Arcanaville

Think about everything a player can do for which the only primary recourse NCSoft has for abusing the privilege is banning. Banning is meaningless to a person that can create an unlimited number of free accounts. So anything that is ripe for abuse that is kept in check primarily through banning has a high probability of being limited from completely free players. And most of (not all) those things involve communication channels.

This reminds me: I don't think I ever mentioned this before. Not only did I not come up with a name for the expression "the net amount of time an attack will take up within a full attack chain due to the limits of the combat clock on the servers" but I also decided not to explicitly coin a name for "the duration of time after the cast time of the power expires when you cannot activate another attack." In the original Arcanatime article I simply called it the "server tailgate interval" which is some old-timey ethernet lingo leaking out there.

But *that* thing I actually *did* coin a term for, and decided not to use it. Originally, I was going to call it the Server QUantum Induced Delay. However, I then realized the delay was not due to the combat quantum alone, but the interplay between the animation quantum and the combat quantum, so I decided to call it the Server QUantum Induced Beat.

Then I decided I was probably spending too much time having fun with that, and changed it in the article to "tailgate." But you can still see remnants of my discussion of server quantums as a legacy, and its probably why I forgot to go back later and give a simple name to the effective rooted time.

The game isn't about heals, and I used to be one of those people that used to say that. It helped I used to team a lot with an FF controller back in the day. But when talking about blasters specifically, most other options don't exist like click defenses. And I wouldn't consider Provoke to be a survival tool. Its specifically within the context of Blasters that Aid Self becomes less controversial: some like it and some don't, but most would agree its the main build option for building for survivability that doesn't go to range-capping with power pools and inventions.


No harm, no foul.

If I remember correctly, Nemesis Veng is a +30% tohit buff and +20% defense buff (melee/ranged only). Even one stack of Vengeance is not good, but six places them into being able to beat Elude territory. And you often can't hit them back either, except with AoEs.

They'll also have a +30% damage buff per Veng. So +180% tohit, +180% damage, +120% defense, for thirty seconds. The best power to have in that situation is probably superspeed.


The part about jogging off of caltrops that is problematic is you have to do it very fast. Which is to say, you need to be moving when that first patch lands on you. Even if you have the speed to run off the patch, as the KoA start stacking it, the next thing they tend to do is run up to melee and surround you. At that point, you can't move and you can't hop off the patches. There are times I've considered adding Hover to my MA/SR build for no other reason but to give myself an escape path off of caltrops.

The only way I could see that happening is if they didn't just disable set bonuses, but disabled everything that wasn't direct enhancement strength. That means no set bonuses, no procs, no global bonuses, nothing that doesn't buff attribute strength within a single power like a conventional enhancement.

I'm not saying that would necessarily be a good idea, I'm just saying that's the only way I could see this happening at all.

Six years later, it seems brilliance tends to be stable, insanity tends to snowball, and free time generally evaporates.

Some - not all - of the critters in incarnate trials are "praetorian class critters" (note that is just an internal name: the DE that show up in Tip Missions: they are technically "praetorian class critters"). These critters have a base chance to hit of 64%, not the normal 50%. This isn't due to having any special power or buff: their *intrinsic* chance to hit is baked in at 64%. Since the intermediate floor for how low defense can bring down tohit is 5%, the best you can do is 59% against 64% base tohit.

It was the first time ever I didn't coin a name for something myself, and people had to call it something. It might have been Werner that first called it that. I would have probably called it the power's effective rooted time, which means Arcanatime was a heartbeat away from being Pert.

Huh? What I said was:

I highlighted the specific part you quoted: in context I don't see the problem. It seemed reasonable to me to assume most people would know that if I was talking about survivability for an energy/energy blaster, the most likely power I could have that would directly help survivability that benefits from recharge would be aid self. My Energy/Energy blaster doesn't have any click buffs that help survivability directly, and the only ones she could have are not usually ones people spend a lot of money improving recharge on because they crash - Force of Nature and Surge of Power.

No boy could fit in those shorts with calamitous biomechanical difficulty.

Four discussion threads, five issues of content, a couple hundred hours of in-game testing, 350 hours of simulation time, and about nine hours to write up and proof.


Longer.

And the intent of the articles was actually for the reason you read it: less to offer an absolute comparison of the sets (which gets quickly dated with game changes anyway) and more to illustrate the thought process behind the current state of the art in mitigation comparison at the time, which is not too dissimilar from what it is today.

And?


I'm now going to have extreme difficulty not hearing Desdemona's voice in my head being autotuned.

Your chance to hit a target doesn't just depend on you, it depends on the target as well. It could be running defenses, for example. So there is no way to actually say what your chance to hit a target is, for all targets in the game.

Mids assumes that your base chance to hit a target is 75%, which is the base chance for a player to hit an even con target without any defense. It then calculates your chance to hit such a target after factoring in all accuracy bonuses. That's why you end up with these very large numbers: you've generally saturated accuracy against such a target to the point where its higher than the 95% ceiling the game enforces.

You can change that base 75% chance to hit the target if you wish by going into the Options -> Configuration -> Exemping and Base Values. There you'll see the base tohit that Mids is assuming in all its Accuracy calculations. You could change that to the base chance to hit a +1 (65%), or the chance to hit a +2 with 15% defense (41%) or whatever you want. Just keep in mind that your target has a say in whether you hit or not, and all targets are different, and that's why neither Mids nor the game can give one single value for your chance to hit.


As to endurance, that's highly dependent on your build and how you play. Its much harder to give guidance there. But its a safe bet that differentials as high or higher than base recovery with unslotted stamina (somewhere around 2.0 eps) tend to provide a lot of breathing room on endurance.

If I was in charge, I would explicitly state that the rules of the Help channel are you can only ask question or give answers. Any other discussion is forbidden, and any denigration of any kind expressed against a player asking for help would draw an automatic zero tolerance three day ban.

And then I would send someone to their house to shoot them in the face.

Which is probably why Zwillinger is a community coordinator, and I'm ... not.

Don't worry about it: we make allowances for New Jersey accents.

I think that while sometimes we can get caught up in holding up examples of "sexist" poses, costumes, or whatever, I think most people realize and its important to highlight that what you personally prefer to play is fine. If you want to play a petite girl with small hands and a schoolgirl uniform, it is NOT sexist for you to want to do that. Women play big breasted bikini clad sashayers all the time, and this is a fantasy role playing game: if that is what they find fun, no one should feel embarrassed about their preferences.

No one is, or at least should be, suggesting removing options, no matter how mild, girlish, coquettish, haughty, or just plain slutty they may appear. No guy should be embarrassed to play them, no woman should be embarrassed to play them. What most people want is *more* options that fill in the blanks elsewhere besides schoolgirls and Power Girl. But, not to put too fine a point on it, no one should believe they are hurting the cause to play schoolgirls and Power Girl. You pay your money, and you're entitled to have fun just like everyone else.

So: make whatever you want, play whatever you want, and we're all cool with it. No one here wants to take those options from you, and no one here judges you for using those options (at least, no one should). The only thing at issue is addressing the addition of *more* options for people who want to play something different.


Also, your English makes my Japanese look like the typing of someone having electroshock treatment while at the keyboard. If I was lost in Tokyo and asked for the location of the train station, there is a 50% chance I'd ask for an electric blender by mistake.

"Hey, I only wear skintight clothes that are easy to draw" is, if nothing else, a pick up line you will never forget.

I don't think that is the case, for the simple reason that the adjective "longest" doesn't really make sense in that context. If you were comparing total time logged in, you'd describe that number as being "higher" and "lower" not "shorter" and "longer."


It does mean they are spending more over the lifetime of the sub, but the question is whether the sub duration is longer. I contend the x-axis implies it does. Moreover, if we assume that the average sub duration was approximately the same, that would mean the *average* player was paying 75% more than their subscription amount per month, every month, buying points. In other words, translated into City of Heroes terms, that would mean the average subscriber would be buying more than $8 of points per month, every month of their subscription. That seems awfully high.


The file name of the copy I have is Paiz_Fernando_TheFutureOfMMOMonetization_SOGS.pdf. However, a google search on that name turns up only one download link consistently: cmpmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/vault/gdc10/slides/Paiz_Fernando_TheFutureOfMMOMonetization_SOGS.pdf (I removed the "http://" from the link because the forum kept hyperlink converting it and I wanted the entire link to be visible to read). And that site seems to be very slow or not working when I test it. But give it a try.

Actually, I don't think you are talking about "leveling" you are talking about one component to leveling: the side effect to leveling progress, or the reward of leveling if you prefer: power progress. As characters colloquially level in an MMO, they typically increase their power. How they do that is generally in one of three ways which are not exclusive:

1. Attribute increases. In City of Heroes, we increase in health, damage modifier, etc. We have attributes not that different from the classic Strength, Constitution, Endurance, Dexterity, etc from PnP games. As we level, those attributes increase. Sometimes in predefined ways (like in CoX) and sometimes under the discretion of the player (i.e. through a point-purchase system).

2. Ability acquisition. In City of heroes, we get access to new powers at certain levels. We have some discretion over which powers we get because at any moment in time the number of options available to us is generally more than one. But the actual unlocking of abilities is fairly linear. In other systems, things like skill trees can increase the complexity of the unlocking of these abilities through a prerequisite system.

3. Gear gates. In some games, its fundamentally gear that determines how powerful you are, and leveling unlocks the ability to use better gear. Generally, you still have to figure out how to find it and acquire it, but "progress" in such a system is about unlocking potential not about explicitly becoming more powerful through the direct act of leveling. Even City of Heroes has a hint of gear gating: vis a vis the minimum levels of purchasable enhancements.


That's how we become more powerful. But how we level is different. There are two aspects to how we level: the mechanism by which we level, and what we directly gain from leveling. In City of Heroes we level primarily by defeating things, and secondarily by completing tasks. This earns XP, which eventually earns levels, which ultimately unlock power choices and award enhancement slots. We then "spend" those power choices and enhancement slots.

Some games have other methods of leveling: through specific leveling tasks that themselves have prerequisites that have to be completed, which themselves might have prerequisites that have to be completed. Its not about XP or any specific leveling currency, its about a leveling checklist. Complete all the tasks on list ten, and you reach level ten.

And what we get for leveling tends to depend on how the three mechanisms for power progress are implemented in the game, because they tend to have different requirements to make them work correctly.

Its these three things: leveling method, leveling rewards, and power progress, that make up the trinity of what most people call "leveling." And there are a lot of different ways to mix these and implement them, creating a wide range of distinct possibilities.

If that is the necessary and sufficient definition of F2P, fine we're F2P.

The problem comes when someone says we're F2P, so of course X should happen because all F2P games have X. If you're calling the game F2P because there is a free option to play, fine. If you're calling the game F2P so you can use the term to make demands upon it, its not F2P, because now F2P means there is a free to play option and all this other baggage which City of Heroes Freedom does not have.

You cannot say the only requirement for calling the game F2P is it has a free play option, and then start adding all sorts of other requirements on F2P games that City of Heroes should follow. That's semantic gyration.


Too low for too much. However, I've been suggesting that in the same spirit of unlocking individual character slots permanently the devs should probably add a way to unlock inventions on a specific character slot permanently. Something like 300-400 points to permanently unlock a character for invention use might be fair. You'd then have two options to use inventions: a 30 day temp license that would allow you to use them on all characters in your account, and a permanent license that would unlock inventions on a single character forever.

From other women. Its always been from other women. Men can exert a lot of pressure on women to look attractive, but on average men cannot even get past two on a scale of one to ten when it comes to female peer pressure.

With the disclaimer that everyone is different and everyone's circumstances are different, on average its amazing to me the complex web of fashion rules that exist for women, nearly all of them involving the judgment of other women. "Age appropriate attire" is something you hear far more in the context of women than men, and it tends to be judged far more harshly by other women. Female fashion is, at its heart, the art of wearing something that is nearly the same as everyone else without actually being identical to everyone else. If men had to follow that fashion rule, 83% of the male population in the western world would be unable to leave the house.

My own theory is that the subtle pressure at work here is boys grow up in a social dynamic where you're not supposed to care about what other people think about you, or at least *pretend* not to care. Girls are brought up in a social dynamic of fitting into groups. It is that small opportunity that allows peer pressure to slip in at a very early age and start influencing girls to care far more about how other girls judge how they look, how they act, and how they think, than for boys, and it leaks into the larger culture of appearance and body image.

How do men factor into all of this? Primarily as bystanders. Its women who discuss among themselves what men want, women who decide what it is men want, and then judge all other women on the basis of being able to satisfy those requirements. What the men themselves actually want is not often particularly relevant to the process.


I was reading an article the other day in Wired magazine about caricatures, and it reminded me that human brains seem to have evolved to "norm" the notion of what people look like, and "attractiveness" seems to be related to how a particular person compares to an "average" face that the brain builds up over time. The stronger that average model is, the stronger the sense of relative attractiveness when compared to other faces.

So here's a question for the guys and the women out there. From your earliest memories of childhood to the present day, how often do you remember yourself specifically looking at faces? And whose faces? Do guys look at the faces of other guys as often as girls look at the faces of other girls I wonder. I wonder if another subtle dynamic is that girls, subtly pressured to be more social, see and study more faces more often when younger. And that one tiny little thing causes younger girls to formulate stronger opinions of attractiveness and self-image of girls at an earlier age, and that carries over into the teen years. Boys, on the other hand, perhaps spend more time looking at girls. So both boys and girls end up with stronger opinions about how girls look than both do about how boys look. And that creates a positive feedback loop for girls that doesn't exist for boys to the same degree. And then this snowballs over time.

If nothing else, its an interesting conjecture.

Awakened have a lot of psionic attacks, and I believe a lot of them are of the non-positional variety. As SR, you only have melee, ranged, and AoE defense in your toggles and passives. You have scaling resistances in your passives, but they are for smash/lethal/fire/cold/energy/negative; they do not protect against toxic or psi.

So you have a few specific vulnerabilities as SR (tanker or otherwise):

1. Non-positional psionic attacks. Attacks typed psionic but not melee, ranged, or AoE. Mind control-like attacks in particular tend to be typed this way.

2. Tohit buffs. One day you'll be fighting Nemesis and six Nemesis Lts will die at once. Then you're likely to follow them ten seconds later. Also, the quartz enimator dropped by crystal DE Lts buff all nearby DE with a +100% tohit buff. You'll want to kill those fast: they essentially eliminate all your defenses.

3. Autohitting stuff. Most autohitting stuff doesn't hit for a lot, but it can start to add up. Tanking the Knives of Artemis can get ridiculous when you discover you have thirty caltrop patches stacked on top of you and your health is going down slowly but inexorably.

Outside of those three basic weaknesses, which aren't exactly common but also not exactly rare, you'll be extremely difficult to bring down typically. Most debuffs will glance off, and few things will be able to hit you to damage you. Oh, and I recommend finding someplace to stick this: Winter's Gift: Slow Resistance.

20% resistance to movement slow and recharge debuffs doesn't sound like much, but it stacks onto Quickness' 40% resistance to both. Getting that to 60% resistance to movement debuffs and recharge debuffs can actually quite useful, and you can always throw it into Sprint.

Presumably their own market research, beta testing, and the early numbers from that particular game's transition to the hybrid model which at the time of the presentation was about six months after launch.

Its important to note that the numbers aren't being offered to state with certainty what the revenue split is today for that game or what its likely to be for any other game. Its noted for its value in illustrating what one particular MMO developer *believes* about where the revenue opportunities exist and are being tapped. Turbine in particular and in many public presentations related to monetization in the industry has consistently stated the position that the opportunities for this type of model are multifaceted, and its not just about squeezing more money out of subscribers. In fact, they even specifically mention that Dollars/CCU went down in the new model, but that was more than compensated for by the fact that CCU increased by a factor of over five. In other words, the amount of money they earned per player actually playing the game (as represented by ConCurrent Users per month value) dropped, but the total amount of players playing rose by far more. Less money per player on average, but a ton more players total.


Incidentally, one other thing this company states in its presentations is that the shift to the hybrid model tended to shift its player demographics more "casual." That's an elusive thing to strictly define, but here it meant players tended to play less hours per week and tended to prefer less overtly challenging play. A non-monetary side effect of going to the hybrid model? Introducing difficulty sliders. Given how casual-dominated City of Heroes already is, I have wondered what impact that effect might have on us, if any.

Can you name one thing that people actually care about that you could lock premium players out of that would *not* piss off players?

If not, then I refute your assertion that there's any difference between "gaming the system" and "pissing your potential subscriber base off." There's no daylight between the two. It comes down to whether the devs feel the restriction is reasonable, because all restrictions reasonable or otherwise will piss off someone somewhere.

Other than that, I would otherwise tend to agree that being able to pay base rent is a perfect candidate for a Paragon Rewards tier reward. Something not too severe: tier 3 or 4 perhaps.

I google searched for an article I could link to, but I actually saw the original presentation. Checking between the two, there is a small ambiguity in the way the numbers are presented in the article as opposed to the original presentation. The original presentation had this chart which I think is more unambiguous what they were trying to express:



Keep in mind those are *lifetime* revenue estimates, not *monthly* estimates. What they are saying is if you take the average amount of money earned per customer over their lifetime before they went hybrid - which would be about the monthly sub times the average number of months a player subscribed - and call that the baseline, they were projecting that over the lifetime of the player being engaged in playing the game an ala carte MTX player would generate 70% of that revenue, while a subscriber would, after the conversion, generate about 175% of that revenue.

Speaking specifically about the subscribers, that increase is due to both the subscriber buying things from the MTX store *and* from them sticking around longer - presumably because the new game offered a better value proposition or a more engaging game or both.

Why they looked at the numbers this way seems to be that in their analysis, they looked at players sort of like annuities: it cost a certain amount of money to acquire the player in terms of marketing expenses and other things, and then once they acquired the player the player would generate a certain amount of revenue over time. The financial analysis compared total revenue generated over the lifetime of the player vs the cost to acquire the player as a key metric. So lifetime revenue potential is a key factor for this kind of viewpoint.

Note that it *doesn't* mean subscribers were paying their subscriptions and on top of that spending 75% more money per month buying things. It could mean that if subscriber retention remained exactly the same. On the other hand, it could equally mean subscribers tended to stick around 75% longer and never bought anything in the store. Of course, the truth is that its some combination of the two.

The really interesting thing is the MTX number. If they really are sticking around less than subscribers as the chart suggests but nevertheless are spending up to 70% of the total amount of money original subscribers were spending over their entire lifetime of subscription, that suggests MTX non-subscribers are actually a very large source of revenue per player per month in their model: higher than even I might have suspected without these numbers (which date from 2010).

When you factor in other things, like the total number of new players joined and the increase in total subscriptions (said to be about double the pre-launch numbers) a reasonable extrapolation of the numbers is that at the time of the presentation this particular game was getting roughly half its revenue from subscribers and half from its non-subscribers per month. The error bars in that estimate are rather large, but a roughly 50/50 split is about dead center in the acceptable range of possible values.

That disclaimer was irrelevant, so it wasn't necessary to quote. I don't care if you think the law is fair or reasonable, I only care what you assert the law to say. You explicitly said "using anything but your real name on the internet is illegal in the US" because of that Act, and that statement is false. It does not anywhere say that. Every element of the Act refers to unauthorized access. Using a pseudonym here on the City of Heroes forums, for example, is authorized access. I'm allowed to do so, so I am.

That's separate from the fact that federal precedent states legally that the misdemeanor sections involving unauthorized access without an underlying act of fraud, theft, or damage are not to be interpreted as implying breach of contractual requirements represents unauthorized access as defined in the law.

Its too bad there are no estoppel rules in the forum EULA.