Arcanaville

I don't think the article writer is saying that Hawkeye is totally unbelievable because his form is flawed. I think the article writer is making the point that the movie makers clearly spent lots of time trying to make Iron Man's armor at least appear to be plausible, the writers spent an entire movie making Thor's backstory rational, and then they skimped on teaching Jeremy Renner how to shoot a bow better than a twelve year old at summer camp. That's an odd set of priorities, and suggests that given the attention to detail spent elsewhere, they simply didn't think it was necessary to make Hawkeye's archery look realistic. When they want to get it right, they can: movies hire military consultants, weapons consultants, and martial arts consultants all the time. And when they deviate from reality there's usually a reason. Shooting two pistols two handed might suck in the real world, but it looks cool on the screen. The article writer makes the valid point that doing it right in this case would not have made it any less cool: they did not deviate from the proper archery technique to make anything look visually better. In other words, they did not gain anything from being inaccurate, and they would not have lost anything if they attempted to be accurate. That's something worth noting.

I'm not a professional archer. I would not have noticed most of those flaws had they not been pointed out to me. But they snuck in a Captain America shield as an inside joke in one movie, and a frozen Captain America in another (albeit in a cut scene). Shouldn't someone have been thinking about sneaking in some excellent archery form as an inside detail for the archery students in the audience watching supposedly the worlds greatest archer, even if it meant absolutely nothing to the rest of us?


If there is an irony its the fact that you *wouldn't* expect Katniss to show perfect archery form. She's a completely self-taught archer that hunts for food. She has superior innate skill, but shouldn't have perfect form. She should be a diamond in the rough, so to speak: an instinctive shooter and not a crafted one. But you'd think with the resources available to him Hawkeye would have at least studied archery, in a way completely impossible for Katniss to do so. Katniss can't even look up archery on wikipedia.

Would you be willing to have everything I specifically judge to be irrational eliminated from the game, and conversely everything I find to have a rational justification for being included added to the game?

Preferences are unlikely to appear rational to most other people that don't share them, but the real question is does a preference have to be rationally justifiable to be addressed by a subset of the game content.

In most parts of the game, you have to balance the needs of the majority of players. But if you do that everywhere, you end up with tyrannies of the majority. Setting aside areas explicitly intended to defy the majority is not a bad thing. Its not a good thing either: its just a thing. But its a thing that is entirely in keeping with how the devs have designed and implemented this game from day one. They didn't just say "ok, we have an end game trial system, now lets go make a non-trial incarnate area." They responded to some of the critique about the trial system, decided which areas they would focus on, and then created something that was the exact opposite of the trials in those particular areas. Its more story-driven, less difficult, more accomodating to a wide range of characters and team compositions. Its much more casual, and much less power and ability hungry. Some people want that. I don't see the benefit of tampering with it in general.

And actually, holding the line on that doesn't mean I disagree with Aeon's open discussion regarding scaling. Far from it, I believe that the easiest thing to do would have been to flip the switch and toss AVs in there: by holding the line on *not* doing that, a creative solution may result.

A creative solution that isn't just a matter of making the current difficulty a scaled down version of an AV class scale up version would be exactly the sort of benefit I would expect holding the design line would promote.

In this specific case, yes.

I had this idea for a random boss generator that would among other things do exactly that. Would be nice to build it someday.

I would make it so that the next wave either happens at a designated time, or ten seconds after the last critter in the previous wave is killed, whichever comes first.

We're just like the Avengers.

Not if the overall experience is tainted by players recognizing that they are only succeeding at the mission because it was executed at a diminished difficulty.

I have no interest in rationalizing that opinion: its not even an opinion I share. But I know it exists, and its already been expressed directly. The fact that it exists makes it problematic when the intent is to avoid that.

Yes, there are solo players that want higher difficulty. But we know what the majority of solo players are capable of, because we know something about the overall performance of the average player. We know for Blasters, at one time it was that they mostly die, and for everyone else its that they do significantly better but not astronomically better than someone who always dies. The statistical likelihood that the majority of solo players entering DA could or would want more than a moderatly higher difficulty than the standard difficulty of this game is extremely low.

Although I said "solo and small team" I did not literally mean all players who do not team or only team with a small number of people. The game already has a standard difficulty model for solo players: essentially the average game content at +0x1. The devs appear to have decided that the target for solo and small teams should be something only moderately higher than standard difficulty, in keeping with the normal difficulty curve for solo players, and that the missions should be explicitly targeted at that difficulty level by critter design so that players attempting to progress in incarnate ability don't feel they are experiencing watered down content relative to vastly more powerful players.

Across the entire game, that perspective would be impractical. DA is a special case, and one where I have no problem with letting that perspective live. Because if not there, then where?

Its been a while since I've done that particular mission, so I don't remember if they just spawn in random locations and then run to the exit or if they are there all along and are yanked to the exit, although I think its the former rather than the latter.

But in general, that's the concept. Except we use stacking to our advantage: we can face things all at once or dispersed, but dispersed is always easier because there's less concentrated threat, but also less potential for stacking reinforcement between the critters.

There's a reason my challenge mission uses bots/sonic for the "background" minions. Those are not that difficult to beat one at a time: the bots get quickly vaporized and the actual MM is no threat. But scale that to x4, or x8, and the denser they get the stronger the overlapping resistance buffs become, the more resistance debuffs you experience, the longer the bots can last, the more offensive threat they become.

Usually, its us doing that to them. There are ways for them to do it to us that actually involve no scaling at all except for numbers.

I wish somewhere, someday, the industry learned the lesson that just as you need programmers to write code and artists to design the content and writers to script the story, mechanics and systems is an engineering task.

I believe there is no game mechanical problem that doesn't have an engineering-based solution, and all game mechanical infrastructure is really just a set of engineering edifices. I believe that a good engineer with no knowledge of gaming would make a far better mechanical infrastructure than a good game designer with no knowledge of engineering. Someone that is good at both will outperform either by a quantum leap of quality.

A game designer with no experience programming will never *code* a good game engine, while a programmer with no knowledge of gaming can still implement a good game engine. An artist with no knowledge of gaming can still make good gaming artwork, but a game designer that can't draw, use animation tools, or compose music is not the best person to be doing any of those things. No one needs to be told this. But saying that systems is an engineering thing, perhaps you should get an engineer to do that (and preferrable not a brain dead one: there's lots of those) is a radical idea.

Every time I hear someone say that, for example, "game balance is impossible" because games are more than math, or the even more pernicious "game balance is not even a good idea because it makes games boring" I realize that game design isn't merely living in the stone age, its living in the time before fire.

I've seen glimmers. CCE has had some spectacular design failures or incidents in the past, but the way they at least sometimes *analyze* those failures suggests a level of self-awareness about the complexity of their game design that I don't usually see elsewhere. But I have yet to play an MMO whose internal systems and mechanics make sense to me from an engineering perspective, completely separate from whether I like them or not. And that always creates problems that were completely avoidable, but MMO dev teams seem to think are inevitable.

The vet badges are now Paragon Rewards tier badges, and while you still get credit for subscription time, you now also get credit for each $15 you spend on Paragon Points. The idea was to allow some way for premium players to advance in tiers as a veteran player since they do not subscribe. So subscription players get credit for each month of subscription, and on top of that all players premium or subscription get credit for each $15 they spend on paragon points.

When I told Castle that J_B had been calling for Invuln buffs coincidentally around the same time Castle decided to look at those and passive buffs would probably make his day, Castle said that even so he'd still do it anyway.

I believe Aeon is asking people to think of ideas which focus on what the mission designer can do given the existing assets and technology, because that is his area of responsibility. Suggestions like improving the design of critters, or changing the game technology, while interesting, go beyond what he or any other mission designer can do.

Which is why I suggested both. The powers people design critters, so its really up to Black Scorpion and his minions to design more interesting bosses. The programmers at the direction of the design leads can add or alter game mechanics, but that is often time consuming and expensive, and rarely done ad hoc. The mission designers can ask for certain kinds of assets like a new critter group, but they don't explicitly make them. Basically, the only things Aeon can do to try to make missions more interesting in terms of difficulty scaling is essentially what we could do in the Architect, but with better control. He could also ask for certain new things in terms of critter design or game mechanics, but of course those requests would then be completely outside his ability to control or even get scheduled to happen. So the less he has to ask for changes tot he powers or the game code, and the more he can do things through mission design itself, the more likely he can put a suggestion into practice.

Well, J_B took credit for getting Invuln buffed, when actually the reverse was closer to the truth. In this case, though, while lots of people have made this sort of comment before, its likely that this time the devs happened to pick out J_B's comments from the thread. But there's no question the devs have been thinking about this sort of thing before, because unless Aeon suffered a serious brain injury recently, he should remember all of the discussion surrounding the design of interesting encounters in the AE, given that this is fearghas we're talking about.

Everywhere else, we just add the option and make the vegetarians prove the option spoils their eating experience. Here in DA, where the stated purpose is to serve vegetarians, the opposite should be true.

Well, given those parameters the three main options I can think of are the same three options I came up with in I14 beta for the AE:

1. Support "constellations" of minions around the Boss explicitly designed to support the boss. Most minions are not support critters and die to fast to support anything anyway. I came up with the strategy of making support critters that were like tank/defenders: they could buff the boss, they were hard to kill, but they were not offensively dangerous themselves. That way they could add difficulty to the fight without adding too much offensive threat.

2. Ambushes. These aren't just dumping more critters into the fight: if you design them right you can make them upset the apple cart so that players cannot lock into a static strategy. The problem with the AE was how difficult it was to control the composition of ambushes, which is a limitation the devs wouldn't have (I tried to get pohsyb to add composition dials to ambush spawns but there didn't seem to be the time).

3. Better designed Bosses. Even with the limitations of the AE custom critter editor, there are still lots of tricks the game engine has that the dev designed critters don't use much of. Particularly with regard to balancing the degree to which strong targets straight up kill the players and the degree to which they act more "defensively" by applying debuffs and soft controls.

There's a number of ways to do this, but the bottom line on bosses was that I felt the best way to make a good boss was to give it actually low damage and higher survivability, but then give it something that periodically hit hard. So the boss became more of a bursty threat than a continuous one.

In fact, in general the best possible way to make encounters more interesting is to make them less predictable.


I also like the idea of using "scaling powers" - I asked for that exact tech during AE beta many many times, but I don't think that is leveraged to the best extent possible either when its used (for example in the iTrials).


The one other major idea I had with regard to boss scaling which would have required tech to add (the AE doesn't support this) was to add a pacing parameter to the mission. In the same way that AE missions track and throttle tickets, a separate meter could measure player performance throughout the mission. Based on a number of parameters including how fast the player (or team) burned through the mission and how much damage and deaths were incurred, the boss could be scaled upward with a scaling power that factored those things in. So basically the quicker you burn through the mission, the harder the boss at the end to scale up to your ability.

I also thought of a cheap way to do this without as much tech and complex metering. Spawn reinforcements around the boss, and have those reinforcements attack the players at regular intervals. The quicker you get to the boss, the more of those reinforcements would be left. The longer you take to get to the end, the more you'd have sapped that reinforcement strength during the mission and the weaker the final boss would be, roughly in keeping with scaling the final encounter to the relative ease with which the player dispatches threat during the mission. In other words, the faster you go, the steeper the mission gets.

So lets say the final boss is a strong Elite Boss. But on his own, he's not that big of a threat. But he has five "lieutenants" that guard him, each of which synergistically makes him stronger and in literal rank could be bosses or elite bosses himself. At regular intervals one of those Lts is dispatched like an ambush to seek out the player or team in the mission, and he takes an entourage with him. This denudes the final boss of one of his protectors and some minions. If the team is less powerful and slow, it will take them time to burn through the minions in the mission and this "LT" which is actually a boss or EB would also slow the player or team down.

If the team is very slow, eventually a second, and even a third "LT" would leave the boss to go attack the player(s). When the player(s) finally arrived at the boss, the boss could be alone except for his normal minions. But if the player or team is strong and/or fast, he could find himself facing a significant constellation of support for that final boss.

This works in conjunction with the normal difficulty sliders. Turning bosses off would mean these "Lt" ambushes would be led by Lts, and thus capable of being dealt with by even weaker players. At the extreme case, they could be led by EBs or even AVs in theory at high enough difficulty.

So instead of reinforcing the boss, we could do the opposite. Start the boss with an army, and slowly strip that army away. Or rather, spread the army out so instead of facing it all at once it gets faced a piece at a time throughout the mission. And the regulating variable would be how fast the players themselves progressed through the mission, as a proxy for how powerful they are.


Really, though, I think crafty critter design is where you get the biggest bang for effort. Based on my own experience designing critters for AE missions, I don't think we've scratched the surface of what we can do there. Take my Challenge arc. Contrary to what some people think, I did not build that to be the hardest possible mission you could construct. Actually, I tried to built it to have the widest degree of difficulty possible. I believe that that single mission has a wider range of difficulty from -1x1 with no bosses to +4x8 with bosses and AVs than I think any other content in the game has. It goes from actually not hard at all to extremely hard, and has a lot of shades of grey in between. And it doesn't even have every trick in the book because half that mission was damaged over time by AE changes.

Instead of armor, they could have more strongly leveraged stances. But then that would create potential issues for the crafting system, although I think those were resolvable also. If anything, the crafting system should be the place where the conceptual glitches occur, because everyone knows that the crafting system in most MMOs is metagaming anyway.

To be honest, I think crafting in *this* game should have probably been made much simpler, and much more metagaming rather than trying so hard to make it "real." Its not like any of us thinks we're actually walking around with all that stuff crammed into our pockets.

You mean like every Oracle programmer on Earth?

The dichotomy you claim did not need to exist needs to exist if the devs are attempting to address different player perspectives on the appropriate level of difficulty for content. A dichotomy that is only one among many the devs make in the design of this game. Its not just not novel, its actually very predictable, speaking as someone who keeps predicting this basic design philosophy and is never surprised when it occurs.

The problem isn't the dichotomy, the problem is that the devs didn't pick bifurcation points that exist right on top of your gameplay preference. But that doesn't make the choice invalid.

No, its not. As proof, suggest something to the devs and see if the burden of proof is on them to prove your suggestion should not be done. QED.

That its detrimental is not particularly relevant. If the point of DA and its content is that its explicitly intended to serve a specific purpose, and that specific purpose is to provide an avenue for solo and small team players to have an incarnate content environment explicitly targeted at them, them its irrelevant if its not hard enough for some people. What's relevant is whether the content servers its intended target well first. Everything else should be a distant second. To the extent that the devs have decided to target a lower level of difficulty as part of that design, I think any suggestion claiming that increasing that difficulty better serves other people is irrelevant, and any suggestion claiming that increasing that difficulty would have no impact on the target audience should not be taken seriously without an extremely persuasive argument to back it up. In the absence of that, I don't see the point in taking the risk in this specific case.

You don't have to prove that changing it will have no impact on its intended target audience. But that doesn't alter the fact that my statement to the devs is in the absence of such proof, they should err on the side of not taking the risk.

Actually, the programmers and content developers are almost never directly in charge of pricing.

A rules-abuse expert would try to color the ground beneath an enemy "high intensity infrared" and their internal organs "microwave."

I'll be honest, my opinion of the expanded universe has not in general been high, but when the prequels were released I realized that it was my view of the original trilogy that was the exception, not the rule. Taken as a whole, the vast majority of the Star Wars universe is not very much like the original trilogy, at least in my opinion. And I fully recognize that most expanded universe content is both licensed by, and rigorously content-controlled by, Lucas.

But to correct myself, I don't think the backstory hurts TOR. If anything, the story itself is one of its strengths. What I intended to say was that in my opinion the gameplay doesn't match my expectations of an MMO advertised to include Jedi, because I have preconceived notions of what Jedi are from the backstory of the property I'm most familiar with. Its ten times more effective to spam heals on Cuisinart and let him go berserk than try to cut things in half while Holiday "distracts" the targets, which is a bit of a cognitive dissonance for me.

Here, I don't have that particular difficulty. Although we could only wish for writing that good (although I actually like the writing in DA in I22, as opposed to just not disliking it in general), I'm not usually fighting preconceived notions of how certain things should play, probably because I simply have not many strong metaphoric expectations for how things should play beyond simply things here. I don't "know" these powersets and these archetypes from anywhere besides the game itself. They are what the game purports them to be.

They are in fact melee/self-support. They were originally (for the most part) melee damage powersets but were adjusted to add support powers designed to support the blaster itself (as opposed to ally support powers).

But agonizing over how things are textually described in this game is not a particularly productive course of action.

I would not want to presume that without direct evidence.