Arcanaville

We had more damage, and when I saw very few people die after the call to spawn Lore, I knew we had it. What stopped us in the past was either not having enough damage period, or in a couple cases we probably had the damage but the league did not have enough practice dodging lightning and the lore pets all died too quickly. This time most of the Lore pets were hammering Tyrant throughout the final phase so his health was not bouncing back up as high. Once we could sustain keeping him in the low 20s, it was just a matter of timing.

Demorecords don't visually show interface elements, but maybe I can extract Tyrant health from the data because I had him targeted the entire time. Might be fun to superimpose an estimate of his health on the video, if I can figure out how to do that.

Actually, it was not and that does not. Account verification was mentioned as part of the process by which the *servers* validate that an authorized client is accessing them. However, the defendant was not accused of bypassing controls to WoW's servers. Blizzard's argument was that as part of the overall process access to copyright work in the client is protected by technological means to authenticate the validity of the client which the rogue servers essentially bypassed. A priori proof that the account authentication mechanism does not protect the protected works in the client is the obvious fact that any authentication information will allow the client to work if connected to a different server.

My assessment of the technological access and authentication controls within City of Heroes is that there is no such technology to assess.

Upon reviewing the current EULA for City of Heroes, the issue may be moot:

The EULA requires me to either assert I have no rights, or that to the extent that I have such rights to license those rights to them. It does not specifically ask me to transfer those rights, and that makes the EULA not an "instrument of conveyance." It does not explicitly state that by agreeing to the EULA I am consenting to have my rights transferred. So even if accepting the EULA counts as a "signature" for the purposes of Title 17, there's no transfer being requested.

I'm not sure what that has to do with my post, which is discussing the intellectual property rights of authors in the United States and their relationship to contract law.

The enforceability of clickwrap agreements is not at issue. Contracts cannot override Copyright law under any circumstances whatsoever in the US. The precedent in question would not be applicable to a copyright case in the US, as Korean law is different than US law and does not have jurisdiction over my authorship rights within the US.

Let me put it this way. US Copyright law forbids me from transferring my copyright rights through an EULA even if I want it to. I'm not even allowed to voluntarily do so. The law was designed to make it impossible for me to do this, even if I have a gun to my head, because the law concluded many authors in the past had that figurative gun to their heads by virtue of their extremely untenable negotiating position.

In other words, the law doesn't just say NCSoft can't take my rights this way, it says the stronger thing that I can't even given them away this away even if I want to, and the law doesn't recognize any such attempt by me to do so. I can only transfer rights through the method proscribed by Copyright law, and no contract (except for the work-for-hire exception noted in the law) can alter that requirement under federal law.

Also, the article itself suggests that Korean law has similar protections afforded to creators:

(emphasis mine)

I'm not as knowledgeable about Korean law, so I cannot confirm those, but I mention them specifically to suggest that the earlier passage mentioned ("...A recent judgment by the Seoul District Court...") in context appears to refer to the question of the tangibility of game constructs, and not the intellectual property related to them.

You can grant irrevocable licenses. What you cannot ordinarily do is grant irrevocable ownership rights. The right NCSoft grants to itself in the EULA is a non-exclusive license. This means to the degree I own anything, I'm free to use it elsewhere (I'm not free to use IP that NCSoft owns outside the context of the game). Because this license is non-exclusive, its not an ownership right as defined by Title 17.

Contract law is always superceded by statutory law. Copyright law isn't just silent on the matter, it explicitly states that copyright cannot be transferred except in one way only: by a written signed document that explicitly names the work being transferred. Saying "we own everything you make" would be an attempt to make playing a game into a work for hire relationship as far as US law is concerned, which is blatantly illegal.

Moreover, judges tend to note legislative history in interpreting the law. This clause was put into Copyright law explicitly for the purpose of preventing authors from being coerced into signing their rights away in the manner the EULA requests.

In other words, even if the EULA was theoretically enforceable in the matter of authorship rights, it would *still* be overridden by Copyright law which explicitly covers this situation.

The for-profit element had nothing to do with the actual legal grounds for judgment. The statement implies that the judgment was primarily based on 17.12, 1201: "Circumvention of copyright protection systems." The WoW private server actively bypassed copy protection systems built into WoW to prevent WoW clients from running on unauthorized servers.

City of Heroes has no such protections to break.

1. AoE attacks would not be impossible to avoid, they would just be impossible to avoid with mechanical evasion. You could, as I mentioned, simply leave the area of effect.

2. It would be unfair if AoE attacks were unavoidable by targets but not by the attacker. So they would not be.

3. In a game structured like this, mechanical defense and resistance would not work in precisely the same way they do in City of Heroes, since we're aiming for a somewhat more conceptually congruent system to reality. I would consider "avoidance" and "damage reduction" which map to defense and resistance in CoH to be building blocks of more complex effects in a game like this. Powers would convey combinations of those effects.

For example, you could have powers that provide shields that reduce the damage you take. But instead of being a purely resistance power, the power could both resist incoming damage and completely avoid damage below a certain threshold, ala deflection. In fact Champions Online's version of Invulnerability does something comparable to this.

An interesting option for a super reflexes power is a way to simulate fast reflexes by explicitly delaying effects from taking effect for a brief period of time in certain circumstances. For example, when hit by an AoE the actual damage and effects might land a fraction of a second after they ordinarily would when someone has super reflexes, giving the player more time to move out of the area of effect than someone without super reflexes.

There's also the separate question of combination attacks. If you fire a gas grenade at someone that explodes into a poison gas cloud, before you ask the question of what the gas cloud does, you first have to ask the question what the grenade does. Its a directed attack and it might not hit the target. If it doesn't, it may not land anywhere near the target.

Something like an explosion would be an AoE attack. It would not be conventionally evadeable except by escaping the area of effect completely.

So no. Evasion would be able to dodge directed attacks and (to a lesser degree) enveloping attacks. Not AoE attacks. A bullet (directed) can be dodged. A sweeping sword (enveloping) can be dodged, albeit it can be harder. An explosion (area) cannot be dodged.

To evade an AoE, you have to not be in the area, or be in the area but break line of sight, if the attack requires line of sight. An explosion requires line of sight (to a first order approximation). A poison gas cloud does not.

Actually, I think we would all agree with Tunnel Rat trying to outdo you would require hours explicitly dedicated to crazy.

Penetrating Enveloping attack with target cap N, dealing Physical damage.

"Enveloping" might not be the best evocative description of the type, but this sort of attack affects an area but in a dodgeable way, therefore its Enveloping. In CoH, multiple attack types are handled in a certain way, but the way I wouldn't necessarily handle them the same way (as high match). "Penetrating, Enveloping" would be more what you would expect: Enveloping for the purpose of dodging, Penetrating for the purpose of checking against deflection, combined in a more synergistic fashion than override.

likeyoudontuseupallthespaceswithnoregardfortheneedsofothersseriously

These forums are like every internet forum: some letters, some numbers, and the occasional punctuation mark.

Yes, yes, and yes. The way I think about attacks is to think about how you'd defend against them, not how you would create them. To (over)simplify a bit, consider an arrow that explodes when it reaches the target. It is not an arrow, its a bomb. That happens to fly. Being an arrow is the visual representation of the attack. But the mechanical one is of an explosion.

A "magic user" is describing the attacker. But if he waves his arms around and ends up hitting the target with elemental damage, that attack is elemental. If it hits the target for magical damage, its magical. I liken this to the Green Lantern loophole. In some of his past incarnations, he couldn't affect yellow, so yellow arrows would pass through his green force fields for example. But he could use his green lantern powers to scoop up a wall and hold it up in front of him: yellow arrows would just bounce off that. Conversely, he couldn't attack through yellow shields. But if he used his power to lift a heavy rock over a yellow shield, the rock would squish the guy.

The origination of the attack might be magic, but what I care about mechanically is what the attack finally ends up being. Because the only reason for typing attacks and damage is to allow for different things happening to the target. So in the above example, the damage type isn't "green" its "rock."

Conceptually, the way I think about this is that attack type describes how the attack hits the target. Damage type describes what the attack does to the target when it hits. Everything else should be handled with customizable visual effects.


As I mentioned further upthread, I don't think its a good idea to dictate "origin" as character origin. I think that's something you should just leave up to the player. I think of the concept of origin in terms of source of power. Does your attack's effects obey the laws of physics? Does your attack's effects obey the laws of magic? That affects *how* those effects ultimately affect the target, because the target can have equally typed protections.

At the moment, City of Heroes has a Toxic_Attack type. However, no defense power offers defense against toxic_attack at the moment.

The four types were based on conceptual notions of attack avoidance. "Directed" attacks are the standard notion of the single target attack that attempts to strike a specific target or location. This would be comparable to the Melee_attack and Ranged_attack types in City of Heroes. Area of Effect would be comparable to the AoE_Attack type in CoH. "Enveloping" would be a new conceptual type that was a variation on AoE. As you mention, its conceptually difficult to conceive of a way to "avoid" a radial bomb blast - an attack that literally strikes or covers an entire area. But there are other kinds of attacks that affect an area. For example, a snare that mechanically functions similar to a lasso in some respects affects an area, but in other respects does not. These are attacks that involve areas but don't actually directly affect everything in the area. They are more aptly described as attacks that attempt to encircle targets within an area in an attempt to ultimately hit them. Attacks that come from multiple directions while primarily affecting a single target, as opposed to Directed attacks that mostly come from one direction and AoEs which affect everything in their area.

These three come from my analysis of how you go about attempting to evade an attack. An attack that comes from one direction - Directed attacks - can be dodged or blocked. For me, the melee/ranged distinction isn't that important, and certainly the dichotomy isn't: if range has an effect on how easy or hard it is for the attacker to hit the target and the defender to evade the attack, its a continuous effect not a binary one.

But you can't just dodge or block effects that encompass an entire area. You don't dodge an explosion, short of leaving the zip code entirely. The distinction between Directed and Area attacks is huge conceptually, and the mechanical typing acknowledges that.

But some effects don't fall into those two - again, the simplest example is that of a lasso. It sort of affects an area, but unlike explosions it can be evaded because of its mechanics. Also, I can conceive of magical attacks that "seek out" a single target within an area. And stretching the concept to its limits (as all simplifications ultimately are) consider someone firing a machine gun and trying to zero in on and hit an evading target. In one sense the "attack" is affecting an area, but in another sense its actively trying to zero in on one target in that area. It can be evaded, but not in exactly the same way as a single Directed attack. You could say this is the conceptual boundary between Directed and Enveloping: the case where lots of little directed attacks affect an area. A game designer would have to make a call: is a Rain of Arrows dense enough to be considered an Area of Effect attack, or is it more of an Enveloping attack that can be evaded in a similar manner.

Another way of putting it, albeit in a simplified way that loses some of the nuance, is that Directed/Enveloping/Area represent a way to represent the continuum of attacks that go from (attack from one direction)/(attacks from many directions)/(attacks from all directions at once).

Penetrating attacks are my way of dealing with the Smash/Lethal distinction in a different way.

That was the intent, which is also why Standard is in parentheses. The other types are specializations of the base type. Specializations would have advantages and disadvantages relative to the base type.


I would look at it the other way. By eliminating any mention of physical aspects from the damage types, its possible to state that some fire-based attacks are elemental in nature, and some are energy in nature. "Fire" becomes more of a visual skin than a mechanical cue.

You have to, or everything becomes magical or psionic. There's no such thing as the empty set flag.


Attack types

• Directed
• Penetrating
• Area of Effect
• Enveloping

Damage types

• Physical
  • (Standard)
  • Energy
  • Elemental
• Magical
  • (Standard)
  • Metamorphic
  • Chaos
• Psionic
  • (Standard)
  • Telepathic
  • Astral

In City of Heroes, Fire_Attack is not a form of energy. Fire_Attacks are attacks that can all be defended against by some abstract form of defense that happens to work on all attacks that are in some way related to Fire.

Which is a bunch of gibberish.

There's a very obvious conceptual distinction between positional and non-positional defense/attack types. Positional defense is associated with Evasion. You evade the attack in some manner so that it does not hit you. Non-positional defenses are associated with Deflection and Absorption. In some manner, the attack actually hits you but doesn't affect you for some reason. That evasion/deflection distinction has a very strong conceptual grounding.

But what's the difference between melee_attack and ranged_attack? In City of Heroes, this gets conceptually hazy very fast. Colloquially, melee attacks are attacks that probably can be blocked. They are evaded in the sense they don't land, but not strictly speaking by getting out of the way alone but by also effecting some short-ranged countering move. Parrying, for example. Ranged attacks are more generally evasive. AoE defense is god only knows what.

And among the non-positional attack/defense types it gets even hazier. You can make conceptual cases for smashing vs lethal defense as armor that is strong against crushing blows and vs penetrating attacks: brittle vs ductile armor perhaps. But Fire and Cold, Fire and Energy? Sure you can make up a string of plausible gibberish, but there's really no conceptual logic behind fire defense and fire attacks.

The attack and defense types are mostly spreadsheet fodder. They don't have strong conceptual reasons for existing, except to have lots of types.

Why have types at all? In my opinion, it should be to distinguish things you actually want to distinguish in the game, and its hard to come up with a reason why you really want to distinguish "fire" and "energy" attacks (note: I'm still talking about attack types, not damage types).

I would want to distinguish between magical effects and non-magical effects, because the rules surrounding them are generally totally different in fictional settings in and around the comic book genre. By allocating types to them, I can make that distinction in the game systems.

That's really the only reason to make such typing, and there are no other really sound reasons to do so. In other words, you type things when you need to, not when it seems you should.


Which begs the question when would you have general vs specific resistances, and what the advantages and disadvantages would be, and would any player actually go along with that. Its easy to fall into the trap of having distinctions without differences. Smashing and Lethal damage types are one step removed from being redundant. Ironically, they are one of the easiest distinctions to conceptualize, but in-game they are almost always encountered together equally. So much so that even acknowledging the exceptions, we often referred to those two types as a single pseudo-type: smash-lethal damage.

Which means as obvious as the conceptual distinction appears to be, having those two types was probably 99% a waste of time. You have to start from what you intend to use to what you decide you need. You don't make smashing and lethal damage types just because it sounds good or because it seems obvious. You do it because you intend to *leverage* the difference between the two. This game does not.

We don't really leverage the difference between Fire_Attack and Energy_Attack. Its just spreadsheet sweetener. Conversely, I think the fact we can't distinguish between magical and non-magical effects is a serious deficit, one that almost demands typing considerations.

So when I say I would make magic, science/natural, and mind/psi into some form of fundamental types in an MMO, I'm not saying they *should* be types. I'm saying something a bit different. I'm saying I would make a game that *required* those types. The game I'm thinking about would be impossible to make without that typing. Any game without that typing would be fundamentally unlike the game I'm thinking about in an irreconcilable way.

"Special doesn't quite cover it."

You're willing to disregard responses because this is just the internet, but you're also willing to post on the internet hoping people will actually read it.

Naked narcissism at its finest.


It was an unreal game.

I disagree for the reason you mention:
Here's a question. Conceptually speaking, what's the difference between an Energy_Attack and a Fire_Attack? And I'm using the underlines to emphasize the nature of the question.

One area where I believe the original devs were clearly trapped by convention was in setting the story in a universe where superpowered beings were relatively common and generally accepted. In trying to explain why so many super powered people were running around, they almost made superheroes pedestrian. Its almost impossible to do anything impressive in a world that gives actual permits to people to be flying fusion reactors.

Its ironic that CoH is such a novel MMO experience in many ways, and yet tries to make the notion of a city full of superheroes appear normal. Whatever else I think about that game, DCUO did have a more novel way of explaining the sudden burst of superbeings in a way that didn't trivialize their existence. Stealing a page from that story, it would have been interesting if on Primal Earth the first real burst of superheroes were born just in time to fight in the Rikti War, while on Praetorian Earth the first big burst of superheroes was born in time to fight in WW2, and that was the biggest difference between the two worlds. Praetoria, in other words, would be a cautionary world for Primal Earth where eventually superpowers destroys the planet.

In this completely different alternate multiverse timeline, this gives Prometheus an interesting backstory option. Maybe *he* is the one that brings superpowers to Praetorian Earth, and sees what happens, and now he's trying again on Primal Earth, but wants to control the process more and slow things down.