Another_Fan

Must make it very hard to set the thermostat in your home. Do the two of you change it when you think the other isn't looking ?

Anyway if you think about it and look at the things the devs have been doing over the past 6-9 months, a good portion of it seems to be testing how grind sensitive the playerbase as a whole is. CoP, Apex, Tin Mage, first round Itrials.

I know from personal experience about IBM's. It wouldn't surprise me if honeywell had one as well, D.E.C. also had a near endless list of that sort of thing, going from making machines that had to buy proprietary format disks to making not quite standard memory.


You can measure the range of acceptable range of progression speeds for the game. Well in principle it can be measured I don't really have the motivation but NCSOFT has however many subscribers*#of sales/subscriberMOnth*Price per sale as their motivation. I would hardly call doing that, and setting prices to maximize profits sinister, its just good business.

But that is irrelevant for most people. They will be able to see it. For them it will be like getting the weather report by opening a window. We already have people upset about the grindy nature of the new trials.


Well if you can get their man hour numbers that's truly impressive, are you NCSOFT'S accountant or efficiency expert ? I can't imagine extrapolating the time it took to create a piece of software from the finished product. It is usually an incredibly variable process to define the project and make certain it actually completes in a timely fashion to begin with.

Once again though I don't think anyone is going to care about the amount of development effort that goes into the overall product. They are going to care that what they enjoy in the game gets addressed and gets addressed in a tolerable way.

IBM used to have a line printer in their product line, they had a very similar model that was twice as fast, and they had an upgrade from the slow model to the fast model. The upgrade cost was exactly double the price, of the lower cost model and it consisted of wrapping a cable twice around the spindles driving it. The customers weren't happy about being gotten the better of, but seeing as the lease costs were enormous for any kind of electronic computing equipment at the time, they bit the bullet. The added productivity from the rest of the system made up for the cost.

The new incarnate system is horribly grindy in many people's eyes, they could simply sell table upgrade tokens. Yes you would be taken advantage of but it would save you lots of real time, and let you use empyrean merits for other shinies.

You wouldn't be aware of any games that use a model where everything is possible in the game but you have to pay to lower the grind to a reasonable level ?

You won't be buying the IO directly, at least not at first. You may just be buying a temp power that makes your drops much much better.

Why do you think they won't say anything about how the incarnate trial participation system works ?

You have a mix of solo and teamed that you are using, I don't know what your mix is but for the sake of argument, lets say your teaming was 20 % more effective because of force multiplication but your soloing was 50% slower, much of the deficit from poor soloing would be erased from improved speeds teaming and the teaming bonus.

Well pvp is an entirely different game, and right now the really big FotM seem to be PSI/EM, shark throwing stalkers, and various corruptors.


There aree all kinds of ways to make the comparison. You can take theoretical best combos and run them through benchmarks to see how well they do. On things like running tip missions, leveling 1-50, various farming scenarios I am confident solo performance of a tanker or a blaster will exceed the performance of a solo defender.

Tell me if I am understanding this correctly, empirically you have no trouble soloing blasters, but a random sample of people that selected the at likely because the words blast and cannon appealed and it had a machine gun were having trouble making it work is a valid indictment of the at ?

Just going back to the prior post, you have blasters and tankers as "virtually impossible" to be outdoing defenders. I am pretty sure I can solo either to 50 faster than a defender. That is coming from someone who would never roll another blaster because of the problems inherent in the AT that castle really never addressed.

Anyway going back to what I said earlier, I believe what was datamined as poor performance was debtload


1st thank you, ill bookmark and archive the above post as it will save me considerable typing in discussions on the blaster forums. Its not valid discourse but what the hay you really aren't going to get socratic debates on a videogame forum.

Its funny as I am about the last person to argue that blasters don't need a buff, but in this very narrow context I find myself arguing their greater capability over defenders. But here I am. On anything but very hard targets the blaster is going to do better. I really have to ask just what is meant by performance here ? Is it solo net xp/time ? Is it average time to complete a mission ? Is it time to kill for singularly hard targets ? Is it running with no temps no insps ? To the best of my recollection that underperformance was based on the debt blasters were carrying.

Say what you mean !!! and Make your own statements don't hide behind double blinds of twice undefined performance metrics.

Where would you rank defenders overall on soloing speed as in how quickly can the accomplish tasks in the game to complete missions or gain rewards in the game or just level from 1-50. .

As to arcanaville and the devs statement that is completely unglued. From what I understood at the time, the devs were using debt load as a measure of poor performance. Anyone who plays a blaster giggles at debt by level 20 or they roll something else.

Have I mentioned lately how enjoyable your posts are ? They are just incredible word games where the implications have to be peeled away from the statements and then the statements need to be compared to others for consistency.

Anyway onto this, am I reading your right ? "you are saying blasters or tanks are the worst soloing AT" ? Or are you just trying to leave that hanging out there as something deniable at a later date ?

I ask because the last time we had an exchange on this and you said "Blasters have no trouble soloing" ?*

So in Arcana speak the worst is no trouble ?

In the above case that shift of word usage, is but the most minor. I really have to wonder just what you mean by best and worst soloing here ? I ask because just today I saw this

In reference to the alpha slot system and earlier we had this

Leaving out just what is being used as the definitions here. Just a statistical question here I am sure you can clarify this in a heartbeat, just why isn't a valid comparison of performance to compare an AT that is number 1 in popularity in the level range from 1-49 and 3rd at level 50 vs one that isnt in the top 5 from 1-49.

Maybe we could race ? I'd be glad to see how fast I could solo a tank from 1-50 vs how fast you could solo a defender ?**



*I'd search but its been many purges ago.

** Yes it doesn't prove anything about AT performance but its better than memphis bill's analysis using mutually exclusive defender powers and the best performing secondary characteristics all at the same time to characterize the AT

Peacebringers easily solo better than most defender combinations. I am sure you could make a peace bringer that does worse but you would have to work at it. Human only or human-nova only maybe, likely have to work at it.


Upset ? Not at all. They are what they are. With the way things are going they are getting marginalized. I have seen posts talking about how Keyes is going to bring a renaissance for emps and regens, and its hilarious, not in a world were everyone can have rebirth.

And how would you rank their soloing speed ?

You just made a very long post managing to make arguments without ever addressing the actual point.

Lets put it like this, is there any at that solos worse than they do ?

From your posts it looks like reading what was said is a super power for you.

LOL, must be nice to have psychic powers in real life.

Or do you just bend reality so what other people say means what you would like it to ?

Edit: Im sorry there may be a comprehension problem at work. You see getting the incarnate abilities without doing the trials is entirely possible its just not a very desirable thing. I have toons that could have had tier 4 day 1 without doing a single trial its an option I didn't choose. You might not have been able to accomplish this, thus you would think it would be impossible.

Amazing

The problem is using them to cover for a triple gimp, low damage, lack of status protection, and low hitpoints/survivability. Sure you can solo, you can also get all the incarnate abilities without running trials.

HAHA

What a great way to use the term "FREE LUNCH", Its a free lunch you pay for on a subscription plan or by time card, had to buy an expansion for, and then had to accomplish tasks and jump through hoops to actually get. Is there any way it could be less of a "FREE LUNCH" ?


That would be the same way the leveling up model isn't sustainable past 50, 80, 335 (pick a number).

At least I don't use it for deceit.

Anyway Back to the mandate for different greater powers requiring different currencies and different systems to obtain that is just pure stupidity. The new abilities could still have used shards and simply be made costlier.

You see how reason when you try to consider other possibilities instead of assuming the conclusion then twisting yourself into a pretzel to make it right ?

Yes because an extreme break with existing content was mandated. Its amazing what reason can do when you work from a faulty premise.

Very well said. Really when I read that interview, I couldn't help but think that positron was a gm who had begun to resent the players finding ways to enjoy the game in ways he hadn't anticipated. The solution lock it down so they can't.

Different Good. Telling people to do something different just because you like difference for its own sake isn't helpful or particularly kind. Its especially bad if you don't mention that is what is motivating you.

People like their tankers to be survivable, people even like their blasters to do damage. I suppose you could make a blaster that is focused on buffing and healing. Other people would point out there are better ways to do that.

Just what is your idea of good ? The people that dislike devices laid out their reasoning. So far all you have done is make excuses for it.

Well yes and no.

Blasters aren't the best possible choice of damage dealer to begin with. All their secondaries are either substandard, redundant or both. Even so, Energy manipulation, Ice, Fire, Electricity aren't all that far apart from each other.


If you could make a graph of merit* you would get something like this


*Not to scale

Well that and the team/league performance contribution which may override the 10 thread threshold as well

Yes you do, whats more it has crappy heals for combat purposes as well.

Have you seen the numbers on defender rain of arrows ? It takes 5 seconds to cast ?

By bad design. In a game with a declining population its a problem and and it doesn't screw with things as much as your stating more on that below.


Even 2000% only gets you up to around 90 hp/sec which puts you considerably behind the amounts a regen scrapper can achieve.

Yes I am. I really don't feel the make the players sit on their hands to accomplish a task mechanic is valid. Its especially invalid when this isn't something like Eye of the magus where having 2 people with it makes available far more often.

Recover aura brings you up to 8.51 end/sec the cap is 10.5


What you get is a regen scrapper that doesn't have good hit points and isnt doing very good damage when solo.