Broken Toys

I’m really enjoying it, but to be fair I got a really good handle on the character development system before I rolled my first character. That made it a lot easier for me as I don’t deal well with “frustratingly hard frustratingly early”.

I really think that us players are 90% of the problem. We are so used to how the last huge batch of games did it (and especially WoW) that anything different must be broken, too hard, unfair, or poorly balanced. I don’t mean your post, but just the comments I have seen in game.

Take today for instance. I made a character specifically for PvP inthe Hero games. I saw several players over and over again throughout the day. Many of them were very upset with my power selection and ranting about my liberal use of them the entire time. So, here are some other folks who made characters apparently just for PvP like I did, played them all day, and they PURPOSELY messed up their characters? I mean they weren’t out in PvE, they were standing there just like me queueing for match after match. You can have ANY power you want, and still complain that some power is unfair? These weren’t roleplayers with fancy costumes or character bios… they were generic looking heroes with nearly leetspeak names.

So the people that know a little are upset they are getting knocked back and held, and sadly the people who know VERY little are getting clobbered because I read up on what would make me successful in that specific area of gameplay. I feel really bad for that latter group, because it IS very easy to mess up your character early on to the point that the game becomes frustrating.

I do really enjoy the game though. It’s entirely possible to make character of any gaming style (caster, meleer, support, healer, hybrid, etc) and be successful. We, the players, seem to be getting more upset with abilities and mechanics based on their titles than how it makes the game play for us and I don’t really get that.

For instance to the above: I tried helping some folks easy ways to immediately improve characters that were having trouble. One such way was taking Invulnerabilty when out soloing. The straight answer more often than not was “I don’t want to because my character is a an Offensive class”. And there’s a skill that, if you take it, is completely transparent to your gameplay experience save for it helping you take less damage when hit. What can you do when we, the players, become that hooked on labels?

Anyhow, I’m venting a bit ( a lot). Really has nothing to do with your points as I know you fully realize what you need to do to make the experience easier. It just amazes me that we are seeing games making even small attempts to be different and players are still trying to squeeze it into a box. If it doesn’t fit in the box the Devs must surely hate them

Just blame Bill Roper for everything!!

At least that’s what one thread on the forums did when the nerf was released. I think it was titled something like I got flagshipped again.

Maybe the spoonfed approach that WoW gives players is right. This spend hours figuring out combat, gear, skills etc – on top of a game with little/buggy content could be a major turnoff. I found WoW to be easy to play, but difficult to master – thats probably the sweet spot for a mmo since it helps ramp the player up (hopefully – I’m still trying to master it, and I’ve met plenty who are terrible at it).

This isn’t 1995ish everquest anymore. Champions online – while it was fun and everything really didn’t hold my attention for some reason… I’ll keep playing around with it – but for some reason its probably not going to having any staying power.

Er… Where did all the previous comments go? They're not lost, are they?

Haven’t played Champions but this instancing system sounds like a great idea. It always sucks when people you know play on completely different servers and there’s no good way (or an expensive one) to team up with them. Is it like Guild Wars in that you can hop between european/american/asian instances as you like?

The best part of CO that I’ve seen thus far — it’s a game in active development. It should probably still be in beta, arguably, but it DOES feel that people are working on things, and that every day, things are a bit better. Problems DO feel like they’re being looked at, and even if every response is a form letter, the problem-ticket mechanism is such that I want to buy an account for everyone at work, point at it, and say “SEE?! THIS IS WHAT WE NEED.”

So I has hopes.

Granted my build kicks ass, but it’s one of three that all seem to be doing pretty well.

Whatever it is that WoW does, it grew the Western MMO market by an order of magnitude. Of course there are many other ways to make an MMO, but so far, in ten years, there are a bunch of Western MMOs with a high-water mark measured in hundreds of thousands of subs and one that measures in millions.

Until a game company comes up with a Western MMO that attracts and holds a similar subscriber base, all MMOs will benchmark against WoW. There would only appear to be two routes to breaking this pattern: a game that does what WoW does better than WoW, or one that finds a new paradigm that equals or betters WoW’s.

Until that happens, all games are going to have to put up with their systems and gameplay being held up to the WoW standard. Of course, that doesn’t mean the designers have to copy WoW. They have the choice of settling for a much smaller subscriber/revenue base or having better ideas. The former isn’t attractive to the people paying the bills and the latter requires talent, imagination and maybe genius that can’t just be bought off the shelf.

I don’t think superhero fight games with ultra-modifiable costumes/power sets are set to be the future of MMO gaming, somehow, no matter how much the respecs cost.

He needs less hair and the fat prune cheeks.

Example:

http://www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth/North-Korean-leader-Kim-Jong-Il.jpg

Let me know if there is a way to unsee it.

The good news is, they’ve clearly stated that they need to rebalance respecs. (Although they think what they need to do is pump more money into the economy rather than lowering the price of them, which has the same effect)

They also seem to be talking about expanding the Powerhouse to simulate actual combat, which should be awesome.

“If your end-game is exploring powersets, and you can try them all out over a weekend with cheap respecs, then you have no reason to stay subscribed. It’s really as simple as that.”
@Theocrat,
Quoted for truth.

If you assume that there *is* a “cookie-cutter” build that is superior to all else, then why are you purposely gimping people by making it expensive to switch to it? And why did you create such an unbalanced opportunity to begin with?

If you assume that the cookie-cutter build *is NOT* superior to everything else, then why do you care if people switch to it? Why not let them try it cheaply and then move away when they realize there’s other options?

I like how airtight the logic is… however, it seems to me that Champions Online is rather complicated in that there is no cookie-cuter build. It’s something to do with the awkwardness of transitioning between sets on the onset and the way the statistics are balanced to bring everybody to focus on different paths.

Roper has either somehow managed to evade templating entirely (which is a formidable game design feat I thought beyond him) or it’s so deeply buried that it will take some time for “perfect builds” to surface.

At least, my investigations into finding such a build seem to be digging me deeper in the opposite direction. It’s odd, but Champions Online seems to reward a generalist more than it does a specialist. Characters which attack, defend, and support seem to be able to do these things more effectively than one who is built entirely to do one of the three. Focusing on just two stats is sure to result in a dead-end character.

Look, they just CAN’T give away respecs. It’s never going to happen.

If you’re going to declare absolutes, you should probably not refute the existence of things that clearly actually happened just a few days ago.

There is even less of an end-game than CoH had when it launched. The end-game is to roll and alt and explore another powerset

That was about the same way I treated CoH’s end game, actually. I hear they’ve got some interesting end-game content in Champions Online with these “UNITY “missions — I’ll have to really give it a spin to tell for sure.

Fan: Spoiled WoW noob stop complaining!

When they stop using examples out of WoW to explain to Cryptic why they’re doing it (the “it” will vary) wrong, I’ll stop saying this.

The truth is Cryptic’s adjustments go way the hell off from where they need to be. I just don’t get it.

Apparently, that’s the way Roper rolls. I’ve an interview where he describes the process of balancing like steering a ship, and the further off course you are, the further you need to overcompensate to eventually put the ship back on course.

A long note on defensive powers…

From the time defensive powers were roughly in the shape we see them now, to the end of open beta, there have only been two overpowered defensive passives: regeneration and invincibility. Invincibility was overpowered for the longest time, only being nerfed just as open beta began (I think). Regeneration was never nerfed, because somehow, it flew under the radar while everyone bitched about invincibility actually making you invincible. Of course, after invincibility was nerfed, regeneration was the go-to “best defensive passive” and now everyone finally got to see why.

Personal Force Field, Defiance, and Lightning Reflexes were always shitty in some fashion. LR did not become acceptable until you had over 150 dex and were at level cap, and even then the rates were slightly worse than regeneration. Defiance blows, unless you have an endurance problem but no defensive problems (lol right), in which case the end boost is really good. PFF had a brief stint where it was overpowered according to some, but ultimately it never overcame the massive drawback of losing the shield in either a long fight or a fight against multiple foes.

The big “if” here is the bigger picture. As it was, having a defensive passive was seen as necessary. It’s been that way for a long, long time, even when defensive powers operated much differently half a year ago. Offensive and utility passives never, ever, EVER matched the significance of a defensive passive.

So, if you need to make a balance issue out of it, what are your options? The logical path would be to improve all the offensive and utility passives until players feel they can give up the defensive passive without gimping themselves. The other path, less obviously logical, is “bringing defensive passives in line with other passives” by nerfing the fuck out of them. The former is awesome and maintains the status quo of being able to pick some crappy powers and make it to 40 in a few days. The latter brings a whole new shift in the way the game plays, as now you’re going to die a lot and spend more time being careful now that defensive powers don’t improve your character anymore than an offensive or utility would.

It’s quite possible I’m giving cryptic more benefit of the doubt than I should. If it helps any, I personally think much of cryptic staff is god awful at planning ahead and their design philosophy is both highly ignorant and self centered. What we see now are the results of no real communication, no solid plan, and blissful inexperience, all of which I have witnessed and inferred during the long closed beta process. It was obvious to me just what a terrible mishmash of drama and broken mechanics this game was headed into as early as late febuary.

A long note on defensive powers…

Generally I agree with what you’re saying here, although you did omit that the idea behind the different defensive passives were that they operated on different mechanics:

Invulnerability is meant to blunt a series of smaller attacks.
Lightning Reflexes is meant to avoid larger, more ponderous attacks.
Personal Force Field is meant to provide protection for shorter engagements.
Regeneration becomes stronger the longer an engagement lasts.

It’s an ambitious focus that’s naturally quite tricky to balance because you’re coming at the question of defense from two tangents both ways: size of attack and length of battle.

A lot of the reason why Regeneration is currently the best overall defensive passive is because you can always block, severely blunting incoming damage. If you’re regenerating while blocking, this can functionally make you invincible. In PvP, you can break blocks with taunts, but in PvE there’s very little of that going on (outside of high magnitude holds). It’s definitely a newbie favorite for this reason.

All the rest of the passives are now working-as-intended in that they’re not supposed to be 100% of your defense. You’re supposed to supplement them with an active defense (a tap power like Unbreakable), heals, and/or crowd control. Even a lot of firepower can do the trick, as defeated enemies tend not to be much of a threat.

It was definitely a bit of a rude shifting of gears at release after playing 3 days of a pre-order when a defensive passive was all you needed to convert the game into superheroic/easy mode, but they’ve given everybody a free retcon, so people who are capable of not living in the past have adaptedby now.

What we see now are the results of no real communication, no solid plan, and blissful inexperience, all of which I have witnessed and inferred during the long closed beta process. It was obvious to me just what a terrible mishmash of drama and broken mechanics this game was headed into as early as late febuary.

Though most of my comments here have somewhat been on the side of Cryptic and Champions Online in general, I have to agree somewhat with the ‘no real communication’ and ‘no solid plan’ aspects of this critique in that there have been signs of communication issues and in that the game was largely in flux pretty late into development.

However, maybe it’s not “blissful inexperience” we’re seeing here so much as Champions Online is attempting experimentation in the direction of something new and interesting. In a genre full of clones, this is highly commendable, and have next to no sympathy for the casual WoW player demanding the game conform more when there’s 1001 titles already happy to do that for them.

If CO truly avoids cookie-cutter builds, then that’s pretty interesting. It does sound like there are definitely “anti-cookie-cutter” builds though, ie. builds that don’t work and that you don’t want.

I think a power gamer like myself can always pick out something that’s wrong with their character, and if we dwell overmuch on these flaws then our characters will seem like an “anti-cookie-cutter” build after awhile — better off rerolling than dealing with it.

However, even in these cases, we do have a considerable amount of flexibility. It’s tricky when we’re talking about something we took back at level 5 and we’re no level 20 – there’s no retconning that out. However, if I take a few more levels, good investment of advantage or power pints and smooth out the kinks. In the long run, if I take my hero to level 40 and I have something back at level 5 I don’t like about them, I’m not necessarily SOL – technically, what else is there to do at 40 but grind influence I can spend retconning back to level 5 with, anyway?

Gah, could someone helpfully tell me what the right tags are for this board?

I haven’t played CO yet, although I’m sure I’ll give it a try eventually. None of my statements are a critique or commentary on Champions Online specifically, just comments in this post and on classless skill systems.

With that said, I think some of the observations that “the players” are the problem is laughable. I’m sure game developers around the world wish they could say “Oh, the players just don’t get it” and pretend like there isn’t a problem. You can’t ignore your player’s expectations; they are your customer base. Dismissing them leads to pain and subscriber loss.

If everyone in the world played WoW and expect something a certain way, you need to understand that in advance, and even if you make different design choices, you need to actively design something that converts people. You can’t ignore the elephant in the room and expect that it won’t break your china set.

Honestly, expecting your game to be intuitive to play without stereo instructions isn’t really much for players to ask for. Requiring research and spreadsheets to make character decisions is going to naturally attract a niche, not a mainstream audience.

With that in mind, any open, choice-centered skill system need to be designed with the following in order to be effective:

1. A clear and effective method in game for conveying enough information to players to make informed decisions, regardless of their out of game research habits.

2. All powers should work effectively enough that you can’t gimp yourself. Yes, balance is tricky, and it may be impossible to make every build combination as effective as every other, but there should be obvious effort on the part of the development team. Variety builds and focused builds should not be so different in power that only the most hardcore with spreadsheets are having fun.

3. Experimentation should be encouraged early on among new players, with an easy method for new players to undo a bad decision. Let the people who are learning how to play learn how to play without punishing them, and create a clear transition for them so they know when the game means business.

Now, from the feedback I’ve seen, they fail at 1, they’re half there on 2, and they’re deciding whether to do 3. That doesn’t bode well, but until I play it myself, that will be the extent of my observations.

It’s blockquote instead of quote and inequality signs instead of brackets.

Ahh, so more traditional tag formats. I can live with that.

On topic, since WoW keeps coming up, does anyone remember just how bad WoW’s talent trees were on launch, particularly compared to what they were two years in? I played a feral Druid, myself. You’d have a hard time convincing me that CO’s launch is somehow worse than typical for the genre.

If anything, I’d call the speed of CO’s responsiveness frightening. People are certainly freaked out by it, right?

(The Powerhouse does need a basement level with one room with mobs who fight back, and another empty one for duels, the first room much more than the second, I’ll strongly agree there.)

I would argue that a game in which the players need learn nothing to play is begging to be boring and derivative. If that’s what the player’s want, there’s plenty of clones available to service them.

Let there be at least one game that isn’t so very mired on the beaten path to be completely intuitive, and any who come there to demand it conform to simply be told to leave for the ample offerings already available to them.

No problem. Just expect it to be a nice niche game.

@geldonyetich: WAR.

But then it let them go.

On the subject of WoW, I’m increasingly thinking that what bothered me so much about that game was not so much that it aimed at the casual market, but instead that it turned every casual aspect of the game into a repetitious treadmill to achieve some further aim down the road. In other words, you had to do that raid, even though you had run through it a dozen times. Extremely successful as a business model, but not so much as an MMO.

On the other hand, I’m playing Dungeons & Dragons Online these days, now that it has gone semi-free, and I can see why it was mostly a failure as an MMO. The over-instancing of everything, and a rather bland game world where even the most epic quest lines, in the larger scheme of things, seem to have barely more importance than brushing your teeth. It never felt *massive* in any way. However, to quote a friend also playing it, it was the purest multiplayer experience he had seen in a long time, and at that level, the game is a success. Certainly the most fun I’ve obtained from any MMO in over a year.

The Free 2 Play model really suits it, doesn’t it? DDO had more in common with Guild Wars than EverQuest. The gameplay wasn’t bad, but the “massive” wasn’t there.

At the same time, I’m not sure the F2P model will be successful in this case, as it has been implemented on an existing game rather than built into it from the start. So far, to be honest, I have seen no compelling argument to spend money on it.

Quite a coincidence that this has been brought up just before Mr. Jennings posted news of Dungeon Runners’ closure.