Snow Globe

Looking at the data again, I noticed something annoying. Over all my characters, I'm close of the predicted 10 V / 20 R / 40 U / 30 C range. However, looking at the individual characters, I'm seeing far less than the predicted 10 V / 20 R / 40 U / 30 C range.

Totals across all trials

Snow Globe - Ice/FF Controller:
Very Rare (3) = 3.85%
Rare (10) = 12.82%
Uncommon (36) = 46.15%
Common (22) = 28.21%
Threads (1) = 1.28%
Fails (6) = 7.69%
Total = 78

White Succubus - Illusion/Empath Controller:
Very Rare (9)= 13.04%
Rare (18) = 26.09%
Uncommon (31) = 44.93%
Common (9) = 13.04%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (2) = 2.90%
Total = 69

Blastbot - Bots/Dark Master Mind:
Very Rare (1) = 3.13%
Rare (7) = 21.88%
Uncommon (13) = 40.63%
Common (8) = 25.00%
Threads (1) = 3.13%
Fails (2) = 6.25%
Total = 32

Little Imp - Fire/Fire Tanker:
Very Rare (1) = 3.03%
Rare (5) = 15.15%
Uncommon (14) = 42.42%
Common (12) = 36.36%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (1) = 3.03%
Total = 33

My individual character totals are mostly falling drastically short of the predicted 10 V / 20 R / 40 U / 30 C range.

Only one character comes close, but only because it gets so few commons.

Edit:
I'm working on separating my trials results before April 26, form April 26 to June 27, and from June 28 on.

Um, so does Air Applications. Air apps do not run through a browser. Yes, it does have a runtime. However the runtime is not OS-specific in the way .NET is. It functions more like Java (which is also cross-platform).

Again, you seem to have the misconception that Air Apps are browser apps. They are not. Even Java doesn't require a browser to operate in.

Air apps are mostly stand alone desktop applications. For instance, take tweetdeck for an example. It can be a desktop app, an iPhone app, an Android app, or an add-on to Google Chrome. And they are currently testing out Tweetdeck Web. It started as a stand-alone (no browser) desktop app though.

Where Air (or Java) shines is that there is ONE code base to take care of for both Windows and Macs. It also helps the Linux users because the same code works for them too.

My main objection to .NET is the fact that it is so closely entrenched in Windows. Also I hate all the bad programs made with Visual Basic that never seem to be stable (or fast).

I trust cross platform environments more than environments that are exclusive to one platform.

The launcher could be written in C/C++ and have a quarter of the footprint of the current launcher. It would be cross-platform as well. Given the previous launcher lasted nearly 7 years. Would a native app be better than a cross-platform app? Sure. However that means multiple sets of code to maintain.

At any rate, I'm not going to derail this thread further with this topic.

Had you said, "i have not seen this phenomena, could you help me understand it by letting me know if its frequent or widespread among the community", I would have responded far differently than I did. If you had asked "In what circumstances have you seen this happening?", I would have responded far differently than I did. With that one line, you instead set the tone that I was either imagining the situation or blowing it out of proportion. Then you proceeded to knock down what you thought I was saying.

It depends a lot on how you ask it. How you did so initially, yes, I read it as an attack. Your post came across as trying to tell me I was wrong, not trying to figure out what was going on.

Had you said it this way, I would not have read it as an attack.

Given that I was quoting someone that said that THEY were doing it, I don't think I would need more evidence.

I have booted someone from a league because they purposely failed a master badge run (pulled the AV out of the Lambda courtyard). I know of several people that refuse to run any trials with that person, even months later. I've teamed with the person several times since, but I wouldn't want him on any trial where I'm looking to get badges.

I take people at their word when they say they are doing something. I can't point you to other posters saying the same thing as the Issue 20 Open Beta and Issue 20 Live sections have been removed.

A number of reasons. Time of day I'm able to get on 7-9pm Pacific on Triumph. Sometimes I log on to see that a trial started 5 minutes ago, or just filled by everyone that is interested in running a trial. Sometimes the number of friends I have on amounts to 2-3 people.

Why are you continuing to try to make it out as if I'm some kind of social leper? Seriously, it isn't that you are asking questions, it is you asking questions in such a way as to paint me in a negative light that I'm having an issue with.

This isn't about me.

The only time I've been turned down is if the trial was full. The problem with that is that sometimes a full trial means that everyone that is interested in running a trial is already on the league, and people have to wait until that trial is done. In other words, the trial running population can only support 1 trial at times.

The common place on Triumph seems to be Pocket D, but no one really hears about the trials launching from the RWZ.

Back before the Lambda badges were changed, I witnessed one person repeatedly getting told they were not welcome because they didn't have level shifts.

Yes, there is some of that as well.

Well, you get your wish:
Sometimes those developers are sneaky types.

Actually attempting to reason is fine, but your post wasn't an attempt to reason, it was telling me that the post I quoted wasn't happening. You also started out with attacking me and my post.
That really didn't sound to me that you wanted to discuss anything. It sounded like you wanted to put me on the defensive and then use that as a basis to poke holes in my post. That question is like "how often do you beat your wife?" There is no way that I could respond reasonably to a post that started that way. If you really want to discuss the issue instead of attacking me or telling me that what I've seen doesn't exist, then I'd welcome that. However if all you have to say is that "I don't see it" or "it isn't happening to me so it doesn't exist", then what is left to discuss?
It has been happening. It might not be omni-present (thankfully it isn't), but it is happening. I suspect that it is happening to some degree on every server. I didn't say it was prevalent yet. I said I've seen it starting to happen. Do you see every league formed? I do know that during the last few weeks, I've been on less trials. I've also seen some people get rejected from running trials for various reasons.

I actually agree with this.

I think I'll dig up a post from Arcanaville that seems relevant:
Given that last graph I put up, I can't see a difference between the first 50 recorded runs (those happened before May 3rd) and the rest. In addition the April 26th patch was supposed to produce higher level components, which my graph does not reflect. In fact, my overall results seem to reflect that the rewards seem to be fairly constant. Can you tell where the rewards were increased? I can't. So that post from Arcanaville is fairly accurate in that we can't tell if there has been a change before/after the April 26th patch.

Well, I personally wouldn't mind the random reward table at the end of the trial IF the deterministic approach used was less punitive. Two weeks (not everyone does 3 trials/day) to compensate for the RNG is not a balanced approach between Random and Deterministic.

My problem with the reward tables is that it doesn't address the desires for a predictable component in a meaningful way. The reward tables (and Merit stores) are geared in such a fashion that it is clearly better to wait to win the lottery than it is to spend merits on components. A player will get a Rare or Very Rare component faster by grinding trials for the reward table than to buy them with merits. By putting an additional strain on merits with costumes and recipes, it makes purchasing components a fool's task in comparison.

I think you might have that reversed. The former would have me intentionally wanting to get rid of those that want random drops, while the latter means that I don't know how many people want random reward tables. In truth, it is somewhere between those extremes. I don't think there are as many that would quit over static reward tables, as the static reward tables exist throughout the game. Random drops exist, and I don't have any problem with those. I do have a problem with a full task having a random reward. The difference is that while the random drops are present, that the rewards for completing a task

But that isn't entirely accurate either.

Leandro: With a steady league of players getting 10% Very Rares, 20% Rares, 30% Commons, and 40% Uncommons.
Your guess: a moderately skilled league getting 5% Very Rares, 10% Rares, 30% Uncommons, 55% Commons, plus or minus a few percentage points here and there.

Though I'm not sure about the Uncommons/Commons when you said 5/10/30/55. I'm assuming you meant 55% commons and 30% uncommons.

The problem is the league participation changes that luck.

Okay, here are my problems with the random reward tables based on how they exist at this point:

• The deterministic path is punitive.
• The deterministic path has other pressures on it (Costumes, Emotes, Recipes).
• The deterministic path is limited per day.
• The random path is shrouded in secrecy.
• The random path is somehow affected by not only your participation, but other players' participation.
• The random path seems to favor some people over others.
• The random path rewards far more frequently if you grind out trials.
• The random path rewards more than daily.

If a player could only get the reward table once a day per trial, I doubt that many players would agree that the random table is a good thing.

I mean that I've run into this attitude too often to think it doesn't happen:
All your post does, rian_frostdrake, is cover your ears and go "LALALALALALALA- I CAN'T HEAR YOU." to the problem. Yes, there are PUG Trials, but they are trending fewer. Closed leagues are becoming more predominant.

To be fair, Uberguy acknowledges that it is an ugly though process:
The thing is, that ever since Issue 20 went into open beta, this attitude has been a driving force for the league locks (ie the attitude of "I don't want to play with people I don't know, because we're not as efficient."), and it has disgusted me since it was brought up. It is getting worse.

I'm pretty sure the game itself is C++, not C#. However, the launcher IS a thin client. It is NOT a full desktop app. I could get the same functionality for the launcher in Adobe Air and have it 100% cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, anything else that can run flash).

All the launcher does is (a) display a web page and (b) sends a command to the OS to launch the game. That is all the launcher is doing. Heck, in tracking down some problems with the launcher, I can tell you what most of the traffic is like to and from NCsoft Austin is like.

As someone pointed out, players can still run the game (if it didn't need to be patched) from a command line.

It is a Kingston SSDNow V100 Drive, 64GB. It uses NAND Flash memory components.
http://www.kingston.com/ssd/v100.asp

I've had this machine since Christmas 2007, but the drive is about 2 years old. I can't afford to replace it any time soon so I upgrade parts when I can (or they fail).

My ISP is notorious for throttling rich media and P2P, and yes, it is a Cable ISP.

I might have to look into this, as I got this launcher from the NCsoft site back in January, not the version from the City of Heroes site. Then again, they might be the same at this point.

Actually only a few incidents. Only 2, in fact:

One of the incidents the league managed to get 17/20 temp powers in the 5 minutes that I was crashed and tried to rejoin the event (On my Ice/FF controller). That was completely beyond my control, and I blame the developers for it. They still haven't fixed the Lambda crashes. The other time I was on my Bots/Dark and missed most of the prisoners in BAF, again due to a memory leak crash.

I don't hate the size of the leagues, I hate the fact that sometimes I can't get enough to actually do the trials. I hate the snobbery that the developer's design choices have caused. The difficulty, the participation metric, and the secrecy shrouding the reward tables all combine to make a perfect storm of discontent for those that don't have a select group that continually run them or have a large server population to choose from.

I hate the attitude expressed in this post (probably more than Uberguy says that he dislikes what he is doing too), but the developers only have themselves to blame for it. Not only does it reduce the pool of players willing to do the trials with people they don't know, it also is poisonous to the community as a whole.

On the other hand finding people to run those 3 trials/day is problematical. I've had days where I couldn't get a single trial in during my available play-time.

Heck, even Leandro is saying that people aren't running as many Keyes:

The trial reward tables were also adjusted on June 28th (Issue 20.5), so are we to ignore everything before then as well?

June 28:
April 26:
I have not had the thread table since the June 28th patch, just to name one change that affects my results AFTER April 26th.

This is my distribution for the first 180 runs (included in those 212 runs):

If anything, I think I can safely say that I've been getting consistently random rewards. Bottom of the grey sections are a fail, 1st line up is threads, 2nd line is common, 3rd line is uncommon, 4th line is rare, 5th line is very rare. Each of the 4 bars represents 50 trials.

Suggestion: Try this website to see what ports are actually blocked, stealthed, or open:
https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

It is a site called shields up, you'll need to click on the "proceed" button in the middle of the page, then "all service ports". It should try the first 1024 ports (including port 80). It tries to see if there is any openings to your computer that hackers can get to.

green = stealthed/good.
red = probably open to attack.
blue = closed letting people know that there is a computer there.

Oh, and here is a bit of security info about port 80:
https://www.grc.com/port_80.htm

Given that I'm no longer writing desktop apps, and I am writing applications that run elsewhere (or with Adobe Air), my programming competencies are fine for what I'm doing these days.

Just for kicks, I started a dedicated update of the beta server. Now I've had it updated in case I was invited.

At any rate, the update is 432.7 MB. It is going to take 8 minutes to download. I'm on a 10 Mbps cable broadband. I'm getting around 730KBs/sec-760KBs/sec according to the updater. I'd already be patched in that time with the old updater. It hasn't even started updating the files.

Edit:
After it finished downloading it took 4 minutes and 5 seconds to apply all the patches, almost stalling on the stage1.pigg file.

Normally I don't have to ask this of you, but can you untangle what you have said here? Are you saying that the intent is that the absolute best and absolute worst cases should be very large?

Are you saying that one player getting 30 very rares & rare in a row while another player on the same trials getting only common & uncommon is an acceptable margin? One of the players would say "yes", while the other would say "no".

I would think that kind of margin would be something to be avoided as it would be designed to lose subscribers that feel they are getting the shaft.

This is an exaggeration. Then again, I don't drink the Microsoft juice.

I do all my web development in PHP, MySQL, Javascript (I use Mootools framework), HTML, CSS, and Flash (Actionscript 2 & 3). I can also program in C, C++, and Java. I avoid Microsoft frameworks like the plague they are.

Thanks for the tip.

I've had it crash on me, and the only time I use it is to check out builds people send me.

Players can have the expectation that the disparity between the two is close. Given Oedipus_Tex's results, I don't think the average player will think it is close or fair.

Ahem. I just ran my last 212 trials (over 4 characters) through Excel. (Edit: I should note that my recorded trials are from around the same time as Leandro's - mid-April.)

Overall:

Very Rare (14) = 6.60%
Rare (40) = 18.87%
Uncommons (94) = 44.34%
Commons (51) = 24.06%
Threads (2) = 0.94%
Failed Trials (11) = 5.19%
Total trials = 212

BAF Trial:

Snow Globe - Ice/FF Controller:
Very Rare (2) = 4.88%
Rare (6) = 14.63%
Uncommon (19) = 46.34%
Common (11) = 26.83%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (3) = 7.32%
Total trials = 41

White Succubus - Illusion/Empath Controller:
Very Rare (4) = 12.12%
Rare (9) = 27.27%
Uncommon (16) = 48.48%
Common (3) = 9.09%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (1) = 3.03%
Total trials = 33

Blastbot - Bots/Dark Master Mind:
Very Rare (1) = 5.26%
Rare (4) = 21.05%
Uncommon (9) = 47.37%
Common (4) = 21.05%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (1) = 5.26%
Total trials = 19

Little Imp - Fire/Fire Tanker:
Very Rare (0) = 0.00%
Rare (3) = 18.75%
Uncommon (8) = 50.00%
Common (5) = 31.25%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (0) = 0.00%
Total trials = 16

BAF Total:
Very Rare (7) = 6.42%
Rare (22) = 20.18%
Uncommon (52) = 47.71%
Common (23) = 21.10%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (5) = 4.59%
Total trials = 109

Lambda Trial:

Snow Globe - Ice/FF Controller:
Very Rare (1) = 2.86%
Rare (4) = 11.43%
Uncommon (16) = 45.71%
Common (10) = 28.57%
Threads (1) = 2.86%
Fails (3) = 8.57%
Total trials = 35

White Succubus - Illusion/Empath Controller:
Very Rare (4) = 11.43%
Rare (9) = 25.71%
Uncommon (15) = 42.86%
Common (6) = 17.14%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (1) = 2.86%
Total trials = 35

Blastbot - Bots/Dark Master Mind:
Very Rare (0) = 0.00%
Rare (3) = 23.08%
Uncommon (4) = 30.77%
Common (4) = 30.77%
Threads (1) = 7.69%
Fails (1) = 7.69%
Total trials = 13

Little Imp - Fire/Fire Tanker:
Very Rare (1) = 7.14%
Rare (2) = 14.29%
Uncommon (5) = 35.71%
Common (6) = 42.86%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (0) = 0.00%
Total trials = 14

Lambda Total:
Very Rare (6) = 6.19%
Rare (18) = 18.56%
Uncommon (40) = 41.24%
Common (26) = 26.80%
Threads (2) = 2.06%
Fails (5) = 5.15%
Total trials = 97

Keyes Island Trial:

Snow Globe - Ice/FF Controller:
Very Rare (0) = 0.00%
Rare (0) = 0.00%
Uncommon (1) = 50.00%
Common (1) = 50.00%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (0) = 0.00%
Total trials = 2

White Succubus - Illusion/Empath Controller:
Very Rare (1) = 100.00%
Rare (0) = 0.00%
Uncommon (0) = 0.00%
Common (0) = 0.00%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (0) = 0.00%
Total trials = 1

Little Imp - Fire/Fire Tanker:
Very Rare (0) = 0.00%
Rare (0) = 0.00%
Uncommon (1) = 33.33%
Common (1) = 33.33%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (1) = 33.33%
Total trials = 3

Keyes Total:
Very Rare (1) = 16.67%
Rare (0) = 0.00%
Uncommon (2) = 33.33%
Common (2) = 33.33%
Threads (0) = 0.00%
Fails (1) = 16.67%
Total trials = 6

Yes, it looks like they've updated the NCsoft store from the last time I checked. Earlier this year, the store had lower requirements for the game.

http://us.ncsoft.com/en/launcher/ncsoft-launcher.html
Game requirements:
Edit:
Not on my machine. And I have CoH (Live, Test, and Beta) on a SSD with 35 GB free. Given some comments above, I suspect that they are using a temp files for the pigg updating on my slower hard drive (around 65-70 GB free).

Outside of a few websites (that I've made myself) needing to be tested, I don't run Internet Explorer. I've have had too many security problems with IE compared with every other browser I've used.

Nope, with the old launcher, it took 30 seconds to get to the loading City of heroes. With the launcher, it is about a minute.

No, see above.

Yes, and most tend to be unstable.

There isn't really anywhere to go from that. Well, except that I know of one person that told me that after 50 trials without a very rare or rare that they intend to quit because the game isn't treating his participation equally with other players.

Trial rewards shouldn't be lotteries.

I really don't find that acceptable.

And I know of one player that seems to have greater odds for the higher rarities than Leandro, as well as several players with lower than you are stating here (5/10/30/55).

I have to wonder what would happen to Leandro's numbers if he were doing these trials with groups with less than average ability (but still capable of finishing the trials).

Do you leave it running while playing? I can see it might be faster IF you have it downloading in the background, but I don't.

I don't let the launcher run all the time (it is set to close itself while playing) in order to conserve system resources. So any patch means I still have to wait for it to download & patch when I log in if there is a new patch. The trickle download is pointless unless the resource hog is running.

I had the test (and beta) client installed far easier than with the NCsoft launcher. I don't use, or even care about, the other NCsoft games.

As far as I know, the mac users have been able to use a version of the launcher for a month or two now.