TF/SF buffage: The spirit of Statesman lives on

[Trippy]

Heard about this on globals and couldn't believe what I was hearing but yup, they've actually made TFs/SFs that have people drop out *harder* than they were before. Like people didn't already hate most of the TFs, many of which were only practical with small teams and the only reason why they do them is for the Task Force Commander accolade.

I can speak from experience that this makes a *significant* difference in the completion times for the Positron TF, one of the most hated TFs Heroside. With 2 people (one below the minimum), no bosses will spawn other than the "fixed" ones (story-based). This means, for example, no Ruin Mages and no Clockwork bosses that spawn the little gears that just slow everybody down. With 3 people (the minimum) you do get bosses. That takes the completion time from around 3:30 - 4:00 for a duo (assuming you stealth what you can) to over 4+ hours having to slog through the bosses (my most recent 3 player Positron took 5 hours).

This is particularly problematic for TFs that have people drop out of them (which is probably a large percentage of them). If too many drop out the TFs will now be unfinishable (some were already that way that had particular tough AVs at the end) and all those hours put in would've been wasted assuming the completion badge was all you cared about.

I was hoping the acquisition would do away with all the "Vision" crap of Statesman but that does not seem to be the case now.

Announcement
Discussion

[UnSub]

It seems a stupid change to a system everyone had grown comfortable with over the past 3 years in such a short-sighted fashion.

It's also going to benefit farmers over casual players and drive the prices in the markets for TF recipe drops up, up, up.

Plus it also makes it much less likely people will join a TF / SF just to 'give it a shot'. If all it takes is one or two people to drop out for the TF to become unworkable, players will be much less inclined to even start one.

This is one of the few changes I've seen in CoH/V history that deserves a rollback.

[stark]

I'm guessing this is to address the problem where TF/SF groups would have everyone except one person log off, have that one person spawn the mission (for a group now of size one) then have everyone return and blow through mission.

[Trippy]

And why is this a problem?

[UnSub]

And why is this a problem?

Soft-loading a mission is obviously seen as a bit of an exploit.

However, the solution on offer here just screws casual players over.

[Trippy]

I still don't see why it's a problem. If people want to make the TFs easier for themselves, let them. TFs recipe rewards already have a limit on how often you can receive them. If that's the problem (people farming recipes) then either increase the minimum time between rewards or limit the number of TF recipe rewards you can get per day/week/whatever. This change does nothing, for example, to slow down the Katie TF recipe farming which are already typically done with a full or close to full team which can be completed in 45 minutes with a decent team or 30 minutes with a really good team.

[Nebu]

Preventing players from having fun is always a bad idea.  Even if a few hardcore people whine about it.  This is particularly the case in CoH/CoX as the endgame is really meaningless anyway.   MMO's could benefit from having fewer cockblocks, not more. 

[Phred]

I was hoping the acquisition would do away with all the "Vision" crap of Statesman but that does not seem to be the case now.

Announcement
Discussion

2 thumbs up on the title of this thread. :)

[tazelbain]

I don't see the problem.  TF have a minimum requirements.

[Glazius]

The problem is, most of the villain-side strike forces have a lower limit of 4. This is not the case for heroside. Especially the most frustrating hero TFs, the Shadow Shard, all of which require 8.

Positron's task force has a minimum of 3. It shouldn't spawn any bosses at 3 unless you're running on tenacious or unyielding, which spawn even or +1 groups for 4 people.

[UnSub]

I don't see the problem.  TF have a minimum requirements.

The problems with the change are:

1) It turned up as a missed patch note. Personally I don't care, but for a portion of the CoH/V community, it's proof of a conspiracy, the devs lied, they hatez uz, etc.

2) CoH/V has been out for almost 4 years. A number of changes made to CoH/V would seem to suggest that soloing a TF / completing it after losing a few players was well within the realm of what the devs considered acceptable (e.g. the AVs turn into EBs below a certain number of players on the team).

3) It's a hamfisted change that will see more work required to make it acceptable to heroside players. To adding to Glazius' comments, some TFs have a very high attrition rate (e.g. the stupidly long, overly repetitive Shard TFs) which the change will make even harder to get completed. Villain SFs, by comparison, are much sharper and punchier in their delivery and execution.

Hero TFs will need their minimum starting numbers changed and also their length reduced to offset the impact of the change.

4) It's a change that actually benefits farmers. Farmers can enter a TF and fight masses of spawns to their hearts' content without having to go to the effort of finding people to pad all their missions. All they need is a TF set-up (which would require a few minutes to find enough players to start one) then they can kick the team and start to solo spawns set for a full team.

5) It's going to reduce the flow of recipes into the in-game economy, which will see prices increase, which benefits farmers and external RMTers.

I respect that the devs don't like soft-loading tactics. But the change seems poorly thought out and has a much wider range of impact than just stopping soft-loading or reducing the speed with which recipe hunters can fly through a mission. It would have been a better idea to find out which TFs / SFs were frequently soft-loaded and why, then fix the 'why'.

There's a chance that this change heralds more changes coming to TFs / SFs, but until those changes are announced, this particular one looks pretty stupid.

[Trippy]

Positron's task force has a minimum of 3. It shouldn't spawn any bosses at 3 unless you're running on tenacious or unyielding, which spawn even or +1 groups for 4 people.

Positron does spawn the non-fixed (storyline) bosses with only 3. I've run it like 7 times on Heroic in the last month on my various alts. With my Scrappers I'll duo it with one of my Defenders or Controllers dual-box-style. With my Tankers I try to find a group so I can practice aggro management but one I dual-boxed as a duo as well. Pre-change a 2 person Posi never spawned a non-fixed boss. With 3 people, on some maps, bosses will spawn. This includes the FEMA rescue mission (one of the hardest missions) which will spawn Ruin Mages even with just 3 people and a couple of other maps will spawn the Vahz bosses (Eidolon) and CW bosses, though the CW bosses seem semi-random in that they don't always spawn with 3 people.

I ran Posi with the change in place with a dual-box duo and a triple-box trio and both sets of them spawned bosses though the numbers and types varied slightly. The duo go Ruins and Eidolons but no CW bosses. The trio got all 3 types.

The number of extra bosses that spawn with 3 is actually pretty small (the duo had to fight 4, the trio 6) so the bigger slow down with a duo (or a soloer) is the sheer number of extra mobs you have to wade through which is made even more brutal by the enemy types you have to fight.

[Trippy]

The problems with the change are:

[...]

The TFs are also now ripe for griefers and leechers.

[Glazius]

2) CoH/V has been out for almost 4 years. A number of changes made to CoH/V would seem to suggest that soloing a TF / completing it after losing a few players was well within the realm of what the devs considered acceptable (e.g. the AVs turn into EBs below a certain number of players on the team).

Taskforce AVs actually don't turn into EBs, ever. That only happens for AVs encountered in contact missions.

[UnSub]

2) CoH/V has been out for almost 4 years. A number of changes made to CoH/V would seem to suggest that soloing a TF / completing it after losing a few players was well within the realm of what the devs considered acceptable (e.g. the AVs turn into EBs below a certain number of players on the team).

Taskforce AVs actually don't turn into EBs, ever. That only happens for AVs encountered in contact missions.

Really? I could have sworn I fought an EB Clockwork King at the end of a TF...

[UnSub]

Positron posts an explanation:

Ok, I have been watching the boards and a lot of people are confused as to why we changed the spawn behavior in Task/Strike Forces to work for a minimum team size.

CoH was never designed to have a "Raid" in the original game. However, we saw a desire for a group of friends to get together and do some hard, lengthy content for good rewards. This is how Task Forces were born. They are the "casual" raid, something you can plan with your buddies that you are going to do on a certain day and for a certain amount of time, but you didn't need 30 or 60 people to pull it off.

That said, TF's (and SF's) have grown into their own. They are no longer the casual raid, but are run by pick up groups and nearly every character wants to get them done during their career. Personally I have no problem with the difference between how they were designed and how they are actually being played.

Where the problem comes in is where players are using our spawning system to reduce the challenge to trivial levels. When you load a map it places spawns on the map appropriate to your team size. If you have a team of 8, you will get huge spawns, if you have a team of 1, you will get a couple minions and the occassional lieutenant. Some of the "back end" spawns may not be spawned as soon as the map is loaded, it's a proximity thing. As you move through the map more and more spawns are loaded. If you ever wondered what the "trigger" for a cut-scene was it was simply "that is when that spawn was created."

Now TFs and SFs were made for the casual group of friends. This means that the group could persist over several game sessions. To do this we made it so that when you logged off, or lost connection, you didn't drop out of the group. Coming back into the game you would find that your character was still on the TF. This way you could run a TF "every Friday night from 8 to 9" and if all the participants agreed, you could progress the TF a little bit every week.

Now when you combine the spawn size system with the "you don't drop from team on logout" system, you have a system that is ripe for abuse. Players can start a TF with a team of 8 (or whatever the minimum number is for that TF), and right before entering every map, have all but one player log off. This single player can then stealth through the map (or simply run through it as a superspeed or high damage mitigating AT), and, when all the spawns have triggered for a team size of 1, tell everyone else they can log in now.

Suddenly the team of (x) is blowing through the map and its tiny spawns, getting the badge and Task Force reward at the end! Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns? I didn't think so either.

So we went back to the drawing board. We didn't want to change how TFs worked intrinsicly, but we did want to have a challenge remain. So we looked at minimum team size to start. Since you needed that many players to "commit" to starting the TF in the first place this was an excellent point at which to set the Minimum Spawn Size in the TF maps. So if you ran a TF with a minimum team size of 5 and you had 8 players, you would find that, when all 8 players were on line, you would get 8 person spawns. When one dropped out, it would fall to 7, another would go to 6, but if the team size dropped below 5, it would still spawn as if 5 people were on the map.

Now that said there are probably some "8 person" TFs that do not need to be spawning for 8 people all the time. The Shadow Shard comes to mind, and those will get looked at in a reduction of how many players it takes to start (and therefore how small the spawns will be at a minimum).

I hope this better explains why the change was made.

... nope, still a hamfisted change.

[tkinnun0]

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

That's the spirit!

You know, if your pickup groups want to run them within pickup group time-frames, why not let them without having to resort to tricks?

[Typhon]

I focused on that sentence as well, very fucked up.  I thought for awhile that it was Positron that was as much of a driving force of t3h nerfage as the Statesman, that sentiment pretty much convinces me that I was right.

[Reg]

That's the attitude that has made COH the one mmog I've played that I've never resubscribed to even for a month.

[Der Helm]

Just in case any of their developers lurk here.

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

[Glazius]

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

That's the spirit!

You know, if your pickup groups want to run them within pickup group time-frames, why not let them without having to resort to tricks?

The thing is, I've done all the TFs except those stupid Shadow Shard ones in pickup-group time. TFs as a whole need a revamp to be more like the Lady Grey one, but when the preferred strategy is "okay, you guys log off for 10 minutes" that's not right.

[Trippy]

The "fairness card" was the worst possible reason he could've played. The entire game is built on inequities. They should've stuck with the RMT excuse even though it was totally wrong.

[Typhon]

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

That's the spirit!

You know, if your pickup groups want to run them within pickup group time-frames, why not let them without having to resort to tricks?

The thing is, I've done all the TFs except those stupid Shadow Shard ones in pickup-group time. TFs as a whole need a revamp to be more like the Lady Grey one, but when the preferred strategy is "okay, you guys log off for 10 minutes" that's not right.

I'm not sure exactly what you are saying here (where I added emphasis).  I agree that when a preferred strategy for something in-game is to bypass it as much as possible then it needs to be fixed.  The way to fix it is to make the TF fun to do, not make it so that everyone "paid in time and debt" equally.

[tazelbain]

That's not right. It could funnest mission in the world and people are going bypass it because people are broken. Not to mention, farmers don't care about fun.

[Sky]

That's not right. It could funnest mission in the world and people are going bypass it because people are broken. Not to mention, farmers don't care about fun.

This is correct.

If some people want to be mmogtards about the way they play, fuck 'em. That's fair to people who play the game normally, ignore the douchebags who min/max and deprive themselves of an enjoyable experience. Or maybe they enjoy the content being a pushover. Who gives a fuck.

People wonder why I solo in mmo. Take a look around, folks.

[Llava]

In WoW you can have an insanely powerful max level player drag you through all the instances and help on all your quests and there's no penalty.

Sometimes it happens, mostly it doesn't.

I don't see the problem.

[Typhon]

That's not right. It could funnest mission in the world and people are going bypass it because people are broken. Not to mention, farmers don't care about fun.

I agree that there are broken people, I think that saying that all people are broken is a tad pessimistic... but that's not what we're talking about.  We're talking about something that is supposed to be an attraction within the game, and a significant portion of the player base either chooses not to make use of that attraction, or chooses to bypass it (specifically the Shadow Shard TFs). 

I'm saying that when that is the case, the developer's response shouldn't be to try to remove the loophole by which some players bypass the "fun", but rather the developer should spend some time figuring out why players aren't getting the most out of that particular attraction (or just leave it the hell alone and focus on adding something to the game).

With this crew in particular I'd say they have neither the developer cycles, nor the overabundance of paying customers to be wasting time "fixing" the wrong problem.  Making this content less soul-crushing seems like it would be the better fix.

[Phred]

It's been so long since I did a tf in CoH I can't remember but didn't being in a task force lock you out of accepting missions or joinging other groups? So that tight group of friends doing the taskforce slowly week after week couldn't do fuck all else between sessions? Personally I think the team should have accepted that their initial design for task forces sucked ass and fixed it, not nerfing it to bring it in line with the original broken intent.

[Trippy]

That's correct. You can street sweep and stuff but no missions are available including the ones you had open before you started the TF. In the *really* old days you couldn't even buy inspirations (baring a few contact bugs) or get them from your base (cause they didn't exist) so you had to rely purely on drops.

[Moosehands]

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

Translation:  We've discovered yet another way that players are advancing faster than we want them to, so we're going to nerf the shit out of it like we have for every publish since the first person hit the level cap.

[Glazius]

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

Translation:  We've discovered yet another way that players are advancing faster than we want them to, so we're going to nerf the shit out of it like we have for every publish since the first person hit the level cap.

Actually, it's faster now. The only thing slightly special about TFs was the recipe at the end, so somebody out for mad phat XPs can get a couple of temporary pads and discard them to fight huge spawns on their own.

[Llava]

Is this fair to those players who play the TF without using this trick? Those that have paid in time and debt fighting through the larger size spawns?

Translation:  We've discovered yet another way that players are advancing faster than we want them to, so we're going to nerf the shit out of it like we have for every publish since the first person hit the level cap.

Missed that whole bit about the experience curve being cut and experience rewards for enemies being increased, did we?

[UnSub]

Currently on Test is a revision to this system, where only players (online or not) on the team count towards the spawn size. If someone quits the TF / SF, then the spawn sizes change.

It's not optimal from my point of view, but it's a lot fairer than the original change.

[Trippy]

Yeah that was one of the suggestions in the mammoth thread. Doesn't fix the griefing problem but it's better than what we have now.

[Llava]

You could just kick them from the team if they try to grief, couldn't you?

Sounds fair to me.