City of Heroes: Breaking: NCsoft Trademarks City of Heroes 2

green13

Originally posted by xaldraxius

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Originally posted by green13

If I could dare to dream I'd imagine CoH2 as a slightly less instance-heavy version of CoH, plus maybe with a more open power selection system. They could so easily take what CO got right, i.e. open power selection plus roles/stances, as opposed to defined ATs plus defined powersets - but also avoid what CO got wrong, i.e. unnecessary statistics that do nothing except create clusters of powers which work better together, equipment (I like CoH's enhancement system), wildly unbalanced powers etc. etc.

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No offense, but I read this a lot and I just don't understand. Well, that's not exactly true. I understand what you are saying, I just don't understand what you are expecting and how you expect to accomplish it.

1: Open power selection. Sure, this would give you the ability to create a variety of different characters, but in the end you are left with less choice as balancing an open power system, especially when you are talking about not linking stats which is another beef I have with your system, is impossible. In an open system the effective choices become more limited as there will always be one build that rules them all: Tank/Mage. High output ranged damage dealer with heavy armor/resistances.

2: All this hate for the class system. Classes work because they force people into a certain role, all the time. This way you learn to use your powers effectively, you know what stats are important to you and you have a place in a well organized team. Classes encourage grouping. Open systems create nothing but a group of soloers and combat becomes all about DPS. To me the sacrifice of being able to select whatever power I want is far outweighed by the effectiveness of a Tank/DPS/Support/Healer team.

3: Back to the stats issue. It's a standard of RPGS that your character progresses with experience and stat progression, side by side with power acquisition, is the most reasonable way to have that progress in a superhero game where 'gear' isn't an option. And certain stats are logically going to effect certain powers more than others.

Again, no offense intended to you personally, but I think what the current batch of new MMOs have done wrong is to listen to ideas like the ones you are presenting. It's one thing to say 'Oh, this would be fun.' and quite another to have the foresight to see what those fun ideas actually represent once they are implemented.

No offense taken, but... you are wrong on every count :P

1) Open power selection can be done and can be balanced. CO failed miserably at this but the mere fact that Cryptic failed at something really is no indication that it's impossible.... otherwise we'd all have to give up on the MMO industry as a lost cause and find some other way to waste away our leisure hours :P

This issue was discussed quite vigorously on the CO forums and I came up with a solution there that would work. Contrary to what most people might think, just about anything you care to name can be quantified. If it can be quantified it can be measured. If it can be measured it can be balanced.

Every power can be boiled down to basic qualities - damage, damage prevention (armour, hit debuff, mez etc. etc.) or repair (healing) - and costs - mana/endurance etc., time to activate, and cooldown.

Reduce each individual power to these numbers and you can balance them. This is basic QA.

Even the issue of power synergies (i.e. certain powers working together in combination for extra effectiveness) can be balanced because that degree of synergy can also be quantified and ergo managed.

An open skill system would probably even be easier to balance than what CoH currently has. With all of the different ATs and all of the different combinations of powersets that are possible there are an insane number of builds that need to be balanced against each other. CoH is the most nerftastic MMO I've played because they (and players) never seem to be happy on this score.

2) 'Hate' is a strong word and you've misapplied it here. Classless games - if done properly - have a few real advantages over class-based games and while I think CO majorly screwed up a lot of things their approach to classlessness was solid. I don't have a problem with CoH's ATs, but in this instance CO has done it better.

The two (related) key advantages here are flexibility and less need for alts. Most class based games revolve around the 'holy trinity' and many group encounters are designed based on the assumption that the team includes tank/dps/healer. That can make assembling teams difficult, and large raid groups nightmarish. It's particularly unfortunate if you play with friends and your classes don't have that trinity covered. It means that you have to split up and PUG some content. That's not the end of the world, but it less fun.

Allow players to effectively switch between these three roles (or varying degrees thereof) and you eliminate that problem.

At its core (ignoring their problematic stats system) CO's approach is eloquent. Players can switch between roles. Switch to a tank role and your DPS drops dramatically, but your defence and threat generation goes up. Switch to DPS and the reverse happens. Etc. etc.

These roles also potentially add an extra strategic element to solo gameplay.

And because of all of this you remove one common need for alts. Particularly back when WoW's raids required 40'ish players, many players in my guild, myself included, had to keep several alts to fill gaps. We were drowning in paladins and rangers, but priests and warlocks (back when they were severely gimped in pvp) were in short supply. It got to the point where we'd accept or reject guild member applications based on the player's class rather than their inherent coolness - a tragedy if ever there was one....

A classless system completely avoids this problem. Players absolutely can decide "I'm a tank" or "I'm a healer" and never, ever touch those other roles if they don't want to. But the flexibility is there.

3) If you'd played CoH then you'd know that 'standard RPG stats' etc. aren't necessary. CoH does just fine without them.

If you'd played CO then you'd know that 'standard RPG stats' can be extremely problematic, particularly when combined with a supposedly open skill system. The big (and obvious) problem is that once you link powers to statistics then your 'open' system turns into a series of predefined clusters of skills that rely on the same statistic and are therefore more effective together.

FE - also with a supposedly open skill system and skills reliant on different stats - has the same problem.

It also adds an extra (unecessary) layer of difficulty to balancing powers, because you need to balance how powers scale for different statistic scores.

Sometimes simple is better.

xaldraxius

Ok Green, not gonna quote ya because we are going to start filling a page at a time, but anyone who's interested can look back a page or whatever to read.

 

I love, and I mean love, your idea about quantifying each power and breaking it down. I used to play GURPS, so I am all about free form systems, however translating this into an MMO is a task I don't know any developer capable of undertaking. Not only that but in order to make the system completely open from a player's standpoint would leave you with a system most players would find much too in depth and complicated.

But hey, I'm not wanting to argue about plausibility, or anything for that matter. I just don't see an open system working on a mainstream MMO. If a company were to go out on a limb and make something like that I'd love it, complicated character creation systems are a big plus to me, but it's not going to draw very large numbers as most of your MMO players now are casual players who would rather just be able to jump in and start playing.

championsFan

Sure, maybe a dedicated healer role is pretty rare, but support characters that rely primarily on non-offensive buffs and heals do exist and are common in comics.

How often does Jean Gray stand behind her colleagues and blast heals at them, I have never seen it happen.   Playing as a healer does not remind me of any actions in a comic book, and needing to look for healers before battle also does not remind me of anything in comics.

In an ultimate super hero MMO, I guess the kind of healers you are describing would be like sort of crafters, non-combat gameplay, healing players that have sustained severe wounds or impairments that would not other wise heal.  

But a game that uses dedicated healers in combat just don't resemble the super hero genre.   

What I am saying is that characters such as the Hulk and Supes just aren't reasonable to expect in a MMO. You can't be good at everything or else once again you end up with nothing but damage dealers and everyone just solos all the time.

All progress depends on the unreasonable man!  This is not a joke, I think that building a proper MMO around super heroes will require innovating and solving design challenges.   I don't think people will keep playing the same holy trinity for the next 10 to 20 years. 

Because it simply doesn't make a good game to have a jack of all trades be as good at each individual power as a character who is specified in one set. 

Haha, because the final book on game design has already been written, right?  There is no sense in which developers will continue pushing the limits, if they haven't done it so far, it is necessarily impossible, right?

That's why that game was great for community and grouping. Not like CO where everyone solos everything except for a few strongholds. 

Soloing everything and the grouping for lairs has more to do with post-WoW vs pre-WoW in my opinion.   I agree with you that CoX has a better community for teaming, but I think this has as much to do with incentives for teams as it does with the open build system.    

In CO, the developers really wanted to break us from the old mentality of grinding foes to gain XP, and shift us to the new post-WoW model of questing for XP.   The problem is that most of us were former CoX players, so all we wanted to do was form big teams and farm foes for hours.   Defeating foes in CO gives relatively little XP, and there weren't many incentives for doing quests in groups.  

I agree that they screwed up the teaming incentives in CO.   I can see why they got rid of he CoX system, because why would we leave CoX if not because we are tired of that grinding!  But they failed to put in a new teaming incentive system, they weren't even close.  

Cryptic is listening to our feedback about how to encourage teaming, but it is a slow process and i far from being ready to challenge CoX.   

MMOs are trying to capture the feeling of PnP RPGs, not arcade games.

Whoa, that is a pretty broad statement.  Maybe then the MMOs need to slow down by a few more orders of magnitude, because usually it is about ~10 minutes at least between turns in a PnP game.  

Of course, the MMOs to date have not been slow on purpose, actually, they are slow because of the technology they use.   No one likes clunky characters and laggy response times, not even PnP players.

CO has shown that open systems are not only impossible to balance, but boring as well as each power has to be balanced against every other and you end up with a bunch of powers that work exactly the same aside from having a different appearance.

Interesting, to me this shows that you have not given CO more than a cursory play, if at all, because the reality is that the game goes out of its way not to duplicate any powers with different skins, specifically to avoid this criticism you are making.   This extreme avoidance of duplication goes so far as to hurt the game for some players, who wish they could make a "pure" hero without needing to mix and match.

The Champions PnP game and the single player game Freedom Force both had a system like the one you describe: perfectly balanced to the point of being boring.   Everything is a zero-sum game aimed at keeping DPS as constant as possible.  

CO takes a bold step by dispensing with this sterile system, but in the process they give up the customization and balance it brings.    It still leads to a final product that is much more interesting than the zero-sum re-skin games, while having more freedom than class based games.

It has nothing to do with fantasy except for the fact that fantasy games were the first to define the roles and form classes to encorperate the skills of an effective build while limiting choices so as to avoid the very do-it-all 'Superman' characters you seem to want. Champions sounds like a great game for you. It allows the very picking and choosing that you want, all you have to suffer with is contributing stats and groups of powers that work better together than others. I understand what you want and it sure sounds fun to be able to play exactly the superhero you can imagine, but it doesn't work well as a MMORPG.

 

We mostly agree, but I would change "doesn't work well" to "hasn't worked yet."   The fact that developers have not succeeded in producing a well-balanced open build classless MMO that also encourages a large diversity of builds and encourages multi-player, is not a proof that such a game can't work or is impossible.   In fact, the consumer desire for such a game is the motivation to overcome the design challenges.

So, I have not seen any proof that it is impossible to balance a classless open build MMO.  In fact, I suspect that such a game is possible.  I don't claim that CO has succeeded at that goal, but at least it has the primary foundation of such a system in place, as a core feature, and the rest really is details that they may or may not ever be able to iron out.   If another developer delivers an open build system with arcade gameplay in a non-fantasy setting, I'll check it out for sure.

 

 

 

Naturalist99

People need to realize open class power selection type thing is bad for an MMO, the way champions did it that is. I say this because champions allowed anyone to take the strongest powers for there character, and the best heals and stuff, to make an invincible player. It also allowed for soloing everything. And if you needed to group in this game, it was for more damage, not for teamwork, because everyone was expected to have there own heals. That doesnt mean you should have a class based superhero game either. I think they should make it so players can spec things, but cant be the best at everything. The best way I think this would work, Fallen Earth type skill system. Ya, it wold work perfect for this. You can specialize in anything you want, as long as they work together. But you cant be good at everything either. So if you want you can max out Rifle, Pistol, and Melee skills, but after that your screwed, no point to it, youd die. You need healing or defensive skills. So a superhero mmo should have that kinda thing. So you cant master everything. Like maybe mastering Pain enduring, knocking powers, and melee. To make a tank. Or for a blaster type thing, but you still want heals, you could have a debuff, hold, and range damage. This would make it so you can make your character you want, but you need groups for the skills you cant spec in. For example, maybe you didnt specialize in debuffing, so you need a debuffer for your team, or maybe you need a tank, cuz not every1 can heal, debuff, blast, and tank. That my friends, would be the perfect skill system for mmos.

tyanya

The classless, open power selection does bring with it many problems as CO ably demonstrates. The primary problem is that by mushrooming the variety possible in an avatar there is an exponential burden placed on the gameworld to realise it in any meaningful way.

Ultimately players want total freedom with their avatar, but when there is no consequence or response to choice it actually works to devalue the game experience and undermine any reason to care about what is going on. the structure of tabel top RPG isnt an accident - Role playing AT's delveloped as a means to segregate play into meaningful categories - you take a theme or IP and encourage players to adopt known roles so that their presence is synchronous with the theme and isn't contradictory to fellow players......its a tough juggling act by any circumstances, a game by definition has no material consequences so you need to deliver somthing to prevent everyone becoming a god like GM.

In a comicbook there is one artistic mind govening the actions of those taking part, in an mmo there is a myriad of artistic visions and somehow they have to be satisfied yet still live together.....its not simply about emulating anything you see in a comic, its about creating a comic like environment for players to inhabit and have fun....this is where the value of defined roles comes into play....a world composed totally of SUPERMAN equivalents would offer no purpose or reward for its inhabitants, players have to adopt a role or their presence simply denies the need for anyone else. That problem is valid for those playing with RP in mind...but a bigger burden is that an mmo game has players there for many reasons nothing to do with RP, its painfully easy for them to destroy the fun of others by accident or design, again the segregation of roles works to minimise this concern.

A classless, open power game can work - but it needs a radical and comprehensive gameworld to suport it and the players therein....imo its not possible atm and certianly not going to be achieved without a very extensive and committted set of designers working on it.

Fuckyou11111

as far as the information at this time in Jan 2015 NCSOFT have no plans to build City of Heroes 2 what I got now is Atlas Park Revival is working on recreating City of Heroes (1.5) Unreal Engine 4 the bad news is deleay  its slow. Alpha game play might or might be ready at the end of 2015

NCSOFT is not talking about COH 2. However they do tell people to look at NCSOFT news. if something dose come up in 2016 or 2017 or 2018 and so on and so forth. its limited.

of Dose any one have a copy of the document of the NCSOFT COH user agreement that contain information of the account payment and who ever owns COH? I like to know for my research that is timed sentive thanks