Arcanaville

Because if they decide to compromise on one area, might as well just scoop their brains out with a shovel and turn over the keys to the players.

Always I feel sorry for the developers, who are always accused of having "vision" when they do not compromise as if that were a curse, and always accused of being inconsistent when they do compromise as if that only proves they could always do it our way if they can do it once.

Based on what I know about it, which is probably far more than I'm supposed to know, I have every reason to believe the data reasonably supported their conclusions.

The devs were not "using" anything. The devs collected the performance of the players. All of them. There was no possible way to misrepresent the playerbase, because the data was the playerbase.

In my opinion I think its extremely likely that what you are experiencing is heavily influenced by the character of the game and likely experienced to varying degrees by the majority of the playerbase.

I think this game promotes a feeling that many players have that what they have is a "family" of characters, whereas in many other games alts are a way to find The One True Character that you will invest most of your time and energy into, because its often extremely expensive to do so.

I think the thing that best epitomizes the thought as well as points to the challenges of it arising in other games is this phrase: "let me get my controller." In this game, you can be playing your tank and decide maybe this team could use a controller more, so you decide to swap. Or you decide that on this team you'd rather level your controller than your tank. Either way, the switch is often mentally easy *and* more important mechanically easy. You just log in what you want and then teleport/gateway/portal/run/fly/jump your way back to the team. Takes almost no time and almost no effort. The game doesn't just give us slots: it lets us play whatever we want for the most part *and* lets us easily switch characters without disrupting the teams we're on.

We start seeing our characters as options to play, as different suits we can wear, as different characters we can become. We see our characters as options, and the game as options, and we tend to play mix and match. In this mission, with these team mates, what do I think they need. What would I rather play.

I think that tends to make us value gameplay options over absolute power. Power's good, but we tend to spread it around. We tend to want to have a decent blaster and mastermind and brute and dominator, not the best mastermind humanly possible to construct to the exclusion of all else.

Of course, everyone is different and some people do like to make that one powerful character, or like sticking to one or two mains, or prefer to focus their attention on one or a few things. But I think the majority of players don't, and I think that is the culture of City of Heroes players, and its a direct result of the way the game plays which is a lot different than most other MMOs. So I wouldn't be surprised if the things that sold the best were usually things that removed content locks or created new opportunities to make new alts or characters or in general created new options that could be exercised in-game.

I think the Male and Huge thinks that's alright.

Honestly, that is probably your best bet. I would personally never recommend Kheldians to relatively new players, explicitly because of the thread of Voids among other things. There are ways to mitigate them as there are to mitigate anything and everything in the game, but unless you like challenge content almost anything else will probably be a better introduction into the game than Peacebringers or Warshades. Warshades in particular eventually become monsters at high level, but you have to get there first.

Are you saying that when you use the word "exploitation" gambling is a normal requirement? Or are you saying that exploitation involving gambling is a completely separate category of exploitation for which the normal context of exploitation is insufficient?

Or are you saying that when you talk about any topic, you are the only person allowed to use analogies.

I thought you said you were a huge male fan. Oh, you're a huge Male fan. I guess we need some huge Huge fans to stir up some huge huge Huge love.

I think when people talk about the proactive and reactive nature of heroes and villains, they are talking about two different, and almost opposite ends of the spectrum, things. First, in terms of how they relate to each other: villains commit crimes and heroes stop them. "Proactively" stopping villains from commiting crimes is not so much heroic, as anti-heroic. The Punisher is proactive. Conversely, its rare for villains to simply wait for heroes to do something and then act to stop them. Villainy is presumed to have an agenda besides stopping the heroes, although there are exceptions.

On a different level entirely, I believe that heroism is almost always associated with a certain amount of selflessness and service: a need to serve others. So in a grander sense, superheroes are always reacting to need. Others need help, they discover that need, and they try to serve it. Villainy, on the other hand, tends to be associated with selfishness: with seeing either one's goals, agenda, or personal preferences being superior to everyone else's. Villainy tends not to react to others but to react to their own needs and desires.

An individual act may be proactive or reactive, but the motivations most associated with heroism are reacting to others in need and villainy tends to be associated with serving one's own interests. We normally describe serving ones own interests as being proactive, while serving others interests as being reactive.

The devs have made statements in the past that are consistent with saying that Scrappers have tended to perform above average, and Defenders about average, of all the blue-side archetypes. This is inconsistent with the belief that buff/debuff consistently wins and wins big in most or all content.

Defenders buffing Scrappers cannot help Scrapper performance relative to Defenders, because they are generally on the same team and there is no reason to believe that Defenders were sidekicking Scrappers more often than the reverse, which would be the only reasonable explanation for how buffing could skew the performance in the wrong way.

The only other possibility is that buff/debuff Defenders had horrible solo performance which dragged their average performance down relative to the high performance they got when teamed. But that's also impossible because then they would have low solo performance, and according to Castle *only* Blasters had consistently significantly below average performance in any regime of play, solo, small team, or full team.

The only option that is reasonable is that the edge in buffing and debuffing in increasing the Defender average upward was either low or nonexistent relative to the huge advantage Scrappers probably had when solo. The buff/debuff advantage could not be extremely high unless Defenders teamed very infrequently, which seems highly unlikely.

It used to exploit people who liked to dress up non-existent dolls in non-existent clothes and charge them rent to play with them. Still does now. Is this a better form of exploitation?

By the devs own admission they knew this game was addictive in the literal sense: they were specifically proud of this game's addictive nature, also referred to as its subscriber retention ratio. Long before City of Heroes Freedom launched, the devs knew that anything they could do to keep a player engaged for a year radically increased the odds they would then keep that player indefinitely. And "free" costumes, power customization, even the nature of replayability are all designed to keep people playing until they cross the threshold of making a critical emotional investment in the game. Many never do, but the game is designed to keep the ones that do.

It is this very theory of addictability that runs *counter* to most free to play games, which are predicated on the presumption that they will not retain players for long, so the goal is to convert as many of them into temporary paying customers as rapidly as possible.

Either you're saying a different thing or you're saying the wrong thing, because Kyriani is saying that the rule of five only allows you to have the five *highest* bonuses for a particular attribute, which is not correct. I've underlined the significant and incorrect aspects of that first statement.

That's what I meant by "name." I think I specifically referred to it as the internal name of the power that grants the bonus, but going any farther seemed to be more detail than necessary.

Technically speaking the rule of five is a designer-imposed constraint on the number of times a set bonus power is allowed to stack. The same tech that only allows one stack of Bruising only allows five stacks of Set_Bonus.Set_Bonus.Luck_of_the_Gambler, because its NumAllowed is 5, and that prevents you from getting the benefit of a sixth. That's a different power than the power which grants the tier 5 recharge set bonus of +7.5% which is Set_Bonus.Set_Bonus.Improved_Recharge_Time_5. That also has a NumAllowed of 5, preventing a player from getting the benefit of more than five copies of that power.

That probably describes most of my villains. They are villains because other people see them as villains because the rules they play by are not the rules other people play by, but they make perfect sense to them.

Actually, I don't even see most of my villainous characters as "villains." I see them as "outlaws." I think that best describes them. They disregard the law, the social rules, and the typical moral code that most people adhere to most of the time. Its not so much that they pursue evil, but rather that they refuse to live under the restrictions that good requires.

I can't play a "straight villain" - someone who thinks its wrong, knows its wrong, but does it anyway. I can play an outlaw: everyone else thinks is wrong, but I don't, so I do it. And I can play completely crazy: everyone else thinks is wrong, but they don't count because their heads are upside down and they taste like ginger snaps. But its not generally in my nature to play evil for its own sake. I can be Magneto. I can't be Hannibal Lector.

Probably, and this assumes the only bottleneck on earning XP is offense. If increasing difficulty starts causing people to die, or even slow down to heal and such, then it would probably not be worth it. If you're steamrolling along, steamrolling at +2 is better than +1, and +3 is probably better than +4 unless you are killing things so fast that there's literally no difference between +3 and +4. And if that's the case, the optimal speed would probably be to split in half and attack two different spawns at the same time at +2 or +3.

Another thing with the potential to arouse addictive behavior:

My point though was that even now Real Numbers doesn't consistently and correctly factor in things like resistances and such, so the "net" effect of debuffs is even less likely to have been factored into the AI brains of the critters in 2004, and also unlikely to have been patched into the brains of the critters at a later date. In 2007 when Real Numbers was being first worked on, that was even at that time considered too much work and too much computation, and doing it for all critters would have been more computationally expensive than for the fraction of the players that use Real Numbers attribute displays.

Nothing to apologize for, its a harmless mistake. I was just explaining the joke, which you are aware is a joke that is as common around these parts as pigeons in a park.

First, you asked what the laws were. Second, I find it disturbing that someone who admits to having worked in the gaming industry refers to "the law" as "pseudo rules." Third, a box of Cracker Jacks still doesn't have hotline numbers printed on it after a hundred years, so "always" clearly also requires an "eventually" measured in millenia. Fourth, I don't think anyone was snickering at your previous post, although rather ironically some are probably doing so with this one.

I misparsed that, my mistake. Fleeing can happen at any level of health, although I'm not certain its *independent* of health.


Scrapyard seems to be a coward in general. Not sure about Deathsurge.


I doubt its gross or net. It think it might count attribmods. In other words, I think it might count the number of effects, not what their magnitude is, because of computational cost. Consider that even today Real Numbers can tell you what debuffs are on you, and what the net of all those debuffs are, but not what each individual debuff is doing to you accurately and consistently, because that would take too much computation.

I can get thousands of shards doing nothing. So I guess the Incarnate system is equally exploitable.

Across the widest range of situations, from leveling to 50, from SO builds to invention builds, when played by neophytes to experts, I believe Scrappers and Brutes have the best all-around performance across all of their powerset combinations. Some controller and mastermind powerset combinations sometimes outperform them. When built powerfully enough Crabs, Widows, and Warshades can outdo them. But you can use a random number generator to make a Scrapper or Brute build, and its going to do far better than any other archetype under the same condition, because the wheel always lands on a winner for those two archetypes. And no one says their top tier performance is anything but great.

The problem is people comparing peak performance of a specific condition to the average performance of a wide range of other conditions. "So long as Ill/Rad can solo Giant Monsters, no Brute is overpowered" would be an example, or "a rad/rad soloed Lusca, so Corruptors must be fine" would be another. These are less than meaningless statements, because they have absolutely nothing to do with archetype balance.

I recently slotted up the Scrapper's Strike proc into my MA scrapper, and decided to give it a test drive by going to Monster Island. As expected, it did not change the fact that MA doesn't generally have the damage output to take down a GM. I thought adding in Lore pets would help, but actually they hurt a little: the GM starting running away with them up, whereas it would just stand and fight if it was just me.

So after maybe fifteen or twenty minutes of goofing off, I decided to give up. But not after I had chased the GM all over that island, and not after I had aggroed two other GMs, and not after I tried to take them down as well. Yeah, it sucks I can't bring down a GM. Even after tanking three for ten minutes I still just couldn't bring that GM down. I suck.

As to taunt auras, getting rid of them won't specifically help blasters, and I'm not advocating getting rid of them either, but conversely the move to give them to everything exacerbates the problem with Blasters in a very tangibly uncomfortable way, because it continues to shrink the options for remedies that target buffing Blasters without causing any collateral damage to other archetypes. And as I said, if melee causes the problem by insisting they have the tools to keep everything in melee, they become the first in line to take the hit when it comes to determining who will have to be intruded upon when we buff Blasters.

And since I said Blasters have no champion, I thought it would be a good way to spend my time for the next two or three years.

Actually, one of the run conditions the AI tracks is when a significant number of allies are defeated in a short span of time. Another is when the critter for some reason cannot seem to hit the target they are aggroed onto for an extended period of time.

You can actually induce the latter. Make a critter with no attacks in the AE but enough regen to survive, and then stand there and brawl it. Eventually, it will simply run away, even if its health bar is still full and you are no real threat, because its decided something has gone horribly wrong if it cannot attack you at all, its just not sure what.

I think the problem with DoT is that its a "lingering effect." The AI recognizes when there's a lot of debuffing effects on it and that counts towards its tendency to flee: DoT is I think being registered as a kind of "debuff." But this is *not* unconditional as Uberguy put it in the general case (meaning: with most AI "brains" - critters can have different AI brains with different preferences, vis-a-vis the purse snatcher spawn groups). I have yet to find a reproducible set of conditions which will cause DoT alone to force a critter to flee that isn't already predisposed to flee for other reasons.

As someone in the gambling industry, you should have been familiar with how the law defines gambling. At least in the United States, in every jurisdiction I'm aware of, an act requires three separate elements to be considered gambling. It requires consideration for a random chance at a prize. And those three terms are themselves legally defined to be a monetary entry fee (consideration), non-deterministic random probability (random chance) and an award of specific monetary value above a certain nominal amount. And its not enough to claim the prize can be bought. It must intrinsically have monetary value. The prize in Cracker Jacks is of course technically worth something and you could theoretically buy them on ebay, but that would not meet the requirements for gambling.

None of the prizes in the Super Packs have actual monetary value: you can't sell them back to NCSoft for money, and NCSoft does not allow you by the terms of their usage agreement to sell them for money. That means any exchange of those prizes for money would itself be illegal, and NCSoft is not responsible for such activity.

People keep bringing up gambling in the legal sense in the context of these Super Packs, but that argument has exactly zero legal foundation.

That's in retrospect. What would you have told the players back then, who said that Hami enhancement was the only end game progress this game had, and it was locked behind participating in a huge trial they didn't want to participate in. Because there were players making that argument then. Would you honestly have told them that no, in fact this isn't really end game progress and so they had no foundation for their objection?

While the Incarnate system is definitely a much more developed and intricate system, that's a matter of detail. The question for the players themselves has always been is there an identifiable end game progression mechanism, and is it gated? Its clear to me that HOs do satisfy the notion that the devs were willing to tell players that some elements of the end game would be gated behind teamed content. That willingness to say it is the best indicator of their design philosophy, not the comparison to raw numbers.

Moreover, they said it more clearly when the LRSF was released. There, they actually used the words end game, and stated that while this game (at the time) was not a game with an involved end game, they felt it was reasonable to have some end game content for the highest performance players, and that end game content was going to be teamed as that was the most obvious way to create high end and high difficulty content at the time.

If people are looking for proof that the devs in the past have been willing to lock what they call end game content behind teamed tasks, the LRSF is unambiguous proof of that. The incarnate system is vastly larger and qualitatively different of course, but that doesn't change the fact that the LRSF was proof the devs were *willing* to lock some end game stuff behind teamed content. And until the markets showed up the only way to get HOs was from large raids or teamed task forces, or have someone give one to you. There was no way for a solo player to get them on their own.

That means the sum total of the Hamidon encounter and the LRSF and STF are proof the devs have in the past have been willing to create an end game, albeit a small one, which was predominantly locked behind teamed content. Whether that was the right decision or not doesn't change the fact that they did make it once before.