Unlimited Growth

[Hew]

4 hours ago, DougGraves said:

 

 

But the players wanted to reach the end quickly.  They wanted unlimited power quickly and effortlessly.

No. They want to feel heroic, villainous, or praetorian. And not all powersets get you to feeling one of those things by level X. Some "boutique" power combinations only work when you throw lots of crap on top. Others "just work", and you get that feeling early on. But really, people want to smash a lot of pixels, not stand and have a bunch of people on a team fight one block of pixels for however long. 

[macskull]

5 hours ago, DougGraves said:

The devs could simply wipe the characters and make it harder to reach unlimited power.  Remove AE farming, remove the XP multipliers, etc.  Make IO sets massively expensive.

Doing something like this would undoubtedly cause a much larger loss in players than the current trickle of "I'm bored" players.

[golstat2003]

5 hours ago, DougGraves said:

Players have unlimited power.  The problem you have is that they reach it. 

 

The devs could simply wipe the characters and make it harder to reach unlimited power.  Remove AE farming, remove the XP multipliers, etc.  Make IO sets massively expensive.

 

But the players wanted to reach the end quickly.  They wanted unlimited power quickly and effortlessly.

No thanks.

[Rishidian]

21 hours ago, Darmian said:

Is your character a powerful character because they have all Superman's powers, or because they are Superman?

 

21 hours ago, SuperPlyx said:

This reminds me of that meme from the office: "they are the same picture" 

 

No, It's not the same picture.  Superman is not the sum of his powers.  It's WHO Superman is, not WHAT superman is.

[Snarky]

here is a new challenge i am doing regular on my dark/dark brute.  join a pug baf.  when the siege portion starts go to the reinforcement spawn point immediately.  start fighting there, do not leave, do not quit until team has finished trial.  for my dark dark this is razors edge fun lol.  if i fall i have to hit Soul Transfer FAST or I lose all the agro and my playmates race for the league.  I am more useful soloing all adds than i am DPS on the bosses, due to rings.  I can control the outside agro and let the league focus on primary task

 

my point in mentioning this are there are a hundred thousand challenges awaiting you in the game if you look for them.  done everything huh?  do you have your ski badges?  because that takes a different level of toon control lol

Edited March 12, 2021 by Snarky

[oedipus_tex]

This is probably best balanced on a private server where you can control your own adventure. You won't get all of the fantastic additions the Homecoming team has created or balanced, but you do get complete control over your world. Actually editing values on a server is somewhat challenging and requires some development experience, but you do get access to dev commands and can make things harder or easier for yourself. 

[Darmian]

21 minutes ago, Snarky said:

my point in mentioning this are there are a hundred thousand challenges awaiting you in the game if you look for them.  done everything huh?

I'm working on my second 24 Carat Level 50 Praetorian, Resistance this time, Loyalist last time.  And I like writing AE adventures.  Maybe no one will play them but me, but unlike when I was a TT GM, this time *I* get to run through them too!

[CaptTastic]

This would be a big no for me. We’ve all been on end-game content with characters literally straight out of AE. Last thing we need is a bunch of people with 1000 vet levels, all of which were gained while stood next to a door, bragging about how how powerful they are. 
 

Think slowly earning your power is one of the true highlights of CoX, but it needs to be done through 1-50, not 50-1000. 
 

I started a stone melee/SR Brute, thrown together on a random whim to be honest, a few weeks ago and started him in Preatoria. I’ve solo’d him all the way, which has cost me the joys of teaming, but boy do I know him. 
 

I was with him when Syndicate were beating him down in the Nova Preatoria sewers. I was with him when he started to find his feet even though Resistance laid every ambush imaginable. I was with him when Seismic Smash changed his life, but came with an endurance cost he couldn’t handle. I was with him when he chose villainy and headed to Rogue Isles and his defence started to grow. I was with him when he finally conquered those endurance problems in his mid-30s and hit the defence caps. Now, at 38, he’s taking on much tougher challenges, x3/+3, and that’s brought more struggles particularly when you run into an occasional +4 EB. 

 

The end-game power is not the game. The journey is the game. Right now he’s got 12 more levels ahead of him before he can even think about incarnates. He has Rikti, Romans, Patrons, Arachnoids in his path. Will he have a crisis of conscience and seek redemption in Paragon City? Will he go home to Praetoria? I don’t know right now. But what I do know is that character, his powers, his strengths, his weaknesses, and all the lessons we have learned together. 
 

City of Heroes is VAST. It’s practically a masterpiece. There is already a huge world out there for players to explore and experience. The last thing it needs is more incentive to just endlessly cycle the end-game stuff, at best, or AE fire-farms at worst. 

Edited March 12, 2021 by CaptTastic

[Darmian]

Blowing my own trumpet here, @CaptTastic, but if your boy wants a "blast from the past", check out the Praetorian entries in my sig 😄

[CaptTastic]

11 minutes ago, Darmian said:

Blowing my own trumpet here, @CaptTastic, but if your boy wants a "blast from the past", check out the Praetorian entries in my sig 😄

I'll certainly give them a look! 

[Darmian]

1 minute ago, CaptTastic said:

I'll certainly give them a look! 

Deliberately set Pre War to "fit in" to the Imperial Power line.

[nihilii]

I love infinite progression in general, and I'd love it here. Give me +1 HP and +0.1 END per veteran level and I'm going to grind and grind endlessly and love every moment of it.

 

But this probably doesn't fit the game, and the negative externalities have been pointed out:

- leads to compulsive behavior in some of us

- discourages altitism

- goes against the laid-back and smoothed out progression Homecoming is striving for

- no sense of completion for finishing a character

 

...and the list goes on.

[Snarky]

3 hours ago, nihilii said:

I love infinite progression in general, and I'd love it here. Give me +1 HP and +0.1 END per veteran level and I'm going to grind and grind endlessly and love every moment of it.

 

But this probably doesn't fit the game, and the negative externalities have been pointed out:

- leads to compulsive behavior in some of us

- discourages altitism

- goes against the laid-back and smoothed out progression Homecoming is striving for

- no sense of completion for finishing a character

 

...and the list goes on.

I would love to get 1 health and .1 end per veteran level....maybe after 100?  Really make it a lifetime achievement character lol.

[Hew]

4 hours ago, nihilii said:

I love infinite progression in general, and I'd love it here. Give me +1 HP and +0.1 END per veteran level and I'm going to grind and grind endlessly and love every moment of it.

 

But this probably doesn't fit the game, and the negative externalities have been pointed out:

- leads to compulsive behavior in some of us

- discourages altitism

- goes against the laid-back and smoothed out progression Homecoming is striving for

- no sense of completion for finishing a character

 

...and the list goes on.

FANTASTIC summation of a lot of this discussion.

 

[Galaxy Brain]

It is a crime that nobody has mentioned

 

[Hew]

11 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

It is a crime that nobody has mentioned

 

Didn't he make a comeback in a pretty bad movie?

[Replacement]

I would only accept an unlimited progression system if it was...

 

A) extremely minor benefits

AND

B) account-wide

AND

C) only applies to level 50 characters.

 

That's not multiple choice, it has to meet all those requirements, or else you've just killed altism.

 

It's probably hard for some people to wrap their minds around, but people can be both, neurotic levels of completionist and want to play lots of alts. Endless progression forces an unnecessary choice.

[Andreah]

I'm not a fan of account progression, but I understand why it would have better altism incentives. That's really key for this game.

 

We already have quite a lot of this, in a way. It's easy to leverage prior progression of other characters into greater capability of a new character compared to a player who did not have those prior characters. You can transfer influence, enhancements, supplies, and even incarnate empyrean merits.

 

So I'm going to reluctantly agree completely with Replacement's A, B, and C points. 

 

What I would look for is some way for veteran levels to convey some small mechanical benefit (it would have to be really small, and diminish as those levels increased) that would apply to every character on the account at level 50 or higher.

 

Perhaps these could be Account-wide Accolade badges with effects that apply to level 50's an up; unlocked at certain vet levels - like vet level 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000. Perhaps there's a series of them that offer, +5% health, +5% stamina, +5% to-hit, +5% defense, and +5% resist total accumulated by vet level 1000. And if you 'only' get to vet level 200, you've gained 80% of it all. Kind of like running the P2W amplifiers constantly.

 

Bonuses like those are small-ish compared to what we get from IO's well-slotted or from full-fledged incarnate abilities, but they would make a significant difference and reward anyone who pushed at least one character up into the vet levels past the big incarnate merits & threads rewards.

 

But now, think on this further. The base content of the game isn't getting any harder (and I would argue that some optional higher difficulty is already needed) and increased progression combat power just makes it even easier, especially account-wide. So with that in mind, although I'm in favor of Replacement's three points, -IF- this ends up being done, I would add a fourth point -- (D) An optional increased level of difficulty is made available (or the +4/x8 setting get some unique challenge tweaks) or don't do it at all.

[Replacement]

@Andreah I think we're in a similar space here. We would probably just prefer the solution is "don't."  But if it was deemed a definite path forward, you basically need considerations as I mentioned.

 

Another thing that occurred to me though was creating more ways to get the same benefits as other builds.

So for example:

• Use veteran levels to directly buy accolades
• Use them to convert out set bonuses and add them to SOs (a way to grant higher power to the folks that don't memorize sets but are still willing to put in the work to get their toons to high end set power levels)

[arcane]

1 hour ago, Galaxy Brain said:

It is a crime that nobody has mentioned

 

I was wondering what was taking y’all so long on this lol

[arcane]

3 hours ago, Snarky said:

I would love to get 1 health and .1 end per veteran level....maybe after 100?  Really make it a lifetime achievement character lol.

My fire brutes will able to afford to be... double afk?

[Andreah]

5 minutes ago, arcane said:

My fire brutes will able to afford to be... double afk?

Indeed.

 

This is also why any increased progression has to diminish further into the veteran levels. There are players out there with near to, or more than, 5000 veteran levels. I don't think I want them to have +5000 health and +500 end. 

 

Any linear mechanical progression reward will fail catastrophically.

[Galaxy Brain]

To actually toss my hat into the ring, the Borderlands series has a really great way of handling this while ENCOURAGING alts.

 

In their games, they have a system called "Badass Ranks" where completing certain milestones or challenges unlocks account wide boosts for the player across all their characters. This is unlimited... but the kicker is that you can only attain certain milestones once per character and as you level up it gets harder and harder. For example, there could be 5 different tiers of "defeat an enemy with X thing", with each level being like 100x / 1000x / 10000x, etc. Naturally as you progress it will get harder and harder to achieve. Likewise, the boosts you get also have diminishing returns where the first time you cash in your rank you get 5% Damage. The next time is 4%.... 3%.... 2% ..... 1%.... 0.5%..... etc. Do this across multiple characters enough and you still gain rewards, but it takes longer and the output you get is very small additions to the pile.

 

I like this as it encourages alts + player longevity and can still offer bonuses to max lvl characters who can complete some challenges far easier than others. There are even some bonuses that only affect high lvl gameplay in the series that have no value to new / alt characters you make.

[arcane]

10 minutes ago, Andreah said:

Indeed.

 

This is also why any increased progression has to diminish further into the veteran levels. There are players out there with near to, or more than, 5000 veteran levels. I don't think I want them to have +5000 health and +500 end. 

 

Any linear mechanical progression reward will fail catastrophically.

Well they’d cap HP eventually lol

 

But yeah, this reminds me of ESO champion points which gave fractions of a percent in various buffs and capped at 810 pts last time I played.

[Taboo]

Sounds like we'll be needing new IO sets that don't have +hp in them.