Arcanaville

You can't retrofit this into CoH, but my current best idea for balancing AoE in a CoH-like game is to make all or nearly all attacks single target, and have the players basically pay to make them AoE through enhancements.

Of course, to really explain that I would have to explain my idea for two-dimensional enhancement slotting.

I don't really follow your logic on this, especially when I can prove VIP players will always, under all conceivable conditions, pay less.

Unless you are counting everything I've paid for this game up to this point as factoring into the total cost of Freedom, which I don't believe to be a fair assessment. I paid over the last seven years to play the game over the last several years. I've already gotten the appropriate value for that money. This is no different than saying someone who's been subscribed for six years has paid less than I have for the exact same game, so I've been cheated in some way. That's false: I got seven years of play and they only got six.

More than that, giving away 800 points a month doesn't seem economically viable: the prices in the store would have to increase markedly to compensate. There's no logical reason to do it. The point to the stipend is to offer a reasonable hedge against market prices to provide a frontloaded discount to VIPs. Shifting that stipend to a full 66% of the subscription or more (in my case it would be 84% before the tier 9 bonus was factored in, and proportionately speaking 115% of my subscription with it) makes it an unwieldy adjunct to the subscription. In effect the subscription's value itself would have to be almost entirely based on the points we get, and by extension it could offer very little value on its own. That makes subscriptions devalued, and VIP players devalued as a consequence.

I am now Everybody on Exalted.

I don't want to know.

After you execute that command, find the log for today in C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\logs\game (C:\Program Files (x86) for the Win7 and Vista people), and find the log entry corresponding to that command. It will be on one long line. Copy that one long line to another file, delete the header part with the timestamp and save it to a file called something.html. Then open it in a browser.

The line will start something like this:

09-15-2011 23:06:25 <color #ffaaff><color2 #ffaaff><colorhover #ffaaff><colorselect #0><colorselectbg #333333><link #ffaaff><linkhover #ffd2ff><linkselect #0><linkselectbg #666666><table><tr><td><b>Name</b></td><td><b>Purchased</b></td><td><b>Used</b></td>

and just keep going. Delete the date and time, so the line starts:

<color #ffaaff><color2 #ffaaff><colorhover #ffaaff><colorselect #0><colorselectbg #333333><link #ffaaff><linkhover #ffd2ff><linkselect #0><linkselectbg #666666><table><tr><td><b>Name</b></td><td><b>Purchased</b></td><td><b>Used</b></td>

When that is saved to a file and opened in a browser, it will be formatted reasonably.


I find this amusing:

Mission Architect License (30 day) 800 0 2077-05-29 10:33:00 COLIMARC

The game thinks I've bought 800 30 day mission architect licenses and they will expire in 2077. Ditto the auction house and inventions. It sort of makes sense, but its still funny.

Edit: I'm not sure if I would consider that fail safe, or wildly optimistic.

Are you actually hinting that you targeted posters deliberately based on their position on naming? Because I do remember you. Since you stated your plan to drop down to premium, there would be no point in making characters on Exalted as they would be inaccessible to a Premium player, if those characters were being made to actually be played.

That's probably Cisco training jargon. That's not the standard use of the term "network" as its generally used professionally. At least, that hasn't been my experience. Remember that the term "network" even in the specific field of computers predates "broadcast domains" and not all networking technologies have any sense of a broadcast domain. If the term "network" was ever defined to be "broadcast domain" there would be no token ring networks, no fddi networks, no frame relay networks. ARPANET would not be a network, nor would ATM.

As to the internet access device in people's homes, if its a cable modem its technically not a bridge in the original sense although it acts like one in the modern sense. Both DSL modems and cable modems perform transport translation which means some people will call them translational bridges and some would call them modems for disambiguation.

However, if it has a Wifi access point or offers DHCP, its definitely not a bridge, or rather its not exclusively a bridge. In that case, it is a single device with a bridge/modem to the internet and a router/NAT connecting to the modem on one side and the internal and wifi address space on the other side(s) of the router.


Usually, this is just terminology: distinctions without much difference in a practical sense. The one that is dying out but used to be highly significant is the "10/100 hub." There is no such thing as a 10/100 hub. "Hub" implies standard ethernet as opposed to a switch, and by definition its impossible for a single ethernet hub to operate at two different speeds. All 10/100 hubs were either 10/100 switches that lied about being hubs, or single boxes with a 10 meg hub and a 100 meg hub connected inside with a 10/100 switch. This was not a mere distinction without a difference, because in the old days we used to use hubs to monitor network traffic at control points in the days before mirror ports on switches. A 10/100 hub was two hubs connected via switch internally, which meant 10 meg linked sniffers could not see the 100 meg linked traffic and vice versa. This used to cause all manner of pain at times.


Jargon is a funny thing because even in a technical field like networking, there's a lot of politics involved. For example, when ethernet switches started to arrive on the scene, Cisco did a lot of road shows basically saying "switches are not ethernet." Technically correct, because ethernet was defined originally in terms of CSMA/CD, and switches obviously were not. And this was because switches were able to replace routers in some situations where routers were being used to reduce the size of the broadcast domain to reduce unicast collisions. Switches cut into Cisco's action. To this day I believe Cisco still calls "layer 3 switches" just a fancy name for "fast router" as a legacy to their pre-Catalyst pre-switch days of being an all router shop.


Speaking of jargon, be careful about calling generic things autonomous systems on the internet. The definition you give above is the descriptive colloquial definition. The technical definition of an autonomous system on the internet is the set of networks operating under a single ASN. If it doesn't have a single ASN, its not an AS, period.

If it was up to me, the concept of evasion - causing an attack to completely miss its target - would exist. However, I recognize that causes the potential problem that players can miss (allowing only critters to miss and not players violates my cardinal design rule that PvP should work the same way as PvE from the beginning rather than ad hocing PvP into weird exception rules for balance purposes). I would probably be fighting uphill convincing an entire dev team to allow for missing.

Creating a way to miss in a way that minimizes the potential frustration of players is one of those open ended problems I find most interesting from a design perspective, but also most difficult to resolve.


And yes, between melee attacks being borderline retarded to take and (super) reflexes being anything but, except until extreme circumstances, it took no time at all for me to be completely turned off to melee-anything in that other game.


I do find the basic idea of blocking to be attractive, though. I think that was basically a good idea, albeit with some issues.

As I've mentioned in the past, logistically Paragon Studios could have given VIPs a discount on price, but they chose to give free points instead. The advantage of free points is that they are frontloaded. You get stuff for free spending no money at all, and then you pay for whatever you want above that. Theoretically speaking, a patient person might spend nothing at all.

As to whether we're getting enough free points, suppose we're looking at the value choice between giving us a 50% discount across the board or points. We get the equivalent of $5 of points per month (more if we are tier9) and that is $60 per year. The break even point between 50% off and the frontloaded points is $120 of stuff per year. In other words, if the choice was between 50% off and 400 PP per month, every VIP player who bought less than $120 of face value stuff per year would come out ahead, and everyone who bought more would come out behind.

I think that's actually a far better proposition than a discount. For one thing, it rewards patience and taxes impatience. It offers a theoretical path to lowering your costs if you have less money, and are willing to wait. That's an option discounts don't have. For another thing, it tends to shift the costs to the players more likely to be able to afford it: the players that intrinsically buy more stuff at a quicker rate.

That's completely separate from the fact that it greatly simplifies things if players change tiers. Suppose times are good and you are a subscriber and buy a bunch of points. Then times change, and you are forced to temporarily unsubscribe. As a premium player, your points just depreciated in value; in the example above by a whopping 50%. This way, points are points are points and always have the same buying power. What's different is that VIPs gets more of them.

In general, you can't copyright names. You can trademark them, but only when used within the scope of an actual business doing actual commerce. For example I could trademark "Arcanaville" if I did some sort of business under that name, but I don't.

Even if I did trademark the name, by using it on one of NCSoft's services I was required to extend to them a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license to use that mark within any context, which in effect allows NCSoft to grant the use of that name to any player of City of Heroes. Its not really the other player that has the right to use "Arcanaville" its NCSoft that has the right to grant that name to anyone in the game, whether I had any actual legal rights to it or not (and I don't).

I see it and I still can't quite believe it myself. Unless this is an extremely recent change to the client, I've never seen that happen in all the times I've watched memory usage for the client. I would have sworn the client was still two gig heap limited. Time to dig up the debugger again, I guess.

Positron is a designer. Second Measure is a producer. Their relationship is comparable to that of a producer and a director for a movie. In a company as relatively small as Paragon Studios, the lines of *contribution* are blurry (remember when BaB, an animator, helped design the I9 Hamidon?) but operationally speaking Nate's job is to make sure the company itself is running smoothly: his job is to make sure timelines are being met, resources are being properly allocated to different projects, etc. Matt's job is to oversee the actual design and implementation details of the game.

Let's say I want +health added to Practiced Brawler. So I ask Black Scorpion to add +health to Practiced Brawler. Its Black Scorpion's responsibility, as the lead for anything you can type in Excel, to decide if that's an appropriate powers change. If he does, as the powers (among other things) lead his responsibility is to send an email to Arbiter Hawk saying "take care of this please, I'm going to lunch."

Then War Witch is supposed to step in and say "wait a minute Black Scorpion, you're in charge of the Live and End Game strike force, not the Bend Over Backwards for Arcana strike force. I'm going to have to reassign that task.

Then Positron's job is to jump in and say "hmm, adding +health to any super reflexes power contradicts the design principles of this game, which are to annoy Arcana as much as possible. I'm afraid I'm going to have to veto that change. Instead, lets add +Fly to Practiced Brawler. And make it unslottable for maximum irritation."

Now its Second Measure's turn to weigh in. "Synapse generally handles all buffs related to flight, and all of his time is allocated to making Afterburner do something useful in I22. So I'm afraid annoying Arcana will have to be an I22.5 feature."

I'm pretty sure at this point Brian Clayton pops his head in and says "who's Arcana?" before making an executive decision that on Friday everyone must show up to work dressed as their favorite character from Firefly.

I've said that within the context of AoEs (and actually, I include super-stacking AoE buffs and debuffs in there with damage) but I think the single target combat in CoH is perfectly fine. It should be the germ of a model for better MMO combat in general, I think. If I were designing an MMO combat system from scratch, there are a lot of ideas I would steal from CoH, that few if any MMOs give half a glance to.

Cryptic's legacy (which includes Paragon Studios to a degree) is, I think, going to be that because Cryptic had no idea what they were doing when they made CoH (you could argue the same for CO and STO to a lesser degree) they were willing to take chances others wouldn't take in doing things others wouldn't do. If there were no City of Heroes, I could say global cooldowns were an unnecessary drag on the pace of combat and I would be patted on the head like a child. But because City of Heroes actually exists, we can see the result of that experiment. And I can say CoH is basically right, and everyone else is basically wrong. Or rather, everyone else took the easy way out. CoH didn't actually get global cooldown right either because they did nothing to control combat once it was removed, but they prove the point removing it can be done.

Its interesting to me that for all Cryptic gets wrong, my idea of a pretty good starting point for an MMO is Champions Online's mechanics, City of Heroes powers and combat system, and Star Trek Online's reward system. In other words, rationalized non-accelerating base mechanics, diversified archetypes and activation-based combat, and task-skewed rewards. The two ways to pull the teeth out of AoE overkill are to depower AoE which can make AoE less fun, or reduce the reward for singular kills and increase the reward for completing missions separate from kills, which allows you to kill whatever you want as only the means to an end, not the end itself. The guy who kills eight things and finishes the mission doesn't end up too far behind the guy who kills eighty things and finishes the mission.

Of course, that is an extreme oversimplfication, but its still surprising to me nonetheless. Cryptic has problems making the whole enchilada work correctly, but its amusing to me that Cryptic has implemented more good original design ideas by accident than I think most MMO dev teams have come up with deliberately.

You shouldn't let people get under your skin like that. I'm going to go out on a limb that the person that grabbed "Arcanaville" wasn't thinking that would be an excellent name for a beam rifle corruptor.

Still, it did prompt me, upon reflection, to grab Arcanaville on every other server. And on Exalted, I just decided to grab "Arcana Prime." There, and everywhere else except on the one server that apparently someone decided to use it.

We're speaking completely hypothetically because the devs themselves haven't said anything except maybe it might happen someday, but I would assume it would depend on what happened to the crashing nukes. If the crash was removed, I would imagine the non-crashing nukes might be buffed slightly to bring them up to the crashing nuke's current level. On the other hand crashing nukes might just be converted into non-crashing nukes by bringing them down to the level of the current non-crashing nukes, in which case probably nothing at all would happen to the current non-crashing nukes.

Will wonders never cease.

Since we were discussing it just the other day, I thought I would point you to something to think about when it comes to thinking about what you like (and don't like) about City of Heroes. I thought of you when reading it:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/09...couldve-made/6

I'm not specifically endorsing everything in it (it still a pet peeve of mine people bemoan "balance" while clearly having zero understanding of what balance even is in a game), but I thought it was an interesting coincidence coming on the heels of discussing the general pace of combat in City of Heroes. People do complain about the very things the article writer complains about in City of Heroes as well, but we sometimes forget just how powerful CoH allows us to be compared to *most* combat situations. Three on one is usually a big deal in most MMOs, where as three on one is the norm in CoH, and seventeen on one means you hit the aggro limit and can't go any higher.

I specifically noted this passage:

City of Heroes, it should be pointed out, is designed around the three hit kill on average; our "DPS classes" can generally two-shot even minions often. Stalker assassin's strikes can one-shot both minions and Lts, and the only reason that's not looked upon favorably in CoH is because AoE can get you a dozen kills in just two or three shots: in a manner of speaking a one quarter of one hit kill.

An MMO made the attempt: the author just apparently hasn't found it yet. I suspect if you put a light saber into the hands of a Katana scrapper you'd have something rather like the Jedi he envisions.


Of course, the author also says the most mathematically illiterate thing I've read in a long long time:

But still, its an interesting read nonetheless when compared to how combat works, and sometimes doesn't work, in City of Heroes.

Unfortunately not good initially. Something's borked OpenGL under Workstation 8 in my testing, but I only had a short while to test it before I had to move on to more productive testing. I'll swing back and look at it again more carefully after I've completed putting VM8 through its paces. My guess is that the new virtual hardware does something funky with screen mapping or something.

I've heard things are better under Fusion, but I don't have a copy of Fusion to test, and I've also heard things work better under Virtualbox, but I don't have my home workstation set up to run Virtualbox.

I can say that workstation 7 was *almost* playable. I could get CoH to start, run and play, but my frame rate was somewhere between 7 frames per second in instances, to 0.5 frames per second in some outdoor shared zone maps. That sounds awful, but its just an order of magnitude from being playable, and that's under 100% software emulated OpenGL. If VMware can get OpenGL somehow accelerated, you could probably play CoH (and anything else) in a Unity window with zero chance of spyware seeing anything else on your workstation. I'm sure its just a matter of time before that's how we end up running all apps we have concerns about.

In fairness, those losses appear from analysis to be due to their development costs incurred for upcoming titles; both of their games appear to be incrementally profitable to at least some degree. Also, their F2P conversion numbers wouldn't be in those financial numbers to any significant degree.

I'm more inclined to think comparisons aren't fair when they don't factor in very important situational differences. For example, our slots are more expensive than theirs are, but we get more of them for free than they do. That's not an inconsequential difference, and it plagues most comparisons for most things between the games out of context.

Because the games are so different in how they offer what they offer across their tiers of play, "simple" comparisons tend to be anything but.

Black Scorpion is a LEG man.

But none of that is relevant to the quote I objected to:

There is no way to parse this in English that implies anything other you are asserting this is the *first* time you are reading that sentiment, when its actually been a common sentiment.

Its your fault you don't have a bigger sphere of control. You think we pay you fifteen bucks a month to meekly sit there and obey the rules of game design, balance, arithmetic, gravity?