in pvp zones and disabling email would be another improvement.

PvP travel suppression is disabled in zones and off by default in the arena.

[HelenCarnate]

1 minute ago, macskull said:

PvP travel suppression is disabled in zones and off by default in the arena.

Well good.  You can tell how much I did PvP after I13.  🙂 Now can we take it out of the regular game?   Seriously, no one was jousting mobs.  If they were, they were not getting enough of a benefit to justify slowing down everyone in PvE.

[Hew]

Pvp for me is, and only is, recluses victory running around randomly whacking on people, capturing cataphracts, the spiders, and the base points. Nothing else engages in a sort of pvp/pve way that I like, and without the heavy muscle from the click pets, I will never have a straight up pvp io'd build to compete, and would not want to anyway.

[Frunobulax]

Nothing, really. I'll put it this way, I quit WoW when they put bg's in, and I had considered it to be far too blue before then but was in "wait and see" mode with my guild.

 

I don't care one bit about canned pvp, I don't even see it as actual pvp if you can drop in and out and level/gear in pve and escape any consequences and confrontations at will, it's just a minigame to me.

 

I like mmo pvp where it it mandatory and shapes the world through player-made rules, I like the politics, spies, alliances and betrayals, the eternal struggle between pk and anti for the hearts and minds (and corpses) of psychotic lowbies and such.

 

Although if I was a roleplayer in coh I am sure I'd love it, seems like a lot of potential for that.

 

I've made my peace with my favoured style of pvp (open world ffa with no place being 100% "safe" ever) not being viable in this day and age, anything that comes close to catering to what I like dies fairly quickly, coh's version of "pvp" is a pale shadow of what I want and it would only tease me.

 

 

Edited September 12, 2020 by Frunobulax

[Outrider_01]

57 minutes ago, macskull said:

You know there were arenas before PvP zones, right? Constant balance tweaks and changes are the nature of the beast in any PvP environment because they mix things up and respond to combinations/powers that are too good.

 

Part of the problem is that PvEers will immediately jump into a PvP-related thread and blame PvP for nerfs or changes when in reality there's only been one power in the entire history of this game that's been nerfed solely for PvP reasons. I'd be willing to bet there's not more than one poster in this thread who knows what that power is.

Didn't know the arenas were before the zones, never heard much much noise about them and never looked at the buildings, cause 90%of the buildings are the same buildings in every zone.  How many Sherazades do you need with in 5 minutes of each other, vs all the liquor stores and fast food joints (even villians gotta eat)

 

Ah, Issue 4 release.  When they finally released the complete game after "beta testing" 4 issues when they went to target caps and Erectile Dysfunction Enhancement Diversification.  Who would of noticed that among the massive "balance tweaks".

 

Would of thought before they released the zones they would of brain stormed through most rules of PVP before releasing them, like blaster damage vs 90% resist cap.  I remember that was sometime after PVP release; not a long time but pretty obvious glasscannon punching steel jaw kinda one sided.  Stuff like that sticks out to me, revamp something for balance when its pretty obvious from the start.

[macskull]

1 minute ago, Outrider_01 said:

Didn't know the arenas were before the zones, never heard much much noise about them and never looked at the buildings, cause 90%of the buildings are the same buildings in every zone.  How many Sherazades do you need with in 5 minutes of each other, vs all the liquor stores and fast food joints (even villians gotta eat)

 

Ah, Issue 4 release.  When they finally released the complete game after "beta testing" 4 issues when they went to target caps and Erectile Dysfunction Enhancement Diversification.  Who would of noticed that among the massive "balance tweaks".

 

Would of thought before they released the zones they would of brain stormed through most rules of PVP before releasing them, like blaster damage vs 90% resist cap.  I remember that was sometime after PVP release; not a long time but pretty obvious glasscannon punching steel jaw kinda one sided.  Stuff like that sticks out to me, revamp something for balance when its pretty obvious from the start.

Neither target caps nor ED had anything to do with PvP, so I'm not sure why you brought those up in response to my statement. Also not sure why you keep bringing up Blaster damage in particular as if it was the only difference between PvE and PvP. For what it's worth, the percentage of Blaster damage that was unresisted did get tweaked for balance at least once.

[RageusQuitus2]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

Objective-based PvP is something the PvP community has been asking for for a long time - and I think the Shivan temp power and Warburg nuke temp powers were the team's original attempt to make something like that happen. Like, you'd have a team going in to collect meteor samples, or escort scientists, and the other side's players would be trying to stop that so it would be up to your team to keep those players alive. As with pretty much everything else in this game the developers' vision ended up being nothing like what the players actually did.

Whats stopping events based around those objectives?  Yall host arena events all the time, why not some zone to mix it up?  Hell sirens even keeps score.

[Eva Destruction]

I did try PvP.  I was bad at it.  I simply don't have the twitch reflexes.  And that was over a decade ago, when I was more than a decade younger and my powers still worked more or less the same in PvP as in PvE.  Now that you'd have to figure out how your powers work all over again, make an entirely different build to even be able to participate in casual PvP, and for all I know level up an entirely new character because all of the ones I have might have powersets that are completely useless, just to get beaten up repeatedly by people 20 years younger than I am who have spent the last decade of their lives playing PvP games...nah.  Too much effort for zero reward.

[Luminara]

24 minutes ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

Whats stopping events based around those objectives?

 

Nothing, really.

 

Well, the lack of defensible positions, the wide open approach from all sides, the enormous maps with widely scattered objective locations, not having queues to ensure that there are actually combatants, no teaming requirement to ensure that there you're not trying to guard an objective alone, the constant intrusion of PvE critters cluttering up the targeting system, not having a reward to offer for successful defense of an objective, the way the PvP system discourages players from continuing to participate (heal decay, diminishing returns on status effects, etc.) for more than a couple of minutes at a time...

 

Nothing at all.

[Xeres]

I'm not going to PvP.  COH isn't my first MMO, and I've PvPed in a few of them.  I just don't enjoy it.  My feeling is that if I want to battle other players, I'll fire up a FPS.

 

The only thing that would make me PvP is a team / world setting which unlocked an instance or something like that - ie: Wintergrasp in WoW.

[Dazl]

I like PvP, my first MMO was Dark Age of Camelot. I've played many PvP type MMO's, but I don't have any interest in it here. CoH was designed around PvE and that is where it shines. PvP may have been planned from the beginning to part of the game but only as an added feature. Even during live it was never a main part of the game.

 

Perhaps if it was more accessible to all players, not just those with the proper power sets and builds, it might be more popular.

[macskull]

1 hour ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

Whats stopping events based around those objectives?  Yall host arena events all the time, why not some zone to mix it up?  Hell sirens even keeps score.

Nothing, really. People have hosted PvP events in zones before but they're not particularly popular. It's hard to balance sides when people will naturally want to gravitate toward the side that already has more players. It seems at this point that players prefer to play at level 50 anyways, which pretty much leaves Recluse's Victory. Zone PvP on its own has quite a few issues which I doubt will ever be seriously addressed.

 

9 minutes ago, Crimsonpyre said:

Perhaps if it was more accessible to all players, not just those with the proper power sets and builds, it might be more popular.

(Emphasis mine) I hear this a lot but I don't really buy it, especially with how trivial it is to level/IO/accolade a new character on Homecoming. Yes, you'll be more successful at PvP with certain powersets and builds, but that's true for pretty much everything in this game. If I want to make a +4x8 fire farmer I'm not going to roll a Mercs/Kin Mastermind. If I want to build a character to solo AVs and GMs I'm not going to use a FF/AR Defender. PvP is the same way - anything can do it but you'll be way more successful if you're built for it. The biggest difference there is that the NPC AI in this game is relatively dumb and the powers enemies get is pretty limited, compared with PvP where you're actually encountering other players who have (usually) put some thought into what they're doing.

[Ukase]

17 hours ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

Considering the stigma pvp has, how could we get some of the anti crowd to try it? 

 

My preference is zone play.  I know the arena crowd has tried super hard to get more involvement.

 

Just curious what might make someone try it.

If I'm in the right mood, I'm okay with pvp. That said - as soon as I get there and see that my build is for pve and that my build isn't optimized for pvp - I lose interest. The best thing that could happen would be for the stats in pve to work the same in pvp. 

Now, I know enough about it, if that were to occur - there would be a terrible imbalance. So, that won't happen. 

But - a couple of other things I find annoying:

Hibernation. You finally catch up and do enough damage to just about defeat the other player - and they hibernate - giving them time to call in reinforcements. Then I get suckerpunched by an ally of my foe that I wasn't even aware of. Lose the hibernation. Take your licks.

The attacking player often underestimates me. Not all the time, sometimes I get whipped, and soundly. But often - they'll attack ...and when they aren't winning - they run away. You wanted to fight, so why run? I get no thrill out of playing chase. It's one thing if I start it, yeah, cool if you run. You may not have wanted to do any pvp. But if you attack me and run - what happened? Change your mind?

The profanity. The filter catches most of it - but some folks are deliberately creative in getting around the filter. Why name call in the first place? 

Lastly - there's no reward to it. Maybe a badge here and there. But no merits. No ginormous amount of inf. What's the point? If it were fun, that'd be one thing. But where's the fun in it? You're taking risk, but there's no reward. 

 

[Ironblade]

18 hours ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

Considering the stigma pvp has, how could we get some of the anti crowd to try it?

I don't see it as having a stigma.  I've tried it and don't care for it.  Like PL'ing and farming.  Lots of people like these things but I don't.

[RageusQuitus2]

38 minutes ago, macskull said:

especially with how trivial it is to level/IO/accolade a new character on Homecoming.

Even with a maxed out fire farmer, i dont find it trivial.  It takes alot of time doing something i dont really enjoy to get to the fun part.  8 mill per run, 5 minutes per run. A good build runs you 1 billion easy.  And so repetitive.  Ok so play the market/ponzi scheme.  Again i dont find that or crafting fun.  When do i get to play?  Or expirement?  

[macskull]

11 minutes ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

Even with a maxed out fire farmer, i dont find it trivial.  It takes alot of time doing something i dont really enjoy to get to the fun part.  8 mill per run, 5 minutes per run. A good build runs you 1 billion easy.  And so repetitive.  Ok so play the market/ponzi scheme.  Again i dont find that or crafting fun.  When do i get to play?  Or expirement?  

I don't think I've ever spent close to even half that on any of my PvP builds. Enhancement converters, lowball bids, and patience are your friends.

 

EDIT: To clarify, I meant relative to live. Most of my characters now have builds I would have never had on live simply because everything is much more affordable and it's even easier to make inf. A build that might cost me 300-400 million here would have been 5+ billion on live, easy, probably even higher.

Edited September 12, 2020 by macskull

[Outrider_01]

2 hours ago, macskull said:

Neither target caps nor ED had anything to do with PvP, so I'm not sure why you brought those up in response to my statement. Also not sure why you keep bringing up Blaster damage in particular as if it was the only difference between PvE and PvP. For what it's worth, the percentage of Blaster damage that was unresisted did get tweaked for balance at least once.

Naw man, its not how those features apply.  Its how the Devs went about implementing it.  It took a long time and the effect was drastic, felt like paying to beta test CoH for Issue 4 and beyond that time frame.

 

As for PVP, I wasn't clear.  It felt like the product was unfinished when first release, like playing PVE and targeting players.  Took a lot of tweaks just to make it presentable, like the Blaster unresisted damage.  

 

I will put it another way, PVP in COH/V felt like it was subpar at its release and PVE mechanics changed to allow players as a target and damage them.  It was like building a house with out a foundation on sand, than driving piles through the house to stablize it and build up from there.  Other PVP games generally had a foundation, first floor, and a second floor at release but able to expand from there while as COH/V was building really slow on a shake foundation.  Devs kept building, but there wasn't a very good blueprint to begin with.

[Eva Destruction]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

(Emphasis mine) I hear this a lot but I don't really buy it, especially with how trivial it is to level/IO/accolade a new character on Homecoming. Yes, you'll be more successful at PvP with certain powersets and builds, but that's true for pretty much everything in this game. If I want to make a +4x8 fire farmer I'm not going to roll a Mercs/Kin Mastermind. If I want to build a character to solo AVs and GMs I'm not going to use a FF/AR Defender. PvP is the same way - anything can do it but you'll be way more successful if you're built for it. The biggest difference there is that the NPC AI in this game is relatively dumb and the powers enemies get is pretty limited, compared with PvP where you're actually encountering other players who have (usually) put some thought into what they're doing.

Except with farming the definition of success isn't "am I the fastest farmer in the game," it's "can I generate a bunch of inf fast."  If someone generates inf faster than you, it doesn't change the fact that now you're sitting on a pile of inf.  With soloing AVs, it doesn't matter that the TW/Bio can take down the AV faster; as long as you can take it down before you die of boredom, you're a successful AV soloer.  It's not a competition.  PvP is a competition, so the only measure of success is "can you defeat the other player" and if your powersets aren't good for PvP, you can't. 

 

And yes, I know it's trivial to level up and trick out a new character, but if the optimal PvP powersets don't interest me, I don't want to play them.

[macskull]

8 minutes ago, Eva Destruction said:

Except with farming the definition of success isn't "am I the fastest farmer in the game," it's "can I generate a bunch of inf fast."  If someone generates inf faster than you, it doesn't change the fact that now you're sitting on a pile of inf.  With soloing AVs, it doesn't matter that the TW/Bio can take down the AV faster; as long as you can take it down before you die of boredom, you're a successful AV soloer.  It's not a competition.  PvP is a competition, so the only measure of success is "can you defeat the other player" and if your powersets aren't good for PvP, you can't. 

 

And yes, I know it's trivial to level up and trick out a new character, but if the optimal PvP powersets don't interest me, I don't want to play them.

"I don't PvP because only certain powersets are good at PvP" != "I don't PvP because the powersets that are good don't interest me." Besides, it's not really true. I've seen some pretty wacky builds be somewhat successful in PvP. Success in PvP still has a lot to do with the person at the keyboard. That being said, the things you mentioned can be competitive - what build can clear X farm fastest, or what build can solo Y AV fastest, or what build can solo Z task force the fastest. There's always going to be one singular answer for those. There isn't one singular answer for "what build is best at PvP" because PvP doesn't work that way.

 

Besides, aside from 1v1 scenarios (which have always been sort of rock/paper/scissors) you can always call for help from friends. If you're just hopping around a PvP zone trying to get badges and you run into problems, grab some extra people. Even with PvE builds a larger group of coordinated people will have some success.

Edited September 12, 2020 by macskull

[Eva Destruction]

2 minutes ago, macskull said:

"I don't PvP because only certain powersets are good at PvP" != "I don't PvP because the powersets that are good don't interest me." Besides, it's not really true. I've seen some pretty wacky builds be somewhat successful in PvP. Success in PvP still has a lot to do with the person at the keyboard. That being said, the things you mentioned can be competitive - what build can clear X farm fastest, or what build can solo Y AV fastest, or what build can solo Z task force the fastest. There's always going to be one singular answer for those. There isn't one singular answer for "what build is best at PvP" because PvP doesn't work that way.

They can be competitive, but they're not inherently so.  Meanwhile, competition is the entire point of PvP.

[macskull]

I mean, yeah, that's always been true. In a competitive environment there are going to be some powers or sets that are better in certain scenarios than other ones. That's true in this game, that's true in almost every other MMO, and that's true in pretty much every competitive video game. I think it's fair to say "I don't like PvP because I don't like things that are competitive," but trying to blame that on the game's mechanics seems a bit disingenuous. I can be competitive on a character that isn't "meta," I'm just making it a little bit more of an uphill battle.