New efforts!

[Surelle]

I read the Arcana wall of text!

And all I got was this darn post.

Sounds like a t-shirt :)

Haha, yeah.  Good one!

[Shibboleth]

Also, and I have to be blunt here, I know of no case where the devs said "all powers of form X were adjusted" and in fact there was only one such power adjusted and all other ones were left alone.  If such a thing had occurred, and it was actually discussed on the forums, I would have endeavored to prove it true or false.  So much of this kind of anecdote are things I know to be false specifically *because* I investigated them or have first hand knowledge of them that its hard to give them the full benefit of the doubt after the fact.

It happened and I know it did because it happened to me, in the official forums. It is why I stopped playing the game for years. And the powerset in question was Defender Radiation Emission, Enervating Field. This is not anecdote, it is quite personal and upsetting history for me.

Sadly the official forums are gone and I cannot find the series of post. I can however find where I described the situation at a later date:

The reduction in the effectiveness of Enervating Field in Issue 5 (or whichever was the one released about a year ago).

The Issue hit the test server nearly 2 months previously. As a Radiation Defender player I noticed that EF was not having the same impact on the test server as on live ones, however there was nothing in the patch notes to suggest a change. That suggested either an undocumented or unintentional change. To demonstrate the issue I took screenshots of my character both on the test server and on the live server attacking the same level mob both with and without EF operating. The damage for both without EF was the same, but with EF up it was different. I then reported this on their forums in the Test section and in the Controller and Defender sections.

After much commentary a statement was issued saying that they had recieved claims of EF having been changed in the past and that the claim, "Still not true."

I still happen to have the screenshots from the year before that demonstrating that (a) EF had been changed previously in an undocumented fashion, and (b) that EF at that point in time had changed (and can link them if anyone really wants).

Understand that a number of changes that were announced with Issue 5 were successfully argued against but that users of EF never got to present a case because the big question was if there was indeed a change.

Needless to say 2 months passed and the Issue went live and EF's function changed on the Test server without being mentioned in the patch notes.

After some serious agitation on the forums it was stated that yes indeed there had been a change to the function of all powers of the type that EF was and it had unfortunately been left out of the notes.

If it was an intentional change then why had they released the previous statement about there being, "Still no change"?

As I happened to have a Darkness Defender too with a similar power (Tar Patch increased damage against those caught in it) I tested it--no change in effectiveness despite the claim that all powerf of the type that EF was having been reduced in effectiveness.

This was noted by myself in posts to the forum and in private correspondence to various representatives with whom I had been in communication (including Statesman) with from the beginning.

After a very contentious thread on the subject of missing patch notes, claiming no changes, and claiming all powers of the type were changed another clarifying announcement was given: By all powers of the type they meant all powers which attached to a target and had the impact of increasing damage.

Thing is. . .there was only one power that was true of--Enervating Field. In common usage of the English language you do not use "all" to refer to one thing, you use "it".

So we have:

(1) The change is not included in the test notes.
(2) The change is denied when this is brought to the attention of the game designers.
(3) The change goes live without notes.
(4) The claim is made that the change unfortunately not in the notes but is an intentional change to all powers of the type.
(5) It is clarified that "all" means just one thing.

As I noted, I do not appreciate being called a liar ("Still no change") nor being lied to (No change, all power) and can find other places to spend my money than on people would insult my intelligence and character.

But yes, CoH was quite enjoyable and I'd expected to be playing CoV. . .until the above.

That post is from 2006. I eventually did go back to game...about a year before it closed. However I never played my beloved, first character or any of the characters on the same server again. The memory of what had happened would have soured me to the point of not being able to enjoy the game. So I started over on a new server just to avoid having to see reminders at the character screen.

Edit: Ahh...found someone else talking about the issue about a year later in 2006:

[/* Quality of Life : Neither Erratic nor the Defender community have been given an apology, formal or informal, for the Developer behavior regarding the I5 Enervating Field changes.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


That was my mistake. Statesman asked me to look into it so I looked at the powers. The power itself did not change, so I told Statesman that and he then told you. When you folks pressed on the issue, I went back and found that the Archetype modifier had been reduced. I told States, and he passed it along to you guys.

http://www.mmorpgitalia.it/mmorpg/threads/castle-defender-issues.83733/

[Felderburg]

Wait, that last quote indicates that there actually was developer / customer communication? And that the power, in fact, did not change? And that the defenders pressing the issue helped find another issue, that was reported?

[Tubbius]

Also: page 976 on my screen.

So close to 1,000 already!

[LaughingAlex]

I think SWTOR originally allowed most things to stack, but I think they changed at on the second or third balancing pass.  Eve Online allows stacking, but they (being probably among the most mathematically literate MMO developers I've seen) use what a CoH quant would call multiplicative stacking.  I played both D&D Online and Age of Conan long enough to know both had some form of buff stacking in at least some cases, but not long enough to have figured out the byzantine rules for when it does and doesn't.  And of course coming from Cryptic, CO and STO both have at least some form of buff stacking, STO with more limits than CO (I think: I haven't played CO in forever).  I think DCUO started off with more buff stacking and gradually moved more to binary exclusive buffs.

CO's buffs/debuffs either do not stack but "appear" to stack, suffer extreme diminishing returns to make it not worth it to stack them, or the % modifier is so low as to be worthless anyways.  Or it only affects those you wouldn't care if it affected(the games low-rank enemies are far far less durable in CO than they were in city of heroes in proportion to most attacks).  Generally, if it's not healing, it's generally useless.

Thing is, Cryptic Studios when designing CO, very clearly wanted a super solo friendly game, but wanted very clear limits to be very very low.  They wanted to make the game harder than CoX, but in reality they ended up with a broken game made for casuals.  Course, they nerf player powers to try and make it for the "hardcore" types they originally wanted it for, but the result is they drive the casuals away and many hardcore types are just not interested in a game like CO, it's environment isn't fit for hardcore gamers, it's to light and friendly and to slow paced, even if it seems faster paced than CoX, it's actually slower due to enemy damage being very low.

Edit: Straying but, i'll make a comparison...

CoX, 3 minions COULD if you were very unlucky, kill you in about 4-5 seconds, if they all landed hits, you had no resistances and they were higher damage minions.  Otherwise though you'd have about 10-12 seconds.  It also takes far more to bring down a minion.  And thing is, just one hit can take off up to 25% your health, in one hit.  If you just try to defend(and do zero damage) you'll die eventually.

Archvillains can take you from full to 1 health in one hit and can attack once every 1-2 seconds.

CO, 3 henchmen may do at moderate levels about 1-2% of your health per second each for a total of 3-6%.  This is just the feel I have.  But this number can actually be reduced some and is always going to be, equipment gives you damage resistance.  So that 20 seconds gets downgraded to 30 or so seconds easy.  And of course, constitution can raise that time you have to react significantly.  When you combine that with very low health of those same enemies compared to your damage abilities(they die in about 1-2 seconds always), the difficulty is far, far lower as a result.  If you have any self-healing, you can defend indefinitely.(and this is also assuming, your using GOOD powers, using the bad ones and they will in fact last, far far FAR longer, and actually have a chance at killing you in cases where you get extra agro which can be frequent in a good number of areas, which kills the overall fun of the game due to general fake difficulty; you get zerged by respawning enemies that are far to tightly packed on a bad build due to bad powers).

Legendary enemies can be defended easily by just blocking and healing, most of the time, indefinitely.

So when the game tries to balance buffs/debuffs, the numbers are kept extremely low as to be useless, because of the above.  The same can be said about crowd control.

[Shibboleth]

Wait, that last quote indicates that there actually was developer / customer communication? And that the power, in fact, did not change? And that the defenders pressing the issue helped find another issue, that was reported?

That was months after I stopped playing as people persisted on the issue. No other issue was found, they made a change that impacted performance. Technically they did not change the power but rather a global value which impacted the power. That is sort of like someone complaining that you did something to their engine to make their car run slower and getting back the response, "The engine wasn't changed, we filled the wheel with concrete"--the car does in fact run slower and the engine does in fact not get you up to the speeds you were used to. Its playing on technicalities and makes clear that everything provided to demonstrate the car is running slower was in fact ignored because the conclusion that the engine hasn't been tampered with, while correct, does not answer the question of why the car is indeed moving slower as indicated in the proof given.

And mind, the response above is also the third answer for what occurred, starting with (a) nothing changed, going to (b) all powers of that type (even though only one power fits that type) were changed to (c) well, the power wasn't changed, just a global value elsewhere that caps the behavior of that power.

We the players didn't have access to the internal workings of the mechanics and how things were set up. When players said, "Enervating Field has been changed and is no longer producing the results it once did," it is implicit they are referring to the only thing they can see--the behavior of the power at the end. Knowing that a lot of things go into that end result, as they are the designers of the game, responding with, "The power hasn't changed" when you know that there are all sorts of things that feed into that end result is laziness or dishonesty at work.

If you want to read that as open and honest I am not going to argue the point. I did not find it to be so and hence left the game and did not return until the group running the game had moved on and the game had gone to a free model.

[Shibboleth]

Speaking of fond memories of developer changes, I have vague memories (its been nearly 10 years) of nerf that was planned which, when the players complained, resulted in the developers delivering a video of a scrapper taking down something like a +7 level boss in, if not fast order, quickly enough for the developers to feel justified in the announced, coming change.

The players took a look at the video and asked, "Uh, how is the scrapper hitting so reliably?"

Seems that in their testing the developers had forgotten that hitting higher level targets was more difficult than hitting level appropriate or near level appropriate targets and their testing setup had ignores that aspect of the game as actually played.

At least through the time I played, I do not recall the developers ever offering another video of their testing.  ;D

[LaughingAlex]

We the players didn't have access to the internal workings of the mechanics and how things were set up. When players said, "Enervating Field has been changed and is no longer producing the results it once did," it is implicit they are referring to the only thing they can see--the behavior of the power at the end. Knowing that a lot of things go into that end result, as they are the designers of the game, responding with, "The power hasn't changed" when you know that there are all sorts of things that feed into that end result is laziness or dishonesty at work.

If you want to read that as open and honest I am not going to argue the point. I did not find it to be so and hence left the game and did not return until the group running the game had moved on and the game had gone to a free model.

Given what they'd done with CO(even the last patch they for a time forgot to mention the cooldown reduction nerf) and the ninja nerfs they had done that were wholly undocumented, I am not surprised at things like this.

[umber]

Shibboleth, it looks like you're attributing way too much early CoH dev behavior to malice when history has shown it was largely incompetence.  I look at my beloved game and i'm astonished the game succeeded to the point it did with the devs we had at the helm, darn near every aspect of the game that we love wasn't a successful deployment but the devs trying and failing to deliver a different plan.  A no-loot MMO?  Awesome, but they wanted loot but either couldn't figure out how to implement it at launch and/or ran out of time.  A no-holy-trinity MMO?  Awesome, but they wanted a trinity game but didn't understand game design well enough to realize the archetypes broke the trinity left and right.  The list goes on and on.

If they said they didn't make a change when it was clear a change was indeed implemented, odds are they were not lying but that they simply did not know.

[Shibboleth]

Shibboleth, it looks like you're attributing way too much early CoH dev behavior to malice when history has shown it was largely incompetence.  I look at my beloved game and i'm astonished the game succeeded to the point it did with the devs we had at the helm, darn near every aspect of the game that we love wasn't a successful deployment but the devs trying and failing to deliver a different plan.  A no-loot MMO?  Awesome, but they wanted loot but either couldn't figure out how to implement it at launch and/or ran out of time.  A no-holy-trinity MMO?  Awesome, but they wanted a trinity game but didn't understand game design well enough to realize the archetypes broke the trinity left and right.  The list goes on and on.

If they said they didn't make a change when it was clear a change was indeed implemented, odds are they were not lying but that they simply did not know.

Being told in no uncertain terms you're wrong when you are in fact right and getting a continuingly shifting set of responses certainly feels malicious. But you're right, I certainly would not have imagined at the time the level of incompetence and lack of awareness it would take to not realize, even when provided proof, that something had changed and how your flat denials are going to appear to others if it turns out you're wrong.

Of course it would not have felt so bad had I not loved the game. I returned to it almost exactly a year before the announcement of the shutdown. In that time I created a whole new slate of characters, ran most of the them to max level, and was at least as deeply committed to the game if not more as when I left. It remains to me not just the best superhero MMO but an amazingly unique MMO that operated in ways no other MMO has come close to.

[Rejolt]

That moment when...

After reading walls of text

You realize CoH was a happy accident

That no one but the core fanbase and Paragon Studios got.


Aka blargh. Good luck, successors

[katycat737]

Guild wars had no stacking of any kind, and different primary classes were thus required due to max skill limits being a big factor of success or failure. ....

Perhaps  you were playing another Guild Wars because I did not encounter any problems in the Luxon area and I've been playing since 4 months after the launch of Prophecies. Not to turn this into a GW forum but I see a lot of errors.


1st,  The original Guild Wars is a game that can hardly be compared to other MMO'S, the only one at the top of my head I can think of is the Secret World. Some don't even consider it an MMO, more like a CORPG

2nd The gameplay was designed to be a like a deck of cards. You have a bad build and your team mates have bad builds too? You are going to fail. The whole point of the skill/build system was to give flexibility and customization with limits. If you failed with Build1, specialize it or turn to another build. The whole inspiration for the Guild Wars skill system was to play "the deck of cards"  (Magic The Gathering type)
All classes had viable options, some were better at it than others.

3rd, even in the early days of GW, you could certainly play with someone the same primary profession as you. 2 monks, 1 healing 1 protection. 2 elementalists, 1 fire nuker, 1 ice slower. 2 necromancers, 1 minion, 1 hex user. And then it got even more complicated with 2nd professions. Most popular example: 3 necromancers, all have a damage skills, each have a support skill (either through buffing or controlling) and one was slightly specialized in healing, the other in making minions.


Yes Guild Wars had the Holy trinity of gaming, I will not deny that. But control and buffing had their place too. Later in the game's life, protection and party wide buffing even replaced primary healers if built correctly. Also, consider that while not as flashy as big damage, control was just as important if you were good in it. Interrupting important skills,  and disabling(like knock down and blind) was hard control; weakness, "body blocking", slowing, healing reduction and debuffing was more soft.

My point is that, having played both CoH/V and Guild Wars side by side (I love both games  8)) , they are almost 2 entirely different beasts. Where City or Heroes allows you to play almost anything you want (literally), Guild Wars made you specialize and "strategize" skills/builds. Yes CoH and other games do it too, but that's the main selling point of GW's combat mechanics.

Guild wars 2 however is also another beast and I only play it because of the name sake.  :roll:

[Abraxus]

Also: page 976 on my screen.

So close to 1,000 already!

I stand by my theory that an announcement for the successful conclusion to negotiation has been pinned to this thread hitting 1,000 pages, so we have nobody to blame but ourselves that it is taking so long.  ;) :o ??? :roll: 8)

[pinballdave]

http://talklikeapirate.com/

Avast Mateys! Let's KEEL Haul the devs who omit a pirate mastermind set in CoH reborn

[syberghost]

Quite often, when a developer says "every X, Y, and Z" was changed, and you find an X, Y, or Z that wasn't changed, it means the developer thought he changed them all and missed one, or he did change them all but the change didn't work as intended, or somebody else's change reverted his change, or something got missed in a build and didn't make it into the patch properly, or a million other innocent explanations.

Jumping straight to "dev lied" is almost always wrong, always insulting, and says bad things about the person making the statement. Almost everyone working in video games does so because they love video games, because they could make a LOT more money elsewhere. A dev who speaks on the forums at all REALLY loves that game, because the forums (all forums) are a hostile environment that takes time away from doing what they love.

No changes means dead game. Nothing is perfect; even Ultima Online still has periodic patches and it's been out for nearly two decades.

[LaughingAlex]

Perhaps  you were playing another Guild Wars because I did not encounter any problems in the Luxon area and I've been playing since 4 months after the launch of Prophecies. Not to turn this into a GW forum but I see a lot of errors.


1st,  The original Guild Wars is a game that can hardly be compared to other MMO'S, the only one at the top of my head I can think of is the Secret World. Some don't even consider it an MMO, more like a CORPG

2nd The gameplay was designed to be a like a deck of cards. You have a bad build and your team mates have bad builds too? You are going to fail. The whole point of the skill/build system was to give flexibility and customization with limits. If you failed with Build1, specialize it or turn to another build. The whole inspiration for the Guild Wars skill system was to play "the deck of cards"  (Magic The Gathering type)
All classes had viable options, some were better at it than others.

3rd, even in the early days of GW, you could certainly play with someone the same primary profession as you. 2 monks, 1 healing 1 protection. 2 elementalists, 1 fire nuker, 1 ice slower. 2 necromancers, 1 minion, 1 hex user. And then it got even more complicated with 2nd professions. Most popular example: 3 necromancers, all have a damage skills, each have a support skill (either through buffing or controlling) and one was slightly specialized in healing, the other in making minions.


Yes Guild Wars had the Holy trinity of gaming, I will not deny that. But control and buffing had their place too. Later in the game's life, protection and party wide buffing even replaced primary healers if built correctly. Also, consider that while not as flashy as big damage, control was just as important if you were good in it. Interrupting important skills,  and disabling(like knock down and blind) was hard control; weakness, "body blocking", slowing, healing reduction and debuffing was more soft.

My point is that, having played both CoH/V and Guild Wars side by side (I love both games  8)) , they are almost 2 entirely different beasts. Where City or Heroes allows you to play almost anything you want (literally), Guild Wars made you specialize and "strategize" skills/builds. Yes CoH and other games do it too, but that's the main selling point of GW's combat mechanics.

Guild wars 2 however is also another beast and I only play it because of the name sake.  :roll:

I wasn't saying buffs/debuffs or crowd control had no place in GW1.  More that certain missions still required certain spells/skills and whatnot.  And I was well aware that it was more, every single person in the team was more just a card with a bunch of skills picked.  But you still had missions where you needed x or y types of skills/spells and if your class did not have that, you had no heroes with that, and the henchmen had none of that(and in the luxon mission in particular none of the henchmen were all that good) you were screwed in a lot of cases.

I speak of Gayla hatchery, the escort mission with level 5 baby turtles, if you didn't have anything available to you to deal with the juggernauts, you were hosed.  And you needed spells like Aegis to keep the turtles from being one-shotted while other anti-melee stuff to deal with those juggernauts.

Edit: Another way to look at GW1 was you were litterally just another cog in a machine at all times, rather than a player.  You had a job and had to do it in a specific way that the team required it, or they also would fall apart.  You always had only one job or type of job.  It got very boring to me over time because of that and when I tried going back to it from CoH I couldn't get into it anymore, because I felt so limited.  I was just a cog in a machine, I was entering missions because of my skillsets/class/spells ect, not because I was a person.

[Shibboleth]

Quite often, when a developer says "every X, Y, and Z" was changed, and you find an X, Y, or Z that wasn't changed, it means the developer thought he changed them all and missed one, or he did change them all but the change didn't work as intended, or somebody else's change reverted his change, or something got missed in a build and didn't make it into the patch properly, or a million other innocent explanations.

Jumping straight to "dev lied" is almost always wrong, always insulting, and says bad things about the person making the statement. Almost everyone working in video games does so because they love video games, because they could make a LOT more money elsewhere. A dev who speaks on the forums at all REALLY loves that game, because the forums (all forums) are a hostile environment that takes time away from doing what they love.

There was only one power that fit the criteria given.

If people are complaining that people in New York City were forced to pay a tax and head of the IRS responded, "You're wrong, every person in the US living in a city with a French statue in its harbor of 300' or more had to pay that tax," as if there were more than one city fitting that criteria and a category of cities were affected when in fact the only city fitting the category described is New York City the phrasing is obfuscatory at best. Normal English usage does not refer to one thing with the word "all", which is why phrases like, "All Black presidents of the United States...", "All female prime ministers of the UK...", and "All the people who shot at JFK from the Dallas Book Depository..." rarely see use.

You will perhaps be sympathetic to my declining to discuss this matter further. I have had one person flatly state what I related did not occur, necessitating digging up posts from nine years ago, and have just now had to clarify a misunderstanding of what I related that went on to an accusation that I, "...jump[ed] straight to 'dev lied'...." It is every bit as unpleasant as the events from 10 years ago.

[blacksly]

But you're right, I certainly would not have imagined at the time the level of incompetence and lack of awareness it would take to not realize, even when provided proof, that something had changed and how your flat denials are going to appear to others if it turns out you're wrong.

Mrgh.
Having been a dev for a MMORPG (albeit a very small one), I can tell you this: Devs don't lie to players.
First, for a dev to lie, he has to know that he is giving you false information, and would have to do so deliberately. Programmers are not that dumb. They know that it is possible to test their assertions in the game, and they know that there are very smart gamers who will most certainly find bugs, loopholes, and lies. So if they were to consider lying, they would instantly have to consider that they will most certainly be caught lying.

Second, it is very possible for a dev to tell you the exact truth, and have you think that it's a lie. As has been stated, "players consider that a power has changed when its effects change". That's not an unreasonable viewpoint. But you have to accept that it's also reasonable for a dev to look at a power's statistics in the database before and after a patch, see that the power is exactly identical in its pre-patch and post-patch versions, and tell you the truth: "The power was not changed in any way".

If somebody missed the patch note that changed the AT attribute, or there was some other reason why the power may have had its effects changed without actually changing the statistics of the power, then it's certainly possible for a dev to believe that the power is completely unchanged, while players believe that the power's effects have changed, and for both to be right.

At this point, you have to realize that there is probably some communication breakdown, and re-start the communication from the first step. If, instead, you take it to accusations of lying or incompetence, frankly, you would be asking for what you would get on most forums.

I remember several cases of miscommunication, where someone on the CoH dev team said something (that was true), and players took it to mean something else (which was reasonable from their viewpoint, although not strictly true in a programming sense), and then some kind of crapstorm occurred on the forums to the effect of "Teh D3vs are l10rs!!!". I do not recall a single case, however, where the dev viewpoint could not be justified if you took exactly what they said and tested it narrowly for truth and accuracy. You have to remember that a lot of programmers are very explicit and literal in their statements, and they usually think that they're being clear when they do so. While many gamers aren't used to taking statements so literally and explicitly, and then misinterpret what was meant.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I remember several cases of miscommunication, where someone on the CoH dev team said something (that was true), and players took it to mean something else (which was reasonable from their viewpoint, although not strictly true in a programming sense), and then some kind of crapstorm occurred on the forums to the effect of "Teh D3vs are l10rs!!!". I do not recall a single case, however, where the dev viewpoint could not be justified if you took exactly what they said and tested it narrowly for truth and accuracy. You have to remember that a lot of programmers are very explicit and literal in their statements, and they usually think that they're being clear when they do so. While many gamers aren't used to taking statements so literally and explicitly, and then misinterpret what was meant.

This. From a dev standpoint, especially one working primarily on the actual powers, if the coding and attributes of a specific power have not changed then the power has not changed, regardless of whether an external modifier, like the AT modifier, has changed. Like blacksly said, they're not trying to deceive you; they most likely looked at the power in the powers database, verified that it hadn't been modified recently, and then said it hadn't been changed because from their perspective it hadn't.

[hejtmane]

Quite often, when a developer says "every X, Y, and Z" was changed, and you find an X, Y, or Z that wasn't changed, it means the developer thought he changed them all and missed one, or he did change them all but the change didn't work as intended, or somebody else's change reverted his change, or something got missed in a build and didn't make it into the patch properly, or a million other innocent explanations.

Jumping straight to "dev lied" is almost always wrong, always insulting, and says bad things about the person making the statement. Almost everyone working in video games does so because they love video games, because they could make a LOT more money elsewhere. A dev who speaks on the forums at all REALLY loves that game, because the forums (all forums) are a hostile environment that takes time away from doing what they love.

No changes means dead game. Nothing is perfect; even Ultima Online still has periodic patches and it's been out for nearly two decades.

Early COH the devs lied at times they nerfed Regen build a couple times early and never put it in the change notes. people would notice on the forms DEV's deny deny deny then would have to relent with all the data admitting they stealth nerfed a power. We had an issue on test server before the go live the over boost of regen on AV's. The forum post in the test area was long talking about it the data etc etc DEvs ignored went live then the regular forms exploded they had to come out and admit they ignored the post because they had to much work going on and had to do an emergency change.

I thought the best thing to ever happen to COH was Jack leaving