Will you please tell us, in all honesty, what the long-term goal is that ED is meant to accomplish?

There were two goals: 1) we wanted to make sure that high level game play was just as thrilling and exciting as the low and mid levels and 2) we wanted every Archetype to contribute to a team.

In the first point, character builds could easily tackle what the game delivered; there’s only so many spawns that appear in a mission. A single character could face off against spawns +4 or more levels higher and intended for a group of three or more – and not face any real risk. Some players found the only entertainment in rounding up several spawns together and eliminating them. When a game gets this boring, people leave. It’s really that simple.

There were several possible solutions to this problem: 1) make more powerful entities, 2) increase spawn sizes, 3) create special new villains that targeted characters’ weaknesses, or 4) rework the player power sets. We actually tried option 1 briefly, but it turned out to be unpopular. It also didn’t address the second problem – allowing all Archetypes to contribute. Certain builds could hit their Resistance cap without needing help; in other words, some buffs were meaningless. Defenders and Controllers couldn’t offer any help to those builds. So we needed to address the fact that players could hit the cap, as well. We couldn’t do option 2, because there’s a lot of tech built around our current spawn sizes. It would’ve been extremely risky in terms of stability and simply impossible to do manpower wise. We could have created special villains for every villain group, similar to “Nictus” or “Sappers”, that would level the playing field, but this would have taken a LONG time to do. Plus, we wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of things for players in the meantime, like add new powers or villain groups. Also, the problem of the high level game was immediate and had to be addressed quickly.
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