City of Heroes Issue 13 Interview

Ten Ton Hammer was able to track down City of Heroes lead designer Matt Miller and executive producer Brian Clayton for a Q&A about the game's upcoming Issue 13 update.
Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk about the power rebalancing at all? How are you balancing you PvP and PvE powers?

Matt: One of the things when we started the studio was to make hires in the "Powers" department. Not only do we have more people to work on the powers, but we can also now take a fine-toothed comb to the power system and get some data mining and cold hard facts on the powers and how they're being used.

To start, we rebalanced the Patron powers and the Epic powers that villains and heroes get so they're more in line with each other. We looked at what players were picking more often and changed some powers completely and pruned some powers.

In addition, we wanted to make sure PvP remained fun. We were getting into a situation with the games because PvP was getting less and less fun because of how some powers interacted with players. Back then, we couldn't adjust the powers without having an adjustment made in PvE as well. Basically, we got more people, had more code time, and created a new technology system so that when you're in a PvP zone some powers act very differently than what they do in PvE. Hopefully this will bring a more balanced PvP game to the CoX franchise and allow new players to find this enjoyable.