Arcanaville

That's almost certainly a bug. I'd PM that one to Arbiter Hawk and Synapse.

I'm not surprised. He's suggested killing you off a couple times also.

It is never a good idea to allow broken things to remain in the game just because players like their side effects. If players like their side effects and its acceptable for those side effects to exist, the broken thing should be fixed and the side effects placed back into the game deliberately. It is never, ever, ever a good idea to let bugs accumulate by fiat just because they seem to be ok today. Even tolerating such bugs temporarily because they cost too much to fix at the time should be considered a temporary tactic at best.

Actually, if you are at level -1.5 Billion, you need negative XP to level up. I think you get that by rezzing a enemy.

I don't think supporters are necessarily naive, I think most of them believe those are acceptable casualties of war.

In any event, the two biggest problems with SOPA and its Senatorial analog are that it mandates specific technical remedies without understanding the consequences of them (the DNS issue was the most obvious) and by its supporters' own admission it invents a class of viable targets for law enforcement simply because they have trouble going after the actual infringers.

Another superhero MMO has those. Actually, that MMO has almost nothing *but* those.

That suggests the PPM is way too high. In-combat decay is 0.75/sec I believe, which means a 7 fury per proc ATIO must proc less than six times per minute or it will allow a brute to peg fury.

We don't know they don't. It may be that combat level is *stored* in a more compact datatype, but its the *printing* code that is written to recast everything into 32-bit integers for consistency purposes.

Unfortunately, while everyone can judge good writing objectively, they don't all judge it the same way.

When it came to tohit, defense, and accuracy, the devs didn't really know what they were doing.

To be honest, they were making it up as they went along. City of Heroes is practically unique among all MMOs before and since in its extremely cavalier foundational design decisions. No one would have the guts to make a game like City of Heroes deliberately today, because even with City of Heroes as a live example no one thinks it would work.

That's not to say that the devs didn't make deliberate decisions that worked out very well. The devs deliberately decided to create easily accessible travel powers because the devs felt that was fundamental to the superheroic genre, and that decision pays dividends to our players every single day, many of which play no other MMOs and have no idea just how amazing that is (and its better today than at launch). It was an explicit decision to separate what we look like from what we can do - i.e. eliminating nearly all appearance-altering gear. Seven years later that is still a rarity, but it works well for us.

But when it comes to how our powers work, and particularly how powersets were originally designed, and what effects we're allowed to have on critters, compared to most other MMOs our powers look like they were designed by a random number generator. And when it comes specifically to three things, the devs were literally guessing wildly. Those three things are accuracy and defense, passive regeneration, and recharge.

And the one thing they really didn't think about at all (not in the right way, anyway) that turned out to have the largest impact on the game? Cast times.


I will say this though: regeneration and healing seem to be a major blind spot with MMO designers; I believe because game designers tend not to have either a math or engineering background, and healing and regeneration require more than "D&D math" to make work. I'm playing a recently launched MMO which has *amazingly* complex formulas to describe how all of its stuff works, but I wonder if those formulas were just cobbled together because it takes nothing more complicated than a pencil and some long division to know that either healing is totally broken in that game, or the devs of that game decided that healers were supposed to be far more powerful than everything else just because.

Its always true. In every MMO I've played, healing classes and specifically healing classes are always ground zero for seeing where the game balance falls apart. Either they are worthless, or they are gods.

Ironically, except here.

I believe the OP was asking, in a colloquial fashion, to what degree do people feel an obligation to sacrifice some of their entertainment for the betterment of the game. And in that respect, the question is an edge variant of the tragedy of the commons scenario.

I can say this much: I don't feel *obligated* to do things like test the game, but I sometimes feel *compelled* to do so.

Apropros typo of the year.

And the colloquial sense is something that I don't think is specific enough for me to have a moral position on. If you ask me if I have a moral stance on being presented with the option to pay money for one or more prizes selected by random chance, I would say participating in such an offering or offering it to other people in and of itself connotes no moral question worthy of special recognition.

In general, I have ethical issues with deliberate deception with intent to defraud, but my definition of such is neither vague nor expansive, and no element of City of Heroes currently qualifies as such for me.

He never left. He's been freeloading off of my subscription dollars all this time.

This game's beta wasn't like most. I wasn't in it myself, but from what I know and have been told, it was a bit smaller than betas are now. Players were vastly less well informed then than now, so dissecting the game was not as much of an option then as now, even in modern betas. And the game changed radically from its original marketed alpha design to the beta design, and major changes happened just before the game launched.

There was very little extrapolatable history to complain about when this game launched. Not even the most well-informed players of beta knew 10% of what the most ignorant player knows today.

Let me put it this way: when the Confessor showed how SR could solo a ton of minions in beta, no one, not even the Confessor himself could fully and correctly explain what was going on there. Not even the devs themselves fully understood what was happening there, as evidenced by what happened next**. I would say its a true statement that no one in or out of the dev team could fully explain why SR could do that and yet why it didn't really matter until at least a year after launch.

When your playerbase and your dev team are, to put it directly, that completely ignorant of what the game even is, its much more difficult to generate a lot of energy about what the devs got wrong. We couldn't even specifically articulate what they got right.

Of course, some people were complaining right from the start. But over time, the characteristics of the complaints shifted over time as players became more knowledgeable and sophisticated, and as a consequence much more comfortable in being absolutely sure of their criticism, and much more capable of citing prior history to advance their criticism.


** They cut SR defenses in half just prior to launch, from maxing out at 60% to maxing out at 30%. Today, I don't have to explain what sort of effect that had, but back then it took several candid discussions with the devs to explain to them they cut the set right to the bone and made it totally worthless.

Colloquially, most people would probably call buying packs for a chance to get some random prize gambling. However, while the super packs meet that criteria colloquially, they do not meet the legal definition of gambling in any jurisdiction in the United States that I'm aware of.


As to my moral obligations to the devs and the other players of the game, the way I see this game is that contrary to the implication sometimes drawn from the phrase "in real life" I consider this game to be *in* real life. Every collection of pixels comprising a player character is being piloted by a real person. How I treat that avatar determines how I treat that person. I don't need special morals for that: I already knew how to treat people before I started playing this game, and seven years of playing this and other MMOs has yet to require me to modify any of those morals or add special modifiers to them.

The devs are professionals working for a company that produces a product I use. I already knew how to treat such people before I started playing City of Heroes. They are also professionals working in a subset of the information systems realm, albeit a highly specialized part of it. I also know how to treat such people specifically. I haven't really needed to rewrite the handbook on how to treat them either.

The fact that the company the devs work for is Paragon Studios instead of Apple Computer or Google or Microsoft, and the fact that the product is City of Heroes instead of fill in the blank here, has almost no relevance to how I treat my fellow players and how I treat the devs. And as to my commitment to the game where it comes to testing, suggesting, commenting, and contributing, that is solely a question of my desire and my ability to contribute to a game I personally like. I don't feel a moral obligation to the game in that sense beyond that.

As a "known" player, and as someone in a rather unique position in many ways I feel some obligation to be as helpful as possible, but I don't think I would consider that a "moral" obligation.

Technically speaking, you can't use a change to HOs as evidence that the devs don't balance around SOs. If they balance around SOs, they would then be less inclined to care as much about radical performance changes that occur in non-SOed builds when a bug is fixed. They would still be inclined to fix a bug regardless.

Or to put it simply, there aren't any SOed balance issues with fixing HOs, by definition.


I have some sympathy for min/maxers that used the HOs in this way and never read the forums or participated in any discussions with any other players aware of the public discussions surrounding the matter, if any such people actually exist, but for the rest of us we were all warned, multiple times, that this behavior was unintended and subject to change without warning. Doing it anyway in the face of such warnings because of an assumption that if enough people do it the devs won't change it is taking and automatically accepting a calculated risk. A calculated risk that in this case was not a good one in the long run. As recently as just over a year ago I publicly stated the odds of this bug being closed within the next two years were about two to three in favor. So my recommendation to other players was don't gamble with what you can't afford to lose.

Min/maxing in an MMO is not for the risk-averse. You are specifically playing in the area of the game most likely to see disruptive changes, and you're supposed to realize that fact when you min/max. The game changes constantly, and many changes alter how min/maxed builds function. There is no more sure thing in an MMO than that yesterdays min/maxed build is tomorrow's broken build.

Even the soft-cap itself was a disruptive min/max change**, and the devs began chipping at it (with things like Praetorian base tohit and increased use of tohit buffs) almost two years ago.


** When it was first introduced, some people complained that under the I7 system while low to moderate defense got stronger, powers like Elude actually got somewhat weaker: in some cases almost *50%* weaker.

It also would have been very difficult for a player to make claims that the devs never do anything right with a straight face, just a couple days after launch. History has to exist before it can be criticized.

Of course, that was then. MMOs that launch today have people criticizing the dev team from launch day, because every mistake they make from day one is further proof that they didn't learn anything from beta, or every other MMO that launched before them. We didn't really have that problem. We also didn't have to deal with people saying we were only copying WoW, or not doing things correctly like WoW, or somehow deal with the existence of WoW.

Its dirt-bias. Mess up the shape of the ocean, and that's fine. Mess up the shape of the land, and its a crime against humanity.

You specifically said:

This sounds to me, and probably most everyone else reading, as if you are making the case that since taunt offers an option that you wouldn't otherwise have in a specific aggro scenario, that justifies other people saying that taunt is, in effect, if not necessary than difficult to justify not taking. If that isn't the case you're making, I'm not sure why you would mention it specifically.

Here you seem to be making the case that every tanker primary has options that other primaries don't, so its ok if people take them. But I don't see you affording the same distinction to tauntless tankers vs taunt tankers. Are you saying you can make the case that every primary has valuable options the others lack, but no tauntless tanker could possibly have any valuable option a taunt tanker wouldn't make redundant? That seems to be a very high hurdle to achieve.

Slight tangent: in a sense, there isn't really any such thing anymore. Technically, you can cycle PA continuously, but there is no way to guarantee holding aggro when the PA refreshes because the current PA dismisses the old pets as it casts the new ones automatically. As a result, if the new ones don't attack instantly (and they don't always) the aggro from the old ones will dump to the controller by default. When tanking an offensively strong target, even a split second of aggro can be very hazardous.

The correct way to deal with that is to have the Phantasm cast its own decoy to cover the cutover, but if you just rely on luck its always possible for the Phantasm to be in the middle of recasting its decoy when the PA cuts over, and then you get shot in the face. The only way to *guarantee* never getting aggro is to watch the timing of the pets, and if you see you're in danger of falling into that gap, recast the Phantasm itself. One of the first things he'll tend to do is recast his decoy, so if you do this ten seconds ahead of PA expiry you can usually guarantee good aggro overlap.

In the days of *stacking* PA, Illusion controllers could basically hold aggro on a single target with zero threat. Nowadays, I haven't seen many Illusion controllers able to do that continuously. In fact I'm asked to do it so rarely these days that every so often I do something like go into Croatoa and practice holding aggro on the Jack/Eochai pair or set up an AE mission with a high AV just so I don't forget how to do it. In fact I *did* forget how to do this years ago on an STF (trying to tank LR with decoys) and that's when I realized I had to practice the timing every so often.

Based in part on the discussions surrounding the previous version, Arbiter Hawk changed the proc. If its currently set to grant 5 points of Fury for the rare version and 7 for the very rare version, that is what I believe Arbiter Hawk intended.

I am way behind on "looking" at it, so I don't have revised calculations for its net effect based on PPM, but it should be far better than the previous version regardless.

Incidentally, Arbiter Hawk also told me that the proc PPM is *supposed* to be working and works in his tests, so either we had an outstandingly out of date build or something else goofy is happening. People who observed the procs not working at all should retest with the current beta build carefully to see if they are working now, and post the results of tests that suggest procs with proc per minute ratings are not working.

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. I did say that scarcity was irrelevant (using those precise words) and if you are correct that people will stop using HOs, their price has to necessarily come down because players will stop buying them at the current high prices.

Its important to note that we as players only see execution prices, and every execution price is a statement by a player that the enhancement is worth that price. We never see offers to sell that don't execute. We only see offers to buy that do execute. If the rational course of action is not to use them, it will also be not to buy them, and those wanting to sell them will have to lower prices, or just not sell them at all.

To the best of my knowledge Mind Link was never stated to be *intended* to benefit from multiaspect HOs for recharge, but rather the more weaker statement that it was designed with the knowledge that it could be slotted in that way. Castle was not above conducting experiments to see what the playerbase reaction would be to novel circumstances, but he tended to be very restrained on what he would allow in that area in my experience. Mind Link comes from a period of time when Castle and the powers team were at their most experimental. The VEATs themselves were probably the largest experiment done under Castle.