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Quote:Sociologists studying where people look is like dogs sniffing butts?Sociologists have actually studied where the eyes wander to and linger or furtively glance at in social interactions and everybody is looking at everybody's naughty bits (and other erogenous zones or whatever gets associated with sexual attractiveness or sexual aggression) all the time regardless of gender or orientation. It's like dogs sniffing butts.
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Quote:It isn't very different, but that's the point. We know that's ok, because its not too bad here. We don't have tons of players complaining about replay value in the first few levels, and the devs even acknowledged this by streamlining the early content and adding DFB in the first place. DFB is explicitly intended to be a streamlined version of leveling through the sewers.How is this any different than making a Kat/Regen, going to 20, then deciding you don't like Katana, and rerolling as BS/Regen? Other than badges, obviously...but we do this already.
So we know it would most likely work in a freeform MMO, because structurally allowing rapid leveling early and then decelerating later to invest players functionally works here, and the tools already exist to in net effect respec early characters by rerolling them and accelerating them through the content. This would go a little farther, but in a freeform system that would probably have minimal extra cost. -
Quote:If City of Heroes existed when I was still in college, I might have done a degree in games theory instead of sleepwalking through engineering and fleeing before the ink on my diploma was dry.Because that looks like one of the few subjects I would like to attempt a Doctoral dissertation on. Of course I need to do a lot of coursework to do that, but at least the subject looks interesting.
Who am I kidding. I would have flunked out playing City of Heroes all day. Structured academia and I have not gotten along very well in the past. -
Quote:CO did it, but that's not because they solved the problems it creates. The opposite: they ran into those problems face first, ate their costs, and then retroactively tried to solve some of those problems when they transitioned to F2P, with F2P classes.Old hat. CO, TSW, and several others already permit this. Despite how you may personally feel about those games, they do have loyal players.
CO isn't an example of a solution to the problem, its a cautionary tale of how serious the problem can be. The fact that they have a loyal playerbase doesn't change that. That would be like saying decimal point errors are obviously a good thing for developers to constantly make, because CoH has loyal players. -
Quote:I would put it at one step away from impossible, if not actually impossible, when you start looking at the framework surrounding long-term MMO play.
For example: What is the value of having multiple characters if any character can pick anything and respecs are available (the equivalent of jumping from Empathy Defender to Fire Brute)? Do you just not allow respeccing at all to preserve the system? Can you only respec at huge cost? Do you have to slowly migrate skills over because a full respec would be too powerful? How do players who are new to the game manage their progression if respecs are very limited and they will be stuck with what they pick? If you do allow them to respec, how do you manage the fact that no matter what you do some builds will be better at leveling than others, so players will be pushed into building a fast-leveling character and then switching their build to what they actually want?
This isn't an impossible situation to solve, but it is very, very difficult. One thing I think some people (though not you, I suspect) overlook is that by limiting us to specific powers, CoX prevents the optimal strategy from being directing yourself into an aberrant temporary build, leveling it up, and then using it as your vehicle to access any character you want at any time by respeccing.Quote:Except with DFB that is exactly what is the easiest thing to do now. I can level any character to 50, no matter how impossible the build is to level, no matter how little I know about that archetype/power setup, because it is easy easy easy. THen, when the character gets it's uber powers at 38 and you can I/O it to godhood it is ready for the I-trials without me struggling to get it through regular content.
Your point about that being even worse in a respeccable full variable system is well seen. I could build mondo the tank, crush all enemies by standing there with the 3 allowable damage toggles. Then after Mondo has hit max experience turn Mondo into Mondrotron the Mighty Blaster with no armor and 3 nukes that kill at a distance, while I am cloaked, and phase shifted. (Not a good build to level, but fun at a party)
It would be kinda like if in CoH your archetype choice was frozen, but you could respec primary and secondary between levels 1 and 20. But after 20, you couldn't anymore, but you could still respec power and slot choices within those powersets. A free form system would not be that large-grained, but the concept would be similar.
Free form power systems don't automatically imply unlimited respecification. Combining the two together is in my opinion bad for almost any MMO. The only kinds of MMOs that could tolerate that sort of thing without serious problems are ones where the content itself is specifically designed to challenge such options existing. -
Quote:I'm aware of both concepts you're referring to. The first one isn't really a good one to base a game like CoH on. The other is the line of attack that has been the foundation of my standing response to players that claim reasonable balance is not possible in MMOs without homogenization.It's either very difficult or very expensive (and still kind of difficult).
But I think Arcana has overlooked -- or anyway isn't talking about -- at least two solutions other than the one she has proposed. One of them is encapsulated in any discussion of zero-sum economics. The other is encapsulated in the process of answering the question, "Can an anthill be described as sentient?"
However, that's not a "solution" that's a methodology. The extremely difficult part is building in the proper design control into a system that is directly intended to have emergent properties. You could make your Ph.D dissertation on the structural framework required to do that properly for a system wide enough to encompass the ability breadth of a game comparable to City of Heroes. -
Quote:The login screen could be a depiction of Times Square at New Years Eve and the forums would be discussing the number of crotches per square inch the artist rendered.Well, with any picture, the composition tends to draw attention to certain areas.
The login screen could have nothing but Lusca on it and the forums would figure out a way to make the discussion about crotches. If we removed everyone from the login screen we'd start seeing crotches in the clouds. -
Quote:That's what people are generally thinking when it comes to free form systems: the ability to take any amount of any kind of power they want, and modify those powers to have whatever effects they want, with the only real limits being the absolute limits of the ability system and the fixed resources granted to perform those customizations.Well, sure. The alternative is basically letting the players (or forcing the players to) code their own game, since you're encompassing literally anything with discrete elements.
In other words, rather like if City of Heroes had no primary or secondary powersets, it only had a large number of power pools, and every power effect including damage and buffing were encapsulated into invention procs and globals with a cost tied to leveling XP.
I think anyone who thinks that's impossible doesn't understand the nature of the solution, and anyone who thinks that's easy doesn't understand the nature of the problem. -
Quote:I made it a point to emphasize this during the beta for "another game" but the HERO system was incredibly broken. The authors even say so in the manuals: its one of the few PnP games that actually warns GMs which parts of the game are dangerous to even use without strict oversight by the GMs. Damage mitigation in particular.Yes, this. The old Hero system stuff was wonderful, and you could see the beautifulness in it. I could create anything in it. That kind of flexibility is a dream, but I think it's a dream that will be coming to our computers, or gaming consoles, or whatever we have in a few years.
HERO got away with being incredibly broken specifically because nobody played the books, they played the game as managed by a human being that referred to the books. HERO was powerful for its expressive range: you could build anything in it. Including session-breaking things that the GMs had to moderate. Which was their job. The job of the system was to provide structure to the game for the GM to use.
We'll be able to translate something like HERO into a computer MMO just as soon as we can translate human GMs into computer MMOs. And not one day earlier.
We don't judge PnP game systems by their edge cases. We judge them by their core ability to support entertaining gaming sessions. And HERO was great for that: when the GM and the players cooperated, the system could create almost anything they wanted within reasonable limits. And the solution to a player trying repeatedly to break the game system is to stop inviting them to play anymore, and there's immense social pressure on players not to do that. That resolution system isn't workable in the general case in a computer MMO, because that social pressure doesn't exist. -
Quote:That's an example of paying for diversity in one area by eliminating it in other areas. Everyone has the same specific set of abilities, and the only diversity element is in tweaking specific components of those abilities.it should be easily doable, the key is the modifier matrix. I've done it for a pen and paper game
imagine you can pick any powers in the game (except maybe pets).
then you select your effects levels: damage, defense (including resistance), control mag, buff/debuff percents
everyone could have a ranged attack, damage resistance, a self heal, and a buff to defense
but the blaster has good damage, their DR sucks, their self heal is weak, and their buff is weak
the defender has a good heal and buff, but their other numbers are bad
the game does this already. Just imagine that everyone takes tough and weave plus all of the DR and Def in their sets. Everyone then has DR and Def - just at different levels.
everyone does damage - just varying amounts
Fundamentally, that's a point-based attribute system mapped to an ability system. -
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Quote:I haven't had much time to play TSW although I've followed the game since early pre-beta, so I'm not an expert on TSW. But I can say - at least from what I've seen so far - there's nothing obviously innovative about its core power system, because its fundamentally a point-based skill tree system and not a freeform power system. And like all point-based skill tree systems its a bit mechanically rigid. TSW has two critical departure points that make it both interesting and inapplicable to City of Heroes, though. The first is that its a level-less system. The second is that its reward system isn't tightly coupled to combat proficiency because of its out of combat puzzle components.Yeah, there are no mechanically viable games with freeform power selection, *cough*SecretWorld*cough*.
Its really embryonic in terms of what they can do with their game. There are great places it could go if they stick around long enough and are ambitious enough. But its not going to be what most people consider to be a freeform powers system. Most people think about something like a fully fleshed out HERO system for computer MMOs. -
Quote:I also proposed this "bread and butter" theory long ago, and it was in fact the thing that spurred me to actually coin the terms "DPA" and "DPC" (as far as I know, I was the first one to use it here).Somewhat off topic, but I've personally always believed that low-level powers should have high DPS but relatively low DPA so that you're most often seen cycling them, whereas high-level powers should have lower DPS but higher DPA, meaning they're the things you WANT to use when they're available, but aren't feeling hard-pressed to fit into an attack chain. I'm aware that bigger attacks also tend to be slower, so giving them better DPA than the faster smaller attacks means some numbers-juggling, but there are a few sets which accomplish this quite well.
Only one of those terms caught on though. -
Quote:Reskinning is much more likely over the very long run. At one point I was discussing with BaB the possibility of making a sort of animation and vfx "library" that you could swap around between the powers. The logistics would be tricky, and it would be better if the FX files were autogenerated by a compatibility library generator rather than created by hand, but its not far-fetched to think its likely in the long term powers will be more likely to look like what people want them to look like.Brutal Arcanaville, but thanks for the honesty. I'll focus on trying to "reskin" existing stuff and alternate animations. If I could get Energy Blast images laid over Water Blast I'd be in hog heaven. Which, just grossed me out.
Do exactly what they want them to do is a lot less likely without a complete overhaul of the powers system. I figured out a way to do that for critters, but the advantage there is the critters don't deliberately try to cheat the system. Players will. That's two orders of magnitude more difficult to design around. Assuming you want to do it right. -
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Quote:Freeform power selection? Anything is possible, but one of two things will be true on that day. Either the devs will have created the best power system in existence and City of Heroes will take over the MMO space, or it means City of Heroes will cease being a game and become a SuperSIMS environment.I think OP's feedback is valid and may one day be incorporated in some form, at which point we'll be saying "how did we manage so long without this?!"
One is far more likely than the other. -
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Quote:I don't even think Illusion controllers are a good candidate there: I've been there and with just SOs or common IOs it takes too much endurance and too much perfect decoy timing. Its *possible* but you usually have to get very lucky.Try to take on AVs on any character with that setup (I'm assuming you meant "no insps" as you mention stocking up on inspirations later) and the list comes up painfully short, though.
You've got Illusion controllers... You've got some masterminds... You've got perhaps a handful more of debuffers and controllers if they do things like spamming immobilizes from out of LoS (but I honestly doubt anyone uses this as a main and sustainable AV soloing tactic, it's just so long and can go wrong so easily, without any mitigation).
There's probably some melee combos that can do it with common IOs though. -
Quote:It depends on what you mean by "extreme inferiority." AR doesn't have particularly good single target, but I believe its high AoE potential more than makes up for that. I think Staff Fighting's high AoE more than makes up for its lackluster ST, because its kill speed is still going to be faster than a high ST moderate AoE set against normal spawns.On the other hand, if memory does not fail me, basically all blast sets get nukes. This would mean that even insanely high AoE compared to other ATs would still not justify extreme ST inferiority among it's peers... do you agree with that?
Remember my notion of the standard spawn for mitigation? Its also useful in this context: real offense is composed of single target and AoE, and the interesting question is how long does a set with a mix of both take to bring down certain kinds of spawns. Say one boss, two Lts, and 6 minions. A high AoE low ST set would wipe out the minions fast, and the LTs would be right behind them. It would then take longer to take out the last boss standing. But while a low AoE high ST set could take down the boss faster, it would take down the LTs slower.
One simplistic but interesting question is to ask, if everything gets hit by everything, what happens? At level 50, it'll take about 860 damage to take down the Lts. That will leave the boss with about 1710 health. So in an ST/AoE mixed offense, a "balanced" attacker will have about twice the ST output as AoE per target, when you factor in the time to generate the AoE (which can't use used to generate ST damage). It *suggests* that there is such a thing as "too much AoE" but also such a thing as "not enough AoE" - we want our single target damage to kill the boss at about the same time AoE kills the Lts.
This is a very simplistic model, but it highlights the fact that bad X doesn't make up for great Y, but it also suggests that the balance between the two depends on the spawns you encounter. At +0x1, the situation is heavily slanted towards single target. At +0x8, its heavily slanted towards AoE. Also, ranking doesn't matter: what matters is the absolute relationship between absolute single target damage and absolute AoE damage. The third best AoE and third worst ST could end up being the fastest killer. -
Quote:Actually, that's not exactly true. While that's one way to look at the numbers, and it works for certain kinds of analysis, in your case when it comes to the question of how much damage mitigation SR has against Incarnate critters from a gameplay perspective, that's not correct.Normally, my "baggage" with other people wouldn't matter. In the seven years before it went Inheremt, I took Stamina all of once and never let people's criticisms get to me. It made asking for advise functionally impossible, but that's still not a problem. The problem THIS time is that the people who are implicitly telling me this are the developers themselves, and how they're telling me this is via Incarnate to-hit percentages. Let me explain:
A SR Scrapper just through his own powers can achieve right around 30% defence from everything positional. That's by far not bad, but it's also by far not amazing. Under normal circumstances, it's playable to a very comfortable degree. However, Incarnate critters have a base to-hit value of 14% higher, which effectively reduces my defence down to 16^, and that IS bad. And the thing is... There is no solution to this that SR can offer. There is, however, the solution of taking Weave that just about everyone I've spoken to has given me, and this seems to be literally the only way to salvage SR outside of strong Inventions builds, which even to this day are too expensive for me. I have built a few, but mostly through donated parts.
30% defense against 64% base tohit would be 46.9% damage mitigation. That's roughly comparable to 23.5% defense.
The difference in perspective is due to the fact that 64% tohit doesn't just make things more difficult for SR, it also makes things more difficult for everyone with or without defense. We normally gauge defensive mitigation relative to having no defense. We don't consider the fact that non-defense sets take (64/50=1.28) 28% more damage than normal against incarnate critters "a problem to solve" that's just a measure of the increase in difficulty for incarnate content. We then gauge defensive strength relative to that.
Why the devs decided to do this is because, in their opinion, defense is more valuable than resistance in the higher and end game relative to the lower game due to the increase in non-defensive debuffing. They are using increased tohit to counterbalance that with a shift in efficacy away from defense slightly and in effect towards resistance slightly. I'm not sure I fully agree with the magnitude of the shift or the solution, but it is true that high defense gains significant ground over other mitigation verses end game critters due to secondary effect avoidance.
They are also aware of the fact that in the end game, building towards higher amounts of defenses is far more common than in the lower game. While the devs have said in the past they do not directly design content to be balanced around invention builds, they do balance content against "the average player" and what that statistical average player does. If the average player has more defense in the end game due to pools or inventions, the devs will factor that into their design mentality when it comes to content. -
Quote:That would be a case of giving the attack a buff that stacks. Technically, Parry stacks because it has a defense buff, but I wouldn't call that a case of an attack stacking.Attacks sort of can. Maybe Boxing and/or Kick could get a Defiance/Follow Up type ability? Using a fighting attack amplifies the next attack you make or something?
Activation time is the critical offensive resource, but there's no real analog for damage mitigation. There's no real equivalent to "DPA" for damage mitigation. Once you've spent it all, the only way to improve is to get a better attack. Such superceding doesn't generally occur for defense. -
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Quote:Although it does go a long way to explaining why when Order 66 is executed, it seems basically no one in the galaxy really gives a damn.Per the storyline, you're actually not technically at war til near the end.
Some of the atrocities committed aren't strictly a matter of your-side-versus-mine, even so. Moreover, there are some betrayals you can't forgive. Or if you do forgive them (which is fine, from an interpersonal and/or spiritual perspective), you can't let them walk off scot free. You definitely can't put them right back in their old position of power so that they can betray you again.
The impression the story gives me is that the Jedi are a group of self-serving superhumans who traipse around the galaxy declaring who is and who isn't above the law, seemingly at whim. A couple of redemption scenes wouldn't have been out of place, but after the bajillionth dude-massacred-a-colony-but-the-dark-side-made-him-do-it cutscene, I started to feel a little ill. Both Jedi class stories are chock-full of those moments.
The worst part is when there's a non-Jedi NPC standing nearby saying, "WTF," when you spare the villain who killed his comrades, and the game implies that he's the evil one for feeling as he does, or that you'd be evil if you sided with him. Let's put blame where it most belongs, eh? -