Winter, sorry about that, I thought you were complaining about the mezzes in a pvp context. In PvE, I’m honestly not sure what they could have done. Short of changing to a gradual build mez system, which would have meant ripping the guts out of the curent onee and putting it back together, or simply shortening or chaning to sleeps all of the existing mezzes, which would require rebalancing in a lot of other aspects, or giving squishies some level of mez protection, which would also require rebalancing, I’m not sure what they could have done about it. It was just too entrenched in the system once it went live. As far as the nerfs, though, I stand by what I said: PCs were insanely overpowered at every level but the first 15 or 20 pre-Issue 5, and a lot of those nerfs needed to happen. Since then, there have been almost no nerfs to the characters, and a fair few buffs.

I wasn’t talking about PvP (I stopped playing just as the first arena things came out), I was talking about the Carnies or the Ritki or any of the other enemies whose goons could completely lock down your “hero”. It is so completely not fun to not even be able to do anything except watch your character die.

Was the binary mez system a good idea? No, and they acknowledged that. One of the things they’ve said, IIRC, is that binary status effects will be very minor in CO. However, you say two sets of things here: 1) he had a pathological need to nerf players and 2) he didn’t nerf players enough in the ways you wanted. So which is it?

I’m not saying I think it’ll be a good game. I am saying they’ve at least said what they learned from CoX, and seem to want to implement it. While I’m not sure they can, I’m willing to at least wait to pass judgment.

In my opinion however, the biggest problem that Champions will face is that Emmert is involved.

While gattsuru asserts that he isn’t an idiot, IMO he certainly can’t design a game system for crap.

Stupid mechanics like mez/stun where you are either fine or dead… who comes up with that amatuer crap? Who then doesn’t have the balls to change it when it is such a stupid mechanic.

Then there is his pathological need to nerf the playerbase. You must play my game as I want!! You shouldn’t be able to kill a bunch of goons!!! You must not be superheroes!!!

Gah, I would never play a game he has any control over.

I don’t think EVE is that good of a comparison to a customizable skill system. I’ll admit that I haven’t played a vast amount of the game, but from what I did see, you could only use skills to increase damage, range, accuracy, or fire rate, but damage type and area of effect and base attributes seemed highly dependent on what weapons you slot in the first place.

Jack may manage to put together a completely flexible system with no significant issues. It’s still a work in progress, he could literally pull a golden egg out of his hat. But what I’ve seen from City of Heroes discourages me from trying to judge the game against such a high step.

If he manages to simply make City of Heroes with a re-written costume generator and a decent IP, while managing to make it as fun or more fun, that’s all he needs for a success. It may be a waste of the IP, but that’s not what makes or breaks the game for the 99.9% of the gaming populace who can’t figure out or never heard of the Hero System.

And then we have EVE, which has demonstrated a flexible system based on character skills. That does not go all the way to allowing player-designed modules, but it does use a solution similar to ED: you can have millions of points of skills, but only so much can be brought to bear on a situation.

The only way I see to avoid those same issues of customization is to do that illusory customization. “Look, you can do whatever you want with your costume.” And that will be enough for some people. But if that is all that matters to me, I can do that in Second Life, and I already have a superhero game that does that while also having three years’ worth of content under its belt. If you are selling your game as Champions, but are just recycling its IP with a re-written City of Heroes costume generator, you are not bringing anything new to the table. Chronicles of Spellborn is closer to Hero Games than that.

It wasn’t amazing, Hero System-level customization. That’s my point. It was also impossible to balance; the sort of performance difference between munchkin and the average build was so vast that ED actually seemed like a good idea to these idiots. It wasn’t much customization at all, and the developer still couldn’t keep everything straight.

Same goes for the pre-archetype system. We’ve been told that the best class-less system the could could up with let you select a variety of powersets (the number being based on what your origin was). Amazingly, the end result was a massive difference between the min/maxers and normal players, too large to be accounted for.

Jack Emmert is no genius, but he’s not an idiot, either. I don’t see him proudly jumping his new baby into the exact same issues that he ran into with the last one.

And archetypes have been there since beta, so there was no attempt to move away from a class structure, apart from the pool powers that everyone can take.

The (character) skill-based elements in CoX are extremely small. Each class has two menus of nine powers, plus the standard pools. You take five to nine from each menu, and every character will take the same ones plus or minus one or two. Ideal slotting can be calculated easily, and the game conveniently color-codes which IOs to buy to get the highest values in each slot.

I will consider there to be vastly customizable powers when I can make energy blast (8d6, cone, special effect: fire). CoX’s degree of customization is how many d6s go in each power.

I’d expect Champions Online to end up being pretty similar. It’s nice to think about really and vastly customizable powers and classes, but Emmert already found out exactly how badly that could end. CoH tried both, and the results were the enhancement diversification and the archetype system, respectively.

I think it’s hard to say much before there’s at least a some detailed information or beta available, and it may be up to a year before then. There are a lot of games out there with experienced developers and grand visions, but that didn’t stop Garriot from making Tabula Rasa. Concept matters a lot. Gameplay and fun factor matter so much more than it’s hard to compare the two.