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Some easy Quality of Life improvements CO could make in less than 10h of programmer time
squirrelloid
Posts: 869 Arc User
There are a number of simple things CO could do which would improve player gameplay experience.
1. More powersets available for nemeses. Heavy Weapons, Wind, and Earth aren't available, and there may be others. And at least HW and Earth definitely have enemy AI, because there are alert bosses who use them. (Hrodegir, Madstone).
2. Nemesis minions: CO world organizations. DEMON, Viper, Argent, Mind, various gangs - allowing us to embed our nemesis in the CO world would increase immersion, and be really easy since they all have all the relevant unit types.
3. More frequent nemesis alerts and more types of nemesis alerts. I know people love playing them, because the number of people queued jumps by a factor of ~3 every time they come up. Ideally, nemesis alerts would be like 50% of the time, and they would be capable of being the villain in all the scenarios.
4. No 'generic' nemeses for alerts unless *no one* has a designed nemesis.
5. Rebalance rewards between alerts and adventure packs / comic series. Story rewards are pitifully low compared to alert dailies. Restore end-of-comic-issue drops, for instance, even if it is something like an R5 mod.
6. Despite that, burst alert rewards are awful. Instead of R4/R3/R3, make them Rs 5/4/4 minimally so its actually worth the time to play when not on daily. (And it's pretty obvious it's not worth the time now, because pretty much no one plays bursts if there isn't a daily reward up.)
7. Make mod caches in high level areas be tier 4 (that is, drop R4 mods). At the very least, the level 40+ areas (Andrith Ruins, parts of the Lemurian Abyss), but 38+ level areas could probably all afford to be tier 4 mod caches. (Notably VB)
8. Change the fusion ratios to better than 5:1 or significantly improve the chances for fusing mods at a given tier (or both!). The market has spoken - fusing mods is not worthwhile because lockboxes pump high rank mods into the economy and because the return on effort for 'farming' them is so poor. (Check the AH - for any given tier of mods, it costs significantly less than 5x that for the next tier of mods, and that's not even accounting for failure rate or catalyst usage). I think whomever designed the system didn't understand just how crazy 5:1 with significant failure was either, when the best that can drop from play is R5s - with no failure it takes 125 R4 mods to get a single R7, which is just crazy given there are 20 types of mods to collect (not even counting vehicle mods), and with multiple levels of failure, that spikes to somewhere well over 300 once you try to factor failure in (assumptions about catalyst use make giving a single estimate hard).
9. Restore costume and other 'special' (devices, AFs) drops. Known affected content: Open Missions (pretty much all of them), NemCon (all the costume drops except the sword), Therakiel's Temple lair (Valerian's costume unlock, Vlad's costume unlock, Therakiel's Sword), Cosmics (Qwyjibo's AF, Teleiosaur device). Some (but not all) of the devices are available in the legacy drifter box, but most of these items are completely unavailable now.
10. Make available costume unlocks from power replace items somehow - would not object if they returned *as* power replace items. These could be good Q store items, since Q is significantly devalued, especially as power replace items (since even if you had the costume, you'd need the replace for a new toon if that toon wanted to use it). Consider some way of making special gear like the Hotsleep Fists available too.
1. More powersets available for nemeses. Heavy Weapons, Wind, and Earth aren't available, and there may be others. And at least HW and Earth definitely have enemy AI, because there are alert bosses who use them. (Hrodegir, Madstone).
2. Nemesis minions: CO world organizations. DEMON, Viper, Argent, Mind, various gangs - allowing us to embed our nemesis in the CO world would increase immersion, and be really easy since they all have all the relevant unit types.
3. More frequent nemesis alerts and more types of nemesis alerts. I know people love playing them, because the number of people queued jumps by a factor of ~3 every time they come up. Ideally, nemesis alerts would be like 50% of the time, and they would be capable of being the villain in all the scenarios.
4. No 'generic' nemeses for alerts unless *no one* has a designed nemesis.
5. Rebalance rewards between alerts and adventure packs / comic series. Story rewards are pitifully low compared to alert dailies. Restore end-of-comic-issue drops, for instance, even if it is something like an R5 mod.
6. Despite that, burst alert rewards are awful. Instead of R4/R3/R3, make them Rs 5/4/4 minimally so its actually worth the time to play when not on daily. (And it's pretty obvious it's not worth the time now, because pretty much no one plays bursts if there isn't a daily reward up.)
7. Make mod caches in high level areas be tier 4 (that is, drop R4 mods). At the very least, the level 40+ areas (Andrith Ruins, parts of the Lemurian Abyss), but 38+ level areas could probably all afford to be tier 4 mod caches. (Notably VB)
8. Change the fusion ratios to better than 5:1 or significantly improve the chances for fusing mods at a given tier (or both!). The market has spoken - fusing mods is not worthwhile because lockboxes pump high rank mods into the economy and because the return on effort for 'farming' them is so poor. (Check the AH - for any given tier of mods, it costs significantly less than 5x that for the next tier of mods, and that's not even accounting for failure rate or catalyst usage). I think whomever designed the system didn't understand just how crazy 5:1 with significant failure was either, when the best that can drop from play is R5s - with no failure it takes 125 R4 mods to get a single R7, which is just crazy given there are 20 types of mods to collect (not even counting vehicle mods), and with multiple levels of failure, that spikes to somewhere well over 300 once you try to factor failure in (assumptions about catalyst use make giving a single estimate hard).
9. Restore costume and other 'special' (devices, AFs) drops. Known affected content: Open Missions (pretty much all of them), NemCon (all the costume drops except the sword), Therakiel's Temple lair (Valerian's costume unlock, Vlad's costume unlock, Therakiel's Sword), Cosmics (Qwyjibo's AF, Teleiosaur device). Some (but not all) of the devices are available in the legacy drifter box, but most of these items are completely unavailable now.
10. Make available costume unlocks from power replace items somehow - would not object if they returned *as* power replace items. These could be good Q store items, since Q is significantly devalued, especially as power replace items (since even if you had the costume, you'd need the replace for a new toon if that toon wanted to use it). Consider some way of making special gear like the Hotsleep Fists available too.
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11. Some damage types (fire, electricity, maybe others) override enemy animations with the reaction animation. This includes overriding Baron Cimitierre's voodoo doll reflection block. FIX THIS. (That doll animation should be the top priority).
12. A pop-up at some point that informs protector-role characters about crippling challenge and that they *need it* if they want to tank. (That's a QoL improvement for everyone else they play with).
I'm sure I'll think of more at some point...
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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Surely you're joking? You've never done any programming, have you? All of these changes make use of capabilities we know exist, or would tweak one or two parameters in existing formulae.
Let's take an example: add HW powerset for nemeses. This is literally 'add a button which lets you do this', and make the appropriate link to the HW powers/AI used by Hrodegir. That's probably 10-15 minutes of programmer time, tops. I mean, they already built a HW villain, making it available as a nemesis powerset is just asking to reskin that villain. (Doesn't count the art asset time, but for a button that would re-use an existing icon and have some text, I can't imagine that would take that much time either). Not much QA either - load it up on PTS, see if it works.
Or having more types of nemesis alerts? They already have the code to insert a nemesis as the alert boss - we see them in two alerts! You'd just have to make nemesis a possibility for the other types, and hook that code in. (If they don't say anything, that's fine. For a little more effort, writing 3 lines of dialog - one for each nemesis personality - for each alert scenario would hardly kill their writing staff, but that's not programming time).
A couple may take some design time, but the programming time would still be minimal. The worst offenders here are changes to AP/CS rewards and rethinking mod fuse ratios and failure rates. But the claimed low programmer time is still true. The AP/CS reward fix could vary from 10 minutes of programmer time to an hour or two depending on how they implemented it (end reward vs. per section), but even then Comic Series are designed to drop something at the end of each 'comic', it's just disabled at present. The fusion change would be literally 5 minutes of programmer time. Now, the necessary design time for both of these is potentially unlimited, but even a quick fix would be a marked improvement. (And honestly, for something like fusing ratios, look at what the price ratios between R5:R6 and R6:R7 are in AH sales over a month, round down to nearest integer to account for failure, and you'll be a lot closer to 'right' than you are now.)
Most of these would require very little QA or testing.
For example, restoring removed items would perhaps be the most programmer time intensive, and it's literally just adding things back to the drop tables. Minimal QA and testing.
If you have an argument for a specific one being longer, please provide it. But i promise you, if i was working with the code, I could do anything on here in an hour or two, with the possible exception of #11. (And only because I'm not sure, without looking at the code, why fire and electricity reaction animations override a target's skill use animations in the first place).
Actually, its not the damage, its the debuffs that are doing that. But, still needs to be fixed.
"Rebalancing" loot, as you basically refer to it, would take more than just simply changing things. Since the current content is ridiculously easy, it would be a hard call to even say that giving better loot is even mandated. And then that would take days of back and forth to try and find where the right balance would be at, since player perception is often significantly different from actual. When the content is challenging then boosting the loot might be justifiable.
Considering that rank 5 is considered the optimal your suggestion of changing mods to rank 4 is unsound.
I think your analysis of the mod market is flawed. The market hasn't spoken, people just have what they needed and because he economy is not shifting in any way (IE worn out items being replaced) the mods are now becoming less and less valuable because of over saturation. They use to be way more expensive. But this is what over saturation causes.
Power replace items would require significant rebalancing since a few of them actually caused significant issues. This isn't even a maybe, since none of the old power replacers have even been balanced remotely for On Alert.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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Player perception is actual. There's all this content in the game - players should feel encouraged to play it. If they don't feel that way, that dictates reality (virtually no one plays it).
Finally, the claim was less than 10h of *programmer time*, which has nothing to do with design discussion time. But they don't even have to find a perfect balance - APs and Comic Series are so badly off that it would be virtually impossible to over-reward them with any reasonable addition.
I'm going to note that none of your other complaints have anything to do with time at all, programming or otherwise. What.
R7 is optimal. Which is blindingly obvious to anyone who even bothers to look at them.
I'd also note that R5s drop from regular high level content now. My suggestion gives burst a reason for existing (as the best way to get mods), rather than being the wasteland it currently is where you have to beg people to queue. Yes, they used to be way more expensive... because they didn't used to come in lockboxes!
If the AH is anything to go by, the market for higher ranked mods (7+) is actually pretty tight. It isn't over saturated at all. If it was oversaturated you'd see hundreds of a given mod at a given rank, but you don't. When people advertise in zone its for small quantities of any given mod, and they specifically list quantities. These are all signs of a tight market that doesn't have a lot of slack.
Despite that, the price of a given rank mod is substantially less than 5x the next lower rank of the same mod. That means fusing is *never* worthwhile. That's terrible game design - it makes catalysts irrelevant, makes the fusing interface irrelevant, and the system only exists as a trap for new players so they can lose value by using it. You either have to be ignorant of the market or hate new players to insist the system should stay as it is. Power levels have gone up since On Alert. None of these items caused 'significant issues' before On Alert, and they're even weaker now relative to standard gear because what is 'standard' has improved substantially. I am incredulous that anyone could think they'd be overpowered. It defies all logic and common sense.
And the only reason they were removed in the first place is a dev who is no longer around didn't like them. They weren't removed for balance reasons. And the old items still exist - I have a bunch of them stored away, and i'm sure other players do as well.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/championsonline/#/discussion/239805/a-torrent-of-bugs
2.The items removed, how do you know they still have the files for them? PLayers still have them but do the Devs have copies of the files to put them back in. See item
3. Nemesis powers- they have to set up each power set, so that the nemesis will do different powers at different times.
3. People like doing nemesis alerts because you get a Q box from it. Black fang used to be popular too, then the Q box was removed from him and put on someone else, the interest dropped at the same time.
4. The 'no random nemesis in alerts', they couldn't fix the random powers for random nemesis system , which broke after 1 week. Giving all random nemesises Pestilence. (see item 1.) Me, I'd go for, if there are no nemesis at all in a group, get one of the Normal villains turn up, sneer at the pitiful collection and order their minions to attack. The large collection you see at the back of a failed mission(along with a few reinforcements) then attack from behind.
5. Increase rewards on mission- no, decrease rewards on the shorter items. Less effort required, less reward.
Isn't that what people keep saying," it requires more effort so we should get better rewards". Well, that runs both ways.
(also see item 1.)
6. Mods-or, because people have a whole collection of mods- they aren't buying them on the AH. prices are what players set, if they don't go at the higher price, then it's a waste of time putting them on at that price. So you lower your price to what sells. And if you're going on prices then the higher priced mods like Con should be rare drops.
7. Bursts- people don't like because; you only get mods as a reward and a boost in getting mods form nodes. How many people farm nodes now? Also there are only 2 types, Rad rumble- quick and easy and pyramid power- long and frequently tedious. All to get a few mods and a mod finding boost.
8. Power replacers were on old gear- so they would have to be found.(see item 1.) and then changed into new items.
9. The nemesis - enemies sounds good but then they have to find them all( see item 1) but at least they all have power sets already. For those of a more... mercenary mindset- UNTIL and PRIMUS or for the non humans IHA.
10. From Rod Boyer onwards in MI is 38+. That's the top end from him, to Major Blixen in the Worm area,then down to Captain Fyodorovich, DR Silverback at Andrith and the Castaway.
11. Jack Fool uses Night Avenger. Wind, I can't think of any NPC who uses it
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2: Would be nice, but it might be harder than you think it is. It shouldn't however be all that hard to liink the minions...
3: Again easier said thn ddone, Nem alerts were set to a rarity due to them granting boxes, it was a design choice.
4: This would require a MAJOR change to how alerts (and all other instanced content in the game) work. As it stands, the first one spawned in affects ALL the settings. It's just like how in APs if someone entered part of the AP before anyone else and hadn't SK'd with everyone all the mobs will spawn at their level.
5: This shouldn't be hard to do at all. Simply putting the rewards back for many of them, and increasing the Q rewards to 4~8k would do it.
6: I don't know what your talking about with Burst alerts... the last several I did on my level 40 gave me R5s & R4s, not a single R3 or lower... Beond that the mod ranks tend to be based on your character level. A character who just unlocked Bursts at 15 gets mostly R2 mods and the occasional R3, around 25 you start getting mostly R3 and usually 1 R2, aaround 35 you start getting R4s and at 40 you can (and, if my experiance says anything, often do) get R5s
7: Mod caches should give higher level mods yes
8: Not sure how balanced that would be TBH... but it should atleast be looked at.
9: Eh, don't care for the devices but I do agree that they should be available again... nothing should be discontinued in my honest oppinion.
10: Yes, restore old costume unlock... however not as Power Replacers... they were removed for good reason... I would like to see them returned but the way they programed powers would mean that the rreturn of power replacers in any form would take HUNDREDS of hours of programming. They would have to redo the entire code for powers just to accomodate for them properly.
See previous: there's already AI for Earth, Heavy Weapons, Night Warrior (Jack, as you note). Only wind would require writing an AI for it, and if we're restricting it to just adding the three they have AIs for, that would still be a huge improvement. That's why you like doing them, maybe. Some of us like doing them to see/fight our nemesis. They seem to have nemeses working fine now, just need a check that looks at the first hero, sees if they have a constructed nemesis, if yes choose it, if not go to the next hero. Simple for loop which defaults to the generic 'random' nemesis if no player nemesis is found.
I'm not a professional programmer, although i do have some programming experience, and if i know exactly how to do it than someone whose job it is to write code should not have a problem. Probably some of both. APs/Comic Series are really long for only 2k Q. Comic Series used to have a reward at the end of every comic, after all. And the Mechanon dailies rewards seem about right. But i agree, alert daily rewards could afford to come down a little. See post above yours - every reason to believe R7+ mod market is pretty tight. And it's not about absolute price, it's about relative price of a given type of mod across ranks. R7 Con mods aren't worth 5x an R6 con mod either. Price differentials between types is all about demand (which again proves the market is tight, because Con does command a premium - if there was a glut, there wouldn't be a noticeable price differential between mod types).
(Even the R5 + 6 mod market might be reasonably tight, but i pay far less attention to it. That Con Mods at R5 or 6 aren't trending towards 1/5th the price of the next higher mod suggests they probably are tight, because if there was a glut, prices would drop from oversupply, and get locked at about 1/5th or a little below because that's when people would start buying them to fuse and resell). And if you got mods that were as good as what you could have drop in regular play (5s and 4s for a 40), but on a guaranteed drop basis so you could specifically farm them, people might be more interested. Especially if you also adjusted failure rates and fusion ratios so fusing mods was worthwhile. Or just enable the old items? Why change them? The whole goal here is quick and dirty improvements. (Pretty sure, even lacking text comments, you could find the relevant code by text searching for the names of the old items, fwiw, since the name has to be attached to the items in the code.) I'll note mysticism nodes (and apparently only mysticism) in Echinocos Shores (and only Echinocos) are already R4. The rest of the 38+ content should be adjusted to match.
(And while they're at changing mod caches, can they fix the broken psionic mysticism nodes in Canada already? The ones in the far south? They haven't worked right since before Alerts).
-The code still exists, because all those old items still exist. I'm using one right now. (See my reply above this one for how you could easily find the relevant code).
-Those old items could easily be re-activated. I suggested Q-store items to give Q more uses, and for something that wasn't just 1/account, but potentially 1/character.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Similarly for the rest of those tasks. Some of them can be done in minutes of programming time (ex: change fusing ratio).
Have I done game development? No. I have programmed an interface for accessing and manipulating a large database (larger than all databases in CO put together - probably by at least one order of magnitude if not several), doing computational tasks with elements of the database as inputs, and visualizing the results in a variety of graphical formats. Game development isn't some special snowflake, it's just software.
I don't know why some people think that simple tasks like this take extraordinarily long amounts of time to program. I can only imagine you've never looked at code before at all, and think programs (including games) arise by magic. If anything on this list takes more than 10h of programming time, the game itself wouldve taken 100 years or more to program with twice the staff they had. That's how unbelievable your claim is.
Also, I whuold like to point, that OPs Ego is way higher then it should be, if you say "Oh Im leet best hacker evea" then prove it, no one is going to believe your some pro- programmer, just by saying "I am dah best, yo are nut"
But I have to agree, in reality, it should not take years on end, to make QOL updates, but they are doing their best, and they are giveing us new content and bug fixing, so that's good enough for me, sure they need more better staff and more people working, not on the trash STO or something.
You'd be surprised. So far I've only made very small games, and it's amazing how a "small" task can balloon, especially if your scripting isn't modular. A few times I went to make a simple change in somebody else's script, and realized I had just set off a Rube Goldberg machine due to how intertwined they had made everything. Now take that and apply it to a game with millions of lines of code, various chunks made by different teams... - I haven't seen CO's scripts, but people keep saying with utter confidence that they look like a set of christmas lights when you first take them out of storage ( not mine... I wrap mine around something u3u )
My super cool CC build and how to use it.