I'd certainly be interested in knowing what new powers players want most, and whether there's a strong preference for new sets, versus new shiny toys for existing frameworks.
Well, you did ask....
I would ask for shiny new toys. The players need stuff to do with our level 40's. But I know new zones and missions are expensive and time consuming, so here's some suggestions that would hopefully be cheap and easy to implement, but would give a lot of new things to do.
1) Have all the missions available from SOCRATES scale to the current level of the player. This means all the content that's in the game is always relevant. All the bad guys seem to have scaling built in already, so I hope this would be fairly simple to implement.
2) Make the difficulty levels mean something. This is two-fold: First, make the higher difficulties MUCH HARDER. Second, have better loot drop at higher difficulties. This might take some tweaking, but it would increase the amount of content in the game 500 percent in one fell swoop.
Increase difficulty: For every difficulty level increase the hit points and damage output of all enemies by about twenty percent. "Normal" is unchanged, "Difficult" is +20 percent, "hard" is +40 percent, "Very Difficult" is +60 percent and "Elite" is +100 percent, or, doubled.
For teams, add mobs to spawns. Two people get two extra mobs per spawn that is a 'tough' rated mob, like from the alerts. Three people get three 'tough' mobs added per spawn, four get four and five get five. Note that these 'tough' mobs only show up in teams, and in teams that are set to higher than normal difficulty.
Increase drops: The drop rates should NOT change. Instead, there should be four new sets of loot created, game-wide, to match the four higher difficulty levels. Normal is not changed at all.
"Difficult" loot gets a new prefix added of "improved" or something. All loot is the same, except all numerical values are one better than normal loot.
"Hard" loot gets a new prefix added of "excellent" or something. All numerical values are two better than normal loot.
"Very Difficult" loot gets a prefix added of 'superior' or something. All numerical values are three better.
"Elite" loot gets a prefix added of 'elite'. All numerical values are five better.
Add a store where you can buy all the gear up to 'superior' for things that drop in-game, like the qliphotic residue purple things. The idea is to give people reasons to run the old content again. Note that this store should also charge people globals, perhaps twice the 'sell' value. Start soaking some money out of the game.
To preserve the cash model, put all these levels of loot for sale in a new vendor for Zen. Prices should be in the 20 to 100 zen range for each piece or Elite gear. This stuff will sell like hotcakes, man.
These changes would be simple find and replace activities, I think, so a huge number could be done quickly and easily, and would give the players lots, LOTS more to do.
biased towards FF, which is always payed for, either directly or indirectly through subs.
just buy the gear from the zen store , and for a ridiculously low price of 20-100 zen.
as soon as you put the same gear in a game store to be bought with globals you reduce the replay value.
why waste time doing missions, when you can just buy it?
next;
what level will this gear be at,
Green, blue, purple.
heroic, mercenary, legion, rampage
which ever ones you make it better than, people will complain about it making their gear obsolete.. and then go to the store and buy some more.
scaling difficulty leads to a problem with sidekicking.
1 x level 40, 4 x level 6. 40 does the work, 6 gets the xp as if they were level 6.
if it scales to level, which level in a mixed group does it go to?
the 40 or the 6?
These changes would be simple find and replace activities, I think, so a huge number could be done quickly and easily, and would give the players lots, LOTS more to do.
remember, our files are not annotated, there is no simple, find and replace.
It's go through ALL the 2217(at least thats how many are in my folder) files,
find all the missions> add the 4 new levels to them
find ALL the rewards. > make 4(new) extra versions,> link them to 4 new(created) levels,
oh and not all missions are on Socrates.
To preserve the cash model, put all these levels of loot for sale in a new vendor for Zen. Prices should be in the 20 to 100 zen range for each piece or Elite gear. This stuff will sell like hotcakes, man.
Games that let players interact on a competitive level should never ever ever sell power for IRL cash.
I have never seen the problem with pay to win. If you pay you should have the better stuff.
No, you should not. Ever. Your financial level outside the game shouldn't have anything to do with your abilities in-game. Your in-game money sure, but that's only because it still promotes playing the game to be good. Buying your power is cheap(in the non-wealth sense of the word) and unfair.
I would ask for shiny new toys. The players need stuff to do with our level 40's. But I know new zones and missions are expensive and time consuming, so here's some suggestions that would hopefully be cheap and easy to implement, but would give a lot of new things to do.
You didn't actually answer the question that the dev asked. He asked about powers only, since that is what he works on.
I never understand the concept even coming up in a co-op game.
For me the concept is a matter of competition against myself. I do not feel the need to compete with others but I do try to push myself against my own performance with a character.
Oh please. As if PvP would be the only reason not to make a game P2W.
It's more a matter of "pay to win what, exactly?"
If I can only acquire it through cash purchase, it'd better be something I really want. And if its only function is to make me "better" at the game, and I'm doing well enough without it, I'm not buying it. It's the reason my main in STO is still flying around in his Tier 5 prototype Odyssey Star Cruiser - sure, I could buy a "better" ship, but the increase in performance simply isn't worth 25 bucks to me, especially when the USS Hans Asperger seems more than capable of handling the content I've been playing. (And if I ever do need a T6 ship, I've still got that Kobali Cruiser I picked up during the anniversary event, USS George Romero.)
I'm certainly not going to "P2W" when there's nothing to W. It makes no sense at all.
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
I'd certainly be interested in knowing what new powers players want most, and whether there's a strong preference for new sets, versus new shiny toys for existing frameworks.
Not sure if it's been said already, but fighting sticks, short and long, think Mockingbird and Caiera.
Many thanks!
I don't like Sigs, but I'll leave this here anyway. At least I'm not to trying to hypnotise you with moving things!
I'd certainly be interested in knowing what new powers players want most, and whether there's a strong preference for new sets, versus new shiny toys for existing frameworks.
Well if this post is posing as a poll i would certainly love :
- Spear/pole weapon/quarterstaff fighting style like Seung Mi-na (Soulcalibur) or Shao-Lin fighting style
- Two weapons sticks (Daredevil/Mockingbird)
-Nunchaku weapon style (both one-hand /two hands even shifting from one hand to two hands, perhaps chaining it with a fist/foot combo)
-Water-based powers (wall of water, summon water creature/elemental, water strike/column, etc) with an effect as in Abyss
- Plant-like powers (Poison Ivy) entangling vines, wall of thorns, toxic flowers, grass covering surrounding which hinders/slow opponent in an AoE, etc
-Elasticity (Plastic Man/Fantastic four) whereas it will be a true challenge, since you managed to affect colors of the costume to the rocket punch or/and cape glide pattern, maybe stretching the actual costume would be possible for arms/legs as well?
-Also i would add more animals choices for summon animals : spiders/tigers/giant insects/snakes, etc. and perhaps their elemental version for summon air elemental/summon golem
to do 2 weapon sticks, just pick dual weapons and truncheon.
unfortunately the only animals ingame are;
wolf, bear, dino, demon dog
and some flying bugs.
that's it.
any others they would have to make the model from scratch.
stretching we've been told, would have to stretch the person.
stretching would involve having to stretch a large amount of parts, just look how many types of hands, gloves, feet are available.
as for my last post , people seemed to have missed the other comment. part way down.
those changes were supposedly to give replay value but how many people will just say," I've already run it before, why should I do it again, when I can just buy the gear."
next; unless it's level 40 gear, why get it?
how many people apart from Jonsills (and me when I can't be bothered seeing if I have any in the junk pile)level their alts(not first) with normal gear rather than Heirloom gear?
Going from the amount of comments I get ingame, not many.
Nope! All rewards drop in-game, not a nickel required if you don't want to pay. If you DO want to pay, well good for you! Keeps the lights on. Also, this does not alter the lockbox and vendor gear in any way. I have other thoughts for that stuff, though.
Honestly, right now the Legion gear in the lockboxes is the true pay to win, along with Vigilante pieces. All these rewards are below those items.
biased towards FF, which is always payed for, either directly or indirectly through subs.
FF? You mean Free Form?
How is this biased towards free form, except for the obvious fact that freeform builds are "better" than AT's.
next;
what level will this gear be at,
Green, blue, purple.
heroic, mercenary, legion, rampage
which ever ones you make it better than, people will complain about it making their gear obsolete.. and then go to the store and buy some more.
All mission-dropped gear. All of it. If you crank your difficulty to Elite, missions should be HARD, and good stuff drops.
Not as good as lockbox gear, but darn good.
As for making gear obsolete, of course it does. That's rather the entire point: Give people an upgrade path for their stables of 40's.
scaling difficulty leads to a problem with sidekicking.
1 x level 40, 4 x level 6. 40 does the work, 6 gets the xp as if they were level 6.
if it scales to level, which level in a mixed group does it go to?
the 40 or the 6?
This change would have nothing to do with XP. How does it scale now?
oh and not all missions are on Socrates.
Scale the ones that ARE on there then. Lots of new stuff to do then.
For me the concept is a matter of competition against myself. I do not feel the need to compete with others but I do try to push myself against my own performance with a character.
Exactly!
Adding in higher tiers of loots, WHEN, coupled with significantly higher levels of challenge, will allow lots and lots of people to push themselves and their characters higher and harder.
I would love that, and so would a lot of other people. Adding replay value to existing content by enabling new rewards. This is sort of how Diablo works, with their difficulty settings. I'm not suggesting you get quite THAT nuts with it, but the idea is the same.
Nope! All rewards drop in-game, not a nickel required if you don't want to pay. If you DO want to pay, well good for you! Keeps the lights on. all rewards drop ingame but best version is available in shop for cash. That is pay to win: When the best gear is available to buy for cash,so you don't have to work for it ingame.
Also, this does not alter the lockbox and vendor gear in any way. I have other thoughts for that stuff, though.
Honestly, right now the Legion gear in the lockboxes is the true pay to win, along with Vigilante pieces. All these rewards are below those items. more accurately gamble to win, since you can't buy it directly form the shop. and anyone can do it, by farming Q , trading for zen and getting keys.
FF? You mean Free Form?
How is this biased towards free form, except for the obvious fact that freeform builds are "better" than AT's.
you have the best rewards on the highest difficulties , which means that the people most likely to get best ones will be FF, which are the ones able to min/max easiest. SO those on AT's especially the squishier ones, will be getting the lower ones and the FF will be getting the better ones.
That is BIAS.
All mission-dropped gear. All of it. If you crank your difficulty to Elite, missions should be HARD, and good stuff drops. currently you are limited by the AI on the mobs, a lot are just plain stupid. or in the case of master villain default, do NOTHING. Increasing the numbers doesn't change that they are stupid.
Not as good as lockbox gear, but darn good.
As for making gear obsolete, of course it does. That's rather the entire point: Give people an upgrade path for their stables of 40's. if it's better than legion, won't happen. if it's equal to legion- won't happen.
and if it's better than or equal to Rampage gear,won't happen
the first is a bribe to get people to open the lockboxes, the second is the bribe to get people to run Rampages.
Unless they are better than those 2, you'll find a not really surprising lack of interest.
This change would have nothing to do with XP. How does it scale now? yes it does have to do with XP.
sidekicking, works on, you get the xp for what level you are, not the level you are side kicked to.
So a level 6, sidekicked to 40, gets xp as if they were a level 6 fighting whatever it is, while the level 40 does the work. with scale to level, sidekicking causes a problem because it can't scale to one level.
Scale the ones that ARE on there then. Lots of new stuff to do then. no, that's lot of the same stuff to do them. Just with more mobs.
level 40, gear is mission, Heroic/mercenary, legion, rampage in that order.
Unless your gear is better than those, why would people want them.
the min/maxers and " I can squeeze a few points out, I'm sure"(another group entirely) are farming for Rampage gear.and complaining about drop rates.
To be a reason to replay content, it needs to be;
1. better than current level 40 gear
2. AND accessible to ALL characters. Not easily but at least a possibility.(Rampages are stretching the point a lot on that one with the RNG and DR.)
3. AND not available anywhere else.
you're idea falls down, as a reason to play content again, when you make it purchasable in-game and in the zen store.
as soon as you have that, you will have people will go.
" I can get that in 10 seconds and then pose in Zone or I can waste time doing the mission."
scaleable is good but there are problems , like sidekicking, which make it harder to do. STO has missions that are scaleable but pretty much all of theirs are instanced missions.
we need different missions not just the same ones with more mobs, which unless they reprogram the AI's on all mobs, is what you will get.
Currently, higher level difficulty only works on instanced missions and increases hit points, damage and damage resistance.(anything else?)
quite frankly, a lot of people are sick of running the same missions with each character, all you're doing is making the same missions harder, They are still the same missions.
I'm still running them because I find spamming alerts more boring.
Since I have around 30 characters I am leveling I don't have enough heirloom gear for all of them. I make do with the gear that comes along, that I have in storage, or occasionally splurge and buy.
how many people apart from Jonsills (and me when I can't be bothered seeing if I have any in the junk pile)level their alts(not first) with normal gear rather than Heirloom gear?
how many people apart from Jonsills (and me when I can't be bothered seeing if I have any in the junk pile)level their alts(not first) with normal gear rather than Heirloom gear?
Going from the amount of comments I get ingame, not many.
I have 4 Sets of Nemesis's Heirloom Gear to level characters
The Nemesis Tokens from the characters who were doing Non-stop Nemesis Missions didn't go wasted
I NEVER use the Garbage Gear missions give
quite frankly, a lot of people are sick of running the same missions with each character, all you're doing is making the same missions harder, They are still the same missions.
I'm still running them because I find spamming alerts more boring.
Yeap, I have completely STOP leveling character with Grab alerts,
it's boring, frustating, it ruins my Character experience and feels really unsatisfying
even now I look back at character I leveled exclusively by doing Alerts and I feel like I never got to actually enjoy playing as them
with Double XP Weekend buff, Missions give REALLY good XP
The worse Missions to do is Vibora Bay's missions, you get through time sinking grinding missions and the game rewards you with LESS-THAN-A-HALF XP tab, Really Pathetic
Vibora Bay exist only to waste your time
The only good thing I find doing VB is getting rare costumes pieces which I sell in AH
I'm bored to Death doing Westside over and over again, I try to Speedrun it as fast as I can every time (Vehicles help doing so)
POWERFRAME REVAMPS, NEW POWERS and BUG FIXES > Recycled Content and Events and even costumes at this point Introvert guy who use CO to make his characters playable and get experimental with Viable FF Theme builds! Running out of Unique FF builds due to the lack of updates and synergies! Playing since 1 February 2011 128 + Characters (21 ATs, 107 FFs) ALTitis for Life!
I use the items from missions for almost every character, and I typically do most of my leveling from 35-40 in Vibora Bay. I use xp boost items and do an alert every hour or so for the bonus...but I prefer leveling up with missions.
level 40, gear is mission, Heroic/mercenary, legion, rampage in that order.
Unless your gear is better than those, why would people want them.
Indeed, this is correct! So, here's the second set of thoughts.
Rampage gear (Justice) has a huge problem in that it is bind on pickup, and even worse, there is literally only one set of the darn stuff.
So, first, shake that up a bit. Add in three or four more sets of gear that are identical to current justice gear, except the set bonuses are different. Add in a set that adds avoidance, add in a set that adds resistance (like Armadillo), add in a set that adds healing, etc, etc, etc. Suddenly, lots more reasons to slog through that horrible grind.
Second, and even more importantly, add in new sets of secondary gear. Add a bunch of vigilante-class secondary sets that also has a set bonus. Make it about 50 percent more expensive than vigilante.
Third, add a new purple secondary set that accepts 1 mod per piece. (Holy moly!) Make it cost the same Q as the other secondary sets, but also require 20 (or whatever number seems right) of each of the level currencies. So it costs Until tokens, MCPD, Silver Champion, and Mechanon. Note that this probably requires the missions to scale if you want to 'back equip' a bunch of 40's.
Fourth, and by far the most important, allow us to buy upgrades to our existing 40's. As an example of what you could do, if we pay 50 of every currency, we can buy another spec tree point, for example. For 100 of every currency (or whatever mechanic seems to work) we can buy another innate talent. To get really crazy, for 1000 of every currency, we can buy a second passive slot (HOLY MOLY).
Namely, give us ways to make our favorite toons better, once you've made the content tough enough to give us a run for our money.
Namely, give us ways to make our favorite toons better, once you've made the content tough enough to give us a run for our money.
Without the tougher content, it just doesn't matter. I outfitted two of my toons with vigilante/justice gear, but it hardly mattered. They already could solo Lairs--now it's just even easier.
If I can only acquire it through cash purchase, it'd better be something I really want. And if its only function is to make me "better" at the game, and I'm doing well enough without it, I'm not buying it. It's the reason my main in STO is still flying around in his Tier 5 prototype Odyssey Star Cruiser - sure, I could buy a "better" ship, but the increase in performance simply isn't worth 25 bucks to me, especially when the USS Hans Asperger seems more than capable of handling the content I've been playing. (And if I ever do need a T6 ship, I've still got that Kobali Cruiser I picked up during the anniversary event, USS George Romero.)
I'm certainly not going to "P2W" when there's nothing to W. It makes no sense at all.
It's a matter of segregation between F2P players and P2P players. Segregation purely on IRL cash flow. If F2P players can earn an equivalent or even better version of the cash ship item in-game, as how the CO/STO models exist currently, it wouldn't count. Especially when any player can grind premium currency relatively easily anyway.
Without the tougher content, it just doesn't matter. I outfitted two of my toons with vigilante/justice gear, but it hardly mattered. They already could solo Lairs--now it's just even easier.
Indeed, this is so. I equip everything with Legion/Vigilante, and that's plenty for the game as it stands.
This is why I stated FIRST that the difficulty sliders must be HARD, and give good drops. As a note, the recommendation I put out, for +100 percent hitpoints and +100 percent damage, means that encounters are four times as difficult: Twice as much damage for twice as long.
This has a lot of effects, such as making controls more important to survival, etc. If quadruple isn't tough enough, the difficulties can and should be raised even higher.
Now, as for the last thing I'd ask for: Allow us access to the Foundry from Neverwinter.
Even more importantly, every week, take a foundry mission and add it to the Alerts system.
Suddenly, there is a never-ending stream of new content, that anyone can access, in a team, from anywhere.
Voila! There is something new to do every week, heck, even every day, and all it requires is one Dev to tag Foundry missions he likes as Alerts.
How easy is this? The players become their own developers!
If you really want to sweeten the pot, award every player who creates an alert-worthy Foundry mission with a free free-form slot. Suddenly you'll be DROWNING in new content, and its FREE.
What's not to like here?
The Foundry system is well-vetted by now, and conversion of it should be fairly painless. The only part which requires Dev support is choosing which missions to tag into Alerts.
I honestly can't think of a simpler and more effective way to make quality new content more cheaply than this.
This gives tons and tons of new toys to play with and new things to do for very little company resources.
It's a matter of segregation between F2P players and P2P players. Segregation purely on IRL cash flow. If F2P players can earn an equivalent or even better version of the cash ship item in-game, as how the CO/STO models exist currently, it wouldn't count. Especially when any player can grind premium currency relatively easily anyway.
What segregation? I can get everything in this game outside of vet rewards by grinding up globals. Or I could throw my wallet at the screen. Both work.
Here's a semi-random list of additions I'd love to see.
1) Add a 1-point "rank-4" advantage to all melee powers that you can only buy after rank3 is in place. Have it add +50 percent damage. (Yikes!) This will go a LONG way towards addressing the damage disparity between melee and ranged. Melee is supposed to do more damage, and it flat out doesn't. Even better from your perspective, this will trigger a whole bunch of respecs, and tasty-tasty sales. Money is good, make us want to send it to you.
2) Devices. For pity's sake, give us some new, decent, devices that are not becomes or vehicles. I HATE becomes and vehicles. Give us an upgraded version of the Sparcshield,give us versions of the Pheromone that summon golems or constructs or dogs or robots or thugs or phantoms or nightmares. I HATE how there's dinosaurs everywhere because the only pet device worth a hoot summons them. Have a better version of the nightmare generator summon a tougher version of the pet. Give us a better version of the humidity dome. Etc, etc.
3) More mods. DU cores are nice, but can we get some new stuff? Combo mods for example as a place to start. Have Juryrig and Doctor Silverback sets. Go nuts, guys!
4) Let us buy a sixth power point slot for all our powers. OMG, you think number 1 idea would put money in your pocket from respec sales? Having a sixth point available would be HUGE. Let us buy it using the same mechanism you use for the additional talent, or extra spec points. Everybody will want a couple of these.
5) Let us buy more advantage points, up to about ten. The more of these you make available, the more respecs you sell. This sounds like a win!
Its not P2W, its Pay2Customize. The only Win aspect of the game would be PvP which is pretty much just bragging rights in this game and can be done by a f2p player with dedication. Someone has to pay for the Devs Ramen noodles. If you fail to see that, you are living in a dream world, and this game would not exist.
The first step in decision making is an analysis of the situation.
MMOs are on a scale of fun vs addicting.
A 'fun' game is self explanatory, and Champions Online is fun.
An 'addicting' game feeds on psychological weaknesses of the gamers, getting them to either grind existing content to get a desired result and/or pay more money. For example, in most MMOs, mats drop randomly rather than having one drop every time and requiring more mats. The random drop is a staple in MMOs because of psychological tests on lower animals. Suppose a rat in a cage is given a button that dispenses food. If the button is predictable, the rat will only press the button when it's hungry. If it's random, the rat will press the button repeatedly in order to stockpile food. MMOs use the random loot model to play to this base stockpiling instinct.
Champions Online is very far on the 'fun' side of the scale. Most of the customization doesn't require unlocking. Sure rampage gear requires a bit of grinding, but even the Blue quality gear from missions is enough to handle end-game content. PvP isn't designed to get players to hate each other. Also, check out the player base. There are role-players and costume contests, which mostly don't even exist in other games. It was only a month ago that this game finally started getting spam-bots, which was probably set up by a generalist who spams all PWI games - Nobody is going to pay somebody to grind this game because there isn't much to grind.
Bottom line, Champions Online is a game for enthusiasts who like MMOs but don't like to be manipulated into addictive behavior.
As for a course of action:
What I'd recommend is getting some outside consulting from somebody who knows how to make an addicting MMO. Ideally, you should get a guy who worked for Blizzard on either Diablo or WoW. In lieu of that, getting a developer from Perfect World (the game) will work too. Have that person do a once over look at Champions Online and get their advice as to what they would do to make it more addicting.
...And then for every one of their recommendations, do the exact opposite in the areas they notice.
The first step in decision making is an analysis of the situation.
MMOs are on a scale of fun vs addicting.
A 'fun' game is self explanatory, and Champions Online is fun.
No, it is not self explanatory. People have fun in different ways, sports, climbing mountains, making boats inside bottles. CO has a group of players that consider it fun that you refer in your next quote
Bottom line, Champions Online is a game for enthusiasts who like MMOs but don't like to be manipulated into addictive behavior.
Certainly AAA mmos has their fair share of addicted players, but claiming that it is th rule in those games is a gross generalization. Nowadays, those games offer several path of progression. It is player choice to take them or not. CO made it simpler, since there is no much to do(besides roleplaying and costume contest) you can't really get addicted.
CO has been pretty much reduced to a hangout zone with costume contest and roleplays as its premium activities.
For you. I've participated in maybe five or six CCs over several years, and the only RP I do is with myself, because typing everything out just makes it sound stupid to me. On the other hand, I have lots of fun playing through the various missions with different builds - they all play differently, with enough variance to keep me interested. And sometimes I just like playing the missions with a character who looks sufficiently different, like Superbat (a product of poor genetic engineering, the fusion of a fallen superhero and a bat, with a Vampire 2 head and Dragon Wings, wearing blue-and-red tights with a yellow bat on the chest), or Mindseye (who I recently redecorated with a Headless head with blue Cosmic Flames, and a Cosmic face hanging in front of it).
We all have fun in our own ways, as you started pointing out before falling into the trap of "since this is what I like, it must be what everyone likes".
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
actually the spam bot site is all sorts of games from all different publishers. NOT just PWI games
and their site is in the US.
get thing from random drops.
ok for people for the RNG likes, everyone else, it's just an exercise in frustration and quickly left.
ok, they aren't dropping for me, what else is there to do?
difference between wow & diablo vs CO.
no. of devs working on it when shipped, 75
then theres WOW with over 400 devs working on it, to produce the results you talk about.
I've never participated in either, so nah. Now, if you had said it was reduced to people standing around Defender in RenCen you'd be closer to the mark.
Comments
Well, you did ask....
I would ask for shiny new toys. The players need stuff to do with our level 40's. But I know new zones and missions are expensive and time consuming, so here's some suggestions that would hopefully be cheap and easy to implement, but would give a lot of new things to do.
1) Have all the missions available from SOCRATES scale to the current level of the player. This means all the content that's in the game is always relevant. All the bad guys seem to have scaling built in already, so I hope this would be fairly simple to implement.
2) Make the difficulty levels mean something. This is two-fold: First, make the higher difficulties MUCH HARDER. Second, have better loot drop at higher difficulties. This might take some tweaking, but it would increase the amount of content in the game 500 percent in one fell swoop.
Increase difficulty: For every difficulty level increase the hit points and damage output of all enemies by about twenty percent. "Normal" is unchanged, "Difficult" is +20 percent, "hard" is +40 percent, "Very Difficult" is +60 percent and "Elite" is +100 percent, or, doubled.
For teams, add mobs to spawns. Two people get two extra mobs per spawn that is a 'tough' rated mob, like from the alerts. Three people get three 'tough' mobs added per spawn, four get four and five get five. Note that these 'tough' mobs only show up in teams, and in teams that are set to higher than normal difficulty.
Increase drops: The drop rates should NOT change. Instead, there should be four new sets of loot created, game-wide, to match the four higher difficulty levels. Normal is not changed at all.
"Difficult" loot gets a new prefix added of "improved" or something. All loot is the same, except all numerical values are one better than normal loot.
"Hard" loot gets a new prefix added of "excellent" or something. All numerical values are two better than normal loot.
"Very Difficult" loot gets a prefix added of 'superior' or something. All numerical values are three better.
"Elite" loot gets a prefix added of 'elite'. All numerical values are five better.
Add a store where you can buy all the gear up to 'superior' for things that drop in-game, like the qliphotic residue purple things. The idea is to give people reasons to run the old content again. Note that this store should also charge people globals, perhaps twice the 'sell' value. Start soaking some money out of the game.
To preserve the cash model, put all these levels of loot for sale in a new vendor for Zen. Prices should be in the 20 to 100 zen range for each piece or Elite gear. This stuff will sell like hotcakes, man.
These changes would be simple find and replace activities, I think, so a huge number could be done quickly and easily, and would give the players lots, LOTS more to do.
More thoughts later.
biased towards FF, which is always payed for, either directly or indirectly through subs.
just buy the gear from the zen store , and for a ridiculously low price of 20-100 zen.
as soon as you put the same gear in a game store to be bought with globals you reduce the replay value.
why waste time doing missions, when you can just buy it?
next;
what level will this gear be at,
Green, blue, purple.
heroic, mercenary, legion, rampage
which ever ones you make it better than, people will complain about it making their gear obsolete.. and then go to the store and buy some more.
scaling difficulty leads to a problem with sidekicking.
1 x level 40, 4 x level 6. 40 does the work, 6 gets the xp as if they were level 6.
if it scales to level, which level in a mixed group does it go to?
the 40 or the 6?
These changes would be simple find and replace activities, I think, so a huge number could be done quickly and easily, and would give the players lots, LOTS more to do.
remember, our files are not annotated, there is no simple, find and replace.
It's go through ALL the 2217(at least thats how many are in my folder) files,
find all the missions> add the 4 new levels to them
find ALL the rewards. > make 4(new) extra versions,> link them to 4 new(created) levels,
oh and not all missions are on Socrates.
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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!
No, you should not. Ever. Your financial level outside the game shouldn't have anything to do with your abilities in-game. Your in-game money sure, but that's only because it still promotes playing the game to be good. Buying your power is cheap(in the non-wealth sense of the word) and unfair.
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Since P2W was brought up....
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
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You didn't actually answer the question that the dev asked. He asked about powers only, since that is what he works on.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
I never understand the concept even coming up in a co-op game.
"It's an exhibition, not a competition. Please, no wagering." - David Letterman, Stupid Pet Tricks :biggrin:
For me the concept is a matter of competition against myself. I do not feel the need to compete with others but I do try to push myself against my own performance with a character.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
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If I can only acquire it through cash purchase, it'd better be something I really want. And if its only function is to make me "better" at the game, and I'm doing well enough without it, I'm not buying it. It's the reason my main in STO is still flying around in his Tier 5 prototype Odyssey Star Cruiser - sure, I could buy a "better" ship, but the increase in performance simply isn't worth 25 bucks to me, especially when the USS Hans Asperger seems more than capable of handling the content I've been playing. (And if I ever do need a T6 ship, I've still got that Kobali Cruiser I picked up during the anniversary event, USS George Romero.)
I'm certainly not going to "P2W" when there's nothing to W. It makes no sense at all.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Not sure if it's been said already, but fighting sticks, short and long, think Mockingbird and Caiera.
Many thanks!
Well if this post is posing as a poll i would certainly love :
- Spear/pole weapon/quarterstaff fighting style like Seung Mi-na (Soulcalibur) or Shao-Lin fighting style
- Two weapons sticks (Daredevil/Mockingbird)
-Nunchaku weapon style (both one-hand /two hands even shifting from one hand to two hands, perhaps chaining it with a fist/foot combo)
-Water-based powers (wall of water, summon water creature/elemental, water strike/column, etc) with an effect as in Abyss
- Plant-like powers (Poison Ivy) entangling vines, wall of thorns, toxic flowers, grass covering surrounding which hinders/slow opponent in an AoE, etc
-Elasticity (Plastic Man/Fantastic four) whereas it will be a true challenge, since you managed to affect colors of the costume to the rocket punch or/and cape glide pattern, maybe stretching the actual costume would be possible for arms/legs as well?
-Also i would add more animals choices for summon animals : spiders/tigers/giant insects/snakes, etc. and perhaps their elemental version for summon air elemental/summon golem
unfortunately the only animals ingame are;
wolf, bear, dino, demon dog
and some flying bugs.
that's it.
any others they would have to make the model from scratch.
stretching we've been told, would have to stretch the person.
stretching would involve having to stretch a large amount of parts, just look how many types of hands, gloves, feet are available.
as for my last post , people seemed to have missed the other comment. part way down.
those changes were supposedly to give replay value but how many people will just say," I've already run it before, why should I do it again, when I can just buy the gear."
next; unless it's level 40 gear, why get it?
how many people apart from Jonsills (and me when I can't be bothered seeing if I have any in the junk pile)level their alts(not first) with normal gear rather than Heirloom gear?
Going from the amount of comments I get ingame, not many.
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Nope! All rewards drop in-game, not a nickel required if you don't want to pay. If you DO want to pay, well good for you! Keeps the lights on. Also, this does not alter the lockbox and vendor gear in any way. I have other thoughts for that stuff, though.
Honestly, right now the Legion gear in the lockboxes is the true pay to win, along with Vigilante pieces. All these rewards are below those items.
FF? You mean Free Form?
How is this biased towards free form, except for the obvious fact that freeform builds are "better" than AT's.
All mission-dropped gear. All of it. If you crank your difficulty to Elite, missions should be HARD, and good stuff drops.
Not as good as lockbox gear, but darn good.
As for making gear obsolete, of course it does. That's rather the entire point: Give people an upgrade path for their stables of 40's.
This change would have nothing to do with XP. How does it scale now?
Scale the ones that ARE on there then. Lots of new stuff to do then.
Exactly!
Adding in higher tiers of loots, WHEN, coupled with significantly higher levels of challenge, will allow lots and lots of people to push themselves and their characters higher and harder.
I would love that, and so would a lot of other people. Adding replay value to existing content by enabling new rewards. This is sort of how Diablo works, with their difficulty settings. I'm not suggesting you get quite THAT nuts with it, but the idea is the same.
I see where you are going. I had this on a toon dressed as a police and well, not really the same.
level 40, gear is mission, Heroic/mercenary, legion, rampage in that order.
Unless your gear is better than those, why would people want them.
the min/maxers and " I can squeeze a few points out, I'm sure"(another group entirely) are farming for Rampage gear.and complaining about drop rates.
To be a reason to replay content, it needs to be;
1. better than current level 40 gear
2. AND accessible to ALL characters. Not easily but at least a possibility.(Rampages are stretching the point a lot on that one with the RNG and DR.)
3. AND not available anywhere else.
you're idea falls down, as a reason to play content again, when you make it purchasable in-game and in the zen store.
as soon as you have that, you will have people will go.
" I can get that in 10 seconds and then pose in Zone or I can waste time doing the mission."
scaleable is good but there are problems , like sidekicking, which make it harder to do. STO has missions that are scaleable but pretty much all of theirs are instanced missions.
we need different missions not just the same ones with more mobs, which unless they reprogram the AI's on all mobs, is what you will get.
Currently, higher level difficulty only works on instanced missions and increases hit points, damage and damage resistance.(anything else?)
quite frankly, a lot of people are sick of running the same missions with each character, all you're doing is making the same missions harder, They are still the same missions.
I'm still running them because I find spamming alerts more boring.
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I have 4 Sets of Nemesis's Heirloom Gear to level characters
The Nemesis Tokens from the characters who were doing Non-stop Nemesis Missions didn't go wasted
I NEVER use the Garbage Gear missions give
Yeap, I have completely STOP leveling character with Grab alerts,
it's boring, frustating, it ruins my Character experience and feels really unsatisfying
even now I look back at character I leveled exclusively by doing Alerts and I feel like I never got to actually enjoy playing as them
with Double XP Weekend buff, Missions give REALLY good XP
The worse Missions to do is Vibora Bay's missions, you get through time sinking grinding missions and the game rewards you with LESS-THAN-A-HALF XP tab, Really Pathetic
Vibora Bay exist only to waste your time
The only good thing I find doing VB is getting rare costumes pieces which I sell in AH
I'm bored to Death doing Westside over and over again, I try to Speedrun it as fast as I can every time (Vehicles help doing so)
I tend to level 30-40 on Monster Island because the missions can be done in bunches as you work your way down and around.
a small side trip to canada at 33-35 fills in a gap, chasing yetis.
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To each their own I suppose.
Indeed, this is correct! So, here's the second set of thoughts.
Rampage gear (Justice) has a huge problem in that it is bind on pickup, and even worse, there is literally only one set of the darn stuff.
So, first, shake that up a bit. Add in three or four more sets of gear that are identical to current justice gear, except the set bonuses are different. Add in a set that adds avoidance, add in a set that adds resistance (like Armadillo), add in a set that adds healing, etc, etc, etc. Suddenly, lots more reasons to slog through that horrible grind.
Second, and even more importantly, add in new sets of secondary gear. Add a bunch of vigilante-class secondary sets that also has a set bonus. Make it about 50 percent more expensive than vigilante.
Third, add a new purple secondary set that accepts 1 mod per piece. (Holy moly!) Make it cost the same Q as the other secondary sets, but also require 20 (or whatever number seems right) of each of the level currencies. So it costs Until tokens, MCPD, Silver Champion, and Mechanon. Note that this probably requires the missions to scale if you want to 'back equip' a bunch of 40's.
Fourth, and by far the most important, allow us to buy upgrades to our existing 40's. As an example of what you could do, if we pay 50 of every currency, we can buy another spec tree point, for example. For 100 of every currency (or whatever mechanic seems to work) we can buy another innate talent. To get really crazy, for 1000 of every currency, we can buy a second passive slot (HOLY MOLY).
Namely, give us ways to make our favorite toons better, once you've made the content tough enough to give us a run for our money.
Lots more ideas, but this is too long already.
Without the tougher content, it just doesn't matter. I outfitted two of my toons with vigilante/justice gear, but it hardly mattered. They already could solo Lairs--now it's just even easier.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
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Indeed, this is so. I equip everything with Legion/Vigilante, and that's plenty for the game as it stands.
This is why I stated FIRST that the difficulty sliders must be HARD, and give good drops. As a note, the recommendation I put out, for +100 percent hitpoints and +100 percent damage, means that encounters are four times as difficult: Twice as much damage for twice as long.
This has a lot of effects, such as making controls more important to survival, etc. If quadruple isn't tough enough, the difficulties can and should be raised even higher.
Now, as for the last thing I'd ask for: Allow us access to the Foundry from Neverwinter.
Even more importantly, every week, take a foundry mission and add it to the Alerts system.
Suddenly, there is a never-ending stream of new content, that anyone can access, in a team, from anywhere.
Voila! There is something new to do every week, heck, even every day, and all it requires is one Dev to tag Foundry missions he likes as Alerts.
How easy is this? The players become their own developers!
If you really want to sweeten the pot, award every player who creates an alert-worthy Foundry mission with a free free-form slot. Suddenly you'll be DROWNING in new content, and its FREE.
What's not to like here?
The Foundry system is well-vetted by now, and conversion of it should be fairly painless. The only part which requires Dev support is choosing which missions to tag into Alerts.
I honestly can't think of a simpler and more effective way to make quality new content more cheaply than this.
This gives tons and tons of new toys to play with and new things to do for very little company resources.
Come on guys, why not give it a shot?
What segregation? I can get everything in this game outside of vet rewards by grinding up globals. Or I could throw my wallet at the screen. Both work.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
Okay, I totally lied.
Here's a semi-random list of additions I'd love to see.
1) Add a 1-point "rank-4" advantage to all melee powers that you can only buy after rank3 is in place. Have it add +50 percent damage. (Yikes!) This will go a LONG way towards addressing the damage disparity between melee and ranged. Melee is supposed to do more damage, and it flat out doesn't. Even better from your perspective, this will trigger a whole bunch of respecs, and tasty-tasty sales. Money is good, make us want to send it to you.
2) Devices. For pity's sake, give us some new, decent, devices that are not becomes or vehicles. I HATE becomes and vehicles. Give us an upgraded version of the Sparcshield,give us versions of the Pheromone that summon golems or constructs or dogs or robots or thugs or phantoms or nightmares. I HATE how there's dinosaurs everywhere because the only pet device worth a hoot summons them. Have a better version of the nightmare generator summon a tougher version of the pet. Give us a better version of the humidity dome. Etc, etc.
3) More mods. DU cores are nice, but can we get some new stuff? Combo mods for example as a place to start. Have Juryrig and Doctor Silverback sets. Go nuts, guys!
4) Let us buy a sixth power point slot for all our powers. OMG, you think number 1 idea would put money in your pocket from respec sales? Having a sixth point available would be HUGE. Let us buy it using the same mechanism you use for the additional talent, or extra spec points. Everybody will want a couple of these.
5) Let us buy more advantage points, up to about ten. The more of these you make available, the more respecs you sell. This sounds like a win!
I'd like a melee power, preferably one with a somewhat generic animation, to get an advantage to make it like Skarn's Bane.
Trauma can be applied by multiple powers, it's about time Skarn's gets a bit less exclusive.
MMOs are on a scale of fun vs addicting.
A 'fun' game is self explanatory, and Champions Online is fun.
An 'addicting' game feeds on psychological weaknesses of the gamers, getting them to either grind existing content to get a desired result and/or pay more money. For example, in most MMOs, mats drop randomly rather than having one drop every time and requiring more mats. The random drop is a staple in MMOs because of psychological tests on lower animals. Suppose a rat in a cage is given a button that dispenses food. If the button is predictable, the rat will only press the button when it's hungry. If it's random, the rat will press the button repeatedly in order to stockpile food. MMOs use the random loot model to play to this base stockpiling instinct.
Champions Online is very far on the 'fun' side of the scale. Most of the customization doesn't require unlocking. Sure rampage gear requires a bit of grinding, but even the Blue quality gear from missions is enough to handle end-game content. PvP isn't designed to get players to hate each other. Also, check out the player base. There are role-players and costume contests, which mostly don't even exist in other games. It was only a month ago that this game finally started getting spam-bots, which was probably set up by a generalist who spams all PWI games - Nobody is going to pay somebody to grind this game because there isn't much to grind.
Bottom line, Champions Online is a game for enthusiasts who like MMOs but don't like to be manipulated into addictive behavior.
As for a course of action:
What I'd recommend is getting some outside consulting from somebody who knows how to make an addicting MMO. Ideally, you should get a guy who worked for Blizzard on either Diablo or WoW. In lieu of that, getting a developer from Perfect World (the game) will work too. Have that person do a once over look at Champions Online and get their advice as to what they would do to make it more addicting.
...And then for every one of their recommendations, do the exact opposite in the areas they notice.
Sonic (you already have that bird manimal power on mobs)
Plants
I'd also really like to see a miscellaneous power "set" that is a grab bag of individual powers that aren't in a set at all.
It would be FANTASTIC to think that CO actually has some life left to it, I've pretty well given up hope.
???
I'd love for that to be true, but the existence of Lock Boxes and the way they work speak otherwise.
No, it is not self explanatory. People have fun in different ways, sports, climbing mountains, making boats inside bottles. CO has a group of players that consider it fun that you refer in your next quote
CO has been pretty much reduced to a hangout zone with costume contest and roleplays as its premium activities.
Certainly AAA mmos has their fair share of addicted players, but claiming that it is th rule in those games is a gross generalization. Nowadays, those games offer several path of progression. It is player choice to take them or not. CO made it simpler, since there is no much to do(besides roleplaying and costume contest) you can't really get addicted
We all have fun in our own ways, as you started pointing out before falling into the trap of "since this is what I like, it must be what everyone likes".
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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and their site is in the US.
get thing from random drops.
ok for people for the RNG likes, everyone else, it's just an exercise in frustration and quickly left.
ok, they aren't dropping for me, what else is there to do?
difference between wow & diablo vs CO.
no. of devs working on it when shipped, 75
then theres WOW with over 400 devs working on it, to produce the results you talk about.
and we have ?
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