New efforts!

[LaughingAlex]

Of course they were.  That's what makes them problematic to hand out to players.  Sleeps on the other hand for all the reasons you list as being problematic also make them a much safer mez to hand out to players (other MMOs would call these more generically "fragile holds" - holds that can be broken, usually by combat in some way).  With more ability to moderate the effect and with the effect not providing accelerating benefit to stacking players, you can afford to be more generous with them.

Remember: holds were so useful in City that the devs had to invent purple triangles to combat them.  Which then significantly nullified controller holds vs AVs.  So the tool you use every day doesn't work against the foe that is strong enough to require using all of your tools to defeat it.  That's not the best way to design MMO combat.

See, the reason I never enjoyed mmorpgs is when I tried playing guild wars, it was often because you had to wait around to make sure X or Y joined but also had C or D skill.  I inevitably found myself unable to play guild wars after having played city of heroes for a long time.  To me, strategy to me should be far more then making sure x or y joins with c or d skill.  But often, because mmorpgs are to scared of handing variety out thats actually usable, the same tactics get used over and over.

To me city of heroes was better balanced because crowd control existed as it had, while it was ineffective vs purple triangles, everything else it was actually useful.  I can't wait to see city of titans tackle the problem, as they are making it a far grayer area, they plan to make crowd control debuff if it isn't 100% effective against something and debuff majorly.  But we'll have to see when they get gameplay going.

[Graydar]

Installed Paragon Chat.

Design costume. Try not to cry. Cry a lot.  :gonk:

[Arcana]

See, the reason I never enjoyed mmorpgs is when I tried playing guild wars, it was often because you had to wait around to make sure X or Y joined but also had C or D skill.  I inevitably found myself unable to play guild wars after having played city of heroes for a long time.  To me, strategy to me should be far more then making sure x or y joins with c or d skill.  But often, because mmorpgs are to scared of handing variety out thats actually usable, the same tactics get used over and over.

To me city of heroes was better balanced because crowd control existed as it had, while it was ineffective vs purple triangles, everything else it was actually useful.  I can't wait to see city of titans tackle the problem, as they are making it a far grayer area, they plan to make crowd control debuff if it isn't 100% effective against something and debuff majorly.  But we'll have to see when they get gameplay going.

Its important to note you and I are talking about slightly different things.  You're suggesting that holds are good and sleeps are bad because you like hard control, so in your opinion there's no problem with having a lot of hard control.  I'm not addressing the question of whether its objectively good or bad; I'm saying that for every game designer on Earth, something will be too little and something will be too much, and his or her opinion is the one that matters.  Even if we stack the deck of Paragon Studios with munchkins, there will still be a point beyond which they will not want to go.  That's a truism.

In such a world where there will be limits, regardless of where they are, hard control will almost *always* create problems for designers, its just a question of where.  Give players something they can leverage without limits, and eventually they will hit your limits, even if you are the most generous dev in the world.  And at that point, you're going to have to create artificial limits.

Self-moderating mezzes like fragile or breakable mezzes are self-moderating.  Self-moderating effects are almost always better because you don't have to create artificial barriers to them: as players push them higher they provide their own natural negative feedback.  Sleeps are tremendous for beginning players, for solo players, for low performance players.  As they get more powerful, they start to outgrow the benefits sleep can provide.  The devs don't have to interfere with ad hoc balancing in that situation.

In between instantly breakable mezzes like City of Heroes sleep and unbreakable holds like City of Heroes hold, there are all sorts of other mezzes: City of Heroes terrorize, for example.  Also, there are mezzes that break after a certain amount of damage is done to their targets (which City did not have, but other MMOs do).  There are partial mezzes that only partially impair the target (STO's subsystem disables are a form of this kind of mez).  One of City's flaws was its initial design thought of mezzes as too binary (in fact, mez attributes are actually referred to as "booleans" internally, because they are basically true/false threshold values).  Even if you like binary mez and think its fine, the problem was that City's designers felt they were problematic and did all sorts of things to offset that which few players did like.  Think incarnate content.  And this is not a problem of wrong designers: no credible designer would allow unlimited hard mez.  If the purple triangles and other mitigators didn't appear then, they would have appeared eventually.  Its a problem inherent in having strong unbreakable binary effects in a game where the designers attempt to enforce any limits at all.

To put it another way, you can design a game to have self-moderating diminishing returns with negative feedback, or you can have railroad barriers with tall fences.  The third option, where players can do whatever they want without any limits at all, is not a real choice you get to have.  Almost by definition, a game with no rules is not a game, and thus its not something I think actual game designers ever want to build.

[Twisted Toon]

Installed Paragon Chat.

Design costume. Try not to cry. Cry a lot.  :gonk:

I enjoyed flying around Paragon City for a while today. It was nice not seeing citizens that needed rescuing. Of course, the only citizens that I saw were Icon employees and city planners, and a construction worker.

[Felderburg]

...and a construction worker.

What? Where?

Even if we stack the deck of Paragon Studios with munchkins, there will still be a point beyond which they will not want to go. 

For those who don't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchkin_(role-playing_games)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Munchkin

[Zombie Hustler]

Somehow, CoT or VO or someone needs to put that tidbit into their game.  Maybe as a server, as an Easter egg.... somehow.

Arcanet- The trinity that completes TV and Radio?

[Brigadine]

Installed Paragon Chat.

Design costume. Try not to cry. Cry a lot.  :gonk:

I haven't ever cried at a download window till now.

[Vee]

What? Where?

For those who don't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchkin_(role-playing_games)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Munchkin

I liked the comment a lot better before you gave us the specialized definition of munchkin.

[LaughingAlex]

Personally, I tend to follow a "So long as they can do unto me I'm fine with being able to do that".  Which city of heroes followed very well as a rule.  Enemy mobs could crowd control you and even lock you down very harshly just as well as you could, which to me was fine.  It was similar regarding buffing/debuffing to.  It gave city of heroes a lot of strategy, ultimately.  Crowd control heavy?  Are you confident you can crowd control the guy before he does that to you ect?  It's not like some games where it's all damage, without also making it all healing when it does come to support.

[Arcana]

Personally, I tend to follow a "So long as they can do unto me I'm fine with being able to do that".  Which city of heroes followed very well as a rule.  Enemy mobs could crowd control you and even lock you down very harshly just as well as you could, which to me was fine.  It was similar regarding buffing/debuffing to.  It gave city of heroes a lot of strategy, ultimately.  Crowd control heavy?  Are you confident you can crowd control the guy before he does that to you ect?  It's not like some games where it's all damage, without also making it all healing when it does come to support.

I would disagree in a number of respects.  First, City of Heroes did not follow a "if the NPCs could do it it was okay if the players could and vice versa" rule.  In fact, while the mechanics for powers was basically the same, the design rules for NPCs and player abilities were significantly different.  For example, there was a general "no conventional attack above scale 2.0 damage" rule.  Even NPC energy transfer obeyed this rule - because if you hand NPCs a scale 4.0+ attack they'd just plain smoke the players (we saw this with early versions of architect custom critters).  NPCs also had a "in general, no single critter should be able to hard lock a player" rule.  NPC hard mez durations were usually around 80%-90%-ish of their recharge, so even if they continuously hit the player there would still be moments when the players could act (groups of critters with mez could lock a player down, as could higher level critters, but you generally did not face such things while solo at standard difficulty).

Its also a bit nonsensical to talk about symmetry in this case, because the situation itself isn't symmetrical.  For example, AoE mez benefits players far more than critters, because critters generally outnumbered players, and AI limitations prevented NPCs from deploying AoEs geometrically efficiently.

Moreover, the devs actually deliberately implemented rules directly counter to that principle.  Consider confuse.  Players got a lot of it.  NPCs almost never got it.  Ditto taunt.  The devs realized that these effects take control away from the entity.  This is acceptable when players are doing it to NPCs, but it had to be used incredibly sparingly  the other way around.  In fact, when players complained loudly about red-side critters getting strong confuses, Castle instituted a rule preventing that from happening in the future.

If the devs *did* have a rule that said "its okay for the players to have it as long as the critters also have it" your time in Paragon City would be spent far more frequently in the hospital.  NPCs were nerfed explicitly or implicitly ten times more often than players, because NPCs didn't complain about it nearly as much.

Also, in my opinion the lack of fragile (non-binary) control and diminishing returns from the very beginning probably hurt the game a lot in terms of nullifying a lot of the strategic and tactical options the game would otherwise allow for.  We had decent tactical diversity in spite of hard control, not because of it.  In other games, its not "all damage" - in many games control and debuff effects are used a lot more widely and in diverse ways than in City of Heroes, specifically because options exist other than "lock down" or "ineffective."  The fact that most players in most MMOs focus on damage was not something exclusive to City of Heroes, and more a case of player psychology than anything else.  As much as players ask for content that can be defeated without simply stacking up a lot of damage, content that can't be defeated by just swamping it with damage tends to be complained about and not played often.  Devs are rarely rewarded for making such content.  The LRSF in City of Heroes is an example, as was the original respec trial.  Both examples of extremely difficult content that could be more easily completed with tactical options other than focusing on overwhelming the content with pure damage, but in both cases the devs were forced to tone them down to accommodate player complaints about them being "too hard" when they were really "too hard to pound quickly into the ground."

By my recollection there were over three dozen different suggestions for making Incarnate content more tactically diverse when it first appeared on beta, about a dozen of them by me.  Exactly zero made it into the game.  Not just initially, but ever.  Because it was incredibly difficult to implement any of them in a way that a giant pile of damage wouldn't simply wash away, which most teams running incarnate content would eventually possess.  And because City didn't have a history of non-binary mez effects, the psychology of players would act strongly to devalue such effects as being worthless compared to "real holds"   anyway.  You don't always get a second chance to make a first impression.

The devs were trying to take baby steps to rectify these problems, but it would have been years before they made serious progress in that area.  Target limits for buffs for example.  Synergistic holds for another (an invention of mine, actually).  But if City was still running today, I don't think we'd *still* have made much progress in this area.  Inertia for the status quo was simply too high to change more than glacially.

[LaughingAlex]

I would disagree in a number of respects.  First, City of Heroes did not follow a "if the NPCs could do it it was okay if the players could and vice versa" rule.  In fact, while the mechanics for powers was basically the same, the design rules for NPCs and player abilities were significantly different.  For example, there was a general "no conventional attack above scale 2.0 damage" rule.  Even NPC energy transfer obeyed this rule - because if you hand NPCs a scale 4.0+ attack they'd just plain smoke the players (we saw this with early versions of architect custom critters).  NPCs also had a "in general, no single critter should be able to hard lock a player" rule.  NPC hard mez durations were usually around 80%-90%-ish of their recharge, so even if they continuously hit the player there would still be moments when the players could act (groups of critters with mez could lock a player down, as could higher level critters, but you generally did not face such things while solo at standard difficulty).

Its also a bit nonsensical to talk about symmetry in this case, because the situation itself isn't symmetrical.  For example, AoE mez benefits players far more than critters, because critters generally outnumbered players, and AI limitations prevented NPCs from deploying AoEs geometrically efficiently.

Moreover, the devs actually deliberately implemented rules directly counter to that principle.  Consider confuse.  Players got a lot of it.  NPCs almost never got it.  Ditto taunt.  The devs realized that these effects take control away from the entity.  This is acceptable when players are doing it to NPCs, but it had to be used incredibly sparingly  the other way around.  In fact, when players complained loudly about red-side critters getting strong confuses, Castle instituted a rule preventing that from happening in the future.

If the devs *did* have a rule that said "its okay for the players to have it as long as the critters also have it" your time in Paragon City would be spent far more frequently in the hospital.  NPCs were nerfed explicitly or implicitly ten times more often than players, because NPCs didn't complain about it nearly as much.

Also, in my opinion the lack of fragile (non-binary) control and diminishing returns from the very beginning probably hurt the game a lot in terms of nullifying a lot of the strategic and tactical options the game would otherwise allow for.  We had decent tactical diversity in spite of hard control, not because of it.  In other games, its not "all damage" - in many games control and debuff effects are used a lot more widely and in diverse ways than in City of Heroes, specifically because options exist other than "lock down" or "ineffective."  The fact that most players in most MMOs focus on damage was not something exclusive to City of Heroes, and more a case of player psychology than anything else.  As much as players ask for content that can be defeated without simply stacking up a lot of damage, content that can't be defeated by just swamping it with damage tends to be complained about and not played often.  Devs are rarely rewarded for making such content.  The LRSF in City of Heroes is an example, as was the original respec trial.  Both examples of extremely difficult content that could be more easily completed with tactical options other than focusing on overwhelming the content with pure damage, but in both cases the devs were forced to tone them down to accommodate player complaints about them being "too hard" when they were really "too hard to pound quickly into the ground."

By my recollection there were over three dozen different suggestions for making Incarnate content more tactically diverse when it first appeared on beta, about a dozen of them by me.  Exactly zero made it into the game.  Not just initially, but ever.  Because it was incredibly difficult to implement any of them in a way that a giant pile of damage wouldn't simply wash away, which most teams running incarnate content would eventually possess.  And because City didn't have a history of non-binary mez effects, the psychology of players would act strongly to devalue such effects as being worthless compared to "real holds"   anyway.  You don't always get a second chance to make a first impression.

The devs were trying to take baby steps to rectify these problems, but it would have been years before they made serious progress in that area.  Target limits for buffs for example.  Synergistic holds for another (an invention of mine, actually).  But if City was still running today, I don't think we'd *still* have made much progress in this area.  Inertia for the status quo was simply too high to change more than glacially.

Well see, we don't want a holy trinity game.  Many of us don't play other mmorpgs because you HAVE to have healers and it's even worst with buffs/debuffs/cc being the polar opposite in usefulness in those games; such there was no reason to even bother.  People liked city of heroes because it was more of a real rpg in which you had options and a wide variety of tactics.  There were almost no games out there were you could buff everyone to super high defense ratings and actually make it without any healing.  Or in missions without AV's, just mass control everything and never let them do much with a lot of different controllers/dominators ect.  Thats what a real rpg means to me, multiple solutions to problems.  MMORPGS deserve to be called MMOHTG because that point is totally lost; you either holy trinity everything or you get destroyed and the developers never provide any other means.

[Twisted Toon]

and a construction worker.

What? Where?

SKyway City up next to the Faultline entrance. the construction worker is next to the building with the helicopter on the roof...wit the engine still running and all. Those things have AWESOME fuel economy.

[Joshex]

Dr. Vahz, maybe.  A level 50 AV resisting 85% of all drains and with a 53 point recovery tick would need to see 353 points of drain more or less simultaneously to nullify their endurance recovery tick.  Did you have a build that packed that kind of drain?

A team of drainers can do that.  I don't think a single character could sustain that kind of drain.  I'd love to see someone post a build that could.

not with those 2 powers alone.. 353 is alot.

[Felderburg]

I liked the comment a lot better before you gave us the specialized definition of munchkin.

Sorry. I did assume that was the definition Arcana was going for, and thought some people might not get a reference to The Wizard of Oz. Given the lack of rebuttal, I'm further assuming my assumption was correct.

NPCs were nerfed explicitly or implicitly ten times more often than players, because NPCs didn't complain about it nearly as much.

Ha!

SKyway City up next to the Faultline entrance. the construction worker is next to the building with the helicopter on the roof...wit the engine still running and all. Those things have AWESOME fuel economy.

That's one to a PvP zone (right?), so it obviously runs on the tears of carebears. Or something like that.

[hejtmane]

Conspiracy theory: every game company/team I apply at gets shut down.

I applied at paragon studios before the shutdown. I applied at Rockstar North, they closed down that office or moved.

it's like something about me applying triggered some negative corporate attention. I wonder why..

Quick apply at NCSoft  ;D

[Arcana]

Well see, we don't want a holy trinity game.  Many of us don't play other mmorpgs because you HAVE to have healers and it's even worst with buffs/debuffs/cc being the polar opposite in usefulness in those games; such there was no reason to even bother.  People liked city of heroes because it was more of a real rpg in which you had options and a wide variety of tactics.  There were almost no games out there were you could buff everyone to super high defense ratings and actually make it without any healing.  Or in missions without AV's, just mass control everything and never let them do much with a lot of different controllers/dominators ect.  Thats what a real rpg means to me, multiple solutions to problems.  MMORPGS deserve to be called MMOHTG because that point is totally lost; you either holy trinity everything or you get destroyed and the developers never provide any other means.

I don't think I'm being clear, so I will be direct.  Hard holds always create problems for tactical diversity, and that means less opportunities for anything other than "holy trinity" play.  Everything you like about City of Heroes in terms of its divergence from what people refer to as holy trinity play, and everything you like about City of Heroes in terms of having solid options besides stacking damage, exists in the game in spite of hard control, not because of it, even if you want to give hard control credit for it. 

From practically the very first day of launch, the devs were trying to reign in hard control.  A better mez system would have been something the devs would have developed and expanded over time; instead they were putting out fires caused by it and in all other respects stayed away from it.

If you're thinking hard control is the alternative to tanking, and thus a way to move away from trinity play, the exact opposite is true.  Hard control begets hard control limits, and then your non-trinity control aggro vanishes as an option in BAF.  It all but *requires* multiple controllers to make work at all against AVs (short of corner cases).  The problem I mentioned earlier with LRSF?  That happened because the tools players were so good they didn't need to think about them to make them work, and then suddenly they were in a mission where they had to think about them to make them work, and many didn't work as expected.  What happened next?  The City of Heroes version of trinity play: going to the one-dimensional solution of massive overstacking.  Worked for Hamidon1.0**.  Worked for LRSF.  Works for basically everything in the game.  Except being funneled into an overstacking steamroller is no different than being funneled into a trinity team.

To be even more direct: hard control is not a genuine valid option in City of Heroes.  Its a toy we're allowed to play with until the real action happens, and then the devs mostly take it away.  A better mez system is something we'd be allowed to use everywhere, so we don't outgrow it.  But that was never, ever, ever, ever going to happen with hard holds.  The devs went from making strong critters require more mag, to requiring a megaton of mag, to basically being straight up immune to it.  That was never going to change in City of Heroes, and good luck convincing anyone else to avoid doing it.


** The level 40 original Hamidon was originally beaten by super-stacked all-rad teams.

[Arcana]

Sorry. I did assume that was the definition Arcana was going for, and thought some people might not get a reference to The Wizard of Oz. Given the lack of rebuttal, I'm further assuming my assumption was correct.

"Munchkin" is generally a pejorative, but among gamers there's a softer meaning comparable to friends gently making otherwise insulting jokes about each other, which was kind of the slant I was going for there.  For example, if I say that Arbiter Hawk had a lot more munchkin in him than the average dev, I'm not insulting his social gaming skills or claiming he cares about statistics more than his fellow gamers.  Rather, I'm making an observation that, completely separate from his objective game design skills he appreciated the thrill of being more powerful than probably warranted.  In other words, if you told the average dev that you think they made a mistake and set the strength of a power to twice its expected value, most would go "hmm, that's a problem, I should go fix that."  If you told that to Arbiter Hawk, he'd also say "hmm, that's a problem, I should go fix that" but he'd be laughing when he said it, and you're pretty sure he'd conveniently forget to do that for at least a couple of builds so he could go play with it himself.

That's not *a* munchkin, but its someone with a lot of munchkin DNA.  A group of literal munchkins probably couldn't even make a functional game.  But a group of devs willing to express their munchkin side when it came to handing out powers and abilities wouldn't necessarily care only about stats and powers above gameplay experience, but would be willing to push the envelope a lot harder and a lot farther.  Even that would have practical limits, though, which was part of the point I was making.  Someone acting like a literal munchkin would have no limits: they'd burn the game down in their attempts to escalate ever upward.

[hejtmane]

Well see, we don't want a holy trinity game.  Many of us don't play other mmorpgs because you HAVE to have healers and it's even worst with buffs/debuffs/cc being the polar opposite in usefulness in those games; such there was no reason to even bother.  People liked city of heroes because it was more of a real rpg in which you had options and a wide variety of tactics.  There were almost no games out there were you could buff everyone to super high defense ratings and actually make it without any healing.  Or in missions without AV's, just mass control everything and never let them do much with a lot of different controllers/dominators ect.  Thats what a real rpg means to me, multiple solutions to problems.  MMORPGS deserve to be called MMOHTG because that point is totally lost; you either holy trinity everything or you get destroyed and the developers never provide any other means.

Most other MMO's do not allow stacking buffs so you get one buffer and the rest are useless it sucks quite a bit. Now the game Rift was like that but at least you could have like 8 different builds and you could swap to the build depending on what you need as long as you where not in combat but you had to have heals and a tank build to do team content and every class had some tank or heal build

[MM3squints]

That's one to a PvP zone (right?), so it obviously runs on the tears of carebears. Or something like that.

There are no "carebears" around at the moment so I would assume it runs on hope and aspiration of the CoX community at the moment.

[Sinistar]

Conspiracy theory: every game company/team I apply at gets shut down.

I applied at paragon studios before the shutdown. I applied at Rockstar North, they closed down that office or moved.

it's like something about me applying triggered some negative corporate attention. I wonder why..

You really need to apply for a position at NCSoft.......  :)