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I fear for the future of CoX
Hoplites
Member CommonPosts: 463
After having enough time to digest the Incarnate system, there is a major flaw that is driving players away. For those that do not know, an unknown participation mechanic, which has some unknown criteria is being used for the Incarnate trials. This to me is poisoning the CoX community, and is turning the game we all loved into a ghoulish nightmare. Furthermore, because of the secrecy this participation mechanic is cloaked in, and the lack of communication from the Devs, it truly has become a polarizing wedge issue. Some players like it, while others hate it. But based on my circle of friends, it seems a lot more hate this mechanic as they are quitting in droves. Incarnate content was to supposed help with player retention, but not only is it causing the returning players to leave, but also existing players too! This participation mechanic is toxic to the long term health of the CoX game.
CoX has always been community driven game, so any leechers, or AFKers were dealt with by the people in the groups themsevlves. Now, there is an unknown mechanic that determines if you are participating or not and you may receive the door mat prize of threads. Worse, it has been determined that there are some criteria that can be met to improve your rewards, and that is changing how you play your archtype. And if you are a mastermind you are out of luck, as the response from the Devs is" working as intended".
From my point of view, Positrion has lost touch of the direction CoX should head into, and he is actually making the same mistakes Jack Emmert made while he was in charge. For the sake of CoX future he probably needs to step down, and let someone else take the lead. As the leader of the CoX franchise he should have stepped in at some point, and argued that this doesn't make sense to add to the game, especially one with a very good reputation for community amongst other players.
Comments
After playing during the reactivation week briefly, I have to agree.
These new incarnate powers are an all or nothing affair, and is basically the equivalent of the Burning Crusade hitting WoW. All previous progress is swell, but unless you hop on the boat you will be obsolete and ignored.
I joined a MoRSF on my corruptor, and the only thing I was even useful for was speed boost. Everyone has uber shields, crashless nukes, uber shield buffs (Core Radial something was it?), and there were AoE super heals going off. AV's were dropping like flies, and I contributed basically nothing to this team. Couldn't help but feel like dead weight.
Right now, you buy GR or you're useless on high end teams. Fine, that's one way to sell an expansion from a business perspective. What I don't like is the necessary grinding for incarnate components however. I haven't bothered to read much on it as I have no immediate plans to buy the expansion or resub, but I do know that it takes a very long time to each such powers, basically because you can only earn components at a set rate, like the old taskforce timers, only much worse (one component per week was it?)
Whatever the finer details, this is basically the same as raid grinding loot in every other MMORPG out there. CoH was supposed to be different, better than all of this.
Hate to break it to you, but Positron's never been that close to the player base. He was the very dev who came out and condescendingly told the community that "You guys don't know how to play the game." when negative feedback about the first iteration of the RSF came out before Issue 7 (when they were all 54 and the first mission was horribly bugged), and internal testing failed to actually beat this trial before it was pushed live. This is basically LRN2PLAYN00B coming from a game developer. Pretentious much?
It's unfortunate. NC's quarterly reports are out as of yesterday for Q1 2011, and as I suspected CoH numbers are down yet again. Not significantly, but by a noticeable margin.
Remember, it has to be fun to be a game. Grinding is a bedroom activity, and the point is definitely not to do my wife as fast as possible.
So basically the whole system relies on some luck as to which type of component you get offered at the end of the trial. I managed to get all my tier 3 powers I wanted within a week, though that was playing a bit more heavily than I'm used to. I know some people who had their T3s by the second day ... I'm not sure if they slept or not, it was kind of disturbing really.
If you were to do two trials a day for a few weeks (about an hour play time ... more in setting up the groups though) you'd easily have enough for at least one tier four power, assuming you didn't get a single rare or very rare option when you finished the trials.
I've not tried any MO runs since they've come out, so I don't know about fully incarnated out teams, but in mixed teams none of my mid-40s characters have felt too terribly useless, though I can certainly see how a lot of judgment nukes would make my blasters feel kind of pointless. The important thing to note about the buffs though is that they start off terribly strong but then fade away fairly quickly. So you start off resistance and defense capped for about ten seconds, but for about half the duration of the power you only have about five or ten percent buffs.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of the homogenization of ATs this causes. I'd really like to see the AT modifiers come into play, so the damage classes do more with the nukes but less with the buffs and heals. Instead everyone can nuke just as easily and buff or heal just as easily .... It's just not quite as fun for me when a defender's judgment hurts just as much as my blaster, or my blaster heals for just as much as the defender on my team.
Still, overall it's about as lightweight a raid system as I've run across in a game. Accessible and fast (if somewhat laggy) raids that I personally find fun (I know some folks disagree). If they can ever nail down the cause of all the lag a large number of players using powers at the same time and when they manage to get in some more trials (I'd say five or six at least for variety's sake) I'll be generally happy with the thing.
The homogenization that is being generated is indeed dulling the game, and I suspect when the remaining powers are released it will drive that point home. Many players are starting to feel that their purpled out 50's feel less powerful, and many that players that played support feel like they are not contributing anything.
Anyways, I agree that the raids are light weight compared to other games, but these raids do not provide meaningful play when you have a participation mechanic judging players in the back ground. Based on loose evidence players have gathered, it seems that, the participation mechanic runs counter to many of the objectives in these raids for maximum reward, or even to qualify for a reward for hitting a certain X threshold. The conversion rates are too harsh for a currency that can't be traded to other players, and more than likely new currency will be added down the road.
I wil make a quick comment on NCSOFT Q1 numbers for CoX, and that is I am not surprised, but I find it surprising that L2 in comparison shows signs of life, especially in light of Lineage 1 NA being shut down.
What is in store for the future? According to what we know, there will be an Issue 20.5 release which will have more incarnate trials. As a result, Issue 21 may be a long way off, and it has been very vague as to what will be in that issue. A steam punk pack will be released but there are multiple sticking points. The first is that Issue 20 did not introduce any new costume pieces for free, and it has been a long time that has happened with any issue release while booster packs are being pumped out. The second is the new face technology is in the Stseam punk booster, when it is a highly asked feature by many players, and should be added for free to the game.
In summary, I don't understand where they are trying to go with the game, and the strange participation mechanic makes the game a lot more grindier than it needs to be. When some players are able to obtain tier 3/4 in a short of span of time, while others are receiving threads it poisons the community. Players start to question one another, and even themselves as to what they are doing and "playing wrong". The thread prize was insinuated by the devs that it is the prize for door sitters, but when active players are receiving the thread prize, they are insulted. And I don't blame them as CoX used to be a relaxing experiece. Now it is merely a shell of its formers self which is sad.
Wow, this is horrible. I was actually thinking about resubbing to CoX, but with these changes there's not a chance in hell. This makes me sad.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
The participation mechanic currently is only in the Incarnate trials. But you can make the logical leap that:
1. More than likely it will exist in the future Incarnate trials released unless they have a change of heart.
2. There is nothing stopping them from adding this participation mechanic throughout the entire game.
I think scenario 2 is unlikely for now given that it would take a lot of time to put in place. But for scenario 1 I can see the participation mechanic existing with the new Incarnate trials in Issue 20.5. Let me also say that the solo option for progressing the Incarnate trials is way down the road, and no deadline has been set or given. The calculations have been done, and it is futile to even attempt to try to obtain the additional Incarnate slots via solo.
The qualification mechanic was explained quite clearly in this thread by Baryonyx (and he returned to further clarify at least once more):
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=258774
Basically, you always get something. Just for showing up, you at least get 10 threads. If you participate, you qualify for a salvage drop. At that point, whether you get common, uncommon, rare, or very rare is random. You don't get common for doing "poorly", or very rare for doing "well". Mainly, they just don't want you sleeping at the door while everyone else does the work.
People seem to be most annoyed that they can't game the system to improve their chances to get a Very Rare. The devs have since implemented a system where you can change one type of salvage into another. You can turn a piece of salvage into any lower tier salvage of your choice for free. You can make it into a different type of equal tier salvage for the cost of a few threads. And there's a bit of a steep exchange for making lower-tier salvage into higher.
Hardly a system that "judges" you. In fact, I find it frees me to play in my usual manner during a trial without thinking about whether I'm jumping through the right hoops or not.
If the participation mechanic was explained clearly, then that thread wouldn't have reached such length, and views in such a short period of time based on the history and record of the forum. In addition, showing up to receive the 10 thread prize when you are actively playing is not a just reward while others who put their fastest attack on auto watching a movie in the back ground receive superior rewards. Pets and pseudo pets are unfarily punishing some AT combinations, and we still don't know what the participation thresholds are, or how it judges at all. We do know fast activating attacks like brawl for example are advantageous to use. Some suspected use of AoE's was also part of the formula, but it actually was misunderstood. It was the fast activating AoE's that generated the better rewards.
Based on your participation score you must pass the threshold before it truly becomes "random" if not you will always pick up the thread prize. Let me also add that some players have already gamed the system and obtained very rare tier 4's weeks ago by exploiting it. The system converting salvage into another is extremelly punitive and costly if you consider how alt driven the CoX game is.
You have to jump through hoops to avoid the thread prize which is the main point of frustration for players with this secretive participation mechanic.
I'll admit, I stopped reading the thread ages ago, so maybe something has changed since then, but the majority of what I saw was people creating imaginary trends out of a very small data set from their own experience and what their friends told them. Especially during the initial rush, people want their new shinies NAO!!!
For the record, 200 (or 1000 or more) runs is not nearly enough of a data set to distill the drop percentages, yet people continuously argue that they get different results on different characters while refusing to accept that random is random. I noticed nobody seemed to run with the same character repeatedly and then compare the first half of their data against the second to see if similar trends emerged. Mostly they present wild guesses as observed fact when, in truth, it's only a justification to themselves of why they "failed" (at a random award draw).
The 10 thread table tends to com up most often in the Lambda trial where people are more likely to hesitate and stand back during the grenades/acids collection in the warehouse/labs. I do it myself by instinct even though dying repeatedly doesn't seem to have a negative impact on the qualification criteria.
I do suspect there is something messed up with the way pets are involved, but I also think that's a separate issue from the qualification criteria.
Once again, no need to feel slighted or attacked by the system. If people quit over it, I'll be sorry to hear them go, but to each his/her own. I still have a ton of characters to play and no need to get them all kitted out with Incarnate slots, same as I don't really feel the need to get all of them to max level at any rate other than as a side consequence to playing
That's just kind of silly right there. Purplied out characters aren't one iota less powerful than they were before the incarnate trials came out. Did people not think that adding a system that was supposed to give character advancement past the level 50 power level wasn't going to make characters more powerful than a highly IOed 50 though? I guess if they're feeling like they're no longer the most powerful characters in the game that's right, but they're still just as powerful as they were before.
As far as the support players go it's somewhat more understandable, but somewhat silly (in my opinion). Sure the destiny buffs provide large up-front numbers, but those quickly drop off to somewhat minor levels. I did a ITF the other week where the folks running it decided we didn't need any support since about half of the team had higher tier destiny buffs. So much death. So much. We did fine until there was something that didn't die in a few seconds. So the AVs, the ambush in the first mission, and any area with a lot of enemies. Of course that's just anecdotal there, but it certainly made me think that while the buffs are good they're not a complete replacement for a real support character.
Those who have maxed out all the incarnate tiers are more powerfull than a purpled out character. Of course a purpled out player that also has maxed out incarnate tiers is even more so. But, for most players that have spent millions into their purpled players to be passed by people simply doing Incarnate trials it is an uneasy feeling in the pit of their stomach. In other words, players that have purpled out characters that choose not to do Incarnate trials are inferior not only based on perception but also mechanically. This will become even more prominent once the new Incarnate powers are released in Issue 21 most likely.
With the recent announcement of radial buffs for support with one cast, my initial point is enhanced. The Incarnate powers made the old buffers obsolete, which is why the recent announced changes to existing support to keep up with the power of incarnates. I am glad that was addressed because I was starting to feel outdated compared to my Incarnate counter parts.
Anyways, a series of bad design decisions has taken hold with the CoX franchise the last year or so:
1. Going Rogue expansion
2. Incarnate Trials RNG loot reward and Mysterious Participation mechanic
3. Gating cosmetic content behind level 50 Incarnate Trials
Number three is the biggest problem that has come up the last week or so. Apparently, new cosmetic options (that are not part of a paid booster) will be gated behind level 50 Incarnate trials. They will be unlocked one time, but it still requires you do Incarnate trials (which is a big, big problem for an alt driven game) at level 50. Worse, you must choose to A. Progress or B. Cosmetic options as you must use the end game currency for either one.
What made CoX unique was not gating cosmetic options behind end game grinds. CoX was the trailblazer, and set the standard for Super Hero MMO's that cosmetic options should be at the finger tips of the player very early of the life of the character, or even at the start of character creation. Trying to undo what made CoX standout from other MMORPG's and copy the model other MMORPG's use is a massive miscalculation.
In summary, I was a supporter of adding an end game content to CoX, but not the way it is being handled. They are undoing the alt driven nature of the game with these changes, and they are gating the most important content for a a super hero MMORPG behind end game trials, and that is cosmetic options.
Big, big miscalculation on the devs part.
Yeah, if you look at the financials post-iTrials the numbers continue to dwindle so the players have spoken and both Going Rogue and end game have been rejected. Unlike past years, the game finds a new all-time low in revenue with each new quarter. I feel bad for Paragon Studios because they have a QUALITY game in CoH. Yet the audience continues to shrink.
Okay, here is a hypothetical. The current lead for CoH is fired and you (by "you" I mean anyone reading this) are hired as their replacement. Your job: to turn the declining revenue around. What do you do?
I didn't think the most recent financial report contained data from after I20's release. Granted, I fully expect the next financial report to continue showing the declining trend, but I'm honestly more curious to see how big a drop it is.
I may have to stand corrected on that, hehenep. Good catch. I withdraw my comment on the iTrials being rejected in my above post. It is currently an unknown. I'd LOVE it if the game saw an increase in financials post i20.
Still curious what people would do with the game to turn things around.
1. Finish power pool, and epic customization
2. More proliferation of powersets and new powers
3. New zones 1-50/Different instances from office/warehouse (eg jungle).
4. Improve AE, base building, and IO systems
5. More free costumes
6. Expand the Tip mission to lead to lead to larger mission arcs.
Nothing revolutionary in my opinion, but new zones that take place in exotic locales would be very important. Especially to move away from the office/warehouse settings.
Sometimes, going back to work on what is already established is often overlooked. AE for example could use a revamp, and updating while base building has too much promise to be left out in the cold (housing is a very polarizing issues with MMORPG players). The IO system could use some new blood to inject life, especially for new players.
Unique costume pieces not gated behind content, or paid booster packs would be very important pull factor for players to return in my opinion.
Instead of the Incarnate content, I would have stuck with the older idea of a legacy system where 50's could pick any powers they like regardless of AT once completing an epic arc. That would have accomplished the same homogenization that Incarnate content introduces, but way, way more options.
Introducing puzzles, and mystery solving would be an interesting way to spice up tip missions for example.
Its too late to save this game. They have turned the best casual teaming game into a top heavy grind fest. There's only people farming to 50 now then farming their 50's. Very few new people actualy playing the game and leveling toons. Super Groups are mostly dead, pvp is dead.
Content, content, and mo' content.