New efforts!

[Arcana]

This seems an odd assertion on its face since Champions/Hero System has always put far more focus on game mechanics and min/maxing than RP. Champions character creation revolves far more around designing powers and tailoring advantages and disadvantages than deciding on your character's favorite colour.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the focus of Champions PnP was on number crunching, but the system did encourage it given the way the points system worked.  There were just so many opportunities to do so for those that were so inclined.  I'm not just talking about trying to slip lactose intolerance past the GM for some extra points, I'm talking about the fact that few other games actually allowed you to in effect *create* the powers you used.  But I think whether the players were particularly crunchy or particularly RP the game could accommodate you either way.

It is by far one of the crunchiest, most mechanics-heavy game systems i've ever played.

Of course, nothing beats Traveller. I don't know if I would call Traveller "mechanics heavy" or "role playing rigorous" but when you're rolling dice to see if you had a crippling injury during your military service that might require you to have custom space suits, "totally whack-a-mole insane" probably covers it.  In fact if you decided to spend too much time in the military earning skills, bad dice rolls could actually cause your character to *die* during creation.  Imagine if that happened in City of Heroes.

Now that I think about it, City of Heroes should have probably just straight up did that to anyone that tried to create an Electric/Fire blaster.  You want to be what?  With what?  Look buddy, you're dead.  No, you can't rez in the character creator, try again.  In fact, here, let me start you up with a nice Brute, how about that?

I'm imagining a tiny Pither in the character creator screens like the Microsoft Office paperclip right now.

[Surelle]

I wouldn't go so far as to say the focus of Champions PnP was on number crunching, but the system did encourage it given the way the points system worked.  There were just so many opportunities to do so for those that were so inclined.  I'm not just talking about trying to slip lactose intolerance past the GM for some extra points, I'm talking about the fact that few other games actually allowed you to in effect *create* the powers you used.  But I think whether the players were particularly crunchy or particularly RP the game could accommodate you either way.

Of course, nothing beats Traveller. I don't know if I would call Traveller "mechanics heavy" or "role playing rigorous" but when you're rolling dice to see if you had a crippling injury during your military service that might require you to have custom space suits, "totally whack-a-mole insane" probably covers it.  In fact if you decided to spend too much time in the military earning skills, bad dice rolls could actually cause your character to *die* during creation.  Imagine if that happened in City of Heroes.

Now that I think about it, City of Heroes should have probably just straight up did that to anyone that tried to create an Electric/Fire blaster.  You want to be what?  With what?  Look buddy, you're dead.  No, you can't rez in the character creator, try again.  In fact, here, let me start you up with a nice Brute, how about that?

I'm imagining a tiny Pither in the character creator screens like the Microsoft Office paperclip right now.

Every time you mention the fiasco of the Electric/Fire blaster, I think of my very first character on Virtue, Celestial Dawn, the Electric/Fire blaster.   :P  I nicknamed her the Human Debt Machine.   However, any time I threatened to reroll her, everyone in my supergroup would freak out.   They all loved that nuke.  I finally told them to make their own if they wanted one so badly, axed her in her mid-30s, and rerolled her as Energy/Devices.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

This does not bode well for a couple of my homes away from home...

And it's no longer a rumor.


http://massivelyop.com/2016/07/07/rumor-more-layoffs-for-turbine/

[adarict]

Talking about how players complained that things were too hard, then complained again when it became too easy...  I think there is something that tends to get missed.  Granted, the majority of my MMO experience is from CoH.  I dabbled in lots of others, but aside from Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners and Star Trek Online, I never really stayed with any of them for a significant period.  In any case, one thing I noticed, quite a lot was that reducing the difficulty of things even just a little bit, elicited those same responses saying the game was too easy.  the problem I had with that was, it was the vocal minority that generally made that assertion.  I can't tell you how many times I saw complaints of how easy something was.  And it WAS easy...if you were an advanced player.  The casual players, or the new players, really didn't see a huge amount of easiness.  We already know that the forum population was only a very small percentage of the overall population.  We frequently got things changed due to our vocal complaining.  I teamed with a lot of people, that still struggled with aspects of the game, right up until shutdown.  They did not think the game was too easy.

That isn't to say some things were significantly dumbed down.  Respec trials were a great example of swinging too much in the wrong direction.  When I started right before I2, Respecs were a giant pain in the butt.  You had to be very careful about the team makeup, or you would fail.  You never had to worry about finding a team for Respec, because so many people failed it.  When they redesigned it, it became almost trivial in comparison.  Not that it was a cakewalk, but you no longer really had to be concerned with exact levels and power choices.  For the new people, and for people who just may not be super gamers in the first place, the respec became a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.  For the old timers, all you ever heard was how much of a waste of time it was.  Many times I saw people saying that they might as well just give out the respec tokens, because the trial was more of a timesink than anything.

the CoH community was by far the friendliest I had ever run into, both in the forums and in the game, but even then, I saw quite a bit of elitism.  Not as in your face as some others, but in many ways, even more insidious.  Here is an example.  Influence and IO slotting.  How many times do you remember someone either in-game or on the forums saying that outfitting their characters was too expensive?  And in those situations, how many times did you see a response to the effect of "Gaining influence in CoH is trivial".  I don't think players were trying to be jerks, but I wonder, how many people decided to just stop asking questions because they felt like they were asking stupid questions? Was it hard to earn influence enough to outfit most characters?  Not really, once you learned a few things.  The problem was, many players were dismissed out of hand, the only answer they got was being told that influence was super easy to get.

We often forget what it is like when you are new to the game.  How many of us had huge areas completely memorized, and could almost run through most missions on autopilot?  We are not the norm.  We have spent a lot of time and effort into learning the game.  Not everyone has the time or inclination to know a game that much. 

I can only assume that the same thing occurs in other MMOs.  I know that it does in other games.  Diablo III and Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4 have the same kind of people.  When I started out in Fallout 4 it was a couple months after release.  I saw so many people complaining about how easy the game was, and when people would ask questions, I would see them basically told that if they couldn't do it, they were stupid.  granted, I didn't ever see it get to that level in CoH, but it still makes me uneasy when I see people talking about how easy the game became.  I believe it DID become significantly easier for those of us who had spent a lot of time in the game, but I don't think a lot of the average or casual players felt the game was "easy mode".

[eabrace]

This does not bode well for a couple of my homes away from home...

And it's no longer a rumor.

http://massivelyop.com/2016/07/07/rumor-more-layoffs-for-turbine/

On the bright side, even if it isn't being updated anymore, they're still keeping the Asheron's Call servers up and running in maintenance mode.  That's a positive sign that DDO and LOTRO aren't just going to up and disappear any time soon.

[Blackshear]

This seems an odd assertion on its face since Champions/Hero System has always put far more focus on game mechanics and min/maxing than RP.

I've never seen RP as something that needs to be baked into a tabletop system.  RPG systems are about conflict and task resolution.  Give me good combat and skill resolution mechanics let the players bring the roleplaying.

You are right about the amount of GM involvement that Hero requires, though.  One time a buddy of mine ran a Champions one-shot that he called XS Force.  The point of the game was for the players to create the most broken and overpowered characters they could, and see if we could beat the GM's equally abusive bad guys.  The game was a total blast.  My buddy Marc carried the day by creating a power that stripped Body from its target and fed the stolen points into the power itself, creating an uncontrolled feedback loop that would destroy any target.  The game ended when he missed a bad guy with this power, instead hitting a building or something, and wound up destroying planet Earth.

Later, when I read Ender's Game for the first time, I realized Marc had created the Little Doctor.

That said, though, with good GM oversight Hero is an outstanding system that can imitate anything from straight reality to Gandalf to Galactus and do it well.

[Reaper]

Now that I think about it, City of Heroes should have probably just straight up did that to anyone that tried to create an Electric/Fire blaster.  You want to be what?  With what?  Look buddy, you're dead.  No, you can't rez in the character creator, try again.  In fact, here, let me start you up with a nice Brute, how about that?

I'm imagining a tiny Pither in the character creator screens like the Microsoft Office paperclip right now.

This made me laugh!  I think all mmos should follow this.  +1 for the MS paperclip.   ;D

[ivanhedgehog]

Talking about how players complained that things were too hard, then complained again when it became too easy...  I think there is something that tends to get missed.  Granted, the majority of my MMO experience is from CoH.  I dabbled in lots of others, but aside from Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners and Star Trek Online, I never really stayed with any of them for a significant period.  In any case, one thing I noticed, quite a lot was that reducing the difficulty of things even just a little bit, elicited those same responses saying the game was too easy.  the problem I had with that was, it was the vocal minority that generally made that assertion.  I can't tell you how many times I saw complaints of how easy something was.  And it WAS easy...if you were an advanced player.  The casual players, or the new players, really didn't see a huge amount of easiness.  We already know that the forum population was only a very small percentage of the overall population.  We frequently got things changed due to our vocal complaining.  I teamed with a lot of people, that still struggled with aspects of the game, right up until shutdown.  They did not think the game was too easy.

That isn't to say some things were significantly dumbed down.  Respec trials were a great example of swinging too much in the wrong direction.  When I started right before I2, Respecs were a giant pain in the butt.  You had to be very careful about the team makeup, or you would fail.  You never had to worry about finding a team for Respec, because so many people failed it.  When they redesigned it, it became almost trivial in comparison.  Not that it was a cakewalk, but you no longer really had to be concerned with exact levels and power choices.  For the new people, and for people who just may not be super gamers in the first place, the respec became a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.  For the old timers, all you ever heard was how much of a waste of time it was.  Many times I saw people saying that they might as well just give out the respec tokens, because the trial was more of a timesink than anything.

the CoH community was by far the friendliest I had ever run into, both in the forums and in the game, but even then, I saw quite a bit of elitism.  Not as in your face as some others, but in many ways, even more insidious.  Here is an example.  Influence and IO slotting.  How many times do you remember someone either in-game or on the forums saying that outfitting their characters was too expensive?  And in those situations, how many times did you see a response to the effect of "Gaining influence in CoH is trivial".  I don't think players were trying to be jerks, but I wonder, how many people decided to just stop asking questions because they felt like they were asking stupid questions? Was it hard to earn influence enough to outfit most characters?  Not really, once you learned a few things.  The problem was, many players were dismissed out of hand, the only answer they got was being told that influence was super easy to get.

We often forget what it is like when you are new to the game.  How many of us had huge areas completely memorized, and could almost run through most missions on autopilot?  We are not the norm.  We have spent a lot of time and effort into learning the game.  Not everyone has the time or inclination to know a game that much. 

I can only assume that the same thing occurs in other MMOs.  I know that it does in other games.  Diablo III and Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4 have the same kind of people.  When I started out in Fallout 4 it was a couple months after release.  I saw so many people complaining about how easy the game was, and when people would ask questions, I would see them basically told that if they couldn't do it, they were stupid.  granted, I didn't ever see it get to that level in CoH, but it still makes me uneasy when I see people talking about how easy the game became.  I believe it DID become significantly easier for those of us who had spent a lot of time in the game, but I don't think a lot of the average or casual players felt the game was "easy mode".

The respec was for people that had made poor choices in their build. Obviously they would not be optimum members of a hard task force. Why would you tune the task force to exclude the very people that needed the 1 thing that it dropped? I see people is SWTOR complaining that it is too easy. they have every legacy buff, every advantage they can possibly load on their character and they complain it is too easy. Yet the refuse to do any little thing to increase their own difficulty. What they are really wanting is to increase everyone elses difficulty.

[Surelle]

On the bright side, even if it isn't being updated anymore, they're still keeping the Asheron's Call servers up and running in maintenance mode.  That's a positive sign that DDO and LOTRO aren't just going to up and disappear any time soon.

They own the IPs for Asheron's Call.  They don't for DDO (isn't that Wizards of the Coast) and LoTRO of course.  This is the very same reason the Matrix Online and Star Wars:  Galaxies went down.  I think they renewed LoTRO for 5 more years last fall or thereabouts-- and there were some LoTRO gamers sweating that one out; it didn't seem all that certain it would happen via the forums even then.

[pinballdave]

The respec was for people that had made poor choices in their build. Obviously they would not be optimum members of a hard task force. Why would you tune the task force to exclude the very people that needed the 1 thing that it dropped? <snip>

There was a lot that made the original respec trial very hard. As you say, early builds with fewer guides out there made for some interesting but undesirable builds. My cousin made a tank with three leadership powers before level 20 because he thought tanks were the leaders. The respec was touched up a bit, but the big thing that made that thing so much easier was super side-kicking. Auto exempt your level 33+ down and sidekick the team to the highest level of the task force.

Getting the right pairings the old way meant you often had team members fighting +4/+5 when they needed a respec - GRUESOME. There were some really ugly taskforce compositions. My forcefield defender made a lot of levels assisting respec teams. My one request was get a kinetic or at least a rad for the endurance hungry broken characters.

On a related point, when the defender/controller/mastermind buffs became aoe for the team, the respec became quite less difficult yet again.

[Arcana]

the problem I had with that was, it was the vocal minority that generally made that assertion.

Thing is, "vocal" is always the minority.  That's what makes it so difficult to know what "the players" want.  They probably aren't telling you.

[Arcana]

The respec was for people that had made poor choices in their build.

Well, that depends.  Do we all think that respec should have been used to address the problems of players that made poor build choices?  Maybe.  Probably to at least some extent.  Was the respec trial intended specifically to allow players with subpar builds to have a reasonably easy way to rectify that situation?  Almost certainly not.

It is important to note here that Cryptic in the early days didn't design the game from a perspective we would recognize as a coherent bottom-up purpose-driven way.  They were still mostly making it up as they went along, where "it" was not just the game but the entire methodology of how to approach building the game.  And Cryptic was not monolithic either: it was composed of a number if different game designers and implementers, all of whom had different opinions on how and why anything should be done.

Imagine Cryptic is going to lunch, and someone asks "how about Burger King?"  And Jack says "sure, let's go get whoppers."  And Matt says "I want to try their new chicken sandwich."  And Floyd says "I don't care, I just dont' want to go to McDonalds again."  And Jack says "okay, let's go to Burger King."

Why did Cryptic go to Burger King?  Depends on who you ask.  Technically, its because the boss wanted a Whopper.  But it is also because everyone else was willing to go along with that idea for their own personal reasons.  MMO development is a lot like that.

I need to tell that story, because I can actually say why respec exists.  It existed to provide an unusual and difficult to achieve reward that would otherwise be inconsistent with the game intent if it was trivial to achieve.  In other words, the respec trial exists to be a hard way to achieve something the game otherwise would not normally allow - changing the specification of a character.  Who made that claim?  Jack did, to me, when I discussed respec with him.  Jack's the boss, so officially I consider that to be the official answer.  Jack wanted a Whopper, so he made a reactor to serve one.

BUT.  I asked that question soon after respec was up and running, when a lot of public discussion was going on surrounding it.  And by that point, Jack wasn't day-to-day in charge of CoH development.  So does it matter what he thought?  Well, yes and no.  No, it didn't matter what he thought when it came to the long-term development of the game and how respec evolved.  It didn't matter much if you wanted to advocate changes to it.  Heck, we eventually got respec tokens which are all but a repudiation of that original design idea.  But it does matter if you want to know history.  It does matter if you want to know what respec originally was and why it looked the way it looked.  Why did respec look like it did originally and why was it set to the difficulty level it was set to originally and did respec make sense originally given the original design intent of respec.

Respec was hard because it was intended to be hard because it was not intended to be run by players with defective builds.  Respec was intended to be a really good reward that offered players a way to do something the game otherwise forbid by design.  The point of build choices was that they were intended to be choices with consequences, and part of the game experience was intended to be the need to experience those consequences.  If you wanted to see something different, you had to make a new character that made different choices.  Respec was intended to be unusual and uncommon at best.

To put it another way.  At the beginning of time, respecification was seen as a reward, and a valuable one.  It wasn't seen as an in-game meta-build editor for players who made mistakes.  When you see respec as a valuable reward, you design content that is as difficult as that value demands.  When you see respec as a metagaming gate to fix character errors, you design content that is designed to provide enough friction to make it something you only do when necessary, but not so difficult that the very people who would most need it can't run it.  Respec was originally seen as the former, but eventually evolved to be more the latter.

With the experience that comes from being involved with eight years of City of Heroes, if the subject of respec popped up today I would probably be arguing with Black Scorpion that respec should be a friction gate, not a difficulty gate.  It should be inconvenient, not difficult, to accommodate the metagaming requirement that players with poor builds be able to achieve it.  Incarnate trials can have significant difficulty gates associated with them, because they are intended to gate progress: you must be at least this tall to ride this ride.  But even broken characters in wheelchairs should be able to ride respec.

That sort of purpose-driven development perspective was very difficult to sell in the early days, as obvious as it might seem today.  Castle was the first developer that responded favorably to arguments I made from that perspective.  That everything in the game should serve a specific purpose consistent with how players play the game sounds like something you shouldn't have to convince anyone is a good idea, but the notion that game design has rules, and those rules can and often should trump such bottom-up considerations is something that even today I still see developers assert in various ways on various forums.

[princezilla]

Cryptic made a lot of extremely questionable choices and were if we are going to be brutally honest nowhere near as good at their jobs as their successors at Paragon were. Jack Emmett's post CoX track record supports this. There was also a learning curve for the devs who were there all along I think most people will agree the game really started to hit its stride in issue 8 with move towards zone based story arcs featured in the Faultline revamp and truly became amazing during issues 10 and 11 with the addition of true end game content and a global game story.

[adarict]

Thing is, "vocal" is always the minority.  That's what makes it so difficult to know what "the players" want.  They probably aren't telling you.

Why aren't they telling me?  Don't they know that I am to be consulted on all things related to MMOs???  Someone's head will roll!

What they are really wanting is to increase everyone elses difficulty.

That was kind of my point.  The vocal minority wanted higher difficulty for them, without thinking that they were exceptions.  Most games become easy once you have been playing for a long time and learned the tricks and strategies.  I knew a lot of more casual players, and they did not find the game as simple as it was sometimes implied on the forums.  I also have a feeling that a lot of the people claiming how simple the game was, tended to already have a stable of characters to bankroll new characters, not to mention all the veteran bonuses, etc.  Kind of makes a big difference to the early difficulty, as you pointed out in the SWTOR example you gave.

[Sinistar]

Getting the right pairings the old way meant you often had team members fighting +4/+5 when they needed a respec - GRUESOME. There were some really ugly taskforce compositions. My forcefield defender made a lot of levels assisting respec teams. My one request was get a kinetic or at least a rad for the endurance hungry broken characters.

People loved to ask me for assistance on their respec runs, especially if I could trot out my FF defender.  Many of them loved it when I could use repel field and/or force bubble and just park right by the reactor thus provided massive blockage to the enemy reaching it while also bubbling the other players.

[Sinistar]

The respec was for people that had made poor choices in their build.

I have to disagree with you on this.  While it is true that some players did make stupid choices with the powers they choose or when they choose them or how they were slotted,  that wasn't the purpose of the respec trials as Arcana so pointed out.

Once IO's got into the game and people could start using things like Mid's  to design better builds offline, especially builds that could reach the almighty rez/def cap, etc., then people had the unique reward opportunity to tune up and improve their character design to make them even better, regardless if any previous power choices were "Stupid".

Then comes the ability to have 3 builds per character, then the ability to detach enhancements from slots without using them so respecs became slightly less valuable then before but it was still nice to have them on hand for whenever the devs adjusted/buffed/nerfed powers or added new and better IO's

[LateNights]

Jack be nimble...

Might I bother you with a completely unrelated question??

I've just been reading about Alcubierre drives, during which I recalled the gravitational wave experiments of not so long ago - in my (very limited) understanding of the two - both seemed to relate to distortion of space - time...

So, does the detection of those waves suggest to some degree a warp drive really is a possibility in some form - even if it's at subluminal speeds?

(Not sure what that drive is called - so warp drive will have to do...)

[Sinistar]

Might I bother you with a completely unrelated question??

I've just been reading about Alcubierre drives, during which I recalled the gravitational wave experiments of not so long ago - in my (very limited) understanding of the two - both seemed to relate to distortion of space - time...

So, does the detection of those waves suggest to some degree a warp drive really is a possibility in some form - even if it's at subluminal speeds?

(Not sure what that drive is called - so warp drive will have to do...)

Subluminal speed would be impulse drive :)

[Ulysses Dare]

Subluminal speed would be impulse drive :)

Just because impulse drives are limited to sub-light speeds doesn't mean all sub-light speeds are attained via impulse drive. On the contrary. Warp drives are perfectly capable of producing warp factors less than one (i.e. subliminal speeds). Warp vs impulse isn't about what speed they can attain, it's about how they produce that speed.

[LateNights]

Subluminal speed would be impulse drive :)

Cool!!

Now I have something else I can read up on!!

Thanks  :)

Just because impulse drives are limited to sub-light speeds doesn't mean all sub-light speeds are attained via impulse drive. On the contrary. Warp drives are perfectly capable of producing warp factors less than one (i.e. subliminal speeds). Warp vs impulse isn't about what speed they can attain, it's about how they produce that speed.

Cool again!!

I had wondered, but didn't wanna throw to many questions out there if it wasn't a good idea...

Thanks  :)

And actually, that kinda changes my question - now I just want to know if a warp drive is possible, & whether the gravitational wave discovery might be related in some way to that being so - irrespective of whether at faster than light speed or otherwise...