Arcanaville

The problem is that Real Numbers knows two things: it knows the *raw* effect of each buff affecting you, and it knows what the final effect is. But it actually isn't Real Numbers' fault entirely that the sum of your buffs isn't always the total buff, particularly in PvP where DR reduces totals only, so there's no way to report diminished individual buffs separately. There is no "separately" to report, except the raw values. It doesn't always handle resistances correctly either.

Basically, you can only add up buffs in Real Numbers when you are actually allowed to add up buffs at all. Sometimes you're not, but Real Numbers has no obvious way to warn players that you're in a situation where adding up doesn't work, but also doesn't want to simply blank out the intermediate numbers and deny players that information, out of context though it may be.

Except they do that deliberately. For them, that is "properly functioning."

I never said numerically constrained performance (what most people mean when they talk about a "balanced" game) was essential to the long term health of an MMO, or that virtually everyone believes this (actually most MMO developers do not believe that one). In fact, when this topic has come up in other contexts I'm quick to point out that game balance as this game defines balance is essential to the long term health of this game because and only because so much of the design of the game and its reward systems is based on and built upon those balance definitions. Breaking those rules would spin the rest of the design into chaos. But those rules are not specifically important to all possible ways this game could have been constructed. In fact, the less the reward system interacts with something the less constrained its required to be. If this game backloaded most of its rewards and experience into task completion and not combat, wildly unbalanced combat would not have a major impact on the game, for example. Alternatively, if you disconnect rewards entirely from the normal combat system and made a sandbox-like game instead, obviously numerical balance would be less important than opportunity-balance: making sure all options were equally desirable in terms of play mechanics than in terms of defeat potential.

City of Heroes is so good because it gives us travel powers from the start, unlike ... it gives us travel powers from the start, unlike what we used to have when City of Heroes launched.

City of Heroes is so good because its so much better than what City of Heroes used to be. And even then, it was good because it did unique things that ... were ... just like City of Heroes.

Yeah. City of Heroes. Its ... apparently incomparable. Its ... a game played by mammals. And really, what more needs to be said than that.

Actually, while I've had a problem with villain content for as long as villain content has existed, the one area I cut the devs some slack on is co-op content. Co-op content by its very nature has to involve goals where the two factions' interests overlap, at least nominally. And that tends to be "common enemy" interests: they may not like each other, but they decide to hate someone else even more.

The devs aren't going to make "co-op" missions where the villains have an option to defect or betray the hero side: that nullifies the co-op nature of the mission. Players who cannot conceive of villains ever working with heroes should simply avoid - voluntarily and of their own accord - co-op missions with heroes.

In this game, I think its a reasonable concession to state that villains can be villains except where the victims of their villainy are other players. Just like the heroes are not allowed at the end of co-op content to arrest and imprison their fellow red-side players against their will. Their desire to be heroes ends at the feet of villain players except in designated PvP zones.

Its specifically when other players are not involved on the opposite side that I think the devs should be far more expansive on writing for more generalized villainy. There's nothing wrong with roleplaying villainy when the victims are pixels. Only when those pixels are controlled by another player do I have concerns.

Also, I can't really pass this up without mentioning the fact that the level 30 store for Natural is hidden in a tunnel in FF, which makes it kinda difficult to stumble across in the days before it was on the map, and at launch the tech store (Mark IV) used to be surrounded by high level Crey spawns, so you could be killed trying to buy enhancements.

The best part about Mark IV being totally surrounded by Crey? He's supposedly on the run from Crey.

The "optimum" strategy for using converters depends greatly on what becomes common practice once they launch. If I was the only one doing it, the optimum strategy I can think of produces hundreds of millions of inf in value per converter token on average. But I doubt that's likely in actual fact unless all the marketeers besides me get hit by a truck before they launch.

I am instead taking the stand by strategy of simply making sure to put myself into the position of never being without the enhancement I want to make a build for the foreseeable future. That I can do today, without worrying about what anyone else does, and before the converters launch. And if I make a few billion besides after they launch, that's gravy. If I have all the enhancements I could ever want for all my alts, I'm not sure what I would use the influence for anyway.

And by today, I mean I've been doing it for months.

Like sniping the chorus in There's Something About Mary? Sounds like an interesting AE exercise.





This will be the six thousandth time I have destroyed a villain's self-worth, and I have become exceedingly efficient at it.

It tricked many people into trying to keep them green or white, and buying SOs to combine to get out of -1 at any time before 45 was guaranteed to slam you into the poor house indefinitely.

And you needed the cash, and at launch if you calculated the amount of influence you got for the amount of XP you got for doing different activities, you discovered that unless you were in debt a lot or did certain influence farming activities (like farming blinkies) it was almost mathematically impossible to have enough influence to keep SOs in the green below the late 30s. It was in the late 30s that influence caught up with XP and overtook it, and players were earning influence faster than they could outlevel their enhancements.

As I said, I sold *everything* (I would exit missions to go sell TOs) and I was a blaster which means I was in debt all the time. And I *barely* had enough influence to keep myself in SOs until about 38. Unless you farmed blinkies or transferred influence from an alt (and there was no way to email yourself influence back then: you had to transfer through helpful intermediaries or friends) its essentially impossible that any launch character could have had more influence than me per level, and it was very hard for me.

And the whole enhancements degrade over three levels, but SOs are sold every five levels thing didn't help at all.

Actually, I don't care if the narrator disapproves, if the narrator isn't a proxy for *me*. If the story is written so that the narrative voice says "and this is how Arcana became the most hated villain in the Rogue Isles" and my character's inner voice said "yehaw, AMF" then that would be fine. The problem is that the narrative voice is me, saying "and now I'm a villain. I no longer have a soul, but I guess I won't be needing that anymore anyway."

They remind me of the pyrrhic victory song of Dr. Horrible. I actually find myself hating myself for running the mission. Excellent job writing if that was the goal. Was that the goal?

Because City of Heroes was the first MMO I played for more than a short time, all my core values come from City of Heroes. To be precise, they come from the *launch condition* of City of Heroes, which is not the game we play now. One thing I learned: take everything, sell everything, money is tight. Because it used to be. So I play all MMOs that way: I take, I sell. I see a resource off in the distance, I divert course, pick it up, and continue on. I plot a course on my map that takes me towards distant missions, then head back towards hubs so that if at any time my inventory gets full, it gets full as I'm heading back anyway, and I can go sell and come back quicker than if I got full far away.

I haven't had a single cash issue in TOR, or any other MMO I've ever played. Because I grew up when times was tough, and we was poor, and I will stop and pick up a nickle in an MMO. My main alt in TOR is 38, has her starship all tier 3, has *two* speeders (I liked the appearance of a different one after buying the first one), and has advanced crew skills into around 300 in all three by doing the craft/reverse/craft thing. I've never been short buying up my skills, repairing gear, or buying necessities. *And* I have something north of 150k inf without marketeering.

That's what picking up nickles and dimes does. But if you don't do that or spend money on silly things? You will probably run out of money in any MMO you play.

Except this one, actually. In my experience, this game had one of the stingiest reward systems at launch, and has one of the loosest reward systems today. You couldn't buy SOs in this game unless you were the miserliest player and perpetually debt-capped (go blasters) at launch. You can't go broke today without setting all your money on fire or try to build a billion inf invention build.

Except the game you reference has the minor details but is missing most of the major ones. How many body types? How many hair styles? How many faces? How far from human-with-funny-forehead can you get? If you clothe yourself the way you want, do you end up gimped?

If you consider the customization there "dangerous" then we're the cold-blooded assassins of character customization. Yeah, I can't change my eye color. I can make them glow, sparkle, emit gaseous vapors, twinkle, or cover them with a mask, shroud, helmet, or not have any face at all. Can't change eye color, though.

Even if this were true, this contradicts your statement that "Praetoria is pretty close to that." You're now explaining why Praetoria couldn't be close to that.


I don't quite see it that way. From the very beginning and all the way up to launch the devs described Praetoria as a morally grey world. However, I don't think it ever really fulfilled that description. In fact, I believe the developers got cold feet when they realized the implications of a morally grey world would have consequences both within Praetoria and for the larger game. I don't think the writers *want* to do anything but good is good, evil is bad stories.

You see that most dramatically in the writing for the side switching morality missions. The writing is actually pretty good in them, but it portrays switching to the villain side as being hollow, empty, and ultimately meaningless. It doesn't just say that other people see it that way, the missions are scripted for the character themselves to feel that way, which in my opinion is abrogating their responsibility as writers to make a valid player gameplay choice entertaining. If you are going to allow players to switch sides, you should write that choice as being a good one, at least from the player's point of view if no other. If you can't bring yourself to do that, don't offer the choice.

It was obvious to me from day one that Praetoria was not going to be a morally grey place. They dipped their toes into the morally grey arena by making the good guys not so good, but the bad guys are still extremely obviously bad. And not just because I say so, but because the writing itself says so. The writing doesn't ask you if you want to be part of the glorious rebuilding and greatness of Praetoria or a part of the valiant heroic struggle for freedom. Instead it asks you if you want to be a terrorist or a scumbag, and oh yeah by the way the terrorists are the good guys.

I'm not as violently opposed to Praetoria being the setting for the incarnate trials as some other players are, but I will say this: the moment I found out that was going to happen, I knew the devs had either written off Praetoria's potential for being a grey morality area, or they had painted themselves into a corner and would be forced to abandon it. Because if Tyrant aka Cole was going to be the ultimate incarnate threat, the game has declared a winner in Praetoria. The Praetorians lose, the Resistance wins. It declares who the bad guys are: the ones opposed to Cole are ultimately the good guys. That's unavoidable. And because we know there's going to be a winner and a loser, and a good guy and a bad guy, Praetoria cannot be the setting for a morally grey area of the game.


Praetoria wasn't really originally a place, or a setting. It was a street address where the Legion of Doom came from, that's all. City of Villains didn't supercede it, because I don't think there was a Praetoria to supercede back then. City of Villains was supposed to allow us to play as villains. But I don't think the writers had the guts to pull the trigger on that all the way. They did not want to allow villains to win, even in all the ways villains can win in an MMO setting. Granted this is not as easy as writing for heroes, but that's not the point: I don't think they really tried. They tried to shoehorn villains into hero mission templates. That's not me talking today: that's what I said during the beta, using those exact words (I specifically remember the phrase "hero mission templates.")


If I could give a command to the writers that write villain content, it would be this: stop trying to write what you think is the best villain *story*. Stop thinking about drama, or the struggle between good and evil, or the nature of evil, or the proactive nature of evil, or the characterization of villainy. Stop thinking about what you think villainy is for a second.

Now write a red side mission in which your one and only goal is to make the player feel good about being a villain. Really, really good. Lick your lips good. Whatever you're going to write, whether its kicking puppies or destroying cities, only do it if you can make the player feel good about it. You don't have to feel good about it, your feelings are not relevant here. Make the player feel good about it, unequivocally, with no hedge, no oh yeah but, no lingering remorse, no subtle regret. Just yehaw, I'm evil, AMF.

If you can't do that, if its not in you to do that, don't write for the red side. Trade with someone who can.

Unfortunately, we're always going to have to deal with that last five percent.

You could forget to always win.

Also true, but its also true that the critters rarely form a nice conga line and attack you continuously. I often use Aid Self to top off health at the end of one fight and before the next. While its true AS has a cast time of 4.33 seconds, it only roots for about one. You can fire it off, and then still run to the next spawn without it significantly impairing your kill speed.

Starting off at full health more often means less need to manage health during the fight, less need to pop inspirations, and less need to periodically use rest.

There's also the question of what I gave up to get Aid Self, and in my case that was not all that much. I have a basically full attack chain missing only Thunder Kick and Crane Kick, I have every SR power except Elude, and honestly since I wasn't going to go all out on perma-Hasten, I didn't really care as much about taking Hasten either.

*And* even if I never used them, they (aid other and aid self) are good set mules for Numinas which gets me a little more max health and regeneration, so even when I don't activate them, they are still passively helping out.

It was really the combination of having the power around for emergencies *plus* the fact they made good set mules for the concept I wanted (high regen SR) that was the deciding factor, not just the "aid self for max survivability" argument. Alone, that wouldn't be enough for me.

Except we're playing on the wrong side.

I assume Bill's talking about the Return to Battle veteran power which rezzes you and simultaneously grants you all the large insps, similar to what you get when you level. Its a nifty rez, so long as you don't die more than once every hour or so.

The fact that it adheres to the MMO norm of appearance being tied to functional gear (except for certain exceptions like helmets) makes its appearance customization options not directly competitive to City of Heroes, where people specifically want appearance options that are free from performance constraints.


This was touched on in another thread recently, but I would say that what is great about this game that isn't remotely common elsewhere, is:

1. Appearance largely independent of performance. What you look like is normally not constrained by what you can do, or how you perform. You do not have the "silly hat problem" (on the one hand, the hat looks silly, on the other hand it increases my armor class by 20, decisions decisions).

2. Nearly unlimited travel. We can go anywhere and everywhere, and relatively fast, and relatively soon. This is not just a convenience for players to get to where they want to go quickly, it also strongly contributes to our ability to team impromptu with each other no matter where we are and what we're doing at that moment.

3. Global chat. We have the best ability to chat with each other in-game, in zones, across servers, and across the entire game.

4. Extremely casual friendly PvE experience. You actually have to work hard to fail continuously at most of the PvE content. We're balanced to be able to take almost all of it on. And when we're not, we have few restrictions on the amount of help we can bring to bear: temp powers, inspirations - all stackable, with essentially no global cooldown. You can make yourself indestructible and unstoppable for a few minutes, and the game is perfectly fine with that.

5. Teaming is rarely forced. Many games have a percentage of the content intended to be soloable, and a large fraction specifically intended to be handled by a group, and the developers tend to make sure you simply can't solo what's meant for a group. Here, 99% of the PvE content is designed to be soloable. Of the 1% that isn't designed to be soloable, more than half can be soloed anyway.

6. Huge legitimate diversity in player character functional design. We can be offensive juggernauts, literally indestructible tanks, massive pet wranglers, stealth ninjas, buffers, debuffers, you name it. You can make almost anything work, and even within the City of Heroes mainstream there are lots of options that wouldn't raise a single eyebrow. We aren't limited to the Tank/DPS/Healer trinity. Here, we have lots of damage sources, lots of aggro control sources, lots of buff/debuff sources. Its hard to be completely useless, and its hard to make a random team that can't make their assemblage of abilities work.

There are games where you can make all kinds of different things, but people tend not to because those different things are so suboptimal compared to the standard formulas most players adhere to. Here, you don't have to spec as a healer, or spec for maximum DPS, or spec for perfect damage mitigation. Just build, and you'll be ok. The margin for error is so high in our content that no one is even going to know you only have four slots in heal other rather than six. No one is going to care if you did not slot accelerate metabolism for endurance recovery.


Basically, for all that the exceptions are the things most commented on, you can look however you want, be whatever you want, go where ever you want, do whatever you want, and you can do it with whoever you want. That's crazy talk in conventional MMOs. Here, that's just a normal day.

Another recently released MMO takes this to all new heights of silly:

1-10: walk
10-25: jog
25-40: buy travel skill, separately buy travel vehicle, can't use everywhere, being hit while using it immediately detoggles it.
40+: spend even more money, add 10% more speed.

Best possible rate of travel through personal motion: about slotted sprint here. Degrees of freedom: moving horizontally, or falling to your death.

They essentially *have to* be able to do this specific thing (the auth servers themselves know if you're logged in or not). Its doing more than that which is problematic. Consider offline marketeering. Separate from whether the devs even want such a thing to be possible, its worth noting they killed the auction house interface in instanced maps - including bases - because it was causing undesirable load on the systems. That suggests exporting it to an out-of-band market client could be similarly problematic.

As far as I recall, it was out then. It wasn't very well known, however. But I do remember hoping that CoV was going to approach villains kind of like that. A mirror universe where the bad guys won. I still wish they had done that.

Right out of the gate, Regen is simpler to build around and gets effectively unlimited endurance (quick recovery) right from the start. And its probably a better single origin enhancement build (one that doesn't use inventions). Willpower takes longer to mature, but ends up being stronger for most invention build expenditures, particularly at level 50.

Either way, your biggest survival tool is actually a Katana power: Divine Avalanche aka Katana's version of Parry. Each time you hit someone with it, you get back a large amount of defense to lethal and melee attacks. Slotted and stacked (i.e. with the effect on you twice) you're at or near the defense soft-cap: the point at which defense has its maximum allowable effect - which is to cause critters to hit you only 10% as often as normal. Which, combined with the regeneration in either Regen or Willpower is going to make you virtually indestructible to anything that attacks you with attacks that are either melee attacks, lethal damage attacks**, or both. That's going to be more than half of all attacks sent your way.

Unlike most MMOs, here in City of Heroes we're allowed to have a lot of passive regeneration during combat: health recovery doesn't suppress. So while in many games its damage resistance that is the key survival trait, here its a different rule: mitigation times healing equals survival. You want the ability to recover health as much as possible, and you want to wrap that recovery in as much damage mitigation as possible, and the combination of the two keeps you alive here. So the Kat/Regen or Kat/Willpower combo is all about using Divine Avalanche to mitigate most attacks and then letting regeneration heal back the rest while in combat.

Having a lot of one thing is good, but having a significant amount of both mitigation and regeneration/healing is far, far better in the general case.


** Its a little more complex than that, but that's good enough for now.

I thought that would be because you're still dealing out street justice.

You know how people who grew up during the depression like to have a lot of cash on hand? Its like that. I already know high defense is going to work most of the time. Every other power is there because I only remember when it doesn't.