Arcanaville

Nothing prevents the General from hiring a civilian contractor. But being in the military is not about fitting the uniform or learning to pull a trigger. Militaries like all organizations have rules and procedures and cultures. Being a civilian contractor this person can still help the military in almost any capacity. They would not be able (generally) to give orders to combat soldiers actually in combat, but you wouldn't want them to. A civilian recruited by a General with no time to pass either boot camp or officer training would have no idea how the military works, what is legal and illegal, what general orders everyone is expected to follow, the correct way to even give an order and how soldiers will interpret and follow that order. What they normally do in combat and what you have to plan for. Practical logistics issues. They would be basically totally ignorant no matter how smart they were.

It would kind of be like taking a random person off the street that was intelligent but inexperienced and making him the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Even if he's watched football all his life, if he hasn't actually played the game, hasn't actually coached the game, and hasn't actually been around the game directly, he won't even speak the same language as his players or assistants much less be able to coach them effectively.

So I think the correct answer is: it could happen, but no one would ever want it to happen.


One other aside on the subject of rank. Officers are basically managers: they manage other soldiers. Enlisted men are typically the ones that actually fight. There's a memorable scene in Band of Brothers where Captain Dick Winters is watching his unit who he used to directly command as an Lt get hammered because its current commanding officer freezes. At one point he actually starts to move like he's going to run onto the field himself and take over but is immediately admonished by *his* commanding officer, whereupon he orders another Lt to run out there and take command. Because no matter how smart, brave, and proven as a combat commander Winters was, and no matter that he knew that unit better than anyone else, he was a Captain and Captains do not run out into enemy fire taking command of just a handful of people. He had larger responsibilities which is why he *was* a Captain.

Having said that, if I was an Lt or Captain or Grand Moff or whatever and I was asked to assemble the best possible combat unit to go fight advanced alien invaders, I'm absolutely certain there wouldn't be anyone in my selected group that had a rank higher than Lt or so, and would be full of enlisted men. Because those are the guys with *the most experience* actually being in combat, doing the job I now need them to do. I would want Seal Team Six (DevGru, whatever), not the officer's club. I would want the killers, not the middle managers.

You forgot Khaaaaaaan!



The problem with late twentieth century genetic engineering is that even in the Trek universe, twentieth century geeks were primarily obsessed with boobs.

One day I would like to see a "without skin" option so I can go all Hellraiser.

Not real.

Don't worry, I'm sure it will take a while before the forumites realize you're the one in charge of resource allocation and timetables.


Wait, was that my inside voice or my outside voice. Oops.

Telling you the plan will probably get delayed while your execution will proceed right on schedule.

All of which would be relevant to a class on playing blasters optimally, and none of it (except for "defiance" which is a blaster feature added specifically because blasters were datamined to have the worst performance in the game, with no evidence yet that it completely resolved the issue much less in any way reversed it) relevant to whether blaster archetype design has issues.

The fact that the problems blasters are handed sometimes have solutions is completely irrelevant to the question of whether they are handed too many problems. Workarounds are what players do until the devs solve the problem. Balancing is what the devs are supposed to do so the players don't have to.

Its also possible he arm wrestled for it and won. The guy is humongous.



Give me your design docs, your cubicle, your phone, and your rolodex and just walk away and I'll spare your life.

Several people claimed it was literally illegal. You claiming it was problematic isn't especially noteworthy, except in claiming to work for the gaming industry and then claiming that gambling laws were just "pseudo-rules."

But that's what you're doing when you say pay to win is synonymous with pay for rewards, because that's not what that debate has ever centered on in general. Pay to win has never meant pay to get what other people earn in-game. It has specifically meant pay to reach the highest levels of performance, or pay for essentially unlimited progress.

The issue is devaluement, and there is a recognition in debates regarding pay to win that certain kinds of rewards are much more critical when it comes to devaluement. In this game, for example, no one would consider selling standard inspirations to be pay to win, because standard inspirations can't be devalued: they are already considered too trivial to acquire to have any exchange value. And yet they have significant performance value.

If you want to assert that pay for rewards of any kind is objectionable, its disingenuous to even bring up pay to win, because it implies you think they are related, and if you do you should be prepared to defend that association. Saying its a semantic irrelevancy is something you can only do if you don't bring it up first. Since you do bring it up first, I feel compelled to respond to that association.

And the moment City of Heroes Freedom offered a free to play option, they became a pay for rewards game. Because VIPs that pay a subscription get stuff as part of their subscription, including things that can be considered rewards. They pay for those things, while other players do not.


For every one of you there are others for whom the exact opposite is true. People who perhaps had difficulty paying the subscription regularly. People who can now continue to play the game even if they have a lapse in subscription. People who can play and pay nothing, but pay less than $15/month for a limited set of extras. People who didn't measure up to your standard for what everyone should pay and what everyone should equally get for that pay.

We now have the option to pay more and get more. We also have the option to pay less and get less - but still play. And subsidizing it all are the people willing to pay more, and are not actually getting a commensurately higher gaming experience. They get more, but they don't get a proportionately bigger game. They get less than that, because someone has to subsidize the players paying less and getting less, because the devs don't save money on the players getting less most of the time: the cost is in the making, not the using.

The folks without the extra bread lying around are getting more game than they would if they had to pay for it all by themselves, because the folks with the extra bread are willing to part with it for less than one hundred cents on the dollar. This is basic arithmetic. Take away the things that people spend extra money on, and the people who don't spend extra will get less game. There's no other possible way it can work: more money buys more game, less money buys less game, period.

Its a fundamental change, yes, but not one that only favors the people with more money. The people with less money are better off. The people with more money are better off. The only people not better off are the people who don't care how much they get, they only care if someone else gets anything more. They are not better off. And on the day Freedom was launched, I stated dispassionately but unambiguously that those people, the fixed cost completionists, were the one group of people that City of Heroes Freedom does not account for, does not concede to, and cannot and will not accommodate. Its unfortunate, but its not unfortunate in general that everyone else is better off. I wouldn't trade back and penalize everyone else just to make that one group happy again. Nor is it at this point even possible to do that.

Actually, FF was a case study of the original article. The solution was for the *shields* to offer defense, and *dispersion bubble* to offer Elu.

The reason has to do with Dispersion Bubble itself. It stacks with the other two bubbles. That was seen as a constraint on its strength. It also stacks with power pool defense. Another constraint. Because of those constraints, Dispersion bubble is probably a bit weaker than it could be, because any higher and it runs into problems.

If it was Elu, it would not stack with the shields, and it would not stack with power pool defenses. The devs could then balance it based solely on one question: how much defense should dispersion bubble offer *the defender*. Which might be a little bit higher than what it is now.

What you would need to make sure about is a couple of FF defenders couldn't just overlap Elusivity bubbles and become impossible to hit, even by things with tohit buffs. I had a solution for that problem as well, but it is a feature that is not a part of the current implementation of Elusivity. Also, multiple FF defenders already make things unhittable anyway, so I'm not sure Elu makes this situation worse.

No, the defense is "its not illegal, so people claiming its illegal are wrong."

There is no such equation, because tohit buffs would alter the relationship. And for that matter all Praetorians would act like they had +14% tohit, and also alter the equation.

25% defense is 50% average damage mitigation against any critter between the ranks of underling and AV from even con to +5, outside of tohit buffing powers. But its only 39% damage mitigation against a Praetorian class critter, like the ones that exist in the I22 Dark Astoria, and some of the critters in iTrials, and for some weird reason the DE in tip missions.


Interestingly, Elusivity was originally proposed by me to address #1, not #2. The short answer is that if all defense was Elusivity, your relationship equation thing above would hold true. 30% Elusivity means 30% damage mitigation. Always. However, there are some problems with that, in particular with the intent of tohit buffs in special circumstances. Elusivity eliminates the ability to ever declare a special circumstance. And if *all* defense was turned into Elu, there's enough of it to stack up high enough to make Defense aka Elusivity impenetrable.

So the solution, offered in the original article on Elusivity, was to *split* defense into some +Def and some +Elu. Doing so prevented *either* from reaching dangerously high levels, and in particular kept +Def away from the exponential side of the curve near the effective softcap (where ever it was).

The idea was to make Def and Elu like a diversified portfolio. Def was stronger against low tohit, Elu was stronger against higher tohit, Elu dampened the wild swings of Def and Def prevented Elu from becoming impenetrable. In a sense, Elu would be defense invulnerable to tohit buffs and Def would be defense vulnerable to tohit buffs and we could craft the precise amount of protection we wanted by mixing the two.

That wouldn't help at all. It could make things worse, by actually implying defense numbers are percentages, when they are not really. It took years for people to stop asking in droves "what is 35% defense thirty five percent of?" Of nothing: its 35 points of defense which get subtracted from the critter's tohit of 50, except when its not 50 but higher or lower.

If you're actually still arguing against the Issue 7 critter accuracy changes, not only is that horse dead, but even when it was alive it was only mercy that prevented me from vaporizing it with nuclear weaponry, because the case for going back to unrestricted tohit scaling for critters is less than zero. It disappeared the day perma-elude disappeared, and even its memory was vaporized when SR was proliferated to Tankers, making the need to be able to tank higher ranks before level 32 cause the option to go back all but literally impossible.

That would be Castle, but the posts from that period are long gone from the forums.

Actually, correct on the first but not on the second. To the best of my recollection, the devs stated a power change was explicitly due to a power literally being not worth taking exactly three times. Two occurred before you joined (based on your forum date). When the devs replaced Fold Space with Singularity was the first. Technically, they should have replaced Wormhole with Singularity since Wormhole was the tier 9 power. But it was Fold Space that the devs said was basically the "worthless" power and because of that not only was Singularity added at tier 9, wormhole was shuffled to tier 8 and Fold Space was eliminated.

The second: Elude, in I2. The original version of Elude was a power that conferred something like a combination of superspeed and PFF. As in while its on you run fast, you have really high defense but you can't attack anything. Yeah, people picked that power a lot.

The last, most recent change: MoG. Although that was less that the devs said it was not worth taking at all and more addressing the fact that the players believed that to be true.

There are other changes that were likely due to the devs believing a power was not worth it, but I have no direct knowledge they said so directly. Storm Kick is one.

And there was one game mechanical change that simultaneously changed several powers behavior that the devs explicitly stated was due to the mechanic being simultaneously annoying and worthless. That was when they changed the mechanics of Terrorize. It used to cause critters to flee, but they changed it to the current behavior of stand in place and quiver, and occasionally attack back if hit, because the devs stated that the original behavior was so annoying and worthless it was causing players to avoid taking or using any terrorize powers.

In the modern era, the only one I can think of is MoG, so its very rare now. But it was a bit more common in the past.

Actually, the vocal minority wanted gender neutral costumes. The vocal majority wanted to maximize the amount of option porting to both genders, which had the side effect of the devs deciding that more options were reasonable to port from men to women than the reverse.

The silent majority, as usual, cared a lot less either way than either of them.

Until you claim that NCSoft can get in legal trouble. That's when you have to switch to the actual legal definition of gambling, and there is one which the Super Packs do not satisfy.


Properly defining "win" isn't a nit-pick, because the phrase "pay to win" doesn't just refer to "paying for rewards" in most discussions surrounding the term. Most people opposed to "pay to win" as a concept are not opposed to pay for rewards in general, the issue is the specific kind of rewards.


Probably a nit-pick to you, but no one is allowed to out bid me on the Paragon Store, because its not a highest-bidder situation.


Getting back to your assertion about defining "winning" as a nit-pick, a far larger number of people are complaining about the two exclusive rewards in the packs both of which are not performance enhancing items - the wolf pet and the elemental costume set. Neither would *ever* be called "pay to win" items normally, but in this game I could see people making the case that since this game focuses on replay and alts, cosmetic options are potentially just as important as performance items and by extension unlocking them is a form of "winning." I personally would not make that argument, but its not an invalid argument to me, and it specifically relies on opening for discussion something you dismiss as nit-picky: asking the valid question of what is "winning" and what is a "reward" in this game within the context of what should and should not be sold in the stores or gated behind exclusive pathways.

I have a particular opinion, and its not the opinion of the majority of people complaining about the items, but I don't think the discussion itself is nit-picky: it goes to the heart of what this game is and is supposed to be. And there are no straight forward answers to those questions.

The alternative is that you have such a pathological need to prove tankers are always inferior, that even when given an easy way out like "Electric Armor is one of the best tanker sets around, and especially for the critter distribution in question" you still must assume that *no* tanker could *ever* have more *useful* survivability than *any* brute and thus the most likely explanation is a game mechanical glitch or a lie. Not that an Electric tank could ever outsurvive a Willpower brute, because brutes always have enough survivability to make the extra survivability of tankers irrelevant.

This theory seems to explain everything much better, I think.

It should be a lot more fun when it crashes.