Arcanaville

Its hard for me to give Antimatter Mary Sue status when the dude a) nearly always loses and b) is someone we actually have to sort of protect during the trial to prevent from failing.

That definitely makes sense in Lambda. It only sometimes makes sense in BAF. I'm not sure it ever makes sense in Keyes. About the only thing the hospital timer encourages in Keyes that I think is useful is it encourages players to say "well, since I have to wait anyway, maybe I should buy some of those green things that are saving everyone else's life since there's a store for them right over there."

Yes I did read it and this does not answer my question.

I respect your principles but am forced to mention no one else including NCSoft is required to honor them separately. Your principles dictate you will have to wait until an alternate avenue of acquiring the codes becomes available. We all have to decide which battles are worth fighting and what price we're willing to pay to fight them.

Only after you point out where I accused you of saying that. I said you're complaining about the method of an effect the devs have lots of other methods of inducing. So complaining about the method is like asking to not get hit by green beams in Keyes. As if the devs couldn't, if they even cared enough to listen, make the beam purple instead.

Unresistable damage is a way for the devs to deal a level of damage that is a credible threat to ultra-high powered characters in a way that doesn't simultaneously generate impossible to survive levels of damage for everyone else. But those are the only two choices: you get hit hard and they get hit hard, or you get hit hard and then die instantly and you're eventually playing by yourself.

I'm assuming you aren't actually asking me to be more wordy just to avoid semantic objections.


And making the damage resistable in some fashion would change what, exactly?

In other words, if you don't like taking damage, complaining about the mechanics instead of being honest about complaining about taking damage is completely worthless, unless you think the devs are too stupid to come up with another way to deal a lot of damage to you.

In at least a couple ways. Without double checking the actual damage numbers directly, certainly your ablating strike numbers have to be wrong somewhere: the numbers are almost identical for Scrappers and Brutes and that can't be right.

Second, you're multiplying together all the damage buff sources for the Brute and that's wrong. Damage buffs add, not multiply that way. That's acting to make the brute damage come out way higher than it should.

In other words, you're not supposed to take base damage and multiply by slotting then multiply again by BF's buff and then multiply again by Fury. You're supposed to add up all the damage buffs together, and multiply base damage by that final sum of all damage buffs.

Consensus? People were arguing about whether the Enterprise could transport photon torpedoes onto the bridge of a Star Destroyer from a farther range than Darth Vader could kill with the Force. You're not going to build consensus around that debate.

From a purely technological stand point, the only two really interesting questions from that debate were who would attack first (probably the empire) and what the numerical odds would be. Starfleet wins in a straight up one on one fight, but that's not the likely circumstance. Its more likely to be a first strike by the Empire, using hyperspace to surprise its targets, and at odds of dozens to one.

I call it "simplification." Because I know the rules, all of the rules, and what the devs do with unresistable damage I can do without unresistable damage.

In fact, there's no such thing as untyped damage. That damage is normally typed "Special" or "Unique." If I wanted to hit you really hard through your expensive resistances, I can:

1. Type the damage "Special" which you have no resistance for.

2. Type the damage Radiation which you have no resistance for.**

3. Type the damage Lethal but just make it unresistable.

4. Increase the attack to Scale 20 which will hit you really hard even at capped resistances, and everyone else it will one-shot.

5. Mez you and watch your toggles fall.

Take all of those options away, and I can keep coming up with more. The fact is there's no "rules" that say critters can't hit hard, that they cannot mez you with a higher mag of mez than you have protection, that damage cannot be typed with a type you don't have resistance to. What you seem to be saying is if you build something that is indestructible, the devs have to honor that and continue to allow you to be indestructible. That the critters cannot improve along with you, and become more lethal than you become resilient.

There are no such rules. If I'm the designer and I want to bring your multi-billion incarnate build to its knees, there are no rules that can stop me. All you can do is make it take increasingly more time to design. This is not a simulation. The mechanics are there to express intent. If my intent is to kill you, the mechanics of the game can't save you. If my intent is to hit you hard enough to threaten your life with high levels of damage, the mechanics of the game can't protect you. All you're doing is choosing the method of your injury, not the magnitude. Thinking that if the damage was resistable you'd get hit less hard misses the point. The devs don't give critters damage to give them damage. They give them damage to hurt you. They will continue to increase the level of damage until they hurt you as much as they intend to, no matter what your resistances are.


** Remember: I know the rules: there is such a thing as Radiation typed damage. At the moment, nothing fires it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

True, I think the question is not "is it time for another Star Trek series" and rather "is the idea good television?" If it is, the time is right. If its not, calling it Star Trek isn't going to make it better.


Technically, they don't have to ignore it: the original time line is still out there. In fact Star Trek Online simultaneously acknowledges (at least some of) the events of Abrams Trek while still continuing on in the original timeline.

Hmm. Most of my Keyes runs have been on a blaster whose only heal is Rebirth. I do not usually die *that* often, and unless I'm on a zero-death master run of something, my style of play is usually somewhat on the more-aggressive-than-is-healthy-for-a-blaster side. It may not be fun to die, but Keyes shouldn't be killing you constantly. I have actually managed to get through a Keyes without dying once one or two times.

Its kind of irrelevant to regeneration. First of all, there is no actual clock that ticks at 0.132 seconds per tick. That number is a calculated number that references the fact that combat power activations are aligned to a 0.125 second combat clock (8/sec) and power *rooting times* are aligned to a 1/30th animation clock. The interaction "beats" between the two generates the 0.132 arcanatime pseudo-clock used for power activation calculations.

Regeneration probably happens on a faster clock, and in fact we know there are processes that can occur faster than the 0.125 second clock. When Castle oopsied Indominable Will and turned it into an accidental ultra-fast heal, I measured the healing ticks as coming about 8.5 times per second, or about one every 0.115 seconds. That's how fast the game engine can apply an effect when its told "do this continuously." Its also possible regeneration ticks can occur even faster than that, because certain DoT effects occur in as little as 0.1 seconds on average - but the game sometimes does some odd averaging of the rate when things get that fast, so that might be approaching the fastest the game engine can perform a process.

I've been wondering for a while about the feasibility and usefulness of allowing league leaders to gain the ability to direct messages directly to people's screens in a manner similar to but perhaps in-between the visibility of how the game sends trial chat or how the drop system works. Drop text is a little too obtrusive (and too large a font to send meaningful messages) and the trial chat is a little too ignorable. Something in the middle might be useful, but it would have to be limited to perhaps only league and team leaders. For it to serve the purpose intended, though, it would have to be impossible to disable, because the whole point is to make sure that while players can ignore instructions, there is never an excuse for not receiving them.

Needless to say, this is not an idea capable of skirting controversy.

No, I did not miss it.

You're saying that in retrospect. I'm simply saying that argument was used at the time in those cases, and no one at the time could possibly have been using then the counter-argument you're using now. The whole point is that you see a distinction today that didn't exist then, so that makes the argument weaker when used now because there's no way to know if a similar distinction won't be slapped on this situation in the future.

Its not something I would personally hang my hat on.

But it doesn't say if the new Hami is better designed or if the old Hami was more fun. The old Hami was an HO giveaway with some exhibition combat by the time I9 came around. Sure the old Hami was more popular, but if Keyes was reduced to Antimatter shooting HOs out of his ears Keyes would be more popular as well, but still very poorly designed.

Popularity is easy to engineer these days. Just give lots of stuff away for very little effort. The pre-I9 Hamidon *initially* took effort, but within a year or so from our first full defeat on Triumph Hami was an ATM machine.

I would hesitate myself to use that argument, particularly given that it was used initially against Lambda and BAF themselves, as well as other content (I9 Hamidon comes to mind). I think even if Keyes participation was ramping upwards over time, I would still have the same critique of its design I have now. Its worth noting, but I don't think its the most telling aspect of Keyes on its face.

That's somewhat a matter of opinion (the latter part) and Ogre does in fact meet the on-paper list I provided in a superficial sense, but its mechanics as I previously mentioned aren't quite extensible to MMO design. The fuzzy part is significant in one area: requirement one. When the power selection options involve units in a group rather than abilities on a single entity, you add a set of complicating factors that may only work when the set of powers is distributed among multiple entities in that fashion. The notion of interunit tactics exists for a set of units that doesn't exist for a single entity (at least, not in any design I've seen). And that's important because an Ogre army has some diversity due to its specific selection of units and some diversity due to the implicit interunit tactical options each set of units contains separate from per-unit tactics. When you collapse that into a single entity that interunit tactical options disappears, and the options that Ogre presents when translated into an MMO would be too limited to be interesting.

To reproduce interunit field tactics with interpower synergy effects in a way that would make these two situations directly analogous would be challenging to say the least. And that's why requirement one is there: I don't see a way to bypass it and get relateable results. Wargames in general are fine if there is a way to customize *units* in an interesting enough way to be analogous to the way an MMO open powers system would work, or if the wargame fields larger scale superunits that contain individual units that aren't themselves customizable and which operate atomically. That would be more analogous to an MMO open powers system. Ogre doesn't do this.

Fair enough. Your next stop is convincing the devs that first scattering objectives in a mission, then telling everyone where they are is logical. If it actually gets that far, I'm going to be questioning their design logic strongly, and I've already given you a preview of the argument I intend to make. If you think you have the winning hand there, you have no problem. I'm not the one to tell you not to try to get a suggestion implemented, but I will oppose it if it ever gets to the point of serious consideration.

I should point out that I have yet to fail a Keyes. I can't say that about BAF or Lambda. I have literally never been on a Keyes that has failed for any reason. That might be due to luck and it might be due to the fact that except for a couple of early ones a good percentage of the people who run Keyes at know what they are getting into and have already mastered the basics. But as I said above, I don't *personally* find the trial hard in the sense of being difficult to complete. I diverge a little from SnowGlobe in thinking that adding fun is less about making it easier and more about making the design more engaging. But I do think that you're under-estimating the problem of timestop: the problem with timestop is not timestop itself: the problem with timestop is that it can freeze players while they are being disintegrated or targeted by obliteration. Even so, that won't fail a trial on its own so its not even a threat to the league completing the trial. What it is, is a design that crosses the line from a puzzle that can kill you, to a random event that can just kill you without any reasonable way of either reacting or proactively preventing it.

Puzzles are fine, and difficulty is fine, to a point. Bad luck you die is something that many people find frustrating if its done too overtly, and worse if its stretched out over a period of time**, and in my opinion its not necessary. And I say this as someone that frankly doesn't care if I die a hundred times in a trial. Its not like I can't wipe the debt out in ten seconds and at this stage of the game death just kind of tickles. As a player I can, and have no problem running Keyes. But if you ask me to comment on its design, as a designer I have issues with it.

But even that is not my biggest design issue with Keyes. The other two I mention above are more problematic to me.



** Psychologically speaking, as a game designer I would sooner say "bang you're dead" and kill the player than say "bang, you're going to die and there's nothing you can do about it in five, four, three, two..." That's another feature of Obliteration that frankly I can't justify the design sensibility of.

On the other hand, we did take it that far, culling Hamidon with such enthusiasm that sometimes when he got stuck and failed to respawn we started wondering if we completely scared him away.

Primal Earth, man. Its the pecking order of the cosmos:

Hellions
Tsoo
Rikti
Kronos
Praetorian
Hamidon
Primal Earth inhabitant looking for loot

I'm surprised that when we confront Ruladek he doesn't take one look at us, cry "Primal Earth human!" and all the Rularuu jump over the edge into shardspace. The only reason the Shivans are a threat to the universe is because a) Primal Earth humans don't know the location of their home world and b) there are no merits for finding it.

However, if the devs wish to experiment with increasing the rewards on live to 10 empyrean merits per run, in the interests of cooperating with the devs to make a better game I would be willing to make the sacrifice of helping run those.

The problem with Alien 3 was not that the movie sucked, it was that it sucked as a sequel to Aliens. If you had never seen either of the first two movies before, that movie would have been a passable scifi monster movie. Decent, even. But when you're following one of the greatest horror films of all time and one of the biggest action movies of all time with a movie that looks like it was shot on a budget someone charged on their mastercard filmed on location at a site they passed on for Robocop and with special guest star Roc, and you *market* the movie as the best of the three, the producers should be thankful opening night audiences didn't put out a hit on them.

Actually, I think this would make Keyes *easier* but I don't think it would make it more fun. Removing some of the frustration wouldn't make the rest of it automatically more entertaining.

I personally don't have a problem with Keyes, but I do see where the flaws are in terms of it having wider appeal. I think Keyes has three fundamental problematic issues that have nothing to do with dying, difficulty, or badges per se:

1. It encourages leagues to scatter.

You're supposed to collect temps from all over the place and without someone literally assigning individual people to collect individual temps from individual spots which is unlikely, you'll just have a mass of players not sure if they should be going after the blinkies or doing something else. This has nothing to do with explaining the overall structure of the trial either: if you don't get that after one pass through, you're just an idiot. Have something shiny to play with. But that's strategy. The tactics aren't something that is coordinated with individual precision (at least not that I've ever seen) and that breeds confusion.

Plus, scattering is counter-productive to most people's fun in the iTrials, because much of our collective incarnate strength comes from cross buffing and concentrated damage: it comes from acting in groups. Lambda encourages us to split up into two teams, then rejoin. If the individual teams scatter that's their problem. BAF encourages us to split up into a few teams, then rejoin. It doesn't encourage us to scatter: rather the opposite the towers and adds encourage us to stick together in one big mass or a pair of teams or a triplicate group, depending on the strategy.


2. Its serialized.

Except for the early timer sections, the bulk of the terminal work for the last two reactors requires Antimatter to be present. That means however fast we collect temps and however many people have them, only one terminal at a time can be used. It takes a parallel task and forces it into a serialized structure. And this means it forces a lot of people to wait around for others to finish a task. And there's not much for them to do while they wait, once the terminals are cleared. Which they can be by one crazy blaster with a couple of lucks and poor impulse control (like me). It doesn't take an entire team to do that, but whole teams are waiting around to do something.

This situation does not occur in either of the other two trials, nor in TM or Apex, nor in any of the task forces in the game as far as I know, to nearly the same degree, except in a few odd cases that *themselves* are seen as bad (of course I'm talking about Numina).


3. Its meta-puzzle tricks are too gimmicky.

The autohitting turrets in BAF can be turned off. Sequestration can be managed. If you run out of grenades in Lambda you can actually earn more. If Maurader jumps out of Lambda someone on your league is an idiot. But while I believe most things are fair game if you present them correctly, even I have problems with a meta puzzle in which you can be killed by a power that you have to move away from, and the game occasionally prevents you from moving, and those two things can happen at the same time. While its *possible* to manage this in theory, I consider this particular combination to be asking too much. Its like the original Hamidon that was designed to have the players all attack from range and all simultaneously move to the same new firing spot at the same time when the mito bloom occurred, twice. Its worth noting the players actually *thought up* this solution to Hami, and mostly concluded we'd never be able to coordinate it well enough to ever be worth whatever reward Hamidon could possibly give.

If I got all my friends together in the same room to attempt a Keyes run and I could count on them to obey my instructions perfectly and without question, I think I could beat that part of the puzzle without too much difficulty by precisely timing the damage we dealt to Antimatter to prevent simultaneous Time Stop and Obliteration. I'd like to know if the devs have ever managed that feat except by accident.

So, I could do it. But it wouldn't be fun, not even for me. It would be work. I'd be working to defeat the devs' design.


As I said, I'm fine with the overall trial (still need those badges though) and I'm fine with the overall difficulty. I'm even fine with dying. But if you ask me how I would make Keyes more fun, I don't think I would be focused on simply removing the parts some find annoying, but trying to replace the parts that directly impede fun with things more entertaining. If its entertaining, people will not be upset about dying. Dying is what I think people are upset about because they aren't getting enough entertainment for their deaths.

To do that, I would try to find ways to reduce the amount of scatter the trial induces. Funny how the whole point of the hospital lock out is to prevent dead players from just diving back into the trial all by themselves when in Keyes specifically there is absolutely no advantage to that enforced grouping up at all. I'd be looking for ways to parallel-ize the trial. Brainstorming, suppose you needed to bring Antimatter to the terminal to "unlock it" with the first temp, but once energized you could apply the next two temps without him being there. But energizing the terminal summoned reinforcement guards. You could then have an Antimatter team bringing him to the terminals one at a time fast while a separate team or set of teams then clears the terminals and applies the remaining temps. You have the same basic structure, but you get more players simultaneously involved. That's not a completely thought out idea, its just what I came up with off the top of my head for illustration purposes.

And as to Obliteration, I notice if I'm actually staring at the timer, its easy to avoid (the last of your badge runs I was on, I dodged several until I saw two separate people get hit, then I stopped looking at the timer - as soon as I did, I got hit by a beam). Lets face it: CoH players are still coming up to speed on raid mechanics and having to juggle different sources of information. We will get there, see Lambda and BAF, but it will take time. In the meantime, we need to continue to provide a learning curve. Don't assume raid leaders will explain everything precisely, and don't expect players will understand them correctly when they do. Give them some help: in this case, the Obliteration beam should generate a visible and audible warning in the screen of everyone targeted at least four seconds in advance that is *impossible* to miss. Four seconds is what it will take to give ample time for a player to escape the Obliteration beam that a) doesn't notice anything until the blatant warning sounds and b) just completed activating an attack and c) has another attack queued. On average you're going to lose nearly three seconds between two roots and human reaction time, and it takes a good fraction of a second to move clear of the beam.

If you're just staring at the timer and not using *any* attacks, its trivially easy to avoid the patch. But getting twenty four people to do that every thirty seconds is an unreasonable burden, for now, for our current playerbase. In a year, it might be old hat. For now, its not.

And Time Stop should stop time. Timers stop. Disintegration stops. Obliteration stops. Everything stops but Antimatter. If AVs have purple triangles to prevent players trivializing combat by perma-holding the AVs, the devs should consider the ramifications of giving Antimatter essentially an unresistable mez through which he can use powers that can kill us instantly.

As I said, I don't mind puzzles and I don't generally complain about the meta gaming requirements of making high end challenges. So if I think its a little wonky, the devs should assume most players think it sucks donkey balls.


Oh, and just apply a mag 1000000000000 immobilize to people that are being disintegrated already. Seeing players run away from the team as fast as they can or run behind buildings or even just in circles makes me want to shoot them myself.