Arcanaville

Yes and no. Mostly no.

I find it interesting that Dakan cited Warren Ellis, and Planetary in particular, as inspirations for his work on City of Heroes. In 2002, Planetary's conclusion was still almost a decade away, but I'm pretty certain The Four had already been introduced. While there is a core of optimism in Planetary (as there tends to be in all of Ellis' work) the way The Four is portrayed, and what they are allegories for, makes it an interesting counterpoint to Dakan's clear-cut black and white view of good vs evil. In many ways, the most evil thing The Four did was try to turn their world into our world: a mundane world where aliens and monsters and superpowers don't exist. To Snow, that is the ultimate sin.

1. You're responding to me, but I did not express the opinion that voice acting or performance capture performances were "lacking in validity." In fact, since I said the exact opposite, that would seem to be an odd error on your part, either in terms of quoting and responding to the wrong person, or failing to comprehend the person you are responding to.

2. What's more, I did not in any way discuss the tools or associated trappings of the performance as such in terms of whether they contribute or detract from a recognizable performance. What I was talking about was the fact that in most cases, voice actors contribute only a part of the character they portray, and a completely different artist or set of artists contribute a sizable converse percentage, and a similar statement can usually be made for performance capture actors. That's significantly different from things like makeup, because makeup itself is not a part of the dynamics of a performance: that's why there's a separate award for makeup.

3. As to your other specific examples of lighting, camera work, musical score, and editing, these things are far more obviously not specifically part of a character performance, and in all four cases as well there are technical awards for lighting, cinematography, cinematic musical score, and editing. They are so obviously irrelevant I can only assume you conflated expeditiousness and hastiness.

4. The specific technical reasons I was referring to in my reply to Lothic were within the context of the discussion we were having, which appears obvious in context simply by reading mine and Lothic's posts, that touch on whether the definitions of the awards themselves properly recognize that such performances were in fact valid performances worthy of recognition for the major performance awards. Lothic earlier implied he was against the notion that voice acting and performance capture was a radically different form of performance from conventional acting, because he seemed opposed to the belief that I implied so. However, he then seemed to suggest that it was the definitions of the awards themselves which failed to recognize the specific character of those performances, which suggest that he thinks they may be sufficiently different from conventional acting that the definitions of the awards doesn't do them justice.

I sought clarification, because if that's the case there's only two remedies for that: create special awards for those kinds of performances with its own definitions and parameters, or adjust the defintion of the current major performance awards to level the playing field between conventional acting and performance capture and voice acting. But that means taking into account the technical differences between the two kinds of performance, and somehow instructing voters to ignore them for purposes of awards.

It is those technical differences that I was referring to, which appears obvious within the content of the posts I suggested you reread carefully before responding in a manner that suggested a higher degree of confidence than seems advisable.

Only some, not all critters in iTrials have 64% base tohit. So this is a situational problem even in iTrials. I doubt the devs are going to make everything in Dark Astoria have Praetorian tohit.

If you are just solo street sweeping in DA, my guess is that soft-capped defenses, plus liberal use of inspirations, will probably be adequate although in the absence of aid self I would want a build with at least moderate to high levels of passive regeneration (or Destiny Rebirth as previously mentioned).

Another possibility would be to build towards Diamagnetic in Interface, which procs -tohit into your attacks.

Then I would recommend switching to Ion Core for Judgment, and Reactive Radial for Interface.

I would recommend reading the context of a post before quipping off of it.

That would seem to suggest that contrary to what you implied earlier, you yourself feel that voice acting and performance capture do contain a "black and white" distinction from conventional acting that can only be remedied by offering them a special category of award.

Because the alternative, to redefine the existing award in a way that is specifically designed to neutralize any advantage conventional performances may have simply by fiat, would itself be unfair. That would be asking voters to arbitrarily weight some performances higher than others for technical reasons having nothing to do with their evaluation of the performance itself.

Its even more complicated than that. I suspect that when we talk about "the database" we may be more accurate than some realize. I think the runtime game database is monolithic, or nearly so, which means the same basic code that stores things like my character's hat size is also storing things like entity properties in the live game.

I know there's a database that keeps track of various entities and spawns in the game, and their properties. I know that database is accessed whenever something like a GrantPower happens: that actually alters the entry for that critter or player in a live database.

The question is: is that ultimately the same database that would have to be queried to support the Vault, because there's only one? If so, then I know exactly why the Vault was scrapped. Consider the developers that wrote the Paragon Store, and then consider what would happen if Paragon were to contract out to a random third party developer to make the Vault, and consider what would happen if to make the Vault work they needed access to that sensitive runtime database. The one that keeps track of where we are and what powers we have at any given time. That database. The same database that, due to a tiny timing race condition involved in accessing it, caused Oil Slick Arrows to malfunction. Lets see what happens when the Vault randomly slows it down.

I think it would be unfair bias to disqualify voice acting and performance capture out of hand. I do not think its entirely arbitrary, however, to consider conventional performances to have, for lack of a better way of putting it, "more bandwidth" to the viewer, and that they therefore deliver more content to the viewer: this then places the onus on the voice or performance actor to deliver a far stronger performance within their remaining channel in order to overcome that disadvantage.

The farther away the better. What I did in my house was to replace my older 2.4ghz cordless phones with 5ghz phones. That way they were not broadcasting in the same channels at all (and I don't have 802.11a in my house which uses that band). Alternatively, you could upgrade all your 802.11n gear so that it supports the 5ghz band and switch to those channels, which tend to be much less congested and have better useable bandwidth.

Testing with a temporary wired connnected as has been recommended would also serve to rule out any other issues with internet service itself and focus attention specifically on the wireless connection (or alternatively suggest a more permanent wired option as the long term solution).

You might also have a neighborhood source of interference. Testing with a wired connection as has been recommended would be fairly definitive that the problem is the wireless and not the internet connection itself.

I assumed you were thinking about it, because you were looking at taking Ion Radial instead of Ion Core (drain vs more damage).

Prior to Defiance 2.0, I probably would have gone Clarion. But my main's build has a lot of recharge, and being mezzed does not impair my ability to shoot my way out of it as much as it might the average blaster (I can cycle bolt and blast very fast). If I do need to break mez fast, its usually because I'm getting low on health, and the next thing I would be doing after popping Clarion is popping respites. I find it easier to pack a couple of emergency breaks and use Rebirth to mega-heal my way out of trouble than to keep Clarion up as my mez protection and pack a lot of respites.

Of course, I have both (they are the only two I crafted for my blaster specifically: tier 4 Clarion and tier 4 Rebirth). But I use Rebirth a lot more. I can think of few blasters that couldn't make decent use of Rebirth. Maybe a Dark/Mental?

Which is consistent with what I said, which is that voice acting and performance capture are at a significant disadvantage, because they contribute only a part of the overall character performance that is being judged for the award.

There's no "black and white" distinction on the nature of the performances that I'm making or implying, unless you believe there's a black and white distinction between one and two.

(Of course, its not literally one vs two, that's just a simplification of the general statements I made separate from that).

That's actually pretty cool.




Incidentally, of all the original design features for City of Heroes, the one that I regret not seeing the most, by a wide margin, is this one:

I really wish we managed to get that one, although I'm fully aware of the fact it relies on getting the points system also, and that one was doomed for lack of sophisticated enough tools to implement.

Personally, I think Cryptic should have lifted this idea for their future games, because in my opinion its actually pure design genius.


And on the general subject of the thread, I think this is an interesting quote from Dakan on why City of Heroes didn't have a City of Villains in the first place:

You have to wonder, even when they decided to make CoV, were the CoV developers immune to this line of thought? Are the *current* developers immune to this line of thought when they write for villains? I'm not convinced they are.

When specifically did I do that?

Actually, it isn't.

First of all, its fairly well known, at least among people who followed the game, that the game was basically refactored completely during Alpha. It wasn't just a simple matter of them dropping or delaying some features, almost *none* of the original large-scale concepts survived to launch, because its pretty well established that the devs far overreached what they could deliver. It was when they blew their 2003 launch date that Jack basically began pushing for what they could launch, rather than attempt to build the original design of the game.

The original design of the game didn't just have an open powers system, it had called shots, it had a gear system (nothing like the invention system), it had mission computers - it had a huge amount of details that the launch game abandoned.

The most well-known was Jack's introduction of archetypes, which was sold as a way to simplify the game for the players, but it was also to simplify the game for the designers, because it was taking too long to implement a workable open system.

Nearly all of this refactoring took place in 2003 leading up to the 2004 launch. And when it occurred, power sets were significantly rushed: they were still being assembled during the beta. Even things like the Blaster manipulation secondaries were adjusted almost at the last minute. During that time, there was essentially no thought put into whether the sets would work for PvP, because there simply wasn't time.

Its worth noting that the original race to launch was so hectic, there was an actual disconnect between the programmers who implemented features and the powers designers who used them. Geko often mis-described how features worked, and Castle was still learning how some mechanics worked - and even that some even existed - in 2010, and I'm not even referencing Taunt. I have first hand knowledge of the fact that the powers team would sometimes tell me something completely different from the programming team as to how a power or mechanic worked in 2004, when we're talking about the original guys that originally built the things.

When PvP was actually added to the game, the devs admitted in many specific instances that they did not consider how rather large general features of the game would work in PvP, such as whether you could actually hit another player or not. As in no thought at all, prior to implementation.

Actually trying to prove the entire negative - that the devs *never* thought about PvP at any time during the implementation of the game is, of course, impossible. However, the burden of proof is on the people attempting to assert the opposite, because in every case where we have actual knowledge its been established that they did not, or if they did the thought they put into it was nonsensical.

The devs did consistently make a statement that was very telling if you understand the context. The devs often said, when PvP was first introduced, that it was "balanced for teams." That did *not* mean the devs sat down and designed the powers system so that it would allow for a specific PvP team diversity. What they meant - and the actually once said this - was that PvP was balanced around teams because whatever advantage one team had another could acquire with the appropriate team mates. When the devs said explicitly that "PvP is not balanced around 1v1, its balanced around teams" and you combine that with their statement on how it was balanced around teams, you can draw the conclusion that the devs didn't actually *do* anything prior to I3 to design the game for PvP.

One last thing. I asked someone back then how they decided on the correct amount of unresistable damage to give to blasters to balance PvP. What I was told was that the original value was a guess, and they would datamine testing to see if it was reasonable. The devs, in the early days, had a few design rules, but primarily they relied on datamining to tell them if their design was correct or not. There was no model or formula or spreadsheet or calculations to tell them how much regeneration was balanced - not even wrong calculations. No set of calculations to tell them how much offense balanced how much defense. Anyone who claims to be thinking about or designing for PvP has *something* - *anything* - to give them at least an educated guess as to where they should start. Prior to the arena being added, there was no such thing. And that's not a guess: if such a thing ever existed, no one has ever admitted to its existence.

By their own admission, the devs in the early days threw stuff on the wall and used datamining to see what stuck. If you believe the devs put any thought into how to implement the game for a reasonably fair PvP, you first have the contend with the fact that we know with certainty they didn't even do this for PvE.


This is something Cryptic itself *explicitly* attempted to correct when implementing Champions Online, with extremely mixed results. But the "master spreadsheet" of powers that they built for CO that is supposed to guide them in how all the powers are interbalanced between each other is something they did then, because they did not want to repeat the error of not having it in City of Heroes.


Now if Xanatos thinks he has some information I lack which gives him a more accurate perspective than the one I have from among other things actually talking to the developers at the time I'd be happy to hear it.

On Electric/Electric, I would have to go with Spiritual Core Paragon unless you were going for a super-sapper drain build, in which case Agility Core Paragon might be an equally valid choice.


Worth noting: Alpha buffs Judgment effects. If you're going for Radial for the drain, Agility will buff it (or rather it should buff it by design: I haven't done this myself, but if it doesn't its a bug).


I believe Agility will also buff the drain portion of this as well.


Storm, as previously mentioned is a possibility. Another one if you're concerned about concept is Polar Lights. The darned things are almost invisible (at least they are for me), which makes it easy to integrate them into almost any concept.


Even with something like Electric that has heals, I think its a draw between Barrier and Rebirth. The sustained regen from Rebirth (+200% regen) is better than the sustained buff from Barrier (+5% def/res) but Barrier is extremely strong for at least 30 seconds of its duration (still +32.5% def/res).

Spiritual Alpha + Rebirth Radial is what keeps my Blaster alive in Lambdas when I find myself trying to solo a crate. And my MA/SR scrapper just loves that combination. You have a heal so it won't be quite as night and day, but that heal is not a fast heal like reconstruction: you'll probably still notice a radical benefit from Rebirth.

That's a half truth, made a quarter truth by being a statement made before City of Heroes was refactored into the game it is now. Its essentially talking about a different game that happened to share the same name as ours, made by a developer that did not factor into the final design of our version of the game**.


The truth is the devs always told themselves "one day, we'll add PvP" but they did absolutely nothing to ensure that the game could actually support it, either because they deliberately didn't bother, or because they didn't even realize you can't just trivially retrofit PvP into a game that isn't designed to support it.

In other words, the devs statements that they always intended to add PvP have as much value as dev statements that they always intended to move the corporate headquarters to the Sun.

The most accurate statement that can be made is that the original developers intended to *try* to add PvP at some future date. However, they had no idea what that would entail, or how they would go about doing it.

The arena concept is just the setting for PvP: there was exactly zero thought put into whether the powerset and archetypes had any chance of being viable in a PvP setting. The unequivocal evidence for this fact comes from the fact that the devs made many radical PvE-based balancing decisions leading up to launch with no regard for whether the original powersets were proper for PvP, or the altered versions were proper for PvP.




** The game Rick Dakan is talking about never saw the light of day. Here's his answer to another question:

That game, to the best of my knowledge, never existed. In many ways, the pre-Beta paper design of City of Heroes was the Battlecruiser of MMOs. It was a set of features that even a well-funded dev team with modern technology would have a hard time delivering in a coherent game today. People talk about wanting to see "City of Heroes 2" but I'd love to see City of Heroes 0. I'm just not sure any dev team in existence today could pull it off, anywhere.

Lots of things can potentially muck up a wireless connection. If you are experiencing sporatic slowdowns, I would recommend trying to change channels to see if that helps. You may have neighbors close by using wireless systems that are periodically clogging certain channels. When that happens, you'll still see a strong signal, but the channel itself will slow down due to contention or interference.

I've also seen things like 2.4Ghz cordless phones interfere with wifi routers, and even older microwave ovens. Changing channels may dodge the largest sources of interference in your area, if that is the source of the problem.

Fair enough. I have a tank specifically designed to team with your build:

As you can see, I've thought of everything. First of all, this build has significant complementary soft control. Second, to make sure you don't aggro too many things too quickly this build's maximum movement speed is 1.4 mph. Don't worry, I have teleport foe to deal with runners. I also have recall friend if you get too far ahead. Also, if things get too rough I have invisibility and phase shift. And since you don't have phase shift, I have vengeance. I was a little worried my attacks would recharge too slowly to be able to continuously attack, so I made sure to have a very well slotted brawl.

That's true, but rather than suggest this proves the academy believes performance capture is not legitimate, it suggests instead that performance capture requires a similar level of transcending performance as John Hurt.

Benjamin Button is an exception, in that a significant percentage of Brad Pitt's performance occurs with minimal makeup or digital effects, so the elements of his performance enhanced by technology can be seen in the context of his more "raw" performance without it. That frame of reference doesnt exist for performances such as Sirkis' performance in Rise.

Its important to remember that the Academy likes what it likes, and it does things often for motivations other than pure merit. You could argue that the Academy doesn't take performance capture seriously, or you could also argue that even if Sirkis was in an incredibly sophisticated set of makeup and there were no digital effects at all, there was still a good chance he'd have been snubbed simply because that isn't the sort of performance the Academy tends to recognize regardless.

In both motion capture and voice acting there is a performance that they can take full credit for, but the important point is that the character on screen that audiences see is a combination of that unique performance and a separate, supplemental performance.

Its simply a case of 2 > 1. A conventional actor gets a chance to deliver a visual and audio performance which combine to create a single character. A voice actor or motion capture performer gets, at best, to do one of those two. That puts them at a severe handicap, because in a sense they are only playing half the game. That doesn't mean they can't win, but it does mean the remaining performance has to deliver so much more than every other candidate actor's performance for which you have so much more material in general to judge.

The best actor award is technically the best performance by an actor (or actress), and "performances" are judged essentially as portrayals: the character on-screen the actor performed. With animated movies or motion capture, the actor is only responsible for a fraction of the total performance of any one character. And there's no category for best voice performance.

True, but you can't keep contributing to the team if you're dead, and Soul Transfer allows you to keep contributing knockback even if you find yourself somehow passed over for buffs and heals.

Also, Oppressive Gloom encourages you to move to the center of clusters of targets and cause them to either wander away or be catapulted. That should count for something.

Interestingly, it was always theoretically possible to do, but it was the realm of science fiction until relatively recently. I first became aware of the possibility when reading about the image processing techniques astronomers were going to use on Pluto in the early 90s.

Its still not quite as magical as television sometimes portrays, but on the other hand a lot of the limitations of the techniques are not physical, but limitations on processing power and refinement of technique. At least some of the "zoom in without pixelation" stuff in crime dramas is at least theoretically possible (sometimes referred to collectively as "super resolution"), and could one day be not science fiction. Given the advance in the technique to this point, its difficult to judge what is actually impossible and what is just not currently available.