Suggestions for major dev alterations if CoH relaunches

[Aggelakis]

Travel Suppression exists so that player's can't just cheese-kite enemies. I do think it could be re-worked a little bit though...to be a little less of a pain in the rump. Perhaps only activating on using powers, and not being attacked. Switching off after all enemies within a certain radius have been defeated, or say...5 seconds since power usage. To throw out an idea.

Done and done. Suppression doesn't activate on being attacked (only using an attack power - non-damaging debuffs & buffs/heals/pets don't trigger suppression), and it only lasts for four seconds after last attack.

Giving players just free access to skip to the bottom of the Power Pools sounds like a great idea. Why have to take hasten when you just want Super Speed? On the flipside, it does keep players within a certain frame-work, and away from nudging too close to freeform characters. CoH tried freeform...and it didn't quite work.
Honestly, however...this is kind of something I wouldn't mind letting a bunch of beta players loose on a server to try. It could either go horribly, or work pretty well.

Travel Powers are capable of being taken at level four without any prerequisites. Tier 4 and 5 powers still require prerequisites because they are (generally) more powerful and/or more useful.

The last one is...an interesting idea. Very similar to a thought I've been having. It opens the possibility of balance issues, in both PvE and PvP. However, I love the idea of becoming more and more awesome...and Incarnate felt a little...clunky to me. (No offense, Posi. -salute-)

They tried to add more enhancement slots at one point and it broke the game.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

And Agge dibbles, and passes!

Man, I remember Suppression going off when you were attacked... -rubs forehead- Man, it's been too long. My memory's starting to go! That or I'm getting old.

On the powers:
Right, I kind of forgot that had been changed. I used Ninja Run so much as my main travel by the end... -shifty eyes-
I imagine what Silver is talking about likely ends up being Travel Powers for most people, if so...I guess that makes it a pre-solved issue?

On the added enhancement slots:
Did they? I must have missed that... Too bad, I imagine there was a lot of fire and explosions as all that balancing was thrown out of whack with a single change. xD

(Proof that while I know more about CoH than most of the people I know... There are still a couple people out there that beat my knowledge up and take it's lunch money. -bows to Aggelakis-)

[Vee]

I imagine what Silver is talking about likely ends up being Travel Powers for most people, if so...I guess that makes it a pre-solved issue?

Well it'd still be nice to be able to get tough/weave without boxing and aid self without aid other, for example.

[Thunder Glove]

The Patron Power pools are thematically supposed to be representations of the Arachnos Patrons. The idea being that these are special skills you learned from your mentor while under their tutelage. How/Why would a Hero have access to these very special skills?

Scirocco was supposed to become a hero, and allow unlocking of the Patron sets without becoming a villain, though that would really only explain why heroes could learn Mu Mastery.

(Mace Mastery, though, is easy to explain.  "While I was beating up dozens of Arachnos agents, I took a mace from one of those Bane Spiders I KO'd")

[silvers1]

Travel Suppression exists so that player's can't just cheese-kite enemies. I do think it could be re-worked a little bit though...to be a little less of a pain in the rump. Perhaps only activating on using powers, and not being attacked. Switching off after all enemies within a certain radius have been defeated, or say...5 seconds since power usage. To throw out an idea.

Not really interested in kiting anything, and if anyone's willing to extend a fight by 5 minutes this way, I don't see the issue.
What I want is the ability to make a hasty retreat if I get overwhelmed - that extra 5-10 secs before travel suppression ends is the difference between life and death.

The Patron Power pools are thematically supposed to be representations of the Arachnos Patrons. The idea being that these are special skills you learned from your mentor while under their tutelage. How/Why would a Hero have access to these very special skills?

They get access to the main power pools ... without converting to heroes.    Maybe they could have hero patron pools, and just rename the powers.

They tried to add more enhancement slots at one point and it broke the game.

Hopefully the rewritten code wont be so fragile.

[Aggelakis]

that extra 5-10 secs before travel suppression ends is the difference between life and death.

Perception bias. It's only 4 seconds. And it doesn't make a difference very often.

[Arcana]

Hopefully the rewritten code wont be so fragile.

It wasn't strictly speaking a problem with the code being fragile.  It was a problem with the game progression code working like a set of switches: when you gain this much XP, it triggers this, and that triggers that, and that triggers that.  Adding extra slots tripped some of those switches, which disrupted how the game calculated what you should have at any particular time - in effect it confused the game as to what level you were.  To change that would have required rewriting that code, which would have required not just the time to change it but also all of the QA time necessary to regression test such a change.  Because it involved very deeply critical code to the game, the testing itself would have taken a significant amount of time to verify the programmer didn't introduce a new problem.  My guess is that the required testing suite would have dwarfed the amount of time necessary to actually make the fix in the first place.  The actual fix probably wouldn't have taken a competent programmer all that long to implement.

[Arcana]

Travel Suppression exists so that player's can't just cheese-kite enemies.

Interesting thing about that.  At one point, the devs considered kiting to be a valid strategy for blasters.  However, the devs later decided it was not, and tried to put significant emphasis on eliminating kiting as a credible strategy.  For example, by ensuring all critters had ranged attacks.  In fact, by the time they did this kiting was, compared to most strategies, extremely inefficient.  However, there were edge cases they were concerned about.  Two in particular were first the act of herding and vaporizing melee critters, particularly wolves, which they thought was exploitive.  And the other was that although it was a safe strategy, it was a boring one for the average player.  Creating a safe but boring local-minima-like strategy could turn players off to the game, so it was eliminated as a viable strategy altogether.

To this day I believe that a moderated form of kiting was and should have been a legitimate form of gameplay, particularly for novices.  Once aggro limits were put into place for herding, eliminating kiting for PvE specifically was not an important issue.  In fact, a proper risk/reward analysis of the game would suggest that trading safety for lower than average reward rates was an entirely legitimate player gameplay choice no different than other similar but more subtle such choices (such as playing solo tankers).

[Paragon Avenger]

How about ...
replacing all the npc's with teddy bears.

Oh, great, the teddy bears are back.
make it stop, make it stop!
j/k

[Cailyn Alaynn]

Replace War Witch with an angry green, and black teddy bear? Got it.

Arcana: You might be right about Kiting being allowed. Aggro limits do prevent it from being too far abused, It's relative speed vs chainsawing through mobs means it's not exactly exploitative in terms of risk vs reward.

[Ironwolf]

Another point never considered - if you are Speed Boosted you are not suppressed and so can kite freely, yet somehow never considered.

[silvers1]

Yeah, really don't understand the issue with kiting.  If you're in a team, you're just steamrolling everything - no kiting needed.

If you're solo, who really cares?  Play the way you want - personally I would think kiting would make the mission take longer.

Although they denied it, I really think this was brought about by the implementation of PVP, and they were concerned about hit and run tactics.
Totally different issue - but I wish they hadn't tried to tack on pvp onto this game - pvp is never going to be implemented correctly unless it's designed in from the very beginning.

[Arcana]

Another point never considered - if you are Speed Boosted you are not suppressed and so can kite freely, yet somehow never considered.

Say you're an MMO developer.  Someone comes up with an idea and presents it in a meeting, to do X.  You realize that while X might work most of  the time, there are a few edge cases where it won't work.  It won't be worse, just not better.  So you say you object to implementing X because of a couple of edge cases where X doesn't do what it should do, and you stick to that objection.

Because almost *all* implementations have edge cases, and because its extremely difficult to design in a way that avoids all of them, guess what's going to happen when you have a brilliant idea you want to present to the group?  Until MMO development tools get good enough that one guy can make an entire MMO, you will always have compromises that seem stupid in MMOs when they aren't so much stupid as trying to make reasonable accommodations to the reality that no dev team can design perfectly, and one concern an MMO director has that players don't have is ensuring their dev team is motivated to actually continue showing up for work every day.  Often that means implementing ideas that are not perfect, and sometimes even useless but harmless.

I'm certain speed boosting was considered, is what I'm saying.

[LaughingAlex]

A nightmare mode.  Speed-running on this difficulty is required due to the following;

Always 8x+4
Enemies re-spawn.  Re-spawned enemies give zero exp.
Enemies do double damage and have a 50% recharge reduction buff.  Snipers gain an interruption time reduction of 200%.
Enemies gain +perception to detect stalkers easier.  You WILL get hurt on this difficulty.
Respawned enemies actively persue the player as if the player had agroed them on re-spawn!
Enemies also have a 50% movement buff.

Also speed running categories for 8x, 8x+4 and the new nightmare mode.  Variants include pacifist, no attacks allowed except on enemies you have to kill.

[Waffles]

Tempted to ask Synapse how much of these are actually possible.

[Matt Bold]

Off topic question.

Is Irish Girl and Golden Girl the same person?

[Aggelakis]

Off topic question.

Is Irish Girl and Golden Girl the same person?

God no.

[Ironwolf]

If I had my wish - since this is a wish list.


I would make AE how we do PvP in CoX - you would design the mission and setup the conditions of the fight. You could choose Capture the flag, Escort someone/something to safety, last man standing and free-for-all. You could also change the affects of powers within AE ONLY.

I would have the players find a type of PvP that was fun and balanced to THEM. Then you could choose if you thought No Gravity wasn't fun or not. Basically have a drop down menu for each power that has damage + recharge. Then the players could write content and set the balance.

Counterstrike is the perfect example. The game was simply a mod of Halflife that arguably became more of a hit than the original. I also used to play Soldier of Fortune 2 and in that game there were a LOT of mods better than the original content. I find zone wide - PvP to be pointless.

[Stealth Dart]

Irish Girl is the one in charge of Atlas Park Revival.

Golden Girl is the one in charge of Heroes & Villains.

Apples and Oranges.

Atlas Park Revival is attempting to port the City of Heroes Lore and Content to Unreal Engine 4 once the IP sale is concluded for COH from NCSoft.

Heroes & Villains is a spiritual successor to COH in a different game engine with more of a Golden Age feel to it.

[HEATSTROKE]

My Wish...

Paragon Store open with the ability for me to buy any enhancement I want so I can get all my toons right back to the level they were when the game shut down..