Arcanaville

When normal human beings talk about "all available options" they are usually referring to the real ones, not the unreal ones.

I've seen it. Sometimes the first escape causes a league to realize where the weak link is and they rebalance forces well enough that no one else gets past.

If it was activated and scaled by the difficulty scaler, that might be more palatable. But the catch is that the rewards for its presence would have to be commensurate with the fact that the spawns would potentially take longer to kill (or almost no one would use it), and balancing that so that it isn't exploitable would add significant complexity to the system.

There would have been a player revolt, but I've always wanted the NPCs to play much smarter. And I'm pretty certain that could have been done within the current CPU budget of the critter brains, given what I know about how the AI worked generally.

Computer driven cars don't assume or require that all other cars are computer driven cars. They are testing these now, on real roads, with real traffic, under real world conditions.

The game client can be used to play back any demorecords you've made in the past without the need for the servers to be online.

That opens two other potential possibilities. First: players could exchange demorecords of interesting things and using the new floating camera feature revisit or show off certain things, such as bases: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=4402235

Second: one day we might be able to fabricate models of our characters or other game elements: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=296033

Some players are getting pretty good at leveraging this particular capability for other purposes: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=297688

Actually, even more ironically if I was informed correctly he was responsible for most of the numbers (and some of the oddities therein) for the CoV Prima update.

Singularity attacks are untyped, or at least they were as of when I last checked in I23. They basically ignore defense. Its unclear even now if this is working as intended.

Not only is there no heal aggro, to the best of my knowledge there's no way to add it without extensive tech. It can't even happen by accident.

Players observations and memories have been proven faulty a high percentage of the time in the past when it comes to mechanics like this.

Its been said.

Why?

I was ok with people quitting because of the introduction of the invention system, I was ok with people quitting because dominators were buffed, I was ok with people quitting when the XP curve was rebalanced. Every good thing caused some players to quit. There is no such thing as a change everyone likes. If you're going to agonize over every change, lets unwind to launch when there were content gaps. Some people liked the gaps. Are you *sure* it was the right thing to add more content? Can you prove it?

People quit when the level cap was increased to 50. People quit when it wasn't increased to 60.

I'm certain the invention system was a good addition to the game. I'm certain adding content was the right choice. I'm certain XP rebalancing was the right choice. I'm equally certain correctly balancing Blasters was the right choice. Especially because rebalancing Blasters (the fact of it, separate from the method of doing it) was far less controversial than any of those other changes. I would and will bet real money we lost more players due to the introduction of the invention system than we would have ever lost to Blaster buffing if the game survived another hundred years.

Its like if KITT tried to run over Oscar the Grouch while Ben Stein took roll call.

Shove everything off your desk onto the floor. Its like that.

That's an unanswerable question.

I found it very helpful. I was afraid my self-worth was being virtualized, but now I sit in front of a mirror and cut myself to see myself bleed. I'm also hiring someone to build a basement under my house so I can use it to enter the real world.

Also: Hi.

I believe the debt cap used to be about half a level. It was never unlimited. But it could seem that way because a) relative to the skill level of the players the game was much harder back then, so death was more common (and with it more debt) and b) XP was much lower back then, so the ability to burn off debt was much lower back then and c) there wasn't as much content, so if your leveling was slowed by debt you could find yourself out of missions and having to street sweep. And street sweeping was one of those activities that some players and teams could do effectively, and others couldn't. Our zones are not really always very well configured for street sweeping, i.e. the level 15 Lt with the level 11 minions in Steel Canyon.

I think I have screenshots where the mission complete bonus back around release was about as much XP as three or four minion kills. XP was not exactly plentiful at release.

The concrete benefit of addressing blaster issues is that the game attracted a particular subset of MMO players and those players were overwhelmingly represented by the players that were comfortable with a particular level of performance as delivered by every archetype but blasters. Fixing blasters would make them just as mechanically attractive from a performance perspective as any other archetype, which is almost certainly a better situation than for blasters to be the lone massive detrimental outlier.

If this game presented itself as a game where every archetype had completely different performance, and that performance encompassed a wide range, and archetype choice was a proxy for performance choice, and the intent was variety, then there would be no specific problem with blasters being on the bottom and controllers or brutes, say, being on the top and everyone else in between. The design intent would be satisfied by the game implementation: provide a wide variety of performance levels and skill set challenges, with each archetype being different in those regards.

But that's not the case. The game is designed around the intent that archetype and powerset choice affects gameplay options but not overall performance. And everything performs roughly the same except blasters. That makes blasters the unjustified outlier and falls outside the intent of the game. The default position is to fix it to bring it into line with the rest of the archetypes.

This is not just a question of quantitative balance. There were severe restrictions on blasters that no other archetype faced for which the quantitative performance numbers were one side effect. The other was that those design limits constrained blasters to a very narrow set of gameplay options relative to all other archetypes, something the current developers recognized. Arbiter Hawk, in particular, wasn't so much concerned with the numerical performance problem except as a symptom of a larger problem: when every archetype has been adjusted or revisited, there was a certain latitude the developers had in adding new or interesting capabilities to those archetypes. Dominators, for example, were actually reconfigured as primary damage dealers in their last rebalancing, with damage dealer-class damage modifiers, while retaining their massive control and pets.

I think it became obvious to many at that point that every archetype had significant latitude to both increase and widen their capabilities *except* blasters. Blasters were defined in terms of what they could not have. They could not have significant personal defenses. They could not have significant control. They could not have significant ally buff or widespread enemy debuff. They were focused on damage, but they were also limited in the degree to which that damage could be increased, and non-damage dealers were buffed to approach them very closely.

That made it obvious that it should have come as no surprise that blasters were the unique lone exception in performance, because they had always been the unique lone exception when it came to design latitude, and that limitation caused them to far further behind other archetypes over time.

The changes to blasters were not just a matter of increasing their reward earning. Giving them a permanent reward boost wouldn't solve the root problem, which was that even the devs realized that they had been too confined in what they allowed blasters to be over the evolution of the game. The I24 changes were an attempt to begin to reverse that, by exploring options for things blasters had always been barred from having by default.

Some people think the Sustain changes were going to make a huge difference. To them I say that was the intent: to grant blasters a large archetypal-based survivability boost that they had always been denied. Some people think the Sustain changes would have been immaterial. To them I say that as immaterial as they were, they were still denied to blasters for years. If they think blasters needed more, its important to note they would have never even gotten the I24 sustain changes until recently because that was explicitly denied to blasters.

The design mindset of blasters is: blasters die. That's what their design ultimately dictates. Even if you think Blasters are supposed to be some skill test section of the game, the players that got them to work were the exception. The players who died constantly and abandoned them were actually seeing blasters working as intended. Because although this wasn't directly intended, it was indirectly desired for blasters to be under higher risk. And "higher risk" is a meaningless statement if that risk doesn't occasionally trigger bad results.

Dying and giving up was the inevitable consequence of blaster implementation. That fact simply wasn't confronted head on until the I24 changes, when the devs realized there was no way around that without allowing blasters to be buffed in ways previously disallowed.


What was the hypothetical benefit? There was no hypothetical benefit. The long term benefit of treating blasters like they were not second class citizens of the game is making a better game. Its allowing the players who enjoy every other archetype from not having to accept a performance penalty for playing blasters. Its allowing the developers to have more options when it came to the future development of blasters. Its providing for more options when it came to future powersets down the road, and it allows for more options when it comes to designing content that doesn't have to treat blasters as the constant special case when it came to tuning standard difficulty.

Those were the certain benefits of addressing blaster issues. And it might have taken more than I24 to realize that, but most players don't appreciate that I24 was the major hurdle. With the I24 changes, all of the reasons for not doing things that could help blasters basically vanished. No change to blasters would ever be as difficult to justify and implement ever again, because after I24 Blasters would no longer be the exception to every rule.

If a handful of players decided to quit because blasters got too easy to play, that would be unfortunate, but I would be ok with that.

How many prospective players did we lose by making the game be about superheroes? How many by not making it Linux-native? How many by requiring keyboards? How many by not making the game a text-adventure?

Its easy to reference hypothetical losses outside the context of the fact that all design decisions cost players.

The reason all video games obey design rules is that only people who obey design rules end up being designers.

If you want to make a game where every archetype except one is balanced in a particular way, change the design rules to say that and convince everyone else that a set of design rules that says that isn't completely ludicrous, or write your own game that doesn't require anyone else in the design loop.

"I started playing in 2006 and I played some alts and it was fun but in a year I'll probably forget most of it. Also, something something about the Magna Carta."

Problem solved.

I never thought I would see the day when California legalized Nevada.