Arcanaville

You'd be talking about a potentially very computationally intensive process, which means that one power could suck up a significant amount of the server cycles serving maps with swinging characters.

Another possibility is the player mission list is either a stack or a linked list, and something is improperly popping when the trial crashes, dropping everyone into a different mission than the original one when the bug occurs.

Another possibility is that there is some partial fail safe code on the instance server itself that is trying to recover from a trial problem, but that code cannot recover the trial and so it does the only thing it can and dumps everyone into a different instance instead.

Another possibility is someone did a bad thing and wrote their own hash algorithm to generate instance tags, and we're seeing the result of collisions under certain specific situations (it would not be the first time a programmer improperly tried to roll their own something, and that something turned out to be horribly bad).

Most likely, my experience tells me its none of the above.

Not always. Sometimes they are written by groups of people and edited by a panel. However, even when they are written by individual specialists, it often happens that a) their knowledge is actually flawed, but this only shows up when they are forced to attempt to write a textbook covering the entirety of their field rather than just the specific part they tend to work in, and b) sometimes their understanding is correct, but in the process of simplifying it for textbooks they start saying the wrong things.

The rocket one above is probably an example of B. The text book correctly laid out the formulas for rocket-propelled motion, and anyone sticking strictly to the formulas would always get the right answer. Then right there at the end the textbook writer's brain probably said "we need to say one more thing" and at that point a serious malfunction occurred.

The canonical example of A are textbooks on statistics. I don't know what they look like now, having no desire to audit statistics textbooks for all eternity, but back in my day they were prone to making the occasional serious error, not in calculation but in when it was reasonable to apply certain statistical formulas or methods. Which often happened when a statistical something was intended for some large problem for which the statistical method made sense, and the textbook writer reduced the scope of the problem to a simpler one that made the calculations simpler, but then invalidated the method.

Then a whole bunch of people graduate college thinking those methods actually work for real in those exact situations, and start doing improper things.

If you are literally spending cash, then it depends on how you buy points. The best case scenario is buying points $100 at a time and buying the superpacks 24 at a time, for a net $0.625 per pack, or 160 packs per $100.

Of course most people won't do that. $30 buys you 2640 points, which buys you 40 packs (a pack of 24, a pack of 12, and 4 singles) with 40 points left over, which would be about the effective price of the 24 pack if you bought the points a buck at a time.

This doesn't count the reward tokens you'd get for spending that money.

That's rather more descriptive than I think most people required.

You missed the

It could have been worse. I could have gotten here before Zwillinger.

But saying any more would be revealing a magician's trick. Z's no idiot, though, and sometimes what he does makes more sense if you assume he isn't.

Except its not. Even if you assert it should be scaled the same as any other resistance, it doesn't function as one. I did fairly conclusive analysis of the passives that determined that averaged across a wide range of situations:

1. The *average* value of the passives under combat conditions will likely be around 11%.

2. The damage mitigation strength of the passives will be only 3%.

3. The protective value of the passives will be equivalent to static resistances of about 26%.

Increasing the equations for the passives by 33% for tankers would actually change each of those numbers differently. Given their mechanics, its unclear *what* the equivalent scaling factor actually is supposed to be.

The other thing is that it is an exotic mechanic designed to simulate a special environment. It could be refactored into a different mechanic that was not resistance: scaling health for example. Doing so would only make the math uglier, but it would transform the feature from a mechanic that typically scales (resistance) into one that typically does not (+health).

Are you saying that as far as you're concerned, because its mechanically a resistance it should scale? Because that would mean that changing it to a health manipulation would eliminate your objection: you would then be compelled to state it should not scale at all, because those are the rules.



While we are at it, would you like to have all ranged attacks obey the ranged damage modifier, which is the explicit rule that is often violated for melee archetypes?

This was also a matter of technology and politics, but not Science. Its more correct that this was a battle of competing approaches and not competing theories, combined with the fact that astronomers have traditionally been highly parochial in the past.


A lot of controversy could have been excused up to about the 1940s. But after that point, its pretty clear to me that this was another example of Plankian advance: the old geologists had to die first. Incredibly, when I was in high school an older text book on geology claimed continental drift was a controversial and unproven scientific conjecture - in 1983 (the text dated from 1979). At that point, its clear some scientists were acting like they had a bet against continental drift.

Incidentally, I used to collect old text books with odds statements in them. I have one from 1967 - just two years before the Apollo moon landing and years after the first manned space flight - that claimed rockets moved forward because their exhaust pushed them forward, and when the rocket reached the same speed as the exhaust moving backward the rocket would no longer accelerate forward because the exhaust would leave the back of the rocket standing still.

But that's more of an indictment of textbook writers often being idiots.

Well, see, what's happening is... uh... hmm.

Now that you mention it, that is really f-ed up there.

Yes, and activating it causes you to automatically push the green button.

Because the animation rig doesn't support conjoined people.

All I know is the Paragon Store is clearly making enough money to supply blasters with fireballs again.

As an archetype, Blasters do.

Why would you attempt to convince anyone of this fact by transmitting a random set of bits which have no intrinsic meaning?

The specific message was a long series of ones and zeros expressed in base eleven which contained a total number of digits equal to the product of two large roughly equal primes. Rendering that message in a grid generated a circle encoded in the digits. The odds of such a message given reasonable estimates for how large those primes are implied to be would be astronomical.

It echoes the original story where Ellie encounters a radio signal which at first appears to contain just a small signal, and then hidden in the signal was a digital signal which contained a video of a television broadcast from Earth echoed back, and then within the phase of the signal was another signal which contained a set of bits that contained a number of bits equal to the product of two primes, which when arranged in a plane generated the machine blueprint.

The whole point was devising something that a scientist would consider something beyond the ability for science to explain, something that even when you factor in Clarke's law, still seems beyond science and technology. Encoding a message in PI qualifies. Its definitely beyond anything we can remotely extrapolate from our understanding of science and mathematics, but that's the point. Whether its actually impossible for an intelligence far beyond ours is an unanswerable question by definition for us.

Possibility number three is that you just aren't smart enough to understand how its possible to change the laws of mathematics.

Its really a test of faith. If you don't believe the alien, there's no point in looking. If you do, you'll have to look far: the aliens themselves have the sort of computing power to allow them to look so much farther in the digits of pi that you'd be spending generations looking, possibly without finding anything.

Incidentally, at the end of the story Ellie's search in pi turns up an oddity: trillions of digits into pi when expressed in base eleven there's a string of nothing but ones and zeros. Written out in a square grid, the 1s form the picture of a perfect circle. Essentially the signature of the artist: the understanding is that it confirms the idea that there are messages encoded in pi, and the search isn't for nothing.


We assume the axioms of mathematics are the only logical ones that can exist, but Godel proved that there are an infinite number of possible sets of base axioms for mathematics, and not all of them are guaranteed to generate the same conclusions. We assume most of the rest are nonsensical because they conflict with our common sense, but our common sense is informed by only a tiny subset of the functioning of the current universe.

You assume its impossible to encode a message in pi in the same way someone can assume its impossible for parallel lines to meet. It defies the definition of "parallel" but then we live in a universe where the notion of parallel behaves a certain way within the limits of our senses. Suppose we lived in a hyperbolic universe where its impossible to construct parallel lines, even on small scales, that obey our current understanding of parallel. Then we'd probably invent one of the non-Euclidean geometries in which parallel lines do meet, and we'd consider it nonsensical to consider geometries in which that is not true.

If nothing else, a hypothetical creator of the universe could have worked in reverse: they could have created a universe that happens to be specifically Euclidean, and one in which the value of PI has specific meaning, because the constant PI in Euclidean geometry just happened to encode the message they desired. If it didn't, but some other value did, they could have redesigned the universe to promote the invention of a different kind of mathematical system which happened to include that specific value as an important constant.

For any given message, there is a transcendental value that encodes it somewhere. A sufficiently intelligent being could find it and then ensure it becomes an important constant in the mathematical system that intelligent beings are bound to construct, within a universe that promotes that specific system. That is certainly not impossible.

Its not a game for extroverts either.

Its always been a game mostly for people without extreme demands or requirements; specifically for people willing to accept the devs will strive to compromise between different player types that want different experiences, including experiences that exclude your preferences specifically, and in a way impossible to work around.

To put it more simply and more bluntly, this game has always been for people who want X and are willing to wait, its explicitly not for people who absolutely cannot stand Y and refuse to play any game with Y. If you are the type of person who draws lines in the sand, the devs will eventually walk right over it, its only a matter of time. In doing so, they will be adding something someone else really wanted, and given a choice between giving some players what they want or avoiding adding things others can't stand, the former almost always win over the latter.

I cannot think of very many instances where the reverse was true, from launch to now.

Both.

The fact that MMOs are directing more resources towards improving their solo player and small-team player experiences is not tantamount to saying they are moving away from actually *having* large-scale content. Because as I said, they already have it. When they start eliminating it completely, then your point would be supported by the facts exclusive of the more simpler and logical conclusion, which is that most MMOs are softening their teaming requirements. To focus on one thing is not to specifically repudiate the other things.

This false dichotomy also plagues the playerbase in other ways. Making content for level 30-39 is obvious evidence the devs are abandoning the higher levels. And the lower levels. Incarnate trials are obvious evidence the devs are abandoning the standard game (even though the evidence is overwhelmingly the opposite). The Praetorian storyline is obvious evidence that the devs are abandoning everything except Praetorians. The store items are obvious evidence that the devs are abandoning the base subscription game.

The threshold of evidence a lot of people is lower than rational functionality mandates as a minimum, actually.

Also, a game that traditionally had no large-team content may have less people that enjoy it, but that would be irrelevant to the question of whether that means there's an appropriate amount of it. It is also equally logical to state that its obviously true any game with very little such content would be underserving the players that enjoy it.

In both cases, your point is that your conclusions are obvious given the facts, but they fail to distinguish themselves from equally likely and much simpler and direct conclusions. They require inventing motivation that cannot be discerned from the evidence.

Yes, I'm sure you would. The story itself specifically makes the point that there will be people who would say exactly that, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. That's sort of the point of the story.

Strangely enough, the initial message could be interpreted that way.

Hold that thought.


I don't think on average SR needs to be *buffed* in the sense of having its overall performance improved. I think its weak in some areas - too many, probably - but also very strong in others. When we're talking about leveling and SO performance, you can get away with that: it tends to average out and the lows aren't too low when you're dealing with what people normally deal with in SO builds. But when we get to the higher level builds and the end game, what SR lacks more than anything else I believe are *options*. I mentioned this when ED went in, and when the invention system went in. Being (almost) all defense doesn't just make SR's defenses one-dimensional. It eliminated options for reslotting under ED. It limits options for slotting invention sets. It keep winnowing down options until the only thing you can do is soft-cap, take tough, and get as much regen as you can. Its no coincidence that all high end SR builds seem to be soft-capped with tough and a lot of regen: there's nothing else you can do: the only option seems to be whether to take aid self or not.

And SR tends to burn a lot of slots besides, which means even if you were to add slotting options, most SRs would have only limited ability to take advantage of them.

You can make SR stronger: add +health or regen somewhere, for example. But I think the real problem, one that would require a set redesign that is not going to be forthcoming, is that it lacks options. More than any other defensive secondary, its build choices are extremely constrained if you are building for performance of any kind.


You could say that other sets have the same problem: the best option tends to be a singular one: soft cap the set. But that belies the fact that soft-capping non-defensive sets is huge: they essentially get to wrap Elude around their already strong defenses. But when a defense set soft-caps, they are only increasing their already strong defenses by a much smaller amount. Soft cap Willpower and you reduce incoming damage by a factor of ten *and* you also have Willpower itself. Soft cap SR and you reduce incoming damage by something like a factor of 3 to 4, and that's basically all you have. Everything else has other options, and they also get to have the best option defensive sets especially SR have.


But as I said, I don't think this is fixable without the kind of radical changes the devs frown upon when they don't think they are necessary.

Actually, because stalkers tend to lack AoEs which can temporarily break terrorize, the terrorize in demoralize is much more effective at preventing running on a stalker than it might be on a scrapper.

The lack of AoEs might also reduce the inducement to run, so while Stalkers may not have more tools to deal with it, they might cause it to happen less often. One component of the fleeing behavior seems to be tied to how many of a critter's friends are defeated in a span of time. AoEs tend to kill more things at once, while single target attacks tend to reduce the kill per second rate.

Personally, I think its less that Stalkers can stop runners and more that they tend by mechanical design to generate less runners. They also tend to fight less numbers of targets specifically because there is little advantage to fighting large numbers when you have no AoE or taunt auras to aggregate them.