Can we please NOT force "Trinity Gaming" in CoX? (Dr Khan)

[Arbegla]

7 minutes ago, arcane said:

Ok well I agree most with the guy that said there is no “hard trinity” but there was once a “soft trinity” in which team composition was relevant to success. Can we agree with that?

 

I mean sure, if you also agree that it was Player Driven, not Developer Driven. I remember multiple posts that City of Heroes was the game that you could play anything, because there wasn't a requirement for any specificness within a group.

[arcane]

2 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

 

If I get a team of 2 defenders, 2 dominators, 2 blasters, 2 controllers would you consider that soft trinity? If so then sure.

Yes. I am merely arguing that team composition, while flexible, was not always “any 8 imaginable and go”. Roles mattered, even if there were workarounds like using support to make tanks of squishies.

Edited June 17, 2021 by arcane

[golstat2003]

2 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

 

Okay, just so that we all understand that there is some common ground here...there have been and always have been exceptions to the "trinity" rule...however...I still believe that "generally speaking" the Devs had a trinity play style in mind when creating the classes and when judging the difficulty of the game.

 

Hmm, okay fair, if you're talking about folks who came from the traditional Everquest style of mmo era.

 

With that said what they built and what actually happened are two different things.

 

That's always been the case proven time and time again, that the original devs were often surprised by what could be done vs what they thought could be done.

[Solarverse]

2 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

 

If I get a team of 2 defenders, 2 dominators, 2 blasters, 2 controllers would you consider that soft trinity? If so then sure.

Sure, we'll meet half way there. Although me specifically, I was talking before City of Villains. I was thinking more pre i5 with my case.

[arcane]

2 minutes ago, Arbegla said:

 

I mean sure, if you also agree that it was Player Driven, not Developer Driven. I remember multiple posts that City of Heroes was the game that you could play anything, because there wasn't a requirement for any specificness within a group.

I don’t believe the developers made it possible to complete all content with *any* composition imaginable, no. That’s why I’m bringing up extreme examples that sound like they have some vulnerabilities.

[Solarverse]

Just now, golstat2003 said:

That's always been the case proven time and time again, that the original devs were often surprised by what could be done vs what they thought could be done.

 

I can most certainly agree to that. They were blown away by a great deal o things we did in those days. Like herding GMs to Paragrine Island, or Herding entire maps of ninjas and taking out AVs with a team of nothing but defenders. Yeah, I for sure know that regardless of how you design your game, players will always find a way to surprise you, lol.

[Arbegla]

7 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

 

I can most certainly agree to that. They were blown away by a great deal o things we did in those days. Like herding GMs to Paragrine Island, or Herding entire maps of ninjas and taking out AVs with a team of nothing but defenders. Yeah, I for sure know that regardless of how you design your game, players will always find a way to surprise you, lol.

 

Another thing is that Originally in City of Villains the developers wanted Masterminds to be the 'Tank' class, not Brutes. Which is why Masterminds have bodyguard mode. But it just didn't work out that way, mostly because Brutes and Tankers have similar powersets, and Masterminds have the lowest base hit points.

[Luminara]

5 hours ago, arcane said:

I would be interested to see the evidence of your assertions. Just because they didn’t design a “hard” trinity doesn’t mean they didn’t intend the “soft” kind we saw before IO’s. I’d be interested to see a dev saying at i0 that the game was designed so that 8 blasters would be as good as anything else, roles were never intended to exist, etc. Going to need the receipts on that one.

 

*shrug*

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/08/21/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-2

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/09/17/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-3

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/10/16/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-4

 

These articles, written by Emmert eight months before the game launched, walk us through the design process behind creating the archetypes available at launch.  Of particular note is how, in the second article, he outlines the thought process behind categorizing abilities and how that influenced archetype creation itself.

 

"Next, we took these very narrowly defined abilities and grouped them into larger categories. Things like rooting, mezzing and sleep were all related to controlling the behavior of the AI characters. So we dubbed that category 'Crowd Control' (to be honest, I call it now just 'control' but we didn't want to confuse it with our previous named control powers). We ended up with six basic areas: Melee Attacks, Ranged Attacks, Personal Defense, Buff/Debuff, Crowd Control and Movement abilities. At the time, we didn't quite know where we were going with this; we were just trying to get a handle on what exactly the things were that MMORPG players could do - and would want to do - in our game.

Pretty quickly, we decided that an individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories."

 

They didn't start with a trinity model.  That's of critical importance.  There was no tank/damage/heal categorization in mind when they began, no foes requiring a perfect blend of the three in order to win.  They began with a freeform selection model, noted the flaws and addressed them by gradually and carefully pulling things together, into general categories, then further refined those into classes.  Moreover, CoH launched before WoW, and the trinity model hadn't really be fully cemented at that time because there weren't nearly as many MMORPGs (Everquest, Runescape... those were the only big ones, as i recall).  Cryptic had no-one to copy, no game to inspire them (beyond P&P RPGs and tabletop board games), so they weren't eyeing some other wildly successful game and hoping to replicate the success by copying the design (as so many have done since EQ and WoW blew the gaming world up).

 

But the key here is in the final sentence of that quoted material.  "An individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories."  This is significant, because those categories, essentially, correspond to the more basic tank/damage/heal categories.  The process of narrowing down the power selection process and creating classes inherently required them to combine two of the three trinity aspects in order to make each class, due to the way they laid out the categories and how they assigned them in pairs.  The blaster was the exception that appeared to adhere to the trinity model, but it did so within the constraints of Cryptic's archetype model, being Ranged Damage/Melee Damage, and as such, isn't a true representative of a trinity model class.

 

In the third article, Emmert says, "Early this year, when we made some changes to the design, these ideas were knocking around the back of my head. As I explained in earlier columns, we came up with Archetypes - and each one had two "roles.""  That sentence is even more clear.  Every archetype specifically and purposefully fulfills two roles.  And with everyone fulfilling two roles... the trinity simply doesn't exist.  Our characters are, by design, too diverse to be narrowed down to the simplistic categorization of tank/damage/heal.

 

There are also numerous interviews archived all over the Internet, and in the Wayback Machine, some even linked on the wiki, in which Emmert and other Cryptic developers outline an intent to ensure that players aren't forced to dedicate hours of their lives to playing, to making the game as "casual friendly" as possible, as we'd refer to it today.  They wanted to create a game which people could log into for brief periods, feel like they accomplished something, and log out again.  They didn't want to create a game which required players to log in, patiently wait for a trinity team to assemble, go beat their heads against WoW-style Elite mobs for three hours, et cetera.  "Casual friendly" was always one of the most important design goals.  The trinity model is not casual friendly, it never has been and as demanding as it is, it simply can't be.

 

I don't have a direct quote from a developer, a link to the old forums in which one of them says, "Yeah, fuck that holy trinity stuff, we do what we want!".  I don't have it because I'm just not going to dig through tens of thousands of posts on the Wayback Machine to find it.  It's there, if you want to go digging, because I do clearly remember it being said several times over the years, but I'm not going to look for it.  Nor will I e-mail any of the former developers to ask (all of them are quite easy to find with a few minutes of searching).  I don't need to.  The evidence, both in actual play and in looking at developer comments like the ones I've linked, speaks for itself.  This is not and never was intended to be a trinity model game.

[Solarverse]

Just now, Arbegla said:

 

Another thing is that Originally in City of Villains the developers wanted Masterminds to be the 'Tank' class, not Brutes. Which is why Masterminds have bodyguard mode. But it just didn't work out that way, mostly because Brutes and Tankers have similar powersets, and Masterminds have the lowest base hit points.

Master Minds did not have BG in those days. BG was introduced much later.

[Solarverse]

17 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

*shrug*

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/08/21/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-2

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/09/17/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-3

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/10/16/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-4

 

These articles, written by Emmert eight months before the game launched, walk us through the design process behind creating the archetypes available at launch.  Of particular note is how, in the second article, he outlines the thought process behind categorizing abilities and how that influenced archetype creation itself.

 

"Next, we took these very narrowly defined abilities and grouped them into larger categories. Things like rooting, mezzing and sleep were all related to controlling the behavior of the AI characters. So we dubbed that category 'Crowd Control' (to be honest, I call it now just 'control' but we didn't want to confuse it with our previous named control powers). We ended up with six basic areas: Melee Attacks, Ranged Attacks, Personal Defense, Buff/Debuff, Crowd Control and Movement abilities. At the time, we didn't quite know where we were going with this; we were just trying to get a handle on what exactly the things were that MMORPG players could do - and would want to do - in our game.

Pretty quickly, we decided that an individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories."

 

They didn't start with a trinity model.  That's of critical importance.  There was no tank/damage/heal categorization in mind when they began, no foes requiring a perfect blend of the three in order to win.  They began with a freeform selection model, noted the flaws and addressed them by gradually and carefully pulling things together, into general categories, then further refined those into classes.  Moreover, CoH launched before WoW, and the trinity model hadn't really be fully cemented at that time because there weren't nearly as many MMORPGs (Everquest, Runescape... those were the only big ones, as i recall).  Cryptic had no-one to copy, no game to inspire them (beyond P&P RPGs and tabletop board games), so they weren't eyeing some other wildly successful game and hoping to replicate the success by copying the design (as so many have done since EQ and WoW blew the gaming world up).

 

But the key here is in the final sentence of that quoted material.  "An individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories."  This is significant, because those categories, essentially, correspond to the more basic tank/damage/heal categories.  The process of narrowing down the power selection process and creating classes inherently required them to combine two of the three trinity aspects in order to make each class, due to the way they laid out the categories and how they assigned them in pairs.  The blaster was the exception that appeared to adhere to the trinity model, but it did so within the constraints of Cryptic's archetype model, being Ranged Damage/Melee Damage, and as such, isn't a true representative of a trinity model class.

 

In the third article, Emmert says, "Early this year, when we made some changes to the design, these ideas were knocking around the back of my head. As I explained in earlier columns, we came up with Archetypes - and each one had two "roles.""  That sentence is even more clear.  Every archetype specifically and purposefully fulfills two roles.  And with everyone fulfilling two roles... the trinity simply doesn't exist.  Our characters are, by design, too diverse to be narrowed down to the simplistic categorization of tank/damage/heal.

 

There are also numerous interviews archived all over the Internet, and in the Wayback Machine, some even linked on the wiki, in which Emmert and other Cryptic developers outline an intent to ensure that players aren't forced to dedicate hours of their lives to playing, to making the game as "casual friendly" as possible, as we'd refer to it today.  They wanted to create a game which people could log into for brief periods, feel like they accomplished something, and log out again.  They didn't want to create a game which required players to log in, patiently wait for a trinity team to assemble, go beat their heads against WoW-style Elite mobs for three hours, et cetera.  "Casual friendly" was always one of the most important design goals.  The trinity model is not casual friendly, it never has been and as demanding as it is, it simply can't be.

 

I don't have a direct quote from a developer, a link to the old forums in which one of them says, "Yeah, fuck that holy trinity stuff, we do what we want!".  I don't have it because I'm just not going to dig through tens of thousands of posts on the Wayback Machine to find it.  It's there, if you want to go digging, because I do clearly remember it being said several times over the years, but I'm not going to look for it.  Nor will I e-mail any of the former developers to ask (all of them are quite easy to find with a few minutes of searching).  I don't need to.  The evidence, both in actual play and in looking at developer comments like the ones I've linked, speaks for itself.  This is not and never was intended to be a trinity model game.

Works for me...you have me convinced.  That sure didn't stop players from playing as though it was a Trinity style game though, lol.

[Arli]

47 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Sounds like a bunch of Elitists. So is that what we are compared to...the rest of us I mean? Elitists always do things that nobody else can do. I and players on my level on the other hand are just not that.

I'm confused about this statement, but only because elitism is supposed to convey that a group of people look down on others. How is it elitist if someone wants to build a team a certain way? It's not an attack against specific players (and should not be taken as such); it's just a preference for powersets that they feel would benefit their team. If people want to build certain compositions for their teams, why is it an issue? No one is obligated to join those teams, if they don't want to.

 

It's not realistic to expect everyone to play the same ways. Some people like content that's simpler - some like more of a challenge. Why vilify people for that, or call them elitist?

[Solarverse]

Just now, Arli said:

I'm confused about this statement, but only because elitism is supposed to convey that a group of people look down on others. How is it elitist if someone wants to build a team a certain way? It's not an attack against specific players (and should not be taken as such); it's just a preference for powersets that they feel would benefit their team. If people want to build certain compositions for their teams, why is it an issue? No one is obligated to join those teams, if they don't want to.

 

It's not realistic to expect everyone to play the same ways. Some people like content that's simpler - some like more of a challenge. Why vilify people for that, or call them elitist?

I refer to it by its meaning that it had when I first heard the term...Elitists were players who min maxed and did hard number crunching, then took specifically designed teams to completely wipe out content in record time.

I understand the term has changed over the years, but I don't age well with time...I still live in the 90's and early 2000's.

[Apparition]

29 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Master Minds did not have BG in those days. BG was introduced much later.

 

 

Not much later.  Bodyguard mode was introduced in Issue 7, about seven months after City of Villains launch.  And yeah, Masterminds were originally designed as the CoV tank.  That's why Lord Recluse has pets and yet is considered a tank.  But that was pretty quickly walked back, before CoV launch IIRC.

[Arli]

6 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

I refer to it by its meaning that it had when I first heard the term...Elitists were players who min maxed and did hard number crunching, then took specifically designed teams to completely wipe out content in record time.

I understand the term has changed over the years, but I don't age well with time...I still live in the 90's and early 2000's.

I remember using the term "elite" a lot in the 90s (or well, l33t). I'm in my late 30s, so I might not remember it as well as I did - but being called an "elitist" was always more insulting than being called "elite", and there are profound differences between the two - which is why you likely got the reactions you did to it.

 

I do want to go on the record by stating that a Dr. Kahn TF can be completed without "elite" players, although it can be hit or miss sometimes - but victory is not always assured in every instance. I've been part of failed LRSFs, LGTFs, and BSFs - likely also a few Kahns tossed in there, as well.

[golstat2003]

35 minutes ago, Arbegla said:

 

Another thing is that Originally in City of Villains the developers wanted Masterminds to be the 'Tank' class, not Brutes. Which is why Masterminds have bodyguard mode. But it just didn't work out that way, mostly because Brutes and Tankers have similar powersets, and Masterminds have the lowest base hit points.

 

Yeah I forgot which Dev admitted that years back. When I first heard that I was like "umm, wtf?" lol

 

🤯

[Arbegla]

37 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Master Minds did not have BG in those days. BG was introduced much later.

 

Not to throw a wrench in this thought process or anything, but Issue 6 was City of Villains. (released to the live servers 11/27/05) Bodyguard Mode, as we know it today, was in Issue 7. Which interestingly enough, was released 6/6/06, a bit over 6 months later.

 

https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Mastermind_Strategy#Bodyguard

[Arbegla]

10 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

 

Yeah I forgot which Dev admitted that years back. When I first heard that I was like "umm, wtf?" lol

 

🤯

 

To be fair, 'Tanker-mind' is a legit way to play Masterminds, and they can certainly take a beating when used as a tank. Its just hard to make it work well, and not fall apart quickly.

[golstat2003]

42 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

*shrug*

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/08/21/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-2

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/09/17/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-3

https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/10/16/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-4

 

These articles, written by Emmert eight months before the game launched, walk us through the design process behind creating the archetypes available at launch.  Of particular note is how, in the second article, he outlines the thought process behind categorizing abilities and how that influenced archetype creation itself.

 

"Next, we took these very narrowly defined abilities and grouped them into larger categories. Things like rooting, mezzing and sleep were all related to controlling the behavior of the AI characters. So we dubbed that category 'Crowd Control' (to be honest, I call it now just 'control' but we didn't want to confuse it with our previous named control powers). We ended up with six basic areas: Melee Attacks, Ranged Attacks, Personal Defense, Buff/Debuff, Crowd Control and Movement abilities. At the time, we didn't quite know where we were going with this; we were just trying to get a handle on what exactly the things were that MMORPG players could do - and would want to do - in our game.

Pretty quickly, we decided that an individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories."

 

They didn't start with a trinity model.  That's of critical importance.  There was no tank/damage/heal categorization in mind when they began, no foes requiring a perfect blend of the three in order to win.  They began with a freeform selection model, noted the flaws and addressed them by gradually and carefully pulling things together, into general categories, then further refined those into classes.  Moreover, CoH launched before WoW, and the trinity model hadn't really be fully cemented at that time because there weren't nearly as many MMORPGs (Everquest, Runescape... those were the only big ones, as i recall).  Cryptic had no-one to copy, no game to inspire them (beyond P&P RPGs and tabletop board games), so they weren't eyeing some other wildly successful game and hoping to replicate the success by copying the design (as so many have done since EQ and WoW blew the gaming world up).

 

But the key here is in the final sentence of that quoted material.  "An individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories."  This is significant, because those categories, essentially, correspond to the more basic tank/damage/heal categories.  The process of narrowing down the power selection process and creating classes inherently required them to combine two of the three trinity aspects in order to make each class, due to the way they laid out the categories and how they assigned them in pairs.  The blaster was the exception that appeared to adhere to the trinity model, but it did so within the constraints of Cryptic's archetype model, being Ranged Damage/Melee Damage, and as such, isn't a true representative of a trinity model class.

 

In the third article, Emmert says, "Early this year, when we made some changes to the design, these ideas were knocking around the back of my head. As I explained in earlier columns, we came up with Archetypes - and each one had two "roles.""  That sentence is even more clear.  Every archetype specifically and purposefully fulfills two roles.  And with everyone fulfilling two roles... the trinity simply doesn't exist.  Our characters are, by design, too diverse to be narrowed down to the simplistic categorization of tank/damage/heal.

 

There are also numerous interviews archived all over the Internet, and in the Wayback Machine, some even linked on the wiki, in which Emmert and other Cryptic developers outline an intent to ensure that players aren't forced to dedicate hours of their lives to playing, to making the game as "casual friendly" as possible, as we'd refer to it today.  They wanted to create a game which people could log into for brief periods, feel like they accomplished something, and log out again.  They didn't want to create a game which required players to log in, patiently wait for a trinity team to assemble, go beat their heads against WoW-style Elite mobs for three hours, et cetera.  "Casual friendly" was always one of the most important design goals.  The trinity model is not casual friendly, it never has been and as demanding as it is, it simply can't be.

 

I don't have a direct quote from a developer, a link to the old forums in which one of them says, "Yeah, fuck that holy trinity stuff, we do what we want!".  I don't have it because I'm just not going to dig through tens of thousands of posts on the Wayback Machine to find it.  It's there, if you want to go digging, because I do clearly remember it being said several times over the years, but I'm not going to look for it.  Nor will I e-mail any of the former developers to ask (all of them are quite easy to find with a few minutes of searching).  I don't need to.  The evidence, both in actual play and in looking at developer comments like the ones I've linked, speaks for itself.  This is not and never was intended to be a trinity model game.

 

I'm saving this post the next time someone claims COH was not built to be a casual friendly game. LMAO!

[golstat2003]

Just now, Arbegla said:

 

To be fair, 'Tanker-mind' is a legit way to play Masterminds, and they can certainly take a beating when used as a tank. Its just hard to make it work well, and not fall apart quickly.

 

True. My reaction was based on the already existing archetypes that can tank more easily than what MMs have to do.

 

I mean yeah MMs can clearly make it work. But that just seems so painful to base a class around, especially with how traditional mms were (no fast buffing of pets, no group aoe buffing of pets when you res-ummoned them at launch for MMs). 

 

And clearly when COV launched once again the players proved the devs thought process wrong. LOL

[macskull]

5 hours ago, golstat2003 said:

I'm saving this post the next time someone claims COH was not built to be a casual friendly game. LMAO!

I'm amazed there are people who think this as CoH has always been casual-friendly in the "pick any build with any powers and any slotting and you can at least be somewhat effective most of the time" sense, or maybe the "you can still enjoy the game even if you only jump on for an  hour or two once or twice a week" sense. Where the casual-friendliness drops off really fast is when you start digging beneath the surface to figure out how the game actually works. Try explaining to a new player how hit chance is calculated, or how resistible resistance debuffs are resisted by damage resistance, and then watch as their eyes slowly glaze over.

Edited June 18, 2021 by macskull

[ScarySai]

7 hours ago, Solarverse said:

Sounds like a bunch of Elitists. So is that what we are compared to...the rest of us I mean? Elitists always do things that nobody else can do. I and players on my level on the other hand are just not that.

 

Alright, I'm just going to address something really quick.

 

Being a min/maxer, good at the game, or doing high end content isn't elitism. Stop using the term like that, it's wrong.

[Darmian]

8 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

 

Alright, I'm just going to address something really quick.

 

Being a min/maxer, good at the game, or doing high end content isn't elitism. Stop using the term like that, it's wrong.

99 % agree...except for this bit, "good at the game".  That is entirely subjective to how you play/want to play/enjoy playing. This isn't a professional sport. For instance I get my kicks spending ages in the AE writing stuff.  Am I somehow bad at the game? No, not a personal attack actually.  If you're going to address what I feel is a valid point, and make a good point about it, which you have by the way,  then don't torpedo yourself like that.

 

44 minutes ago, macskull said:

I'm amazed there are people who think this as CoH has always been casual-friendly in the "pick any build with any powers and any slotting and you can at least be somewhat effective most of the time" sense, or maybe the "you can still enjoy the game even if you only jump on for an  hour or two once or twice a week" sense. Where the casual-friendliness drops off really fast is when you start digging beneath the surface to figure out how the game actually works. Try explaining to a new player how hit chance is calculated, or how resistible resistance debuffs are resisted by damage resistance, and then watch as their eyes slowly glaze over.

 

And I'm always amazed that people think any of that really matters! To plenty it does, and that baffles me.  And there's plenty, I'm one, who do not give a shit.  And that must surely baffle those who love to craft a build in MIDS/Pines/etc and then test it out. I'm not a new player and MY eyes will glaze over at all that, because it literally does not matter as long was we're having fun and no one is being a dick. Again, as per above not a personal attack at all.  Just a contrary position stated.

[ScarySai]

1 minute ago, Darmian said:

If you're going to address what I feel is a valid point, and make a good point about it, which you have by the way,  then don't torpedo yourself like that.

 

Don't assume it's my idea, this is what other people think 'elitism' entails, not my definition.

[Darmian]

Just now, ScarySai said:

 

Don't assume it's my idea, this is what other people think 'elitism' entails, not my definition.

Fair point.  I did use your post to stand on my own soapbox there, so no actual offense intended.

[Grouchybeast]

7 hours ago, Solarverse said:

I refer to it by its meaning that it had when I first heard the term...Elitists were players who min maxed and did hard number crunching, then took specifically designed teams to completely wipe out content in record time.
 

 

All-support team in CoX are kind of the opposite of this, though.  You don't need to number-crunch, design a specific team, or come up with clever tactics or highly tuned builds.  You just need to round up eight Defenders and stroll around the mission maps chatting, while the enemies melt and nothing gets to fight back because either they're all debuffed to heck, or you're all buffed to the hardcaps.  Or both.  It's basically cheat mode.