UberGuy

I have an anecdote for you. I was, some time back now, on a team with a SG buddy of mine I've known a long time. He doesn't hold back, and charges on in with the expectation that either his character's build or his teammates will carry him through whatever he's doing. He's a good player and firmly grasps the game mechanics, so he's not just being a Leroy. Because I have several Dark Miasma characters, he's used to me being on team doing what I do.

One day we were playing villains on a largeish team, fighting Longbow. My friend was on a SS/Invuln Brute and I was on a Dark/Dark Corr. There was another Dark Miasma Corruptor on the team, but we didn't know the player.

For much of the map, he and I were ahead of the party jumping in the next spawn while the team mopped up the previous one. At some point, for reasons I don't remember, he and I were separated as I got entangled in some other fight. My friend jumped in a large Longbow spawn with the other Dark's assistance. His health dropped precipitously, and he ended up being defeated. It seems that stacked sonic grenades and then general damage output did him in. (This was back when the -RES effect was still unresistable, too.)

In one of our global channels, where the other Dark Miasmist couldn't see it, he said "Hmm, this Dark isn't UberGuy."

The intended point of the story is that your statement about whether the rest of the team has to pay attention strikes me as a little too broad. Sure, if a team all has shields or whatnot they can all run off and do their thing regardless of whether the buff caster is around - that's just the nature of buffs compared to debuffs, and it's inarguably an advantage. However, I think the anecdote illustrates that, so long as you actually are near a Dark, and the player is on the ball, you don't actually have to think about it. The tools the set has are good enough to allow people to just dive in, because that's what my friend was doing until he realized he couldn't rely on that other player to be as on the ball as he was accustomed to from others.

You are correct, a Scrapper with Assault provides a force multiplier to their team. It's not a big multiplier, because Assault is additive with enhancements and other damage buffs, and Scrappers are not highly effective at running the power (10.5% damage buff versus 15% for Corruptors/Controllers and 18.8% for Defenders.) However, it is inarguable that a Scrapper with this power offers force multiplication to the team.

My definition of force multiplication is not "limited", but founded in game mechanics and basic algebra. Force multipliers are exactly that - things that multiply the effect (specifically the damage) of the whole team.

The only Scrapper powers that offer true force multiplication from their secondary effects are those with -defense, because it potentially makes the entire team more likely to hit the foe, increasing average DPS. Personally, I consider -defense to be a weak form of force multiplication even in the hands of ATs where its effect scale is large. The reason is that many characters slot such that their individual chances of hitting foes are already at or near the cap of 95%. This does leave -defense as potentially useful against foes with +defense or that might be smothering the team in -toHit. However, I would suggest that a Scrapper with Tactics might actually be more help to their team than one with -defense effects.

You seem to be trying to abstract the description of "multiplication" to a level where anything that keeps the team effective should be counted in this way. Aside from the problem of its dismissal of the fundamental mathematical meaning of "multiplication", there's nothing about what you seem to be saying that says a Scrapper needs to provide it. You could get "certain flexibilities" from adding a Tanker, another buffer/debuffer, a Blaster, or even a Kheldian.

Force multiplication has a specific meaning. Adding a Scrapper to a team is certain to contribute something to the team, contingent on the skill of the player behind them. However, except for -defense, what that contribution is will not be force multipliers. In that context, Scrappers (along with Blasters) contribute a force that's good to multiply.

Uh, huh. Look, I like Scrappers and other melee damage ATs a lot. That doesn't make me blind to simple algebraic realities. No matter what powersets I have, no Scrapper has the ability to improve a whole team's effectiveness the way a Kineticist can. The Scrapper's presence might mean a team that would have failed at some task instead bumps over the threshold. The Scrapper might pull a stunt that lets a team survive or recover where it would otherwise wipe out. None of that is the same thing as what we're talking about with force multipliers. Your Scrapper is not going to make my powers come back faster, or buff my resistances, or make my attacks hit harder (barring Assault).

That... seems like a significant leap of logic.

In any case, the devs told us in beta that there was supposed to be no dependency on "virtual" team size. Everything they've said suggests there isn't supposed to be a change in drop probabilities at all.

Way to come back to the thread after this kind of childishness had more or less died down and fallaciously distill the topic to name calling.

Epic fail at reading comprehension, and epic fail at your usual hall-monitor righteousness.

That might be something specific to Chimera's mobs. I did the Breaking Knives arc a few nights ago, and I could see the caltrops from the Knives of Artemis.

Edit: You might want to post that here.

Castle, are you sure this is working as intended? I just got this going between two characters who were away from the rest of a raid. I kept them separate for a while, and let the lightning bounce between them. I counted at least twenty leaps. At a 25% chance of leaping after the 3rd chain, that's got a 0.000000006% chance of happening. When it finally ended, it was because it missed.

Also, it still crosses zones.

Edit: Here is a demo recording of the lightning persisting in Ouroboros after that raid. (For those thinking the folks in Ouro were particularly unfriendly... everyone protesting was at the raid. )

There is no reasonable interpretation of my post of the problems with the TF that could qualify as "vague". What you could say is that the details are qualitative. You seem to be suggesting that qualitative is automatically vague. When presented with a significant amount of qualitative information, you turn around and ask for quantitative detail with the clear implication that without it, the given description is inadequate to understand the issue.

You might need that sort of detail to diagnose the problems with the TF. However, you are another player, not a dev. As such, there is no reason you personally need that kind of quantitative detail to grasp the problems with the TF. Claims that the descriptions are "vague" thus ring hollow.

Because of this, your post quoted above (especially worded as it is) comes off as an effort at misdirection, making it look as though no reasonably complete description of the issue had been given when, in fact, it had. It also comes across as a veiled attack on me or my information, suggesting that I was unreasonable not to gather better diagnostic information (despite being on the TF as a player, not a playtester).

Perhaps this was just poor communication on your part, perhaps you didn't want to admit that clear descriptions were given, or perhaps it was some veiled jab at me. Whichever it was, the problems with the TF were already enumerated and were not vague.

This is a slightly educated guess, but I suspect its got more to do with tools.

I know the animation engine isn't the whole system, and that problems local to the animation system aren't necessarily representative of the whole game's challenges, but consider some of the stuff BaB has told us over time about what challenges he faced with customized powers. One of the biggest hurdles he described recently was the sheer volume of FX scripts that had to be touched, and it was finally enabled when a staffer wrote a script to do the bulk of that work. Similarly, one of the long-standing arguments against certain powers changes was the sheer number of powers that would have to be modified, because every AT and mob has its own copy of the powers. (Pool powers are a known exception.) Powers are (or were) maintained in large spreadsheets and changes have been prone to copy-paste errors and missed instances.

These sorts of problems scream for automation. It sounds like the devs lack (or lacked) someone who could create tools that enabled them to work "smarter, not harder". These sorts of tools can also be created for some kinds of potential bug analysis, showing what components of a system might be affected by change. (If you change this glowie definition, what parts of the system import it and therefore might be affected?)

This particular observation isn't really meant as an indictment of the dev team. Staff who can create such tools in short timeframes aren't a dime-a-doezn. People who can make them reusable parts of a product's life cycle are valuable resources. So this is more of a statement of hope that they either have found someone or will someday who can improve the team's efficiency by giving them better tools that can automate labor-intensive, repetitive tasks. The benefits are potentially immense.

Ironically, I recently watched a special about an Amazonian tribe which is involved in legal disputes trying to protect their ancestral lands from loggers. These are guys who have a lot of villagers who trot around with bare chests, painted bodies and bone piercings on their faces, and yet their tribe owns a laptop with a satellite connection so they can do legal research on the web...from the jungle.

The position specific to me is that they have been making very conceptually similar "simple mistakes" for a long time. They've made some improvements over the years certainly, but still break things too often for my tastes. I'd like to have seen those mistakes result in better continuous improvement, so that such bugs surface less with each release.

I know I'm biased. I work in an environment with a very high bar for software correctness. Of course, it's not a game environment, and when my team's system doesn't work right, its other people in the enterprise who come asking why. I can imagine that has a far different dynamic from an MMO shop where players get mad about bugs in game.

But just because I would love to see a higher bar doesn't mean I am trying to vilify devs individually or collectively (and I acknowledge you weren't accusing me of such specifically). I just wish the results made it look like they had a higher bar.

... (← Hyperlink)

Which makes nothing discussed an "exploit". The above is a discussion of game balance. Given his druthers, Castle would modify how the game is balanced. That does not in any way, form or fashion make playing the game as balanced an exploit.

Perhaps, but until then playing the game the way RO does would not be an exploit. Nor would having played the game that way become an exploit retroactively after such a balance change.

That's the point.

There's a frequent thing some people do on the internet (and probably elsewhere, but I notice it on forums). When someone vigorously defends a position that isn't on a topic of life-and-death magnitude, other people have a tendency to think that vigorous defense means the person is making a bigger deal out of the issue than is warranted.

When you post something, and other posters come along and decry what you said or claim it untrue, failing to respond risks lending credence to their argument in the eyes of other readers. It's like the old parable of letting the madman give sermons in the marketplace - if no one challenges what he says, some people may start to believe it.

No one here is saying anything being discussed is the end of the world. This is a video game - there are infinitely more important things in the world. However, some of us like this game, and when it's broken when it seems it needn't be so often, that's frustrating. Just because we don't want to let that issue be buried under dissenting views doesn't mean we think it's "the end of the world".

So due to time pressures they should not ask people to test things because they might not have time to fix uncovered problems before deadlines arrive.

Result, the system goes live with defects which the users find, costing the developers credibility with their user community.

Where I work, doing that costs the team money after year-end reviews.

As players, we get one formal list, which is referred to as patch notes. We don't get to see change logs, as I take you to mean them. Those same notes in beta form are what are given to testers to guide their investigation of the beta versions of the game. I think it's hard to argue that they'd reduce the probability of untested changes if they strove to include more of the changes that they know about in those notes.

Maybe this wasn't a change they knew about. I just don't think it looks like a good candidate for that, and it's not like they never fail to document things they do know about. (On the nature of the change, you seem very focused on "glowies." there are three distinct problems with the TF - the glowie in the wall is only one of them.)

On the patch note/change log distinction... In the enterprise software world, I find the two terms are used largely synonymously, even to technical audiences. However, the term patch note seems used much more frequently.

Please quote the expression of that ideal stated here in this thread.

Because I consider it unlikely because of the nature of the change and its apparent localization to the TF. Because I consider it unlikely because their is contrary precedent. Because I only give benefit of a doubt so often, and their track record for documenting intentional change is terrible.

Here's some examples for you, all from this issue, that are a bit harder for you to dismiss than the Numina end map.

Do you think all the following are unintentional?

• "Chance for Build Up" procs now have a status icon in your buff tray.
• Terrain that was for a long time very angular is now in many instances smooth again.
• Taunt when wielding a weapon and a shield now has a new animation.
• Arctic Air now leaves a visual indicator on foes when it confuses them.
• Characters no longer appear to have spasms while playing teleport animations.
• Using the difficulty NPCs no longer costs inf.

The devs make changes without telling anyone all the time.

That's been in the game for ages. Ever since they added particle physics support, at least.

You mean like the afore-mentioned change to the last map of the Numina TF?

You mean like the afore-mentioned change to the last map of the Numina TF?

Edit: To be clear, no we don't know it was an intentional change. But to claim that it must not be because the devs never make unannounced, intentional changes is clearly false.

I find it difficult to accept that you find this so hard to understand.

The objection is to undocumented, intentional changes. If the change was accidental, then no one expects them to notify anyone, (It would still good if they could find more such things on their own, but given the scope of the game, it's potentially understandable.)

There is far more wrong with the TF than "the wrong maps".

And saying it's not wrong because I haven't seen it is preposterous. It's not like there are 5 people playing the game.

This is untrue. All you would need to do is to have read this thread to find extremely compelling evidence to the contrary. Indeed, virtually all of the meaningful data produced and posted here is for single characters.

We do not know enough about how the RNG is seeded or invoked to make any of those assumptions. In particular, this appears to assume that there is a single RNG used for all calculations across all zone instances. This seems extremely unlikely.

You might note that this was actually the 1st bullet in my list of possible explanations for how this ended up live. In that scenario, no one knew it had changed, and so it would not have been tested internally or announced externally.

However, if no one actually touched Hess, I'd love to get a high-level of what actually caused this to happen to it. Specifically, I'd dig knowing how it, alone, seems to have this particular behavior. I'd expect a more general problem to be able to find its way into more missions, arcs, or Task Forces.

Katie I can easily chalk up to AI issues. It's not like they're rare.

Synapse, there is hard data in this thread. We aren't (just) perceiving lowered drop rates, we are measuring them.

I don't know how to reconcile the differences in what we're measuring with what you're measuring.

Edit: I haven't done any runs at team size of 8. I've been using size 4 and 6 (mostly 6). I don't know if that helps.