Shinryu wrote:
I'm very concerned about the level restriction being in place and all of my active characters are Machinists. *shrug*
Given that, what's the concern for you? Is it the worry that this will turn other people off on the story, or is it something else that hasn't been brought up yet?
MatrixRefugee wrote:
and much as I hate to do this, I'm begging you along with everyone else: Please, remove the level restrictions on the crit missions.
So you can get beat up by high level NPCs, or were you thinking of another change as well (like reverting to the more generic gameplay of using only level-scaled NPCs [EDIT:] in generic mission areas in only Richland/Westview neighborhoods)?
Rarebit wrote:
MatrixRefugee wrote:and much as I hate to do this, I'm begging you along with everyone else: Please, remove the level restrictions on the crit missions.So you can get beat up by high level NPCs, or were you thinking of another change as well (like reverting to the more generic gameplay of using only level-scaled NPCs [EDIT:] in generic mission areas in only Richland/Westview neighborhoods)?
Easily solved, a lvl 50 runs the mission with the lowbies at their own speed. I honestly don't know why everyone keeps saying, remove the level restriction. Its not a difficult work about. We've had to do worse things to work with problems.
All i can say is, i'm not wanting the missions made easier so that lowbies can do them. Most of the general population is lvl 50 anyways.
Anyone says they want to run the mish or wonder about them. Invite them and show, thats what i'v been doing (makes the spawns easier aswell.)
Thanks for your posts Rarebit. While I'm still not convinced the New Approach is a good move overall, I can at least say that your view and position regarding the subjects you mentioned seems to be about as fair and accurate as possible.
M45T3RM1ND wrote:Personally, Rarebit's seeming lack of compassion toward the concerns of the playerbase are very offputting. Maybe NCsoft has just spoiled me rotten, because they take ALL player input into consiedration on the City of Heroes team. Maybe it's time to cut down on my MMO expendature.Considering all players is what I'm trying to get better at; the trick for me is not getting fooled into thinking that forum posts represent all players. The forum is by far the most direct form of feedback I'm able to gather, but I have to remember that it isn't necessarily representative of all of our players, and is very prone to reactionary outbreaks and drama--people trying to sway public opinion or color my own impressions.Also, I'm aware that I don't properly sugar-coat my replies; I'm just a developer, rather than someone skilled in telling people what they want to hear. If we had a larger staff on this project they probably wouldn't let me jump in and make posts like this whenever I have the urge to say something.
M45T3RM1ND wrote:
Personally, Rarebit's seeming lack of compassion toward the concerns of the playerbase are very offputting. Maybe NCsoft has just spoiled me rotten, because they take ALL player input into consiedration on the City of Heroes team. Maybe it's time to cut down on my MMO expendature.
Considering all players is what I'm trying to get better at; the trick for me is not getting fooled into thinking that forum posts represent all players. The forum is by far the most direct form of feedback I'm able to gather, but I have to remember that it isn't necessarily representative of all of our players, and is very prone to reactionary outbreaks and drama--people trying to sway public opinion or color my own impressions.
Also, I'm aware that I don't properly sugar-coat my replies; I'm just a developer, rather than someone skilled in telling people what they want to hear. If we had a larger staff on this project they probably wouldn't let me jump in and make posts like this whenever I have the urge to say something.
Well, the issue here is that an update I was excited about when reading your post about how you were planning to run the new model has turned into a big drawback for me, and I really prefer the old style of calling in to Tyndall/Flood/Grey for the missions. And I'm obviously not the only one here who feels the way I do about the new system. It was a novel idea, but definitely munsoned the game up for me. New Crit Day was the highlight of my week. Now, I'm kinda stuck without.
You don't need to "sugar-coat" replies, no. But a little empathy wouldn't hurt. I realize you're trying to breathe new life into a game that, let's face it, SoE couldn't give a crap about (and never wanted to begin with), and I support that readily. But you tried to fix the one aspect of MxO that wasn't broken, and now that's broken too. There are things you could've done (for example, item storage, which is something EVERYONE has asked for for the 3.5 years I've been on MxO) that would've gone a long way to getting MxO where it needed to be. The missioning system was fine. Now it's not.
The_Bruceter wrote:
Rarebit wrote:MatrixRefugee wrote:and much as I hate to do this, I'm begging you along with everyone else: Please, remove the level restrictions on the crit missions.So you can get beat up by high level NPCs, or were you thinking of another change as well (like reverting to the more generic gameplay of using only level-scaled NPCs [EDIT:] in generic mission areas in only Richland/Westview neighborhoods)? Easily solved, a lvl 50 runs the mission with the lowbies at their own speed. I honestly don't know why everyone keeps saying, remove the level restriction. Its not a difficult work about. We've had to do worse things to work with problems.All i can say is, i'm not wanting the missions made easier so that lowbies can do them. Most of the general population is lvl 50 anyways.Anyone says they want to run the mish or wonder about them. Invite them and show, thats what i'v been doing (makes the spawns easier aswell.)
And, again, those of us who don't get to be in-game during populated hours get the short end of the stick with that approach, so I guess the needs of the few are irrelevant.
I've got alts in other orgs, and between working at my job and housework I really don't have the time to power-level them to get the crits. I doubt I'm the only player in this situation, so it's a shame to leave us all high and dry and not be able to find out the rest of the story.
This reminds me that level-scaled NPCs are an interesting design topic in themselves. It always seemed curious to me the way ours have been set up; for instance, you'll face different Exile types as you level up--from one type of lupines or blood-drinkers through Nightmares and Succubi and eventually end up at high blood-drinkers almost exclusively, or something like that--but aside from possibly one or two special attacks (hm, I should have used the Machine NPCs as an example, since they change RSI as level increases but don't even have different special moves...but they're so incredibly generic as a result that I can't remember them well enough to describe in an example--oops, now I'm rambling), they all have exactly the same stats and share maybe two or three generalized ability loadouts, and fighting one type will be the same experience as fighting another.
Is that...cool? Or has that been dull? It's seemed dull to me, so I've been trying to do more and more customization with the NPCs by giving different types of the new NPCs different stats (modifying things like movement speed, and the four resistances, defences, accuracies, and damages) and starting to throw in a new NPC ability here or there that should make a difference in how you fight them. I'm talking about the more recent NPC additions here, such as the floating override programs, the Accelerated NPCs, SSR guards (not too different, but they did have slightly tweaked stats and loadout combinations), Kunoichi, Sati's Sleepwalkers, Valkyrja, and hm well, a couple you'll see in 12.1 I guess.
I was going to include the Headless in that, but they're a better example of the problems with trying to rely on a level scale that covers from 1-50; players very quickly found out that normal NPC stats simply don't scale equivalently with player ability over the character level range, so until I did a hack job on the higher level Headless to boost their stats in successive stages as level increases, past the lowest character levels you could just (against the TOC or EULA or whatever, mind you) stay there AFK with a sim and not have to worry at all about being killed by the level-scaled NPCs who kept spawning.
It could be pointed out that well I could just make modifications like the Headless ones standard to make level-scaling difficulty challenging and just go that way for new NPCs in the story quests, but the Headless change is very rough: if you watch carefully while levelling against it you'll notice it really isn't very balanced, and it's jagged as you go up--their stats will jump suddenly when they reach certain levels. But even that very rough scaling (which had to be added after their release to stop the AFK exploit: "will this be damaging enough to kill an AFK player's sim? No? MORE DAMAGE! Hm okay, on to the next level") took a good deal of time to hash out, so it isn't something I consider myself able to do well or on a regular basis; it also addresses only one of the many considerations of using scaled vs fixed level enemies.
EDIT: There are other problems too just in how difficulty scales with NPC/character level, for instance when I try to give them unique abilities. The Valkyrja have their Couplers that double their stat boosts for a limited time, but I'm pretty sure boosts like that blow out the difficulty curve at low levels, and would completely own lowbies, which is an example of why I haven't done much in the way of custom abilities for NPCs designed to be found by low level players. For the Kunoichi I experimented a little with how far I could compensate for something like that, so I made separate "Shuriken" abilities for each of the higher level Kunoichi NPCs, each tweaked with slightly different numbers. I think that worked out mostly okay, but it was very time consuming and not something our ability system takes kindly to; the design there was also much more relaxed in terms of balance than it would be for mission/quest NPCs normally, because those very high level Kunoichi are all sort of extra-credit / just for fun (ie they don't yield a compensatingly stat-balanced item, just the outrageously pink gi, funky throwing stars, and a very challenging increasing test of your combat abilities), so I didn't have to be concerned about them being too difficult for beat with the outlay of effort that I typically feel I can ask of players.
I'm curious, how many of the 'bad timing' crowd have actually asked for someone to help them out?
I'm happy to assist people on Syntax, I'm not in America, I can spend quite a while in game most days and my Sundays are completely free.
Or is it that you feel teamwork in an MMO is somehow wrong?
Edit: Typo.
The_Bruceter wrote:Rarebit wrote:MatrixRefugee wrote:and much as I hate to do this, I'm begging you along with everyone else: Please, remove the level restrictions on the crit missions.So you can get beat up by high level NPCs, or were you thinking of another change as well (like reverting to the more generic gameplay of using only level-scaled NPCs [EDIT:] in generic mission areas in only Richland/Westview neighborhoods)? Easily solved, a lvl 50 runs the mission with the lowbies at their own speed. I honestly don't know why everyone keeps saying, remove the level restriction. Its not a difficult work about. We've had to do worse things to work with problems.All i can say is, i'm not wanting the missions made easier so that lowbies can do them. Most of the general population is lvl 50 anyways.Anyone says they want to run the mish or wonder about them. Invite them and show, thats what i'v been doing (makes the spawns easier aswell.)And, again, those of us who don't get to be in-game during populated hours get the short end of the stick with that approach, so I guess the needs of the few are irrelevant.
Look, at quiet times, you are not the only char in the server. Go about and talk to people, ask if they want to help you out.
I'm from vector, live in uk so yeah i know about quiet times and what its like. I think i can only count 1 time when i'v been the only person online. Start adding people that you think are ok and would maybe help. On vector, when its quiet, its farming time. Even reds help...
M45T3RM1ND wrote:The_Bruceter wrote:Rarebit wrote:MatrixRefugee wrote:and much as I hate to do this, I'm begging you along with everyone else: Please, remove the level restrictions on the crit missions.So you can get beat up by high level NPCs, or were you thinking of another change as well (like reverting to the more generic gameplay of using only level-scaled NPCs [EDIT:] in generic mission areas in only Richland/Westview neighborhoods)? Easily solved, a lvl 50 runs the mission with the lowbies at their own speed. I honestly don't know why everyone keeps saying, remove the level restriction. Its not a difficult work about. We've had to do worse things to work with problems.All i can say is, i'm not wanting the missions made easier so that lowbies can do them. Most of the general population is lvl 50 anyways.Anyone says they want to run the mish or wonder about them. Invite them and show, thats what i'v been doing (makes the spawns easier aswell.)And, again, those of us who don't get to be in-game during populated hours get the short end of the stick with that approach, so I guess the needs of the few are irrelevant.Look, at quiet times, you are not the only char in the server. Go about and talk to people, ask if they want to help you out.I'm from vector, live in uk so yeah i know about quiet times and what its like. I think i can only count 1 time when i'v been the only person online. Start adding people that you think are ok and would maybe help. On vector, when its quiet, its farming time. Even reds help...
I have 75-ish people on my friends, not including their alts. I come on, wait an hour or two, none of them come on, nor are any of my factionmates on, and the people who are on at the time are from different orgs or are doing something else. It's seriously the worst time of day on Syntax.
There are things you could've done (for example, item storage, which is something EVERYONE has asked for for the 3.5 years I've been on MxO) that would've gone a long way to getting MxO where it needed to be. The missioning system was fine. Now it's not.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but here's some of my perspective on this.
Item storage isn't a task that I can address myself--it requires engineering resources that I don't have at my disposal. So no, I couldn't have done that instead.
The missioning system was all right for what it had been doing, but I felt pretty tapped out on it. We have 11 and two-thirds chapters of archived missions that still work the old way, not to mention all the neighborhood missions, and the standard random missions. That's all fine...but not so much for keeping people interested by being able to vary up the gameplay. If your focus was ONLY on getting all the story text and eyeballing all the NPCs, then yes, I screwed that up for you, and I was aware that would be the case going in. However, I still believe that story divorced from varied gameplay doesn't keep a game compelling for most game players.
You can still get most of the story for your main's org without exceptional effort (or such is the intent). Squeezing every secret from every org is going to be more challenging, and, hopefully, more rewarding--if you actually give it a shot and put the effort in it to overcome the tough challenges guarding it.
Anyway, I've said this in several ways now so I won't keep rattling on. I felt that it was fundamentally important to make the game's story challenging on a gameplay level as well as on a plot level. If you don't enjoy the game's combat and so forth, then yes this will be a problem for you, but as a designer I have to work on the gameplay and believe that it can be made fun--otherwise I'd just retire and write a book (which I would be very tempted to do even as it is if I thought I could keep myself housed and fed while doing it!).
Rarebit wrote:MatrixRefugee wrote:and much as I hate to do this, I'm begging you along with everyone else: Please, remove the level restrictions on the crit missions.So you can get beat up by high level NPCs, or were you thinking of another change as well (like reverting to the more generic gameplay of using only level-scaled NPCs [EDIT:] in generic mission areas in only Richland/Westview neighborhoods)? I've got alts in other orgs, and between working at my job and housework I really don't have the time to power-level them to get the crits. I doubt I'm the only player in this situation, so it's a shame to leave us all high and dry and not be able to find out the rest of the story.
Well, if finding it out was really all you wanted, then the recaps other players have posted, or just talking to other players who've done it, would be enough. This suggests to me that there's also a desire to experience it, rather than just reading it, and then we're back to the question of what is that experience, what does it involve, what's the fun part of it. Story is a large part of it, but I think gameplay needs to be in there as well, and that's one of the keys behind this change.
Oh, and also the story now has many more options in how it's told; to take a simple example, under the old scheme, I couldn't have told the game to have you meet Agent Gray in a skyscraper, which is really his natural habitat, because there aren't enough of those in Richland/Westview (actually I don't think there are any; the Kalt towers look like skyscrapers but have a special "Kalt Chem" classification in our mission system's area selection).
There seem to be three discussions going on in this single thread now:
a) level requirements on story missions
b) soloability of story missions
c) teaming vs soloing
As I've said, the missions are *intended* to be soloable, so the teaming vs soloing argument shouldn't really apply here, and it's getting a little distracting in this thread.
For myself, item b--soloability of story missions--is the item that I need more feedback on to resolve some fragmentary and puzzling comments I've seen here.
I've done all three 11.3.3 missions and the Machine one was harder by far. The Wright Accelerated Programs have very high defense and seem to buff their own resistance sometimes to prevent being able to be debuffed. The Level 55 Agent in the Zion one and the two Level 53 Agents in the Merovingian one were very easily soloable without any consumables needed. I think the Machine one should be scaled back a bit to match the difficulty of the other two.
