Participated in a Freedom Friday with Paragon on Google Plus today, and finally remembered to ask my favorite question.
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Me: So … when will Level Pacts return? My wife and I do a lot of duoing in the game, and LPs made this a lot more fun (we could solo while the other was away, one of us could opportunistically hunt, etc., without worrying about getting out of sync with leveling).
We still have a number of toons from when LP was put in, and they function just fine. It’s just the ones before (and since) that it’s a problem with.
I understand there are some difficulties with it being abused, but surely there are some ways it could be restored on a restricted fashion. Though I’d also like to see it available at any level — I’d be willing to have my lvl 20 drop to lvl 18 to get pacted with someone at that level.
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City of Heroes Freedom: +Dave Hill : We’d really like to get level pacts working, but they’ll take some time to work out right, and we don’t have an ETA for it at the moment. Hopefully soon! I can understand your desire to have them back. We know they were really popular.
Me: +City of Heroes Freedom – Thanks, I’m glad to know they’re still on the map. Is the problem a technical one, or dealing with unintended (and abusable) consequences? I assume it’s the latter (since the existing LPs were allowed to continue), but it’s hard to believe the latter couldn’t be handled through some limits, cool-offs, etc. I’d rather have a reasonably limited way of doing it than not have it at all.
Je Saist: +Dave Hill: they were disabled, if memory serves, in order to prevent abuse of the pact-system by F2P players. There were also comments that Level Pacts were being envisioned as a VIP benefit only, and I also believe comments were made that the underlying leveling engine itself would need some work in order to isolate level-pacts to VIP’s only.
City of Heroes Freedom: +Dave Hill & +Je Saist : This is roughly correct, though I’m personally fuzzy on the details. I believe there were technical issues involved with level pacts when there were multiple tiers of players, and we need time to work these out so that a robust system can be created.
Me: Fair enough. I’m surprised it’s difficult to ID VIP (or F2P) players, but I’ve done enough development work in legacy systems to be not too surprised.
As I said, I’d settle for a less robust, basic system in the interim than one that’s as polished and powerful as we’d all like to see. But I also appreciate you guys wanting to do it once and do it right. As long as it’s on the docket, I’ll try to be patient. After all, its an excellent game even without it. 🙂
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I certainly don’t know about CoX internals, but if there are “technical issues with level pacts when there were multiple tiers of players,” then simply don’t have those for the moment (if I understood completely what that means, of course) until it gets fixed.
I wonder if part of the problem is the interaction of the leveling pact with all the various buffs you can buy. How would an XP buff affect the process. Also, I am sure they have a lot of processes where the initiator is restricted to VIP, but not many where the recipient is restricted. I wonder if that impacted the decision to let F2P folks join super groups.
Except that those interactions and buffs and inspirations still raise that very problem with LPs that were (thankfully) left in existence.
It seems to me that if the F2P chars were a problem, the straightforward way to deal with it is to simply not allow LPs with F2P characters, and if someone dropping to F2P let them know that will break the LP.
I have the sense that they want to do it all “right” — which is fine so far as it goes, but they may be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.