Arcanaville

They also tend to be the people that write the guides, verify the numbers, test the mechanics, write up the content, and do all the things without which the rest of the playerbase would be in the dark ages. The notion that the closed beta testers are sycophants is actually pretty offensive, albeit in a sad way.

Jeez, Venture is usually a closed beta tester. Because when you think *** kissing sycophant, you think Venture.

Uh, when do you think the last closed beta happened?

Didn't you just tell me that April 2005 was before your time?

As to "something to prove against you" all I'm asking is that when you say you've made spreadsheets to prove Statesman right, and you basically agree with almost everything he had to say about the game design, to provide an actual example of either. Forget proof regarding when anything happened. Right now I'm just interested to know what, of Jack's many game design pronouncements, do you even agree with today.

A power that simultaneously phased the player and the target(s), like a combo dimension shift, would help the player solo by eliminating all the other targets from being able to shoot at him or her, but in teams that would be counterproductive because the team couldn't help you kill your target, you couldn't help them kill anything else, and they couldn't otherwise buff or heal you.

In effect, its making the teamed player effectively solo. But it does not explicitly require using it badly to generate that result.

The lesson seems to be yet another reminder of why the devs invented closed betas.

I don't know that much about Lineage II, but I have followed Guild Wars 2. The question is *why* make a Guild Wars 2, and the answer is:

- Mike O'Brian

Guild Wars is not directly comparable to CoH, due to its focus on PvP, and complex skill systems. The PvE game is often a means to an end in Guild Wars, and in fact you can just roll level capped players in GW. The notion that they could radically slow down or stop large scale development of GW to move on to GW2 is something that couldn't happen here. CoH wouldn't survive on inertia: it needs constant PvE development just to survive. And it doesn't rely on power complexity metagaming: sitting in front of Mids for a couple hours is as close as we get to powerset metagaming.

GW is also subscription free: its a more free to play game than City of Heroes is even now, and constantly evolving content is the engine that drives revenue for GW. A new platform is a new platform that can support radically new content to generate incremental revenue.

GW seems different both in terms of their motivations to make a sequel and in terms of what they can get away with developmentally to make a sequel. Imagine Positron telling us today that they were going to start making CoH2, and because of that content for CoH would radically slow down for about three, maybe four years while they do.

But while you wait you could still PvP.

Now that's one I've never heard before. And I once heard someone ask which key was the space bar, because none of them had that label.

I have a solution for that which simultaneously draws interest to the new game without permanently stealing players from this game.

They should make a superhero-themed MMO version of dungeon keeper. Players design supervillain lairs and superhero fortresses and then the NPC heroes and villains try to attack them and bring them down.

And then they take the best of those and add them to City of Heroes. And then they datamine the players with the best performance running those missions and add them as boss critters in the other game.

The better the new game does, the better this game gets.

I'm not entirely joking.

Pain Manipulation for Blasters. The tier 9 causes you to snap your own neck before the critters can defeat you and comes with 50% debt protection.

Oh wait, you were talking about the other thing, not this thing.

Lets just say without getting too specific that some people wanted a clean start, not just in terms of the game but also in terms of the player community.

I can understand that actually, which is why there has never been an Arcanaville there. There was this other person that got very interested in the damage mitigation models for a while, but no Arcanaville.

There are players who think that another good thing is that it doesn't have Arcanaville. I know this, because I had a number of CO forum posters tell me that in PMs in response to some of my early posts about the game mechanics (I haven't posted there in a long time).

I suppose that's a compliment, sorta.

I think this one isn't examined as carefully as it should be. Sometimes this objection is legitimate, and sometimes not.

Its legitimate when the missing piece is critical to the flow of the plot: the movie shows you A and then jumps to C and C is jarring because without B C appears to come out of nowhere. It breaks up the sense of continuity.

Its not legitimate when the missing piece is required to counter an objection after the fact. The movie goes from A to B to C, and it seems to flow but then you realize that D was more likely than C. So why C; why not D? Knowing E would tell you why C and not D, but E was left out.

That's a much more difficult objection to make, because movies normally *present* stories, they don't *justify* them. The movie is not an argument with armchair story-writers having to explain why they made this decision and not that one. Movies presume receptive audiences. If someone treats viewing a movie like an argument the director lost, of course all sorts of things will appear to be "missing" that aren't really.

Because movies tend to be abbreviated from source material when translated, you will never get the full story on screen that might have been in a book. In that case, the movie has to focus on the elements of the plot most critical to progressing the story. Side issues will be necessarily truncated. Objections that the movie is incomplete at the periphery and therefore not a "complete story" in the judgment of the critic are, in my opinion, justifiably dealt with by asking the critic to review the original story in all its detail, and judge the movie based on its ability to extract the key elements required while leaving some details hanging or omitted.

In other words, "its explained in the book" is ok when the detail is not central to the story, and not ok when it is. Although that's an oversimplification.

Only if it involves a Porsche.

At first, I thought that was impossible. But after thinking about it, I think it might be possible. But it it would not be likely to be stumbled upon either way: it would have to be engineered that way.


Edit: the game mechanic that occurred to me could theoretically be manipulated in this way is phasing.

Technically, we are in the middle part of April between the 1st and the 30th.

I'm sure Black Pebble has a T-shirt with that printed on it.

Jack didn't say that much about game balance after your join date. So I don't know what you remember agreeing with, or calculating agreement with. Most of what he said after that point were announcements about what the devs were going to do, less about the theory behind doing it.

Much of his quotes are gone. But here's something for which there is at least fragmentary evidence still about. At one time Scrappers had a 500% damage cap while Blasters had a 400% cap, while both had the same damage modifier (1.0). Jack's explanation was that Scrappers were at higher risk because they were in melee all the time, while Blasters could function at range, and they needed the higher damage cap to compensate for that. Why you would need a higher damage cap for being in melee range is only trumped by the question of how Statesman could possibly believe that Scrappers were at higher risk than Blasters factoring in their defenses, when at about the same time they were easily testing Scrappers against missions scaled for six.

Gets better: Scrappers had their damage modifier increased to 1.125 while Blasters had their damage cap increased to 500%. When I objected to the fact that Scrappers were getting a higher modifier than Blasters, even though Blasters were supposed to be the "kings of damage," Jack said "but they had their damage increased also: their caps increased by more than Scrapper damage increased."

Which might have been the first time I actually said Jack was insane. I was a little less level headed back then. A thread discussing this still exists here.


Which is not to say that I think *everything* people say about Jack hits the mark. I have rather unpopularly defended him in the past as well, when I think he was being misunderstood or blatantly lied about. But the guy is just not very good with balance conceptualization and he gets details wrong a lot. Somehow he made the same mistake twice by thinking Defiance worked on tiers, then thinking the SR scaling resists worked on tiers. In both cases I had to correct those errors.


I exchanged pleasantries with him a couple times, but I knew him by reputation more than anything else. There was a strange rumor at one time that we were the same person posting on the two different forums, but honestly Dr. Rock seemed a lot less "animated" than I was back then.

That's answering the question of why a player might want this game improved. The question is why would NCSoft spend money to make a game just like this one only with some differences.

They can just as easily make a fresh new game with better graphics and a better server engine and have it have nothing to do with CoH. There's nothing in it for them to make that new game about CoH: it presumes that out of all the possible ideas NCSoft can come up with to make an MMO, none are as good as much less better than reusing CoH.

No one would get shifted "off" this game to work on an upgrade to this game. The most logical people to work on an upgrade to this game are people involved with supporting this game. Even if the work responsibilities changed, there would be no benefit to isolating those developers from the current developers supporting CoH.

Its really more a case where Tycho was an excellent observer but a poor analyst. Tycho's data didn't "deceive" him so much as the skill needed to derive a good theory from them was beyond his ability. Kepler was the better mathematician and the better analyst of the data.

Ultimately, the data demonstrated that circular orbits of any kind couldn't work for all planetary bodies, and that geocentric models couldn't be made to work with actual observed planetary motion once they were known above a certain level of accuracy. Observational data didn't just suggest a heliocentric model with elliptical orbits, it much more importantly eliminated all other theories from contention.

What difference would it make if NCSoft picked up all the Paragon people working on the second project, put them into a different office, and started calling them something different? What's the difference between NCSoft making another game, and NCSoft making another game using Paragon Studios to do it. Its not like the devs are allowed to split their time between the games. If that were the case, neither Second Measure nor Television would have been *transferred* to that title. They'd just work on it in their spare time, or work on this game in their spare time.

Paragon Studios is a building, not a person. Thinking Paragon Studios should only work on one property is like thinking everyone in Mountain View should only work on one game at a time, and if you found out someone in the same zip code was working on something else, you'd worry about the future of City of Heroes.


If you want to know why they are not doing a Coh2, ask the reverse question. Why would NCSoft want to make a sequel to City of Heroes? Very few MMOs get sequels: why would City of Heroes be one of the very few?

I don't know why people feel compelled to manufacture reasons why either the devs or NCSoft *don't* do something, when the most likely answer is often "because they don't want to." Why does it have to be about need, or being forced, or any of that. Why can't it simply be that they came up with an idea, decided it was a good idea, and went with that instead?

The calculator was ahead of its time:



But as to proving yourself, I'm not asking you to prove your existence, I'm asking for some examples of these things Jack said that you agree with. Because he said some very bizarre things at times in a game balance sense.

Fortunately, it has always seemed to have a present.


You're going to keep paying to subsidize my play, though, right?

Doing the Blaster first doesn't seem to be incurring a high penalty, but if the Stalker continues to overtake the Blaster this will null out because eventually the Stalker will be seeing the missions first even though the Blaster is played first in any given day. Once that happens, any advantage doing one first and then the other will shift to the Blaster, and it will also weaken somewhat either way (due to being separated by more time).