Future in/of CB (in General)

i didn't know exactly what to put in thread name but i want to discuss what will happen over time in the world of CB.

now this is my view on things.

people say that the CB1 community was the best, people say CB2's community could never be as good, what would happen if CB2 didn't come out? people would still join CB1 wouldn't they? and if CB2's community sucks that means CB1's community would of sucked, and to there is not much difference anyway, CB1 could of brought their community here and made it a better place but instead they say im not going to play that game because of the community.

now the infamous tank, mage battle. whoever says that tanks are overpowered are right and wrong, at the start they are right, tanks can become much more stronger than mages, but then when you get up to the high levels of the game( i.e. 1 mil+ MPR) tanks' weapons and armour can not grow anymore, it gets to a point where it costs 7 mil to get up one 'x' or '+' on the MH, then mages keep on training, there DD spell goes up and up, where tanks can't really go anywhere. People will say this ' its called $USD, why dont you use it' i believe that USD does help but still when you get up to the point of where costs 7 mil for one point theres nothing you can do, USD won't help unless your a millionaire and dedicate your life to CB.

i would like people to discuss more on this thread, about whatever may/will happen in the future of CB, try and keep it at Discussing people not flaming.

i would like to apologize for not using paragraphs well enough and grammar.

CB3

The game has also changed a great deal since CB1, many people are afraid of change. And tanks CAN go somewhere at higher lvls, even when their weapon costs 7m per point (Although I have no record of that happening since Jon changed the way ranged weapons work...), It's called raising their Strength. The sole fact remains the same, mages = cheap, tanks = expensive. If you don't have the money to support a tank well enough tho, mages will destroy them. But that's not the point you're getting at, at least, i don't think so. The point is, people love to complain. If they can't find something to complain about, they make stuff up. I'm sure you have/had a mother :-p

Actually Flamey hit the nail almost on the head.

In cb1 there was the Uber ELB, which for the cost was massive damage. It was the equalizer or dominator at the high PR (there was no MPR in cb1) levels. Jon took care of the cb1 ELB damage in cb2. However, he also nerfed archery to the point where very few people use the skill anymore, and certainly no primary tanks do in the high MPR levels.

As Flamey points out, there becomes a certain point where 1 more x on your melee weapon costs too much to do. All the time mages DD damage increases just by adding xp. Yes, one could say tanks have AMF and other skills, however, AMF almost never keeps up with the higher DD levels. Right now I have the highest AMF of just over 1 million and the highest DD spell is over 2x that. This divergence will get more as the characters grow. I have other skills, but more knowledgeable FB mages use DM as they realize it is the best spell in the long run vs tanks. Nuke a tanks enchantments and you can eventually kill him early.

Even though there are tweaks to the damage mages and tanks deal, over time the cost to increase melee weapons will be overwhelmed by the sheer damage a FB mage can eventually do, all relatively cost free. Once you get your AG, corn and COI to a certain level, except for perhaps DB's you have nothing left to upgrade.

All the time a tank is constantly upgrading his DB's, melee weapon and possibly a missile weapon.

This gathers together some of the most sensible arguments for a serious cb1 style mage nerf...I wish I could remember who had all the huge single minion fb mages in cb1, just to compare damage...

Cany anybody say Seeker?

seekers haven't been able to do anything since cb2 came out, once the rail gun type elb was dust they lost all use.

the rail gun type ELB? I had a theory in cb1 that if u had a melee weapon with the same nw pumped into it as these gimongous ELB's that it would do equal/more damage when melee popped around. Even though it would mean h x would hafta be rediculously high, and that people would have to live knowing that 1 more x wouldnt quadruple their damage. Sure the x gets high to raise, but people were spending i think 80m for just one point in cb1. These "rail guns" as you like to say were well over the 250m mark. While the highest ELB in existance atm is "Tennis ELBow [6x118] (+110) worth $63,627,612" Give it some time/$$$ and i think you may see a return of the gigantic ELB...

Seekers are also less of an impact now with PL. OK, so some mages won't want to get a second minion, to keep thier DD concentrated, but there is a lot of merit to a PL/Wall type minion. MgS (As it doesn't neutralise skills....), TSA and PL will make your none AMF using Mage so much more hardy.

I've said the Mage DD / Tank Weapon increase thing since day one. No one really listened to me. :)

Just a quick note on the top AMF vs top FB. If your AMF is about half of your opponent's FB, that means whatever damage dealt to you by your opponent, he deals to himself.

Upgrade strength and dexterity if you can't upgrade your weapon anymore. Keep in mind high dex and + to your weapon will usually allow more than one hit to your FB opponent, even if they are wearing DB's. Even if a tank hits for only half the damage of FB, a double or even triple hit will make up for that. With AMF, you also make the FB opponent damage himself.

Not to mention, AMF hurts them too, and with VA, ur healing a lot, so u should be able to counteract the damage u recieve from a mage. I haven't seen any Fire-ballic Aura's draining life with a FB. Also, a small EC minion will drop a mages DX below 0, which, last time i checked, means an extra hit in itself (This may have changed).

Pixel, "Just a quick note on the top AMF vs top FB. If your AMF is about half of your opponent's FB, that means whatever damage dealt to you by your opponent, he deals to himself."

That's not quite right.

You need an equal level AMF to DD to get a 50% effect. While you take 50% of the damage done, the mage get's backlashed for 20% of the damage done (0.5 * 0.4).

The maximum damage AMF will ever return (ignoring Decay) is 40% if you have a 100% AMF effect.

Well, my thoughts on this...

I've always viewed a tanks main strength as its armor, not its weapons

A tank with enough AC to block around 80% of damage done (about 380) against weapons (with a full heavy AC set, ~58%
of magic damage) plus whatever protection can defend (did Shade figure this out?) will be taking very little damage against
other tanks, and with a decent AMF on the team somewhere, very little against mages too.

You say the weakness of the tank is the upgrade costs, while this may be true for weapons, once you hit 380 -- 400 AC,
it doesn't really matter what the upgrade costs are, you are going to stop 80%-85% of all pysical damage all the time, and
58%-63% of all magic damage every time, before AMF.

Why is this important? Well, of course your tank wont _just_ have armor, I'd have to carp you for making one of those nasty walls : )

The big advantage that your tank has over a mage is the multiple hits that a tank can acheive. A mage will only hit you once per
round, and with sufficient armor and AMF, you can reduce the damage done by clost to 90%. If you can do this, all you need
the weapon to do is chip away at the mage (BoNE + VA = regenerating HP every round!) As you can easily outlast any mage
who is only doing 10% of his damage to you.

So, I guess what I am trying to say is, AC owns mages.

Only + AC reduces DD damage. Getting to 380-400 on plus alone is going to cost a lot of money...

Then there's the VB and Decay to watch out for.

yea i agree, considering when basically 100 AC of a wall is off base AC or there around. all these items (base) equate to 104 AC.

Adamantite Cuirass [40]
Shadow Cloak [11]
Chain Mail Leggings [18]
Tulkas' Gauntlets [6]
Helm of Durin [9]
Mithril Shield [20]

i have been looking through the top teams, seems there walls have about 200+ AC, don't think anyone has 400 AC, and i don't think it is possible to get 400 AC after base armour

sorry for the double post but this is on a different matter.

is the rate if new players growing fast than spawning rares?

i was just wondering if rares spawn slower than actual new players, it seems that new players have their NUB and get tons of money, buying rares, so will the price of rares go up in the future?

im no where near all the rares i need, im still doing my tank, but there are new players who have done there whole team in a space of 2 months.

so back to the point, will the value of rares, such as corn, DBs,MHs,BoTHs go up????

380 AC (total, including base) is actually not too expensive, looking at all the largest heavy AC armors in the game now, they add up to 349 AC I believe, and their combined NW's are in the mid 30m's, I would guess for 380 you would need 50 or 60 million NW in your armor. Not that much, compared to the NW of those huge Morgs on the top teams

Those last 30 points are going to cost WAY more than another 30 million. I would guess closer to the 70-90 million range given the exponential nature of the BS costs. And that is going to make for some massive PR (even with light AC-PR weighting).

CB has never been a defensive game. The way folks got invulnerable in CB1 was that layer of Protection on top of the AC. Doesn't work that way now. Even if it did, DM is there to take away the Protection.

AC simply doesn't have the use it used to, except for the anti-mage ones being rather effective against magic attacks dues to the layering of TSA/MgS/AC/Protection/ToE (if used). I may have gotten the order wrong there, but you get my drift. However, against a big tank (especially with a VB in use), once again the heavy AC wall is less useful.

OK so I want to say up front that many will read into this differently than it is intended, and that is fine. People will assume I am making one correlation to further an adjenda versus one to make things better. That is fine too. It is not a requirement that anyone listen or agree with me, only the requirement I do my best and try. From there, well I do not worry so much.

As the original poster brought up, the idea of community, this is why I am posting. The CB1 community, just like this one, was made up of people. Those people in combination made for a great community. When CB2 was created, some from CB1 were very happy, some were not. The ones who were not happy tended to be the die hard CB1 fans, and it was those very die hard CB1 fans that were an integral part of what made the CB1 community great. So that group either quit, stayed with CB1 exclusively, or played CB1 mostly and CB2 as something to do or even better help supplement there CB1 cash flow.

Generally speaking the following changes either ended or contributed directly to the loss of any part of that die hard group of CB1 fans. The linking of NW to PR, the removal of CB1, the removal of camping, and the lets say perceived mistreatment of some old CB1 diehards here in CB2 land. (and I say it in such a way to avoid it being used one way or the other to derail the point of my post)

Those changes pretty much dropped the CB1 diehard fans off the map. Not to say all of them, just most of them. You see a few here now and then, they like to add the {CB1} tag to their nick.

Now the last thing, and again the thing most likely to be misinterpretted. One of the main reason the CB2 community in generally has fallen on lets say perceived hard times is the removal of camping. I can HEAR the groans now. He just wants camping back and will say anything to get it. OK fine if you think like that stop here and I will just conceed to you yes I do this for the entirely selfish reason of wanting camping back. For those of you with enough open mind to listen to a logical reasoning of why, it follows now. OK so here are a couple of things camping did for the community. First and formost it made anyone who seriously wanted to camp play ALL the time. Not just log in, burn down your 160 BA, buy couple hundered more, burn them, persuse some forums, maybe some auctions, finish in 30 mins and move on. You were literally on the computer on CB active for 10-15 hours a day in some cases. This almost forced campers to chat and post and do something to keep them focused on camping CB. If you walked off CB for 30 mins to play a few hands of online poker, after camping 4 hours of nothing, you were assured to have just missed a nice load of gear that you would have been all over had you tried another 5 mins. Or atleast that is how you felt. So I ended up spending a LOT of time in new players because I had a lot of time to spend, AND I had to spend it on CB to keep focused on my goal.

Another thing camping added was increased NEED for altruism. Basically I was running out of places to put gear on all my mules. Eventually all those kats, execs, compounds, lesser tattoos, you were going to get around to the hassle of trying to sell, got in the way of all the other gear I wanted to sell. So it was easier just to give it away, but why not new players, instead of some contest, just sit in new players and hand new people new gear. You know what that does for your want to try and stick with a game. Well all I can say is RainDancer gave me a bow in New Players a few years back and here I STILL am. (much to the chagrin of many Im sure)

So camping almost forced you to post, chat, and give stuff away. And this constant, multi houred session of camp mania, bred a consistancy that a community needs.

Is this to say the ONLY way that things will get better is with the return of camping? NO WAY!!!

It is to say things WILL get better if any system is put into place that requires more time and more interaction from CB members from sheer need to stave off boredom or from actual time being applied usefully. Either way, I can log into CB and log out of CB in 15 mins or less and never miss a single BA all day long. This in a nutshell does not a community make.

I kind of agree with you on this Seft. However I don't think the end of camping was the big knife in the back for community. There is a community here, maybe it isn't the way it was, but then I was never on the family tree for instance, so I can't speak for the old days. I've made what I think are some really good friends here, people I speak to online more often than friends in RL, even though oceans separate us. But from my slightly limited point of view (no chat) I can see that there are less people 'involved' in things. Check out the forums and you see me, BarzooMonkey, Novice, Bast, GL, Maelstrom, G Beee and yourself. I would say that currently we are probably the biggest posters around. Sut if something takes his fancy, a couple of other people but that's it.

I think the real cause for the lack of serious involvement is the NUB. The NUB does a lot of things that are good. But the problem is the amount of cash it generates and it's timescale. The amount of cash is probably too much of a temptation for some people. You might not be able to make a huge living from selling CB$ for USD but it's money for nothing really.

And then you can disappear and a couple of days later along comes a new player who grasps the game much more quickly than any of us did who never had a NUB. Players like this aren't going to involve themselves in the community very much, because you run the risk of (at the least) a lot of suspicion. So we have a lot of players doing 4 month runs then disappearing.

And that 4 month timescale is also a problem for those players who aren't interested in lining their own pockets. I'm running an NCB currently and I can already see how once my bonus runs out it's going to be a lot less interesting to continue with this character. That difference in rewards and growth for a NUB is even worse if they've been used to large cash income too. Suddenly after 4 months of uber rewards they're down to those normal levels and it's like wading in treacle. How many players have we lost after the NUB just because they're bored?

A community without new blood eventually stagnates.

Just my tuppence worth.

Ya know, for once, I'd like to see a thread that talks about strategy and changing CB that doesn't involve reading 5 page essays. Doesn't anyone write brief poignant messages anymore?

CB=lovely.


Brief and poignant enough for you? ;)

The poignancy of a brief message relies solely on the intelligence of the audience.

Sefton=Bast?

Ranger=Robin Williams?

Shade = Thirsty?

Wow, the sheer poignancy of the last several posts is so overwhelming it's bringing my headache back :P

Wasn't directed at you Sefton. Sometimes I just want to know why I'm reading a post, and I don't always want to wait until I've read 2 paragraphs of the author explaining the entire thought process justifying what they think. (yes, I know I do this sometimes too)

The point is if you doubt some peoples intelligence in regard to this topic, would you really want them to be a part of the conversation anyways?

Barzoo indeed, those 3 or 4 replies didn't really have a point, but still, every 'intelligent' thread has got to have a few humorous remarks ;)


as for me, I haven't been really into CB for quite a while due to lack of time so I can't really say what or when...

But I have no control over who responds, so I tend to go with the overwhelm them approach. Anyone who wades through it and still has something to say I would like to hear it :)

If I had said, bringing back camping will bring back the community, and left it at that.... HEH

Now that I think of it, Barzoo = Thirsty, also. Excuse me while I get some more coffee ;)

Caffeine is a diuretic. It isn't going to help, Barzoo. Or was that your point, you clever monkey? *smile*

I am a clever monkey, aren't I? ;)

I like long messages explaining stuff cos it means I don't have to think for myself :-)
Seriously, Sefton and JW posts were well worth being long enough to explain things to new players.
And at risk of flogging my own particular dead horse, a spell checker where you frustratedly have to spend thrice the time to post going back and correcting 'mistakes' doesn't help the community.

Vicious Cat all that you need to do is type <nospellcheck> before all your text and </nospellcheck> after your text and select HTML instead of Plain Text and you are fine, unless in my absence this has also been removed from the game.

Deathwake, that is the preferred method for many in circumventing the spellcheck, yes.

It is used largely by those who would rather add <br> everywhere necessary in their posts, than simply address the deficiencies pointed out by the very helpful spellcheck. Or by those who can't be bothered with either, which tend to be not only ugly and error-riddled but also quite ill-conceived.

The future of CB is getting darker by the day imo. the NUB is a complete bust. what you disagree? Mantra is at a dead end TuffBunny as well and soon they will get bored and leave just like Kitty and several NUB's before. the Economy is dead. Changemonth's are getting down right boring imo. Restrictions are being put in place left and right. with all that said i still enjoy talking to my clan members and a few other people. i also want to see how Jon will handle the ground swell of displeasure that has recently come about.

Bast while you may be partially correct, there are MORE then enough instances of the spellcheck being both hard to use and completely unhelpful. SNK3R's handle, a myriad of in game named items and abbreviations and an endless host of etcetera all fail the spellcheck, and then require html formatting to make the post remotely readable.

Maybe the ability for a user to add a word to spellcheck?
We could even go so far as to enter the modern age and have
a spell check that offer suggestions, or even dog forbid, corrects
the misspellings for you. I know the vindictive nature of the current spellcheck warms the hearts of those individuals who consider themselves to be the protectors of the remains of the English language, but it also leaves the average cb user angry, frustrated and with a ugly post.

Things may be ugly mega, but to say mantra and tuffbunny are at dead ends is simply laughable, both are on there way to being top 5 chars, and both have invested a pitance in comparison to the other members of the top 5. While it may not have done what Jon intended (give new users some hope of gaining the top spot), it certainly has made it possible to join the ranks of the top 10 with a theoretically appropriate amount of work. Sure it hasn't done wonders for the economy, but it isn't exactly a complete bust....

Kitty and the NUB's before her who left quickly didn't do so because they were bored - they did so because their whole intent was to to sell out for small fortunes, which they all did. Knowing that they wouldn't be able to repeat that profitable feat, why would they stick around?

Incidentally, when everyone was giving Mantra props when he first overtook Ranger's MPR a couple of months ago, I publicly stated that I wouldn't congratulate him until he became the first NUB to continue on after his NUB was over, in a month or 2... Well, it has been a month or 2, and my kudos to Mantra are overdue, so I wish to congratulate Mantra for being the first NUB to hit the top, and still "stick it out" after his NUB ended. Good job and keep it going, man!!!! :)

after i first joined, i noticed with the NUB i wasn't going to get anywhere due to my lack of time, so i went to forums, and noticed some great people, so this is why i stick around, i think its 2 months after my NUB. obviously i didnt get far with my NUB (140k MPR)

I don't think that there has been a 'groundswell of displeasure', so much as less positive posts, which is probably down to there being less overall posts nowadays?
I went nowhere with my NUB. I have just started an NCB for a laugh, I don't expect her to go that far either.
In fact - I couldn't really tell you why I keep coming back. Some psychologically damaging event in my past leading to masochistic tendencies I shouldn't wonder.
Errm point? some play for glory, some just play because it fills a void...

Patience is a virture. Flamey you seem to be stuck between two different path's of logic, tanks and mages. I would say you'd be better off going with your gut feeling and putting everything you have into the game no matter the limits of your ability If it be USD or just the time you spend here. On that path I think you will find a new relationship with CB.

just to clarify, this is not a complaint, i have a mage and tank, so i cant complain :P discussion but i think this is getting to serious and personal, my hope was to learn more of the advanced things in the game :D

yes and congratz to you mantra, for not being like all the other NUBs who made it to the top and sold out.

/me just wants to see the return of tourneys :-D

About archery..it still gives you that extra hit(s)