UberGuy

Actually, we do know they don't have this sort of thing. They talked about it a little bit at the latest HeroCon.

Personally, I think this is a horrible example. This is something that very clearly is begging for automated regression testing. The animation system has clearly defined inputs and outputs. Someone should be able to write something that iterates over the input combinations and validates that it gives the correct output. The only thing about this example that makes it hard to test is the combinatorial complexity, which computers excel at slogging through for us.

Based on comments BaB has been making over the last couple of years about the effects scripting, it seems likely that the devs have long been saddled with two problems. (1) A lot of the game is controlled by manually managed files. Excel spreadsheets, manually modified FX scripts, etc. (2) No one had the skill to manipulate or possibly even improve generation of most of these inputs using automated tools. One of the main things that BaB told us enabled Power Customization was them getting someone on board who could write something to make bulk updates to the FX scripts. They still required a manual inspection/tweaking pass, but the man-hours required was massively reduced because someone wrote a batch parser/updater.

That's the kind of tooling that improves your process. You have to work smarter, not harder. QA is no different. You don't QA just by throwing bodies at it; that's just not efficient. You identify things you can verify in an automated way and then you verify those on the cheap every time you make a change unless you just cannot afford the time to test for some extraordinary reason.

You can leave an automated test running all night, and you don't have to pay it overtime.

This example is too easy. If the problem is actually triggered by 2500 people logging in, as opposed, to, say, 2500 people being logged in and 10 of them simultaneously combining HOs, then that problem should be caught by a simple load test that logs in 2500 automated clients.

If you log in 2500 automated clients and the actual problem doesn't happen until you hit 3000, well, that's the breaks. You learn about that and next time maybe you test 3000 clients.

You can't expand testing in such ways forever - eventually test complexity or capacity will become more expensive than dealing with the problems you want to catch. Figuring out what tests to run, and how far/hard is part of an ongoing process. That doesn't mean you shouldn't build test facilities, test cases or automation. Having them will almost improve your the quality and efficiency of your QA process. If you set some of the tests aside later to reduce complexity or save time, you can always go back to them if you need to explore an old problem. "Hey, look, something like this happened before, and here's the test case we built for it...."

We aren't talking about silver bullets. We're talking about the difference in using power tools instead of rocks and flints. If you aren't a good builder, you're going to build a poorly constructed house with the best power tools money can buy. But if you are actually competent, you'll build a nice house a lot faster with power tools instead of stone-age ones, and you'll probably drive more of the nails straight on the first try.

That's a pretty interesting line of though. I'd never even considered such a thing, but actually I find it compelling. I can especially see this line of thinking coming from the dev team at that time, which was heavily invested in how things worked conceptually (in their heads, at least) as opposed to mechanically or in "balance" terms.

All 7 of those people are me.

You do realize that the time it takes you to get to level 12 has virtually no bearing on what it takes you to get to 50?

Very roughly speaking, the halfway for time spent leveling is around 35, not 25. Time to level is not linear. There are many factors involved, including:

• XP required to next level, which is a function of current level
• XP per foe, which is a function of current level
• HP per foe, which is a function of foe level (which is also related to current level).
• Damage per attack, which is a function of current level.

So ... average time to defeat foes is a function of level. It gets harder and harder to kill foes in terms of HP/foe and damage/attack as you go from 1 to 50. In fact, player damage effectively caps out around level 44 while foe HP/level continue to rise all the way to level 54.

In other words, measuring the time it takes to get to level 12 and proclaiming it to be a measure of a problem isn't sensible. If you have a valid argument (not something I'm saying) this isn't the evidence you want.

More to the point, though, measuring leveling speed with the help of a 50 isn't reasonable. To make that argument stick, you need to show that the majority of players level up this way, or if you cannot do that, show that the speed of leveling without such crutches is still "too fast" (preferably by showing leveling speed to a much higher, harder-to reach benchmark than level 10).

It's not worth that much effort. I'm not going to slog through my own list of posts, clicking on my rep icon in every one to see if anyone left me any rep for it.

I actively feel sorry for anyone who does that more than, like, once.

The PM system is not (a) anonymous or (b) explicitly designed to leave feedback. Expanding on point (b) any feedback given in a PM does not actually have any visible impact on the person it is given to, which reinforces the motivation for people who think another poster should change. After all, if enough people agree with your rep feedback on a given poster, they are visibly branded with that feedback's effect, literally for better or worse.

In other words, while people may use PMs that way, they have no special motivations to do so, unlike a system specifically intended for that use.

Why would anyone bother "outing" useful rep? People post about rep comments they want to grip about, and those are almost always the idiotic ones.

Perhaps it would surprise you that people leaving anonymous comments didn't always post the sort of things you see in flame wars.

When people post in a thread, it's relatively uncommon that they specifically join an argument in progress just to explain why they think a particular post was good or bad. Instead, they usually post to weigh in on the argument itself, and usually only agree or disagree with specific posts. People didn't just use the reputation system for that. I would get rep comments that had nothing to do with an ongoing argument, but would comment on attitude, good or bad logic, etc.

If that's what it's doing, then yes, it's incorrect.

Edit: I threw together an Earth/FF controller to test that on, and it's not doing that for me. I slotted 5 LotGs, two sets of Basilisk's Gaze and a set of Kinetic Crash, and it isn't showing any warnings.

They can and have. No one has any right to these forums - they aren't included in any service agreement. Moreover, the game's admins can remove someone's ability to play for any reason whatever. People have actually been banned from both the game and forums for inappropriate behavior in the past.

Edit: I just read the linked article about the guy who got banned from the PS3 network. He's actually claiming that this infringes his first amendment rights and additionally causes him "pain and suffering" because agoraphobia means his PS3 is his primary means of social interaction. I can barely imagine a stronger cocktail of fail, and any judge who lets that get beyond the most preliminary stages is a moron. There are grounds you can successfully sue a gaming for if you can convince the judge/jury they played out certain ways - the above should not be two of them.

You're doing it wrong.

I've seen threads a long time ago where you talked about how you formed teams. You were very picky, not accepting this AT or that powerset, because they weren't "good enough". If that's not changed, that's probably a big part of your problem. Not only does it obviously limit your choices, but plenty of people won't bother teaming again with someone who plays like that.

It is actually true. It has been tested before, many times. Devs have confirmed for us why it's true. If it has changed, it should be considered a bug until we're told otherwise.

What matters is the name of the bonus as it appears in your "Powers" tab in character info. You can only have 5 of any one name as it appears in that list. An LotG: Recharge has its own name, separate from a that given by "actual" set bonuses of the same magnitude.

Taken from ParagonWiki: Note that the wiki page is not considered the source for this information. I am simply quoting it as a concise explanation. I would link you to Castle's quote, but the fact that it was on the I13 beta boards means it no longer exists.

I assure you that when I post something, unless I qualify it with the fact that I am uncertain about what I'm posting, I am supremely confident in my statements and position. That includes when I'm telling someone off. It doesn't always mean I'm right.

I think we all understand the disadvantages of anonymous comments. One of the advantages is that people clearly felt quite free about being able to tell you what they thought of a post without having to argue it in the thread they saw it in, probably as a thread-jack. I actually got useful, informative feedback probably about 1/3 of the time. Who knows, maybe that's because I actually try to make informative if not always useful posts, even when I'm being argumentative.

I'm so very glad that you are so aware of all the human opinions you might encounter, and/or so certain of their invalidity, that you can consider everyone's ability to comment on your posts to compare to the ability of a blind man to judge a drawing. Personally, I consider that insufferable of you. I think that's pretty notable, because I think I can be pretty damn insufferable myself.

Of course all the feedback isn't worth while. I don't think I'd grace most threads or even most posts on this forum as worth while. That doesn't mean we should just shut down the forums. Nor does a lack of consistently awesome feedback mean the feedback system should be made completely non-functional (yet still enabled). In my opinion it should either be functional or disabled.

I do.

I'm probably one of the harsher posters on the forum. I know that, and I don't particularly regret it. I think it has its uses. However, I may not always channel that at the right times and the right people. I've received feedback that made me think about that, and consider whether my tone, content or even need to respond were appropriate. All the time? Certainly not, and perhaps surprisingly, most of the rep I've received has been positive. But the system has undoubtedly influenced me, even if it's been slight.

Obviously, getting frivolous comments attached to either positive or negative rep don't really count as feedback and have no such effect. Not everyone used the system that way, though.

That's almost certainly a bug. We went through a phase where powers that were not supposed to scale by foe level did so (for example, Soul Drain's +damage). I'm guessing that this power was overlooked in the pass where they fixed that because it's in an out-of-the-way place compared to the versions in primary or secondary powersets.

I would /bug it in game and then PM this info and the Incident number to Arbiter Kim and/or Castle.

I think the there would be far less interest in it. I suspect some people might still want it for a variety of reasons, but I think this one we've been covering is the most salient one.

Just bear in mind that some people essentially never bore of some of their characters. I still play characters I created in the first month of this game's existence.

Anyone who thinks their character is immortal just needs to jump in a pile of +4 Arachnos spawned for 8 players. (And trust me, it takes a lot less than that to kill lots of heavily IO'd characters.)

Edit: Just about any large quantity of Rularuu would work, too.

While we don't know for certain, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that they are, indeed, in pool A. Some background can be found in this post.