Champions Online: The No-NDA Merged Edition

[Khaldun]

Learning in any context in life requires following up and constant reinforcement. If you tell people in the second quest, "Learn to block!" and then the game mechanics don't really incentivize blocking for the next 15-20 levels, I guarantee you a casual player is going to forget it ever happened. That's a disconnect that's in the design itself, not in the players. It's as if a player was taught to drink for mana in WoW but then the first time he ever had mana-related downtime was level 25 or so. A casual player who hadn't read a levelling guide would be, "Why am I out of mana, I never was before? It's taking so long to get it back, I'm bored, I quit this character". It doesn't happen that way because the drink-to-replenish mechanic is firmly required by the design from the very beginning and then consistently reinforced--if folks get to the point where mana regen makes drinking less common, it's at the endgame typically, when the mechanic has been mastered.

I really feel for a new-to-MMO player who is trying to intuit from the power descriptions what Tap, Charge, Maintain, and various effects like Fear, etc., actually mean. The descriptions are clear as mud for anyone who isn't fluent in MMOspeak.

[Malakili]

Learning in any context in life requires following up and constant reinforcement. If you tell people in the second quest, "Learn to block!" and then the game mechanics don't really incentivize blocking for the next 15-20 levels, I guarantee you a casual player is going to forget it ever happened. That's a disconnect that's in the design itself, not in the players.

You might be right.   I block pretty much every "special" attack by an enemy at any level throughout the entire game, and have since I kept getting knocked on my ass my specials in the tutorial on my character, so I guess it got reinforced for me early on. 

[Typhon]

Tuesday night I respec'd a couple of my characters because the patch notes said that we'd get new free respecs the next night.  Unfortunately they borked that, and until the fix it, I'm stuck with whatever I picked...

Which lead me to discovering that sword-focues telekinesis character is underperforming.  Character has two swords attacks; spamable rank-2 (maybe rank 3) moderate damage, and a rank-2ish cone damage (has a relatively short timer, does decent damage), a pbaoe blast, the defensive/offensive passive that telekinesis sports, a single target hold and a block enhancement.  This concept charcter is hard to play.  That I stacked End/Rec instead of Con which the defensive power keys on also hurts.  I wasn't setting out to create a gimp character, I was creating what I thought would be a high-dps melee character with a few tricks up his sleeve for emergencies.

He doesn't kill quickly, has poor/no capability to deal with larger groups of mobs and has poor damage mitigation.

Four henchman?  Forget it, or if you really need to kill them do a hit and run (or die once and return).  Get in a mission with two villians in a group?  You're probably gonna die at least once, do your best to take one of the villians with you.

I used the Power House to test out the sword and hold, but wihtout robots that fire back it's hard to get a handle on how much mitigation you'll be doing against multiple low-damage attacks.  The 4 hendhman groups are especially problematic.  

So, yeah, there are a few powersets out there for which it's possible to create poorly performing character.

What I'd like to see them do is have the retcon cost scale with how long you've had those power (not necessarily how deep they are in the selection tree).  Had a power for 20 minutes?  Pretty cheap to spec out of it.  Had it for 10 days?  Not so cheap.

[Malakili]

I used the Power House to test out the sword and hold, but wihtout robots that fire back it's hard to get a handle on how much mitigation you'll be doing against multiple low-damage attacks.  The 4 hendhman groups are especially problematic.  

Luckily they are planning on adding a "danger room" type thing to the power house with robots that will fight back.  I think it'll curb a lot of the problems, and I wish they had it at launch.

[Typhon]

Learning in any context in life requires following up and constant reinforcement. If you tell people in the second quest, "Learn to block!" and then the game mechanics don't really incentivize blocking for the next 15-20 levels, I guarantee you a casual player is going to forget it ever happened. That's a disconnect that's in the design itself, not in the players.

You might be right.   I block pretty much every "special" attack by an enemy at any level throughout the entire game, and have since I kept getting knocked on my ass my specials in the tutorial on my character, so I guess it got reinforced for me early on. 

This is how I play as well, unless I think I can mitigate the special attack in some other way.

In a related note, I'm disappointed that the game doesn't support ducking behind cover like CoX did.  NPCs won't fire on you if you are behind cover (mostly), but if they already have a queued up attack and then you duck for cover, the attacks still land (when pulling you need to duck and block).

[Typhon]

I used the Power House to test out the sword and hold, but wihtout robots that fire back it's hard to get a handle on how much mitigation you'll be doing against multiple low-damage attacks.  The 4 hendhman groups are especially problematic.  

Luckily they are planning on adding a "danger room" type thing to the power house with robots that will fight back.  I think it'll curb a lot of the problems, and I wish they had it at launch.

Yeah, I saw that in the notes, it should help a bit.  Hopefully they disable the death penalty (such as it is) against the robots in the Power House so you can get a "max-power" perspective.  Ideally the room is large enough so that multiple people aren't competing for the same robots (as is occasionally the case currently with the target room)

[Khaldun]

Heck, I could even imagine a casual player who mostly there because of a love of the genre thinking that getting knocked back hard is a natural and intended part of gameplay. Heck, if every once in a while, my toon went flying back and smashed through three floors of a building, I might almost let it happen just to see it. You can also selectively let some specials through depending on the circumstances of a fight--if I'm doing a "kill X" quest, I may just go ahead and let a special go if I know I can survive and regen my way through it while I burn down henchmen, etc. I tend to block more when I can see that the burn rate of the fight is going to require blocking to finish it. (Say, when I did Medusa at +4 level or if I see that I just pulled the Megadestroid's aggro during the OQ.)  It's only when a casual *has* to somehow finish a fight that's unfinishable without blocking, a passive defense, good energy management and so on that they're either going to get schooled about the game mechanics or get frustrated in a serious way.

[Sky]

Maybe I'm not strictly a casual player, but the tutorial did a good job of letting you learn blocking. There were a couple villain mobs that had some pretty nasty specials, and in the end of the tutorial that hero dude yells at you to block the big boss's special. Passive was pretty simple, energy management might be a gamer skill in general, I guess. The tap/charge is a bit funky, but I pretty much had the basics down by the end of the tutorial.

Then again, I played the tutorial many times because these type of games make me alt out like crazy. It's all about the theme heroes imo.

[Slyfeind]

I hate those line of sight reactions, because they always reset the fight. Nobody in the entire universe of Champions knows how to go through a door. I suspect they're trying to foil mob-pulling tactics, which might be fun in some cases. A lot of games do that. But most games also have mobs who go through doors. It's blatantly a dev versus player tactic, and not enemy versus hero.

Getting knocked back would be more fun if it didn't lead to die-respawn-go back. It's a bit better now that monster damage has been nerfed. And yes, blocking would be more fun if it was one of many ways to deal with a fight.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, you can't door pull really. There's a VIPER boss in Canada who gets seriously screwed because of it--he's inside a maze with a bunch of rocket turrets around him, but his AI doesn't really know how to cope with losing LOS on the players.

First time through the tutorials I smashed up the bosses with ease without blocking, though I understood the mechanic and the icons fine, just because it's possible to just burn the boss down, so why bother? It's only when you have to that it's worth the trouble of doing it. Later in the game you have to.

[Lantyssa]

Despite being an MMO veteran, new mechanics take a long time for me to learn.  I'm too busy being overwhelmed by all the new stuff, and as Khaldun said, if I'm shown a mechanic and then never need to use it, I forget about it.  This was very much a problem for me in beta testing.

[Ingmar]

The not-using-blocking thing surprises me. I used it from the moment it was introduced every time I was fighting something that did one of those P-PO-POW attacks, if I didn't I often got my ass kicked - of course this did coincide with me being accidentally set to 'avenger' mode and having no hit points to speak of.

[Khaldun]

Haven't played today, but I gather the servers went down suddenly at 2pm for emergency maintenance after characters started disappearing following the patch this morning. I would guess a rollback is incoming.

[Typhon]

Lol, it's hard not to laugh at how increasingly Keystone Copish the product maintanence of CO is getting, and that's from someone who (still) likes the game.

[Slyfeind]

Yeah, agreed. On the one hand, it's frustrating to watch their clownshoes antics, all the while thinking this is the same guy from Hellgate London, and wondering how much longer before the whole thing explodes.

But on the other hand, I'm still having fun and I'm looking forward to logging on as soon as I get home.

[Malakili]

9/24/09 Dev Chat

http://shadow.game-server.cc/CrypticDevChat/

Worth a read if you are playing the game, don't feel like pasting the whole damn thing in.

[Khaldun]

I am already freaking out at the "we're getting used to having a PTR, that was hard, be nice to us" right off the bat. It's kind of like saying, "Hai guys, I am making a movie, and I am finding this thing called 'the editing studio' very difficult to get used to, I just want to use my daily rushes." I mean, it's weird, isn't it, at this moment in the history of these things to be treating a PTR like some freaky innovation that is  hard to adopt?

The stuff on healers and aggro just seems kind of incoherent, like they scarcely realized that this issue would come up.

I also see that the overreliance on a certain style of entirely quantitative datamining is still Roper's watchword. There are other devs in this industry who have this problem, but he's about the worst afflicted.

Did I read it right that Roper is the actual voice of Foxbat in the game? Now I actually do hate the guy, if that's true.

[Malakili]

I am already freaking out at the "we're getting used to having a PTR, that was hard, be nice to us" right off the bat. It's kind of like saying, "Hai guys, I am making a movie, and I am finding this thing called 'the editing studio' very difficult to get used to, I just want to use my daily rushes." I mean, it's weird, isn't it, at this moment in the history of these things to be treating a PTR like some freaky innovation that is  hard to adopt?

Yeah, I agree that was particularly lame.   Particularly the "oh yeah, we were just SO focused on the economic part of the patch that we didn't notice that, even though people gave us feedback about it."


 On the plus side, "Powerhouse 2.0" should be here within a month.  Celestial power set still seems cool, and I'm looking forward to that.

[Kageru]

The main thing the tutorial doesn't teach you is that your powerset may not have a passive defence, indeed most don't, but you really do need one and need to consider your stance. Also the real strength in block is combining it with over time effects. Block and regen or some sort of self heal, or block and an AoE DoT are really powerful. Probably too powerful really, how they can balance the damage taken while blocking so it is remotely challenging without making it a potential one-shot kill to a non blocking character will be interesting to watch. It's also mechanically pretty boring. The ultimate tanking strategy is holding down your block key and doing nothing as much as possible?

[Malakili]

The main thing the tutorial doesn't teach you is that your powerset may not have a passive defence, indeed most don't, but you really do need one and need to consider your stance. Also the real strength in block is combining it with over time effects. Block and regen or some sort of self heal, or block and an AoE DoT are really powerful. Probably too powerful really, how they can balance the damage taken while blocking so it is remotely challenging without making it a potential one-shot kill to a non blocking character will be interesting to watch. It's also mechanically pretty boring. The ultimate tanking strategy is holding down your block key and doing nothing as much as possible?

Well, you don't NEED a passive defense, but part of the problem is that is REALLY helps when you are new to the game.  I'm finding myself doing just fine, even better maybe, on my offensive passive character, but the margin for error is much smaller.

As for the blocking issue, I think its fine.  Some bosses in the 5man content, and especially the "cosmic" level guys, hit like dump trucks, and you really do need to block as much as possible to survive.  Its tricky to manage threat generation and damage mitigation.  But for solo stuff, its fine.  Block + Heal makes you very survivable, but theres nothing wrong with that really.

[UnSub]

Lol, it's hard not to laugh at how increasingly Keystone Copish the product maintanence of CO is getting, and that's from someone who (still) likes the game.

I agree.

One of the issues appears to be Cryptic scrambling to manage both frontend and backend systems at once - last time NCsoft did a lot of the admin that Cryptic are now preoccupied for. It's splitting attention of decision makers and leading to a lot the miscommunication issues I think we're seeing the results of.

As for ChampO being a test case for STO: 1) it is for all the admin+ systems that will be used for STO and 2) the thought has occurred to me that the PC version is looking increasingly like a paid beta test for the Xbox 360 version (assuming it ever makes it out). From that view, huge launch day patches mean less if the Xbox 360 version launches smoothly.

[Bandit]

But on the other hand, I'm still having fun and I'm looking forward to logging on as soon as I get home.

Pretty much how I feel about CO, interested enough to ignore development hiccups and just actually play the game. 

Got a might/power armour (CON/STR) character up to about level 30 last night.  Missions getting very interesting, including the Nemesis arcs.  I would recommend trying the Destroyer Robot Factoy (Battle of Detroit Museum) at level 28.  The Boss battle is pretty epic and well scripted - makes me hungry for the game when content like that is available.

[Malakili]

But on the other hand, I'm still having fun and I'm looking forward to logging on as soon as I get home.

Pretty much how I feel about CO, interested enough to ignore development hiccups and just actually play the game. 

Got a might/power armour (CON/STR) character up to about level 30 last night.  Missions getting very interesting, including the Nemesis arcs.  I would recommend trying the Destroyer Robot Factoy (Battle of Detroit Museum) at level 28.  The Boss battle is pretty epic and well scripted - makes me hungry for the game when content like that is available.

Viper Nest in Monster Island is even better than the Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory (at least in my opinion).  Definitely give it a shot when you get high enough (i think its around level 35).

[kaid]

I am already freaking out at the "we're getting used to having a PTR, that was hard, be nice to us" right off the bat. It's kind of like saying, "Hai guys, I am making a movie, and I am finding this thing called 'the editing studio' very difficult to get used to, I just want to use my daily rushes." I mean, it's weird, isn't it, at this moment in the history of these things to be treating a PTR like some freaky innovation that is  hard to adopt?

The stuff on healers and aggro just seems kind of incoherent, like they scarcely realized that this issue would come up.

I also see that the overreliance on a certain style of entirely quantitative datamining is still Roper's watchword. There are other devs in this industry who have this problem, but he's about the worst afflicted.

Did I read it right that Roper is the actual voice of Foxbat in the game? Now I actually do hate the guy, if that's true.

Ya with statements like that I can understand why healing agro is totally insane. Right now the best way to play a tank in the game is to grab a heal or two and heal people. Admittedly given how the game is setup its perfectly easy to setup a tank/healer pretty easily. Take invuln and a heal that is not interuptable and you are VERY sturdy.

The problem comes if you try to make a dedicated support/healer class. First off you get ZERO credit in PQs from support activity only doing damage. Second the best heals get interupted with damage due to the reinforcment mechanic and agro mechanics pretty much the second you toss even a tiny heal you now have agro.

How my group got around this was everybody in the group has a heal so we round robin the healing so if one person is forced to block turtle the others can cover them. Its silly as hell but its about the only way we have found a good way to work it.

Also the different stances are pretty ponintless currently at least agrowise. The tank stance sometimes hurts your agro ability because it gimps your equillibrium so you don't have much of an alpha strike to get the initial agro and does not boost your threat.

My character is super statted to presence our "tank" is super statted to presence me in support stance her in tank stance one tiny heal will instantly pull agro no matter how long she has beat on mobs.

[Tmon]

Then again, I played the tutorial many times because these type of games make me alt out like crazy. It's all about the theme heroes imo.

I have too, which is odd for me since I'm not usually an altaholic, but I keep having ideas for new characters.  So far my highest is a Melee/weapons build that hit 20 the other day.  the game seems fairly friendly to my jump in dink around for an hour or so and log out play style and much to my surprise I'm not planning on canceling at the end of the included month.

[kaid]

The main thing the tutorial doesn't teach you is that your powerset may not have a passive defence, indeed most don't, but you really do need one and need to consider your stance. Also the real strength in block is combining it with over time effects. Block and regen or some sort of self heal, or block and an AoE DoT are really powerful. Probably too powerful really, how they can balance the damage taken while blocking so it is remotely challenging without making it a potential one-shot kill to a non blocking character will be interesting to watch. It's also mechanically pretty boring. The ultimate tanking strategy is holding down your block key and doing nothing as much as possible?

Well, you don't NEED a passive defense, but part of the problem is that is REALLY helps when you are new to the game.  I'm finding myself doing just fine, even better maybe, on my offensive passive character, but the margin for error is much smaller.

As for the blocking issue, I think its fine.  Some bosses in the 5man content, and especially the "cosmic" level guys, hit like dump trucks, and you really do need to block as much as possible to survive.  Its tricky to manage threat generation and damage mitigation.  But for solo stuff, its fine.  Block + Heal makes you very survivable, but theres nothing wrong with that really.

It would have been good for them to talk about these a bit. I have helped more than a few people who were frustrated as hell with the game by simply helping them level to their next power pick and talking them into picking regen or invuln. Either of those two powers can change a character who is dying a lot into a pretty darn potent force who at very least can live to run away.

My biggest gripe about champions is that for such a wide open game for powers and abilities it does a terrible job of giving documentation or information on how to make informed choices about powers. There is just so much there its terribly easy to screw yourself and not really have any good in game support on how to avoid that.

[Ratman_tf]

I cancelled my subscription. Another game that would have been fine as a multiplayer game, but doesn't stand out as a MMOG.
I'll put it on the list of games I play when I get burned out on WoW.  

[Malakili]

I cancelled my subscription. Another game that would have been fine as a multiplayer game, but doesn't stand out as a MMOG.
I'll put it on the list of games I play when I get burned out on WoW.  

I'm still really enjoying playing around with the power sets and making all sorts of builds, I think thats basically what you have to enjoy to want to be playing this game right now, because the content is so limited. 

[Khaldun]

Pretty much: it's just a really elaborate engine for playing around with powersets and animations. Actually I spend more time trying to figure out what's a fun set of animations that I do trying to min-max powers per se. I love two-gun mojo plus superspeed plus bullet ballet for the last smidgen of a mob's health just because of how it looks. For some reason, I find lining up three henchmen with a sniper rifle shot and getting all three one-shotted bizarrely hilarious, so I'll also spend an unhealthy amount of time just circling around for the perfect shot.

Same with my Might guy--I like the animations even though some of the Might powers blow, as per the earlier discussion.

But it's not enough to keep me around. I'm already heartily sick of 95% of the content, such as it is.

[Montague]

But it's not enough to keep me around. I'm already heartily sick of 95% of the content, such as it is.

Same. It grabbed me for about a month but I haven't felt any need to log in so cancelled. Funny thing is that I don't have any one singular strident objection to the game, there just isn't any "stickyness" to the game for me.

[Malakili]

Funny thing is that I don't have any one singular strident objection to the game, there just isn't any "stickyness" to the game for me.

This seems to be what a lot of people are saying in the "I quit" threads that are plaguing the official boards.   

A lot of:

"I like this game, but..."
"This game is good, but..."

Granted, any MMO is going to have a lot of drop off after the free month at this point.  A lot of people are saying "If the game was the same game it had been the day before release, I would still be playing" but frankly, I don't buy that at all.  Sure, the nerfs lost them some customers, but I have a feeling the people complaining about that would be quitting for lack of content anyway.

[Count Nerfedalot]

A lot of people are saying "If the game was the same game it had been the day before release, I would still be playing" but frankly, I don't buy that at all.  Sure, the nerfs lost them some customers, but I have a feeling the people complaining about that would be quitting for lack of content anyway.

True, but would they be quitting with a more favorable impression of the game and its developers had they been allowed to play the "fun" version of the game instead of the nerfed one? 

I still maintain that a developer will profit more from the good will generated by players having a blast playing through a too-short game at a fun pace than they would by artificially slowing the game down to the point where players feel the grind and have to repeat content just to finish the game.  But it seems the suits or somebody just don't get it.  *Somebody* is freaking out when they learn that the game will release with less than a month's worth of content, so they decree that the progress must be stretched to at least two months in order to get more people signed up on the subscription gravy train.  Nervermind that at the end of the first month, they still get a massive surge of cancellations.  Only this time it is from people who are annoyed with the company rather than enthusiastic fans who are chomping at the bit for another ride.

On a related point, I think a chart of a player's perceived rate of progress vs fun would look like a standard bell-curve.  Go outside the sweet spot in the direction of slowing down just a little results in a disproportionately large reduction in fun.  But speeding up progress beyond some point also results in diminishing returns of fun.  You actually need to give the player a little time to enjoy his latest achievement before throwing the next one at him, or you waste some of the potential "fun" that achievement could have provided.  Of course, only WoW and EQ2 are in the position of having to worry about outlevelling their content too fast, so not many designers have had to deal with that half of the equation! LOL

[Sky]

Of course, only WoW and EQ2 are in the position of having to worry about outlevelling their content too fast, so not many designers have had to deal with that half of the equation!

Not only does EQ2 have mentoring, but they just put in Chrono-locking, where you can set your characters level to a lower level. No more out-levelling content problem, if it works out.

Also, I haven't played WoW since launch, but doesn't EQ2 have a lot more added content since launch?

[Murgos]

EQ2 probably has 3 or 4 times more content now for the 0-50 trek than it launched with.

The chrono-locking (temporarily set your level to an arbitrary value less than your current level) along with the changes to rare spawn fabled item drops is a really good thing.  Particularly when you look at the amount of Heritage quests/dungeons out there that most people probably outleveled before they had a chance to do.

[Sky]

I kind of think it may be one of the best ideas in a while. Let people pick and choose where they want to play rather than fencing them off from the earlier content. Unfortunately, it will just boil down to a few guild groups burning through old content for AA, but a man can dream. How would those dreams be crushed by the unwashed masses, otherwise?