Arcanaville

Seriously, make up your mind. Am I not accounting for a rule that limits nuke damage, or am I making up a rule excusing nuke damage limits.

Even a troll posts with purpose. This is just Eliza output at this point.

Anything is easy to refute if that's your standard of refutation. That argument doesn't even pass basic sanity tests. The blaster nuke is obviously overpowered because of Build Up and Aim? Because it does more damage than the nukes in other archetypes?

Not even going to waste time doing anything more than pointing out that any attempt to counter that particular assertion would be a waste of time.

As to Lt health, as I think practically everyone else recognizes, because they read my post instead of just doodling in the margins, I actually make the argument that crashing nukes are *supposed* to kill Lts. So the trivial statement that they cannot be boosted because then they might reliably kill Lts is:

Follow the leader, mainly. Different servers are using slightly different tactics. On Triumph, we're currently using the limited attacker approach. That approach is basically:

1. Limit the number of people attacking Antimatter, so they can stay away from each other's entanglements and better avoid obliteration patches (not essential, but helps with preventing deaths).

2. Use a heal team that focuses on healing anyone that either takes a big hit from AM or gets disintegrated.

3. Everyone else dies on reactor three and stays in the hospital. That keeps them away from disintegration, away from obliteration, but they can still earn the badge.


To get the badge, get on a good Loves a Challenge team and either die on command and stay in the hospital, or be a really good on the spot healer, or be an attacker against Antimatter that can avoid getting killed by obliteration, disintegration, and Antimatter himself.

The requirements for the badge basically are, in the last phase against Antimatter himself a) don't die and b) don't destroy the terminals that regen him (meaning, you have to let him heal to full all three times).

Credibility is the last thing you should spend, given its incredible difficulty in acquiring.

This gets into some of the problems that are fairly unique to City of Heroes (and Champions Online, which shares some mechanical similarities due to having the same originating developer). For one thing, no global cooldowns. Because we don't have global and unifying cooldowns, this game is almost uniquely about DPA, a metric I practically invented because it just doesn't exist in the lexicon of most MMOs because for most attacks how long it takes to cast isn't relevant to its output. In most MMOs I've seen, having five AoEs is not five times better than having one because of global cooldowns: you don't get to use all of them at their individual maximum output. In City of Heroes, recharge can be manipulated in two ways that doesn't generally exist to the same degree in other MMOs: you can slot recharge itself to speed the power up, and you can just get more powers.

In many MMOs powers have DPS ratings because the game can actually tell you, if you use that power continuously, what level of damage you can expect from it. We can't do that in CoH because recharge and the mechanics of attack chains makes that almost impossible.

All this feeds back into AoE in CoH: Fire blast isn't just good because it has AoE, its good because it has multiple AoEs. Its also good because it has multiple single target attacks and most have good DPA so they can be chained more effectively. (Its also good because of the balancing decision to make dot damage itself a secondary effect, which is a separate issue).


However, the lack of global cooldown is also another one of those things that makes combat in CoH significantly more "action-oriented" than you would expect from an MMO not focused on "twitch" combat. We can't just put our best attack on auto and periodically use other powers because in City of Heroes that would be extremely pathetic output. So its another thing very dangerous to futz with, because mucking with it can dramatically reduce the entertainment level of combat in CoH.

All those people are ultimately accountable to *someone*. They may not be accountable to the people they have authority over, but they do not possess ultimate unchecked authority. The alternative to totalitarian rule isn't unrestricted democracy. Parents don't have to give their children a vote, but they are accountable to others for how they treat their children. The only time my employees have a vote is when I give it to them (which I do often, but its entirely at my discretion). But even I am ultimately accountable for my decisions, just not to them.

Cole believes he is accountable to no one, and believes he shouldn't be accountable to anyone.

Actually, some of the people that PLed themselves sometimes had less of a problem for the simple reason that they often didn't slot anything at all until the upper levels, so they had influence saved up. No reason to slot enhancements if you're mostly along for the ride and the ride's not lasting very long anyway.

I don't think your analogies are quite applicable in the sense that in both cases the full feature set could have been known at the time of sale, whereas here the problem is the features are being developed and there's a certain amount of latitude expected in that circumstance (no different than say an unexpected delay in shipping a product) however I don't find your specific reaction to be unreasonable.

They are monitoring the activity on their own servers. Are you saying there's a problem with monitoring the activity on their own servers? The EULA does not grant that right explicitly, because there's no need to grant such a right in the EULA: its not something you had any say in in the first place.

Its important to be clear on legal terminology here. The EULA doesn't by virtue of its existence grant NCSoft any rights. The EULA in effect *asks* the user to grant those rights, and failure to do so means you have no legal right to use the service. They are basically asking for a trade: give us these rights, and we will let you connect to the servers. The EULA cannot *force* itself upon you: they can't, say, force you to install the game client. But they can forbid you from using the service until you agree to those terms.

From a strictly legal perspective, this agreement is not forced: its voluntary. Because the player has the legal recourse of terminating the contract and ceasing the use of the service. I do not believe there are any terms in which the EULA does not allow this course of action, beyond some terms that are enforced beyond that on technicalities. Whatever else you might think about the reasonableness of the EULA's terms, the EULA is not specifically granting anything to itself it cannot grant: its asking the player to grant them and the player does have the right to grant those things, or else they are not entitled to play.

I found my XP chart from August 2004 that a player compiled. It doesn't have all the data in it, but I can get the basic idea since many numbers were calculated by formula back then (and now). Lets pick level 27 for an example. To get to level 32 from level 27 according to my calculator took a total of 1,073,650 XP. How much inf you would have had depends on what you killed. Minions would have given about 70% of that value, Lts 1.2x, and Bosses 2x. Realistically speaking, you were very likely to end up with about a million inf or less from that leveling. I don't think the level of the critter mattered then because I believe the ratio of inf to XP was similar for higher level critters.


Assuming you had a full set of level 30 SOs to start and you were then buying a full set of level 35 SO at level 32. At level 32 you would have had 18 powers not counting Brawl and Sprint, and 31 discretionary slots. That's a total of 49 slots not counting Brawl and Sprint. The cost of level 35 SOs varies depending on the type, but your absolute budget for them was about 22k per SO. That's very low relative to the cost of level 35 SOs: most cost more than that and the ones that don't are infrequently slotted (things like taunt duration and jump, for example). The big four - accuracy, damage, endurance reduction, and recharge - are all about 40k each. If you were in perma-debt, you could have a budget of as much as 44k per enhancement assuming you didn't spend inf on anything else, which now is within the realm of possibility to slot aggressively with SOs, but barely.

It got better as levels got higher because eventually you caught up: the amount of XP it took to level rose faster than the number of slots you had. The problem usually disappeared by level 40ish. But lets look at level 22 when SOs first became available to us back then. Assuming we spent *nothing* from level 1 to level 22, we would have earned about 190619 XP, and a similar amount of influence. We'd have 13 powers and 20 discretionary slots for a total of 33 slots. That's a budget of about 5800 inf per slot. *No* level 25 SO costs that little, and in fact almost all of them cost more than double that (11600) which means even at perma-debt you are not likely to have enough influence to buy a full set of SOs at level 22.

So it started off mathematically impossible in the 20s, became barely achievable if you were constantly in debt in the 30s, and then became much easier in the 40s. That was basically the SO curve for much of the game from release to Issue 8, although mission bonuses could help a player gain on the XP/inf ratio for kills after they were boosted (I forget the precise moment they became more than ridiculous: I2ish I think). Even so, they had only a small effect on the ratio most of the time.

Another thing that could help was getting on steamroller teams that were seeing a high percentage of bosses, which would increase the amount of Influence relative to XP you were earning, and make SOs feasible as early as the mid thirties in some cases. But I don't think *anything* makes SOs feasible without influence donations prior to I9 in the 20s.

What does MARTy have to do with the EULA? MARTy isn't even a client side system: its a server side system. And nothing in the EULA past or present addresses such a thing. And MARTy's not the first reward throttle implemented in the game.

From release to about I2ish, that was impossible, as the influence vs XP ratio was too low unless you were permanently in debt, and even then it wasn't possible to fully outfit every three levels. There were discussions about that back then, where it was mathematically demonstrated what the limits were.

And up until I9, it was still difficult to do so running only the normal story arc content.

This is not a matter of opinion or personal experience: the amount of inf you need to buy most of all of your slots into SOs and the amount of XP you need to gain the number of levels which would make those SOs invalid is calculable and the ratio between the two is not generally affected by playstyle to a high enough degree to significantly alter things prior to the introduction of inventions. And for much of the early history of the game this was simply not possible. This has nothing to do with being faster or slower, but rather the ratio of inf per kill and XP per kill for all normal critters. And you couldn't claim that mission completion bonuses could make up the difference because for a while after release those bonuses were so low its not too far from the truth to say they that compared to the amounts being discussed were approximately zero. At release, in fact, the mission completion bonus was far less than the award for killing the lone boss at the end of most missions.

It was the one from the dictionary.

Of all the places to pick as the field of debate with me, few are worse than the dictionary. Unless you want to debate information systems best security practice of the last twenty years.

I'm well aware of what the terms mean. Don't encourage me to prove it. Also, perhaps you should actually read the threads you decide to post in: its good practice:

Mostly, only with less associated pity.

Head start is tomorrow. At this point, and to be honest for a while now, people have been claiming cancellation over either trivial things, inevitable things, or very uncommonly things that simply mean the game has chosen a direction incompatible with their entertainment. In all three cases, I consider that loss in the same way I consider the loss of resources the devs can use to make a better game that is due to general inflation. Academic, unfortunate, minimal, unavoidable, and mostly irrelevant.

Well, I can definitely stop wondering about it:

Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.


I suppose in your philosophy there is the bad forcible suppression and occasional racism, and the good kind, but that only means your moral philosophy is incompatible with mine in a way that commonly generates converse results.

Which is precisely how I define "evil." I'm not saying you're Satan evil or anything; but you are at least Google evil, and probably approaching Oracle evil.

I certainly don't need to be informed of the mechanics of how suggestions pass on to the devs, but as to your repeated suggestion that anyone should factor in the fact that at least *someone* might leave due to having no access to powerset respec of some kind, without any evidence to the contrary you can make the opposite assertion: adding it would also cost customers, and there's no reason to believe that it would save more than it would cost.

I would make the academic argument that it cost more than it saved for CO, for example. And I think they believe it also, which is why non-VIPs are much more significantly restricted. I believe they believe in order to keep the non-subscribers around, they need the replayability that archetypes offer, and their unlimited respec system does not.

Everyone knows that's Xavier. He used to make up pet names for him and everything.

But can you play for free? Or at least without paying any money. Is the gameplay without cost. Because if I know its an F2P game then I know what to expect. I don't want to subscribe unless I can play for free. If I can play for free, then I'll subscribe. I hope they make the game free to play because then they'll have more subscribers.