This is just a "fun" server now

[nihilii]

On 1/17/2023 at 3:45 AM, dtj714 said:

Anywho, just my .02 inf. Curious to know what others think. If there was a "vanilla" CoH private server with Homecoming's population, would you rather play that, or this?

I actually don't disagree with your assessment Homecoming is a fun server. I would not play a vanilla CoH server with Homecoming's population if it was an alternate option to Homecoming with its current population.
 

[tidge]

3 hours ago, WumpusRat said:

Just remember that Issue-1 was pre-innate abilities for ATs, too.

Meaning no gauntlet. A tanker who wanted to keep all those mobs on them would have to slot their powers with taunt, or spam the taunt ability constantly.

 

The AI was slightly different, recall the Fire Tankers who would level by simply walking around zones with DE Swarms. and of course the Invulnerability who couldn't move at all.

[roleki]

8 hours ago, dtj714 said:

 

I was actually referring to the Lights Hope server, which had 10,000 concurrent players at a point. Accounts? Something like 100k+. This project has what, 1000 players across all servers at any point in time? Live's peaks was ???. I'm sure the math still works out to something "insignificant".

 

That's not the point - the point is some level of authenticity. I think Homecoming has lost it. Others don't, or don't care. And that's fine. We make choices accordingly.

 

Oh, you want authenticity?

 

/jranger

[Luminara]

8 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

But my problem has been a consistent cycle of "Let's introduce a new powerset, and let's not bother to see how people will exploit it."  "Hey, this new powerset has one power in it that is *better* than the similar power in my power set!"  "Well, the people have spoken, we need to upgrade this power set.  Let's surprise them and make it the best power in the current meta!"

You do have a point, Cryptic/Paragon certainly didn't spend much time on the buff treadmill.  Look at how they treated Trick Arrows.  One balance pass in I7, and even that was so light-handed that only TA enthusiasts bothered to play it.  Rational people looked at a set with almost all of its powers on recharge timers which mandated Hasten just to use them every third spawn, and debuff strengths so low that they did have to use all of them and stack controls on top of that to have any impact, and knew they were looking at a bad fucking joke.  OSA's failure to spawn OSBurn wasn't fixed until two years after the set went live.  PGA received an adjustment to its Sleep chance near the end of the game's life.  Not the debuff, the goddamn control.  And that was it.  They invested more effort into dicking around with the animation times than they did addressing the glaring problems.  If the Invention system hadn't been released, I doubt even I would've stuck it out with TA for the seven years that I did.

 

No, if something was underperforming, Cryptic/Paragon abandoned it and focused their attention on creating newer and better sets and powers, continually expanding the gap between what was under the baseline and what was over it.  Their approach was to shrug and move on.  For example, creating Time Manipulation, a set so strong that I can use it as a petless mastermind at /x5 solo, whereas with pre-HC TA I would've been limited to /x1 on the same character... with heavy inspiration usage and a lot of running away.

 

You're also glossing over the work the HC team has been doing to narrow that gap between the underperformers and overperformers.  Yes, they've been buffing, but they've also been nerfing.  Or, did you forget that Titan Weapons was reworked so it wasn't so far over the top that it was the most popular melee set by a wide margin?  The balance passes which applied the standardized damage formula to many powers, resulting in nerfs to numerous powers?  The imposition of standard target caps which led to a lot of cones and PBAoEs having their number of targets reduced?  This group of developers hasn't been on an endless spree of buffs, they've taken the hammer to a hell of a lot of powers, and entire sets, in an effort to fix the wild disparity in effectiveness between the top and the bottom, and some of their adjustments have been very heavy-handed (Martial Assault being a poster child for this).

Yes, there are some outliers in what HC has created, but in honesty, no more than what Cryptic or Paragon created.  At least HC is making an effort to minimize the difference between the high end and the low end, something Cryptic/Paragon only did at a rate that made continental drift seem rapid.  It's also worth reminding you, and everyone else, that the HC team raised the baseline, from 3 +0 minions to 3 +3 minions.  The underperformers have to be brought up, and new ones have to meet that minimum.  That's the overarching goal, make everything playable at the new baseline, and with hundreds of sets and thousands of powers, a very small team working in their spare time (and, like everyone else, they have less of that in the post-quarantine era) to fix bugs, create new content, revise old content, create new powers and sets and revisit old powers and sets isn't going to accomplish anything overnight.  Those outliers, those exploitative uses of powers, will be addressed, once the groundwork is complete.  There are a lot more sets and powers in need of attention to bring them up to par than there are newly created powers in need of a bump downward, and if they spend all of their time trying to deal with imperfections on the ceiling, they'll never get around to completing the floor.

[WumpusRat]

After finishing up a couple of defeat badges today, there's one other reason why I wouldn't want to go back to an I-1 server.

 

No streakbreaker. Missing numerous times in a row with a 95% to hit happened all the time back then.

[Zect]

Interesting subject. It's definitely a known problem that private servers of any game tend to devolve into a "kids in charge of the candy store" situation. I feel you make excellent points, though my own thoughts on the matter are mixed. I always found the "Homecoming" name a curious misnomer: this server not-so-subtly lays claim to being the official successor of CoX, yet the experience is very different than the one on live, in both good ways and bad.

 

That said, let's not pretend that live was some utopia of balance and challenge. Many of the most damaging changes to game balance and player culture, in fact, originate on live, such as the universal +1 level shift from the alpha slot (really, the incarnate system as a whole) and the introduction of AE. The balance situation on live was extremely problematic: defense armor sets were king, while resist sets struggled to provide comparable survivability; armored AT's reigned supreme, providing comparable damage to blasters with far more mitigation. And near the end of its life, the game even picked up some scummy P2W practices that were so characteristic of Korean gacha games, they must have been imposed on the dev teams by NCsoft. Selling ATIO's through lootboxes, anyone?

 

I appreciate that the worst aspects of the game, and much of the power creep, originate from a combination of 1) the political environment that the Homecoming team inherited, and 2) expanding the availability of the things that caused many of the above balance issues in the first place. They cannot be blamed for the first, and most certainly not the second. What's good for the goose is good for the gander; if you're okay with even one player running around with IO's and incarnates, you had better damned well be fine with every single person in the game doing so at the same time.

 

With that said, there are some promising signs on the horizon. Recently, we saw:

• The fixing of bugs to Burn and other powers that have long been exploited by players;
• The fixing of bugs to AE exp rates, the revoking of winter pack seasonal discounts, and other unpopular-but-necessary changes;
• The shake-up of defense typing, breathing some fresh air into the defense meta and opening the way for innovative new builds;
• The introduction of hard mode TF's, restoring a gameplay environment that has been taken from us for many years.

Homecoming in the past has also demonstrated its willingness to implement nerfs, which are critical for the enjoyment of any game:

• Rune of protection was nerfed by making its recharge unenhanceable. This is especially notable because nearly every other CoX server out there has added some way for unarmored AT's to get persistent mez protection.
• Titan weapons was nerfed, ending its dominance among the melee sets.

These are all highly positive signs, and going forward, I look forward to more and necessary changes that will address other contemporary balance problems. For these reasons, I still find it worthwhile to support Homecoming.

[macskull]

17 hours ago, dtj714 said:

That's not the point - the point is some level of authenticity. I think Homecoming has lost it. Others don't, or don't care. And that's fine. We make choices accordingly.

The question then becomes: what is "authentic?" The game was constantly changing during its original run. Maybe there's a point in the game's past you could look back at and say "I want to play the game as it was then" but you end up missing out on tons of QoL improvements which came later. For what it's worth, I agree with the other poster in this thread who said that even if the game came back as it was at shutdown with similar player numbers to what Homecoming has, I'd stay here. I don't have the time or energy to deal with the exhausting grind that so many systems in the game had.

 

I think it's also worth pointing out the reason Homecoming started off very differently from the live game is because the code base HC uses had over 6 years of improvements and changes after the live game shut down. Many of those changes were to simply make the game playable with the tiny population which existed while the game was "secret," and the other servers out there working off the I24 codebase are having to find different ways to address those problems - for example, the barely-functional market from the live game is exponentially worse when there are only a few dozen concurrent players most nights. Hopping over to, say, Rebirth and seeing the last 5 sale history for a purple IO go back nine months is disheartening - sure, they've changed merit vendor costs and added new ways to IO your characters, but they still require grind.

 

24 minutes ago, Zect said:

I always found the "Homecoming" name a curious misnomer: this server not-so-subtly lays claim to being the official successor of CoX

This is largely because it was the first publicly-accessible server that was stable enough to handle large populations and didn't get nuked from orbit after three days by a scared admin. Homecoming's head start all but ensured it was (and would always be) the server where the vast majority of players ended up. I would have to go digging through my post history to find, but a year or so ago I did some digging because someone insisted this wasn't true, but HC had something like 2 weeks of lead time over any of the other currently-active servers.

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

Yes, there are some outliers in what HC has created, but in honesty, no more than what Cryptic or Paragon created.  At least HC is making an effort to minimize the difference between the high end and the low end, something Cryptic/Paragon only did at a rate that made continental drift seem rapid.  It's also worth reminding you, and everyone else, that the HC team raised the baseline, from 3 +0 minions to 3 +3 minions.  The underperformers have to be brought up, and new ones have to meet that minimum.  That's the overarching goal, make everything playable at the new baseline, and with hundreds of sets and thousands of powers, a very small team working in their spare time (and, like everyone else, they have less of that in the post-quarantine era) to fix bugs, create new content, revise old content, create new powers and sets and revisit old powers and sets isn't going to accomplish anything overnight.  Those outliers, those exploitative uses of powers, will be addressed, once the groundwork is complete.  There are a lot more sets and powers in need of attention to bring them up to par than there are newly created powers in need of a bump downward, and if they spend all of their time trying to deal with imperfections on the ceiling, they'll never get around to completing the floor.

 

I hear you Lumi.  I think you responded less to my point that power creep (which I detest) was both a function of Live and SCORE and HC, and more to that current admins are better.  They're pretty good, as I say early and often.  But they are not addressing balance like I would want them to.  That's cool.  You want a tank mage?  Go ahead, I'm frankly just happy to be able to log on to a public server that the SCORE and HC people kept secret for many years.

 

To the point I bolded and embiggened, take ten numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

 

Underperformers have to be brought up!  One way to go is :  5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5.  Or even:  5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.  But power creep, which is not specific to this game or any game leads to people complaining that their 5 is not as good as the 10.  There's no sense of balance or tradeoff.  I can have a higher strength but a lower intelligence?  Heck no, as long as there is a high intelligence out there, I *deserve* that and I want it the way I want it, and frankly, that better effing be right now.

 

@Luminara, I'm gonna get you that green dress, by hook or by crook!  Probably by hook, since I'm too pretty to go to prison.

[Sakura Tenshi]

meanwhile, me, who has been faceplanting several times an arc on my blaster because doppelgängers get as much damage as players but more HP, or Metalshift being a goddamn Freakshow tank buffed to EB status, or fighting barracuda and dying, all while chugging lots of inspirations before these fights: yeah… this game is way too easy sometimes. Way way waaaay. Too easy. *proceeds to die more than in From Software games*

[Captain Fabulous]

5 minutes ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

meanwhile, me, who has been faceplanting several times an arc on my blaster because doppelgängers get as much damage as players but more HP, or Metalshift being a goddamn Freakshow tank buffed to EB status, or fighting barracuda and dying, all while chugging lots of inspirations before these fights: yeah… this game is way too easy sometimes. Way way waaaay. Too easy. *proceeds to die more than in From Software games*

Yeah, I think a lot of people have lost sight of how an "average" build performs, and that leveling up is a lot more challenging than they remember. I pulled out my lvl 36-ish common IOd Dark/Dark Stalker the other day and it was a shitshow. Constantly running out of end, constantly missing, getting my ass chewed up by minions and LTs because I have trivial defense and only 30% resistances and still getting knocked around with a Karma IO. it wasn't fun.

[Luminara]

22 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I hear you Lumi.  I think you responded less to my point that power creep (which I detest) was both a function of Live and SCORE and HC, and more to that current admins are better.  They're pretty good, as I say early and often.  But they are not addressing balance like I would want them to.  That's cool.  You want a tank mage?  Go ahead, I'm frankly just happy to be able to log on to a public server that the SCORE and HC people kept secret for many years.

 

The point I was making is that the path toward better balance only has two routes.  One is to nerf the shit out of everything, drag it all down to the same level as the weakest sets... and we know from looking at @Cipher's metrics and graphs that doing so would have driven nearly everyone away.  

 

The other route, pulling the dogs out of the shithole and cleaning them up, can't be accomplished without introducing a significant amount of power creep in the short term, but it opens up a brighter and better future in which everyone is at roughly the same level and the content can be balanced for that level.

 

So it really comes down to what kind of power creep you want.  Cryptic/Paragon's power creep benefited the top end and left the bottom further and further behind.  HC's benefits everyone, but it entails more short-term power creep and a longer path to the point where it's controlled.  Cryptic/Paragon's balance was a line in the sand, which they scuffed out and redrew every time they wanted to drum up subs or increase micro-transaction sales.  HC's approach is to balance the archetypes and sets as well as they can without turning everything into pre-HC TA, and then retune the content to match it so no-one is a dog in a shithole.

 

1 hour ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

To the point I bolded and embiggened, take ten numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

 

Underperformers have to be brought up!  One way to go is :  5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5, 5.5.  Or even:  5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.  But power creep, which is not specific to this game or any game leads to people complaining that their 5 is not as good as the 10.  There's no sense of balance or tradeoff.  I can have a higher strength but a lower intelligence?  Heck no, as long as there is a high intelligence out there, I *deserve* that and I want it the way I want it, and frankly, that better effing be right now.

Do you remember when Council lieutenants could self-defeat and respawn as boss Warwolves?  Do you know how I dealt with that as a TA?  Pop every goddamn inspiration I had, use every TA power that wasn't recharging, and pray.  Invariably, hospital trips were made.  Restock inspirations and try again... and again, and again, and again, until it was whittled down enough to finish.  That was pre-HC TA.  Couldn't handle one boss.  TA wasn't a 1, it was a -1.

 

And with Titan Weapons, the bar was raised to 11.

 

It's impossible to achieve balance with a spread that immense, a spread which continually grew as new sets, and new content designed to challenge those sets, was released.  How many more Issues would Paragon have released before TA was so far behind the curve that it literally was unplayable?  How many other sets were facing the same fate?  How balanced could the game ever be when a disparity like that is allowed?  The game was never balanced the way it should have been under the old regime.

 

The power creep we're discussing, the improvements to underperformers and releases of new sets and powers designed to perform at a higher level, is better, in my experience and opinion, than the power creep Cryptic/Paragon saddled us with.  At least with HC's power creep, we know everyone's going to be capable of completing content, even if they're not top tier, and we know it's a short-term problem, not a continuing situation of ever widening gulfs.

[blackcat70]

Kinda just glad its here at all.

[WumpusRat]

7 minutes ago, Krimson said:

This is why all my builds are jacked-up now. For a game that is allegedly about playing super-powered beings, it sure seems like the Dev team wanted to make sure that no one felt Super under any circumstances. I have no idea why anyone would want to go back to floundering at everything. 

Jack was a big believer in "make players struggle". He was quoted on the original forums many times for wanting things to take as long as possible, and be as hard as possible, because that was his idea of "the perfect MMO". A lot of the TFs that were chock full of "kill every enemy" were due to his design influence. 

And when he realized that people were figuring out how to make things easier through slotting stuff well, he pushed for the whole "enhancement diversification" (ie, game-wide player nerf) to force people to have to struggle even more.

[Wavicle]

12 minutes ago, WumpusRat said:

Jack was a big believer in "make players struggle". He was quoted on the original forums many times for wanting things to take as long as possible, and be as hard as possible, because that was his idea of "the perfect MMO". A lot of the TFs that were chock full of "kill every enemy" were due to his design influence. 

And when he realized that people were figuring out how to make things easier through slotting stuff well, he pushed for the whole "enhancement diversification" (ie, game-wide player nerf) to force people to have to struggle even more.

that is not why ED happened. They wanted to introduce more power systems, what eventually became IOs and Incarnates, but the floor was already too high.

[Snarky]

22 hours ago, dtj714 said:

That's not the point - the point is some level of authenticity. I think Homecoming has lost it. Others don't, or don't care. And that's fine. We make choices accordingly.

Not trying to be Snarky (I do not have to try...)  But exactly what do you mean by authenticity?  Number of Players.  Adherence to original game code?  

 

I disagree vehemently with about half of what the Dev staff does here.  The other half I like.  I wish they did more.  They wish they got paid.  

 

Homecoming offers me the chance to run CoH, my favorite game, team up when I want.  Badge the hardest badges with a team when I want.  Is it exact issue 5?  13?  20?  Are there as many players as Freedumb had at peak?  

 

For me authentic is flavor.  The blood I had tonight is not the same as the blood I had 20 years ago.  Do I remember it that well?  Maybe.  But at least I have real blood and am not looking at a drained plastic container lying in a melting igloo cooler. 

 

What is your authentic?  (Was I Snarky?  I can never tell anymore...)  

[Michiyo]

5 hours ago, macskull said:

I would have to go digging through my post history to find, but a year or so ago I did some digging because someone insisted this wasn't true, but HC had something like 2 weeks of lead time over any of the other currently-active servers.

Not to nitpick, but I had my server up the day before HC, and it's still running. 😛

 

(we're just REALLY small...)

[Ukase]

On 1/16/2023 at 8:45 PM, dtj714 said:

Curious to know what others think.

My thoughts are a bit jumbled. 

I have played here, of course. I played on Rebirth during the summer of 2021. I still play here, but only once a week to lead a small group, during which we seem to do our best to see if we can get the others to groan out loud due to the pain of bad puns and other off-the-wall commentary. 

When I load up Thunderspy  - this is what I see: 

 

I do not get that impression here. I get the impression that I have to walk on eggshells here. Thankfully, I love the crunching sound under my feet. 

To HC's credit, they recognized that running the same content over and over for incarnate loot can get stale. Enter in the vet level rewards. Maybe they're too much. Or maybe they're just enough. Opinions will vary. 

They don't have that option on Tspy. In fact - there is no farming in AE on Thunderspy. Thunderspy has a much lower population. But so far, the only thing I haven't been able to do is a magisterium. We're still waiting on some Task Force Junkies to get something in lore & destiny. 

 

Edited January 20, 2023 by Ukase
brevity

[Captain Fabulous]

3 hours ago, Wavicle said:

that is not why ED happened. They wanted to introduce more power systems, what eventually became IOs and Incarnates, but the floor was already too high.

Nope, that's exactly why ED happened. I remember Jack saying he was annoyed that everyone was slotting everything exactly the same way and only using a small number of enhancements that were in the game. ED was his way to force us to use things other than accuracy and damage. The secondary effect of this is that our damage output was cut in half, regen & recovery were cut in half, and the defense nerf made sure we got hit a lot. IOs were a way to restore some of the functionality that was taken away but we had to work hard for it. Which of course was the point, to keep us grinding away month after month while paying the sub fee.

[Captain Fabulous]

3 hours ago, WumpusRat said:

Jack was a big believer in "make players struggle". He was quoted on the original forums many times for wanting things to take as long as possible, and be as hard as possible, because that was his idea of "the perfect MMO". A lot of the TFs that were chock full of "kill every enemy" were due to his design influence. 

And when he realized that people were figuring out how to make things easier through slotting stuff well, he pushed for the whole "enhancement diversification" (ie, game-wide player nerf) to force people to have to struggle even more.

Jack had some very, umm, unique ideas as to how his game should be played. And did everything he could to ensure we played HIS way, not ours. Things like travel suppression annoy TF out of me even to this day. Completely unnecessary and simply because he didn't want us to be able to run away from a fight. Anything he perceived as even the slightest deviation from his Vision™ he swiftly nerfed the hell out of it. Absolutely the worst way to run a game.

Edited January 20, 2023 by Captain Fabulous

[Captain Fabulous]

4 hours ago, Krimson said:

This is why all my builds are jacked-up now. For a game that is allegedly about playing super-powered beings, it sure seems like the Dev team wanted to make sure that no one felt Super under any circumstances. I have no idea why anyone would want to go back to floundering at everything. 

That was Jack, Al, and later Floyd. I always used to say "Robin the snot-nosed wonder can take out a roomful of minions without breaking a sweat and I can't take out 3 without either getting clobbered or exhausting myself". All 3 of them had very funny ideas as to how a superhero should function.

[Wavicle]

14 minutes ago, Captain Fabulous said:

Nope, that's exactly why ED happened. I remember Jack saying he was annoyed that everyone was slotting everything exactly the same way and only using a small number of enhancements that were in the game. ED was his way to force us to use things other than accuracy and damage. The secondary effect of this is that our damage output was cut in half, regen & recovery were cut in half, and the defense nerf made sure we got hit a lot. IOs were a way to restore some of the functionality that was taken away but we had to work hard for it. Which of course was the point, to keep us grinding away month after month while paying the sub fee.

 

I remember seeing dev statements explicitly stating they wanted to give us more toys but couldn't at the level of power we were then at.

Not in any way trying to say what you state here is incorrect, just that it's incomplete. They definitely were always intending to give us more tools so that we could get back to things like perma Hasten, unlimited Endurance, soft capped Defenses, etc.

[Wavicle]

To get even more specific, I remember ED itself being basically a euphemism, intentional or not. They NEEDED to limit what we could get from enhancements. Talking about diversifying which enhancements we used was a distraction, to try (unsuccessfully) to keep our eyes off what was, at the time, a sizable nerf.

They should have just called it what it was, Enhancement Diminishing Returns. Still a nerf, but not an insultingly idiotic excuse.

[Player2]

16 minutes ago, Captain Fabulous said:

That was Jack, Al, and later Floyd. I always used to say "Robin the snot-nosed wonder can take out a roomful of minions without breaking a sweat and I can't take out 3 without either getting clobbered or exhausting myself". All 3 of them had very funny ideas as to how a superhero should function.

I remember Jack's musings about how he came to realize what fun was... playing some handheld video game while on a plane and being drawn into it more and more because he kept dying, so that meant that dying = fun and the COH had to scale back on what players could do to increase our fun.

 

By the way, Jack was an idiot.  But I guess you all knew that already, didn't you? 

[Wavicle]

Jack wanted CoH to be like Elden Ring.

[Captain Fabulous]

24 minutes ago, Player2 said:

I remember Jack's musings about how he came to realize what fun was... playing some handheld video game while on a plane and being drawn into it more and more because he kept dying, so that meant that dying = fun and the COH had to scale back on what players could do to increase our fun.

 

I vaguely remember that story.
 

24 minutes ago, Player2 said:

 

By the way, Jack was an idiot.  But I guess you all knew that already, didn't you? 

No lies detected. 😂

 

42 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

 

I remember seeing dev statements explicitly stating they wanted to give us more toys but couldn't at the level of power we were then at.

Not in any way trying to say what you state here is incorrect, just that it's incomplete. They definitely were always intending to give us more tools so that we could get back to things like perma Hasten, unlimited Endurance, soft capped Defenses, etc.

I'm not entirely sure this is true, at least not how you're portraying it. ED was a hard nerf, plain and simple, because Jack felt that us being that powerful wasn't fun enough. It was purely punitive and intentional, not because he wanted to add other stuff but because he was angry we weren't playing his game his way. At the time there was no intention of ever giving back what was taken away. He wanted things to be hard. He wanted us to struggle. He didn't want us soloing content (he changed how XP was awarded to dissuade us from soloing and street sweeping). He also assured us we were still going to be able to perma Hasten, and of course lied, because we couldn't. ED was issue 6. Inventions didn't come till issue 9, and IIRC Jack was pretty much gone by that point and none of it was his doing.