New efforts!

[MM3squints]

Kin Melee was one of those toons that ganked me in PvP all the time, a friend had it and it was a KM/WP stalker. She was awesome with it. Another toon that was my PvP bane was a defender toon (Rad/Dark but he had Elec/Dark and one other that I can't remember). The debuffs and his ability to heal himself made it damn near impossible to kill him. And while I am more than capable of making a toon specifically to counter any other toon I want to fight, that is not fun for me. Fun would have been if my favorite toon (whatever it would have been that week, altitis is contagious) at least stood a chance at any other PvP toon if given the right combos, proper slotting, and some decent practice.

One of the add on of i13 pvp where everyone no matter what AT had all Resistance in PvP. That's why defenders became so tanky in post i13 especially cold, sonic, dark, and storm. Again you don't meet the "right combo" (like my AR/Fire blaster example) and with practice you can make any toon viable in PvP and even beat out a FoTM if your reaction time is good enough. I admit it is hard because technically you are playing at a disadvantage, but it is possible

And the "jousting" I was referring to (and maybe its my interpretation of what others called jousting) is when a toon ques up their strong melee based attack at range, then either SuperSpeed or SuperJump to the target, and immediately leave the area so that they were casting the animation of the attack when no where near the intended target. What this did was make sure a melee character could hit and run ideally without being targeted themselves. They fixed this particular tactic iirc, but not many others.

Another gift from i13 PvP. More than likely you are hit by a BU+AIM TF (Total Focus) if its a blaster or a BU+TF if it is a tank.  Pre i13, you see someone running into you like you can pop a break free or if you have status protection you can line up for a counter while the person is still in animation. (After the slam there is a 1 second delay) But in i13 PvP since all mezes work regardless of your protection, you get hit with a TF, you will be stunned for 2 seconds that gives the person who used TF 1 second to recover and 1 more second to close the gap or in a blaster case create more range and just unload. This tactic was to keep a toon "still in motion" while creating some distance while in animation. The distance created was not that far though. I think it's because you were automatically stunned cause of how the new mez system worked then get followed up with another attack. Usually for a EM/Fire, EM/Inv or a EM/Will would be BU+(FE if your using a Fire Tank)+TF, follow up with a ET if the target is not dead yet BS, target not dead yet follow up with another ET. Target still alive, pull out till BU is back up then repeat

[Arcana]

From how you generalized the difference between 3.0 and 2.0 is "just a slowed down," you are just looking at PvP in the Macro sense and concluding the macro is what makes PvP, but not taking account of the mico aspects that actually was the reason PvP was so fun.

Long ago I decided not to make too big a deal of the fact that I could only post too much or not enough about a topic, when it came to critics, just as it was also true that either you can state the details and be accused of being confined to them, or not state them and be accused of being uninformed.

Why PvP was fun was something personalized to each individual player, although its not a stretch to say that generalizing the most vocal PvPers they tended to be ones that enjoyed mobility and powers that provided quicker countermoves (and no, I'm not providing a list of them).  But its still objectively the case that (most of the) I13 PvP changes were explicitly designed to decelerate PvP play (whether they succeeded or not).  Nor do I see any way to determine from that statement what I did or did not realize about the consequences of those changes.

[brothermutant]

Actually, I think (its been a LONG time) that I am referring to when travel suppression did not exist. Didn't you used to be able to skate around with SS on and attack freely?

And I never minded the other sets getting some much needed resistances in PvP; it was the inability of many of my toons to either: debuff the target's regen/healing; heal myself (I did eventually get Aid Self on toons that had no self heal, still didn't help); or detog/mez them as my toon usually had only one or two actual mezzes (a hold or a snare usually) and the others I may have had were all "chance of" mezzes, which suck. The other problem (and this is a maybe as I didn't research it extensively) is any autohit powers/toggles they slapped on me. Since I really wanted to keep them off of me, I usually went out of my way to get some pretty decent def and (if possible) a ToHit Debuff or two in my rotation. Now, maybe many of these were "fixed" or addressed by the last issue, as I had said earlier, I really hated PvP. But those were the problems I had with it.

I will admit I DID like going in to the highest area with my SG and teaming up to get shivans and what have you. But that is NOT the same as what I think of as PvP. Teams always behave differently than soloing.

[Arcana]

Honestly the biggest problem for melee toons was they didn't have some kind of chain attack. I don't know if it was the limitation of the game, or it was just not taken seriously into account, but that would have been better than the travel suppression. Becasue the only "chain attack" that was available was TP Foe which took a long time to activate and can be interrupted and was really not viable in PvP (with the exceptions of the TP Foe Mine Layers or my Ice/Rad Dueler where people try to escape my Ice Patch and Artic Air, but their speed is nuttered and they can't jump. When they are about to be outside of the Ice patch radius, I TP Foe them back to the center and just wailed on them till they drop.) 2.0 PvP travel suppression was in effect once you thrown an attack (your travel power would be down for 4 seconds), but not when you get attacked and honestly that rule made sense because attacks will stay to attack while people trying to run have the ability to do so.

I don't think it was possible in I13 to make powers like Shield Charge, say, be targetable on foes (or rather, it was technically possible but there were issues with doing that back then that I think would have created game engine problems when the targets move as fast as players could), like other games have.  At one time, Air Superiority could have been a potential melee sequence opener (and I think AS->ET when ET was still fast was a legitimate melee sequence) but the devs never really attempted to leverage any difference between KD and KU which could have been significant in PvP (making KB nerf-bait).

I think the biggest problem melee faced in PvP is that their design reason for existence was not compatible with PvP, and the devs didn't really attack that problem head-on.  They tried to tweak PvP into balance, but that was always going to be difficult with the melee toons.  Beyond the obvious issues of range and mitigation, there was the fact that the melee toons were explicitly designed to have strong defensive advantages relative to other archetypes, and when you try to address those in PvP without changing that mindset you tend to limit the options you will even consider.

Consider how much time the devs spent ultimately fruitlessly trying to figure out what the tanker "role" was in PvP.  Remember their statements about "PvP is balanced for teams?"  To this day, I'm not even sure if any two devs would agree on what that statement even means.

To this day, I still believe the devs could really only make PvP fun or make it fair, but within the limits of the CoH archetype system could not do both at the same time.  And even though I think its not a good thing in general in PvE, I think in PvP it was more important to make it fun rather than fair, even if it meant allowing things that would be considered both game-breaking in PvE, and off-putting to casual players in PvE.

The wildest PvP idea I ever had (that I actually posted) was back before the I13 changes, but didn't get much interest in, was for the devs to create a special "PvP power pool" that players could add to their characters, and those powers would only work in PvP.  And within certain limits, players could put almost *anything* into that pool from the other powersets.  The idea was to try to level the playing field between archetypes by allowing players to add anything they thought was missing from their archetype, specifically for PvP only.  So if there were huge advantages to certain kinds of power combinations, rather than try to balance them out, the devs could simply let the players just add them.

Yes, it would be silly and game-breaking, but at least it would be game-breaking in a way that was relatively fair to players, since those silly game-breaking options would be available to everyone.  There were, of course, a lot of stupid corner cases to attempting something like this, but its not like PvP didn't always have corner cases in a game with powers as rich as City of Heroes.

[MM3squints]

Long ago I decided not to make too big a deal of the fact that I could only post too much or not enough about a topic, when it came to critics, just as it was also true that either you can state the details and be accused of being confined to them, or not state them and be accused of being uninformed.

Why PvP was fun was something personalized to each individual player, although its not a stretch to say that generalizing the most vocal PvPers they tended to be ones that enjoyed mobility and powers that provided quicker countermoves (and no, I'm not providing a list of them).  But its still objectively the case that (most of the) I13 PvP changes were explicitly designed to decelerate PvP play (whether they succeeded or not).  Nor do I see any way to determine from that statement what I did or did not realize about the consequences of those changes.

Too much information is not a problem. If someone has a problem, well there is the internet to look it up if they don't know. If they don't want to do that, then the problem is on them. But that is not the issue on this topic. This topic has been going back and forth for several pages and the conversation usually is me talking about the mechanics about PvP while your  post have been anecdotes, but nothing really in the mechanics about PvP or how PvP worked pre 13 or post i13. Could be just me, but if someone says questions my level of knowledge, I would make it a point not only prove them wrong with information overload to show them I know what I'm saying, but then I will then question them on the subject to make sure there are not blowing smoke, but that is me. So to answer your question is there a way to determine what you did or did not realize about the consequences of those changes, I would say no, not by that one comment. However, that one comment combined with the several pages of discussion you haven't talked about the PvP mechanics or functions and mainly talked about the PvP community give me reason to pause.

I don't think it was possible in I13 to make powers like Shield Charge, say, be targetable on foes (or rather, it was technically possible but there were issues with doing that back then that I think would have created game engine problems when the targets move as fast as players could), like other games have.  At one time, Air Superiority could have been a potential melee sequence opener (and I think AS->ET when ET was still fast was a legitimate melee sequence) but the devs never really attempted to leverage any difference between KD and KU which could have been significant in PvP (making KB nerf-bait).

Prior the i13 KB/KU was a non-issue. Acrobatics gave insane amount of resistance. One of the reason why people took super jump, not just for the vertical, but status resistance buffs like combat jump imob proc and acro for the insane KB/KU proc and small hold Proc. AS would have not been an issue in PvP as long you had acro on. Of course post i13 acro has been scaled back dramatically so you actually needed to stack Karma, etc for the KB protection on top of Acro. Pre i13 the only thing that can act like KB were certain repeal attacks like TK

I think the biggest problem melee faced in PvP is that their design reason for existence was not compatible with PvP, and the devs didn't really attack that problem head-on.  They tried to tweak PvP into balance, but that was always going to be difficult with the melee toons.  Beyond the obvious issues of range and mitigation, there was the fact that the melee toons were explicitly designed to have strong defensive advantages relative to other archetypes, and when you try to address those in PvP without changing that mindset you tend to limit the options you will even consider.

Melee was compatible with PvP. On the villain PvP ladder it was essential to have a Stalker for the dmg bonus from assassinate. How does a stalker land an assassinate in a middle of an 8v8 PvP match where everyone is zipping around with SS and SJ on? Very carefully, I'm not joking, I never assumed the role, but Stalkers like Maximum can call out a target to hit follow that target and within 10 seconds land an assassinate in the brief second that target was touching the ground when coming down front a super jump and the rest of us Spike for the last bit of HP the target had.  There was lots of FoTM that were Melee. Heck one of the most devastating combos in PvP for dualing was an Ice/EM tank. But honestly out of all of the set powers like anything FoTM, only a handful of powers were useful in PvP. For attack power, tanks/Brutes was EM. For Scrappers it was Spines. For Stalkers, it was EM, Spines. Defense wise Regen, Ice, Fire, Invun, Electric. Everything and anything else besides those were a wash.

Consider how much time the devs spent ultimately fruitlessly trying to figure out what the tanker "role" was in PvP.  Remember their statements about "PvP is balanced for teams?"  To this day, I'm not even sure if any two devs would agree on what that statement even means.

Tanker role was tested in Test Arenas. Essentially the tank was supposed to taunt a DPS so a spike didn't go through, and that was it because of the limitations where they didn't had some kind of chain attack available. If tanks or melee in general had that capability I can see melee being used under utility (toons only can phase and hibernate so much and have CD on both, but the melee can keep taking out the support from the buff rotation. If that was the case, any team would sacrifice a utility spot for a melee just for that reason.) Unfortunately the taunting tank never made the cut because Sonics were available and not only can Sonics do what taunting tanks do by taking out a DPS from the fight, they can take out a support too while at the same time buff and debuff.

To this day, I still believe the devs could really only make PvP fun or make it fair, but within the limits of the CoH archetype system could not do both at the same time.  And even though I think its not a good thing in general in PvE, I think in PvP it was more important to make it fun rather than fair, even if it meant allowing things that would be considered both game-breaking in PvE, and off-putting to casual players in PvE.

I always thought the same because the balancing act is a pipe dream. I think that was the rational to make 2 sets of rules one for PvP and one for PvE. That way if they messed with PvP rules then it won't affect PvE. Of course that didn't worked as planed as seen with the added time in ET

The wildest PvP idea I ever had (that I actually posted) was back before the I13 changes, but didn't get much interest in, was for the devs to create a special "PvP power pool" that players could add to their characters, and those powers would only work in PvP.  And within certain limits, players could put almost *anything* into that pool from the other powersets.  The idea was to try to level the playing field between archetypes by allowing players to add anything they thought was missing from their archetype, specifically for PvP only.  So if there were huge advantages to certain kinds of power combinations, rather than try to balance them out, the devs could simply let the players just add them.

Don't know why it wasn't implemented especially because they gave 2 builds per toon. Probably at the time Devs didn't think about adding a second build and if people took these powers, they might gimp themselves in PvE.

Yes, it would be silly and game-breaking, but at least it would be game-breaking in a way that was relatively fair to players, since those silly game-breaking options would be available to everyone.  There were, of course, a lot of stupid corner cases to attempting something like this, but its not like PvP didn't always have corner cases in a game with powers as rich as City of Heroes.

I wouldn't say it was game breaking because every AT has specific caps and majority of the time people do have the ability to cap stats, but they don't because they know they will get buffs to make up the difference and allocate the bonuses elsewhere. The whole idea of Min/Maxing in a team environment. Again I do think this idea would have worked, but at the time there was no two build system per toon so at the time to prevent people from gimping their toons in a PvE environment, any power exclusive to PvP would probably have been off the table.

If I appear hostile in the conversations, I apologize in advance. It is nothing against anyone. I love debating (you can call it forum PvP if you want) and like getting insight in ideas and challenge ideas. I know one thing about these forum chatter, it just amps up the return of the game (even post i13 pvp) and just wants me to give more support or aid needed to the people who are making this happen for us.

[Sinistar]

With all this rather informative PVP chat, would it be safe to say that once CoH returns AND CoH 1.5 revival launches that after 1.5 launches the staff should perhaps sit back and do a total revamp of PvP?

PvP was always a blessing and a curse for the game, perhaps new owners/devs can remove some of the curse, which should lead to the removal of some of the cursing from the players. (bad pun, I know)

Two of the things that I would like to see in 1.5/Revival is a complete overhaul of PvP and an overhaul of the base editor, which was badly needed.

[Burnt Toast]

I think it would depend on the pvp community...and how much they make up of the overall community. Just like any other business decision... you need to allocate your resources to those who will benefit most from that allocation. If the pvp community is minuscule...it makes no sense..to again..revamp pvp...in an attempt to lure people to pvp.


I truly hope the base editor gets a few tweaks.. not necessarily a complete overhaul, but some tweaks.

With all this rather informative PVP chat, would it be safe to say that once CoH returns AND CoH 1.5 revival launches that after 1.5 launches the staff should perhaps sit back and do a total revamp of PvP?

PvP was always a blessing and a curse for the game, perhaps new owners/devs can remove some of the curse, which should lead to the removal of some of the cursing from the players. (bad pun, I know)

Two of the things that I would like to see in 1.5/Revival is a complete overhaul of PvP and an overhaul of the base editor, which was badly needed.

[Noyjitat]

I don't think that's fair to those that did pvp. Whether it's a 1000 or 10000 that did.... The changes introduced by Castle were just as stupid.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

I don't think that's fair to those that did pvp. Whether it's a 1000 or 10000 that did.... The changes introduced by Castle were just as stupid.

Point:  It has been established that Castle was only the Messenger, not the force behind the PvP changes.

[LaughingAlex]

I think it would depend on the pvp community...and how much they make up of the overall community. Just like any other business decision... you need to allocate your resources to those who will benefit most from that allocation. If the pvp community is minuscule...it makes no sense..to again..revamp pvp...in an attempt to lure people to pvp.


I truly hope the base editor gets a few tweaks.. not necessarily a complete overhaul, but some tweaks.

I think it also boils down to the overall nature of pvpers in games in general.  They tend to play games designed for them rather than games where pvp was tacked on.  Casual pvpers will play CoD and generally never think outside of just running, and relying exclusively on reflexes or just camping.  All the same more serious ones will play fighting games, or actual competitive arena shooters, or real time strategy games and may even get into competitions.  Games where it's not just a twitch fest but far more than that.

But MMORPGs are notorious for being very poorly done for player vs player, even less so for competitive play.  Either the gameplay is bad, but often at the same time the balance is generally very poor and strategy lacks.  Not to mention the whole "gear and build matters more than skill" factor that exists to this day.  The general "pre-stacked odds regardless of skill" generally keeps them away from mmorpgs.  If you look at the previous videos I posted of unreal tournament, you'll notice both players regardless of either start out even, it's not until later in the match you really start to see the winner.  In an mmorpg it's often right off the bat you can see who'll win just by checking the gear and build of both players and possibly seeing "Ok Joe has build B which automatically kills A which has no counters to it and cannot do anything to B so Joe wins".

Heck heres a loose analasis of mmorpg pvp;

Players: A and B
Builds: CDEF, C auto loses to F, but auto wins vs D and E.

Player A has build C, and has spent 100 hours on it.  He does not have time to make a character with build F and build C took time to practice.

Player B Has build D and E.  He has spent 200 hours total on them but he has time to make another build.  He competes against player A, gets mad he auto lost with no chance of winning.  So he spends another 100 hours building build F.  HE then proceeds to curbstomp player A in revenge, who did not have time to make a counter character to build F.

Player A gets insulted verbally by player B after player B got his revenge, but also realises the futility of pvp in mmorpgs and how much of a waste of time it is.  HE goes back to shooters, or rts or fighting games where you aren't spending all your time building a new toon but just learning a faction/character or learning maps and learning good movement skills.  He only has to worry about skill and finds the games better for fighting other players, even beating players who were initially better.  Player A concludes mmorpg pvp is very poor for the same reasons sirlin had probably concluded at some time or another, that the deck is always pre-stacked.

[Arcana]

Prior the i13 KB/KU was a non-issue. Acrobatics gave insane amount of resistance. One of the reason why people took super jump, not just for the vertical, but status resistance buffs like combat jump imob proc and acro for the insane KB/KU proc and small hold Proc. AS would have not been an issue in PvP as long you had acro on. Of course post i13 acro has been scaled back dramatically so you actually needed to stack Karma, etc for the KB protection on top of Acro. Pre i13 the only thing that can act like KB were certain repeal attacks like TK

While KB was common in PvE, KU was far less common.  What I meant by looking at the KB/KU split was to consider, given the fact that KU was a less interesting effect in PvE, to repurpose KU for PvP in a way that allowed the devs to add knock effects in PvP without the need to completely strip away KB protection from players (this was before the PvP flag made that less relevant).

Melee was compatible with PvP.

I didn't say melee archetypes couldn't compete in PvP.  I said the melee archetype design concept was incompatible with PvP.  The reason was straight-forward: melee archetypes by concept were explicitly intended to be more survivable than the other archetypes.  Whether that was universally true or not is irrelevant: that idea permeated how the devs thought about the archetypes in PvE, and it lingered in PvP.  It so infused their thinking that when they finally decided to abandon that design rule they whiplashed the whole idea of mitigation in I13 with archetype-wide resistances and then later overbuffing Elusivity.

Tanker role was tested in Test Arenas. Essentially the tank was supposed to taunt a DPS so a spike didn't go through, and that was it because of the limitations where they didn't had some kind of chain attack available. If tanks or melee in general had that capability I can see melee being used under utility (toons only can phase and hibernate so much and have CD on both, but the melee can keep taking out the support from the buff rotation. If that was the case, any team would sacrifice a utility spot for a melee just for that reason.) Unfortunately the taunting tank never made the cut because Sonics were available and not only can Sonics do what taunting tanks do by taking out a DPS from the fight, they can take out a support too while at the same time buff and debuff.

Which is another way of saying the traditional tanker role in PvE didn't work under the damage conditions that existed in PvP.

I always thought the same because the balancing act is a pipe dream. I think that was the rational to make 2 sets of rules one for PvP and one for PvE. That way if they messed with PvP rules then it won't affect PvE. Of course that didn't worked as planed as seen with the added time in ET

I never liked the "PvP rules" idea not because I didn't like the concept itself, but because as you reference the game engine didn't fully support dual mecchanics in all ways, some of them critical to how PvP worked.  Cast times, for example, are one area where you can't have two versions (although Titan Weapons plays a trick I mentioned way way back where you could set the cast time to something small and vary power times by changing rooted animations; that would get complex if used in PvP).

I wouldn't say it was game breaking because every AT has specific caps and majority of the time people do have the ability to cap stats, but they don't because they know they will get buffs to make up the difference and allocate the bonuses elsewhere. The whole idea of Min/Maxing in a team environment. Again I do think this idea would have worked, but at the time there was no two build system per toon so at the time to prevent people from gimping their toons in a PvE environment, any power exclusive to PvP would probably have been off the table.

Everyone means something different (if they mean anything specific at all) by "game breaking" but in this case I mean it would allow players to do things that the devs generally have hard and fast rules to disallow in PvE.  For example, the devs would have considered it game-breaking in I13 to allow a blaster to have two Novas, but in PvP that's not nearly as big a deal (particularly with Nova's cast time) since there's not the same AoE concern.  Overlapping Elude would be game-breaking (in terms of PvE design rules) in PvE, but in PvP its only a concern if tohit buffs are not in plentiful enough supply to penetrate Elude (and they are).

The only things you'd have to worry about are PvP-breaking things, like if hurricane made combat itself impossible, or if certain stacked debuffs were so strong they could completely neutralize the best offense.  Then you'd have to step in and level the playing field.

I still think my best PvP idea was the Architect version of PvP, where the Arenas were designed to allow players to customize the very rules of PvP.  Players by agreement could turn on or off travel suppression, change the way taunt worked, increase or decrease everyone's regeneration mods.  Basically a monster expansion of the limited arena switches that exist.  Heck, you could decide to switch gravity to that of the moon, or fight underwater, or make the ground into lava that induced a continuous DoT.  I think that could have given CoH a singularly unique PvP experience where the players decided how PvP should work, and if a large enough group of players didn't like those rules they could just go off and make up their own within their own community of PvPers.  Let the players fight it out to decide how PvP should work.  You could even make meta-games out of that where PvPers actually fought each other for the right to set the rules in certain public areas.  But the bottom line would be that anyone could PvP with any set of rules whatsoever, as long as they could find enough other players that agreed to those rules.

If I appear hostile in the conversations, I apologize in advance. It is nothing against anyone. I love debating (you can call it forum PvP if you want) and like getting insight in ideas and challenge ideas. I know one thing about these forum chatter, it just amps up the return of the game (even post i13 pvp) and just wants me to give more support or aid needed to the people who are making this happen for us.

No harm, no foul.

[Arcana]

But MMORPGs are notorious for being very poorly done for player vs player, even less so for competitive play.  Either the gameplay is bad, but often at the same time the balance is generally very poor and strategy lacks.  Not to mention the whole "gear and build matters more than skill" factor that exists to this day.  The general "pre-stacked odds regardless of skill" generally keeps them away from mmorpgs.  If you look at the previous videos I posted of unreal tournament, you'll notice both players regardless of either start out even, it's not until later in the match you really start to see the winner.  In an mmorpg it's often right off the bat you can see who'll win just by checking the gear and build of both players and possibly seeing "Ok Joe has build B which automatically kills A which has no counters to it and cannot do anything to B so Joe wins".

Games designed for PvP specifically attempt to ensure a certain relationship between offense and defense to moderate the pace and balance of 1v1 and XvX combat.  MMOs tend to balance very diverse player abilities against a more staid set of critter abilities used by the AI.  It is extremely difficult to go from the latter to the former, but most MMOs launch with the absolute need for the latter to work first, and try to retrofit the former afterwards.

Unless you have a truly mathematically gifted engineering team, the only way you're likely to make a rich PvE game that also has a satisfying and balanced PvP game would be to actually design the PvP first, and then build the PvE game on top.  Nobody wants to do that, because it inverts the development process.

[LaughingAlex]

Games designed for PvP specifically attempt to ensure a certain relationship between offense and defense to moderate the pace and balance of 1v1 and XvX combat.  MMOs tend to balance very diverse player abilities against a more staid set of critter abilities used by the AI.  It is extremely difficult to go from the latter to the former, but most MMOs launch with the absolute need for the latter to work first, and try to retrofit the former afterwards.

Unless you have a truly mathematically gifted engineering team, the only way you're likely to make a rich PvE game that also has a satisfying and balanced PvP game would be to actually design the PvP first, and then build the PvE game on top.  Nobody wants to do that, because it inverts the development process.

Guild wars went with an option to go pvp first and also allow for the player to make dedicated pvp characters.  These characters were meant to be deleted and remade on the fly, effectively, as you needed to change gear and change roles.

Which did actually work, heck it was called a "Competitive online roleplaying game" because not just the instanced nature of it, but because pvp was first in reality.  It had solid pve because likewise everything had a counter and it kind of adopted city of heroes anti-trinity design, indirectly.  Monks had healing spells yes but damage mitigation and protection proved more important as time went on for it and monk builds changed accordingly.  Especially with guild wars factions and nightfall, enemy bosses could easily one-shot groups of players who had no real form of mitigation if the bosses were allowed to.  Interupting them, shutting them down was important and critical for the survival of the team.

And it was more because the game was made for pvp.  The "Denial" role, which basically meant preventing badguys from doing what they wanted to, was a critical role to have in both pve and pvp.

I do agree that yeah because mmos try to retrofit for pvp after though, that they never achieve any level of competitive balance for pvp.  Combined with the whole fact that one must spend tons of time making a character they fail for that reason.  To much time making the character and never enough time fighting other players.

[Arcana]

Guild wars went with an option to go pvp first and also allow for the player to make dedicated pvp characters.  These characters were meant to be deleted and remade on the fly, effectively, as you needed to change gear and change roles.

Which did actually work, heck it was called a "Competitive online roleplaying game" because not just the instanced nature of it, but because pvp was first in reality.  It had solid pve because likewise everything had a counter and it kind of adopted city of heroes anti-trinity design, indirectly.

It slipped my mind, but yeah, Guild Wars is an example of what I mentioned above.  It was designed from the start with PvP, and it shows compared to other MMOs that generally don't.

[LaughingAlex]

I'd like to add here.  Guild wars also had separate mechanics for pvp itself.  Primarily a number of skills were changed so they functioned differently in pvp than they did in pve as of I think nightfall.  The developers did that to avoid hurting the pve crowd.  Thing is many balance changes that hurt pve often cause a tremendous amount of hatred by pve'ers towards the pvpers.  They blame pvp for the changes.  So separating the two was critical to avoid that.  Only guild wars did it well, city of heroes kind of messed up on that front.

At least we didn't get the CO treatment of "Double the melee damage, nerf the ranged damage, er, uh, ok buff ranged again no one uses it" kind of bipolar attitude we saw due to crying scrubs in the forums.

[Twisted Toon]

Also just because the majority of people you run into are pricks doesn't mean everyone in that community is a prick :P (So funny that that also applies in real life) If you paint everyone within that community with the same brush as the bad actors, you just end up alienating them and burn the bridge where you can use the "rational" ones to communicate with the pricks. It is the rational ones that will condemn the pricks and with police each other within the community. Of course their are those pricks that can't be talked to and like in real life you deal with them "accordingly"

I now not everyone that PvPs is a prick. However, all I have to go on is my past experiences with PvP, and my chances of running into the pricks is much higher than my chances of running into the not pricks. At least, that is the way it seems to work out, most every time, in most every MMO that has some form of PvP. I keep in mind the adage, "a few rotten apples spoil the bunch." Unfortunately, it doesn't help my sense of fun when I tend to run into the few rotten apples most of the time. So, I tend to avoid PvP, unless I'm feeling slightly masochistic.

[Baja]

My two cents: revert pvp back to pre i13 until there is enough time/money to do a true overhaul. That is if it's even possible to do so. It was fast paced and fun for pretty much everyone, minus the whole perms mezz thing which at this point I could care less if that was back in the game.

Truth of the matter is people who enjoy the easy fotm cookie cutters will always find a way to make them. At least with pre i13 you could still make an impact without being one. That is in a team fight situation though, which seems to be the best form of pvp in this game IMO.

I had fun in both versions of pvp but obviously enjoyed pre13 far more, that being said I would honestly take coh back with no pvp at this point if it meant playing ASAP :P

[Joshex]

I made a fire armor/ electric melee scrapper, it gets lots of kills fast but falls down fast too lol, really needs a tank to take agro but it's fairly lethal if you want a damage build.

[Noyjitat]

Point:  It has been established that Castle was only the Messenger, not the force behind the PvP changes.

I might believe that if it were not for some of the private messages I shared with him on the official forums about other gameplay changes. It seems hard to swallow that the powers guy was "forced" only into making pvp changes when he made other huge power changes along the way with more coming in issue 24.

Not that it really matters at this point as to whether nerfs get undone or content is changed. I just want the bloody game back already!

[LaughingAlex]

I might believe that if it were not for some of the private messages I shared with him on the official forums about other gameplay changes. It seems hard to swallow that the powers guy was "forced" only into making pvp changes when he made other huge power changes along the way with more coming in issue 24.

Not that it really matters at this point as to whether nerfs get undone or content is changed. I just want the bloody game back already!

I agree, i'd like to see City of heroes issue 23 back up and running before that fear of mine about CO comes true and that game has to shut down.  Which I am very worried is going to be soon I mean the game appears to be a ghost town, nearly.  You only see three zones open in MC anymore and hey, holidays are over so there isn't any excuse.  When there used to be FIVE zones open just before the october nerf and the whole "Bait and switch transactions" or as it was renamed "Cash shop concerns thread" became especially prominent.

Edit: And whats on the horizon for them?  Another ugly bike no one will want to use after what happened October.  Pfft.