New efforts!

[MM3squints]

Arcanaville is a notable exception, in that she doesn't appear to have PvPed much (or so I gather from posts here) but has arguably the best grasp on game mechanics of anyone other than devs. So I wonder if her opinion was ignored by the PvPers because, while having the best academic understanding of CoH's mechanics, PvPers assumed she didn't have practical experience with PvP.

Hit the nail on the head (like my DBA example.)

[Arcana]

That I never knew. Castle was so admit in defending the new system, it seems like he wanted to impose an idea to the community. Suck to be the sacrificial anode for something you did not even support. Can see he was in a Catch-22. He didn't do it, he would have been fired and they get someone else to do it. He dose it, he has a job, and in that circumstance you can't hate on a person because everyone needs to work and knowing even if you make a stand and get fired, it will eventually happen. Out of curiosity in the casual conversation, did he ever said who was pushing i13 PvP so hard?

Something else almost no one realized: Castle didn't even implement in any significant fashion many of the PvP changes players hated the most.  However, even now its really not my place to point fingers.

[Arcana]

I can see people in the PvP community saying your 'opinion doesn't matter" because more than likely you didn't have any influence in the PvP circle to be taken seriously. Was it right for people to just dismiss your ideas, nope because all voices are should be heard, but on the flip side if you didn't have any time in with the PvP, why would they listen. It's like a company going through a restructuring process and someone with a DBA (Doctors Business Admin) coming in telling why a certain way it better than the way that is not ingrained in the culture of the organization. You think the workers will say, "Hey this guy has a Doctors, we will go with that," of course not.

1.  The PvP forums were the only forums with that attitude.  Those same players' input was generally welcome in other forums where it was obvious they were extremely limited in knowledge or credibility.

2.  Actually, I did PvP; not often, but occasionally, and I did have a few "real" PvPers come to my defense.  But not enough to change my mind that it was not worth pursuing further.

Keep in mind, shouting me out of the PvP forums didn't significantly hurt my gaming experience; I just moved on to other things I was more likely to be able to make a significant contribution towards.  And it seemed strange to me that anyone would want to shut down my ability to discuss upcoming game changes on the public forums, which would then reduce my options to only being able to discuss them with the devs directly and privately.

Also, what I found odd was that while publicly I got shouted down a lot, privately I had a lot of very polite thoughtful conversations about PvP with some of the same players.  Privately at least credibility did not appear to be an issue.

[Burnt Toast]

I pvp'd from Issue 4 to close... and almost completely solo pvp. I had no issues getting and maintaining a rep of 400 on my pvp toons. My main pvp toons were a stalker, dom, corruptor, and a scrapper. Contrary to what you see on these boards and the old boards... pvp was still quite active in CoH (at least on Freedom).


You want to know what the key to pvp success is... not giving up. You have to learn to pvp...it's not like missions and the NPC AI. I was horrible when I started pvping, but I learned a lot by watching people, talking to people, and practicing in the arena with people who were much better than I was :)  I, and many others I know, actually liked some of the I13 changes... like... get ready... travel suppression. No longer could someone joust you... they had to be ready to actually fight once they did their initial attack. Before I13 it was just people running around like mad men... trying to target and get in range.


Some of my favorite pvp memories are duels underneath the Atlas statue...because you had to actually stand there and fight.


I miss base raids too :( We used to have some pretty epic base raids the short time they were around.


I rarely grouped in pvp unless it was with friends... we even had a super team we would run... usually 6-8 of us...all of us were Elect/Storm Corruptors... used to really make people mad; especially stalkers. One of us would "taunt" someone with a minor attack and then high tail it... round a corner and boom...there was the rest of the team with their lightning storm and freezing rain all going... SPLAT! If they decided to bring a team with them.. no problem we stayed tight in our hurricanes and unleashed tornadoes ...sentinels..and blasted them. I don't remember any time in the 3 years we did that that we ever had a team wipe... sigh... now I reallly miss pvp.

Another thing may be to really have people really test it and even hold tournaments exclusively in testing.  Look at what they did for Starcraft 2, blizzard had TOURNAMENTS internally held to see how the balance was so high end players could really get a feel for how balanced the game was overall.  I personally think city of heroes was a far more balanced game, but I will say this, in pvp it wasn't the case because of the various powerset weaknesses not allowing them to counter some sets.

So for competitive play, team play should be outright enforced entirely.  Like myth 2 soulblighter forced people into a minimum of two players per team with four players minimum in competitive matches I think city of heroes will have to be a team game in it's pvp if competition is to go on.  Duals should not be ranked, and solo players should also not be ranked, it'd be something for fun in pvp, but not for any kind of serious competition.

Because the only way one can truely ensure skill was what was winning was to ensure everyone was teaming in pvp in CoH.  That was also the case for guild wars as well, you couldn't get into any competitive gametypes without being in some kind of team, it just didn't work.  I mean one example in one on one guild wars would, well, warriors could simply take deadly riposte, and deadly riposte to litterally auto-kill other warriors, for example, as those two combined with gladiators stance were "I win" against other melee characters(block and auto-hit for brutally high damage).  One on one in GW didn't work cause certain builds always auto-beat other builds when played right, which was the case for city of heroes.  There was the time were storm automatically beat pure melee for a reason know?

[MM3squints]

Something else almost no one realized: Castle didn't even implement in any significant fashion many of the PvP changes players hated the most.  However, even now its really not my place to point fingers.

At the time he was defending and owning the issue like it was his. Of course in hind sight with the revelation of Code's comment he can't be blame due to the nature of the business. I'm not really pointing fingers (because it happen so long ago), I'm just curious. (Of Course Code said Castle didn't tell, so that end that question.)

1.  The PvP forums were the only forums with that attitude.  Those same players' input was generally welcome in other forums where it was obvious they were extremely limited in knowledge or credibility.

2.  Actually, I did PvP; not often, but occasionally, and I did have a few "real" PvPers come to my defense.  But not enough to change my mind that it was not worth pursuing further.

Keep in mind, shouting me out of the PvP forums didn't significantly hurt my gaming experience; I just moved on to other things I was more likely to be able to make a significant contribution towards.  And it seemed strange to me that anyone would want to shut down my ability to discuss upcoming game changes on the public forums, which would then reduce my options to only being able to discuss them with the devs directly and privately.

Also, what I found odd was that while publicly I got shouted down a lot, privately I had a lot of very polite thoughtful conversations about PvP with some of the same players.  Privately at least credibility did not appear to be an issue.

To me from the conversation we been having, credibility dose appears to be the issue. Not from the number and stat perspective, but in general the actual mechanics on how PvP is played. From how you generalized the difference between 3.0 and 2.0 is "just a slowed down," you are just looking at PvP in the Macro sense and concluding the macro is what makes PvP, but not taking account of the mico aspects that actually was the reason PvP was so fun. In a sense, it's like you can tell me all the Stats about a Z28 Carmaro, how to tweak it to improve efficiency and people will give you credit for that aspect, but when you talk about drifting and your answer is "oh you just round the corner" (essentially the difference between 3.0 and 2.0 it's just a slower version) which is an over generalized answer, people won't give you credit for that because you know what is, but you can't explain art of drifting as well as you can explain the numbers.

[Aggelakis]

^ makes me giggle.

[MM3squints]

You want to know what the key to pvp success is... not giving up. You have to learn to pvp...it's not like missions and the NPC AI. I was horrible when I started pvping, but I learned a lot by watching people, talking to people, and practicing in the arena with people who were much better than I was :)  I, and many others I know, actually liked some of the I13 changes... like... get ready... travel suppression. No longer could someone joust you... they had to be ready to actually fight once they did their initial attack. Before I13 it was just people running around like mad men... trying to target and get in range.

Honestly the biggest problem for melee toons was they didn't have some kind of chain attack. I don't know if it was the limitation of the game, or it was just not taken seriously into account, but that would have been better than the travel suppression. Becasue the only "chain attack" that was available was TP Foe which took a long time to activate and can be interrupted and was really not viable in PvP (with the exceptions of the TP Foe Mine Layers or my Ice/Rad Dueler where people try to escape my Ice Patch and Artic Air, but their speed is nuttered and they can't jump. When they are about to be outside of the Ice patch radius, I TP Foe them back to the center and just wailed on them till they drop.) 2.0 PvP travel suppression was in effect once you thrown an attack (your travel power would be down for 4 seconds), but not when you get attacked and honestly that rule made sense because attacks will stay to attack while people trying to run have the ability to do so.

I miss base raids too :( We used to have some pretty epic base raids the short time they were around.

I think the one silver lining of disabling base raid was it allowed the creation of a whole new subgroup of base making.

[Nightmarer]

It's very interesting to see different points of view about what happened regarding PvP. At the time, forums were still not merged and the issue in EU forums was handled almost exactly as someone described, PvPers made a list of suggestions and I would say they got ignored by the devs because, let's face it, EU forums were actually ignored by the devs. However, on the list of I13 catastrophes, what really forced me to change the way I played and enjoyed the game was the Merit System, it forced me moving from EU to US servers, it forced me to farm far more than I used to and many changes in my gaming habits. It even made me admire Synapse since he destroyed the game for me and made out a living about monitoring the mess he created, although I suspect he also was receiving insructions from higher levels.

As for Castle, I personally think his changes to Dark Melee and Invulnerability were great, not so fond of his Claws revision but hey, never been a fan of Claws anyway, so definitely having Castle's input, specially after knowing he wasn't the one who ruined PvP would be indeed good news for the APR people.-

[LaughingAlex]

That was an interesting article. One quote really spoke to me:

This matches up with my (admittedly limited) experience in MMOs. By and large, PvPers are the ones that truly understand the mechanics and balance of the game. Because they are ruthlessly committed to winning against people, instead of the pushovers that are NPCs, they push the boundaries of game mechanics to the limit, and discover issues in game design.

Arcanaville is a notable exception, in that she doesn't appear to have PvPed much (or so I gather from posts here) but has arguably the best grasp on game mechanics of anyone other than devs. So I wonder if her opinion was ignored by the PvPers because, while having the best academic understanding of CoH's mechanics, PvPers assumed she didn't have practical experience with PvP.

Now this is an interesting quote. While "jousting" may be weird, or "wrong somehow," it is a game mechanic. I would argue that it is not an "exploit." Something like finding a way to use Assassin's Strike without waiting for it to recharge, would be an exploit, that the devs would need to remove right away; whereas jousting is just part of the game. Perhaps the devs should have changed it - I didn't experience it all that much, nor use it that much (except on a stalker - remote AS was super fun!). But the fact is that it was part of the game meant that the "good players," as the article calls them, used it, and found ways to counter it.

Of course, you say yourself that you "hate" PvP, so I don't know what you were even doing in the zones in the first place :p

You'd be surprised of the attitude of a number of pvpers though to.  I saw a lot who really misunderstood things like knockback as "WEll it's a fixed automatic timer", when in reality, the magnitutde increased the distance and how high the arch you flew.  They were extremely phobic and whatnot.  This was a case of potentially "A good scrub", in that you had some players who were otherwise good at pvp I suspect but I also suspected they really had a lot of misconceptions in their heads about the actual game mechanics.  Which also combined with a "This is the only way to play" attitude.

You have to remember that many fruit salads hated pvp.  And fruit salads knew the buff/debuff/crowd control mechanics better than just about anyone and were expected to.  They were in a way, city of heroes hackers.  They had to really know those mechanics because they enjoyed fighting everything on +4.

I'd know those mechanics to, I played the support classes all the time and I knew knockback inside and out and how the directions tended to work for most mobs(some were strange, such as the arachnos tarantulas and arachnobots).  To hit ratings, accuracy and how they meshed together was something I knew to, afterall my luck kind of made it a requirement of me.  I knew the overall IO setups my characters generally needed, and when I saw something go unexpectedly i'd instantly be back at the drawing board.  I knew the mechanics very deeply.  But people like the crowd I mentioned above left me put off, especially when they tried to belittle me for trying to get into pvp myself.  They were being that general cross of a stop having fun guy with the overall arrogance, but also scrubs with the general misunderstanding of knocks.  I decided not to bother anymore.  The attitude was insulting.

Then I look at champions online, and about 99% of the pvpers in that game are just running cookie cutter builds and simultaniously display a level of hatred towards everyone else including other pvpers for not playing like them.  An example of a typical pvp match when one player is to tank-like for the other person to win; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlskE-WUMZU

It's an extremely shallow game in a way.  Granted this guys super tank build cannot kill anything but, he can tank things that would kill a more practical build(he even says his build is in many ways very bad for the general game in another video). It's a case of numerous scrubs playing CO and minimal experts, as they are just there for a false power fantasy as many who do play it are.  The guy in the video?  Very rarely plays anymore, and I don't really blame him, he's as bored as I am.  But he's cool and showed alot of things wrong with it.  He was banned from the forums repeatedly for trying to tell them to fix the game.

You also have to know, I played pvp in that game for a good YEAR in it's first release periodically and sometimes I still pvp if I have an especially tough build with friends.  BUT I generally dispise pvp in that game now because it lost it's depth I feel, the fun just isn't there and then you have assholes who make everyone else playing it look very, very bad.  People who say "If you don't play exactly this way you don't know how to use the freeform system at all, noob".  I don't play with people who say things like that.

It's really never black and white when it comes to pvpers and whether they know the game or not, just as it is with human beings in general.  I never enjoyed pvp myself, since again, to me it's something that one on one cannot be balanced, and I felt people who were "pvp roleplayers" were just playing power builds to rig things.  Hell my roleplaying wasn't particularly serious until AE came alone.

And yeah, I didn't enjoy zone pvp.  I would have loved team vs team pvp but there just wasn't the environment to truely support it I feel, which was unfortunate.  Pvp 2.0 got rid of a lot of people playing it, and I wouldn't call all of them god modders or scrubs/shfgs.  The overall pvp gameplay to alot wasn't fun.

I'll really say this, whether someone knows the mechanics or not has nothing to do with if they pvp or not.  Really, it's insulting.  It's rude, it's condescending to everyone.  Especially those of us who actually played the archtypes that required that knowledge the most to do reasonably well.

I still had a funny memory of a moment though when I managed to pull 10+ kills ahead of two other people in an ffa using just a couple of lore pets(Warworks).  It will be hard to balance pvp with incarnate powers, for certain since they are such equalizers for the various archtypes.

AS for jousting, well, I can see more of a problem with the overall gameplay than just strategy.  There is a lack of "in your face" there.  I actually tended to hit and run mobs all the time, jumping and launching attacks all the time, if thats what your refering to as jousting.  But whether you like it or not you have the "hit run away and then hit him and run away" style, many people actually hate that and it's also boring to watch.

Heres an example of another game where hit and run over dominates.  You'll notice two weapons being used to the near exclusion of all others.  On top of that the games been modded so it looks like tron, it's not fun for me to really watch cause of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWYXQ12R73U

Movement was very high, damage was low.  So the game becomes generic laser tag.  Also they have it modded so all characters also look like the same super fat, over heavy armored gorge with a mass of glowcrap on him designed so he sticks out.

Sure, it's "competitive", but it's not fun to really observe and watch.  It's just laser tag.  And in a way some may even feel jousting in city of heroes?  Laser tag, target the guy, hit a button and run.  Regardless of your opinion many may see it that way as I see it that way in the video above.

So heres a fun pvp video from a real pvp game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWFBxa5Qp5k

No brightskins, no one weapon dominance.  Granted yes, both these videos are of a shooter.  But it's more interesting.  Right off the bat we see a sniper vs shock rifle matchup, with even a near hit from a combo(instant death vs unarmored players).  Course I notice earlier on the one player manages to secure map control of the armor pickups.  But I do find it more entertaining, as it's not just laser tag in this case.  Which, you know, was what I was half left feeling CoH was from when I watch people play it pvp and when I tried it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfUCXZWl2P8

Right off the bat I see just two people jumping around.  Is it fun for them?  Sure, but is it fun for an observer?  Eh. :/

It may have been entertaining to those who were winning I should say though, in a way, since it was very easy to bring a class with a powerset combo and then find your enemy has something with no answer for ya.  OR end up on the recieving end.  I mean even pvpers said that "Sometimes there are people with characters you cannot do a single thing to based on your powersets and archtype".  It's not at all fun to be in that situation either.  Which was why I made the other post I made about why if competitions are to be held, teams have to be enforced.   Just due to how this game tended to work :S, especially if we rolled the pvp changes back.

Heck, the sirlin article?  He chastises mmorpg pvp in later sections for multiple reasons.

[Twisted Toon]

Agree with this, but like Codewalker showed, sometimes it is out of their hands. Could Castle took more time and get more input from the community? Absolutely, but more than likely he was on a deadline to push out this product where they invested money into making. They won't scrap it before launching it to see where their investment takes them (like New Coke)

Personally, I don't mind PvP. It's the majority of the PvPers that I have come across that I don't like. Usually those PvPers are the ones that always run in groups and always take one the lone player. So, I end up ambushed by multiple players and given about a 0.000000000001% chance of surviving, an even less chance of beating them. That is not my idea of fun PvP. It's also why I took my Illusion Controller into Warburg to get nukes when there were very few people in there. Even then, I occasionally would get ambushed by dual Stalker Assassin Strikes. When that happened, I just went to a different character and did something else for a while, in a different zone.

Now, in Mechwarrior Online, I knew what I was going up against and the teams were pretty balanced (most of the time) weight-wise. Although, I do recall one time where I was up against 4 assault mechs, a couple of heavies, and a couple of mediums and it was just me in my little light mech. They had about 25 times the tonnage I did. I still gave it a shot. And, as expected, I was a post toasty pretty quick. I have, however, been able to take out an Assault mech in my little light mech.

Overall, I don't PvP much because I don't like the attitude of most PvPers while they are PvPing.

[LaughingAlex]

Personally, I don't mind PvP. It's the majority of the PvPers that I have come across that I don't like. Usually those PvPers are the ones that always run in groups and always take one the lone player. So, I end up ambushed by multiple players and given about a 0.000000000001% chance of surviving, an even less chance of beating them. That is not my idea of fun PvP. It's also why I took my Illusion Controller into Warburg to get nukes when there were very few people in there. Even then, I occasionally would get ambushed by dual Stalker Assassin Strikes. When that happened, I just went to a different character and did something else for a while, in a different zone.

Now, in Mechwarrior Online, I knew what I was going up against and the teams were pretty balanced (most of the time) weight-wise. Although, I do recall one time where I was up against 4 assault mechs, a couple of heavies, and a couple of mediums and it was just me in my little light mech. They had about 25 times the tonnage I did. I still gave it a shot. And, as expected, I was a post toasty pretty quick. I have, however, been able to take out an Assault mech in my little light mech.

Overall, I don't PvP much because I don't like the attitude of most PvPers while they are PvPing.

Thats usually the case with pvp in mmorpgs, I feel. Usually the players are the worst part of it, not just any imbalances however minor or severe they are.  Or the extreme time factor and the saying "It's 40% the build both players have with one having a huge advantage, 50% time and 10% skill" being a potential problem many mmorpgs(CoH included) have(which was why the saying "Someone will come with a character with a build that your completely helpless against with 0% chance of winning", as a cold fact of pvp in CoH that was I think even in a stickied post somewhere).

The attitude honestly combined with that is honestly what made it especially bad.

[MM3squints]

Personally, I don't mind PvP. It's the majority of the PvPers that I have come across that I don't like. Usually those PvPers are the ones that always run in groups and always take one the lone player. So, I end up ambushed by multiple players and given about a 0.000000000001% chance of surviving, an even less chance of beating them. That is not my idea of fun PvP. It's also why I took my Illusion Controller into Warburg to get nukes when there were very few people in there. Even then, I occasionally would get ambushed by dual Stalker Assassin Strikes. When that happened, I just went to a different character and did something else for a while, in a different zone.

Now, in Mechwarrior Online, I knew what I was going up against and the teams were pretty balanced (most of the time) weight-wise. Although, I do recall one time where I was up against 4 assault mechs, a couple of heavies, and a couple of mediums and it was just me in my little light mech. They had about 25 times the tonnage I did. I still gave it a shot. And, as expected, I was a post toasty pretty quick. I have, however, been able to take out an Assault mech in my little light mech.

Overall, I don't PvP much because I don't like the attitude of most PvPers while they are PvPing.

Essentially that is the initial feeling I had when just badging before I got into PvP. PvP zones are for the lack of a better term open warfare. There are no rules, only the rules that are programmed within the perimeters of that particular zone (Warburg FFA, RV HvV) You can't control the perimeters that are created, therefore as I came to adapt, you learn from how you are dying. They run deep with 8, you rally and run deep with 8. They spike you, you use counter measures. The Test PvP arena however was not an open warfare and actually regulated. It was regulated to the point where before a match, people will do a check with the other team to make sure they are only using tier 1 insps. I guess it all comes down to the setting of where you fight and what rules you are willingly want to imposed on your community in certain times. Zone pvp no hold bars, if you know there is going to be a gun fight, don't walk in with a knife. Arena PvP more procedures and rules on the books. You don't follow the rules, you will be suspended from the ladder. Keep breaking the rules your team will be suspended and eventually you will be let go from your teams roster.

Also just because the majority of people you run into are pricks doesn't mean everyone in that community is a prick :P (So funny that that also applies in real life) If you paint everyone within that community with the same brush as the bad actors, you just end up alienating them and burn the bridge where you can use the "rational" ones to communicate with the pricks. It is the rational ones that will condemn the pricks and with police each other within the community. Of course their are those pricks that can't be talked to and like in real life you deal with them "accordingly"

[Sinistar]

last time I PVP'd I had fun using my Staff/SR character that was inspired by Marcus of Babylon 5.

[MM3squints]

last time I PVP'd I had fun using my Staff/SR character that was inspired by Marcus of Babylon 5.

That reminds me when CoX comes back to make a Staff/Stone brute. I want to make a break dancing rock

[Sinistar]

Y'know....that is one combo I didn't make, and I wish I had. 

Hm, tank or brute?

[MM3squints]

Y'know....that is one combo I didn't make, and I wish I had. 

Hm, tank or brute?

For me Brute so I can get Eye of the Storm faster. I like to see the spinning animation. I am easily amused :P

[LaughingAlex]

I honestly want to make a kinetic melee/super reflexes.....stalker.  In praetoria.

[Sinistar]

I honestly want to make a kinetic melee/super reflexes.....stalker.  In praetoria.

I had a KM/SR scrapper, lots of fun

[darkgob]

Of course, you say yourself that you "hate" PvP, so I don't know what you were even doing in the zones in the first place :p

Might have something to do with all the PvE content that was exclusive to PvP zones.  What a rotten design decision that was.

[brothermutant]

Kin Melee was one of those toons that ganked me in PvP all the time, a friend had it and it was a KM/WP stalker. She was awesome with it. Another toon that was my PvP bane was a defender toon (Rad/Dark but he had Elec/Dark and one other that I can't remember). The debuffs and his ability to heal himself made it damn near impossible to kill him. And while I am more than capable of making a toon specifically to counter any other toon I want to fight, that is not fun for me. Fun would have been if my favorite toon (whatever it would have been that week, altitis is contagious) at least stood a chance at any other PvP toon if given the right combos, proper slotting, and some decent practice.

And the "jousting" I was referring to (and maybe its my interpretation of what others called jousting) is when a toon ques up their strong melee based attack at range, then either SuperSpeed or SuperJump to the target, and immediately leave the area so that they were casting the animation of the attack when no where near the intended target. What this did was make sure a melee character could hit and run ideally without being targeted themselves. They fixed this particular tactic iirc, but not many others.