Arcanaville

I recall being here. I might not be recalling the same me being here.

Also, Calabi-Yau spaces are energy constrained to the laws of physics: expansion has to occur in other spaces otherwise the expansion of the universe would radically alter the Plank constant, among other dramatic things, if I understand the theory correctly.

Conversely, by giving individual players so much power relative to most MMOs so that virtually everything can be soloed, they have made the game a little less team friendly, as many people have observed even in this thread that the same power strength that makes it possible for solo players to never need to call for help in content even in highly suboptimal builds also allows players to blitz content to such an extent it nullifies much of the feeling that you ever needed to be there in the first place.

Its easy to see the problems you care about and even easier to miss the ones that don't even seem like problems in other circumstances.

Of all the misconceptions and exaggerations that surround this particular issue, the most pernicious is the one that suggests that if only the game was optimized for solo players, the people who want to team could team anyway so that's the most inclusive position to take. This is just as false as the notion that people who want to solo can just multibox teamed content. It fails to acknowledge that this is not about teaming or soloing, but about the experiences the players achieve within those contexts. Teaming is not about having human beings control a few more percent of the pixels on the screen, or people wouldn't complain about being redundant on teams.

This is a problem without a solution: you can only be important on a team if it needs you, and it can only need you if failing to have you caused a negative outcome of some kind. You can pick a spot on the dial from A to B, but whatever spot you pick you will annoy a large number of people who will think your selection is obviously stupid.

Actually, not exactly. The original ATIO increased minion crit chance by one percentage point and the higher crit chance by two percentage points. Essentially equivalent to increasing the critical chance by 20%. It will now boost by 2 and 4 instead, an increase of 40%. As far as I know, the powers with an explicit 15% chance to crit are only going to be boosted by the higher value, it won't be increasing by six percentage points.

The crit bonus got higher, but it did not change the way it functioned.

You're using the word "space" in two senses: the colloquial sense and the physics sense. They are different. "Space" as it pertains to the universe and cosmology have a specific, if sometimes debatable definition. By definition "space" is all of the three dimensional space that exists. By definition there is no space outside of space, because any space outside of space would be just more space.

When cosmologists talk about expanding space, they are talking about the geometry of space. When space expands, points separated by a certain distance from each other get farther away. But the space doesn't have to expand into "more space." It has to expand into "something" if you want to think about it that way, but that something may not be anything like space as you know it.

When a balloon expands when you inflate it, the surface expands. But it doesn't expand into "more balloon" that was already there. The balloon itself got larger, and expanded "into" something that has nothing to do with the surface of the balloon itself. In the same sense, our three dimensional space can be expanding into a hypothetical fourth dimension, but that dimensional space would have nothing to do with our space. Its not a different kind of space we can just explore, any more than two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a balloon can just "go" into the third dimensional space their balloon universe is expanding into.

This may be a question with no answer, not even a satisfactory metaphysical answer. Imagine a simulation of a universe with thinking beings in it. Now imagine the simulation is actually not being computed in real time, but is a recording of the simulation that is being played back. Then ask how it can be that the entities in the simulation can experience the flow of time if they are just static recordings that don't and can't change.

Experience itself might be relative. Here, its relative to the playback machine. In the physical universe, experience may be relative to the arrow of time, even if the universe itself is a static general relativistic manifold. In other words, we only experience time moving forward because that's the way cause and effect function within the rules of the universe, even if those rules in a sense have already played out.

Notice how hard it is to even express these concepts without referring to time. Its actually possible that the question "why do we experience the passage of time if time doesn't really pass?" is a meaningless question, because it asks why we perceive the passage of time if time itself doesn't elapse. Time can't elapse: time is the structure by which events elapse.

Put it another way: you might be asking a question that is tantamount to asking this question: how can we move, if we don't move the empty space out of the way? That's nonsensical, because empty space isn't a thing that needs to be moved out of our way. Time itself may not be a thing that needs to itself have a temporal frame of reference. Events pass, but time does not pass. Time can be static, and be the fabric within which events are said to be ordered. That ordering equals cause and event, and within that relative frame of reference we experience time flowing in one direction, the same direction as cause and effect.


Of course, there is another point to consider. We may experience time moving in only one direction simply because its impossible to experience it moving in any other direction. Suppose right now time reversed direction for an indeterminant amount of events. Then reversed again and moved forward. We couldn't perceive that, because as time reversed our memories would unwind and erase: our memories are a cause and effect process embedded in the universe: reversing time reverses those processes. So we can't remember time going backward, we can only remember it going forward. This might be a completely independent way in which "why do we experience time going forward only" may be a meaningless question. Experience itself may be something that can only occur in one direction. We cannot remember the future, so we can only perceive the past, and that's why we only experience time progressing in one direction. Experiencing the future as it becomes now *is* the only experience that can exist, so we're biased by cause and effect to only see things going in one direction. Cause and effect prevent us from ever seeing it the other way.


Mind bogglingly, one final way to look at it is to imagine that all versions of ourselves from every moment in time exist, but are trapped in that one instant of time. Each version of us only knows its own past and only perceives that one instant in time. The experience of time could be an illusion. It could be that no version of ourselves ever experiences time. There are an infinite number of versions of us, each with a *memory* of experiencing time *up to that point* but that memory is itself a construct. We would be like images in a flipbook, each one convinced it is experiencing time flowing, each one trapped on a single page, no two connected by anything in particular except for being in the same book.

Also 50% less likely to end up completely locked out of your room, I would imagine.

You can easily boot Windows off of this and have plenty of space for stuff you want to go fast. I've been playing around with the 120GB version for caching and certain disk-intensive things, and I can say City of Heroes patches plenty fast. The cost is less than most gaming rigs' video cards.

I've thought about attempting to game the physics engine like that, but a simpler way to get a similar effect is to use a teleport foe effect with an effect fx that travels from the target to the teleport location, so it looks like the target moved quickly from the original spot to the targeted location.

Basically Shield charge in reverse.

"Catering to a solo-only playstyle" explicitly says the game should allow people who only wish to solo to have access to everything, it does not say the game must contain content that can only be played solo.

I haven't seen anyone brave enough and crazy enough to espouse the belief that the game should specifically contain only content that requires being solo to play it.

That's actually a good description of what *good* critter AI looks like. You only have so many CPU cycles to fake an AI for a critter, so the best AI systems use a few really stupid-simple rules for the critters that are specifically engineered to combine in interesting ways. The best AI makes the critter do the obvious thing 95% of the time, and 5% of the time do something strange but generally productive. It looks, to the average person, like the AI is normally doing the tactically straight forward, but occasionally trying to be creative.

Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. There are critters that "stand off" from the player and clearly even if they have no attacks they will not rush the player. But some player pets do the opposite: even if they have ranged attacks available they will rush the target, even though they have no melee attacks for which that might be a theoretical advantage.

I only know the parts of the critter AI I tested to death and discussed with the devs. There are other parts of the critter AI that I'm still not sure how they work. If I was allowed to work on one part of the game and clean it up and improve it, it would probably be critter AI. I suspect there are lots of ways to simultaneously make it burn less cycles and yet still be "smarter." Or rather, appear to be smarter even if the actual decision tree they employ is on the surface dumber. Before, the critters were too "smart" for their own good, thinking too much about what to do that they often didn't do anything.

Complicating matters is that its one thing to make a decision tree for attacks, but there are other powers besides attacks critters can use, and also movement preferences (stay at range, close to melee), and also other status effects they are otherwise supposed to obey (taunt, afraid, placate, etc). And these interact in sometimes odd ways. For example, there exists a pseudo mez state that doesn't exist as an actual state flag, but it exists as a behavior. I call it "oblivious" and it sometimes occurs when you first terrorize, then stun a critter. Sometimes, the combination causes a critter to almost act placated: they just walk away as if not aggroed and not terrorized, and also not stunned. I don't know how that happens, because mez states are boolean variables: yes or no. They can't "add" in the normal sense. But it happens.

1. Hover your mouse over the name of the power to see what your enhancement percentages are. Hover over an enhancement to see the set bonuses of all the enhancements of that set (i.e. if a single power had three crushings and three makos in it, hovering over any of the crushings would show which crushings you have slotted and what the set bonuses, are, hovering over any of the makos would show the same thing for the mako set in that power).

2. You have two interesting choices if you want to 5-slot Crushing Impact. If you drop Acc/Dmg/Rech from the power you end up with 41.29% acc, 96.25%dmg, 62.49% end and 44.14% rech. But remember the set bonuses of Crushing Impact include a 7% acc and 5% recharge, so that power is actually 48.29% acc, 96.25% dmg, 62.49% end 49.14% rech. That's already better than the 6-slot level 50 common IO slotting in every way except damage, and common slotting is only 97.94% after ED, a difference of 1.69%. And the acc bonus and rech bonus stack: doing this to two powers would make each have 55.29% acc and 54.14% recharge (compared to the 42.4% you get from slotting a single common level 50 IO).

Alternatively, if you have enough endurance you can drop Acc/Dmg/End instead. You end up with about identical end reduction (44.14% vs 42.4 for common - still higher actually) but you end up with a lot more recharge.


3. If you want to five slot, really want damage, and don't want to deal with procs, and don't want to buy purples, then another possibility is to take four Makos: all except for Acc/End/Rech and the damage proc, and then slot one Crushing Impact Dmg/End/Rech. You end up with 44.05% acc, 66.25% End and Rech, and 97.89% damage *and* a +3% damage set bonus, meaning the attack has a net damage enhancement of 100.89% (set bonuses are unaffected by ED, so you can always add them right onto the top of the ED-slotting net value).

This is in all respects better than common IO slotting and has a bit more net overall damage, including the set bonus.

Tony is asserting that some people believe the entire game must be accessible to someone who solos only, not that the entire game must contain nothing but solo-exclusive content.

Under that criteria, there are lots of people who believe either that the entire game should be accessible to solo-only players, or that all possible rewards must be accessible through content explicitly designed to be soloable.

If the critter has am 80 foot ranged attack and 60 foot ranged attack, and the 80 is recharging and the 60 is available, if the critter is standing 70 feet away it should move closer and use the 60. In the old days it would sometimes wait at 70 if it thought the 80 was coming back soon rather than move closer and use the 60.

I believe this was an attempt by the original designer to make the critters "smarter." To prevent sucking up CPU on the servers, the critters don't make constant decisions every 30th of a second. The only make decisions periodically unless forced to by a change in conditions (getting hit, for example). So if you have an 80' attack recharging and a 60' ready, it might be better to wait for the 80' and use it rather than pursue the target into range of the 60'. In fact, if the target is running away you could be pursuing longer than it would have taken to just wait and shoot. But this more complex behavior was itself prone to getting jammed or confused, and it had to be hard-coded so it relied on powers recharging at a particular range of rates. Outside of that sweet spot, faster recharge could confuse the AI.

The critters still think about range in terms of deciding whether to get into an optimal range for certain attacks, but they no longer try to *predict* what the best move will be in advance. You could say they are aware of range but have no memory of range.

I don't think so. The critters seem to do that for other odd reasons. If it was only the range thing, then critters with no melee attacks would hold to the range of their shortest range attack, but Phantasms which have no melee attacks and a ranged preference run right up to melee range and then use power blast, which is still odd.

My guess is that there's still another set of oddities within the part of critters' AI brain that controls why they run towards or away from targets that is also a bit squirrely.

It should be about 2.4% more slotted damage and 26.5% more slotted accuracy, endurance, and recharge. On top of that among its set bonuses are 7% more accuracy and 5% more recharge, so in fact recharge increased by 31.5 percentage points and accuracy by 33.5 percentage points.

What you might notice most is KO Blow recharging in 14.4 seconds instead of 17.6 seconds. That slotting shaved three seconds off of KO Blow's recharge, while costing nothing in damage, accuracy, or endurance (all also went up). Its not a huge gain of course, but its noticable and that's only the benefit of a single power being reslotted with a relatively inexpensive set.

Nope. If a critter has +100% accuracy, then they hit things without defense 95% of the time - 100%, but obeying the 95% ceiling. The best that defense can do is reduce that from 95% to 10%, which is a reduction of 89.5%. In other words, defense has a mitigation maximum in that circumstance of about 90%, comparable to the 90% resistance cap. In the old days, we could reduce 95% chance tohit down to 5%, which is an effective mitigation percentage of 94.7%. Defense used to be able to exceed the 90% mitigation ceiling. Now, from accuracy values of zero to +90%, defense has a 90% mitigation ceiling. Above +90% its a little lower than that due to saturation, but accuracy has to get really high for that to be a significant problem.

Tohit buffs, on the other hand, either have no effect (if you have so much defense you can keep the attacker at the floor) or bypass defense like its not there, exactly in the same way unresistable damage does. So tohit buffs are all around bad: they either do nothing, or they act like unresistable damage.



Vickys have high amounts of defense debuffs. And I've never been one-shotted by one. Not even on a blaster, and not even counting DoT.

Sure. In both cases actively enabling players to do either thing sets the precedent, correctly or falsely, that the devs support both. It creates openings for players to complain about any other aspect of that feature, or related features. If players discover workarounds, that doesn't change the fact that no one can legitimately use the existence of a workaround as proof the devs actually support the behavior.

They should be considered the compromises that have to exist in an imperfect world.

When the current difficulty sliders were being created, I was asked my opinion of them. I specifically asked what the intent of the sliders was. The answer, which I expected, was that they were intended to be QoL gameplay improvements. I told the devs explicitly that there would be players that said they were proof the devs approve of farming, because the sliders could be used for farming and made farming more convenient by eliminating the need for fillers. What I was told was that they knew that, but they were willing to accept the fact that some people thought that in order to add the feature for its intended purpose, which was to allow people to scale difficulty up and down to suit their playstyle. If it was used to optimize reward earning, that was a price they were willing to pay, not an intended feature. Conversely, they didn't think that using it in that way, while not intended, was a serious enough problem to warrant taking direct preventative action.

Upon thousands of such compromising design decisions is this game built upon. Sometimes, Positron is like Batman: he won't kill you, but he doesn't feel he has to save you either.

It wasn't fixed by having nothing fight at range, it was fixed by having the critters not dwell on range for any period of time. They should no longer care if a power will eventually become available at a given range.

Theoretically speaking, that resolves the problem of recharge confusing player pets. However, the devs might like it this way now, because they also suggested when the change was made that they were uncomfortable with pets being allowed to be recharge buffed indefinitely. The old school Cryptic rules said that was fine, but the modern design thinking says that pets are free damage with no actual activation time cost to the player. Allowing attack cycle times to increase without practical limit is actually a balance-sensitive issue because of that.

And it gets worse: we may have never actually *seen* what properly functioning pets buffed by recharge look like, because all this time buffing their recharge often confused them into not using their powers optimally. They would today be more likely to go even faster than before if allowed to be recharge buffed, which means in effect if the recharge immunity was removed, things like controllers and masterminds would likely be even stronger than before the recharge immunity was put into effect in the first place.

The game did get more solo-friendly over time, and it *also* added more teamed content over time. But this game never did specifically make any attempt to cater to players that wanted everything to be soloable. The guy running the show at launch didn't believe in that, and the current guys running the show don't believe that. They only believe most things should be soloable. They do not believe that precludes them from adding teamed content or rewards exclusive to teamed content.

Its not how it has to be, but it is how it always was and how it will always be. Of that I am absolutely certain. The devs will never stop adding QoL for solo players. They will never stop adding teamed content. They will never stop adding rewards exclusive to teamed content. They will sometimes eventually add solo ways to earn that originally exclusive to teamed content rewards, all the while they are adding more teamed exclusive rewards. This is never going to change, because the devs are not in the process of making up their minds whether the whole game should require teaming or the whole game should be soloable. They long ago made up their minds that most of the game should be soloable, and some of it can require teaming.

Its not my place to tell players not to fight to change that, but I have no problem saying that attempting to do so in either direction is a waste of time.

Of course its not resistable, but I'll be honest and double checked to be certain anyway when I was first thinking about Winter's Gift.

To make sure I don't forget cool commands like this, I tend to add them to POPMENU.

/auctionhouse and /vault are in there, as are commands like mypurchases and reloadgfx.

It undermines his point because unless you already agree with him anyway, saying in effect that all male objectification is irrelevant means you can't disprove his point: he's saying he's going to ignore all evidence which doesn't support his point. Which then makes all the examples in favor of his point fundamentally worthless.