Another_Fan

This was already known. Mercury had its own model in the Ptolemaic system just to deal with its orbit. When criticizing Tycho, you have to remember what his goals were. He wanted to preserve the earth at the center of the universe while reducing errors between observation and prediction. His model was a great success by that standard, was widely adopted and made better predictions than the Copernican model.

Now if you go back to the Original analogy Tycho's model provided better predictions of the observed position of the planets in earths night sky than either Kepler's platonic solid theory, or Copernicus's theory, but if you tried to get there using Tycho's system you would be really out of luck, but with either of the Heliocentric systems you would do much better.

That is the problem with using snapshot statistics of how players are playing anything in the game when you want to make a change. You stop just trying to fit curves to your data and comparing how things are, you are voyaging someplace new. When you make the change player behavior also changes, how little or how much is anyone's guess but you are always betting it is too little to invalidate your model.

My favorite RL example was Bill Clinton's luxury tax. The idea being if you put a large tax on luxury goods, rich people would just pay it because they wanted the goods and could afford it. Well the people it was supposed to tax were perfectly willing to take a little time to find ways to avoid the tax, and all it wound up doing was nearly killing several industries in this country.

The problems of using an analogy in an argument on the internet.

The error between the predictions of Ptolemaic system as calculated in the Almagest, and Mars's actual position peak at roughly 30 arc minutes. Kepler indeed needed to be driven crazy by the problem but that was mostly just being directed at it by someone who wanted him spinning his wheels. He needed Tycho's data to get other people to agree and to show the behavior was "Universal".

You have to remember even after he published his full work, which IIRC was post his conversion to Catholicism, Tycho's Geo Helio model was still picking up steam. Just on the basis that it kept the earth in the center of things even if it had planets orbiting the sun, and corrected the predictive problems that were in the Copernican model, and the Ptolemaic model. It's a really a great example of how large volumes of data can be completely deceiving.

The mezing nukes are mag 3 so everything that survives the nuke, shrugs it off and kills you.

More or less if you hit them with the nuke you don't need the mez and if you don't well it doesn't matter.

To this day blasters argue that "Their blaster is just fine and if yours isn't lrn2ply noob". It was no different before. At a guess, these people just don't like the implication that they picked the wrong AT.

BTW examining the performance data only showed that the people playing blasters weren't doing well with them*. Not surprising when so much of the community had so little idea of what good and bad was they couldn't tell they were doing poorly and needed to get bellicose when people said the AT had problems.

*A subtle but important difference.

Spring attack also has a 2/3 chance of knock down, thats right KNOCK DOWN not Knock Back. This means it has better mitigation than almost all the crashing nukes and absolutely all the non crashing nukes.

Interesting by that logic they wouldn't have left most often created, most often abandoned AT twisting in the wind for 8 years. Its a much simpler assumption that its easier to balance and manage for individuals than it is for teams.

Edit: I forget this was the company that claimed they couldn't assign any relation to their actions and people leaving the game.

You don't say, the AT with the worst status effect protection in the game suffers the most from status effects ?

Your wish granted

It really doesn't take much to understand that the "AT" needs an overall small buff but many of the sets especially the secondary sets are bonkers awful and need some real work.

The biggest problem blasters have is that other ATs you have to work to find poor combinations with blasters you have to work to find good combinations.

Didn't you say you wanted everyone that used Hami-Os with shield defense should be banned ?

You have to pardon me if I can't take you seriously when you talk about abuse exploits.

Edited: Changed charge to defense.

No, non, nyet, rien, jamais, keyu, non, yimba, nese, koa, etc etc etc.
That is just over the top hyperbole. It is also damn ignorant. Its so bad it looks like you are trying to needle THB by worrying his artwork will be destroyed by an ignorant Dev that buys into your thoughtless argument.

There are no secondaries for blasters that rate being called good. The best are tolerable the worst are exceptionally poor.

Most of the sets can only achieve tolerable with a properly paired primary. Mental because it has a cone aoe and a pbaoe and an immob can be tolerable with just about any primary likely its sole advantage.

Sets like /elec /ice /dev really need careful work on what they are paired with to achieve tolerable. The relatively short range immob in ice coupled with a melee range mag 3 hold really demand coupling with another hold from someplace. /Dev needs to be paired with a primary that has a stun to maximize taser.

/mental is more problematic in some ways. First its only reliable hard control power is a fear something that no other blaster set has so the only way to stack it quickly is by taking the relatively undesirable presence pool. Second Drain psyche while it looks very nice, does not achieve its high levels of mitigation without attracting aggro from ten targets in melee range. Even at that high level of regen its not enough by itself to guarantee that the blaster will survive the fight. Without other sources of mitigation or the ability to rapidly disrupt the total amount of incoming damage the blaster dies exceptionally rapidly. Third it isn't even close to permanent without massive amounts of recharge.


An uninterruptible heal that doesn't rely on enemies in melee range has advantages that a constant regen buff can't come close to. Healing flames provides its benefit if there is ten, one or no enemies in melee range. What is more because it provides its healing in a single burst it easily out performs Drain Psyche when you are fighting targets that do large amounts of damage with single hits.


If you can't understand this for yourself think of the following timeline

Would you really like to argue that any blaster with drain psyche is more survivable than a brute, tank or scrapper with will power ?

I am sure you would like to see it nerfed in dominators as well where it is a considerably better power. But in both cases it proves that you have to look at the overall set.

On the other hand it increases the effectiveness of your inspirations and that does extend through the entire mission. All of the time duration inspirations last through proportionately more fights providing proportionately more benefit/mission.

Second increasing kill speed allows the blaster more choice over when to be engaged and not engaged in combat.

Oh hardly, its obvious you love to hear yourself speak.

Brilliant.
See above for the refutation. Or is your point given greater choice everyone will pick badly.

Tell that to an ambush farmer.

OOPS was that a bad example of people listening to your arguments and having them go wrong ?

Ahh but you can bank health.

Think about it you might realize how its done.

Why democracy fails ?

There are two theories on the severely underperform.

There is arcanvile's, which goes "Blasters were underperforming everything prior to defiance 2.0, defiance 2.0 couldn't have been enough so they still must be"

There is mine which goes "Blasters in general under damage other direct damage ATs and if you multiply their survivability by their damage output they have a low figure of merit."

@Twoheaded boy.

Congratulations on taking down the GM. The problem is drain psyche is effectively a 3000+ point attack that only works against enemies with significant but not too much regen.

You say this as if they aren't the same thing and without presenting any argument to show why that should be the case.

Logically being able to better survive fights implies being better able to survive missions.


So much wrong so few sentences.

First you imply that the contribution to survivability from doing more damage is somehow more variable than any other method of increasing survivability.

Then you put forth the assumption that this is something to be concerned about.

First any AT that depends on few or particular powers can have considerably more variability in their survivability than an AT that is depending on overall damage output will.

Controllers and dominators see their survivability from controls go in the toilet whenever they face enemies with mez protection. When it comes to neutralizing enemies they are in a binary situation where they either hit or miss.

Any character that relies on defense can have their survivability trashed by enemies with a source of +tohit.

Extra damage is affected only by resistances and defences something that is shared by everything that is attacking. The only difference is that a character that is doing less damage is going to have to survive even longer.

Well if you can call a constant increase to damage output that is under player control a random effect, you can pretty much argue anything.

Blaster's have particular problems in spawns. Its the problem MOBs that the blaster has trouble dealing with that they need help with. Blasters in general don't have trouble killing CoT guides or the various thorn casters. Death mages are a different issue.

Being able to take out their problem mobs faster is going to increase blaster survivability.

I like that. It improves the blaster without destroying the AT. The blaster gains a more effective tool but still has to make good use of it to benefit. It is not an I win button, it doesn't promote mindless button mashing. it keeps the feeling of victory through superior firepower.


Its actually pretty straightforward especially when you have the information the devs have at their fingertips.


Seeing as the benefit SR's resists depends very much on how the player plays. I doubt your analysis is as useful as you think.

The maximum achievable benefit is much easier to calculate, personally I have no problem with powers that you have to work to get the best of.

It is very hard to determine the eccentricity of a planetary orbit without observations.

Just predicting the motion of mars would hardly have converted anyone to his view. Mercury already had a special means of calculation within the Ptolemaic system.

This doesn't seen to follow. You could increase blaster damage so it takes 1 less shot to kill just higher order bosses or ad a random component so it would sometimes take less shots

For the sake of argument lets say our blaster does 200 points per avg shot a boss has 2500 pts, a lieutenant 800, and a minion 400.

It takes the blaster 13 shots to kill the boss, 4 shots to kill a LT and 2 shots to kill a minion. if you increased his damage to 220/shot it would reduce the number of shots to kill a boss to 12, the number to kill a lt to 3 and the number to kill a minion remains at 2.

When you say telescope you mean



This very large quadrant ?

Well aside from the fact that Kepler formulated his heliocentric model and determined the distances of the planets from the sun and predicted the existence of a planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (where oddly enough the asteroid belt sits) all before he ever met Kepler, You would have to guess he had invented a time machine so he could get the data before he knew they existed.

I suppose Ptolemy also had that voluminous data of Tycho's when mars was given the largest number of epicycles.

Let me see if this sounds familiar.

The devs sample the state of the game and see how players are perfoming at various tasks. They see that the players are doing better at some than they would like and worse at others than they would like. They take the statistics and make adjustments according to them, introducing an entirely new set of problems.

Well amazing, If that isn't what gave us defiance 2.0, and a merit rewards system that over rewards hero task forces and under rewards.

It's actually a thank god moment that they don't iterate the system more often as it would likely throw the whole thing into a state of complete chaos.

Just to ask, what would it take to convince you, you are wrong on this matter ? You keep holding forth ever more wrong statement and each time they are refuted you make a greater stretch to support them.

I can give all kinds of examples with dynamic systems where taking statistics of how the system is behaving at a given point in time and making adjustments based on them would produce completely undesirable results.

However I get the feeling from your argument that watching the statistics of when a television picture was bad would let you fix it, that there is nothing in the world that would convince you that it is an inappropriate method.

Anyway I will have my little laugh at your and and Arcanavile's twisting of the history of science in a combined post.

You should analyze how often you have them and see if there is a correlation with how many times you call Iceland.

Getting things done. Interesting choice of words.

No.

Logically speaking the only thing that statistics showing that an AT earns rewards at the same general rate as all ATs tells you is that any problems with the AT are not affecting its earning rate. You keep speaking of reward rates as if they in themselves were significant. If this were the case the game could just give people rewards for staying logged in all ATs gaining the same fixed rate. Problem solved.

As to their not being an Aristotelian ideal for performance, in the context of a game barring software errors, the performance for any entity is very much an ideal. The players can and will pick up on what is better and worse and act accordingly. Not working from the model just means you are guessing when looking for problems or when correcting them.

You have to ignore so much and make so many assumptions for the idea of sampling the system and applying corrections based on a particular snapshot in time without a model of performance to guide the changes it boggles the mind.

The devs specifically used median run time and the following formula.

(MedianTime / MPM) * TaskModifier * TimesRunModifier * TimeModifier + ArtificialModifiers

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Merit_Rewards

In other words they took a couple of statistics for each TF and allowed it to set the run times.

See that is a really interesting idea lets see what the problem is with it. You are using a sample set of the people currently playing blasters. We know that blasters start as the most popular archetype and end as the third most popular archetype. Intrinsically sampling the statistics of people playing blasters to search for signals of a problem understates the players that found the problem and just decided not to play blasters anymore, while at the same time overstating the effects of people that never felt there was a problem.

Now if you go about things by modeling blaster performance you are in a much better situation. In terms of the game I don't have to experiment to validate my model the way I would in the real world. Why ? Because barring bugs I know what the maximum damage output can be, I Know how many hitpoints they can have and I know how rapidly and under what conditions they can recover them. For years I have been saying these come up short relative to the other ATs. You don't need to sample the data of player base to know that blasters will underperform. It is written on their very D.N.A.. What looking at the data of how a particular set of players is doing with them in the context of the wider game just processes their inherent strengths and weaknesses through a series of funhouse mirrors.


Anyway on to the history of science portion.

Neither Kepler's laws of planetary motion, nor the Heliocentric system were developed with use of the telescope. When you say people used it to predict things you mean they used it to predict things incorrectly. The fact that the tables derived from ptolemy's epicycles were predicting things incorrectly helped prompt the development of the heliocentric model. The telescope was what allowed Galileo to demolish any argument that the universe was geocentric in nature because you could look through it and see that parts clearly were not.

The world view was that waves need a medium to propagate. When you say magically invent more accurate models, in this case it would mean logically exploring the consequences of the idea that light waves did not need a medium to propagate. This is very similar to epicycle being invented to preserve the concept that the earth was at the center of the universe,


Regarding Test Driven Development, we used to call that trial and error. It may work but its a sure sign that the people using it just don't have a better method available.

I never claimed that THB's project was anything but an experiment. Maybe you misunderstood that I was talking about how having statistics that show comparable reward earning rates can mask the fact there actually are problems. What's more they tell you nothing about what the problem actually is.

No the problem was that epicycles etc never predicted more than the data already showed. Given enough terms you can fit a curve to any dataset.


Think of the situation where you have an older vintage television that has bad over the air reception. This isn't usually a problem because the person watching it can't see. Every so often the picture gets bad enough that it upsets the viewer to the point they feel the need to do something about it. They get up adjust the antenna, bang the TV on the side, maybe assume a particular position relative to the set and after doing one of these things their picture gets better.

You have a 100% correlation between their taking action and the picture improving. So obviously what they were doing was fixing the problem. No, the problem is that the set is old and the capacitors in the tuning system are aging out, their values now vary over time. When their values are still in range the phase locked loops can properly sync to the signal when they aren't too bad Mr. Couch Potato.


This is exactly the same problem that permeates this game. Take task force rewards you want TFs to give an average merit reward/unit time across the player base. What do you do ? You sample the times it took to run the given task force and peg their rewards according to that number. This ignores the fact that the people who speed run tfs can see what you are doing and adjust their behavior accordingly. What is more those same people were overwhelmingly abusing the TFs they could break. The end result ? you get 9 merit Edens, 9 Merit Katies, while the people that abuse the system go off to run down citadel and manticore.




The problem with Ether was that it was thrown out there solely for the purpose of preserving a world view. In the context of this discussion its the equivalent of saying blasters don't work well because of (Snipes being poor choices, Crashing nukes being traps, blaster attacks not being more end efficient). They are obviously less desired powers but how badly hurt can blasters be by things they don't use ?

For the sake of argument lets say we go down the really bad process of saying aha we have sampled blaster performance and they still underperform. It's not as bad as it was before so our last fix to the AT did most of the job lets fix some of the minor problems that remain. We get another round of bad fixes that may or may not have an effect on the AT. Fixing Snipes would be a good example of this. Blaming an AT's problems on a power that people mostly skip and don't use very much when they do take really won't fix the AT. Matter of fact improving snipes, would likely widen the gap between blasters and other ranged ATs that have access to them.