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My Very Unofficial State of the Game, November 2016
canadascott
Posts: 1,257 Arc User
Time for another one. Who the hell do I think I am? An out of touch idiot who can’t even tank a giant flaming ape? Yeah, but I’m giving my opinions anyway, and some suggestions that will be ignored.
First, the good news, the game is in much better shape over the last year than it’s been in a long time. If every dev team had pulled its weight as well as the current ones, this game would be in far better shape. To be fair, it looks like Cryptic has wisely left the team alone to develop, and the dedication the team has shown has been awesome. We actually have an end game. The power sets are much improved in terms of balance. The costume editor improvements are great. The game’s monetization is much improved as well, and the QoL improvements, such as the revisions to the AH, are welcome.
I just wish the game pop reflected this. And that’s the bad news, despite the improvements and being a better game, despite having greater direction, despite having more to do, our pop has gone down. And there are two reasons for this.
1. The game is old, and not seen as sexy. CO desperately needs something that will grab gamer’s imaginations and come back.
2. The game’s grind is overdone. Grind in itself is not a bad thing, it provides direction. But the devs REALLY need to study the principles of behaviorism. You make the effort-reward cycle too much effort for insufficient reward. Cut the costs of SCR, GCR, and other grind gear in half. Reconsider anything that locks an item to a single character. It’s making you look greedy and petty. Champions Online is in competition with every game on the market. MMOs are in decline. You need to reduce the barriers to success, not make them harder. I repeat THE GAME’S GRIND IS OVERDONE. Cryptic has a negative reputation for being a petty cash grabbing company, mostly for Neverwinter. You must NOT reinforce this reputation. Don’t tell us to embrace the grind. Ease up on it, at least a little. Focus on those items that have received the most complaints from a broad section of the community. A few voices, however loud, can be ignored. A chorus, particularly when it has had time to consider the change, should not be.
And now for ignorable suggestions.
1. Make it easy to gift this game. Make it easy to gift subs, and additional time to existing (and long dormant) accounts. Help us evangelize the game. Hold a sale where you can purchase vehicles and costume sets at a discount for existing accounts. Hold a half price sale for gifting subs to any account that’s been inactive for three years or longer.
2. We’ve been reinforcing existing power sets and doing extremely well. Now it’s time to give us a new power set. Sonic, please.
3. The nemesis system. I’ve written so much about this elsewhere. I’ll give you one suggestion.
We can’t do the foundry. Sad. But maybe we can do something simpler, a custom nemesis mission editor.
Players get to chose:
1. One of a number of pre-existing maps. No editor needed.
2. Easy, Medium, or Hard settings. These affect the number of minions. Easy has a single type; Medium gives you an additional minion type, chosen at random from the same minion type. Hard gives you three minion types and allows you to choose two existing villains as sub-bosses. All minions and sub-bosses are pre-placed.
3. This is your nemesis, but with one of the three additional powers, depending on the nemesis power type.
4. Text. Give us the ability to input intro text and end text and dialogue for a nemesis cut scene.
.
Coming in a later update:
1. Play as a Nemesis. Similar to Onslaught, or allow yourself to do a full build and play as an enhanced nemmy in PVP.
Some sort of reward system would be required; you folks have shown yourself perfectly capable of inventing this.
Also, PLEASE fix that bug where we can’t read nemmy bios! Please show basic respect for the work that players have put into crafting them. Stop insulting us, which is what you’re telling us by your inaction that this bug is not a priority fix. Our creative efforts matter.
PVP needs some love. I'll let the PVP community speak up for themselves, but I hope you can find some way to show love to that pack of lovable crazies.
This is pretty much it for now. Good luck devs and thank you.
First, the good news, the game is in much better shape over the last year than it’s been in a long time. If every dev team had pulled its weight as well as the current ones, this game would be in far better shape. To be fair, it looks like Cryptic has wisely left the team alone to develop, and the dedication the team has shown has been awesome. We actually have an end game. The power sets are much improved in terms of balance. The costume editor improvements are great. The game’s monetization is much improved as well, and the QoL improvements, such as the revisions to the AH, are welcome.
I just wish the game pop reflected this. And that’s the bad news, despite the improvements and being a better game, despite having greater direction, despite having more to do, our pop has gone down. And there are two reasons for this.
1. The game is old, and not seen as sexy. CO desperately needs something that will grab gamer’s imaginations and come back.
2. The game’s grind is overdone. Grind in itself is not a bad thing, it provides direction. But the devs REALLY need to study the principles of behaviorism. You make the effort-reward cycle too much effort for insufficient reward. Cut the costs of SCR, GCR, and other grind gear in half. Reconsider anything that locks an item to a single character. It’s making you look greedy and petty. Champions Online is in competition with every game on the market. MMOs are in decline. You need to reduce the barriers to success, not make them harder. I repeat THE GAME’S GRIND IS OVERDONE. Cryptic has a negative reputation for being a petty cash grabbing company, mostly for Neverwinter. You must NOT reinforce this reputation. Don’t tell us to embrace the grind. Ease up on it, at least a little. Focus on those items that have received the most complaints from a broad section of the community. A few voices, however loud, can be ignored. A chorus, particularly when it has had time to consider the change, should not be.
And now for ignorable suggestions.
1. Make it easy to gift this game. Make it easy to gift subs, and additional time to existing (and long dormant) accounts. Help us evangelize the game. Hold a sale where you can purchase vehicles and costume sets at a discount for existing accounts. Hold a half price sale for gifting subs to any account that’s been inactive for three years or longer.
2. We’ve been reinforcing existing power sets and doing extremely well. Now it’s time to give us a new power set. Sonic, please.
3. The nemesis system. I’ve written so much about this elsewhere. I’ll give you one suggestion.
We can’t do the foundry. Sad. But maybe we can do something simpler, a custom nemesis mission editor.
Players get to chose:
1. One of a number of pre-existing maps. No editor needed.
2. Easy, Medium, or Hard settings. These affect the number of minions. Easy has a single type; Medium gives you an additional minion type, chosen at random from the same minion type. Hard gives you three minion types and allows you to choose two existing villains as sub-bosses. All minions and sub-bosses are pre-placed.
3. This is your nemesis, but with one of the three additional powers, depending on the nemesis power type.
4. Text. Give us the ability to input intro text and end text and dialogue for a nemesis cut scene.
.
Coming in a later update:
1. Play as a Nemesis. Similar to Onslaught, or allow yourself to do a full build and play as an enhanced nemmy in PVP.
Some sort of reward system would be required; you folks have shown yourself perfectly capable of inventing this.
Also, PLEASE fix that bug where we can’t read nemmy bios! Please show basic respect for the work that players have put into crafting them. Stop insulting us, which is what you’re telling us by your inaction that this bug is not a priority fix. Our creative efforts matter.
PVP needs some love. I'll let the PVP community speak up for themselves, but I hope you can find some way to show love to that pack of lovable crazies.
This is pretty much it for now. Good luck devs and thank you.
/
Post edited by canadascott on
0
Comments
Potential isn't good enough and that's all CO ever had.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
Is not the case in CO, where the "gear" from the exchange is way way expensive than what you can get per day. The worst is the "wait" time in format of CAP the refine of the Questionite.
Why is there a day cap? Is beyond me truly... if you alredy have reduced rewards in the runs of the Rampages, basis daylies from APB, Grab, Smash, Burst and the Montly from Vigilante, so at you time grinded they add another day barrier where you only can refine 8000Q making the process of getting somenthing from the Exchange a tedious chore.
Then comes to the Nemesis and the Nemesis Token, in the time right now I have only 20 Nemesis Token and I already Lv39 (hitting 40)... 20 tokens only from the nearly 600 minimal I need to get Heirlooms, and my Nemesis is already in prison. So I need to make 30 Nemesis more to get 3 pieces of Heirloom.
TL;DR: The rewards aren't appropiated for the hours/days of grind and the Q Cap is somenthing is needed to get rid of the game.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Devs should ask why.
I think it's the grind. These rewards look nice and all but who wants to spend all that work collecting tokens and favors and whatever else. It's basically saying "hey look at all this new fun stuff....that you will never get"
I'd love to buy a lot of those devices but it's only for theme gameplay. I don't want to level and farm the crap out of one toon just to have that one little device (only for one character). I mean there are a pair of AF that are 975 each.... why?!? They do nothing for you. There is no reason for that. No matter what the devs want to believe, this BoP and single character use stuff does not create playability, it creates frustration and abandonment.
How's that F&I and TA going?
It was a Dark Age for CO, really dark, CO was in Maintenance mode
Teleios Ascendant is going GREAT actually, people run it on daily basis, I'm available as Tank-OffTank or DPS
Fire and Ice on the other hand... it's dead Jim, DEAD
The Justice Gear should have complety removed the Tokens, now you have to grind GCR/SCR and be a SLAVE to RNG
It sucks, I should had jumped in the Rampage bandwagon one last time before this change hit live, now Im stuck with a character with only 1 Justice Gear
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Also, Nemesis Confrontation (NemCon) nets you some tokens.
Most importantly, the second time you run Nemesis missions (with old or new Nem), all the token rewards go up significantly, maybe 50% higher. The third time, higher still. If you want Nemesis Heirloom gear, it actually doesn't take long. Half a dozen Nem storylines, maybe less.
Back to the main thread:
1. no idea about gifting the game--might bring in some new folks--does Cryptic have gifting for other games?
2. Oh, yes--please give a sonicset. Heck, any new power set would be great.
3. This would be the thing that could potential bring waves of players back. Any sort of addition to the Nemesis system, especially if it allowed some minor, formulaic player content, would be AMAZING.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
I agree with the statement but not with the reasoning. Why has the game population gone down? Well (and speaking as someone who has barely played for the last three months and who is on the point of cancelling my gold sub and walking away)... the game's balance and enjoyment level is in a worse state than it was 18 months ago. CO remains an old, odd, complicated game with a low population and misbehaving game client (especially to those of us in the EU, where what is shown on the screen is most certainly not what is happening in the game). And yet development resource appears to be focused on:
a) nerfing the obvious sources of power while leaving the subtle ones untouched
b) creating new content of a difficulty level almost completely unrelated to the rest of the game
c) pulling up all the rewards so that you have to conquer the new, difficult content (with added grind) to get all the things that people used to get by sparring a few rounds with Gravitar and praying to the RNGesus.
My advice to the developers would be to leave things alone for a bit in terms of power sets and revisions (particularly if all you can do is make them work the same way and mess up cross-set powers), concentrate on creating some content which is fun for solo players, and have a big think about the mid-end game (levels 35 and up, UNITY, first generation lairs) and how you can structure rewards to offer something which people will want to play, repeatedly, without waiting for a month to form a team. I do have ideas about this.... will write them down at some point (you have been warned....!)
OTOH, adding 10-kill perks for all the rampages and then requiring those perks for justice gear (instead of the tokens) is something I could get behind. Not that I want to run LI or SC ten times per character, but at least it's predictable then.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Stance Name: Stance Used
Confident: Hands on Hip
Heroic Disapproving: Arms Folded
Heroic Casual: Wall Lean
They should have been in years ago. Many years ago.
On the past year I have come around the trouble of wanting to make gifts to 2 friends both who don't have a credit card, and had to resort to using Steam Cards for a FF slot, when what I wanted was to gift LTS during sale.
Also, a discount gift system would also be a good idea. As in, you buy a Gift FF Slot that costs $30 instead of $50, but you can't use it yourself, the system emails it to whoever you type to and it binds to that person. If you are worried about sales dropping, make this Gift System a "Weekend Sale" kind of event.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
> Changing the combat system to what Neverwinter uses would be a terrible change. A lot of people quit both DCUO and NWO when they found out the games used a twitch based control scheme.
I don't know about DCUO, but NWO is certainly a lot more popular than this game.
> Changing the combat system to what Neverwinter uses would be a terrible change. A lot of people quit both DCUO and NWO when they found out the games used a twitch based control scheme.
>
> I love NWO's control system, it's a huge step forward for MMOs but CHANGING CO's existing system would be a bad idea.
Yes, but a Champions 2 with NWO's control system would be a lot more fun than this game imho.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
If CO's system changed to that - well, for starters they'd have to get rid of a lot of powers; I've tried using the built-in Xbox control scheme with CO, and the clumsy alt-key tricks needed to utilize even a sizeable fraction of my super's abilities are just so cumbersome.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Have to add 2 things about the open missions though:
(1) The open missions do have levels. After a certain +x level (4 levels above maybe?) no special recognition could occur. You'd have to go to an open mission with a higher level to get it--and thus gain a reason to go to other zones. It would also be better than the paltry secondary gear you normally get, which I often don't work on the character I just used.
(2) I recently fought Chimera with a Tempest. I did so much more damage than the others that my points were about 5 times the next person's...but that person was the healer who kept me alive during that time. If "special recognition" were tied to open missions, it would have to be a set amount for everyone who was in the fight area actually fighting (INCLUDING HEALING) for a while; I don't mean latecomers should get nothing--that mission has a time limit and every person who helps should get something, but if a healer is there the whole time, keeping damagers alive, that healer shouldn't get shanked on the amount of "special recognition".
Lastly, tougher content that isn't end-game stuff (Telieos Tower from Henry Cronyn in Canada, for example, not to be confused with "Teleios Ascendant") could give some extra for completion since it's relatively hard compared to outside the Tower; you could even get a bit more than usual if you solo it.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
1) Marvel
2) DC Universe Online
3) Champions Online
4) Git Gud Scrub its against forum TOS to advertise for your own products that you either work on or do PR for also nobody cares also get out.
Thats my predictions. Also...
also
But yeah still get out.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
-DC is be a super heroes sidekick game.
-Valiance is a isn't...
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
If anything it will divide the already small community that play super hero games and all three games will suffer. Then we will be left with Marvel and DC...joy.