New efforts!

[Paragon Avenger]

I think I did a good job of saying nothing about nothing, and that's saying something.

So you say.

Hey, I have made over 4200 posts and so far I have said nothing about almost every nothing I could think of and then some.  Don't tell me I don't say nothing.
 

[Vee]

I believe it was Fusionette who once said "Much ado about nothing beats nothing hands down." Might also have been David Foster Wallace.

[Paragon Avenger]

I believe it was Fusionette who once said "Much ado about nothing beats nothing hands down." Might also have been David Foster Wallace.

Heck Yeah!

[Goddangit]

Heck Yeah!

The more I take away from nothing the more nothing I have.  We may have a perpetual motion machine here.  I better stop before a black hole forms.

[blacksly]

The more I take away from nothing the more nothing I have.  We may have a perpetual motion machine here.  I better stop before a black hole forms.

NOW you're onto something!

[LaughingAlex]

Fusionette could speak while faceplanted in the ground?  What?  I thought she deliberately ran into to many lost and Rikti to keep on her feet....

[Arcana]

Hey, I have made over 4200 posts and so far I have said nothing about almost every nothing I could think of and then some.  Don't tell me I don't say nothing.
 

You don't say.

[Arcana]

Screw the old trinity.

Go with "Muscle, support, control.", similar to GW2.  A tank would be a "Muscle" class, capable of inflicting horrific damage and taking it simultaneously.  It would be vulnerable to crowd control effects from control, but could be protected from that with support.  Does something like this exist in games already?  Yes, in RTS's.  For example the starcraft series, such as SC2 and the protoss "Death ball" which comprised of, originally, Void Rays(The muscle) and support comprised of stalkers(who also acted as muscle) and collosus(the actual support) with the occasional high templar.  Or maybe SC 1 and dragoons(muscle), zealots(both muscle and crowd control, they could body-block melee enemies to protect dragoons) and high templar.  Or Terrans and marines/medics with science vessel support.  Or even the ghost to disable dangerous mechanic units in SC1(crowd control) or a protoss arbiter/mothership disabling enemy units in SC 1 and 2 respectively.

The difference between RTS games and MMOs is that in RTS games units only have to be effective, but in MMOs classes must be not just effective but fun to play individually.  For example, in an RTS it is perfectly acceptable to have one unit lock a force down and another swoop in and kill them, but in an MMO no one (or at least much fewer people) will want to play the lock down class.  We saw that in CoH where ironically controllers were originally mega powerful when it came to control but often very deficient when it came to damage.  They were simultaneously overpowered and underpowered: too powerful for the content, making any team with them able to trivialize all content, and yet boring to play.  The post Issue 5 controller is a much more balanced class between control, offense, and defense (arguably, the most balanced class in terms of utility in CoH).  But imagine what the controller class analog would be in an RTS.  Probably totally unbalancing and tactically uninteresting.

In an RTS, every unit class should have a very specific role they excel in.  In MMOs, you have to account for the fact that not every player will want to perform the same job over and over again or be compelled to in teams.  Things like builds and stances can alleviate that to some degree, but they can also globally hurt replayability.  This is not a trivial problem to solve from a player-driven gameplay perspective.

[Goddangit]

NOW you're onto something!

Or I'm on to nothing.

[Thunder Glove]

I really wish I24 had launched.  It might have been very interesting to play a Controller with the Sorcery pool, to bolster its direct damage.

[blacksly]

Or I'm on to nothing.

As long as you're ON nothing, it's all good. Unless the something that you're on is good something, then it's still good.

[LaughingAlex]

The difference between RTS games and MMOs is that in RTS games units only have to be effective, but in MMOs classes must be not just effective but fun to play individually.  For example, in an RTS it is perfectly acceptable to have one unit lock a force down and another swoop in and kill them, but in an MMO no one (or at least much fewer people) will want to play the lock down class.  We saw that in CoH where ironically controllers were originally mega powerful when it came to control but often very deficient when it came to damage.  They were simultaneously overpowered and underpowered: too powerful for the content, making any team with them able to trivialize all content, and yet boring to play.  The post Issue 5 controller is a much more balanced class between control, offense, and defense (arguably, the most balanced class in terms of utility in CoH).  But imagine what the controller class analog would be in an RTS.  Probably totally unbalancing and tactically uninteresting.

In an RTS, every unit class should have a very specific role they excel in.  In MMOs, you have to account for the fact that not every player will want to perform the same job over and over again or be compelled to in teams.  Things like builds and stances can alleviate that to some degree, but they can also globally hurt replayability.  This is not a trivial problem to solve from a player-driven gameplay perspective.

Classes can be fun without making the game trivial or resulting in anything unbalanced or trivial.  The trouble is ultimately, and I really hate saying this, but so many people focus so much on having to have a healer, having to have a tank, having to have pure damage, that ultimately team play in mmorpgs end up very limited.

I said it before, we see check-list gameplay, rather than team-based strategy gameplay, in mmorpgs.  While other game genres succeed at team-based strategy gameplay.

You obviously don't one one tactic to be used everywhere.  But that takes work for the developers.  And it takes a community with a level of creativity and open mindedness to make it work.  The former isn't so much imo the problem, but the later absolutely is.  MMORPG players imo as I have said countless times have displayed a sore lack of creativity compared even to mms players.  They always ask "whats the healer class"(or best healer) and "whats the tank class", and then many look online for a build so they don't have to do any thinking.  And some or even a lot of such players become very vocal on how the game should be played, often forcing the trinity down everyones throats.

Hell, the defender community had the full brunt of force from that: How many times did a thread get posted "I want the best healer build can you hook me up" or "Whats the best healer?".  Not "Hey whats an easy defender build to start with", but very very specifically "Whats the best healer" and many players would then turn on the insult button the moment players told them that defenders were not specifically healers.  They'd try to shove there years of "x other mmorpg" experience in everyones faces as if they were better then everyone, when in reality they had no experience at CoH, and that CoH was a different game.

[pinballdave]

*clicks into gear* - the best healer is a forcefield defender. At top enhancement it can mitigate 19/20 points of damage for teammates.

I know that wasn't what you meant specifically, but it was indeed a hot-button issue.

I think the community would have been better served with what is the best damage mitigation, which would include a lot of controller builds with the hard controls. Remember the fire wall with knock down instead of knock back? That was nearly 100% mitigation.

[Arcana]

Classes can be fun without making the game trivial or resulting in anything unbalanced or trivial.  The trouble is ultimately, and I really hate saying this, but so many people focus so much on having to have a healer, having to have a tank, having to have pure damage, that ultimately team play in mmorpgs end up very limited.

I said it before, we see check-list gameplay, rather than team-based strategy gameplay, in mmorpgs.  While other game genres succeed at team-based strategy gameplay.

That doesn't really address the issue I mentioned.  I didn't say classes can't be fun without making the game trivial or unbalanced.  I said its far easier to make the claim that propose an actual way to do it.  And it is easier because it *seems* like it wouldn't be difficult because it is easy to propose ways to add RTS-like class diversity, but it is rare to find anyone making the proposal actually take the time to pursue the idea deeply enough to demonstrate it doesn't suffer from catastrophically broken gameplay.

It is important to note here that not even the example of City of Heroes necessarily offers proof by example.  City of Heroes players are self-selected to like City  of Heroes gameplay.  But by the standards of many other MMOs - virtually all of them, in fact - City of Heroes was in many ways tactically boring and horribly unbalanced.  If you just tried to blindly convert WoW or Eve or any other MMO into CoH-style class design you'd have a game attractive to former CoH players, but you'd probably lose most of the existing playerbase in response.  That's not what anyone should try to do.  How you go about taking some of the elements of less class-rigid design from City of Heroes and inject it into an existing game with different expectations, or how you go about building an entire new game with a brand new playerbase with little or no pre-existing expectations is extremely complex.  Just because we liked the one way Paragon did that doesn't make it inherently likeable.  Even I found many aspects of it extremely limiting in what the game could do.

Paragon made very good lemonade out of the lemons they were handed.  But you can't serve everyone lemonade.  In terms of game design principles, no one else who even attempts to do anything like CoH will replicate CoH's successes (and failures) because CoH was a synergy between a development team and a playerbase roughly synchronized around its development trajectory.

I was not in the original CoH beta - the only CoH beta I didn't directly participate in - but I did have the opportunity to talk to many players who did, including some prominent advocates and "quants" of the time.  One of the common themes I heard was that one of the most frequently repeated complaints about CoH was that the gameplay was too simplistic and too easy for players to trivialize.  Basically, the difficulty was too low.  Keep in mind that for the most part throughout the entire history of the game from launch to shutdown the devs for the most part *reduced* difficulty downward.  When players talk about how developers "don't listen to 'the' players" and refuse to just do what the players suggest when players know better than the devs, my best understanding is if the devs had listened to the vocal component of the playerbase in beta and at release, the game would have gone in a direction almost entirely counter to what most of us characterize as CoH's primary strengths.  Casual-friendliness in particular was something almost *no one* was strongly advocating for in the early days. 

The notion that CoH was a "casual friendly" game was something that didn't start to take hold until WoW was released.  I know because when WoW was released *it* was held up to be a very casual friendly game (comparatively) as a way to explain its popularity.  When I suggested that CoH was a far more casual friendly game (and of course predated WoW) on the forums, that was considered a sufficiently novel idea I was praised for even suggesting it.  And the reason I gave for CoH's casual-friendly nature was probably one of my more prescient early observations.  I said CoiH was casual friendly because the devs appeared to be canonically incapable of finely balancing the game, so they were instead making a game where player power levels were so high anyone could build ridiculously strong characters.  When anyone could build extremely powerful characters, most of the content becomes much easier to play through for casual players that do not spend a lot of time optimizing their builds, and becomes more open to players more interested in roleplaying their character concepts.

Keep in mind I was still trying to wrap my minds around the fact that the devs literally failed to realize that Invulns could get to 100% resistance and become immortal, had recently admitted that the -10% smoke grenade debuff was accidentally set to -100%, and had just handed SR scrappers perma-elude, when WoW was released.  I wasn't exactly complimenting the devs' at the time when I said CoH was casual friendly.

[LaughingAlex]

In response to many people complaining about the game being to easy, I think they mistook the game being to easy as simply the fact that any kind of build could work as long as you were using the powers correctly.  Many players also did not up the difficulty of CoX any beyond the "normal" setting, which was in many ways the easy mode of the game.

In many mmorpgs, the "Difficulty" of them is entirely based around finding the exact "correct" position and strategy the developers want.  It's more like a puzzle with only one solution in every situation(usually, holy trinity with positioning being the only major challenge, with the occasional effort to make players move).  Due to the dependency on things requiring a check-list plan, it isn't so much as what I'd consider to be hard as simply dependant on memorization/planning.  Memorization/planning doesn't really equate challenge, so much as it equates a "punishing" difficulty style.  It's not about more then one solution to a problem but executing an only solution to a problem.

In essense, it's figuring out what the "plan" is supposed to be.  Incarnate trials even had this problem, although not to a severe degree.  But because CoX had such a wide variety of tactics to win fights with, it was mistaken as being "to easy".  In reality, it really wasn't.  Enemy minions could take off as much as a fifth or fourth of your health.  The game had dozens of "demonic spiders", enemies that could utterly destroy you with seemingly unfair and "cheap" tactics.  In fact, TV tropes listed over HALF of the mobs in the game as "Demonic spiders" but in reality, they all had there counters.

CoX supported a very wide variety of playstyles so players mistook it as a push-over.  In reality it's really a game of strategy and initiative.  If you were fast to apply your crowd control, used buffs/debuffs the game was smooth sailing.  It was when you do things like tradional holy trinity pull tactics and didn't target enemies based on threats ect that caused numerous wipes.  But players thought it was easy because again, they could win doing any kind of strategy as long as it was a reasonable strategy involving at least 60-70% of there powers.

To many of such players I imagine, the game was easy.  But a game is only hard to them if there only accepted strategy, the holy trinity, was the only one that worked and execution of it even had to be difficult.  While every other strategy the game was impossible.  To them, that was "hard".  To me though, thats what I call a form of "Railroading".  In which you HAVE to play that very specific way, take a specific path, no secrets to discover ect.  It just as well be on a railroad as an experience.  Like, a map which has one path, a dozen un-skippable cutscenes, no secrets, no side paths, no exploration.  Only it's in the gameplay itself.  No variety in tactics or strategy.  All one plan with a very tiny variation of positioning.  That to me is not difficult.  It's merely a puzzle.

[LaughingAlex]

Another thing is that, many such players generally complain about games being to easy, when in reality, they tend to be asking for games where "fun had to be earned".  But they ignore whether thats actually a good game.  City of heroes was actually harder then it looked, but it was also extremely approachable.  It had a community which helped you learn how to play it better.  Its mechanics were once you saw them in action, it was easy to learn there uses.  It had things that could ruin you yes, but you had counters and you only had to look for them.  And they were not to hard to find.  It was up to the player to use those counters.

The kind of game the "we had to earn our fun in the old days!" crowd speaks of, are actually what modern developers consider bad games:

1: There is little to no telegraphing or failures to telegraph entirely, difficult attacks and deadly traps.  This leads to "trial and error" gameplay which today is recognized as not really taking any skill.
2: Choices are uninformed to an extreme.  Those aren't choices and there is no skill on the players behalf involved.
3: Rules are inconsistent.  Be it from the AI cheating, to being given unfair perception, to enemies not even obeying the same rules as the player.  Or even some pits having secret rooms rather than killing you with zero hint(such as super mario bros).

With one exception(jumping while stunned) CoX was surprisingly consistent with the rules the AI and players followed.  The only difference was how much health/damage the AI and player did and had to do.
4: Iteration times are long.  Many mmorpgs including CoX actually fail in this.  When you need to spend over an hour preparing for fun, and then the mission/quest takes 1-2 hours and you have to do the entire thing over, thats not really hard, or entertaining.

These are the hallmarks of a punishing game.  A game that, yes, it's hard, but it sucks.

A challenging game lets you:
1: Use a variety of strategies/tactics/solutions.  CoX excelled at this.
2: NPCs and player follow the same rules and other general rules never change.  CoX did this within reason.
3: Things are telegraphed.  This was something CoX didn't always do so well, but at the very least you could still pro-actively prevent devastating attacks from ruining you.
4: Compared to other mmorpgs, lets face it, later task forces and most incarnate trials had relatively short iteration time.  Compare that to DCUO's raids taking well over an hour or two when most CoX trials were 20-30 minutes.

These may make the game seem easier but in reality, they allow a game to be much harder with a higher chance/risk of failure.  Because the player is more likely to be willing to try again.  Many "This game is to easy" types, I hate saying this, but they really tend to equate bad game design as what makes a game hard.  They get mad at people failing 5-6 times and then succeeding on the 7th, as they generally want to be exclusives in the ability to beat a game.  They (possibly even unrealistically) want to have to spend 40-50 hours on a single piece of content to master it, even if it's boring to them, so they can have those bragging rights.  When in reality, they are just wasting time, as that and memorization that really only matters in a punishing game.  In other words, they are masochists.

Most human beings aren't masochists.  Challenging games sell, punishing games don't except to that one market.  Sadly most mmorpg players I guess are masochists if they thought CoX was to easy.  No wonder mmorpg's are considered bad games to everyone else and no wonder CoX players also play other genres .

http://plus10damage.com/blog/2015/2/4/challenge-vs-punishment-the-difference-between-good-and-bad-difficulty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

Best two articles about difficulty of all time.  Yes, World of Warcraft is considered easy.  But could it ever afford to be hard with the style of long raids everyone here is familiar with?  No.

[LaughingAlex]

I know, why not edit a post but, I want to use some examples i'm familiar with in which some players may mistake a harder game as being easy, when in reality it's a challenging but not punishing game.

Terraria vs Starbound(specifically, boss fights)

Terraria combat is very what people call "twitch" based.  It's very high speed, flying(even limitless flying later) and requires you to spend most of your time maintaining distance.  Weapons are very limited to how far you are in the game and options are limited.  A lot of preparation time is needed for boss fights.  Bosses are very inconsistent.  If you lose, you have to often wait 30+ minutes or commit to 30+ minutes of gameplay before even making an attempt on a boss.
Starbound is far more "IN YOUR FACE" than terraria, in that movement is slower and enemies can on planets your not fully upgraded for hurt you tremendously.  But your given means to deal with them and you have a huge variety of weapons.  Boss fights do not let you build anything, but they have very defined patterns which can make a boss very easy, and some can be very dangerous depending on how you play.  Losing on a boss however lets you jump right back in and try again.  The only thing you lose were medical items you used in the previous attempt.

Now, I consider starbound to be harder than terraria normal difficulty.  But terreria expert mode is far harder than starbound, and sadly due to mechanics, it's more due to the game being punishing, but not truely difficult.  See terraria could NOT afford to be hard, at all, period, in it's bosses, due to the criminally long iteration times.  The experience on normal mode becomes almost a snooze fest for anyone with any skill at 2d platformers.  But that is because normal mode terraria bosses, except for the moonlord(who is to hard to be fair on either difficulty), are made to be beaten on the first try by anyone with skill at 2d platformers.

So expert mode was made for experienced 2d platformer players.  Sadly, the iteration times and the bosses tendency to not obey the rules results in the game rapidly flying off into punishing territory and loses any feeling of challenging the player.  Numerous mechanics in terraria besides the iteration time create for a very unwelcome and unapproachable game.  Oh yes, and before you say "well you can afk for those mandatory wait times" there is a good chance a goblin/pirate invasion or a solar eclipse will happen to kill you a dozen times more if you afk, so you HAVE to sit at that keyboard the whole time!

Starbound doesn't run into those problems.  The game gives you multiple paths of progression and the bosses let you try again immedietly.  You don't end up spending dozens of hours doing "preparations" for any event without any progress, instead your always making progress.  Maybe you just completed a massive farm with a huge income on an ocean planet, so you can just BUY the metals to upgrade your armor in the main quest.  Maybe your tenants merchants have the armor of the tier you are trying to get to so you can "shortcut" looking for materials.  You have the means to move through the game as you will, you just need to have the will to do so.

And the bosses keep it fair.  If you like the game to be harder, go ahead and do them with lower tier armors.  You won't be utterly destroyed like in terraria for it.  Want them to be easier?  Try out-teching the bosses and then beat them, they'll be easy.  Try different weapon types to beat a boss to.  Bosses can be harder/easier for people using differing types of weapons, and most or even all of them can be defeated with most types of weapons.  The game makes you choose between differing movement techs, to.  And it gives you the means to change them before attempting a boss again.  This means overall, starbound, while it hasn't gotten a hard mode just yet, it can afford one.  It can grow to have one.  And some bosses even now are significantly harder than terraria's bosses  in ways that I think are pretty good.

Now a much shorter comparison of challenging vs punishing:  Fallout 4's New Survival Difficulty vs the Arbitration difficulty mod.

You get to save anywhere with arbitration and weapon rebalance, given your playing very hard, it's still difficult as heck.  Weapons kill you in only a few hits and you need to really think how you wish to handle a fight, whether your in power armor or not.  But survival mode makes sure that any approach you want to take on a fight you died on WILL be different when you reach it, because you had to go through a long trek stretching as much as 30-40 minutes due to the sleep to save.  On top of that, if you encounter a game breaking glitch, you have to start all over again(God help you if the only save files you are allowed to have are corrupted to).  While arbitration you can save anywhere, thus you get to re-enter right were you failed to try again.

Challenging is difficult to me.  But punishing?  Well thats where I draw the line.

[Sinistar]

"Take me down to Paragon City where the grass is green and the villains are a'plenty! Oh, take me home!"

[darkgob]

Terraria combat is very what people call "twitch" based.  It's very high speed, flying(even limitless flying later) and requires you to spend most of your time maintaining distance.  Weapons are very limited to how far you are in the game and options are limited.  A lot of preparation time is needed for boss fights.  Bosses are very inconsistent.  If you lose, you have to often wait 30+ minutes or commit to 30+ minutes of gameplay before even making an attempt on a boss.

This is just not true in most instances (and the 30+ minutes figure is never true, not sure where you're getting that from).

The Brain of Cthulhu, the Eater of Worlds, King Slime, Queen Bee, the Wall of Flesh, and the Golem all have summoning items (which are admittedly consumable but also craftable, except for the WoF's summoner) that can be used at any time.

The Eye of Cthulhu and Skeletron can only be fought at night, but daytime in Terraria only lasts 15 real-time minutes, and nighttime lasts 9 (also, Skeletron's summoning item is not consumable, and the Eye's is craftable as well as littered in chests across the world).

The Mechanical Bosses have craftable, consumable summoning items although they can only be used at night.  Plantera's Bulb respawns in the Underground Hardmode Jungle constantly.  Duke Fishron is admittedly a massive pain just to summon without creating a specialized Underground Mushroom biome to farm Truffle Worms.

The Lunatic Cultist->Solar Pillar->Moon Lord cycle is definitely a pain since the Pillars take so damn long.  The Lunatic Cultist doesn't need to be summoned to start the cycle though, and after a few cycles you can have the materials to create the Moon Lord's summoning item and summon him directly.

I don't agree at all that options are limited, go read some boss fight guides if you think that's the case and you'll see how many strategies are available.  Mounts (including a couple with limitless flying like you said), Minecart tracks or Asphalt skybridges for extra speed, teleporters, AoE buffs, tons of weapon options...the list just goes on.

One thing I will agree with you on is that Expert Mode is obscenely difficult (I just recently started an Expert Mode world, even just the Expert Eye of Cthulhu is ridiculous), but that's why it's called "Expert".

[Vee]

Duke Fishron is admittedly a massive pain just to summon without creating a specialized Underground Mushroom biome to farm Truffle Worms.

I need to hang on to this sentence in case anyone ever tries to talk me into playing Terraria.