Drunkard's Walk Forums

Boomtown recently got an i13 related interview. Mostly stuff we've heard before, but I thought this portion might be interesting to certain folks:

Quote: Boomtown: The PVP changes in the next issue have received enormous attention and (not unexpectedly) massive criticism from the PVP community. How do
you deal with that sort of "feedback" from a developer viewpoint and possibly even from being a COH fan yourself?




Matt Miller: Issue 13 started off having all sorts of new features tied around PvP, simply because it was a system that we had not put as much attention
towards in the past. When we began to play these new systems, the feedback we got was that none of them were any fun. This was really disappointing, since
they looked good in design. When we drilled down to exactly why they were not fun, we came to the sobering realization that the lack of fun wasn't the
new systems' fault, it was PvP as a whole that was limiting. Certain powersets dominated. Certain ATs were impossible to beat. Certain tactics were fun,
but only for the person employing them. For everyone else these tactics bordered on "frustrating", "annoying", and a plethora of other
words that are antonyms for "fun".




PvP as a whole needed to be fixed. We'd let the current system get into a state where only a small handful of our players actually used it. If we were
really going to invest in these new PvP systems, we needed to get the current PvP game to be accepted and used by more than just that handful of players.
Floyd "Castle" Grubb and his team poured over datamines, made a whole slew of changes to the way powers behaved, and even went so far as to
pre-tackle sticky issues like many-on-one ganking.




As a player of CoH I am excited to see what my Dominator will bring to the table in PvP after Issue 13 goes live. The playtests have been nothing but fun
here in the office, and I hope that the efforts of Castle and his crew can be tried out by people who have been turned off by PvP in the past. I urge
everyone who found PvP in CoH to be frustrating and un-fun to come back and check it out in Issue 13.

---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."

I'm not surprised that's the explicit rationale, if you look at the net effect of changes that have gone in.

Diminishing returns hits a lot of highly specialised builds - imposes effective caps on how much you can push a given mechanic. That helps the non-IO'd more.

Blaster and Stalker damage has been dropped, while the squishy ATs have gained durability. Can't speed-gank as easily anymore, it's harder to BLAM DEAD BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN BLINK.

Travel suppression means that jousting and establishing superior manueverability is harder...being forced to slug it out on both sides.

Melee players have gotten a lot of help; melee was disadvantaged previously. Range debuffs in taunt, suppression in general, increased melee range, etc.

On the other hand, melee ATs are no longer entirely resistant to mez. You WILL get mezzed - just for a shorter time, and of course no toggle drops. Mez was lol on meleers unless you were a controller or dominator.

And then there's dual builds.

It's clear to me that the bulk of these changes are aimed at levelling the playing field and making PvP more even for everyone, rather than something that prejudices certain ATs and playstyles, or the horribly rich l33t PvPers.

Will it work? I don't know. Half the reason I don't zone PvP anymore is because of the freaking rude idiots in the zones.

Changing the system doesn't change the bad attitudes. Unless most of 'em have quit due to the loss of their l33t game, in which case maybe the changes might work for me. =)
-- Acyl

In my opinion, and my admittedly limited experience, the PvP zones are where the WOW kiddies, the griefers and the PKs go when they get high enough in CoX.
They can't get their jollies anywhere else in the game, so they live for PvP, and it's no surprise that they're rude idiots. It's going to take
a lot more than re-engineering the way powers work in PvP to get me to do more than a token visit now and then (never had a Shivan, never had a bomb, never got
any other goodie you can get from the PvP zones...) -- it's going to take some kind of way to suppress the idiots and the griefers.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Shivans are fairly easy to get without dealing with Griefers. Bloody Bay's so low level that anyone with a decent travel power can run halfway across the
zone and avoid conflict.

Siren's Call, I've heard, is utterly dominated by the redside. Warburg is good if you're in a group... and Recluse's Victory has one of the
most obscene requirements to get the temp power ever, so I've not seen many Longbow Mechs around, but they're just Vanguard HVAS in red and
white(metaphorically), so it's not a big deal.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."