Arcanaville

Keep wondering, buck-o

(I haven't had the chance to examine the logs of that trial yet)

If you're just adding new story arcs to an existing zone, you aren't, by my definition, updating old content. Dark Astoria isn't changing, and no existing story arc is changing, so that is making purely new content.

The devs seem to be taking, in general, the attitude that if a player really, really wants to know, there are informal sources out there that can tell them. But they don't want to push that data onto the players that don't want to dig for them, so this game doesn't become a game where newer players are actually ostracized for not knowing the numbers. The vast majority of players don't know, and don't want to spend the effort to find out, and that's more or less seen as working by default.

There's a special case, though, and that's the Iakona case. The devs don't want to spend a lot of time constructing a puzzle for players to figure out like the towers in the STF or the mitos in the Hami raid, only to have someone like me come along and just hand the players all the information about them. The devs want players to experience the game before reading about the data, and I respect that position.

He was temp-banned when he posted inside info on the I9 Hamidon, but it was just a three day "please don't do that again" ban. He was around for I9, and I think I10ish, but then he decided to take a leave around I11 beta or so, and I haven't heard from him since then.

To this day I still informally call the "don't post information about non-player powers that players couldn't theoretically test for themselves or the devs haven't explicitly mentioned" the "Iakona rule."


You know its been years now, and I'm still not sure what I should say or not say about Iakona and his data. Some people back then suspected several things, some of which were true, but technically speaking its still activity that could get anyone, including me, perma-banned in some circumstances.

A part of me says if the league can't get their act together, they should fail. That's what trial badges test for: league-wide performance. But on the other hand, the sometimes draconian steps necessary to *guarantee* such synchronicity are things that aren't explicitly necessary for success, and more difficult for some servers than others due to population. If the person is an idiot or can't listen, heck I'm fine with bumping them. But bumping every single person that shows *any* signs of not being a robot is not always practical.

And I say that as someone who, if the league leader told me to hover 48.2 feet above Antimatter and do the facepalm emote 4.5 seconds before the next Obliteration beam while wearing a bikini and a top hat, and I thought it would help, would set up special macros to do it.

(If I think it wouldn't help, I would shoot you in the face Snow).

True story: on a lark, and because I could, I decided to make a flowchart of how all the animation sequences were connected together for BaB. However, scaled to be readable, the chart would have been six hundred feet wide.

Dark Astoria.

The primary thing I'm not sure you fully appreciate is that the "function" you mention is identical for all attribmods (power effects) separate from side effects: that function is addition. If there are any "functions" to how the value is applied, its due to the intrinsic nature of the aspects (and to some degree the attributes themselves) and how they work, and not how the actual power effects are applied to the target.

The Attribute/Aspect distinction goes all the way back to Iakona, although my familiarity with them is somewhat more first-hand these days.


Resistance debuffs can be buffed. They *would* be buffed by Strength buffs if the devs allowed them to be. But because, as I mentioned above, what we call "resistance" is usually "Damage resistance" and "damage resistance" is itself a set of resistances to one of several actual Attributes - smashing, lethal, fire, etc - the Strengths that would boost resistance debuffs are identical to the Strengths that would boost (powers that deal) damage. The devs did not want damage buffs to boost resistance debuffs, so they made resistance debuffs IgnoreStrength which means those effects ignore Strength buffs that would otherwise buff them.


Lets look at a power that deals scale 1.0 ranged Smashing damage by way of example. That power has an attribmod (an effect) that basically says Deliver magnitude 1.0 scaled by the caster's ranged_damage table to the Abs aspect of the Smashing attribute of the target. That 1.0 scale is multiplied by the ranged damage value of the caster at his or her combat level. Lets assume that is -55.6102. The power then applies an attribmod to the target with value -55.6102 to the Abs aspect of the Smashing attribute of the target. If the target has Smashing Res and the effect is not flagged unresistable, the value is added to the Abs aspect of the Smashing attribute. That happens to be linked to the target's absolute health in points. If the target had 500 points of health, now it has 500 + (-55.6102) = 444.3898. Attribmods always add: the function is always add (ignoring special side effects like GrantPower which also grant a Reward).

The way damage buffs factor in is that before the attribmod is applied, the effect value is multiplied by, in this case, the caster's Smashing Strength. The caster itself has a Smashing Strength associated with it that includes the damage buffs applied to it. But the power itself might have Smashing Strength slotted into it. An enhancement is essentially a special kind of buff. Its effects are explicitly flagged to essentially only affect the power they are slotted into. So when the game engine sums up all the Smashing strength buffs before multiplying the power's effect by them, it includes the Smashing strength in that enhancement for that power but not for other powers.

This is controlled by flags. If a power has an effect that is *not* flagged as only affect power slotted into, it will actually buff the entire player. That's how some global enhancements work. You can actually make a damage enhancement that is flagged so that *every* power benefits from that buff, not just the power its slotted into if you want.


Correct. Because a damage boost is the same thing as a damage resistance boost. The same thing that would boost the Smashing damage you deal also boosts the effect of your Smashing resistance powers - or would, if those powers were not flagged to ignore strength buffs. That Strength is Smashing Strength. Smashing Strength increases the effect of *all* powers that affect *any aspect of the Smashing attribute" except for those effects that are themselves explicitly flagged to be unbuffable.

And incidentally, effects that are not buffable are also not debuffable. Because as I said, technically speaking the game only knows how to add. Buffs and Debuffs are a matter of perspective for the player. Adding positive numbers to Damage Strength is a buff. Adding negative numbers to Damage Strength is a debuff. On the other hand, adding negative numbers to Mez attributes is a buff, while adding positive numbers to Mez attributes is a mez. So when you flag something as ignoring strength, that is both "buff" strength and "debufF" strength because the game doesn't know the difference.


I keep thinking I should make a flowchart for this, although I'm not sure what the devs would think about that.

There is another irrefutable fact, and that is the difference between adding new content and revising old content is that adding new content adds new content and keeps the old content, while revising old content adds new content and deletes old content. That's why adding new content tends to be valued higher, and why the balance generally is in favor of making new content. Making all new content is revision without deletion.

When that's not true, like adding powerset customization options, the opposite happens: revising the old tends to acquire the same or higher priority as making the new.

It would be different if updating the old took less time than creating the new, so you got more bang for your buck. But the devs have also said that updating the old generally requires as much or more effort than making the new, because updating the old basically involves making something totally new that happens to parallel the old. So it takes as much effort to make, on top of the additional requirement to maintain touchstones with the old.

Its only one of many factors going into the decision making process, but one of them is definitely that revisions delete the old while additions only add the new. And Flashback can only mitigate that to a degree.

Who are you, and why do you think I follow you around?

I'm currently debating whether its worth spending a few billion to make a build that can survive +4x8 Arachnos just to see what happens, but I'm already noticing the goal posts moving from just tanking them without difficulty to now farming them. Not worth it in that case.

Its not that I don't appreciate this particular thought, its that I'm wondering how it could possibly be that this game managed to retain so many people who believe it up to this point. I was really hoping most people who are current subscribers are fine with paying a subscription and open to the idea of getting more for their subscription. It never occurred to me that one of the complaints about Freedom would be that subscribers would have to continue to pay their subscription to retain subscription rights just like they do now.

I'm not worried we might lose these customers when Freedom launches: I'm wondering how we managed to have these customers in the first place.

I won't say its not possible for a team of sixteen to jump right in and get this badge. However, after seeing *many* attempts, I've concluded each person above the minimum necessary to take out AM substantially increases the difficulty of acquiring the badge. Its not just the obvious. With less people its easier to spread out and ensure you are either the target of the beam or nowhere near the target. This means you will get an extra message telling you that you're the target: an extra cue to move. There's less power spam to obscure the beam. There's less people jockeying for position on AM, and therefore less people either hovering or hopping around. Being in the air when the beam happens to target someone greatly increases the odds of the beam reticle showing up in a spot someone else cannot see no matter what their zoom out and orientation is. It happened to me once, and I do not believe there was anything I could have done to find that beam and then move out of the way: it happened to be in the worst possible spot for me to see, even though I was *in* the thing.

Completely separate from the fact you can put the people with the most practice dodging Obliteration out there, the actual act of dodging becomes far simpler with far less people. But to me, something seems wrong with the fact that anything more than about five people makes the task increasingly difficult, but you can't actually start the trial with five people. The trial doesn't *force* you to sit people in the hospital; I'm sure its theoretically possible to eventually get sixteen people to get the badge while all simultaneously engaged with AM. But it *encourages* you to do so because by design it radically simplifies the task.

This isn't a case of the players somehow exploiting a flaw in the task force, like the old logout bug in villain respec. This is a case where the actual design of the task says: the more people you put in there, the harder it will be to see what you're doing or actually do it.

I should point out that I am not saying the devs are asking too much to ask players to kindly look for a green cross hair and then move out of its way. If there was a badge to dodge a hundred obliteration beams I'll go out there and solo that ******* for the league (I'd need several runs to do it, of course). And I think its not asking too much for players to practice and learn how to do that. But in a high density group the probability of a degenerate case causing a problem: a target in the air, a target in a cluster of players, a target you can't see or a simultaneous Obliteration and Time Stop where AM is out of place, becomes extremely high and these are not things that are all trivial to control in a league. And just one of them can destroy a lot of prior work to get the badge.


One last thing. As I've said previously, I actually like Keyes. I don't mind running it. However, when we got this badge I was less happy and more relieved. I actually felt a lot of pressure out there to get this thing done. An entire league was counting on me (and a few other people) not to screw up or take my eyes off the ball for even one second. I honestly didn't want to let anyone down. In the back of my mind for the entire run that thought was echoing around: don't let anyone down. I would say that's a bit alarming, because I think if I'm feeling any sort of pressure at all, a lot of players are probably feeling it worse on any given Keyes badge run. And many of the players that don't feel that pressure are probably also not 100% focused on every element of the trial necessary to award these badges.


So speaking as someone that has this badge now, and would do it again to help a league get it if asked, and even acknowledging some people might be having a rip-roaring great time getting it, my opinion is that this badge is not designed with any specific entertainment value folded into it explicitly by design. I would say it sucks donkey balls but after making that crack the last time the first Keyes I ran after that on the first reactor Antimatter decided to just aggro right on me and kill me, and *then* aggro on me as I exited the hospital and kill me again, and then target his first two Obliteration beams on me at the end. Message received Positron, message received.

Not exactly true. In the TNG episode Parallels its shown that in the Trek universe alternate timelines can simultaneously exist due to a variation of the many-worlds hypothesis, and in those alternate timelines alternate versions of most or all the main characters exist, some with only extremely tiny differences. In the TNG episode All Good Things three different timelines come together to close the anomaly. They have to be *different* timelines and not different moments in a single timeline because its only due to Q's tampering that the three different Picards are made aware of those events. The Picard of the present doesn't explicitly remember the moment in the past when he closed an anomaly, nor does the future Picard. So alternate timelines can exist simultaneously with the current one, and people can exist in them.

Time travel normally doesn't create an alternate timeline *reachable* by the main characters, except through extreme circumstances. The Abrams timeline might not be *reachable* to the main characters, but that's not the same thing as saying it doesn't exist. Alternate timelines are *sometimes* reachable directly, however: see the DS9 episode Visionary in which two completely separate timelines are reachable, and its ultimately time travel that is the cause of the difference between them (technically, O'Brien tampers with history to save DS9).

I personally don't mind running Keyes although I know there are players that don't care for it. This specific badge, though, I'm less than crazy about. Not because of the burden the mechanics put on a single player, but rather because I do not believe there exists a strategy that doesn't contain an implicit penalty for having more than the absolute minimum number of players necessary to defeat Antimatter. And that absolute minimum is far lower than the minimum number of players necessary to even start the trial.

If an attack does smashing damage and energy damage, your smashing resistance resists the smashing damage and your energy resistances will resist the energy damage. But the defenses you can use have nothing to do with that. The attack itself has attack typing, which is the same thing as defense typing. If the attack is typed Smashing_Attack you can use your smashing defense against it. If the attack is typed Energy_Attack you can use your energy defense against it. If the attack is typed both you can use the better of the two.

And incidentally, "Smashing Defense" is the same thing as "Smashing attack type" - both are the same Attribute which is Smashing_Attack. That's what you buff when you buff what players call "smashing defense."


Just to add a bit of Did You Know: Did You Know that this was not how the game was originally programmed? Originally, if an attack was typed Smashing_Attack and Energy_Attack the target didn't use the *better* of the two defenses, the target used *the sum* of both defenses.

Today, we think scrapper melee sets that are all smashing or all lethal have a disadvantage to sets like Dark Melee which have substantial non-smash/lethal damage. But Did You Know that when the game was launched with the above rule, the players quickly realized that Dark Melee was at a strong *disadvantage* because while a set like Katana only had to deal with Lethal defense, Dark Melee had to deal with the combination of Negative defense *and* Smashing defense. Just try to hit something that had, say, a dispersion bubble up which had defense to both.

The devs eventually decided this behavior was not intended, and changed it to the "use the single best defense you can" rule we have today.

Paranoid personality disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis characterized by paranoia and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others. Those with the condition are hypersensitive, are easily slighted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions to validate their prejudicial ideas or biases.

Wait, that's not right.

This game has Attributes and each attribute represents some specific thing: a damage type, an attack type, regeneration, etc. Each Attribute has a set of Aspects. Those aspects include things like Cur, Abs, Str, Res, Max, and MaxMax (there are others). Cur and Abs are two different ways of looking at the same thing: the Attribute's *Value*. Cur represents the attribute value as a percentage of its maximum. Abs represents the attirbute value in terms of its absolute value.

So if you have a maximum health of 1000 and its currently 780, your health Cur is 0.78 and your health Abs is 780.0.

Str represents the strength of the entity to create power effects related to that attribute. So under normal circumstances, if you have a power that by default does 5 of something to an attribute, and you have 1.2 strength, you'll end up doing 6. That's how damage works, that's how mez works, that's how anything you slot with enhancements works. Your strength in Attribute X boost the effects of any power that does affects X somehow.

Res represents the entity's Resistance to having that Attribute messed with. If you have 0.50 (50%) Smashing resistance, that means when someone tries to change your Smashing attribute in any way, the effect will be reduced by 50%. That's how damage resistance works.

So here's the special case. Suppose you have 30% Smashing resistance and someone tries to debuff your Smashing resistance by 10%. That power is trying to reduce your Smashing Res from 0.3 to 0.2. But it cannot, because that power effect is trying to change your Smashing Attribute - specifically its Res Aspect. So that -0.1 effect is reduced by 30% to -0.07. Your resistance drops from 0.3 to 0.23 instead of 0.2.

This is why Damage Resistance resists Damage Resistance debuffs. Because as far as the game engine is concerned, someone trying to deal Smashing damage to you is no different than someone trying to deal a Smashing Res debuff to you. Both are Smashing changes, and both are resisted by Smashing Resistance.

It works for all resistances: all resistances resist attempts to debuff that very same resistance. Its just that we only usually see this effect with Damage resistance, because other resistances are uncommon, and other resistance debuffs are even rarer. And that means, by the way, that something with Smashing resistance will resist Smashing damage debuffs as well, unless the effect is flagged unresistable. What we call a "smashing damage debuff" is actually a Smashing Strength debuff. And that's a smashing effect. Which are resisted by Smashing Res.


At the heart of the game, in effect all power effects (well, most of them in this context) try to "give" you something. They implicitly add a value to one Aspect of one Attribute. Damage adds a negative value to one of the damage Attribute's Abs aspect. Heals adds a positive value to the target's Heal Attribute's Abs. Build Up adds 100% or 1.0 (or 0.8, depending on the archetype) to the target's Smashing Str(ength), Lethal Str, Fire Str, Cold Str, etc - you get the idea. Its all about adding a value (possibly negative, essentially subtracting a value) to an Aspect of an Attribute.

Its actually a very simple system, if you know what the Aspects mean and how the Attributes work. For example, life suddenly becomes a lot simpler if you think about the Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative_Energy, Toxic, Psionic, Heal, Special, etc Attributes as symbolic links to Health. Damage is an Abs effect that deducts from Health through the symbolic link of one of the damage types, which allows for different resistance effects. Heal works the same way.

For 90% of the people reading this, that probably meant nothing. For Guy Perfect and many of the quants out there, I suspect it means a lot.

Rx10 was technically paranoid, not psychotic.

You haven't seen enough builds.

That would make for an interesting iTrial.

In Journey to Babel, the Enterprise was strafed by an Orion ship at high warp. In the Elaan of Troyius the Enterprise has to fight a Klingon ship that is attacking it traveling at warp speed while its crippled to impulse: the Enterprise turns the tables when it restores warp speed and maneuverability. In the Ultimate Computer its not explicitly stated but the faux-wargame that takes place at the end is likely happening at warp speed because the Enterprise is traveling at warp speed when it engages the battle group and does not specifically drop out of warp.

Its also never specifically stated that phasers move at the speed of light, and furthermore it was eventually revealed that objects that leave a warp field can be, in at least some circumstances, left with a residual warp field that takes a little time to decay. Saucer section separation while at warp in TNG, for example - the saucer doesn't have a warp drive.


It was old even when it was old. It was going on back when we had to do it with text based USENET readers. But its more interesting to speculate upon the issues than it is to debate the specifics. In a hard core debate both universe's depictions have enough internal contradictions to make any air tight argument impossible. But thinking about the technical and tactical limits themselves is just musing about the limits of extrapolating both fictional universes to their logical conclusions. The Star Trek universe was one based on the premise that humanity would one day master technology and mostly themselves, and use that mastery to conquer all of the external challenges in the universe. The Star Wars universe is based on the premise of a static or cyclical but grand universe where epic stories have a timeless quality. They don't have the same strengths and weaknesses, and so military forces from each would probably never actually fight in the kind of straight-up fight the premise of the "who would win" question tends to assume.

Lets face it; here's how that war would turn out. The Empire would strike first, and cause lots of casualties. Starfleet would regroup and their technological superiority would hold to a point, but they would be fighting a slowly losing battle of attrition. Then Scotty/Spock/Data/whoever would devise a technobabble hyperspace disruptor that would allow the Federation to prevent hyperspace incursion into the Alpha quadrant, preventing Imperial reinforcements and trapping the Imperial expeditionary force in the Alpha quadrant. And the Klingons would arrive and eat them.

Actually, and I'm strictly using the movies for direction here, Star Destroyers have never been depicted as being able to bring a significant percentage of their weapons to bear on a single target and they aren't depicted with something you would call "main batteries." Star Wars combat just doesn't seem to work that way in the movies: the weapons aesthetic seems to be designed around size and numerical superiority, and not around capital ships with appropriately sized weaponry. The only weapons platform specifically designed around its weapons system in the movies seems to have been the Death Star itself.

And on the subject of speed advantage: the Star Wars universe and the Empire in particular may have an advantage in terms of deployment speed - that's not entirely clear. But it doesn't have an advantage in combat velocity. There's no evidence that ships can attack other ships in normal space while in hyperspace. Star Trek ships can attack Imperial ships while at warp moving faster than light. That virtually nullifies the size advantage of Star Destroyers.

As I mentioned previously, the problem is numbers. The Empire wouldn't likely attempt to take on mobile fleets of starships: they would be at a tremendous disadvantage. As an Imperial task force commander, I would attack stationary targets like starbases and planetary colonies, which Starfleet would then have to defend. They couldn't blockade me because I could attack these things by jumping right to them from hyperspace, and so they would have to spread out and remain mostly fixed targets themselves. And then I would get a fifty to one fight against a starship can cannot run away, and I would then be able to neutralize most of Starfleet's advantages. In that kind of fight, Starships have an enormous advantage but Starfleet would be at a tremedous disadvantage, even with no Death Stars to consider.

I should point out, though, that while numbers are on the Empire's side, time is on the Federation's side. The Federation may be militarily disjointed and numerically weak, but in the Star Wars universe military technology appears to be stunted: they haven't made quantum leaps in military technology in thousands of years. On just a time scale of years Starfleet has shown an ability to build things like the Defiant when they are sufficiently motivated. If the war lasts longer than a couple years, Starfleet would soon be massing fleets of hundreds of warships and commanders that are much less ambassador and much more tactician.

Moving forward in time, many of the big league Alpha quadrant powers were willing to work together to defeat the Dominion. If the Empire takes on the Federation that's one thing, if they try to take on the entire Alpha Quadrant simultaneously that's another thing.

This has to be the first time I've ever been accused of that one.