Arcanaville

Ecks-Bocks La-eve.

Slotting a 33% damage enhancement doesn't actually make you hit 33% harder, always. Saying 33% harder always means if you are hitting for 100 now, and you slot that, you will be hitting for 133. That's what the words mean.

But players know that's not really true, that enhancement is actually 33 percentage points more damage and translate appropriately - and yet how many years of explaining what "base damage" did we have before that question dropped to being asked less than once per day?

The problem is that its an easier leap to say that the percent is a percent of some base value, but with tohit and defense the base value itself is expressed as a percentage, and that's where percents of percents tends to confuse people more who do not handle calculations on a regular basis.

I didn't know there was a shortage of lawyers on Cybertron.

Lets not go all Team America just yet.

Alternatively, there are ways in CAD tools to "extrude" or otherwise increase the thickness of what are essentially two-dimensional constructs. Capes, for example, are essentially two-dimensional but I got them to print by using some feature in Blender whose name escapes me right now that in effect thickens the structure just enough to be printable.

Also, this is where the "impossible" in the title comes from. When this subject actually came up on the forums we were told it was basically impossible because the 3D models were not solid models conducive to printing. Which they are not, but the amount of effort to correct that problem is small enough that I believe calling it impossible was not a reasonable exaggeration. Its very possible to fix the geometry holes, two-dimensional surfaces, and other hinky problems with only a relatively small amount of effort.

Also, that model looks pretty darn cool.


Its just like the plot to Cool World, only with 80% less stupid.

You could argue that an attack that had intrinsically higher tohit would be "bypassing defense" but not accuracy, and even if someone thought that that would not explain why they didn't describe all other sets with heightened accuracy as doing the same thing.

And as Starsman says, from launch to now there has never actually been a way to have an attack have intrinsically higher tohit, without resorting to some weird mechanics that I don't think existed at launch (you'd have to actually make the attack autohit and then make its effects have a separate programmatic chance to affect the target, meaning it would be possible for the attack to hit and none of its effects to land).

I still want to know if the people who originally wrote the descriptions for things actually knew anything about the game. Mez protection powers still claim to offer Res. The difference between accuracy and tohit seems to be randomly interchangeable. And I still want to know why Radiation Blast was originally described as being able to bypass defense. It can't be because the writer confused that with debuffing defense, because it *also* says it debuffs defense, so "bypass defense" must have meant something else in the writer's mind.

I doubt it. By the time Real Numbers was a twinkle in pohsyb's eye, the min/maxers had all the data they needed outside of the game to do that, and in fact Real Numbers didn't add very much to what we already knew and could know**.

What it did do is allow me to slowly phase out of the role of giving the players data; City of Data basically put me out of that business by around Issue 18ish. And I was very happy to give that up.

Real Numbers has three components. The power and enhancement effects data displayed with info panels, the attribute display window, and the combat attribute panel. Info data we had outside the game, although Real Numbers made it easier to get it into a format we could maintain. The combat attribute panel is mainly useful for testing: it isn't really an effective min/max tool nor do I see how it could encourage players to min/max, separate from actually making them interested in the numbers in the first place, which I don't think you can really blame RN for. The combat attribute panel was the closest thing to a damage meter-like UI we had: we could see certain stats in real time conveniently while playing. But since it didn't show the kinds of real time information a min/maxer would want outside of Mids (like average DPS) I don't think it played a major role either.

What it *did* do was open the door to a whole new group of players that didn't really truly understand the game mechanics suddenly getting a much easier view of what was going on. Years after the entire matter was settled, mostly by me, wave after wave of new players that gained competency in the game were suddenly complaining about cascade defense failure, because they could now literally see it happen on screen numerically.

If RN had a negative impact, I think it was in actually convincing a lot of players they knew more about the game than they really did, because it distilled a lot of information that normally took a lot of effort to acquire, and a lot of collateral learning happened with that effort that now didn't need to happen, and as a result didn't happen.


All of this has a caveat that only a few players would fully appreciate. Its possible that if Real Numbers didn't happen, City of Data and Mids wouldn't have happened in the form they exist now. But that's a different topic.

The problem is that a) the devs were mathematically challenged, and b) even if they weren't the players were.

An even level recharge SO increases the recharge strength of the power slotted by thirty three point three percentage points.

The average player doesn't actually know precisely what I just said.

Knowing that, I'm actually very much in favor of not using "percentages" *anywhere* in MMO systems just because I know 98% of all game developers and 99.9% of all MMO players will just screw it up.

Incidentally, I have no idea what you mean by "only part of the recharge rate is affected by the enhancement." On its face, that statement is false.

If I remember correctly, what I said in beta was that the tools were for the authors, search was for the players. Meaning, the tools should be as good as possible to allow authors to make whatever they want to make. But when it comes to presenting the arcs to the players, I didn't give a damn how fair it was to the authors. The goal was to try as hard as possible to make sure the player got to see the arcs they were most likely to want to play, period.

If search found 25 arcs the player was likely to play, but it missed three or four, and you were the author of one of those, too bad. I got the impression that there was a concern about "fairness" towards authors. But that was honestly irrelevant. It would live or die on the ability for players to find good arcs, and the honest truth is 99% of all players aren't skilled enough to make an arc anyone would really want to play, and those needed to be filtered from the players except when they were looking for them specifically.

What I think I suggested is a like/don't-like system with a couple of categories: story, action, mission design, something like that. Players could say they liked or disliked each of those for that arc, and then players could search for the top rated stories, the top rated action-oriented arc, and the top overall designed missions.


What I wanted the game to do on rewards is give full rewards to any player for playing any arc the first time, but then diminish those rewards on successive playthrus within a certain period of time, in a manner analogous to how task force diminishing returns work, but with some detail changes. That way, you granted the maximum freedom to the authors, while still controlling the rewards a bit. You could still farm, but not by blitzing the same mission over and over again. You'd have to run different farm arcs, or switch alts a lot.


I really think the AE was the single biggest lost opportunity in CoH. And in retrospect, I wished I had pushed even harder on it, instead of just picking one primary area to focus on. Normally I'm loathe to dominate the discussion on too many simultaneous areas of a part of the game, but I should have ignored that rule when it came to the AE.


But here's what I know I said constantly in and out of beta. For the AE to succeed, it must have just two priorities. When you're working on the tools, the player-authors are the only concern. You don't break missions every time you mess with a map, you don't put ridiculously aggressive word filters into the system, you don't place any limits on the tools except what is absolutely necessary. The tool is for the player-authors, and it can have only one master. And I'm aware of the challenges that statement incurs when I say it. And when you're working on the search, execution, and exploration part of the AE, your only concern are the players that intend to play the arcs. You only place the minimum restrictions on those players that are 100% absolutely necessary. No other concern matters not even the authors. If the players decide to vote your arc down because you can't spell and have the design aesthetic of a howler monkey, tough. If the players decide to vote your arc down because you're an ***-hat and they just don't like you, tough. *They* decide what they want to play, not you.

I know that wasn't true, and I know it would have taken an act of God to make it true. But if I was in charge, that's what I would have done.

Also double check the line "FileInFrameDir = True" specifically; that is the line that tells the plugin to create the OBJ file with the Frame directory, as opposed to the default directory.

There are a couple of systems I have authorization to for which I have both an access code and a duress authentication code. The system I mentioned above contained support for duress authenticators but the client didn't want to use them.

On a laptop I would use something like a TrueCrypt hidden volume.

The lesson is there is always a procedural element to security separate from the technological element. Something I tell/remind IT security professionals often is that bank vaults are rated according to the estimated time it would take to break into them. That time is often surprisingly short: generally minutes to hours.

The reason its not that long is that the purpose of a bank vault is not to protect the contents. The purpose of a bank vault is to protect the contents long enough for the police to arrive and arrest the would-be bank robbers. Something IT security people often forget when designing security systems.

I usually then quiz them: why is it necessary for us to have eight character passwords protecting our files but only four digit pins protecting our money?

Confession: In Issue 29 I would have been revealed to be Nemesis, and everything was actually an Arcana plot.

I'm kinda amazed how many people posting on the internet believe deleting something deletes anything.

Actually, the players did, they just didn't know it. The organizers on Freedom actually came up with the strategy the devs intended, but abandoned it because it was judged too difficult to pull off in reality, and then various exploit strategies and then the hold strategy appeared before anyone could figure out how to properly execute the "correct" strategy.

I believe it was revealed back when the I9 Hami was being tested that the intended way to bring down Hamidon was the "triangle" method. The attackers were supposed to clear the mitos and then position themselves at one corner of a triangle that contained Hamidon at the center with the vertices at maximum range for the players. The players were supposed to range-attack Hami until Hami spawned mitos on their position. They were supposed to race to the second vertex when that happened (trying to minimize deaths) and continue the fight from there. After the second respawn they were supposed to move to the third vertex and finish off Hamidon. If the triangle was configured correctly the players would be in range of Hamidon at all three vertices while the "bloomed" mitos would be just out of range at the earlier firing points.

That the devs thought this was a viable strategy for a playerbase not accustomed to raiding still amazes me. Our playerbase had a better chance of joining Cirque du Soleil than executing that strategy.

In either case, I don't think any of the players that came up with that strategy thought it was the "correct" one; I don't recall them saying so in any case. I think they thought it was too direct, and yet too ridiculous to be the correct one.


Incidentally, I am one of the two players on Triumph that invented the Phantom Army decoy strategy for Hami. At the time, pets were seen as potential aggro problems and almost every server had a "no pets" rule on Hami raids. I and one other player discussed that strategy and put it into practice in a very early raid. Triumph was the first to use the PA as indestructible decoys for Hami, and it was a unique strategy for us for a while because other servers had their own methods for controlling Hami aggro. The trick was realizing they could be hover dropped from the stratosphere completely safe from Hami.

No I won't make that joke I won't I won't I won't you can't make me lalalala ...


Also, that was the most functional Matt Miller life model decoy I've ever seen.

When the SG I was a member of became mostly inactive, I basically kept everything exactly as it was, created a personal base, moved most of my alts into that, and then farmed the bejeezus out of the game until I had the largest possible base plot and ran out of storage space to put all my stuff. Then I made a villain side base and did it again. And then I started to do that two more times on different servers.

I'm still not entirely sure what the heck I was intending to do with the fusion reactor and autonomous expert system, although the AES does create a decent loft space.

My estimate includes the fact I would be working on it on nights and weekends, and not all of those as well. Which means my speed would be much slower than if I was spending actual eight hour days coding continuously.

I also can't work on something for thousands of hours with nothing to show for it for years, so I would have been implementing it in a manner consistent with getting an initial core running and then adding mechanics over time. That's also not the most efficient way to do it, but its the only way to do it while still remaining sane and not getting paid.

I wasn't really thinking about animations. I was thinking about the code to properly translate the raw powers database into powers, attribmods, and the relevant elements of the VFX tables (particularly the sequence and animation data that can be converted into root times) into a time-accurate engine that accounts for all attribmod effects, power enhancement, and combat mechanics. Also a rudimentary AI.

In other words, the entire combat engine minus most of the graphical hooks, three-dimensional real time positioning, and large-scale entity tracking. A 2D side scroller version of the entire combat engine.

If you want to know where the 3000 hours went, consider this: how many of your 800 hour estimate was allocated to handle projectile velocity. How many to implement the asynchronous entity database used by GrantPower. How many to handle rooting. How many to handle all the different kinds of stacking (stack, replace, ignore, extend, overlap, limited). The postfix expression system. Diminishing returns.

There's a lot of stuff in there when you stop to itemize it all. I would guestimate there's about 200 different distinct effects or systems in the combat engine you'd have to account for to properly emulate all of the player and critter powers. Pseudo pets. Requires clauses. CancelOnMiss. Magnitude and Duration based Resistance equations. The complete tohit algorithm. Interruptibility. IgnoreStrength lists. Power redirection. Rage bars. The recharge system. The combat clock. Endurance and recovery. Perception. Intangibility. Mez. Range. I'm not even going anywhere near the physics engine.

Just think about how much code it would take just to understand how to correctly calculate Cur, Abs, Strength, Res, and MaxMax effects on the approximately fifty different attributes each entity has. There's probably a good twenty hours of coding just for that.

Edit: and I'm not as fast a coder as I used to be. A really really fast coder might be able to do all that in 1000 hours. Maybe.

Overkill is underrated. I actually implemented a system back in 2000 that used 4096 RSA signed 512 hashes just because, rather than the specified minimum 1024 RSA 128 bit hash, because the system was only intended to be in use for four years. Its still in use today, and will probably pass security audit until sometime around 2100.

Why 4096 RSA and 512 hash? 512 was as high as my libraries went, and 8192 RSA took too long to compute.

You must not be on Freedom or Virtue.