New efforts!

[darkgob]

I was pugging in CoH in 2005ish, early in the game but still substantially after release, when a player on my team tried to convince the team that he should tank for the team with his blaster because, and I quote "I have stealth so they can't see me so they can't shoot me."  I tried to explain that's not how stealth worked, but he was adamant and so the team decided to just let him try.  Needless to say, we let him take alpha after alpha and die over and over again, but even after being vaporized by several spawns he insisted those mobs had to be bugged, because he said it worked before.

Were you teamed with DarkSydePhil?  ;D  Bugged stealth mechanics, I was pressing buttons!

[Vee]

My favorite was the team leaders who'd rage if someone other than them clicked a glowie because they thought they had a chance for drops or something. Actually I never figured that one out. It was only around when I first started playing in oh-9 so my noob self followed the "rule" sheepishly until someone corrected me.

There were also people right up til the end who never understood why they'd get killed flying through a mission when they had a stealth IO in fly no matter how many times it was explained to them.

[Rejolt]

My favorite was the team leaders who'd rage if someone other than them clicked a glowie because they thought they had a chance for drops or something. Actually I never figured that one out. It was only around when I first started playing in oh-9 so my noob self followed the "rule" sheepishly until someone corrected me.

There were also people right up til the end who never understood why they'd get killed flying through a mission when they had a stealth IO in fly no matter how many times it was explained to them.

At one point glowies gave xp and clicking them didnt drop Hide (coughxmasmissioncough) and if you were saaaay level 5 in a level 40's mission...

[Arcana]

Here's one that a lot of people still believe, even though I did eventually blow the lid on it.  There was a myth that "standing in the goo" when fighting Hamidon would buff his mez protection and make it more difficult to hold him during the hold phase.  This was the pre-I9 Hamidon of course.  That was false: there was not, nor was there ever such an effect.

This myth persisted because there were very few people who knew with certainty this was false, and nearly all of us decided to let the myth go because it made it easier to manage Hamidon raids.  If you tell people to just stand still and do nothing until Hamidon is held, they will hold dance parties around the nucleus and cause more lag and visual dropout for the hold team.  If you tell everyone that the goo is dangerous, then they will all stand waaaaaaaaaay over there.

I know for a fact there were some raid leaders who knew the myth was false and perpetuated (or at least didn't deny) it just because it made players more manageable.  I was one of the players who never actually supported the myth, but didn't exactly go out of my way to dispel it either, until after I9 came out and it became moot.

[Arcana]

I don't think thats why freeform fail.  It failed because there wasn't much synergy from different powersets.  I tried to build a fire and heavy weapons toon, because there was some minor fire effects on some of the heavy weapons powers.  But it didn't work well and the char is gimped.  You really need to stay within the archtype or that powerset to build a powerful toon.

I wouldn't say that.  There wasn't a lot of synergy between different attacks usually, but then again attack synergy itself was very low at release even within powersets (powered armor, you could argue, even had a few anti-synergies).  There was more cross synergy to be found among the more utilitarian sets.  Powers like nanobot swarm or the circles have synergies with different powersets in different ways.  You could combine the "yank" powers from force and combine them with the spammable AoEs in electric to create a pretty powerful ranged AoE attacker.

One real problem there is that because the trees have deep unlocks, taking powers from multiple trees often means you can't easily get the best powers from any of them.  But really at release the problem was massive imbalances that meant that synergy was irrelevant: either you had the best powers (regeneration, gigabolt, etc) or you didn't.  If you did, everything else was candy.  If you didn't, no amount of synergy would make up for the fact you didn't.

I would say the best CO strategy is not to stay in your lane, but to *mostly* stay in your lane and cherry pick the best augments from the other sets.  A scatter shot build is likely to be underpowered (moreso than in CoH).  A stay in your lane build is likely to be ok, but not great.  The great builds are 75% stay in your lane, 25% cherry picking from outside the primary powerset.

[LaughingAlex]

I don't think thats why freeform fail.  It failed because there wasn't much synergy from different powersets.  I tried to build a fire and heavy weapons toon, because there was some minor fire effects on some of the heavy weapons powers.  But it didn't work well and the char is gimped.  You really need to stay within the archtype or that powerset to build a powerful toon.

The most broken and overpowered builds often cross-set across a good number of different sets.  The most cookie cutter combination in fact is the unbreakable/masterful dodge combined with conviction and then likely either aura of primal majesty, quarry, night warrior or some defensive passive.  With high recharge one can keep unbreakable/masterful dodge up almost constantly, conviction heals you very fast.  Then powers from there are just based on equipment and passive.  If one has full justice gear you can throw bountiful chi resurgence + resurgent reiki and you have a heal on every dodge.

If your using lightning reflexes with the last power in there, you already regenerate fast, but pure-dodging legion or dodge/avoidance justice gear will let you pretty much out-regenerate a regeneration player, and you could easily achieve 100% dodging.

Getting 100% dodging in CO requires you to use both evasive maneuvers, a lunge, and thundering kicks.  Hit evasive maneuvers(must be rank 3), for 19% extra dodge, lunge back into melee, then combo thundering kicks before going on to whatever melee attacks you use to hold agro.  Easy 100% dodge, but absolutely a must-do for dealing with frosticus on a dodge character(otherwise, you die in one shot the moment you fail to dodge one of his attacks).

Then of course, theres this character this guy made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wdIWlKOWMw

Scrubs already called him a cheater.  He can tank frosticus with that to I think but the build is a bit, he admits, overspecialized.

Then course the earlier days there were stupid things like 20,000 damage assault rifle hits.

[Joshex]

Here's one that a lot of people still believe, even though I did eventually blow the lid on it.  There was a myth that "standing in the goo" when fighting Hamidon would buff his mez protection and make it more difficult to hold him during the hold phase.  This was the pre-I9 Hamidon of course.  That was false: there was not, nor was there ever such an effect.

This myth persisted because there were very few people who knew with certainty this was false, and nearly all of us decided to let the myth go because it made it easier to manage Hamidon raids.  If you tell people to just stand still and do nothing until Hamidon is held, they will hold dance parties around the nucleus and cause more lag and visual dropout for the hold team.  If you tell everyone that the goo is dangerous, then they will all stand waaaaaaaaaay over there.

I know for a fact there were some raid leaders who knew the myth was false and perpetuated (or at least didn't deny) it just because it made players more manageable.  I was one of the players who never actually supported the myth, but didn't exactly go out of my way to dispel it either, until after I9 came out and it became moot.

mmm giant jellyfish sandwich...

[Xaphan]

Here's one that a lot of people still believe, even though I did eventually blow the lid on it.  There was a myth that "standing in the goo" when fighting Hamidon would buff his mez protection and make it more difficult to hold him during the hold phase.  This was the pre-I9 Hamidon of course.  That was false: there was not, nor was there ever such an effect.

This myth persisted because there were very few people who knew with certainty this was false, and nearly all of us decided to let the myth go because it made it easier to manage Hamidon raids.  If you tell people to just stand still and do nothing until Hamidon is held, they will hold dance parties around the nucleus and cause more lag and visual dropout for the hold team.  If you tell everyone that the goo is dangerous, then they will all stand waaaaaaaaaay over there.

I know for a fact there were some raid leaders who knew the myth was false and perpetuated (or at least didn't deny) it just because it made players more manageable.  I was one of the players who never actually supported the myth, but didn't exactly go out of my way to dispel it either, until after I9 came out and it became moot.

I remember hearing that one a lot, and I remember thinking how silly it was. I just wrote it off as one of those superstitions that seem to persist in any given game. I never really brought it up though, as I'm not the type to speak much at all, and I'd just hang back with the rest of the group since I didn't want to be yelled at.

It makes me wonder how many people actually believed that one, and how many people knew it was a load but didn't want to say anything.

[Arcana]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wdIWlKOWMw

I've never seen that video before (and I haven't been plugged into the CO forum community in years regardless) but funny thing is I've been thinking about what I might roll up, once I've had some time to respec and replay all my old alts for a bit to get back into the swing, and a Defiance+IDF+Nanite defensive build was high on my list of things to think about.  I hadn't thought about Ebon Void much, but I'm going to now.  With Defiance, you really don't need a block with energy return if you fight enough stuff.  In fact, what I was specifically wondering is if I could get the mitigation high enough to tank enough for Defiance to power GB spamming at close range, without sacrificing my ability to engage a single hard target.

Its going to be embarrassing if I can't eventually make a maximal mitigation build in CO (minus expensive gear I might not want to farm for).  I have a reputation to protect after all.  But I've only been playing around for a week or so, and still getting a feel for things, which have changed a lot since I was last playing,

[Thunder Glove]

The only way I can explain thinking that only Dominators could hold Boss enemies is that the person or people making that claim mixed up Bosses (i.e., the class explicitly called Boss) and bosses (major fights at the end of an arc, which were usually Elite Bosses or even AVs), since the latter were indeed much harder to hold (or nearly impossible, in the case of a triangles-up AV).

I'm not surprised that CO has turned into such a cesspool.  I've told this story before, but the last time I posted on their forums involved an argument where someone kept trying to explain to me how having a choice between a good heal that did what I wanted and several healing powers that didn't heal enough was still a choice.  When I said I wanted a choice of several equally effective heals, they eventually started just posting pictures of laughing ponies.

[LaughingAlex]

I've never seen that video before (and I haven't been plugged into the CO forum community in years regardless) but funny thing is I've been thinking about what I might roll up, once I've had some time to respec and replay all my old alts for a bit to get back into the swing, and a Defiance+IDF+Nanite defensive build was high on my list of things to think about.  I hadn't thought about Ebon Void much, but I'm going to now.  With Defiance, you really don't need a block with energy return if you fight enough stuff.  In fact, what I was specifically wondering is if I could get the mitigation high enough to tank enough for Defiance to power GB spamming at close range, without sacrificing my ability to engage a single hard target.

Its going to be embarrassing if I can't eventually make a maximal mitigation build in CO (minus expensive gear I might not want to farm for).  I have a reputation to protect after all.  But I've only been playing around for a week or so, and still getting a feel for things, which have changed a lot since I was last playing,

He's one of the games better players, particularly in that he has very intimate knowledge of the game mechanics and equally intimate knowledge of a number of the bugs in it.  He even knows how to achieve perfect god mode, as in you cannot be hurt at all, in the game.  He doesn't reveal how for multiple reasons.  The tragic thing is the CO developers refused to listen to this guy, they generally treated him like crap for trying to help.  A common fate in the CO forums.

He's among those who also suspect an immanent shutdown.  It's almost like just about anyone who really thinks and isn't complacent suspects the game is in danger.  The guy had been playing the game for a very long time, but as I said, he's about as fed up with it's developers as I am.

He was also banned on the forums for reporting the bug.  Yeah, thats how badly they treated him.  He has a LOT of videos that focus on the core problems of CO.  In one video he kills Mega Terak with a naked character using only regeneration and electrical shield.  Just to illustrate a point about it.

[Arcana]

The only way I can explain thinking that only Dominators could hold Boss enemies is that the person or people making that claim mixed up Bosses (i.e., the class explicitly called Boss) and bosses (major fights at the end of an arc, which were usually Elite Bosses or even AVs), since the latter were indeed much harder to hold (or nearly impossible, in the case of a triangles-up AV).

I'm not surprised that CO has turned into such a cesspool.  I've told this story before, but the last time I posted on their forums involved an argument where someone kept trying to explain to me how having a choice between a good heal that did what I wanted and several healing powers that didn't heal enough was still a choice.  When I said I wanted a choice of several equally effective heals, they eventually started just posting pictures of laughing ponies.

This is going to sound self-serving, but I've often wondered about my true impact on the CoH forums.  Which is to say, I wonder if the tenor of the discussion on the forums when it came to things like gameplay and game mechanics was a lucky happenstance of the playerbase, or if it was due to the active efforts of a few players like myself (and others) not to lord gameplay knowledge over other players.

When I first started playing, soon after release, there were not very many smart alecs on the forums.  They were there, but there were more people trying to figure things out than attack people for being noobs.  We were *all* noobs.  Not only did we not know anything about the game, none of us even knew how to find out.  We had to invent the very tools and techniques we used to find out anything.  Because of that, there was a lot of people trying to help others with what they knew; lots of guide writers and question answerers.  Not all smart, not all wise, not all even polite, but still more people trying to help than people thinking they knew better, or assuming what other people ought to know.

I made it a point early on to try to learn as much as I could from those who knew anything and communicate to others everything I knew, without slamming people (usually) for not knowing things.  As far as I was concerned, none of us really knew much prior to at least I2 anyway.  And I found there were many like-minded players who had the same basic philosophy.  Many of them came and went, like Amauros, Buffy, Circeus, and too many to remember or count.  But I would like to think I was an avenue of continuity from the earliest helpful players down through the Scrapper forum denizens and into the later game, where there were enough players that were proud of being both knowledgeable and not asshats, to keep things better than average most of the time.

I wonder how many players you could subtract before things became like they often are in games like CO.  A hundred?  Twenty?  Ten?  What happens to CoH if there's no Mids?  No Powers Quantification Project?  No Arcanaville?  We'll never know, because unfortunately CO didn't launch without a dozen of us, or even a hundred of us, but rather with practically none of us.  To the best of my knowledge, while there are many knowledgeable CO players out there, I don't think CO has had its Dr Rock, or its TopDoc, or its Stupid_Fanboy, or its Codewalker, or its Arcanaville.  I think in terms of player community, it never got past its BuffyASummers, or maybe its Circeus.

CO is like the Praetorian CoH where the Praetorians rule, Hamidon has eaten the Earth, and the guy who might have become Nemesis died a toy maker.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I remember hearing that one a lot, and I remember thinking how silly it was. I just wrote it off as one of those superstitions that seem to persist in any given game. I never really brought it up though, as I'm not the type to speak much at all, and I'd just hang back with the rest of the group since I didn't want to be yelled at.

It makes me wonder how many people actually believed that one, and how many people knew it was a load but didn't want to say anything.

One of the sillier and less helpful of the original Hamidon superstitions was the people who insisted that players exiting the zone/going to the hospital triggered/flagged yellow Mito splits. There were a few similar variations i heard over the years and i would frequently ask how or why the devs would include that as part of the raid design without receiving anything but incoherent and/or indignant responses when i pointed out that it didn't make any sense from a lore or design standpoint.
While i knew quite a few players who championed the old Hamidon raid as the best version i always thought the newer raid was the most balanced, griefer-resistant, and enjoyable version.

[Arcana]

He's one of the games better players, particularly in that he has very intimate knowledge of the game mechanics and equally intimate knowledge of a number of the bugs in it.  He even knows how to achieve perfect god mode, as in you cannot be hurt at all, in the game.  He doesn't reveal how for multiple reasons.  The tragic thing is the CO developers refused to listen to this guy, they generally treated him like crap for trying to help.  A common fate in the CO forums.

He's among those who also suspect an immanent shutdown.  It's almost like just about anyone who really thinks and isn't complacent suspects the game is in danger.  The guy had been playing the game for a very long time, but as I said, he's about as fed up with it's developers as I am.

He was also banned on the forums for reporting the bug.  Yeah, thats how badly they treated him.  He has a LOT of videos that focus on the core problems of CO.  In one video he kills Mega Terak with a naked character using only regeneration and electrical shield.  Just to illustrate a point about it.

Its weird.  Cryptic seemed so open to dialog with the players during alpha and beta - even to a fault at times.  To me that seemed to almost completely end at release, or shortly before.  So speaking of Praetorian CoH, imagine a CoH where Stupid_Fanboy has no way to work with the devs to fix Claws, where I have no way of communicating to BaB that female attack animations were slower than male ones, where so many of the game changes that came from *sane* discussion with the players (I can mostly think of mine, but there were many players talking to devs going back to pre-release CoV and before) just don't happen.  The players collectively were not always right (in fact, by my scorecard they were mostly wrong) but they often had good ideas that the devs could use.  Possibly 33% of the entire game was in some way influenced directly by player feedback or player advocacy.  Imagine a CoH with all those features, good and bad, removed.  You could be looking at a very different game, played by much more bitter players than we had.

I did offer to help the CO devs work with defensive powers, and they should have known that my offer of help was not just player advocacy: I had been working with the CoH devs on objective improvements to CoH for a while by then.  I never even got back a "no" - just silence.  Its perhaps arrogant to believe they would want or need my help, but when its part of a pattern of not opening dialogs with *any* players, or at least very many of them (Paragon devs were by my estimates talking to *hundreds* of players at least intermittently) you really have to wonder what happened there.  Did something during beta or pre-release make them a lot more insular, or was there a fundamental difference in philosophy between forked-Cryptic and Paragon when it came to player communication.  Or were the rumors really true that they wanted nothing to do with anyone having any connection to City of Heroes (I never believed that rumor seriously, but there are times I wonder).

I'm not surprised CO has a god-mode, even if it is something that only works in certain contexts.  It seems, from what I've been able to gather so far, that the devs have made a lot of changes to the way defensive powers work mechanically, particularly the way they stack, combine, and operate in sequence.  That opens the door to a lot of possible ways for something to stack in an unintended way and becomes stronger than intended, for powers to work in a sequence that delivers more mitigation than foreseen, and for powers and gear to be bugged in subtle ways that are difficult to notice until you stack up a lot of them in the right build.  CoH had defensive rules that were easy to understand - if you were mathematically inclined - and did not have complex order of operations.  But if you block while surrounded by absorption while running invincibility, the order in which damage is negated, reduced, and absorbed significantly alters how much damage you ultimately take.  One mistake, and suddenly you're taking nothing but a string of ones.

A bug that would make you take absolutely no damage at all?  In a system like CO's, I would not bet against it.  A bug like that in CoH wouldn't last long.

[Arcana]

One of the sillier and less helpful of the original Hamidon superstitions was the people who insisted that players exiting the zone/going to the hospital triggered/flagged yellow Mito splits. There were a few similar variations i heard over the years and i would frequently ask how or why the devs would include that as part of the raid design without receiving anything but incoherent and/or indignant responses when i pointed out that it didn't make any sense from a lore or design standpoint.
While i knew quite a few players who championed the old Hamidon raid as the best version i always thought the newer raid was the most balanced, griefer-resistant, and enjoyable version.

Another one: AoEs caused splits.  That was not only false, but basically impossible to even design into them at the time even if the devs wanted to (damage eventually caused splits, but the source of the damage was irrelevant, and the game engine didn't have a good way to determine the source of damage when it came to such effects).

The tiny bit of truth to the myth: since damage caused splits, if you were on a team that split a mito, players using AoEs and targeting through the targetter would not just hit the target, but splash damage to the split mito, which could cause further splits.  But if you're only shooting at one mito, and not already splitting them like crazy for other reasons, AoEs had no detrimental effect.

[silvers1]

Don't remember any of these superstitions, but I do remember in the early Hami raids, tankers were constantly being told off for trying to DPS Hami - "you guys are useless".   A lot of derisive behavior in those raids - I didn't stick with them very long.

[LaughingAlex]

Its weird.  Cryptic seemed so open to dialog with the players during alpha and beta - even to a fault at times.  To me that seemed to almost completely end at release, or shortly before.  So speaking of Praetorian CoH, imagine a CoH where Stupid_Fanboy has no way to work with the devs to fix Claws, where I have no way of communicating to BaB that female attack animations were slower than male ones, where so many of the game changes that came from *sane* discussion with the players (I can mostly think of mine, but there were many players talking to devs going back to pre-release CoV and before) just don't happen.  The players collectively were not always right (in fact, by my scorecard they were mostly wrong) but they often had good ideas that the devs could use.  Possibly 33% of the entire game was in some way influenced directly by player feedback or player advocacy.  Imagine a CoH with all those features, good and bad, removed.  You could be looking at a very different game, played by much more bitter players than we had.

I did offer to help the CO devs work with defensive powers, and they should have known that my offer of help was not just player advocacy: I had been working with the CoH devs on objective improvements to CoH for a while by then.  I never even got back a "no" - just silence.  Its perhaps arrogant to believe they would want or need my help, but when its part of a pattern of not opening dialogs with *any* players, or at least very many of them (Paragon devs were by my estimates talking to *hundreds* of players at least intermittently) you really have to wonder what happened there.  Did something during beta or pre-release make them a lot more insular, or was there a fundamental difference in philosophy between forked-Cryptic and Paragon when it came to player communication.  Or were the rumors really true that they wanted nothing to do with anyone having any connection to City of Heroes (I never believed that rumor seriously, but there are times I wonder).

I'm not surprised CO has a god-mode, even if it is something that only works in certain contexts.  It seems, from what I've been able to gather so far, that the devs have made a lot of changes to the way defensive powers work mechanically, particularly the way they stack, combine, and operate in sequence.  That opens the door to a lot of possible ways for something to stack in an unintended way and becomes stronger than intended, for powers to work in a sequence that delivers more mitigation than foreseen, and for powers and gear to be bugged in subtle ways that are difficult to notice until you stack up a lot of them in the right build.  CoH had defensive rules that were easy to understand - if you were mathematically inclined - and did not have complex order of operations.  But if you block while surrounded by absorption while running invincibility, the order in which damage is negated, reduced, and absorbed significantly alters how much damage you ultimately take.  One mistake, and suddenly you're taking nothing but a string of ones.

A bug that would make you take absolutely no damage at all?  In a system like CO's, I would not bet against it.  A bug like that in CoH wouldn't last long.

Here's a link to the video.  Same guy made it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioT6En4B13s

[Ironwolf]

The CoH devs found out that in some ways the players came to understand the game play at times better than they did.


I know of 2 devs who were either in my SG Awesome Opposum - being one and another a friend who I am certain was Statesman because of some of the conversations we had. I also know during the conversation on how to stop power leveling I suggested the Super Sidekick (not my term) as a way to mitigate the bridging and to let lower level players be far more help.  The point was to make it actually more of a benefit for the players to help rather than doorsit as the team fights +6 groups.

I also found out how to herd despite the aggro cap - it could be done and you could hold roughly 3 X 8 groups near you as a tank with taunt and a taunt aura. It required moving constantly and attacking constantly in a wide circle and cutting back and forth across it.

[Ankhammon]

Another one: AoEs caused splits.  That was not only false, but basically impossible to even design into them at the time even if the devs wanted to (damage eventually caused splits, but the source of the damage was irrelevant, and the game engine didn't have a good way to determine the source of damage when it came to such effects).

The tiny bit of truth to the myth: since damage caused splits, if you were on a team that split a mito, players using AoEs and targeting through the targetter would not just hit the target, but splash damage to the split mito, which could cause further splits.  But if you're only shooting at one mito, and not already splitting them like crazy for other reasons, AoEs had no detrimental effect.

My favorite Hami myth was that if you used Dark Maisma's Fluffy that it would cause all the video cards to burst into flames and destroy everyones ability to see anything... Oh wait.

[Arcana]

I also found out how to herd despite the aggro cap - it could be done and you could hold roughly 3 X 8 groups near you as a tank with taunt and a taunt aura. It required moving constantly and attacking constantly in a wide circle and cutting back and forth across it.

Not only could you splash aggro across all those critters and herd them together, but most of them would not even shoot at you due to the peculiarities of critter AI.  In effect, running around in circles was a +32.5% defense buff.