After having a discussion with a fellow on the Discord, I thought maybe a good thread to open up would be "What can be done to make sure a community doesn't become toxic." This would include what sorts of things can make a community become toxic, and ways to handle them.

For example, when a game's developers tend to cater strongly to PvPers who cry "But balance!" games tend to deteriorate quickly. So much time is spent tweaking classes up and down, forever and ever, that content ends up getting put to the side. This and losing making people hostile and berating their fellows (look at LoL) leads to just horrible levels of toxicity.

So, 1) If people call for nerfing this or that, tell them "Not everything needs to be equal" and move on. Because seriously, no game has ever succeeded in making things balanced. There's always a meta, and certain mindsets will always flock to it once its found. I mean, you can take a good look, and find out if something is brokenly OP, and work on that, but people who say "It's not fair, that DPS class out DPS's my controller!" Tell them tough cookies, and to play DPS if they want to DPS. If they think that the Brawler doing more damage than the Scrapper is imbalanced, tell them where the scrapper has advantage that the brawler doesn't. And there should be something. But that doesn't mean they need to be -equal-.

2) Toxic speech/attitudes on channels. They need to be summarily dealt with. Call me an SJW here if you want, but race jokes, rape jokes, sexual orientation jokes, religion jokes etc need a zero tolerance policy. I think people should be allowed to be grown ups, and swearing should be allowed, but things like personal attacks? Nope. "What the fuck" vs "Go fuck yourself" are quite different. To some extent the community will be responsible for ostracizing people, via ignores, but I think if a person gets reported by X people within a short time frame, they should be muted until a GM can look at the behavior. If the behavior includes any sort of bigotry displayed, anything condoning or supporting violence, and repeated personal attacks, they need to just be gone.

Interested in hearing others' thoughts on this, especially Silverhelm folks.

Edit: This would be better placed in "Improving the Experience". Donno if a mod could move it, but would appreciate if so. Not a huge deal though. =)

Seconded.

Let me just say it like this:

Nerfs made CoH a better game.

I played it in the early days where the primary strategy was herd and burn. It was boring as hell, and there was no diversity. Almost every team was exactly the same and it was rare to see controllers or defenders who weren't kinetics or empaths handing out crack and bandaids. Controllers had no place, and neither did most debuff because the tanks could not die. There were exceptions, but for the most part, OP builds made for boring PVE.

Was it I5 when everything got nerfed? Good.

If you compare PVE at I5 to PVE at the end, the end was so much better. OP tanks were cancer to COH, and I say that as someone who mostly played tanks. Once my tank could die, I was looking for a more diverse team portfolio. At the end, the periodic rebalancing led to a game where so many different types of teams could be successful using so many different strategies. Not every team had to be tank-centric, although most of mine were. I also played teams that were mostly buff/debuff or all controllers. Once we did the STF with two scrappers and and a bunch of random controllers and defenders and it was wicked fun. There was a guild that would run teams of all rad/rad and they would just melt through TFs. The rebalances in COH liberated us from one team configuration and allowed us all to have a more varied and diverse experience. Half blasters, half storm controllers? We did it.

Yet for all these changes, people still cried about PVP as being the impetus.

Powersets can't ever be equal; what can be equal is the value of an archetype within the game's dynamics. No archetype should be so strong it renders others less valuable.

This game will have to evolve to achieve balance as well, and I hope that it does. If you don't agree, I'll meet you in the Warburg.

Thirded it.

HappyRobot wrote:
I don't disagree with this at all. I'm all about the "no archetype left behind" philosophy. On the same token, I don't think CC should be doing anywhere near the DPS that Ranged is, and ranged should be more bursty than melee, with less survivability. The problem is when people QQ about "My blaster dies too easy! Fix it!" when the real issue is their play style. Them wanting to run into a group and fight at melee range while their poor little glass cannon gets pounded into next week, instead of picking off 2-3 of a group of 5 before they even get close.

I don't remember what issue I left CoH, but it was well before it went F2P. I came back a couple times after, and it was still a good, if different, game. I really can't offer a reasonable debate on the particulars.

What I can say is that nerfs aren't always a bad thing. I fully agree with that. If they're done for the right reasons, and done right the first time. You have to admit that yo-yo nerfing/buffing classes isn't good for anyone.

But, that's not the topic of this post. The topic is what makes for -good community-? Or, what can poison community? Do you have anything to contribute to that?