City of Heroes PvP - Last Stand... or is it?

[Hyper Ai]

With all of the talk about the games possible return, it got me digging up old frap files I had stored away on my hard drive. It really made me think about all of the good times I had playing PvE as well as PvP.

I know PvP wasn't a huge part of the game. In fact it was generally frowned upon and for most people forgotten. But me, I loved it.

So for old times sake, I slapped together a couple of videos with some salvageable gameplay that I never used.

My Stalker Hyper Stealth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_PEe0WB1FU

My Tank Hyper Ai:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqQtHGkoCMo

Hopefully these wont be the last videos I post. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some new gameplay to record in the near future.

[Power Gamer]

PvP never captured my attention.

It seemed to focus on a few ATs and powersets that held all the cards and everyone else was left hanging out to dry.

I guess it was fine if that was your focus, but it just never grabbed me.

Yet, when the games comes back I intend to explore it more thoroughly. 

[Waffles]

Eh, PVP was fun before i13.

Post i13? Lolno.

[blacksly]

PvP never captured my attention.

It seemed to focus on a few ATs and powersets that held all the cards and everyone else was left hanging out to dry.

I guess it was fine if that was your focus, but it just never grabbed me.

Yet, when the games comes back I intend to explore it more thoroughly. 

It did focus on some powersets, and others were hung out to dry.

But if you think about it, PvP is highly challenging content (heh)... I don't recall hearing much complaining that many powersets are hung out to dry when it comes to other difficult challenges like soloing AVs, high-speed farming, tanking some TFs, etc. Only in PvP did players expect to take whatever character they happened to have, and have it perform as well as any other powerset combination. If you asked them to do that against AVs, they would (rightly) say that not all powersets are equally good at all tasks, and it's reasonable for their Mind Control/Kinetic to be unable to solo AVs. Or Plant/Empath. Or Ice/Fire Tanker. Etc.

Yes, PvP was largely a game of haves and have-nots, but they put in a lot of work to make it so that an Ice/Energy Blaster without a ton of purples was not totally outmatched by the same build loaded with expensive IOs, and frankly, that's about the best that we could hope for.

[Apex Viper]

I didn't get into PvP until the last few months before the closure. It was in Recluse's Victory and I really enjoyed it, even though I got murdered. That's the only way to put it...murdered. Those villains and their maxed out regen ways! When the game returns I will give it another try....I'll bring my own body chalk for you to use.

[Charged Mastermind]

Oh boy I remember when I thought energy melee was awesome because it was my highest level.

then i learned people thought it was stupid

[Hyper Ai]

I played PvP quite often. I still liked to PvE with my friends, but a good round in RV was very satisfying. The PvP change almost turned me away from it completely since my PvP builds were all gimped, but I learned to adapt and still managed to have fun.

Oh boy I remember when I thought energy melee was awesome because it was my highest level.

then i learned people thought it was stupid

Energy Melee was truly awesome at one time. Energy transfer was just plain nasty. A little too nasty... and then came the "fix". And I use the word fix loosely. It was a little too extreme if you ask me. It worked for stalkers since they were already high damage dealers, but it was a little too much for my Inv/EM tank. I almost completely stopped playing it after the fix.

[Shenku]

Towards the later half of my CoH lifetime, I started spending more and more time in the various PvP zones (until the last two-three years...), but I never built my characters strictly for PvP.

I tried many times to get my SG to join in, sometimes successful, other times not. We even had an internal SG PvP ranking ladder (with yearly "seasons" to determine that year's "champion") that I helped run for a stretch (the league was started by one of the SG's officers, I was promoted and took over for a while when he couldn't, then I passed the torch on to someone else when RL prevented me from attending to the task), and it was fun to do if only slightly tricky to manage the 30-40 characters on it (mostly alts, there were only about 15-16 or so players interested total at the highest peak population). Once I even put together a short music video featuring some various clips of my SG duking it out in the Arena, though I never uploaded it to Youtube or anything like that (I might still have the video laying around somewhere, but it's so dated I'm not sure it's worth uploading now... I recorded it in like 2007-2008ish I think...?)...

To me, PvP was something that could be fun once you got past or even avoided the people with the "super extreme min/max IO" builds/playstyles. Granted open PvP zones sometimes made that difficult, but you could easily trim down the headaches by doing it through the Arena with people you knew(which did help a lot if you were not a seasoned veteran at it and needed someone to practice with or test out builds on).

I started loosing interest towards the end long after all the PvP changes had firmly taken hold, and I would go to any of the various PvP zones and only find 1-2 other people in it. The fun just wasn't there anymore when you only had maybe one guy to fight and he consistently whooped your butt because he had significantly better (and more expensive) IOs, and the other guy in the zone didn't want to PvP because he was farming NPCs for IOs (else, badge farming by taking over the Capsules...)... Of course, Victory Server was always leaning towards the "lol PvP" side of things, so that right there might have been a bigger factor for why the zones eventually died out of activity, but the server was my home so I wasn't about to just jump over to a different server; it wouldn't have been the same...

[MWRuger]

I didn't do PvP but I had a friend that stone cold loved it. His favorite part of the game. For his sake I hope that when we get the game back there are enough people to gather on at least one server for PvP.

I actually did try PvP and it wasn't losing to tricked out Uber builds that put me off. Without even an Uber PvP build I won a few times. It was the constant trash talk and the offensive language. It was too much sexual and even racial hate for me to put up with in something I do for fun.

He assured me that it was all part of PvP and wasn't personal. He was probably right, but I had too much fun PvE to put with that kind of nonsense in PvP.

But I honestly hope that it makes a comeback because I know they some people loved it and miss it.

[Aggelakis]

Agge got several levels in her 40s out of Recluse's Victory. She would hang out in RV, plinking Arachnos and taking pillboxes, until a Villain would come by and attempt to kill her. Then my Heavy would unload on them out of nowhere cos I had used Grant Invisibility on it. XD I got many a curse over the course of a couple weeks!

[Reiraku]

Some vids from my PvP mancrush, m3z

[Von Krieger]

Energy Melee was truly awesome at one time. Energy transfer was just plain nasty. A little too nasty... and then came the "fix". And I use the word fix loosely. It was a little too extreme if you ask me. It worked for stalkers since they were already high damage dealers, but it was a little too much for my Inv/EM tank. I almost completely stopped playing it after the fix.

Yeah, the fix for PvP completely broke the feeling of my first level 50 Brute s badly that she was unplayable to me in PvE.

Almost all my PvP experience was pre-I13, which I thought was okay. It was fun going lulzno at every Stalker that tried to gank me, because my main at the time was a Spines/Regen scrapper.

[Apex Viper]

Energy Melee was truly awesome at one time. Energy transfer was just plain nasty. A little too nasty... and then came the "fix". And I use the word fix loosely. It was a little too extreme if you ask me. It worked for stalkers since they were already high damage dealers, but it was a little too much for my Inv/EM tank. I almost completely stopped playing it after the fix.

My main was an Inv/EM tank. I played him up until the end. He was a beast in PvE, but was a mess in PvP. I took a lot of pillboxes, but I don't think he ever beat anyone. I know I went to the hospital...A LOT. 

[Reiraku]

Yeah, the fix for PvP completely broke the feeling of my first level 50 Brute s badly that she was unplayable to me in PvE.

Almost all my PvP experience was pre-I13, which I thought was okay. It was fun going lulzno at every Stalker that tried to gank me, because my main at the time was a Spines/Regen scrapper.

It wasn't really a fix for PvP. ET was broken by design, just as Psychic Shockwave was, in every aspect of the game. Considering how much of a disadvantage melee was in PvP, it makes a lot more sense that it would be fixed due to its overpowered nature in PvE. The problem is they didn't do much for the set after that.

And I loved /Regen scrappers on my stalker pre-i13. Unless they had DP up, it was a done deal for them.

[Zombie Hustler]

I never got into PvP much- in this or any game- but I will say, that if there is any game in which PvP makes sense, it's in the City of Heroes/City of Villains world.

If the game gets revived, I wouldn't mind seeing a different sort of implementation of PvP, though- perhaps something like a Co-op of the Mayhem/Safeguard Missions, where the villains are trying to pull off their various Mayhem antics (robbing banks, destroying things) while the heroes are trying to counter their antics. Something that might be a bit more involved than just fighting.

Recluse's Victory is probably the closest existing content to what I'm envisioning, although even that isn't quite as far as I'd like to see it taken.

[MWRuger]

Just going to chime in here and say that any changes to PvP will have to be in CoH2 in all likelihood. Unless something changes (and it could) we are probably getting I24 in maintenance mode without the tools necessary to make changes to the code.

But that doesn't mean that there will be no PvP just that it will be the same as when the game closed.

[Supermax]

Hyper! What's up man. Not sure if you remember me, but I played with (and against) you all the time in RV. Your tank and stalker were always some of the toughest opponents.

On topic, PvP's biggest problem (other than i13) was the community. I've played a lot of PvP games, and I have to say, CoH's PvP community was by far the worst I ever saw. It's like 99% of it was 10 year old trolls with no life. There was so much elitism, it was sickening. So much trash talk, and very few people that would take even a minute to educate someone on how to get better. It felt like people were truly proud of themselves if they could own someone so bad that he never PvP'd again.... like they wanted to have LESS competition. And the holier than thou attitude from the top PvP SG's? Just hilarious, considering they were "competing" in a MMO where everything was based on a random number generator.

I'm not too optimistic about CoH coming back. I think there are too many obstacles at this point. But if it does, could they maybe roll back the PvP changes to issue 12?

[Burnt Toast]

I actually loved pvp, but very few people knew of/about me in the pvp community. I never participated in any of the leagues etc because of the trash talking etc. My main pvp toon was an NrG/Ele stalker. I was mainly an RV pvper. I used to run with some friends who did pvp very casually... we ran a team of 4 elect/storm corruptors... that was always fun


I am already working on my builds for pve and pvp toons in Mids in anticipation of the game returning. Basically tweaking my stalker and my earth/fire dom.

[MaidMercury]

I tried PvP after a friend egged me over and over.....>sigh<

So we tried a session...After knocking each other around and going nowhere, we got bored.

We decided to play in Recluse's Victory whenever we wanted the excitement of being in a danger zone. It was like PvP as a team instead of one on one.
..More fun to us anyway.

I did hear some folks used PvP to blow off steam, rants, arguments....or personal vendettas.

[Hyper Ai]

Hyper! What's up man. Not sure if you remember me, but I played with (and against) you all the time in RV. Your tank and stalker were always some of the toughest opponents.

Whats up man! I definitely remember you from the PvP forums as well as zone. Good to hear from you again.