Arcanaville

That does not provide me an answer to my question. In what way specifically does knowing its not impossible help.

I'm not sure what is sadder. The fact that you operate under the delusion that other people have special privileges you lack, or the fact that you appear to revel in the fact that you lack them.


Now behave or I'll have you sent to Siberia.

I would be interested to hear your viewpoint that explains how knowing its not impossible helps you in any way. Virtually no player request is literally impossible.

You could start by actually using the information I said was not particularly useful. The answer to your question is no, its not impossible. Please demonstrate how that knowledge actually helps.

No, its not impossible. I don't see how that piece of information is particularly useful, however.

Nevertheless, judging powersets based on the level of complaint about them would have led you to the incorrect conclusion almost always.

I'm compelled to partially agree with J_B on this one, for this reason. The question that is *often* asked about *anything* is "why not." The presumption is that the burden of proof is not on the person asking, but on everyone else to justify why their request should not be satisfied.

Irrespective of whether it happens in other instances, scaling EBs up has issues. Scaling *upward* always has issues, because things designed to be a particular rank tend to be more intrinsically powerful, separate from the rank scaling. A scaled up EB is weaker than an intrinsically designed AV most of the time. But they award AV-level of rewards. That's not a good idea on its face. Is it worth creating that one problem to solve the alternate problem of the content in DA not scaling to larger or more powerful teams? Not in my opinion because the design intent of DA is to focus on the solo and small team incarnate progress experience. Therefore, solo and small team issues should *always* override teamed ones in essentially all but the most problematic cases. There's no overriding compelling reason to allow the issues associated with scale-up here, so there's no reason to do it. "Because why not" is not a reason, ever, anywhere.

The alternative is to design them to be AVs that scale downward. But that's also problematic because we now have game designers primarily designing the solo and small team path for a completely different target, and then making them scale down hopefully to the right level. And again this violates the design imperative of DA: to serve the solo and small team players and the solo and small team experience.

DA should be the place where the devs focus on one priority: making the best possible solo and small team experience for incarnate progress. Anything else is a distraction from that. If better large team and incarnate power scaling was possible with no cost and no problems then fine, I would be ok with adding it. But if there are *any* issues at all, however small, this is the place where the solo and small team priority should trump everything else. This should be the one place where we do not say "adding the ability to allow larger teams and more powerful characters to better enjoy the content only adds one tiny little problem for the solo and small team players, so they can deal with it.

The burden of proof, I feel, should be 100% with the people asking for scaling beyond the solo/small team target. And that is a burden they must satisfy absolutely. Otherwise the point of DA, which was *not* in my opinion to have a place where solo and small team players could function, but where they were the priority, gets lost.

Its not a question to me of what happens in DA. Its more a question of what the design priority is. And if the devs are sitting around discussing the best way to incorporate higher team scaling in DA and investigating if it can happen in a reasonable way then I think they are already wasting time that should be spent making the solo and small team experience better.

At some point, that design imperative isn't going to hold. They are not likely to focus their attention in DA to solo and small team players indefinitely, and some larger scale stuff will leak through. That's pretty much inevitable. But they should try to hold the line as long as possible, because at the moment this is the only place that sort of thinking is even allowed to happen.

Let the solo and small team players have this small monopoly on the developer's time. Every second spent on DA thinking about anything other than making the solo and small team experience better is stealing time away from them, when historically they haven't been given lots of it when it comes to anything other than the base minimum standard of the game. There will be plenty of time to say ok, devs, you can stop thinking about them now and start thinking about how the rest of us can enjoy the stuff originally built for them. It doesn't have to start happening ten seconds after that content is released. When the Battalion arrives and finally levels Crey's Folly and turns that into a cosmic warzone** we can ask for the kitchen sink to be thrown at us in the zone and every mission in it. The opportunities don't end with DA.


** 110% fact-free prediction on future content

Its no fun unless its also on fire.

What would be the fun in that?

When the beta forums overwhelmingly like something, its probably good. When they overwhelmingly hate something, its probably better, but it'll take a while for people to realize it.

I'm a bit conflicted about BM, since on the one hand I think it has some issues but on the other hand the fact that so many people hate it compels me to reevaluate that opinion just on the basis of statistics alone.

Black Pebble's office nickname is Acererak.

As Positron said, you can do anything in Excel.

However, in my experience most people don't actually try to.

One aspect I like about this game is that while its story genre is superheroes (and super villains) its gameplay is superpowers. And super powers can encompass almost anything.

One thought I've often had was that I think it would be cool if the different game zones were not primarily level-centric but theme-centric. Think Planetary. Planetary was a comic with a meta-twist: each issue's style was reflective of the content, and most issues focused on a different comic or literary sub-genre: Chinese Ghost stories, Japanese Monster movies, the golden age of US comics, etc. I've often thought it would be neat if we could do something similar. There are hints of that: the RWZ is the obvious homage to the alien invasion theme, and we do have monster island(s). I wonder how far you could go with that without getting too cheesy.

Completely separate from that fact, it should be obvious that a movie must gross significantly more than it costs to make to break even for the production studio, because they don't get every single dollar of those grosses. They get the bulk of them in the initial week(s) of US release, but that shifts to the theater operators in successive weeks and overseas release revenue is handled completely differently from US theater releases. Studios are often splitting the revenue for overseas releases with overseas distributors right from the start.

Hollywood accounting is something else entirely: its essentially the extremely shady accounting practice of allowing a company to make money off of a project, while the project itself loses money. What's interesting is that these accounting practices would never pass muster anywhere else but in the entertainment industry: it would be considered malpractice of the first order for these practices to survive audit.

There's a really simple way of explaining Hollywood accounting. Take a movie, and give it to Vinny. Vinny is going to make and distribute the movie, and pay all the expenses for making the movie and distributing it, and then get all the revenue for showing it. If Vinny has any money at the end, ask Vinny for all his money. After Vinny gives that money to you, show that Vinny is broke. Ergo, the movie didn't make money.

Its surprisingly no more complicated than that. You use an intermediary to represent "the movie" that isn't you, that way you can make money, while the intermediary loses money. Then you claim that even though the movie made money for you it didn't make money for the intermediary and thus the movie didn't make money.

Its actually farming inner inspiration itself that seems pointless. That sounds like someone creating alts and leveling then to 10 over and over again so they can farm the invention tutorial.

Actually, the devs design cones and AoEs in degrees, and the design tools convert this to radians because screw degrees. So the implemented formula in the design tools probably uses radians, but the formula the devs would know "on paper" is in degrees.

I don't think this is as big of a problem because of the generally melee-restricted nature of the secondary attacks. If you're at range, you can't stack those effects with ranged attacks, and if you're in melee you're still fine if you can stack the effects with melee attacks, and in melee the melee attacks should generally be the better option anyway (if they are not, then that makes the melee attacks pointless because they are never the best option).

There is one specific problematic area that I do think has some issues worth looking at, and that's endurance drain. The devs see drain as all or nothing and so make the best draining powers have short range or point blank range, and most of the players see drain as all or nothing and assume that anything short of leveraging everything is not worth pursuing. So endurance drain stacking is significant because even in the primary a lot of it is in a PBAoE.

However, I think either way some of that would be collaterally addressed by adding splash counter-mez into ranged attacks. If there are synergy deficiencies in certain effects, those would be the strongest candidates to add to splash counter-mez. Even if the splash is short duration, stacking it onto a longer duration mez that already exists in the blaster sets would mean that the longer duration mez would in effect elevate the splash mez to being able to affect higher ranks.

I do want to avoid making synergy so strong that anything besides the synergistic combination seems worthless by comparison. If stacking synergy has a benefit, there should be some alternate benefit to having a variety of mez effects instead.

Which, as I said, is extreme. Departing from the source material won't kill a game. But it is true that the more you do it, the more people will notice flaws in the game. KOTOR was a good game, and being a good game even people unaware of the backstory were willing to *learn* the backstory for the game, or even *from* the game.

You'll find anecdotes both ways, but I think the more recent MMO is struggling a lot more with this issue that KOTOR did.


Here, I think we tend, on average, to have the opposite problem. Here, people who want the superhero experience often tend to get it, while people expecting certain MMO conventions often fail to get them. I don't think that matches every single players experience, but I do believe it roughly matches the average experience.

I don't think its a coincidence that many returning players don't necessarily say that every other MMO they've played since leaving was bad and now they realize this game is the best: rather the most common statement I've personally heard was that this game is a nice refuge from other MMOs. I don't hear people say that about other MMOs in general. And its an odd statement to make in general, although I think its actually saying something particularly interesting about City of Heroes.

There's lots of things I would like to do, but the shorter the list is and the less time it takes, the more likely it can happen. In the grand scheme of things, I think, say, improving and partially normalizing the tier 3 single target attacks would have a greater impact on blasters than adjusting the tier 1 secondary power, although that's still open for debate.

One of the reasons I'm more focused on those powers is because they beg the question "what's the point of a 40' range attack?" Archery doesn't really have one, and neither does Dark Blast or Ice Blast. The interesting question is what are those attacks getting back for giving up half the normal range of blaster single target attacks? In the case of Blaze, the answer is obvious: its getting very high DPA. Although the attack follows the same formula as every other single target attack, completely separate from its DoT it casts very fast, and thus has exceptionally high DPA. That means if you're willing to attack from within its range, your single target offense will likely be much higher.

But that's not generally true. The question is: should it be true? And if its not, should those powers really give up all that range? Power Burst, for example, seems to have basically given up its range for nothing. Cosmic burst at least gets a guaranteed mag 3 stun, but is that enough considering that its the only soft control Radiation Blast gets outside of the low percentage knock in Haze? Did Cosmic Burst really get a mag 3 stun in exchange for its low range, or was the set due that much stun anyway and it was just put into Cosmic burst so the power wouldn't seem as bad?

That situation is something I would like to think through carefully.

What happens in Xanth, stays in Xanth.

I'm sure Zwill can restore those for you when the servers come back up:

That's not how Tankers (and Scrappers) were originally envisioned:

- Jack Emmert, City of Heroes dev diary

Tankers were always, from the start, envisioned to primarily be able to absorb lots of damage. The intent is even more unambiguous when Jack describes the process of coming up with the names for those archetypes:

But mostly because a sniper's job is to kill one thing at a time deliberately. No City of Heroes archetype's job is to do that.

The people who type the text into text descriptions in the game believe "close enough" is close enough. Its the same thought process that made someone say that radiation attacks "bypasses some defense" even though at no time in the history of this game has radiation attacks ever had a property that could be described in that way.

In fact, no game mechanic that has ever existed could have given radiation attacks that ability even if the devs wanted them to have it. The closest thing to that description would be tohit buffs, which sort of "bypass some defense" but its impossible for an attack to have intrinsically higher tohit from the player. It can have higher accuracy, but accuracy does not bypass defense. Radiation powers *still* say in the text window that they "bypass normal defense" when they do nothing of the sort. And this is not accidentally describing defense debuffing weirdly, because it *also* says those attacks bypass defense.

Then again the old description used to say that Super Reflexes can dodge anything regardless of the kind of attack. But that's false, because SR does not have psionic defense: it has no protection against mind control-like attacks and things like Blind. So they updated the description: it now explicitly says SR dodges psionic attacks by name. Because if you're going to be misleading, might as well aim right for being completely wrong.

The game would be less misleading if all the text was in Korean. In any case, the current Blaster description explicitly says "offensive juggernaut." It says blasters can deal a ton of damage from a distance, which they can, but it doesn't say Blasters are explicitly range-focused.

And if you're playing a robed laser-sword wielder specifically with the robed laser-sword wielding companion, you will often find that your gameplay very specifically matches a very explicit IP-originating scene.

Order 66.

Bah.