Arcanaville

Certainly, it saying nothing about the entire NCSoft corporation, or even its entire North American operations, or certainly about Paragon Studios who appears to have less than nothing to do with it. It certainly is no reflection on Zwill who can only pass on the bad news to us.

But that doesn't change my professional opinion on the situation.

If the discount is on the store prices and not on points purchased, then a 20% discount in the store essentially lets you buy 500 points of stuff. The break even point is at 440 points discounted = 550 points.

Not only is it still not universally better, but at some point the question becomes is it even possible to get it. We can ask for 50% off, or 90% off, but this is all fungible: you can't just give away whatever you want.

Points are frontloaded. Every tier 9 VIP gets the same benefit: the same 150 points. We can spend them, we can bank them. We do not need to spend any cash to use them. A discount cash spending to leverage the discount. For any reasonable set of numbers, we will have to spend money to get the benefit. That's the fundamental difference. Do we tell our long term tier 9 VIPs that we value them enough to give all of them the same something extra, or do we tell our long term tier 9 VIPs that we value them enough to let them have a discount if they are willing to spend even more money.

Coincidentally, the same thing happened to me.

Actually, 13.3dps (modifier). In this simplified analysis, the brute must deal 13.3dps more than the tanker *and* 1.33x tanker damage on top of that with AoEs large enough to encompass most of the targets the tanker is affecting nearby the tanker. That's actually not trivial. The breakeven point when comparing identical AoE attacks is about 40dps or so (for the tanker, or 67 dps for the brute), and that's not easy to generate with just large area of effect attacks. I don't think that is within the reach of most tanker secondaries or brute primaries short of very high recharge builds.

Its been so long my memory is getting hazy, but correct me if I'm wrong the idea was that originally that was going to be the first experimental change and it would eventually be propagated out to all the tanker secondaries, but the fact there was strong opposition to having basically continuous screen shake caused the devs to abandon the idea.

Actually, there have been dozens, if not hundreds of discussion threads over the years discussing the fact that the game mechanics and the overall design of the archetypes is remarkably well suited to the superhero genre, if only purely by accident. I don't think most players have your problem.

In particular, City of Heroes Tankers have levels of defense *and offense* so much higher than anything before and most things since called "tankers" were and are allowed to have. The fact that you can complain about constantly running afoul of the damage cap would be a ludicrous complaint in almost any other MMO. And even now, even without massive influsions of inventions, City of Heroes Tankers still vastly outperform what passes for tankers in the other two superhero-based MMOs out there. Both defensively *and* offensively.

You simply don't get the levels of AoE, of buff, of debuff, of enhancement anywhere else in the way we get them. All of that allows *most* players to achieve huge levels of power they just can't get in most other MMOs, and entirely in keeping with the genre.

Interesting: Lineage II's boards haven't randomly logged my browser out yet. CoH's boards do so consistently.

That quote doesn't prove the lead developer wanted tankers to be the heaviest hitter. It proves only that he wanted them to appear to be a heavy hitter.

Jack *always* had issues with conflating performance and appearance, and he had essentially no intuitive grasp of what the consequences of the game's numerical decisions were. He didn't even know how Blaster Defiance was implemented before writing a guide on how to use it, so his guide was completely wrong. He was responsible for a serious structural issue with the numbers in the I6 Prima Guide (he didn't appreciate power pool numbers were different for different archetypes). And in discussions with him, he alternated between discussing appearance and performance without distinction. At one point he thought one way for tankers to be the "heavy hitter" was to increase screen shake**. That was Jack's perspective on being a heavy hitter.


I can't prove it, but I believe the reason Jack was opposed to releasing numbers is because Jack believed that City of Heroes was supposed to evoke a different picture from what the MMO design rules enforced. In other words, Jack believed the game was supposed to essentially deliver the gameplay illusion that tankers dealt a lot of damage, while under the hood Scrappers were actually dealing more damage because that's what was required for balance. He just couldn't admit it for obvious reasons.



** I don't have a quote handy, but I have to believe there are other long-term tankers out there who remember that discussion on the forums, along with the almost universal oh-hell-no.

Actually, just throw the boards away entirely, and create a City of Heroes subforum under the Lineage II boards. Those boards appear to run the same version of vBB we do, and while they seem to have had their own issues with vBB at times, my preliminary testing suggests their boards seem to work just fine. So apparently there's a bug in vBB that makes it specifically incompatible with City of Heroes. How astronomically unlucky for us.

The obvious solution is therefore, since L2 is now f2p, all City of Heroes players should just make Lineage II accounts, make Lineage II forum accounts, and NCSoft should just let us use a subset of those boards.

No, I'm deadly serious.

I'm not sure there's enough cool stuff to spend 16,800 points a year on. We're way past german shepherd and entering Iditarod mush team territory.

I know that's what you meant.

400 points + 15% discount vs 400 points + 150 VIP bonus

@ 550 points of purchase: you pay 127.5 points, I pay zero
@ 750 points of purchase: you pay 297.5 points, I pay 200
@1000 points of purchase: you pay 510 points, I pay 450
@1400 points of purchase: you pay 850 points, I pay 850

Below 1400 points of purchase per month, I pay less with 150 VIP bonus than you pay with 15% discount. At 10% discount the break even is higher.

Something like that.

I would not be fine with Paragon Studios switching my extra 150 points into a 10% - 15% discount, given that the breakeven point is 1000 - 1500 points of purchases per month *above* the 400 stipend, or 1400 - 1900 points per month total.

The other difference is that Tanker inherent taunt is AoE on single target attacks: its not on Brute attacks. Tankers were designed to affect more targets with inherent taunting.

I guess my problem is that I'm not frustrated as a player, thinking they are entitled to something grand for my fifteen bucks. I'm frustrated as an IT professional who cannot understand how this problem could persist for years. And I *know* what the web team is feeding Zwill is ********, and I know my knowing that means nothing.

You know what *really* kills me? Guess what Lineage II's boards run on? vBB 3.8.6, same as us. I wonder if they have our problem. I'm going to find out.

Many of the people describing the costumes are saying or implying *they* are offended in some way by them. If its the intent, I don't think anyone is getting the vibe that some people are upset that there's nothing but honorable prostitute options being generated. Its being used as an insult, primarily of the costume itself and secondarily of the developers who thought it was acceptable. But its very difficult not to extend that to the people who use the costumes and think they are perfectly acceptable. Obviously, those people must just like looking like whores.

Inara isn't *portrayed* as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by. But try this: "why does television have so many whores on it, like Inara? Television executives should respect their female audience more than to be portraying women as willing prostitutes." Very different feel.

Its highly unlikely anyone is hearing "there's too much whorish female options" and hearing something no different than saying "there's too much firefighter female options." Not when the complaint rises to the point of saying its symptomatic of a lack of respect for female game players. You don't say that about an option you think is noble and respectable but there's just a few too many of. No one would say "this blatant lack of respect for women which is typified by costume set after costume set of armored suits for women cannot be tolerated."

If people said "there should be more options that aren't the sexy frilly type" no one would think that was an insult to the people who like those options. But saying "its insulting there's nothing but tramps" is insulting, and you can't just hand-wave that away by saying there's no intent to insult. Its insulting to hear that someone else thinks the things Paragon Studios is giving you and you are happily using is a sign the developers have poor judgment.

The difference is the difference between asking Paragon for different options, and telling Paragon they should be ashamed of the ones they are making. If they should be ashamed of making them, I should be ashamed for wearing them. I know that's not the intent, at least for most people, or else I'd be ripping people's heads off for making that sort of insult. But its the reasonable conclusion, and even if you are trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, hearing it over and over and over again isn't easy.

My heroines are not prostitutes. They are just working their way through college.

But you have to see it before you can complain about it. The question (as I interpreted it) was why anime draws more criticism. The answer is, among other things, because it can. When I ask for more horror, you have no target for your criticism.


All true - at least for you - but the impression anime has is what you'll evoke when you invoke it. If you're trying to explain to a listener, you have to factor in what the listener will hear. It may not be your fault that the listener hears "anime" and thinks big eyes and heads, but they will, and if you want to spend time correcting them, you can, or you can try to express your thought without wading through that minefield.

I was specifically responding to gec72 who suggested that this was an ethnocentric thing: anime is associated with "asian" and so its discriminated against. I don't think that is true. It think its associated with a specific artistic style, and that's why its discriminated against. Just like when you say "comic book" most people think "Superman" not "Maus."

Lots of other metaphors are associated with asian media and don't generate nearly as strong a reaction. The dual-wielding pistol fighter is most recently an asian thing, ala John Woo, but it doesn't generate a strong anti-asian sentiment.


I think the Marvel Anime stuff borrows from anime in the way you describe: from a broader artistic base than most people associate with anime, in a way that translates American content into that style. But its still stylized, and because its stylized, it will tend to draw more criticism than something that doesn't have a stylized form.

ICUs generally have a different service level requirement than public forums, but I will say as an IT professional whose judgment on this matter is something people listen to, in my opinion we have a professional responsibility to deliver the same quality, service, and effort whether we're supporting an ICU or a public forum. Anyone who thinks differently shouldn't support either.

People have to balance resources all the time, and in my professional opinion when faced with the decision to allocate resources to the proper operation of one of my games, or allocate those resources to doing a dev push on another game's forums, that's an easy decision. The game shards come first, period.

However, by the same token anyone who thinks they could tell me for a year that they couldn't fix my boards and still be employed, well that's highly unlikely.

They also didn't have superpowers. There's a certain amount of escapism in the game, including the costumes. I wouldn't actually advise picking a fight in a sleveless top and miniskirt either, but that's how my MA/SR is currently dressed. My DB scrapper is ten times the ***** the gunslinger female costume is. If the standard is the gunslinger costume is basically degrading compared to the male one, then by those standards I'm two feet in the gutter. The fact that I actually want a gunfighter female costume doesn't mean I think the actual one is flawed to the point of being degrading. If arguing against it implies that, I would rather accept the costume and the mismatch it encapsulates.

Separate from the bugs, there's the simple fact that the NPC literally just runs away from you while you are punching them in the back of the head, without even acknowledging you're there. It would be like fighting a really strong AV with no health bar: there's absolutely no feedback at all you're doing anything: its kill him or let him escape. If you have some sort of mez that can affect the guy its a little different, but not everyone does.

And when you see someone literally ignore you like you're not there, it tends to be a bit belittling. And that's when you notice you have to root to shoot, but he doesn't have to do anything but skedaddle at a constant speed like someone is towing him on rollerskates.

Oh yeah, and if you have stuns, that's when the hate really flows.

There are powers that affect mez strength: Benumb and Weaken in particular. However that only affects mez protection powers, not base mez protection baked into the archetype. So you could debuff a troll running integration, but you cannot reduce the intrinsic mag 3 protection that bosses have with that kind of debuff.

Allowing actual -resistance powers to also debuff mez protection doesn't sound like a good idea to me. -Res is already a highly valued debuff, and it already helps offense a lot. Having it also reduce mez protection seems like functional overloading.

Its not just that: its that manga is as much more of a visual style than a thematic one. Horror doesn't dictate a precise style of appearance. Its not like people specifically ask for an entire storyline with nothing but Cthulu minions. Horror, Superhero, Post-apocalyptic, are all thematic genres that aren't locked into a specific visual style.

It would be like asking for more Todd McFarlane superheroes. Or to pick a one with comparable controversy, it would be like asking for more Rob Liefeld superheroes.

Is that really representative of your impression of the difference between the two costumes in the gunslinger pack?

Last I checked Power Boost still boosted tohit buffs, so it should buff tohit debuffs as well, since its all just Tohit Strength.

Actually, you're right the devs removed that. Ah well, that's not really a major issue for Dark Blast either way. Honestly, I thought one of the reasons blasters didn't get heals in the old days was because they could have power boost. I have a sneaking suspicion the devs might have forgotten that.