When will the game be rebalanced around IOs? Never, and here's why.

[Luminara]

When the Invention system was released in Issue 9 (May 1, 2007), there was a lot of excitement for what it represented.  Inventions allowed players to sidestep Enhancement Diversification (which had been implemented 18 months earlier), added the potential for significantly greater flexibility in designing and playing characters, and suggested a much more interesting development direction in regard to content.  Many people expected the next several Issues to include content aimed at, using and requiring IOs.  Issue after Issue came and went, and the anticipated IO-dependent content never arrived, which left a lot of people scratching their heads and expressing disappointment and discontent.  There we were with all these great new things, and nothing to test our limits.

 

The question is why that content was never created.  To answer that, we have to go further back, to Issue 6.

 

Issue 6, coinciding with the release of City of Villains, added supergroup bases, prestige and base salvage.  Prestige was a new currency, one which, at that time, was earned mutually exclusively with inf*.  You could earn one or the other, not both (later changed due to the unpopularity of the prestige system, bases... and the fact that not earning inf* while leveling meant not replacing out-leveled enhancements).  For veteran MMORPG players, even in those early-ish years, the advent of a new currency implied newer and harder content.  Adding a new currency with each content update was a common approach in MMORPGs, a method of preventing players from blitzing the new content by purchasing all of the new gear with their old currency, which they'd had months to accumulate.  So the addition of prestige represented, from the players' perspective, a wave of newer and harder content... which, like IO-dependent content, never materialized (the Cathedral of Pain trial wasn't any more difficult than other trials and *Fs).  And that raises yet another question - what was the point of prestige, if it was never intended to be used as a gate to newer and harder content?

If you were around in those days, you'll recall one of the developers mentioning that they were always working two or three Issues ahead.  By the time an Issue went live, Cryptic was in the planning and implementation stages of future Issues.  You'll also remember that it wasn't uncommon for features to be pushed back one or more Issues.  And this tells us the real purpose of prestige.

 

By the time Issue 6 went live, players had been accumulating influence (infamy didn't exist until Issue 6 and the simultaneous release of CoV) for 18 months.  And there just wasn't much to do with it.  Enhancements and inspirations were the only things which could be purchased at that time, and at level 50, players weren't buying more SOs, they were switching to HOs, which could only be acquired through Hamidon raids and direct trades with other players.  Nor were they wasting influence on first tier inspirations, and if they did buy those, they were so inexpensive that it would've taken years of endless clicking to burn enough influence to be broke.  There was, literally, nothing to do with influence beyond funding alts and giving it away.  This meant there was a shocking amount of influence, hundreds of trillions, being banked and hoarded by players, just waiting to be flooded into any economy created to utilize that influence.  This was likely recognized even before Issue 1 was released, but it wasn't until Issue 6 that the first efforts were made to address the problematic nature of having influence and not having anything to do with it.

 

Prestige was not, in fact, a gate currency.  It was an attempt to liquidate and destroy the enormous influence stockpile which was lurking in the shadows, waiting to be unleashed.  In requiring players to forego earning inf* (now applicable because it applied to both heroes and villains), and to spend 1,000,000 inf* to purchase 2000 prestige, Cryptic hoped to reduce the total unspent influence to a manageable level.  We know this by reference to their workflow and design methodology, always looking a few Issues ahead.  When Issue 6 was published, they were already at some point of work on Issue 9, the Inventions and player market Issue.  They may have even intended to go live with those features before Issue 9, as it's not uncommon for content to be pushed back to later releases, not even for large development teams.

 

What Cryptic wanted was for the massive influence backlog to be whittled down, so there wouldn't be a class division when Inventions and the player market went live.  They made two critical errors in judgement, though.

 

First, they set base costs for the desired effect, the draining and destruction of influence, rather than at an attractive point which would have encouraged the majority of players to participate in that aspect of the game, and coupled with the total loss of inf* income when earning prestige, and the destruction of base objects in base raids in addition to the overwhelming rents, the result was far too little inf* being converted to prestige, and far too few players earning prestige instead of inf*, to have the desired impact.

 

Second, they failed to make base building and ownership engaging.  The base editor was confusing and counter-intuitive.  Bases were too limited in how they could be designed even when players figured out how to use the editor, and the expense made experimentation a risk that turned many away.  And most players didn't want the complicated, finicky system they were offered, they wanted something simple and straight-forward.  They wanted a cave, a chateau, a trauma ward with doctors and nurses wandering around, a forest, an underwater complex... having to try to build these things themselves left them frustrated, disappointed and turned off by the whole thing, not to mention short on inf*, which, as noted above, they needed to upgrade their SOs.

 

Consequently, when Issue 9 finally went live, that horrifying surplus of unspent influence was still present, and it was even more disastrous than Cryptic had anticipated.  Co*'s player-driven economy, newly introduced and still sparkling with promise, immediately went into a state of hyperinflation.  It happened so quickly and with such ferocity that it dwarfed the inflation of the German mark in the 1920's or the Hungarian pengő in the 1940's.  Those who had stored up vast amounts of influence were able to immediately dominate the market.  Those with excess sums of inf* simply dumped it on the market to acquire what they wanted immediately, setting a bar for pricing, and those with desirable items noted that pricing and listed them accordingly.  Where a list/sale price discrepancy existed, what was referred to as a niche, other players moved in and owned entire supplies of items, buying at any price to control that niche and relying on long-term sales within the controlled niche to net profits.  

 

The end result of this was a complete disenfranchisement of new players.  Those who didn't have, couldn't have... ever.  Or, at least, not in what players considered a reasonable time frame.  Not less than six to twelve months of endless repetitive grinding after hitting 50, in a game coming from a development team which stated that their goal was to make a game in which players could log in, play for an hour and log out feeling like they'd made progress. The entire Invention set system was essentially walled off from new players by the mass of influence dumped onto the market in its first weeks.  The wall was expanded considerably when very rare (purple) sets were added, and it was firmly reinforced by players manipulating the market to build their own wealth (observation, not accusation, unbunch your knickers).  Coupled with low drop rates to counter farming, and even lower drop rates on the most desirable items, anyone who didn't start the game with several hundred million inf*, or discover an untapped niche in marketeering, was effectively restricted to SOs.

 

By the time Paragon took over management of the game, only six months later, there was nothing they could do to pull everything back on course for IO-dependent content.  The damage was done.  They did make an effort, with merits, but like prestige, merits were too heavily gated and items purchased with merits were too expensive for the comparative work put in to earn them (in Paragon's case, this was a short-sighted effort to increase long-term player retention, though equalizing IO set availability would probably have had a stronger effect on long-term retention), and they failed to bridge the gap between "I ain't got no inf*" new players and "I wipe my butt with 1,000,000 inf* bills" old hands.  They tried again with converters and catalysts, but, again, gated by micro-transactions and, at that point, new players weren't bothering when there were easier ways to get what they wanted in other games, and for less cashy-money.

 

In the end, they had no choice but to abandon any plans of IO-dependent content that they might've imagined, and stay on the "SOs are the baseline" course.  Every power they designed, every critter they created, every story arc and mission they envisioned, had to remain consistent with the expectation that players would only have SOs at their disposal, because the gulf between those who could afford IO sets and those who couldn't was as vast as the Atlantic Ocean.

 

We're playing a different game today.  The HC team implemented numerous counter-inflation tactics, the most important of which was making merits the "gold standard" and inf* "gold certificates", which, in concert with merits being easily obtained and widely available now, ensures that even first day players can immediately start kitting out their characters with IO sets.  But we still have 24 Issues, more than 8 years, of legacy content which can't be revised or restructured around IO sets as the baseline, not with the size of the HC team and time available to them.  Future content can be designed around the expectation that players are using IO sets, and the new super-uber-LOLSO difficulty modes are evidence that the HC team is interested in doing that, but the foundation of the game is too large and expansive to retrofit into that design model.

 

Could Paragon have used some of the same approaches that the HC team did?  Probably, and they likely considered some of them.  Salvage seeding would've eased the constriction on that supply, but salvage without recipes is of little use or value, and it was the tightly controlled supply of recipes and crafted IOs by players which determined who could use IOs and who couldn't, and nothing short of a complete reboot of the market, combined with a global inf* wipe, would've had any effect.  They stuck to the belief that long-term retention could only be accomplished through forcing players to grind, either for drops, or for the inf* or merits to buy what they needed/wanted, and the drop rates would've remained consistent.  Ultimately, even a complete reset would've only temporarily stabilized the market.  Inflation would set in as soon as a few players accumulated enough inf* to dominate a niche, then another bout of hyperinflation would've followed, because Paragon wouldn't decouple the grind from the market.

 

Here's some more food for thought: the Incarnate system was intended to smooth out the discrepancies between IO-heavy builds and strictly SO builds so they could, finally, develop more difficult content.  Going beyond 50, in some manner, was always a given with any post-50 content they created, but taking everyone there was far more important, and the only way they could do that was to create a comparable system which didn't require seven to fifteen times the inf* cap to get there.  They had to devise a solution which would include as much of the population as possible, not content which would only be accessible to the wealthy, immensely patient or incredibly lucky, and not another SO-only bore-fest which left the IO crowd feeling underwhelmed.  Thus, Incarnate abilities, which simulate the effects of having IO sets and procs, without the market dependency.

[Greycat]

Just a few random thoughts while reading through this. No particular  order.  Primarily on the base and prestige bits.

 

- Don't forget, Prestige was "free" under - I think it was level 25. You could be in SG mode and not lose whatever INF you were making. It then ramped up 'til at 50 (or earier... 40? It's been a while) if you were in SG mode, you wouldn't be making INF.

-- Which also had, for some, the effect of encouraging (or demanding...) people stay in SG mode. Occasional rumors of people getting kicked after when they realized they had to make a choice.

-- Also, at least for those of us around at the time, they also provided a - probably more massive than intended - injection of INF when we could have trial accounts. I know I made something like four accounts filled with serial-number type names, since we not only got prestige for the first (20?) people in an SG, bu tthey were going to *grant* prestige for SG members. And I know I'm not the only one - it's the way we *finally* got to actually build things.

 

- Bases were also tied to PVP, and were a bit of a failure there. Not only was the system... wonky, to say the least, which turned people off of it, but people didn't want to spend time on it just to have it wrecked in a PVP match (and if I recall spend prestige to fix it.)

--And of course there's the "get and risk losing an Item of Power for a SG buff" which... I don't think worked properly during live. I don't think I ever ran on or saw offered a Cathedral of Pain trial on live.

[Solarverse]

So my question is, where do we stand today? Are we finally at the point where we can start creating content that is strictly for players who have kitted out builds? Or do we continue with the idea that no content shall be made that doesn't include SO only builds? Personally I feel we are beyond ready, especially with all the farming going on in this game. It takes nothing to build yourself a farmer and support your own IO's. I buy IOs from the market with the cash my farmer makes, and then dump anything worth of value back in to the market so that players who enjoy crafting can use those Recipes to keep the market filled. Often if I delete a character that has been kitted out, I dump all of those IO's back in to the market at base price, pretty much, the highest bidder gets them regardless of what that high bid is, essentially selling something worth 2 million to somebody who only had to pay 750K to buy. I don't play the market, I do my part in keeping the market prices low by selling at first cheap. Having said all that, I would like to think that we are far ready for IO difficulty content post level 50.

[Clave Dark 5]

Speaking of farming, maybe this would explain why the devs on Live sort of let it exist within AE?  I dunno, but it's a thought I'd like to see explained or torn down.  Just curious!

[Without_Pause]

There's enough and certainly a high enough percentage of the player base who can rock out IO builds with Incarnates. Death post IOs and even a small about of Incarnates basically amounts to a situation your build isn't good for(debuffs), or so much damage you simply die. Dying on a team feels like a foreign idea. I wish the devs luck in finding a happy medium as some of the power balances how swung a bit on the too good side of things(Tanker buffs, EM rework).

[Greycat]

11 hours ago, Solarverse said:

So my question is, where do we stand today? Are we finally at the point where we can start creating content that is strictly for players who have kitted out builds? Or do we continue with the idea that no content shall be made that doesn't include SO only builds?

 

Not everyone "does builds." Not everyone deals or "gets" either the IO or incarnate system - there are questions enough on help that prove that (and conflicting information given as answers.)

 

No, I don't think that - outside of players doing it in AE and labeling it as such - we should have content created with "you are IO'd out" in mind. Do it the way the team's started doing it - with extended difficulty settings - sure, but not by default. After all, what exactly defines a "kitted out" build? Do you require perma-everything? Recharge times on everything under five seconds? Everything purple?

 

Hell, I played I3-close, SCORE, and a few years here now. I know what I'm doing. I have zero perma-doms, zero anything with perma-hasten, anything actually capped is purely incidental. I play because it's accessible and relaxing. If I want to play games where I *MUST* have gear, and MUST be this tall to ride... well, I wouldn't be playing COH, and frankly I wouldn't want that grind getting introduced. I had enough of a taste of that in Aion.

 

(And amusingly, even without perma-this capped-that, I'll waltz through content that people "with builds" complain about being too hard... see the thread on the end mission in Croatoa, "prevent 30 fir bolg from escaping," with people insisting you need teams or only certain ATs. Which you absolutely don't.)

[Solarverse]

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

 

Not everyone "does builds." Not everyone deals or "gets" either the IO or incarnate system - there are questions enough on help that prove that (and conflicting information given as answers.)

 

But isn't that a choice? I mean, I have played other games that I chose not to "kit out" Black Desert being a prime example. Since I was not interested in kitting out those characters in that game, I was not interested in the content made for kitted out characters. However, if I wanted to play that content, I would have kitted out only the characters I desired to do that content with. I mean, should we really never go forward, should we always remain gridlocked because some players don't wish to progress their characters beyond SO's? I guess the moral question is, who is this being unfair to? When you really think about it, this game is about choice. So why not make content for players who chose to kit out their characters? Why deadlock a game at SO only content? This is an MMO, MMOs should progress.
 

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

 

No, I don't think that - outside of players doing it in AE and labeling it as such - we should have content created with "you are IO'd out" in mind. Do it the way the team's started doing it - with extended difficulty settings - sure, but not by default. After all, what exactly defines a "kitted out" build? Do you require perma-everything? Recharge times on everything under five seconds? Everything purple?

 

In my opinion, just adding another difficulty level doesn't cut it because players seem to have a psychological need to play something that is designed to challenge them, adding more difficulty levels does not do this because it does not give mobs more powers to debuff you with, it does not grant them a substantial amount of Hit Points, it will not grant mobs Incarnate powers or even procs. All that does is raise the level and hit point caps. Not very challenging. As far as what constitutes as a kitted out build, that is completely up to the player, there is no definition of kitted out. Kitted out simply means, you have IO'ed out your character and perhaps unlocked your 50 +1. How they kit them out is totally up to them, there is no set standard. Having content made like this, will be a way for them to challenge their builds. The problem we have now is, people kit out their characters, and then they just sit, shelved because there is nothing to do with them. Having content made for this gives your kitted out characters something challenging to face...and who knows, it may introduce a way to make healers and controllers feel useful again in late game. As of right now, I for one feel useless when I play mine. It would be nice to feel needed again.

 

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

 

Hell, I played I3-close, SCORE, and a few years here now. I know what I'm doing. I have zero perma-doms, zero anything with perma-hasten, anything actually capped is purely incidental. I play because it's accessible and relaxing. If I want to play games where I *MUST* have gear, and MUST be this tall to ride... well, I wouldn't be playing COH, and frankly I wouldn't want that grind getting introduced. I had enough of a taste of that in Aion.

 

So because you don't want to, nobody else can either? isn't that kind of an, "I took my ball and went home" attitude? If it is any consolation to you, I don't have perma-dom or perma-hasten either. I mean, you can't force other players to play at your pace, that's just not right and is completely being dismissive of other players who want to move forward.

 

 

[golstat2003]

15 hours ago, Solarverse said:

So my question is, where do we stand today? Are we finally at the point where we can start creating content that is strictly for players who have kitted out builds? Or do we continue with the idea that no content shall be made that doesn't include SO only builds? Personally I feel we are beyond ready, especially with all the farming going on in this game. It takes nothing to build yourself a farmer and support your own IO's. I buy IOs from the market with the cash my farmer makes, and then dump anything worth of value back in to the market so that players who enjoy crafting can use those Recipes to keep the market filled. Often if I delete a character that has been kitted out, I dump all of those IO's back in to the market at base price, pretty much, the highest bidder gets them regardless of what that high bid is, essentially selling something worth 2 million to somebody who only had to pay 750K to buy. I don't play the market, I do my part in keeping the market prices low by selling at first cheap. Having said all that, I would like to think that we are far ready for IO difficulty content post level 50.

 

Unfortunately there are still far too many people who don't know how to use the market or choose not to. Merits are there but that's far slower than using the market or farming. But that's for the main game.

 

The devs ARE building content with IOs in mind for the optional "we WILL kill" you mode that will be slowly rolling out to other TFs/SFs. 🙂 

[golstat2003]

20 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

 

 

In my opinion, just adding another difficulty level doesn't cut it because players seem to have a psychological need to play something that is designed to challenge them, adding more difficulty levels does not do this because it does not give mobs more powers to debuff you with, it does not grant them a substantial amount of Hit Points, it will not grant mobs Incarnate powers or even procs. All that does is raise the level and hit point caps. Not very challenging. As far as what constitutes as a kitted out build, that is completely up to the player, there is no definition of kitted out. Kitted out simply means, you have IO'ed out your character and perhaps unlocked your 50 +1. How they kit them out is totally up to them, there is no set standard. Having content made like this, will be a way for them to challenge their builds. The problem we have now is, people kit out their characters, and then they just sit, shelved because there is nothing to do with them. Having content made for this gives your kitted out characters something challenging to face...and who knows, it may introduce a way to make healers and controllers feel useful again in late game. As of right now, I for one feel useless when I play mine. It would be nice to feel needed again.

 

 

 

 

HUH?

 

Have you read anything about the work done on the ASF or the new difficulty options. Cause if you did you would know the bolded isn't correct at all.

 

The tech they just added MOST CERTAINLY DOES allow the devs to do just what you said they can't, with mobs having different abilities depending on which of the new difficulty options you run the ASF on. I think you need to go back and read the recent patch notes, and read up a bit in the discord channel.

Edited January 31, 2022 by golstat2003

[Clave Dark 5]

3 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

"we WILL kill" you  🙂 

Devs confirmed to be out to get us, but at least put a smiley on it!

[Solarverse]

1 minute ago, golstat2003 said:

 

HUH?

 

Have you read anything about the work done on the ASF or the new difficulty options. Cause if you did you would know the bolded isn't correct at all.

 

No I have not, so that is good to know, thank you.  🙂

 

1 minute ago, golstat2003 said:

 

The tech they just added MOST CERTAINLY DOES allow the devs to do just what you said they can't, with mobs having different abilities depending on which of the new difficulty options you run the ASF on. I think you need to go back and read the recent patch notes, and read up a bit in the discord channel.

 

Hell yes, sorry, I don't stay up to date on what the Devs are doing, it kind of ruins the surprise for me. So this is great news, thank you.

[Bill Z Bubba]

7 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Hell yes, sorry, I don't stay up to date on what the Devs are doing, it kind of ruins the surprise for me. So this is great news, thank you.

 

Everyone should experience the max diff DASF.

[Solarverse]

9 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Devs confirmed to be out to get us, but at least put a smiley on it!

 

[Solarverse]

1 minute ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

Everyone should experience the max diff DASF.

 

I have ran Aeon, but I was not the leader and didn't pay attention to what difficulty it was set on. So honestly, I don't know if it was set to max difficulty or not. I do know my Gravity Controller actually felt useful again when I was running it, which is why I have said in the past that Aeon was a step in the right direction, but I don't know what difficulty level it was set on. I just know it was more challenging than your typical TF.

[Ukase]

Well, that's certainly interesting reading. So much so, I turned off the NFL commentary in the background to better remember it. Thanks for writing it out. 



 

[iBot]

From a game design perspective I've always wondered why the TO->DO->SO system was abandoned for the IO system.  I've wondered why the original devs did not find some way to incorporate that original enh system into the new invention system.  Maybe too much conflicting code or other hard coded obstacles but I've always thought that was the mistake.  That would have made the transition cleaner and kept those origin enh relevant rather than a straight replacement.

 

PvP was always a horrible implementation.  I remember when it was first introduced and there were major design flaws given that they tried to take a system that was created to make us unstoppable and then nerf it to hell so we could be stopped.  Add to that then forcing us to have PvE builds and PvP builds and the added headache of being unable to easily switch between those two completely different goals was just too much.  I remember being excited to have a chance to face off in the new zones or on a base raid but that quickly turned sour when I realized that my awesome mob killing sniper was less than a paper tiger in PvP.

 

Prestige was again another head scratching idea.  It should have been left on the cutting room floor.  First off, the only groups that could really do it were going to be the large member groups.  Second, with the horrible PvP base raids were never going to fly.  Who would want to spend all that time and effort to build something that could be wrecked on any given day if something happened and the scheduled defense couldn't materialize.  Then compound the problem with forcing players to choose between funding themselves or funding the SG.  I think quite a few friendships ended over that argument.

 

Personally, I think the difficulty and rebalance questions are different animals.  Don't get me wrong I used to enjoy insanely difficult games.  You know, Dark Souls, Ninja Gaidan, Contra, etc.  Not any more.  So what I'd want out of CoX is different.  Challenge sure but that is difficult to achieve when one of the main tenants of the game is "ANY group of ATs can make this work."  No holy trinity.  No "we MUST have a debuffer for this or it will fail."  That is tricky at best and impossible otherwise to balance content around.  It is what leads to the feeling of "my XYZ character feel useless on this".  So far, I like the newer difficulty idea that HC seems to be headed for and I'm certainly willing to wait and see how this progresses.  Hopefully, it will turn out better than some of the systems in the past.

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, Solarverse said:

 

But isn't that a choice?

<snip>

3 hours ago, Solarverse said:

So because you don't want to, nobody else can either? isn't that kind of an, "I took my ball and went home" attitude? If it is any consolation to you, I don't have perma-dom or perma-hasten either. I mean, you can't force other players to play at your pace, that's just not right and is completely being dismissive of other players who want to move forward.

 

 

 

If that's what you're getting from it, you're sorely misreading it.

 

Yes, I do it by choice. Just like I don't do master runs - I don't want a death thanks to the RNG or something stupid being the reason others don't get the badge they're after.  But that's *not* the reasoning at all.

Accessibility is. The very first line of my reply to you should have made that clear. Just because many of us on the forum here, and likely the people we directly play with, can IO out a character (both in terms of theorycrafting a build and affording to, or knowing how to afford to build one,) doesn't make it the majority or even necessarily common. As mentioned, just a few minutes listening to the Help channel should make that clear.

 

It's one thing if *I* do something off the wall (the "launch issue simulation" where I'm doing things like picking powers to simulate having to take the fitness pool, not taking powers 'til later levels, etc. or an all-pool-power build.) I'm doing that intentionally and know the limitations. This suggestion isn't that.

 

Hell, the basic "Here's how to make an IO" tutorial doesn't even come up automatically any longer. We have people asking about *that.* So content *requiring* full bulds (and again, we have to go down the rabbit hole of what a "proper" build is for this, making it even more exclusionary and making builds *more* cookie-cutter) - well, that's something I'll generally argue against.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 1/30/2022 at 11:49 AM, Luminara said:

When the Invention system was released in Issue 9 (May 1, 2007), there was a lot of excitement for what it represented.  Inventions allowed players to sidestep Enhancement Diversification (which had been implemented 18 months earlier), added the potential for significantly greater flexibility in designing and playing characters, and suggested a much more interesting development direction in regard to content.  Many people expected the next several Issues to include content aimed at, using and requiring IOs.  Issue after Issue came and went, and the anticipated IO-dependent content never arrived, which left a lot of people scratching their heads and expressing disappointment and discontent.  There we were with all these great new things, and nothing to test our limits.

 

The question is why that content was never created.  To answer that, we have to go further back, to Issue 6.

 

Issue 6, coinciding with the release of City of Villains, added supergroup bases, prestige and base salvage.  Prestige was a new currency, one which, at that time, was earned mutually exclusively with inf*.  You could earn one or the other, not both (later changed due to the unpopularity of the prestige system, bases... and the fact that not earning inf* while leveling meant not replacing out-leveled enhancements).  For veteran MMORPG players, even in those early-ish years, the advent of a new currency implied newer and harder content.  Adding a new currency with each content update was a common approach in MMORPGs, a method of preventing players from blitzing the new content by purchasing all of the new gear with their old currency, which they'd had months to accumulate.  So the addition of prestige represented, from the players' perspective, a wave of newer and harder content... which, like IO-dependent content, never materialized (the Cathedral of Pain trial wasn't any more difficult than other trials and *Fs).  And that raises yet another question - what was the point of prestige, if it was never intended to be used as a gate to newer and harder content?

If you were around in those days, you'll recall one of the developers mentioning that they were always working two or three Issues ahead.  By the time an Issue went live, Cryptic was in the planning and implementation stages of future Issues.  You'll also remember that it wasn't uncommon for features to be pushed back one or more Issues.  And this tells us the real purpose of prestige.

 

By the time Issue 6 went live, players had been accumulating influence (infamy didn't exist until Issue 6 and the simultaneous release of CoV) for 18 months.  And there just wasn't much to do with it.  Enhancements and inspirations were the only things which could be purchased at that time, and at level 50, players weren't buying more SOs, they were switching to HOs, which could only be acquired through Hamidon raids and direct trades with other players.  Nor were they wasting influence on first tier inspirations, and if they did buy those, they were so inexpensive that it would've taken years of endless clicking to burn enough influence to be broke.  There was, literally, nothing to do with influence beyond funding alts and giving it away.  This meant there was a shocking amount of influence, hundreds of trillions, being banked and hoarded by players, just waiting to be flooded into any economy created to utilize that influence.  This was likely recognized even before Issue 1 was released, but it wasn't until Issue 6 that the first efforts were made to address the problematic nature of having influence and not having anything to do with it.

 

Prestige was not, in fact, a gate currency.  It was an attempt to liquidate and destroy the enormous influence stockpile which was lurking in the shadows, waiting to be unleashed.  In requiring players to forego earning inf* (now applicable because it applied to both heroes and villains), and to spend 1,000,000 inf* to purchase 2000 prestige, Cryptic hoped to reduce the total unspent influence to a manageable level.  We know this by reference to their workflow and design methodology, always looking a few Issues ahead.  When Issue 6 was published, they were already at some point of work on Issue 9, the Inventions and player market Issue.  They may have even intended to go live with those features before Issue 9, as it's not uncommon for content to be pushed back to later releases, not even for large development teams.

 

What Cryptic wanted was for the massive influence backlog to be whittled down, so there wouldn't be a class division when Inventions and the player market went live.  They made two critical errors in judgement, though.

 

First, they set base costs for the desired effect, the draining and destruction of influence, rather than at an attractive point which would have encouraged the majority of players to participate in that aspect of the game, and coupled with the total loss of inf* income when earning prestige, and the destruction of base objects in base raids in addition to the overwhelming rents, the result was far too little inf* being converted to prestige, and far too few players earning prestige instead of inf*, to have the desired impact.

 

Second, they failed to make base building and ownership engaging.  The base editor was confusing and counter-intuitive.  Bases were too limited in how they could be designed even when players figured out how to use the editor, and the expense made experimentation a risk that turned many away.  And most players didn't want the complicated, finicky system they were offered, they wanted something simple and straight-forward.  They wanted a cave, a chateau, a trauma ward with doctors and nurses wandering around, a forest, an underwater complex... having to try to build these things themselves left them frustrated, disappointed and turned off by the whole thing, not to mention short on inf*, which, as noted above, they needed to upgrade their SOs.

 

Consequently, when Issue 9 finally went live, that horrifying surplus of unspent influence was still present, and it was even more disastrous than Cryptic had anticipated.  Co*'s player-driven economy, newly introduced and still sparkling with promise, immediately went into a state of hyperinflation.  It happened so quickly and with such ferocity that it dwarfed the inflation of the German mark in the 1920's or the Hungarian pengő in the 1940's.  Those who had stored up vast amounts of influence were able to immediately dominate the market.  Those with excess sums of inf* simply dumped it on the market to acquire what they wanted immediately, setting a bar for pricing, and those with desirable items noted that pricing and listed them accordingly.  Where a list/sale price discrepancy existed, what was referred to as a niche, other players moved in and owned entire supplies of items, buying at any price to control that niche and relying on long-term sales within the controlled niche to net profits.  

 

The end result of this was a complete disenfranchisement of new players.  Those who didn't have, couldn't have... ever.  Or, at least, not in what players considered a reasonable time frame.  Not less than six to twelve months of endless repetitive grinding after hitting 50, in a game coming from a development team which stated that their goal was to make a game in which players could log in, play for an hour and log out feeling like they'd made progress. The entire Invention set system was essentially walled off from new players by the mass of influence dumped onto the market in its first weeks.  The wall was expanded considerably when very rare (purple) sets were added, and it was firmly reinforced by players manipulating the market to build their own wealth (observation, not accusation, unbunch your knickers).  Coupled with low drop rates to counter farming, and even lower drop rates on the most desirable items, anyone who didn't start the game with several hundred million inf*, or discover an untapped niche in marketeering, was effectively restricted to SOs.

 

By the time Paragon took over management of the game, only six months later, there was nothing they could do to pull everything back on course for IO-dependent content.  The damage was done.  They did make an effort, with merits, but like prestige, merits were too heavily gated and items purchased with merits were too expensive for the comparative work put in to earn them (in Paragon's case, this was a short-sighted effort to increase long-term player retention, though equalizing IO set availability would probably have had a stronger effect on long-term retention), and they failed to bridge the gap between "I ain't got no inf*" new players and "I wipe my butt with 1,000,000 inf* bills" old hands.  They tried again with converters and catalysts, but, again, gated by micro-transactions and, at that point, new players weren't bothering when there were easier ways to get what they wanted in other games, and for less cashy-money.

 

In the end, they had no choice but to abandon any plans of IO-dependent content that they might've imagined, and stay on the "SOs are the baseline" course.  Every power they designed, every critter they created, every story arc and mission they envisioned, had to remain consistent with the expectation that players would only have SOs at their disposal, because the gulf between those who could afford IO sets and those who couldn't was as vast as the Atlantic Ocean.

 

We're playing a different game today.  The HC team implemented numerous counter-inflation tactics, the most important of which was making merits the "gold standard" and inf* "gold certificates", which, in concert with merits being easily obtained and widely available now, ensures that even first day players can immediately start kitting out their characters with IO sets.  But we still have 24 Issues, more than 8 years, of legacy content which can't be revised or restructured around IO sets as the baseline, not with the size of the HC team and time available to them.  Future content can be designed around the expectation that players are using IO sets, and the new super-uber-LOLSO difficulty modes are evidence that the HC team is interested in doing that, but the foundation of the game is too large and expansive to retrofit into that design model.

 

Could Paragon have used some of the same approaches that the HC team did?  Probably, and they likely considered some of them.  Salvage seeding would've eased the constriction on that supply, but salvage without recipes is of little use or value, and it was the tightly controlled supply of recipes and crafted IOs by players which determined who could use IOs and who couldn't, and nothing short of a complete reboot of the market, combined with a global inf* wipe, would've had any effect.  They stuck to the belief that long-term retention could only be accomplished through forcing players to grind, either for drops, or for the inf* or merits to buy what they needed/wanted, and the drop rates would've remained consistent.  Ultimately, even a complete reset would've only temporarily stabilized the market.  Inflation would set in as soon as a few players accumulated enough inf* to dominate a niche, then another bout of hyperinflation would've followed, because Paragon wouldn't decouple the grind from the market.

 

Here's some more food for thought: the Incarnate system was intended to smooth out the discrepancies between IO-heavy builds and strictly SO builds so they could, finally, develop more difficult content.  Going beyond 50, in some manner, was always a given with any post-50 content they created, but taking everyone there was far more important, and the only way they could do that was to create a comparable system which didn't require seven to fifteen times the inf* cap to get there.  They had to devise a solution which would include as much of the population as possible, not content which would only be accessible to the wealthy, immensely patient or incredibly lucky, and not another SO-only bore-fest which left the IO crowd feeling underwhelmed.  Thus, Incarnate abilities, which simulate the effects of having IO sets and procs, without the market dependency.

 

As James Carville would say, "It's the economy, stupid!"

 

But the issue I see is that the haves v. the have-nots now are those with the knowledge and/or inclination to min-max v. others.  Yet development continues (mainly, the new difficulty ratings are a welcome exception) on new, more powerful options rather on ways to educate.  As I would say, "It's power creep, stupid!"

 

[HOPEFULLY UNNECESSARY DISCLAIMER:  I'm not calling anyone stupid.  Except possibly *scans crowd slowly, points finger emphatically* YOU!]

[The_Warpact]

5 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

Everyone should experience the max diff DASF.

You are such a f*cking sadist....I like it makes my nethers all wiggly.

[Erratic1]

2 hours ago, iBot said:

From a game design perspective I've always wondered why the TO->DO->SO system was abandoned for the IO system. 

 

Are you asking/suggesting that TO->DO->SO should have continued in some fashion ala TO->DO->SO->....->[x]O? Or are you asking why IOs at all?

[gamingglen]

3 hours ago, iBot said:

From a game design perspective I've always wondered why the TO->DO->SO system was abandoned for the IO system. 

 

Wasn't a crafting system desired by players at the time?  That's what the IO system does, as well as power creep.

 

An idea: SOs can be combined, similar to multi-bonus IOs now. Combine an Acc SO with a Dam SO and get an Acc/Dam S2(abbrev?). Combine that with a Rech SO and get Acc/Dam/Rech S3. Perhaps it costs influence (of course), and maybe an additional component if some more involved crafting system was desired. 

 

edit: the additional component could be a lesser enhancement; examples: DO+DO+TO=D2. SO+SO+DO=S2.

 

 

Edited January 31, 2022 by gamingglen

[Erratic1]

34 minutes ago, gamingglen said:

Wasn't a crafting system desired by players at the time?  That's what the IO system does, as well as power creep.

 

There was also that ED made certain results previously attainable results impossible which IO brought back into existence.

[MTeague]

There is enough existing content that is simple enough to do with only SO's, that I don't think it would be Beyond the Pale for the devs to experiment with a few story arcs that assumed you are kitted out with IO's and Incarnates, if they so choose. 

 

However, keep in mind, some people say "kitted out character" to mean "Blaster with softcapped defenses and massive +Recharge"

Also, what does "designed for that character" mean?

• Does it mean,"the mobs have so much +To-Hit that you're not even close to capped defenses anymore and are dying left and right"?  I suspect this would not be popular content. People avoid Rularuu for a reason, and it's not just because the shadow shard is big. 
• Does it mean "the mobs have CC effects that entirely ignore Clarion and Mez you ANYWAY?", like a kind of "Reverse Purple Triangles", where for X seconds your mez control is worth something and for Y seconds it might as well not be there?  Again, I suspect this would not be popular content. 
• Does it mean the mobs are just big giant bullet sponges that take more hits?  Um.... boring? Surely we can do better than just that for challenge?
• Does it mean so much incoming damage such that anyone trying to solo it, even your best kitted out Tank, is GOING TO DIE, unless they are accompanied by squads of support and controllers?  

What kind of enemies would you WANT to see in these situations?

What would be fair and challenging?

What would be just annoying / unfair / fliptables territory?

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

But the issue I see is that the haves v. the have-nots now are those with the knowledge and/or inclination to min-max v. others.

 

Information is easily shared.  We have a community filled with intelligent, helpful players, many of whom are here as much for the opportunities to both learn and teach as they are to play the game.

 

Incentive is on the shoulders of the individual, though, and you're right, interest in IOs and high end builds, or even common IOs, isn't universal.  But the option to do so isn't walled off, the informational have-nots aren't restricted by anything but their own preferences.  As such, I believe it would be better expressed as haves and choose-not-to-haves, because there really aren't any have-nots now.  The players who don't have, can, if they wish.

[PeregrineFalcon]

31 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Information is easily shared.  We have a community filled with intelligent, helpful players, many of whom are here as much for the opportunities to both learn and teach as they are to play the game.

You say that, but evidence would indicate otherwise.

 

For example, even though the developers are in the process of proliferating a Challenge Mode specifically for IO'd out super characters, there's still a new thread every week where someone complains about how the game is too easy and the devs need to nerf everyone. And, when they are informed that the devs are in the process of doing that they are actually surprised.

 

Because it's clearly impossible for people to read patch notes, and the post right above yours is a perfect example of that.

 

And I'll bet you money that if the devs proliferate the challenge modes across all of the content, or at least all of the level 50 content, people are still going to be creating new "game too easy, bruh" threads every week, like clockwork.