New efforts!

[Brigadine]

STOP

NO

[Twisted Toon]

NO

the correct way to say that is...

/JRanger

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

the correct way to say that is...

/JRanger

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2581/3779834896_a9c1d7f4d7_o.png

[Arcana]

In response to many people complaining about the game being to easy, I think they mistook the game being to easy as simply the fact that any kind of build could work as long as you were using the powers correctly.  Many players also did not up the difficulty of CoX any beyond the "normal" setting, which was in many ways the easy mode of the game.

In many mmorpgs, the "Difficulty" of them is entirely based around finding the exact "correct" position and strategy the developers want.  It's more like a puzzle with only one solution in every situation(usually, holy trinity with positioning being the only major challenge, with the occasional effort to make players move).  Due to the dependency on things requiring a check-list plan, it isn't so much as what I'd consider to be hard as simply dependant on memorization/planning.  Memorization/planning doesn't really equate challenge, so much as it equates a "punishing" difficulty style.  It's not about more then one solution to a problem but executing an only solution to a problem.

In essense, it's figuring out what the "plan" is supposed to be.  Incarnate trials even had this problem, although not to a severe degree.  But because CoX had such a wide variety of tactics to win fights with, it was mistaken as being "to easy".  In reality, it really wasn't.  Enemy minions could take off as much as a fifth or fourth of your health.  The game had dozens of "demonic spiders", enemies that could utterly destroy you with seemingly unfair and "cheap" tactics.  In fact, TV tropes listed over HALF of the mobs in the game as "Demonic spiders" but in reality, they all had there counters.

CoX supported a very wide variety of playstyles so players mistook it as a push-over.  In reality it's really a game of strategy and initiative.  If you were fast to apply your crowd control, used buffs/debuffs the game was smooth sailing.  It was when you do things like tradional holy trinity pull tactics and didn't target enemies based on threats ect that caused numerous wipes.  But players thought it was easy because again, they could win doing any kind of strategy as long as it was a reasonable strategy involving at least 60-70% of there powers.

To many of such players I imagine, the game was easy.  But a game is only hard to them if there only accepted strategy, the holy trinity, was the only one that worked and execution of it even had to be difficult.  While every other strategy the game was impossible.  To them, that was "hard".  To me though, thats what I call a form of "Railroading".  In which you HAVE to play that very specific way, take a specific path, no secrets to discover ect.  It just as well be on a railroad as an experience.  Like, a map which has one path, a dozen un-skippable cutscenes, no secrets, no side paths, no exploration.  Only it's in the gameplay itself.  No variety in tactics or strategy.  All one plan with a very tiny variation of positioning.  That to me is not difficult.  It's merely a puzzle.

Couple of things.  First, difficulty sliders didn't exist at release, so that wasn't an option.  But more importantly, I think difficulty sliders mask the fundamental problem.  The oft-repeated notion is that if the game was too easy for you then the solution was to provide a way to increase the difficulty for you and then leave the game the same for everyone else.

The problem is that things like difficulty sliders work more or less linearly, or rather one-dimensionally.  They increase combat difficulty by increasing the required damage mitigation threshold and the amount of work that offense has to do to complete the mission, and increase the rewards upward.  Doing that puts all of the development effort into a very small set of gameplay tools.  Players bemoaning the lack of diversity of gameplay, or complained about the huge time requirements for farming incarnate shards, or the massive combat difficulty of incarnate trials, are witnessing the consequences of mortgaging the future to make a simplified "casual friendly" present.  We build the game of tomorrow with the tools of today.  When the playerbase decides that non-damaging effects like taunt and confuse are "not casual friendly" or that "no one wants to fight smart AI" or "if players want anything harder than 'really easy' they can just push a difficulty slider" they created the future of an endgame with huge time sinks and a difficulty slider pushed completely to the right.  The incarnate system was a great way to make an end game given the constraints of the game up to that point.  It certainly had flaws in terms of the nitty gritty details.  But anyone who thinks it could have been different or better in the broad scales is just plain wrong.  The price of the entire game being "casual friendly" in the fanatically extreme sense City of Heroes was, was an end game that was emphatically not going to be casual friendly in that same sense.  Because we never gave the devs any other options.

We like to think City of Heroes offered players "more than one way to" approach the content, but that wasn't really true.  What was true was that there was exactly *one* way to run City of Heroes content, and almost everything you did to your characters, including building them with a random number generator or a dart board, was guaranteed to meet the requirements of that one way.  That one way was so easy, so simple, so rewarding, that it became impossible to make any other way meaningful or competitive.  I tried: in CoV I tried to make stealthing a valid alternate approach.  But even by Issue 6, the "casual friendly" nature of how combat worked and how content was generated was making that almost impossible.  It was virtually impossible to balance alternate gameplay against an option that was so close to being on the edge of exploitive even when just played normally.

It sounds easy, again, until you actually try.  I did, for the entirety of CoV beta.  I couldn't come up with a well-balanced way to do that within the context of the rest of City of Heroes/Villains development that didn't make stealthing either horribly worthless to try or exploitively amazing to pursue.  In fact, during head start I was keeping up with the primary levelers on my server (Triumph) in large part by using a specific soloing strategy with my stalker and the PvP missions which I originally formulated in CoV beta, which in beta was so good had that strategy survived to head start I would have been the first to 40 by a long-shot, passing whole teams of players trying to get there first.

[Knowmad]

the best healer is a forcefield defender

Nothing's more powerful

[Thunder Glove]

If CoH is Lemonade and WoW is Pineapple juice neither one is inferior or superior in any objective way. Some people like Lemonade and others like Pineapple Juice and some people, like me, enjoy both.  It's okay to like one more then the other, but it doesn't objectively make the other one worse.  Different games for different people, if we all liked the same stuff the world would have really long lines.

The problem is that nobody really wants to make more lemonade (aside from City of Titans and Valiance Online, and Heroes and Villains if that's still being worked on).  Everyone is instead trying to make their own pineapple juice.  There's a glut of places to go if you want pineapple juice and nothing for all the lemonade drinkers.  Every time a new juice stand opens, I think "Maybe this one will have some lemonade", but... nope, it's more pineapple juice.

[LaughingAlex]

Couple of things.  First, difficulty sliders didn't exist at release, so that wasn't an option.  But more importantly, I think difficulty sliders mask the fundamental problem.  The oft-repeated notion is that if the game was too easy for you then the solution was to provide a way to increase the difficulty for you and then leave the game the same for everyone else.

The problem is that things like difficulty sliders work more or less linearly, or rather one-dimensionally.  They increase combat difficulty by increasing the required damage mitigation threshold and the amount of work that offense has to do to complete the mission, and increase the rewards upward.  Doing that puts all of the development effort into a very small set of gameplay tools.  Players bemoaning the lack of diversity of gameplay, or complained about the huge time requirements for farming incarnate shards, or the massive combat difficulty of incarnate trials, are witnessing the consequences of mortgaging the future to make a simplified "casual friendly" present.  We build the game of tomorrow with the tools of today.  When the playerbase decides that non-damaging effects like taunt and confuse are "not casual friendly" or that "no one wants to fight smart AI" or "if players want anything harder than 'really easy' they can just push a difficulty slider" they created the future of an endgame with huge time sinks and a difficulty slider pushed completely to the right.  The incarnate system was a great way to make an end game given the constraints of the game up to that point.  It certainly had flaws in terms of the nitty gritty details.  But anyone who thinks it could have been different or better in the broad scales is just plain wrong.  The price of the entire game being "casual friendly" in the fanatically extreme sense City of Heroes was, was an end game that was emphatically not going to be casual friendly in that same sense.  Because we never gave the devs any other options.

We like to think City of Heroes offered players "more than one way to" approach the content, but that wasn't really true.  What was true was that there was exactly *one* way to run City of Heroes content, and almost everything you did to your characters, including building them with a random number generator or a dart board, was guaranteed to meet the requirements of that one way.  That one way was so easy, so simple, so rewarding, that it became impossible to make any other way meaningful or competitive.  I tried: in CoV I tried to make stealthing a valid alternate approach.  But even by Issue 6, the "casual friendly" nature of how combat worked and how content was generated was making that almost impossible.  It was virtually impossible to balance alternate gameplay against an option that was so close to being on the edge of exploitive even when just played normally.

It sounds easy, again, until you actually try.  I did, for the entirety of CoV beta.  I couldn't come up with a well-balanced way to do that within the context of the rest of City of Heroes/Villains development that didn't make stealthing either horribly worthless to try or exploitively amazing to pursue.  In fact, during head start I was keeping up with the primary levelers on my server (Triumph) in large part by using a specific soloing strategy with my stalker and the PvP missions which I originally formulated in CoV beta, which in beta was so good had that strategy survived to head start I would have been the first to 40 by a long-shot, passing whole teams of players trying to get there first.

Seems like you speak of non-combat approaches to quests.  In that case, there aren't really a lot of mmorpgs that did that in general and CoH wasn't one of those.  When I speak of multiple ways of play, I refer to multiple ways of approaching combat.  You could crowd control to lock them down or debuff them into oblivion.  Or you could be relying on your own buffs to be strong enough to win a straight fight, or just play a tough enough class or destructive enough class in general, and there was archtypes for combat styles in the middle.

When it comes to non-combat solutions to quests/missions, I think earlier rpgs and some more recent ones, such as the Deus Ex Series or the original two fallout games/new vegas(3 doesn't count at all and 4 everything still revolves around destroying badguys, just different ways to be good enough to do so).  You could easily sneak past every regular badguy in every deus ex game, with only a couple exceptions here and there(such as the annoying bosses of human revolution or a character or 2 in the original deus ex being hard to bypass).  Even those exceptions, some had ways of "bypassing" them or even had non-combative solutions added to defeat them(Anna Nevarre/Gunther Hermman and the kill switches, Walton Simons can be sneaked past entirely, HR bosses and the added non-combat solutions for the directors cut).

Or the original 2 fallout games and new vegas, numerous quests have solutions a pacifist could use, heck fallout 1 a guy speed ran the game never even encountering the final "boss" of the game.  Or many a true nerd's pacifist run of New Vegas(don't kill anything or do anything that could cause a person to die).

I think the trouble mmorpgs have, is that when you approach a quest with a multiple solution mindset, you have to spend more time on each individual quest.  You have to make multiple approaches within your map design and even have things like destructable/movable objects and make skills matter when using them to really make it truely feel like a multiple approach game.  That can be very difficult.  Sadly city of heroes, I'll be honest it's map design was made more for a classic shooter in a number of ways, but they were pretty linear and not made for such a playstyle.

[Goddangit]

Nothing's more powerful

So... If we do nothing...

(Here we go again.)   ;D

[Arcana]

Seems like you speak of non-combat approaches to quests.  In that case, there aren't really a lot of mmorpgs that did that in general and CoH wasn't one of those.  When I speak of multiple ways of play, I refer to multiple ways of approaching combat.  You could crowd control to lock them down or debuff them into oblivion.  Or you could be relying on your own buffs to be strong enough to win a straight fight, or just play a tough enough class or destructive enough class in general, and there was archtypes for combat styles in the middle.

That's too binary of a distinction.  Consider this: when I use my stalker to run past the spawns in a room to kill the boss with my Build-Up Assassins Strike burst damage to end the mission, is that a "non-combat approach" to missions?

Conversely, it is technically not possible to use either control or debuff to defeat enemies in CoH.  One is a form of damage mitigation and the other (generally) a form of offensive amplification.  Ultimately, you are still killing them through direct damage.  Those are different tools to accomplish the same thing.

Where CoH dipped their toes into using our combat tools in non-linear ways were things like that mission where you had to prevent critters from escaping through the henges.  Technically speaking you still had to kill/defeat them with conventional offense, but control had a completely separate critical value besides damage mitigation.  Similar things happened in some of the incarnate content.  But those were few and far between.

When you throw in non-combat meta games, like unlocking doors, you create breaks in the core gameplay.  That's not what I'm talking about.  What I'm talking about is illustrated by this question: why *can't* we use control - and *only* control - to neutralize a villain?  This is another one of those questions that sounds simple, but isn't.

[LaughingAlex]

That's too binary of a distinction.  Consider this: when I use my stalker to run past the spawns in a room to kill the boss with my Build-Up Assassins Strike burst damage to end the mission, is that a "non-combat approach" to missions?

When you throw in non-combat meta games, like unlocking doors, you create breaks in the core gameplay.  That's not what I'm talking about.  What I'm talking about is illustrated by this question: why *can't* we use control - and *only* control - to neutralize a villain?  This is another one of those questions that sounds simple, but isn't.

Well, what is combat?  In a sense, if your knocking a guy out to neutralize him, thats combat.  Or using a power to bind him in a sense counts as combat.  I suppose you have another distinction, is it violent/lethal?  Then you go into non-lethal vs lethal.  Are you really using lethal means?  If it's listed as lethal, that is gun shots/slashing/stabbing, absolutely, even knocked out the badguy is bleeding to death.  Smashing?  Not necessarily killing, but can be from the wrong types of blunt for ect.  Energy?  Could be non-lethal, or "less lethal".  Toxic?  Could be "Less Lethal" depending on the toxin used ect.

Is that combat?  Honestly, I think it's only combat if both sides exchange attacks with one another.  If the boss is eliminated covertly, without being able to fight back at all then thats kind of non-combative.  Still lethal, but non-combative.

Combat or non-combat solutions, lethal/less lethal ect, there is a lot of grey area with that.  Most games actually don't do that, heck tv tropes only lists the games where thats not done for a reason.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RPGsEqualCombat

The quotes of the lets play describe dozens of rpgs in a nutshell :).

[Arcana]

Well, what is combat?

That's more philosophical than the distinction I'm discussing.  The distinction involves the practical issue of gameplay.  Consider Matrix Online.  Sure, it had combat, but it had a ranged system of combat and a melee system of combat that were fundamentally distinct in terms of gameplay.  In fact, MxO's melee "chiclet combat" was fundamentally different gameplay from anything in any conventional MMO.

A task like "make sure he doesn't escape for three minutes" might *involve* combat tools, but those tools are being repurposed to achieve a completely different goal using completely different tactics.  It isn't just combat by a different name or in a different skin because the gameplay itself is different.  Players have to think about the situation differently and use their abilities to different ends.

Those aren't examples necessarily of expansive gameplay done right so much as it is an example of gameplay that is non-congruent with traditional one-dimensional combat in most MMOs.  Its hard to come up with complete examples, because they don't readily exist in real MMOs.

Let me answer my own question.  Why couldn't we use control to neutralize enemies in City of Heroes?  Because control was explicitly designed to aid in defeating them through direct combat, and balanced under that assumption.  It is really that simple.  But within that simple statement is a complex system of whys and hows involving how game systems are put together in an integrated fashion.  If you build something to have a purpose, the constellation of systems you build around that thing that presume that purpose can make it impossible to use it for anything else.  Control was too strong to give too much of it out, because control could trivialize conventional combat.  But that paints you into a corner when it comes to thinking about whether control alone could be made to be useful in certain gameplay situations.  You have to presume no player has a lot of control, because you actively prevent them from getting too much control, because too much control trivializes core gameplay.

If you didn't start playing at release, you might not know that Controller AoE controls originally did not have two minute recharge.  Originally they could be practically spammed.  So they were.  The situation was referred to as "City of Statues."  Controllers were originally not popular as a player class, so it wasn't common to see a lot of stacked controller teams.  However, if you happened to be on a team with two controllers at release, you were essentially immortal.  Nothing would be shooting back, and that includes bosses and archvillains.  The amount of control that controllers possessed was carefully crafted over time to support conventional combat, and only to support conventional combat.  Those kinds of decisions collectively narrow the range of possibilities for what you can do in the game over time.  All the while the devs improved the ways we could approach conventional combat, they were unavoidably eliminating the possibility for doing anything else.

And it isn't easy to see whether they had any other choice at the time.

[Fireheart]

I think, one issue with 'winning through Control' is that it only produces a stand-off.  As soon as your 'pure Control' wears off, we're back in combat.  At what point have you established enough Control to 'win'?  There's no definitive end to it.  Introduce Damage into the equation and the end comes, naturally, when you run out of hit-points.

So it becomes a game-design issue with no easy answers.

That said, Controllers were one of my favorite ATs.

Be Well!
Fireheart

[Arcana]

I think, one issue with 'winning through Control' is that it only produces a stand-off.  As soon as your 'pure Control' wears off, we're back in combat.  At what point have you established enough Control to 'win'?  There's no definitive end to it.  Introduce Damage into the equation and the end comes, naturally, when you run out of hit-points.

So it becomes a game-design issue with no easy answers.

That said, Controllers were one of my favorite ATs.

Be Well!
Fireheart

To answer this question, I have to take a couple steps backward and ask what appears to be an obvious question.  How much XP do you give a critter?

The obvious answer is: it depends on how strong it is, and how difficult it is to defeat.  The problem with this answer is that it contains a very powerful but dangerous assumption.  It assumes that your game is going to be balanced around individual fights.

City of Heroes was created on this foundational assumption.  You make a critter, you assign it strengths and weaknesses, and then you balance the rewards it grants around that design.  Then you build the rest of the game around those fundamental building blocks.  And this one powerful unspoken apparently obvious assumption also answers your question: how do you win with control?  Answer: you don't.  You cannot extract rewards from a critter with control, and the game is mostly comprised around those building blocks, so that problem is largely intractable.

But actually, City of Heroes developers realized early on that wasn't 100% reasonable.  The problem came when it became obvious that running missions was actually less efficient than street sweeping critters one after the other.  Because so much of the reward system was tied to critter defeats, anything that made critter defeats less efficient would induce a serious reward slowdown - like actually running the content of the game.  However, the devs couldn't (or wouldn't) violate the bedrock assumption of how the game was designed - around critter defeat/rewards - but did decide to boost the completion rewards for missions to be relatively large to incentivize instanced mission running.  Later reward balancing further incentivized this along with the difficulty sliders, which were explicitly designed in part to allow players to make critter kills within instanced missions more efficient (that's why sliders both increase critter difficulty and critter density).

If you realize that game design decision isn't mandatory, you can change the nature of how rewards are connected to activity.  STO (Star Trek Online), for example, isn't balanced that way.  Rewards for individual kills are actually low bordering on horrible in most cases.  But that's because STO isn't balanced around individual fights.  It is balanced around missions.  The atomic unit of earning rewards is the mission not the kill.  Missions can be much more complex in theory than individual kills.  They can involve things other than one-dimensional health bar grinding.  They can be constructed to have multiple ways to complete them.  I'm not saying STO necessarily does all of this in a great way, but the fundamental *idea* works in STO: you are primarily rewarded for completing missions, not kills.  No one farms Romulans all day long for the most part, because that is an extremely inefficient method of earning rewards in general.  It can be efficient in CoH, because CoH is explicitly designed to provide efficient rewards for individual kills.  STO doesn't.

If we design a game fundamentally around granting limited rewards for kills and higher more efficient rewards for "task completion" it becomes a lot easier to answer your question: how do you win with control? The answer now is "make missions that can be completed primarily through the exercise of control."  And that is a much simpler answer to envision.


Having said all of that, the CoH rules lawyer in me also has a CoH answer to the question "how can you win with control?"  The answer is: Mind control dominator.  I basically soloed my way to a Master of ITF with one of those, and I won a lot with control.  Domination boosted mass confusion in particular.  I didn't get a lot of XP from many of those spawns, but I did win.

[AlienOne]

So we've reached 1,270 pages, and we're still going....hehehe

Hey, guys.

[Paragon Avenger]

So we've reached 1,270 pages, and we're still going....hehehe

Hey, guys.

I'm thinking that about 1000 of those pages can be attributed to Arcana, lol.

[LaughingAlex]

While everyone was talking....know this happened....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-mIkn89nBI

I am not even a speed runner(and I know I could have gotten a shorter time if I was super lucky to get such a situation again).

Basically I made this since someone who seems very hell-bent against higher difficulties unless a reward to make him more powerful is involved.....complained the early game was super hard.  That was my rebuttal.

[Azrael]

(that's why sliders both increase critter difficulty and critter density).

An excellent idea.  One of the best bits of game design I ever came across.  Very well implemented.

The amount of fine tuning missions I did...alts from Defenders through to benching Tanks using this system.

*Fond memories of those Striga 'warehouse' missions with mobs packed in on +2 x8.

Azrael.

[Tubbius]

I found these shots last night while reviewing a couple old folders of saved screens.  See the red and white Santa Claus figure in the middle?  That's me, on Justice server.

My apologies if this stretches the thread display horribly.  I hate when that happens.

The first is of a costume contest on Justice from April 30, 2011, at 11:53:14 PM; I always enjoyed making folks do silly things in the middle of a contest.  This time, I had everyone turn and start fishing off the side of the platform in Atlas Park.

https://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u25/Roderic_Cliche/screenshot_110430-23-53-14_zps428eda44.jpg

The second is from the final moments on Justice.  The time on the screen is from December 1, 2012 at 2:48:20 AM.  I like this shot because it's a daylight shot; you can really make out the costumes and poses of the players who gathered at City Hall.

https://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u25/Roderic_Cliche/screenshot_121201-02-48-20_zpsbv46mhbt.jpg

The third is also from the final moments on Justice.  The time on the screen is from December 1 at 2:57:06 AM: under three minutes before closing.  I have another shot that's slightly later and more zoomed in, but I like this simply because it shows just how many people were there at the end in my little corner of Atlas Park.

https://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u25/Roderic_Cliche/screenshot_121201-02-57-06_zpsqcidg1va.jpg

[Fireheart]

Having said all of that, the CoH rules lawyer in me also has a CoH answer to the question "how can you win with control?"  The answer is: Mind control dominator.  I basically soloed my way to a Master of ITF with one of those, and I won a lot with control.  Domination boosted mass confusion in particular.  I didn't get a lot of XP from many of those spawns, but I did win.

I acknowledge that defeating 'all' through chaos and confusion is certainly 'Winning with Control'.  Except that, as you mentioned, there wasn't much XP in it and one of the ways we know we are 'winning' is collecting lots of XP.  One could produce a similar effect by using 'Gale' (or any other consistent Knock power) to sweep all of your opponents into the Lava... all you need is a source of Lava.

Of course, we both know that I was really looking for 'victory conditions' that could be achieved through Hold and Immobilize, those staple powers of all(?) Controllers.

Your analysis of the game design showed that the fundamental assumption of 'defeat foes' led to a game that rewarded DPS and little else.  Brilliant, as usual.  So, how might a game be designed where 'beat them down and leave them (bleeding) on the floor' is not the only way to 'win'?

Be Well!
Fireheart

[Arcana]

So, how might a game be designed where 'beat them down and leave them (bleeding) on the floor' is not the only way to 'win'?

Ever fight the Paladin?  The Paladin was an interesting oddity in City of Heroes, in that unlike most of his ilk he didn't just randomly spawn.  Instead, he was constructed.  A group of clockwork would start building him, and over a period of time he would take form.  And eventually, he'd be build and then start roaming around.  You could actually stop him from forming by killing off the clockwork that were building him, possibly to the consternation of other players that might have wanted to fight him.

Now, ever notice how 99.99% of all the enemies we ever fought and defeated in City of Heroes were not actually doing anything.  I mean literally: they are just standing around waiting for us to arrive and kick their ass.  Sure, we are *told* that Nemesis is building a weather machine, and the Skyraiders are stealing blah blah end of world whatever.  But they aren't actually *doing* anything.  We don't stop them from accomplishing anything, because they aren't actually trying to accomplish anything.

That's actually odd for a game focused on "superheroes" that in the comics superheroes almost always defeat the villains as part of stopping them from doing some villain-thing.  From Spiderman stopping criminals from robbing banks to the Avengers trying to stop Thanos from assembling the Infinity Gauntlet, they are actively trying not to "defeat villains" but stop villainous activity.  Sometimes, even most of the time maybe that involves ultimately literally defeating the villains, but not always.  Sometimes, it is just stopping them from doing that thing they want to do.

That's how you give players win conditions other than "kill villain" in a game like City of Heroes.  You start by giving the villains actual villain things to do.  The goal then isn't to "kill villain" but to "stop villain."  You open the parameters up to what it means to stop the villain.  Maybe you just smash his get-away car so he can't escape with the loot.  Maybe you smash his weather control machine, or you destroy his super batch of Supradyne-2, or you rescue the mayor whom the villain has replaced with a robot duplicate.  City of Heroes scratched the surface of some of these things, but it was always marginal.  The principle is that instead of giving the players the goal of "kill villain" you give the *villains* a goal and then tell the players you win if you stop the villains win-condition from happening.  You can then invite player innovation, and try to arm them with diverse tools to come up with interesting solutions.

You can travel endlessly down this road (and that's kind of the point), but try this one out.  Consider the classic "click multiple blinkies" mission in CoH.  This was presented in a number of ways. Sometimes, you just had to click multiple things, period.  Sometimes you had to click them simultaneously, basically forcing teaming.  Sometimes the different clicks were heavily defended and required splitting up forces.  Here's one we didn't get: suppose the NPCs are given the click-goal, and it is up to the players to stop them from completing it.  They can do that in a number of ways: they can unclick the blinkies as fast as the NPCs click them, they can kill all the NPCs so they don't live long enough to click them, or the players can sleep the NPCs so they just plain stop clicking things anymore.  Sleeping might be more efficient if defeated villains respawn (think repairmen in the STF).  Knockback comes into play here (think respec reactor).  Maybe toggle debuffs interrupt NPCs just like they do us.

Bottom line: give the NPCs a goal, and let the players figure out how to prevent that goal from happening without simply killing everything - or let them kill everything if that's how they want to play it.  This way, you don't "make" alternate ways to win, you let the players make alternate ways to win.