So imagine our Devs decided to go for CoH 2...

[Shenanigunner]

4 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I'd be interested in understanding how you feel PVP has actually been of detriment to the PVE game and wider community - and I think it's worth pointing out that there are a significant number of players who enjoy casual PVP and wouldn't go for a completely distinct and separate game just to PVP

 

Unless I am misremembering, a lot of work went into "balancing" powers and builds for PvP, and that caused ripples in the way those powers etc. worked in PvE. Only the PvP subset was happy with the changes.

 

As I said... if there's absolutely no such attention to making PvP a balanced game in itself, and thus distorting if not crippling PvE aspects, I'd have no further objection. But the PvP crowd, and the powergamer crowd, just seem to bitch and whine and demand until they get things bent their way, in a game that fundamentally isn't PvP and at the expense of regular play modes.

 

In a nutshell: maybe every game doesn't have to accommodate every possible player type.

[Scarlet Shocker]

17 minutes ago, Shenanigunner said:

 

Unless I am misremembering, a lot of work went into "balancing" powers and builds for PvP, and that caused ripples in the way those powers etc. worked in PvE. Only the PvP subset was happy with the changes.

 

As I said... if there's absolutely no such attention to making PvP a balanced game in itself, and thus distorting if not crippling PvE aspects, I'd have no further objection. But the PvP crowd, and the powergamer crowd, just seem to bitch and whine and demand until they get things bent their way, in a game that fundamentally isn't PvP and at the expense of regular play modes.

 

In a nutshell: maybe every game doesn't have to accommodate every possible player type.

 

I have to say I don't recall any of that - I remember a big PVP rebalance around I13 which seemed to please nobody but I don't think it had any effect on the PVE game at all. I could be mistaken but I don't remember it

 

But I think it's also important in an MMO to be willing to accommodate other players' desires too - otherwise you're playing a solo Superhero RPG which is an entirely different experience.

[Oubliette_Red]

The only thing I require:

1. Take the legacy Criptic game engine out back and shoot it.
2. Then draw and quarter it.
3. Incinerate it.
4. Crush it to dust.
5. Bury it.
6. Salt the earth in which it is buried.
7. Nuke it from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.

 

Everything else is icing on the cake.

 

Edited March 24, 2023 by Oubliette_Red

[srmalloy]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

Exactly how large an order of crap did you want?  Large, extra large, or “bury me under Bandini mountain?”

That brings back memories. Many years ago, when I rode the bus out to Point Loma to work, it drove past a Mexican restaurant that always lifted my spirits, because you had to wonder how much flak they took over their name once those commercials began airing. The restaurant was the 'Casa de Bandini'.

[nihilii]

27 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I have to say I don't recall any of that - I remember a big PVP rebalance around I13 which seemed to please nobody but I don't think it had any effect on the PVE game at all. I could be mistaken but I don't remember it

Travel suppression in the early issues was pretty much a PvP change. This was obvious and generated so much animosity against PvP (which was the studio's new baby), the devs had to cook up a narrative this was to stop PvE jousting. Even though nobody did any sort of jousting regularly in PvE because the risk/reward ratio simply wasn't there compared to herding and killing.

All in all, I think this is the original sin that fueled further PvP-ruins-PvE sentiment forever. Objectively, later changes were much more carefully implemented, but the trust was lost on that particular idea.

Edited March 24, 2023 by nihilii

[Shenanigunner]

25 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I have to say I don't recall any of that - I remember a big PVP rebalance around I13 which seemed to please nobody but I don't think it had any effect on the PVE game at all. I could be mistaken but I don't remember it

 

I could be wrong. (I was wrong once; it was an interesting experience. That is, I thought I made a mistake once, but I was wrong.) 🙂

 

 

25 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

But I think it's also important in an MMO to be willing to accommodate other players' desires too - otherwise you're playing a solo Superhero RPG which is an entirely different experience.

 

I completely agree that any good game should be as flexible as possible, but... within its scope? Trying to make every game for every stripe of player just dilutes them into mush only distinguishable by the title screen. And to me, PvE and PvP are a huge, fundamental fork between game types.

 

Maybe CoX2 should be fundamentally PvP, hero vs. villain, with well-designed mobs to fill out the experience. But that would be a very different game from one resolutely designed as PvE, with an added player "enemy" option that is anything but, and then completely vanilla arena PvP shoehorned in. There would have to be draw to have alts on both sides for that to work, though.

 

[High_Beam]

On 3/23/2023 at 7:26 AM, Snarky said:

I am a Semi driver in a large Metro area.  So, I have to amuse myself.

This is Jack Burton in the Pork Chop Express.

[Techwright]

I've only had a moment to skim the comments.  I'll probably come back later with a deep read and probably a more detailed answer.

 

I'd not want to continue the story, nor replay it.  Portal Corp.  has revealed a multi-verse.  I'd want to set 2.0 in an undiscovered dimension.  Build the lore from the distant past forward.  What would that look like? Not sure, except that certain things would have a familiarity to them.  Would there even be a Well?  I realize The Well is a multi-dimensional entity, but does it extend to all dimensions or just a great many?  Would the Prussian who indefinitely extended his life through incredible mechanical means even be a megalomaniac villain, or would he possibly be the long-lived hero, taking Statesman's place as leader of the world's champions?  Would characters we know as normal people be superheroes there, and vice versa?  I find the idea of a fresh start within a slightly familiar situation would deliver a lot of delighted surprises to players of 1.0.

 

No war walls, as others have said.

 

A new game could have a more expansive city, possibly with different neighborhoods in places (or parts of places) where familiar ones exist in 1.0, but also with an eye toward the broader state, region, and yes, world.  An airport or city-to-city technology should be a necessity to explain trips to Europe, some Pacific islands, Antarctica, or the Congo.  For that matter, we need trains. I don't mean the elevated commuter system (which I think we should still have), but tracks and switch yards representing freight hauling as well as passenger systems hopefully a bit more like European or Japanese models rather than real-world Amtrak.

 

I'd want instance settings in more than just non-descript open spaces and half-empty or deserted warehouses and office buildings in the Brutalist style.  Where are the junk yards, the ballfields, the museums?  If we must fight in closer quarters, why not through an apartment building or a deserted school?  Oh, and as I think of it, do so with breakable walls, possibly even a challenge of bringing a building down if there's too much damage done.

 

One other point I always think about (and have occasionally mentioned):  ethnic neighborhoods.  I want to see the Czech Village, and the "Littles" for cultures like Italy, Greece, and China (or since we have the Tsoo, something reflecting Hmong culture).  Show their bodegas, their restaurants, their fruit stands, trinket stores, and urban temples. Maybe even set missions within some of them.

 

 

[Snarky]

And make sure villains can run through the neighborhoods destroying everything 

[aethereal]

I feel like nobody has really gone all-in on a big mechanical discussion, so here I go:

 

The basic sins of current CoH on a mechanical level are the way defense and recharge work.  They distort everything in the game.  Too much stuff is built on top of them to really rework them in CoH as it stands, it would just be too disruptive.  But if you're starting from the beginning, you should definitely change how they work.

 

It should not be possible for carefully built high-end players to divide the cooldown of every power by three, while a "normal" 50 gets about 40% off the cooldown.

 

It should also not be the case that there's a hard increasing-returns curve towards 90% mitigation available to everyone in the game.

 

So, recharge reduction:  This is probably relatively simple.  Strongly limit the amount of recharge available, very especially global recharge, then rebalance everything to lower base cooldowns.  A power like Hasten (high global cooldown available to everyone) should simply not exist.  If you feel the need to thematically support super-speedsters in globally available pool powers (and I'm kind of dubious that we've ever had a great experience with that, instead of building a speed powerset), then the way to do it is not a perma-able cooldown reducer, it's probably something more like a brief buff that reduces animation times (which is not possible in current codebase, but in a hypothetical CoH2 could be).

 

Defense:  Somewhat less simple, and more so than global recharge you have to make real decisions about playing off the power-fantasy of superheroes who can wade into groups of foes with some level of niche protection for more armored classes and challenge level.  But broadly speaking, removing the increasing-returns cycle would be great.  Make it easier to build meaningful amounts of defense for low investment, harder to build defense that achieves >75% total mitigation.  Probably entirely remove the confusing accuracy/to-hit distinction (do we in fact need two different traits that both represent being better/worse at landing a blow, that trade off with each other in impossibly nuanced ways?).  Probably have class-by-class caps on defense values.  Maybe make armor sets that are defense/resistance oriented raise the normal cap for the chosen type of mitigation, but have lower caps for building either outside of your actual powerset.  Then, in response to a sane amount of mitigation based on Defense, we remove the doctrine of building content that responds to that defense mitigation by essentially entirely removing Defense (whether through gigantic to-hit/accuracy bonuses or huge defense debuffs).

 

 

 

 

Some bonus mechanical changes that aren't the two above:

 

1.  Remove the increasing-returns cycle on Resistance, too.  This is a little less extreme than for Defense and probably only a really big deal for the high-resistance ATs, but it still should be easier to build moderate mitigation, harder to get to 90%.

 

2.  Revamp how mezz protection works.  We currently have a situation where armored classes are mooooostly immune to mez and unarmored classes are horribly screwed over by it, we should move both towards the center a little, making mez less problematic for the unarmored classes, but less ignoreable for the armored classes (this probably looks something like armored classes mostly get mez resistance, not protection, so they still get mezzed but for short periods of time, plus everyone gets a period of invulnerability or nigh-invulnerability after they get mezzed, like in PvP, so that large mobs don't lock you down).

 

3.  End the City of Toggles.  This game has way too many toggles.  Make a focused effort to say that all-in, most characters should have at most two toggles from pools and, if they have a toggle-heavy powerset, two toggles from their powerset.  Convert lots of powers that currently are toggles to being auto-powers, or to adding an effect to another toggle, or just rethink whether this power needs to be an always-on bonus to begin with.  This should be aided by a decreasing-returns curve with defense/resistance, in which we aren't chasing every last 2% defense obsessively.

Edited March 24, 2023 by aethereal

[srmalloy]

3 hours ago, nihilii said:

... the devs had to cook up a narrative this was to stop PvE jousting. Even though nobody did any sort of jousting regularly in PvE because the risk/reward ratio simply wasn't there compared to herding and killing.

And with the change that gave every NPC mob a ranged attack, any purported benefit to jousting went away; since NPCs react on the server, they can aggro and shoot at you regardless of how far away you get before their attack goes off. Given that, I don't see why movement suppression in PvE is still a thing; it is a solution in desperate search of a problem.

 

That said, I did use jousting extensively on Live with a Katana/Regen scrapper; the character had Super Leap for his travel power, and queuing up an attack then jumping past the Sky Skiffs in Terra Volta was the best way to work on the badge for them, since he couldn't hang there and attack. He still took fire from the other mobs in the spawns, though, so it wasn't a 'get out of retaliation free' tactic.

[Shenanigunner]

26 minutes ago, aethereal said:

I feel like nobody has really gone all-in on a big mechanical discussion, so here I go:

 

Kudos and appreciation for the thought and detail in this post, but... my read is "change everything that keeps you from assembling an optimized mega for any build." Or "take away every limitation that isn't all-but-perma powers of steadily increasing strength."

 

Maybe I misread.

[aethereal]

15 minutes ago, Shenanigunner said:

 

Kudos and appreciation for the thought and detail in this post, but... my read is "change everything that keeps you from assembling an optimized mega for any build." Or "take away every limitation that isn't all-but-perma powers of steadily increasing strength."

 

Maybe I misread.

 

I mean, look, there's a balance here.  I'm absolutely here for a power fantasy of a superhero game, and the whole early modus of "a hero should be balanced against three minions" is dumb and bad.  But on the other hand, there's no actual game if the deal is that you get "invulnerable to all harm," "instakill anyone I attack," and "travel anywhere instantly" at first level.  We gotta find some kind of middle ground.

 

The way that CoH was as of whatever, about two years ago, was that a well-built level 50+3 character was so strong that it could solo all content, and high-end teams were basically a eight different people going off in all directions and speedrunning objectives.  ATs like Defender were pretty superfluous, and those high-end builds all looked pretty similar to each other.  The response to that has been the introduction of content that has ludicrous counters to Defense in particular (I believe that it is a case that if you bring a character into 4-star hard mode content who is at 45% defense to all positionals and all types, every enemy on the map will have a 95% chance to hit you with every attack.  That is, you get literally no mitigation from soft-capped defense without additional buffs on top).  I don't think that's the best meta we can get if we give ourselves the freedom to imagine a place where we're starting over and building up from scratch.

 

My vision is that there's some rough power-level that's maximally attainable, call it X, and:

 

1.  There are several different ways to get your character to roughly X.  It's not just Defense + Recharge.  We want there to be diversity in people who are at power level X.  Now, there's always going to be a best, it's impossible to have a perfectly balanced meta, but the gulf between the best and the second and third and fourth best should be relatively narrow.

 

2.  Characters at power X can feel nicely superheroic.  They can wade into large groups of foes and defeat them, and they can fight cool-seeming named villains one-on-one and defeat them.

 

3.  But there is content that is intended for groups of 4-8 characters at power X, and that necessarily means that one character, no matter how well-built, won't be able to do that content solo.  And that content doesn't achieve this difficulty level by unceremoniously ignoring the schtick of any characters.  No "lol, your defense does you no good," no "mezzes just don't work here," etc.

Edited March 24, 2023 by aethereal

[FupDup]

An interesting thing about player power is that too much of it can actually backfire and make you feel powerless, if enemies die way too quickly and you never get a chance to even target them before they get deleted by your teammates. 

 

And obviously, nerfing players to feel like you're slapping baddies with pillows also makes players feel weak.

 

Such is the great "Power Paradox" of balancing. 

[Snarky]

2 hours ago, aethereal said:

I feel like nobody has really gone all-in on a big mechanical discussion, so here I go:

 

The basic sins of current CoH on a mechanical level are the way defense and recharge work.  They distort everything in the game.  Too much stuff is built on top of them to really rework them in CoH as it stands, it would just be too disruptive.  But if you're starting from the beginning, you should definitely change how they work.

 

It should not be possible for carefully built high-end players to divide the cooldown of every power by three, while a "normal" 50 gets about 40% off the cooldown.

 

It should also not be the case that there's a hard increasing-returns curve towards 90% mitigation available to everyone in the game.

 

So, recharge reduction:  This is probably relatively simple.  Strongly limit the amount of recharge available, very especially global recharge, then rebalance everything to lower base cooldowns.  A power like Hasten (high global cooldown available to everyone) should simply not exist.  If you feel the need to thematically support super-speedsters in globally available pool powers (and I'm kind of dubious that we've ever had a great experience with that, instead of building a speed powerset), then the way to do it is not a perma-able cooldown reducer, it's probably something more like a brief buff that reduces animation times (which is not possible in current codebase, but in a hypothetical CoH2 could be).

 

Defense:  Somewhat less simple, and more so than global recharge you have to make real decisions about playing off the power-fantasy of superheroes who can wade into groups of foes with some level of niche protection for more armored classes and challenge level.  But broadly speaking, removing the increasing-returns cycle would be great.  Make it easier to build meaningful amounts of defense for low investment, harder to build defense that achieves >75% total mitigation.  Probably entirely remove the confusing accuracy/to-hit distinction (do we in fact need two different traits that both represent being better/worse at landing a blow, that trade off with each other in impossibly nuanced ways?).  Probably have class-by-class caps on defense values.  Maybe make armor sets that are defense/resistance oriented raise the normal cap for the chosen type of mitigation, but have lower caps for building either outside of your actual powerset.  Then, in response to a sane amount of mitigation based on Defense, we remove the doctrine of building content that responds to that defense mitigation by essentially entirely removing Defense (whether through gigantic to-hit/accuracy bonuses or huge defense debuffs).

 

 

 

 

Some bonus mechanical changes that aren't the two above:

 

1.  Remove the increasing-returns cycle on Resistance, too.  This is a little less extreme than for Defense and probably only a really big deal for the high-resistance ATs, but it still should be easier to build moderate mitigation, harder to get to 90%.

 

2.  Revamp how mezz protection works.  We currently have a situation where armored classes are mooooostly immune to mez and unarmored classes are horribly screwed over by it, we should move both towards the center a little, making mez less problematic for the unarmored classes, but less ignoreable for the armored classes (this probably looks something like armored classes mostly get mez resistance, not protection, so they still get mezzed but for short periods of time, plus everyone gets a period of invulnerability or nigh-invulnerability after they get mezzed, like in PvP, so that large mobs don't lock you down).

 

3.  End the City of Toggles.  This game has way too many toggles.  Make a focused effort to say that all-in, most characters should have at most two toggles from pools and, if they have a toggle-heavy powerset, two toggles from their powerset.  Convert lots of powers that currently are toggles to being auto-powers, or to adding an effect to another toggle, or just rethink whether this power needs to be an always-on bonus to begin with.  This should be aided by a decreasing-returns curve with defense/resistance, in which we aren't chasing every last 2% defense obsessively.

so......simplify....everything?  

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, FupDup said:

An interesting thing about player power is that too much of it can actually backfire and make you feel powerless, if enemies die way too quickly and you never get a chance to even target them before they get deleted by your teammates. 

 

And obviously, nerfing players to feel like you're slapping baddies with pillows also makes players feel weak.

 

Such is the great "Power Paradox" of balancing. 

two words....git gud

 

seriously.  knowing when to drop KO blow and a blaster nuke is about knowing how to play.  because you are on a team with people cleaning spawns you feel powerless.   sometimes on a +4 kill all itf i will follow that one guy not with the group.  we become a mini team and get to crush shit.  the team did not need us, so we are actually speeding up the TF completion.  

 

git gud

[aethereal]

2 minutes ago, Snarky said:

so......simplify....everything?  

That wouldn't be my summary of it, no.  I think the only thing I really suggested simplifying there was the to-hit calculation, which strikes me as complexity without purpose.

 

I think there was a period, maybe...  gosh, at this point 15 years ago...  where there was enjoyable complexity in figuring out the invention system and that you could do things like softcap S/L even for squishy classes or build to perma-Hasten, and you could make the argument that even though the result here wasn't really a great thing, the process of unravelling that ball of yarn was diverting enough for a big chunk of the playerbase that it "paid for itself" as it were.

 

To the extent that we're taking seriously the counterfactual of a CoH2, we should recognize that we'll get that kind of problem solving for free!  Anything that's actually a real from-scratch rewrite of CoH would change enough that character building will be de facto more complicated than CoH1, at least for a while, until people sink a few tens of thousands of man-hours into it and figure out how it works.

 

To the extent that this isn't really about CoH2, and is simply a rehash of complaints about CoH1, we should recognize that the time when there was enjoyable complexity in building for defense and global recharge was ages ago, and now it's just a matter of typing a Google query and walking down a well-trodden path.  But...  I wasn't actually just complaining about CoH1!  I do think that the game is in pretty good shape for what it is, and trying to attack the problems I highlighted doesn't really make a lot of sense in the context of this legacy game.  We're just spitballing about a thing that'll never happen, here.

[Snarky]

4 minutes ago, aethereal said:

That wouldn't be my summary of it, no.  I think the only thing I really suggested simplifying there was the to-hit calculation, which strikes me as complexity without purpose.

 

yes, exactly.  that.  and defense.  and resistance.  and recharge.  and toggles.  oh, and mez protection.

[Luminara]

Fully deformable terrain.  Punch through walls.  Make potholes when you land.  Knock over buildings.

 

Knockback deals extra damage based on the force of the strike.

 

Every power is thematically linked to your first choice.  If you're a Fire blaster, for example, and you take Fly, your Fly emits flames.  And you can select how that works, such as the lower half of your body becoming obscured by a flaming tornado, or your entire body changing to flame, or flames shooting out of your boots.  If you have defensive powers, they're fire-themed.  You take Air Superiority and whack someone with it, the animation isn't the same two-fisted hammer maneuver that a Super Strength character uses, it's... a small explosion, or a sudden gust of flames shooting up from the ground, or something fire-related.  Spring Attack into an enemy spawn and a ring of fire explodes from where you land.  Every power ties back into your primary power, the first power you select, and every animation is relative to that first choice.

 

Zero "wasted" powers, via upgrades.  Your Fire blaster decides he/she needs the next level of pew-pew, so instead of adding another power to your repertoire and taking that first pew-pew off of your tray, you improve the first pew-pew.  Upgrade it again and it's an AoE or cone.  You can always go back and select your first pew-pew again, and upgrade that to obtain more powers, but the net result is you only have what you want and need, not a lot of abandoned crap.

 

Visual indicators for cones and AoEs.

 

Cute non-combat pets.  Cute little non-combat pets.  Bunnies.  Kittens.  I guess some puppies are cute... when they're not peeing on things, crapping on things, slobbering on things...  Anyway, adorable little pets to follow you around and make you happy.

 

Buff/debuff notification icons on the target window.

 

Better than a 50% guaranteed hit rate (miss, forced hit, miss, forced hit, miss, forced hit, mi-MOTHERFUCKERJUSTSTOPTHATALREADY).  And AoEs included in the calculation (AoE miss, single-target miss, AoE miss, single-target m-OHI'VESOHADITWITHYOURSHIT).

 

Better mission design.  Running from one portal to another in PI is stupid.  Having a mission with one objective, and the entire mission taking 92 seconds, is stupid.

 

Colonel Runaway is fired.  His replacement is enemy ramping.  If they can't hit you, they try harder.  If they're close to being defeated, they fight harder.  Challenge, not chase.

 

Hazard courses for movement modes.  Jumping puzzles, flight paths, et cetera.  Like the ski slopes, but for everyone and every type of travel.

 

Choices and consequences.  Right now, it doesn't matter if a mission ends in failure, the story just moves on.  It doesn't matter if you decide to save Detective Hopp or not, the story moves on.  The story is pre-determined, you're just witnessing it.  Instead, if you fuck up and don't stop the bad guy, maybe he sets a building on fire when he escapes, or kidnaps a family and assassinates them on television, or dumps dioxin into the reservoir.  Hostage?  Maybe you save her, maybe you don't, but what you do determines what happens next in the story, rather than simply being a one line side note in the next mission's acceptance text.  Crate of weapons?  What happens if you take it for yourself instead of delivering it to the police?  Or you blow it up... along with that underground base where the bad guys were hiding?

 

More value to less utilitarian controls and debuffs.  Okay, so I debuffed that dude's Recharge TIme.  So fucking what, the script just moves the enemy to the next available attack and my debuff doesn't actually have any appreciable effect if combat isn't unnecessarily long.  Why not have that debuff put enemy powers on recharge so it's immediately useful?  Immobilized an enemy, go me, oh wait, Captain Shitbiscuit can still blow my face off with an Armalite AR-18.  Make Immob prevent turning.  Done, now Immob is more useful than shitting on tanks' days and keeping psychotic AVs from trying to run to Poland, because it can limit how much damage an enemy can deal.

 

Control durations are fixed.  Magnitude can be increased, duration can't.  Makes multiple control characters useful.  Want to keep everything locked down?  Bring more than one X.

 

Better feet.  Seriously, these Quasimodo clubfoot things with lines on them, they have to go.

 

Some thigh high boots that aren't stiletto heels or high heels, for the ladies.  Haven't you tormented my toes enough with the Chinese foot wrapping shit, I have to wear six inch heels, too?  How's a girl supposed to kick ass when she can't walk?  GIVE ME FLAT THIGH HIGH BOOTS, GODDAMNIT.

 

Easter eggs everywhere.  Secret caves, underwater grottos, a sky ship that can't be seen until you're above it.  Ever play Fallout 3?  Remember all of those weird garden gnome and teddy bear easter egg tableaus?  Stuff like that.  Things for us to find and enjoy finding when we're out exploring.

 

The city reflects overall player activity.  If there are a lot of people doing good things in an area, it's bright and shiny.  If an area is neglected, clouds move in, it becomes dark and gloomy.

 

Random crime that amounts to more than NPCs locked in a single animation endlessly.  I don't stop muggings because the muggers won't get the purse if I don't intervene.  I don't engage the criminals staring into a store window or crouched in front of the door because they're static.  They'll be in front of that window or door until they despawn.  I want a reason to intervene.  Let that mugger grab the purse so I'm inclined to chase him.  Let those guys break into the store so I'm encouraged to run in after them and stop the theft.

 

No morality missions.  Morality is coupled to action.  What you do determines where you are on the compass, not which mission you select or which "side" you're on when you're doing missions.

 

Objective interaction animations.  Why do I just stand there like a useless idiot when I'm "hacking" a computer?  Why am I staring at a progress bar with a brief description of my action when I'm playing a game rich with animations which could be used to depict that action?  Nope.  If you're opening a crate, you're opening the crate, your character is going through the motions of opening that crate.

 

Archetype differentiation that makes sense.  Cryptic fucked it up by trying to do it with restrictions on power sets.  A better method is to make every archetype capable of doing something no other archetype can.  Controllers, for instance, would be the only archetype with access to AoE controls.  Defenders would have one buff/debuff that no-one else had.  Et cetera.  Makes everyone different and valuable for different reasons, and allows us to redefine archetypes for the sequel.

 

More than one raid, and none on an oversized breast implant.  Boobs aren't scary.

 

Options for + and - abilities.  Maybe I'm willing to live with flying more slowly if it means I can increase the power of my dive attack by 10%.  Or I can make my AoE attack deal 10% less damage, but have a 2 second Stun.  Lots of ways we could customize our characters with benefits and penalties.

 

Every power's effects are determined partially by animation time.  If you're using an attack with a 3.5 second animation, it's goddamn well not going to be a heartbreaking letdown.  That fucker's going to be almost guaranteed to hit, and it's going to be worth that 3.5 seconds.  Fucking Incandescent Strike... I'M STILL ANGRY ABOUT THAT MONUMENTAL DISAPPOINTMENT.

 

A dozen or so pre-designed bases/lairs for players to start out with, so getting into that aspect is quick and painless.

 

A UI that doesn't feel like it was designed by a Windows 95 enthusiast.

[aethereal]

Just now, Snarky said:

yes, exactly.  that.  and defense.  and resistance.  and recharge.  and toggles.  oh, and mez protection.

I super didn't, my friend!  I really suggest that you try to read it without it feeling like an attack.

 

There's nothing complicated about increasing-returns curves.  They're simplifying!  They mean that you don't have a hard tradeoff when you consider "should I push for more defense (or resistance, if that's my thing), or should I diversify."  There's certainly nothing complicated about the current meta for recharge, my god can we get more cookie-cutter than "drop in five LotG procs, five 10% global recharge bonuses, get Hasten, find the other 20% in a couple of standard places"?

 

Mez protection would get a TON more complex if you, like...  actually had to worry about being mezzed?

 

Activating ten toggles isn't complex, it's just tedious.  If you activated four instead to get the same effects, it'd be a nice QoL.  If you couldn't get the same effects as the current 10 toggles but actually had to think about when to time clickies for some of them, then it'd be more complex, not less!

[Snarky]

3 minutes ago, aethereal said:

I super didn't, my friend!  I really suggest that you try to read it without it feeling like an attack.

 

There's nothing complicated about increasing-returns curves.  They're simplifying!  They mean that you don't have a hard tradeoff when you consider "should I push for more defense (or resistance, if that's my thing), or should I diversify."  There's certainly nothing complicated about the current meta for recharge, my god can we get more cookie-cutter than "drop in five LotG procs, five 10% global recharge bonuses, get Hasten, find the other 20% in a couple of standard places"?

 

Mez protection would get a TON more complex if you, like...  actually had to worry about being mezzed?

 

Activating ten toggles isn't complex, it's just tedious.  If you activated four instead to get the same effects, it'd be a nice QoL.  If you couldn't get the same effects as the current 10 toggles but actually had to think about when to time clickies for some of them, then it'd be more complex, not less!

You are definitely complicating your response about a desire to simplify each of these areas

 

Does that make you feel better?

[aethereal]

6 minutes ago, Snarky said:

You are definitely complicating your response about a desire to simplify each of these areas

 

Does that make you feel better?

I feel like you think I'm attacking you.  I am not, I promise!  I have no beef with you.  I'm sorry that I upset you with my post about mechanics.  If it makes you feel any better, there is not going to be a CoH2, and all of this is very academic.

[Snarky]

21 minutes ago, aethereal said:

I feel like you think I'm attacking you.  I am not, I promise!  I have no beef with you.  I'm sorry that I upset you with my post about mechanics.  If it makes you feel any better, there is not going to be a CoH2, and all of this is very academic.

oh i get that.  i am just amusing myself.  watching you insist you were not advocating for simplifying each of those areas brings me some joy, and since no CoH2 is around the corner i need to keep amused.

 

ps.  honestly, you can tell me, why are you insisting you are not advocating for simplifying those areas.  I've read it over twice.  you addressed each of those areas specifically and advocated for changes....that simplified....each of the areas.  

 

wait...are you just amusing yourself too?  nice.

Edited March 24, 2023 by Snarky

[Luminara]

On 3/23/2023 at 11:20 AM, Sir Myshkin said:

For some reason I'm struggling to see this. A vampire... truck driver.

 

[aethereal]

2 minutes ago, Snarky said:

oh i get that.  i am just amusing myself.  watching you insist you were not advocating for simplifying each of those areas brings me some joy, and since no CoH2 is around the corner i need to keep amused.

 

ps.  honestly, you can tell me, why are you insisting you are not advocating for simplifying those areas.  I've read it over twice.  you addressed each of those areas specifically and advocated for changes....that simplified....each of the areas.  

 

I just...  really didn't.  I'm not totally sure why you think I did!  If someone put me in charge of CoH2, I think that one of my biggest concerns would be that my ideas would make it too complex, too hard to understand and manipulate the mechanics of.  I think that there are some areas of CoH as it stands that are persistently misunderstood that I don't think are very complex.

 

(The accuracy vs to-hit thing is the exception, I do think that should be simplified.  I think it's potentially super complex as it stands, and that we actually end up with kind of dumb mechanics here precisely because it's so complex that we have to limit the number of moving pieces in order to keep it from having weird results.)

 

But, like, I genuinely don't know why you think it's more complicated to activate three toggles that, combined, give you let's say 13% defense-all, instead of having one toggle and then two auto-powers that modify the toggle to have 13% defense-all.  It seems straightforwardly the case that those are basically the same, just one of them involves less unnecessary button-pushing.  And it seems clearly the case to me as well that if you have one toggle that gives you +8% defense-all, and then a non-perma clicky that gives you another +12% defense-all, that using that clicky is more complicated than the toggle-on-and-forget 13% defense-all of three toggles.