What I think the major flaw of this game always was....

[FoulVileTerror]

Eight?

No no no.  You think too small.

I said "Trial."   Isn't the cap on Trials 48?

[Darmian]

So how big was this bank raid again?  Or should we abandon bank raids and say they're breaking prisoners out of the Zig?

 

(I'm only assuming bank raid because of the mention of mayhem mission, if I've misread that...oh well.)

[FoulVileTerror]

That's great!  I was thinking a major heist, but a massive prison break is even better!

Really, there are all kinds of things they could do.  They could potentially make a different asynchronous PvP event for each standard Zone, and/or Trial/Hazard Zones.

[Darmian]

1 minute ago, FoulVileTerror said:

That's great!  I was thinking a major heist, but a massive prison break is even better!

Really, there are all kinds of things they could do.  They could potentially make a different asynchronous PvP event for each standard Zone, and/or Trial/Hazard Zones.

We already have a "model" for the Zig prison break. Or some of it at least!  Lambda. With maybe a bit of the Director 11 escape maps thrown in.

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, RageusQuitus2 said:

Sorry I was voted in as speaker for the vast majority not you.  The job is filled, and it I work at it tirelessly.  One day you might achieve the hive mind necessary to read all players thoughts and desires, imagine all possibilities (like I have).  Till then you speak for yourself and yourself alone.  

 

I never claimed to speak for anyone.

 

On 10/3/2020 at 10:07 AM, Luminara said:

The majority of players who respond indicate that they don't want that in this game.  The search function for these forums works quite well, give it a whirl and sift through similar threads and see what the general sentiment is.

 

That is what I said, and it was neither an attempt to put words into other peoples' mouths, nor an arbitrary self-appointment of importance.

 

Statistically, the majority of responses in threads which propose PvP activity which, in any way, has an impact on PvE are negative.  The majority of people, the general sentiment.

 

At the top right of the page, you'll find the word Search...  Use it.

[macskull]

1 hour ago, Twisted Toon said:

Otherwise, PvP would, most likely, have been introduced in a more seamless manner.

This is the second time I've seen this argument in this thread and I've gotta admit I'm a bit confused. How do you "seamlessly" introduce something into the game? One day it's not there, the next day it is. Minus the story-driven content that started popping up near the end of the game's retail run, most things were just dropped into the existing game.

[Haijinx]

On 10/3/2020 at 10:07 AM, Luminara said:

 

You're going go find that suggestions which imply that PvP activity would have a direct impact on PvE activity historically gain no traction.  The majority of players who respond indicate that they don't want that in this game.  The search function for these forums works quite well, give it a whirl and sift through similar threads and see what the general sentiment is.

You could probably argue PVP actually made COH worse.  

[macskull]

[citation needed]

Edited October 4, 2020 by macskull

[Haijinx]

3 hours ago, tidge said:

A hard "no" from me on MOAR PVP.

 

I certainly like the idea of having the option of facing more variety of "Elite Bosses/AV" that are tricked out like players (*1), there is no need to add the possibility of griefing other players in most of the world.

 

(*1) One of the benefits of playing Redside is (IMO) that you get to face the named heroes of Paragon City in regular arcs.

It seems like people that like PVP imagine that more PVP will rev up MMOs 

 

However even on MMOs with a much more PVP oriented focus, their open-PVP servers tend to be less populous than their PVE servers.

 

So I'd suggest there is very little evidence to suggest more PVP will improve the overall health of the game.   

[Haijinx]

5 minutes ago, macskull said:

[citation needed]

I didn't say it made it worse.  I said you could argue that it did.  

 

The main suggestion I'd make is that PVP requires a new Axis to balance your game around.   Making the task more difficult.  

 

An effort worthwhile if you have a big PVP focus in your game.  But if you don't?  

[macskull]

When you can balance powers separately for PvE and PvP it's not that much more difficult, especially if you actually solicit feedback from the players.

[Haijinx]

51 minutes ago, macskull said:

When you can balance powers separately for PvE and PvP it's not that much more difficult, especially if you actually solicit feedback from the players.

I think that perhaps that ability was added due to the balance difficulty question.  

 

A lot of games do not have separate PVP/PVE attribute levels.

[Twisted Toon]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

This is the second time I've seen this argument in this thread and I've gotta admit I'm a bit confused. How do you "seamlessly" introduce something into the game? One day it's not there, the next day it is. Minus the story-driven content that started popping up near the end of the game's retail run, most things were just dropped into the existing game.

Story-wise, they way Hero vs Villain PvP was introduced was fairly seamless.

Mechanics-wise, it was as clunky as driving a car on triangular wheels.

The ATs were not even remotely designed with PvP in mind.

Not to mention the balance between the powers within each AT.

Yes, if you are going to have PvP in a game, there is an absolute need for balance between powers and ATs, including powers within each AT.

CoH's powers balance was atrocious when it was first released. Same for the AT balance.

It became very apparent when the Arena was introduced.

 

If they had planned on adding PvP to the game, they would have planned the ATs with that in mind.

They just had the idea, "we'd like to have PvP in this game" but didn't actually put any thought (planning) into it until after the game was released.

And, by then, it was too late to plan the ATs (and the powers) for PvP.

Which, is one reason why we got the Issue 13 PvP revamp and the PvP powers working differently than the PvE powers.

Those were plaid patches trying to cover a hole in pinstriped materiel.

 

[macskull]

16 minutes ago, Twisted Toon said:

Story-wise, they way Hero vs Villain PvP was introduced was fairly seamless.

Mechanics-wise, it was as clunky as driving a car on triangular wheels.

The ATs were not even remotely designed with PvP in mind.

Not to mention the balance between the powers within each AT.

Yes, if you are going to have PvP in a game, there is an absolute need for balance between powers and ATs, including powers within each AT.

CoH's powers balance was atrocious when it was first released. Same for the AT balance.

It became very apparent when the Arena was introduced.

 

If they had planned on adding PvP to the game, they would have planned the ATs with that in mind.

They just had the idea, "we'd like to have PvP in this game" but didn't actually put any thought (planning) into it until after the game was released.

And, by then, it was too late to plan the ATs (and the powers) for PvP.

Which, is one reason why we got the Issue 13 PvP revamp and the PvP powers working differently than the PvE powers.

Those were plaid patches trying to cover a hole in pinstriped materiel.

 

From the beginning, there were a few PvP-specific differences to assist in AT balance (things like unresisted Defender debuffs and a portion of Blaster damage being unresisted, as examples). It isn't possible to build a PvP system in an MMO where every single powerset and AT performs exactly the same, because at that point you might as well just give everyone the exact same powers and then the actual character you're playing becomes irrelevant. The argument that every single powerset and every single build combination on every AT should be equally viable at one specific part of the game is laughable. If I want to build a character that is good at soloing AVs and monsters, I'm not going to build an FF/AR Defender to do it.

 

The Issue 13 changes were a well-intentioned but poorly-conceived and poorly-implemented effort at trying to make PvP more accessible for those who didn't participate in it, while simultaneously ignoring the inputs and suggestions of the players who did. The PvP community had a rather long list of fixes that would have helped PvP balance but that list was largely ignored.

[srmalloy]

22 hours ago, LiquidBandage said:

If PvP was integrated into the game design from the very beginning, proper implementation would have done a couple things.

Actually, it seems to me that there is a much simpler test than what you describe -- if PvP was integrated into the game design from before launch, the devs wouldn't have had to continually patch and rework powers in PvP from the moment it was implemented, with some PvP changes jamming back into PvE changes, and we wouldn't have watched the devs' declaration on the PvE changes mutate from "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make PvE changes purely for PvP reasons" to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", and then stopped commenting about the PvP-driven changes to PvE at all.

[Ignatz the Insane]

If the Devs decided to open another server with open world PvP, I'd be all for it, especially if it increased the player base.  It's not a server I'd visit, but PvP IS popular with many players.  I absolutely don't want any kind of PvP, even in limited capacity, to affect my PvE gameplay.  PvP isn't my cup of tea.

[srmalloy]

21 hours ago, macskull said:

In the entirety of this game's history there has only been one power - one - that has been nerfed in PvE solely for PvP reasons. Do you know what that power is? Probably not, that's how obscure a nerf it was. Every other nerf that the playerbase has blamed on PvPers has had just as much a foundation in PvE, if not more.

Besides "movement suppression"? It was implemented to prevent 'jousting' -- queuing up an attack on a target, then moving rapidly past them with SS, Fly, or SJ to have the power trigger and halt your movement after you'd passed out of your target's range, so your attack would go off but they would be unable to attack back. This was implemented in PvE despite the fact that jousting doesn't work in PvE -- the moment you get within your attack range of your target, your target instantly aggros on you and attacks back, so even if your travel power carries you out of their attack range, they still get to attack back at you. It's mostly only usable against characters with just melee attacks, because it's much harder to judge 'just inside' your range on an attack and getting out of their range before they can respond. And with the update that gave every mob a ranged attack if they didn't have one, there aren't any mobs left that can be successfully jousted in PvE.

[macskull]

51 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Besides "movement suppression"? It was implemented to prevent 'jousting' -- queuing up an attack on a target, then moving rapidly past them with SS, Fly, or SJ to have the power trigger and halt your movement after you'd passed out of your target's range, so your attack would go off but they would be unable to attack back. This was implemented in PvE despite the fact that jousting doesn't work in PvE -- the moment you get within your attack range of your target, your target instantly aggros on you and attacks back, so even if your travel power carries you out of their attack range, they still get to attack back at you. It's mostly only usable against characters with just melee attacks, because it's much harder to judge 'just inside' your range on an attack and getting out of their range before they can respond. And with the update that gave every mob a ranged attack if they didn't have one, there aren't any mobs left that can be successfully jousted in PvE.

Jousting and kiting work perfectly well against almost any NPC because even the ones with plenty of ranged attacks are still controlled by this game's (pretty dumb) AI. As long as I'm moving around a target at range that target will keep trying to run to where I was instead of where I am, meaning even with movement suppression it's trivial to stay at range. Additionally you can still abuse jousting by doing things like creatively timing the activation of powers so you're around geometry or out of range by the time the enemy actually responds.

 

That being said, this discussion doesn't actually matter since movement suppression doesn't exist in PvP. Don't believe me? Hop into a PvP zone and try it out for yourself.

Edited October 4, 2020 by macskull

[Twisted Toon]

9 hours ago, macskull said:

From the beginning, there were a few PvP-specific differences to assist in AT balance (things like unresisted Defender debuffs and a portion of Blaster damage being unresisted, as examples). It isn't possible to build a PvP system in an MMO where every single powerset and AT performs exactly the same, because at that point you might as well just give everyone the exact same powers and then the actual character you're playing becomes irrelevant.

Why do you assume that when someone says "balanced", they mean "the same"?

Balanced, does not mean "the same".

Do you honestly think that any game that was designed with PvP, from the start, doesn't make character balance a priority?

 

Mechwarrior Online (when I tested the Beta) balanced their teams by tonnage.

Unless there was a bug, you wouldn't find a team of six 100 ton mechs fighting a team of six 30 ton mechs.

100 ton vs 100 ton was an even match, and came down to player skill and luck.

 

9 hours ago, macskull said:

 The argument that every single powerset and every single build combination on every AT should be equally viable at one specific part of the game is laughable. If I want to build a character that is good at soloing AVs and monsters, I'm not going to build an FF/AR Defender to do it.

And then you have everyone playing the same AT with the same 2 Power-sets.

So, you're now playing PvP where everyone has the exact same powers because anything else won't hack it in PvP.

 

9 hours ago, macskull said:

The PvP community had a rather long list of fixes that would have helped PvP balance but that list was largely ignored.

That might have had something to do with feasibility and return on investment.

Considering the small percentage of people that played PvP on live, they might not have seen it as worth the invested time and money to make those changes.

I don't know. I wasn't a part of the planning sessions for the game during its live run.

[Greycat]

9 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Actually, it seems to me that there is a much simpler test than what you describe -- if PvP was integrated into the game design from before launch, the devs wouldn't have had to continually patch and rework powers in PvP from the moment it was implemented, with some PvP changes jamming back into PvE changes, and we wouldn't have watched the devs' declaration on the PvE changes mutate from "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make PvE changes purely for PvP reasons" to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", and then stopped commenting about the PvP-driven changes to PvE at all.

... if "the devs had to keep adjusting PVP powers/effects" is the argument trying to disprove PVP being intended as part of the game design from launch (which... search on old statements,) then PVE wasn't intended either, as... powers have had to be continually adjusted in PVE, as well.

 

I mean, come on now, nobody calls it "city of blasters" any more, you can run multiple armors, and regen's barely able to regen from being nerfed so often.

[macskull]

5 hours ago, Twisted Toon said:

So, you're now playing PvP where everyone has the exact same powers because anything else won't hack it in PvP.

A competent player can be successful with most powersets and combinations. There are absolutely some that are better than others but that’s because not all powersets are the same. If I’m building a character to mess around in PvP zones I can make most things work. Hell, I’ve got a PvE-built Psi/SR Stalker that is relatively successful when I want to dig it out. Competitive team arena matches are a little less diverse but even then you can still field a pretty wide variety of things and do well.

5 hours ago, Twisted Toon said:

Considering the small percentage of people that played PvP on live, they might not have seen it as worth the invested time and money to make those changes.

Yet instead of listening to that feedback they spent even more time and effort on sweeping changes that completely alienated most of the existing PvP playerbase while bringing in almost no new players. That’s bad game design 101.