Arcanaville

For what its worth, you have my support Tony. I don't know how realistic the endeavor is, but we might as well swing for the fences.

I'm still not a dev.

Although my relationship with the developers has always been ... complex to describe.

Well, I guess now's a good time.

Let's see. Excluding small numbers changes and bug fixes and such:

- I suggested the Defense set procs be changed from unique to normal rule of five bonuses. Thus did LotG become one of the most sought after procs.

- I suggested that tohit buff bonuses in the invention system be changed to accuracy buffs, and I suggested to Castle to investigate the existence of player accuracy buffs in the first place.

- I suggested some of the power changes in the latest Martial Arts. Particularly, the "Eagle's Claw boosts your crit chance" effect was a suggestion I made a couple times over the years.

- I'm responsible for some of the features in Real Numbers, in particular the tohit roll channel and the fact that combat attributes shows accuracy and tohit bonuses. I'm also partially responsible for encouraging pohsyb to "follow" pseudopet effects. I also specifically suggested adding a DPA field for attacks: real numbers was originally only going to show DPS.

- I'm significantly responsible for AE custom critters, at least in terms of capabilities. Even now I'm not sure what I should say here, but I now feel comfortable in saying that they exist in the first place because I championed them and even got the devs to delay the AE so that they could be added. I'm also primarily responsible for the way custom critters are currently valued.

- I long championed the critter accuracy changes that were eventually introduced in Issue 7.

- The "base brain" AI of standard critters uses an algorithm I created to address issues with critters failing to use all of their attacks consistently in many cases.

- I played a role in getting BaB thinking about DPA, and the net result of that was the various attack speedups that were added to things like weapon sets. As soon as he was comfortable understanding just how important cast time was, he began reducing it in cases he felt comfortable.

- The fact that the reward message that shows on your screen when you get a salvage or recipe drop has a color identical to the type of drop was based on a suggestion I made in Issue 9 beta.

- When Castle was expressed concern that the scaling passives Widows got might be too strong for a tier 1 power I suggested splitting them into Combat Training: Defensive and Foresight. Voila.

- I strongly encouraged Castle to look at cast time adjusted formulas for attacks, and the result of that is Claws and Widows. Claws in fact uses a formula that is essentially identical to the one I proposed to Castle, but it makes an error when its translated to AoEs. The net result is Claws became an AoE monster. Oops.

- I suggested some of the changes made to the control side of the Hybrid tree. In particular the fear+immobilize idea was an idea of mine to act as a way to synergize two effects into a pseudo hold.

- Elusivity is almost entirely an invention of mine that pohsyb slipped into the game engine probably when no one was looking.

- /ghide is the direct result of a suggestion I made to pohsyb when I learned about some of the global chat changes that were coming.


I also think I helped a little push the devs to look at Blasters. I think the devs were leaning in that direction, but I think I helped the cause by drumming up interest in looking at them again. Also, the snipe-buffs-range effect was a suggestion I made to Arbiter Hawk. To bad we'll never know fully how those changes would have all come together on live.

Also, Blasters, Arbiter Hawk said he liked the "nuke while mezzed" idea, but he thought someone would smack him upside the head if he allowed us to get away with that. I think we would have gotten it eventually though.


I also invented the term DPA (damage per activation-second) along with a term DPC (damage per cycle-second) that no one uses (everyone just calls that "DPS"), and the term "immortality line" which was probably a mistake.

I did *not* invent the term "arcanatime" - that was Werner.


One other thing: when BaB posted a message saying he thought it was unlikely the code would easily allow power customization, I posted a reply that said it was possible, and outlined a precise way it could work based on my knowledge of the system that BaB helped to inform in the first place. Although I was not to my knowledge responsible for the actual work done in any way, its fair to say I did at least predict precisely how it could work, because it does work in exactly the way I described then.


Oh, and I was the one that prompted Shonuff to make that signature icon. One of my cooler contributions.

I will be here until the end. I was crunched by MxO. I expect to be eaten by Mot right before the servers disconnect my session.

Its sad to know it will all end, but I always knew one day it would all end. Whatever the devs decide to do with the last few months, I intend to see as much of it as I can.

Of course, I'm not going to be leveling that level 18 Dual Pistols blaster. But there are a few things yet that I haven't done, and there is no other time but now to do them.

And there are some things I want to make sure I get to keep when the game goes away. Pictures and recordings and just stuff I've poured into the game. I'm going to be doing a lot of that in the coming weeks.

It just occurred to me I have tons of demorecords that will soon be nothing but strange text files. I need to record them to video while I still can. They can take the servers away from me, but they can't take everything away.

To me, this game is like the movie Tropic Thunder.

On paper, Tropic Thunder is a stupid, insulting, predictable, movie with a cast of actors that shouldn't share a plane ride much less screen time.

In actuality, its crazy-broken in all the right ways. City of Heroes was crazy-broken in so many right ways. Robert Downey Jr. in black face is not supposed to be funny. Its hilarious. 400% recharge is not supposed to be possible. Its ridiculously fun.

My fondest memories of this game involve things that not only don't happen in other MMOs, not only can't happen in other MMOs, but would probably get people fired in other MMOs for letting it happen. There, its unbalanced. Here, its Wednesday.

A lot of people think I wanted a numerically constrained game. A "balanced" game in the same manner other MMOs are balanced. But that was never true. I only advocated having the quantitative precision to hit the target the devs aimed for. I never specifically said what that target should be most of the time. What I always wanted was to preserve and protect that crazy-fun, by making sure it stayed within the tolerance of the devs so they *wouldn't* have to curtail that crazy-fun.

In other words, I didn't want to ban alcohol at the party, I only wanted a designated driver. And I think this game sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally tended to do that: to let us have our fun within limits, rather than dictate the precise performance everyone was supposed to have. The players didn't always agree with the devs when they placed limits on that, but the devs did consistently give us a very wide playground to play in.

Anyone wants to contact me after the lights go out, I maintain an email account for this game at coharcana at gmail dot com. I don't check it constantly, but I do periodically and I intend to maintain it indefinitely.

That goes double for the dev team: those I had the privilege of interacting with, and those I did not. Even that guy that tattled me out to Art way back when. Yeah you: we're cool.

Well, if you were going to ask me engineering questions, you might want to hurry.

Although PM me, and I'll give you a more permanent way to do that.