Arcanaville

In the Marvel Universe, there's ultimately two different kinds of beings. The first kind use tools to manipulate energy. There's two kinds of those: those that wield technology and those that wield non-inherent magic. In the Marvel Universe, guns and bullets are tools. Spells and symbols are also tools, tools that tap different kinds of energy (typically but not always extradimensional energy). In the Marvel Universe, both sets of tools ultimately lead to the second kind of being: a being that *intrinsically* wields and controls "cosmic" or other energy. Basically, science and magic become indistinguishable when both are tapping universally powerful energies.

The power cosmic isn't magical although its effects can seem so relative to the real world, for the necessary and sufficient reason that its theoretically understandable and controllable with scientific methods within the Marvel Universe. In fact, Marvel has generally skewed in the direction of stating that most magic is either science we don't understand yet, or science from a different universe that seems magical because their rules are so different from the normal universe's rules.

The way that the Marvel Universe "unifies" magic and science doesn't work for Origin of Power, because the Marvel Universe doesn't say there is a *singular* source for science and technology. What the Marvel Universe says is that beyond a certain point, scientific mastery of natural forces is indistinguishable from magical mastery of magical forces. Its all cosmic beings wielding cosmic power, sometimes from a different cosmos.

I don't know that it fails *worse* for them. I believe the canonical implication is that while anyone can pick up a gun and try to fight crime, most of them get gunned down in the street. There is something *special* about the heroes who *apparently* use nothing but natural means to be superheroic: call it luck, call it Ferris Bueller Syndrome, call it The Jazz. Something makes those people "just work" and its something deep within the way the universe works that creates such people.

The character of John Constantine was said to possess, and claimed to be able to control, a quintessential aspect of the universe called "synchronicity" which allowed him to subconsciously know the right place to be and the right things to do to have a huge impact on the world. Nearly everything he did wasn't ascribable to magic as such: he didn't have magical powers (most of the time) and he rarely used magical forces directly.

In The Books of Magic he shows up to save Tim Hunter and Zatanna from a club full of magical beings that were going to capture or kill Hunter. He shows up and basically tells them he's going to take the two of them and leave, and dares any of them to stop him. Which they all decide not to. When they leave Zatanna tells John that he has no magical powers and any one of them could have killed him easily, and wonders how he did that. John simply says that *is* his power. He says "stop me if you can" and they all run away, because they were all thinking the same thing: if he has the balls to do that, he must be more dangerous than they think. Which is his power: he knew the right thing to say, and it works - for him. It wouldn't for anyone else.

You could argue that riding synchronicity is a natural ability: its definitely not science, mutation, or technology. Its either magical or natural, but here no magical process occurs. John's weapons are sarcasm, bravado, psychology, and a little knowledge about forces beyond his actual control, and with those very mundane weapons he's taken down some of the most powerful beings in his universe.

Somehow, an analogous thing happens in the City of Heroes universe. Some beings armed with a gun and a utility belt of devices take down Cthulu. John Constantine has done it with a knife, some candles, and his middle finder.

Origin of Power implies there's some "thing" that makes this possible, but doesn't elaborate on it. But to be honest, the same conclusion was reachable *before* Origin of Power, so I don't know what it adds either.

I would have thought it was obvious that when talking about fictional worlds, I would be talking about the science within those worlds.


The Power Cosmic has been treated differently by different writers, but mostly its been treated as a force in the universe which obeys normal scientific laws, even if they are laws that are different in that universe than the real one. Doctor Doom (among others) has used purely scientific and technological processes to tap the power cosmic in the past, which means it obeys scientific and technological principles.

I don't recall the discussion you reference there, but in most of the mainstream comics magic obeys its own laws. It generally *has* laws but they in critical ways are completely incompatible with normal science. Or else they would actually *be* science.

The dichotomy isn't false if its embedded in the definitions. Magic is generally defined to be that which is permanently beyond the reach of scientific principles to be able to explain. For there to be two different things beyond Science, their definitions would have to allow that.

The problem here is that the origins themselves in the game are expansive, not restrictive. The devs have made no attempt to redefine magic as something specific and not all emcompassing beyond science and technology: in fact they specifically *repudiate* such attempts at restrictive definitions of origins. But you cannot have it both ways. The only way for there to be a rational heirarchy of magic is for that heirarchy to have some structure to hold it up. Amorphous magic and more-magic simply isn't coherent.

Or to put it more directly, so long as Origin is some trivial non-entity, the devs can handwave away the fact that the origins themselves are extremely poorly and expansively *and* intrusively (with each other) defined. Doesn't matter much. But you cannot handwave away the structure of origins and then base a story arc upon the structure you continue to handwave away. In other words, you cannot say "origins are a little funky and ill-defined, but that's ok because we want players to have many options for interpretation, oh, but by the way they have a structure in which they are interrelated in an important way that has a similarly ill-defined source which somehow creates those five things we haven't defined."

No, No, No. I mean its obvious its physically possible, because the writers did it. But not even giant foam #1 hands can generate that magnitude of hand wave.

The way I describe Origin of Power is: it makes just enough sense to be talked about, but not enough sense to be thought about.

Because doing so reduces the time you can spend on the forums.

Whether the Well looks like a metal box or a Ming vase is irrelevant: either it functions according to scientific principles or it does not. If it does, its either Science or Technology. If it does not, its Magic.

By definition, if you can't explain it with Science, its Magic. If you can't explain it with Magic, its Magic you haven't learned yet.

Imagine if this game allowed players to select if their character was human, or non-human. And then one day a writer said that there was a third type of character that was neither human nor non-human, but beyond both. That would be a fanciful notion that also unfortunately pointed to functional illiteracy.

How do you know that. There appears to be no way to prove that yet, given that Wade hasn't actually revealed his entire plan yet, and may never within canon reveal all of the contingencies his plan contained.

To even begin to make the claim, you would have to demonstrate that at no time during the story line to date did anything surprise Wade, and at no time did he plan multiple contingencies that ended up being unnecessary. I would like to see such an attempt.

Unfortunately, this gets to the writing train-wreck that is *my* pet-peeve, which is that Origin of Powers asserts canonically that everything is magic. Super-science, natural ability, and even super-technology has as its origin magic, just a higher level magic than normal magic. The Well of the Furies is, in effect, hyper-magic.

But of course, whenever you want to talk about something inexplicable, something with no real explanation, something that defies the normal rules, its going to be magic. So if you're going to kill an incarnate, you're going to use magic. If you're going to absorb someone else's powers and become an incarnate, you're going to use magic. Although Incarnate power is supposed to be beyond the five origins, anything beyond Science is magic, even if its supposed to be "beyond magic" also.

Magic is not an equal peer to the other origins. Magic is still treated by the writers as the thing beyond the others, and Origin of Powers is a reflection of the fact that the writers don't understand that saying there's something that is the common origin of science, technology, mutation, natural training, and magic is nonsensical: everything beyond science technology, mutation, and natural training *is* magic. That's the definition of magic: that which science cannot explain.

Beyond a certain point, its always going to be magic rituals, because magic is the go-to process for rule-breaking power.

That's not a stalemate, that's how stores work. You buy what you want, and you don't buy what you don't want. There's nothing wrong with not wanting something, or alternatively not believing the price is worth it. There are things I haven't bought from the store, and its not necessarily because there's something wrong with me or something wrong with Paragon Studios.


Theoretically yes, but its probably more likely your computer will explode during the opening of those 500 packs.

To be more precise, a change needs a compelling reason in favor of it, and no compelling reasons against it, for it to happen. The combination of the two is necessary and sufficient for a change to make.

On a scale from one to ten, where five is what the current level of commentary likely deserves and eight is what I'd personally be leveling if I was a dev, Ghost Falcon's post scores a zero.

"Performance" as defined by this game's design parameters, refers to the rate of reward earning across all possible standard content rewards, from experience to influence to reward drops. A powerset combination is said to be underperforming within a certain circumstance if it earns less than a certain percentage of the average earning rate of all players within that same circumstance. The datamining that was done that showed Blasters underperformed showed that for every blaster powerset combination, at every level range from 1-10 to 41-50, across all teaming situations from being solo to being in small teams to being in full teams, their reward earning rates were consistently significantly below average. Blasters were the only archetype for which it could be said that *every* powerset combination underperformed.

It could not be said that any other archetype underperformed across all its powerset combinations, nor could it be said that any other archetype overperformed across all its powerset combinations outside the tolerable margin of performance.

I was told directly under other circumstances that Scrappers did not need help, they did not underperform under almost *any* circumstances.

Beyond that, you'll have to ask them yourself.


That's an interesting position to take, given your own "data" is even less reviewable.

Regen on a level 50 AV is around 90ish h/s. So debuffing regen is equivalent to doing an extra 90 dps. Anything that does more than 90dps damage than you will beat you with or without regen debuffs, all other things being equal.


Edit: that's net damage; net after resistance and defense of the AV. Anything with very high damage mitigation will magnify the benefit of -regen unless its also resistant to regen debuffs.

You wouldn't buy it unless it actually happened in reality, and then it would be obvious rather than unrealistic.

You don't know that. The same objection was leveled on the Joker in The Dark Knight: his plans seem to require omniscience. But actually, few people bothered to ask what would have happened if things *hadn't* gone according to the plan. The Joker absolutely *loves* chaos: if things had not gone to plan, he would have just changed his plan so that it did. What if he wasn't arrested and taken to the police station? Then he would have gone there and surrendered. He didn't actually have to *count* on being arrested: there were lots of ways he could have gotten there fully under his control. The fact that he got arrested was itself probably a glitch in his plan.

Same with Wade. Its not just possible but likely that his plan involves dozens or hundreds of contingencies mapped out over years, and for every one we see there's dozens that are just sitting around unused because it didn't go that way. That's what makes a good planner: someone who anticipates every possible alternative and creates a contingency for it. So that no matter what happens, it looks like that was what was anticipated all along.

Jeez I do that for my job and the stakes aren't nearly as high for me as "cosmic level superpowers." If that was the payoff at the end of any of my projects, I would have more contingencies than Wade.

See also: magician's force.

Its implied that she's keeping the psychic bomb in check, disabling her in any way can set off the bomb before her powers fail. The game mechanical objection isn't really valid in this case, but it also doesn't contradict how powers work in this game. I can construct a critter that does exactly what people are concerned Sister Psyche would do in this circumstance.

Some already do have analogous effects. Some critters have "death" triggered powers: Carnival of Shadows have their endurance draining psychic scream for example, which could be directly analogous to what is happening to Sister Psyche. Then there are powers that can suppress their own crash, but only so long as the player can cycle them. Rage, for example, has a crash that a component of it can be suppressed indefinitely, but if you stop cycling rage the crash then becomes inevitable - unless you die. If the psychic bomb was a form of crash, its entirely within the parameters of the game mechanics for Sister Psyche to be able to suppress that crash until she became unconscious or ran out of endurance, whereupon the crash would occur unless she was dead.

By definition, QoL purchases save time without otherwise increasing power. Technically, the alignment switch token does exactly that: it saves the time to make the switch, but it does so without granting any of the potential rewards you can accumulate as part of performing the switch in-game. The difference between offering the alignment switch token and offering instant leveling tokens is not just a matter of degree, they are fundamentally different offerings.

That's a false assumption. It presupposes that pacing is itself not an important part of making an overall entertaining experience. The badge system would be completely worthless to me and completely unentertaining to me if I could get all the badges in an hour. There would be no point, because the point of a system like that is to make something that requires enough effort to be meaningful, without making it require so much effort that its completely frustrating. And since everyone is different, there's no way to appeal to everyone with such a system. You have to pick a range, and anyone whose particular preferences fall outside that range will not be happy. But you cannot escape the fact that if you do not factor in pacing into the system, the system can fail to be entertaining even if every other aspect of it is designed well. Improper pacing alone can kill it.

If nothing else, I would factor in pacing as a necessary component of any content of similar nature as a coupled, not independent element to its entertainment value. So even if you think there's no logical reason to require such, it does not logically follow that its objectively true there's no logical reason. It may simply be that you don't see one, or don't recognize one as being valid when its presented.

The thrifty and discretionary don't have to buy them. The game lets them play as premium players with full control over what they decide to spend their money on, without eliminating their ability to play the core game. An option that did not exist prior to City of Heroes Freedom.

The thrifty, discretionary, and entitled are permanently and irrevocably out of luck.

Its worth noting that given what I know about the system, everyone who thought that "tagging" helped drops, to the point of being absolutely convinced of it and practiced it because they thought it got them better drops, were all actually slightly penalizing themselves and more importantly the entire rest of the team with that behavior due to the nature of the participation algorithm. If they did happen to get really good drops, it was entirely coincidental, but they still skewed the odds downward for everyone else by probably subtly reducing league participation scores in several ways.

Are you actually saying that the people who enjoy running trials and slotting out their characters are doing so incidentally? That even though such people exist, there is zero possibility that the end game was actually made for the people who would enjoy it but rather it was made to bore everyone else and only coincidentally entertain them?

Or are you instead assuming that the people who actually really enjoy the end game is an empty set.

What about the badge system? There are badges I've spent hours of playing time getting. Some I've spent *years* pursuing. Is the badge system explicitly designed to be non-entertaining as well, because its obviously true that anything that takes that much time and effort cannot possibly be entertaining?

Its kinda strange to me that I've often said this game is much more about the journey than the end because this game is really targeted at players who like *playing* the game, just for the sake of playing it, than for people who pursue an escalating series of rewards. And yet I'm now in a position to say the exact same thing with regard *to* the end game: that its designed to appeal to the people who actually like playing it. The rewards are a part of it, but they are only a weak incentive. You play a game of basketball with your friends because you like playing with them, but you still keep score. The rewards are a form of scorekeeping, but you aren't supposed to play it if you don't like it just to score points. There is no "but" after that sentence that contradicts it.

Honestly, I like running trials. Not all the time, but I do. And I like collecting incarnate rewards and making incarnate powers and using them. I don't think I'm being absurd to believe that maybe *that* was intentional, and the people who don't like it was accidental, rather than the other way around.

If you look at a narrow enough slice of do-content, you will always be able to find one that is smaller than the get-content associated with it. But that has nothing to do with what the devs development focus is.

Not only that, but independent testing also debunked that myth. People on both sides of the participation metric debate concluded that the magnitude of damage dealt had no effect on whether one satisfied the participation algorithm or increased the chances for a better drop.

I'm very certain "the public" would laugh that off, as they did every other lawsuit that got on the news claiming MMOs "forced" people to become addicts to them. I think when people are dropping dead while grinding in them, and contracting hitmen to take out rivals, and getting married in them and divorced over them, and "the public" yawns, claiming that superpacks are gambling for minors has about as much chance of becoming "a thing" as an asteroid impact in Texas has of wiping out the servers, except asteroids actually exist. The legal foundation for this argument doesn't.