Arcanaville

They kinda seem quaint by today's standards.

Although, I still harbor a little bit of a grudge that during the debates orbiting the GDN I never got my two slots back (and *that's* a bit of trivia I doubt anyone remembers anymore).

As the article said, as long as Kevin Feige still has Disney's confidence, I don't think this represents any issue with Marvel Studios except marketing redundancies.

And its not like he has Schindler's List on his resume or anything, but I think most producers in Hollywood would sell their soul for his overall list producer credits.

Yeah, I remember. I was just having some fun there. It was never official: it was a rumor started by the players before the big HO nerf. "Hami disease" was the idea.

You're thinking of The Gamemaster, another old-school quant I haven't seen in a lot of years.

You could say that about anything. There's no failure in combat, because there's no perma-death. There is only a temporary condition that time is guaranteed to resolve. At worst, you go to the hospital and try again. And possibly multiple times. But almost no fight is impossible to win, so its only a matter of time and repetition.

What you're saying is a matter of perspective that isn't universal. All penalties we don't like and think are easy to surmount are "annoyances." But that doesn't mean they aren't serving an important game play function to encourage getting it right either the first time or quickly.

The problem is we cannot simply remove any penalty that someone finds annoying, even optionally for just that one person. It undermines the integrity of the game when everyone can simply rewrite the game rules to their own convenience. So there has to be a line drawn somewhere. The real question to ask is why not just put all the objectives in the very first room you enter, and give everyone the option to go any farther and clear the mission. That kind of design goes farther than your suggestion. Does it go too far? It does to me, but the real question is, if it does to you, why does it go too far, and how do you judge too far? And how do you judge too far in a way you could explain, so even if the devs were willing to do it your way, they could understand what your way actually was?

If its just an ad hoc decision, and not based on some specific line of thought as to what kinds of things should or should not be in the game, recognize that those kinds of things are very difficult to get other people to understand and follow, even if they were of a mind to do so.

Although I don't have first hand experience buying recent re-releases and such, my understanding is most versions of Ogre use the same basic rules. Also keep in mind I'm talking about Ogre the hex-board wargame, not GURPS Ogre the RPG or the miniature system Ogre which is based on the hex-board version but I'm much less familiar with.

In my opinion, if you're a student of game design and game balance, Ogre is your first point of call. You could spend years thinking about how and why Ogre works. There's even a *hint*, albeit only a hint, of the kind of thinking that should go into open powers systems design. I suspect that might be where Another_Fan is coming from by mentioning wargames. In a sense, you could analogize an army as being a set of powers, and the assembly of an army as a form of open powers selection. However, that analogy doesn't hold strongly enough for it to be a model for open powers design in an MMO for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that there's no good evidence that any wargame like that cared about constant-point balance. It was all about making a better or more effective force than your opponent, and the balance was due to both sides having similar options or being put into static situations that themselves were engineered with balancing forces.

Ogre is interesting in that it has a stronger hint of open powers balance than most wargames, because one side is very strongly fixed: it takes the Ogre. For Ogre (the game) to work, of all possible counter-army constructions there cannot be lots of combinations that are obviously more powerful than the Ogre, but there must be a wide rage of combinations that are nominally as powerful as the Ogre. Which meets some of the requirements I set forth as mandatory in a balanced open powers system.

Why its just a hint of the problem is because the strength of the counter-army is difficult to fully assess because its partially based on the tactics used to drive it. Its hard to say if the Ogre is exactly balanced with the intrinsic power of the counter-army, or if the Ogre is easier to tactically deploy and the counter-army much harder to get maximum effectiveness out of, which acts to handicap the counter-army. In other words, I don't know if in a computer vs computer match, if the Ogre has a significant advantage or the opposing army does, eliminating human factors. It would be an interesting problem to study, though.

Fortunately, primal earth Hamidon seems incapable of operating a camera phone, so this worry was a bit overblown.

Whether Eurisko really did the investigation as Lenat suggested or not is not really relevant to my point. We can call the combination Eurisko/Lenat and the same discussion applies. The point is the cybernetic combination is illustrative of what happens when you take a gaming environment judged "reasonably balanced" by its participants and insert into it something that doesn't want or care to do anything but beat the system. Not even win, per se, but literally beat the system. Whether TCS was actually balanced or not is almost besides the point, because it was judged so by its participants which is important. That same belief translates to other systems for which there exist a large number of people who claim its balanced, only to discover that claim contains an alarming set of caveats. Which usually turn out to be variants of "balanced so long as no one tries to break it."

Every scrapper that has taken one of the challenges understands that none of us is actually "winning" anything: we're knocking down pylons and wiping out spawns as feats that involve beating the system, in achieving levels of performance clearly beyond the devs intentions. We win nothing really for doing that. We just gain some satisfaction from taking the game system and turning it into a pinata. Its harmless fun so long as we a) don't leverage that performance for exploitive levels of gain and b) don't judge other normal players against anything remotely resembling that level of performance. And the scrapper forums have held both rules more or less since the beginning of performance challenge threads in those forums.


Keep in mind, I'm not saying balanced gaming systems can't exist. Starcraft is a great example of a relatively strongly balanced game system and its a moderately heterogeneous one as well. And even more interesting in terms of game design is the game Ogre, which was in my opinion the absolute pinnacle of asymmetric game balance. You can't get much more asymmetric than Ogre.

But open powers systems are not the same thing as balanced gaming environments. Open powers system presume a far wider latitude of choices than most balanced gaming environments contain. There's no strong lessons to be learned in Starcraft that would be easy to extend to balancing an open powers system that could drive a game like City of Heroes (or, say, Champions Online).

Interesting projects that would get them sued out of existence today. My own foray there was the carbon dioxide laser. Too big and too fragile, ultimately.

Eurisko is actually the perfect example of an entity that only wants to win, and is willing to destroy any semblance of gamesmanship to do it. Eurisko is digital pun-pun. Its worth noting that Eurisko wasn't particularly innovative, it was pure cold evil in its decision making that would bring a smile to any real min/maxer. In its first outing in TCS it spent all trillion credits on a gigantic fleet of the tiniest ships it could make with nothing but guns; not even engines. To win, its human opponents had to engage him because his fleet couldn't move, and when they did their own weapons were overkill against his unarmored fleet. But because he often outnumbered his opponents a hundred to one, he ultimately blasted them to pieces with sheer numbers. Today, we'd just call that stationary zerging.

Its second outing proved its real evil genius. The TCS rules were changed so you had to be able to move: in addition you got bonuses for the average ability for your fleet to move. So Eurisko created ships with the minimum propulsion possible, and then during the game it self-destructed any ship that was hit to eliminate a damaged ship from the fleet, maintaining its high agility bonus. When you still outnumber your enemy ten to one, you can blow up your own ships to game the rules.

It was *that* maneuver that caused the tournament to ban Eurisko (or rather: threaten to cancel if Eurisko entered). The problem was that people were entering real fleets that might reasonably exist in the Traveller universe, and Eurisko could care less. Could they have made TCS balanced enough for Eurisko? Probably only by sucking the life out of the game to the point only computers would want to play it.

But what Eurisko did is nothing more than what min/maxers have done throughout the history of gaming: shredded rules intended to be used to make an entertaining game, not to be beaten. The response in *every* gaming system to such people who were willing to burn the game to beat it has been the same: ban them.

For humans, its not usually enough to win. You have to win in a way that people will invite you back to play again. But Eurisko just really didn't care. It wasn't programmed to win graciously. And that same distinction is evident in the difference between how most people play PnP games with other people, and how they play computer games against the computer.

Its not an open powers system as is being discussed, and furthermore there is no specific design intent for corewars to be "balanced" by any criteria other than the obvious: that all options are available to both players. The reason for my PvP rule above is that *all* combat systems, including randomly generated ones, are trivially claimed to be balanced if the definition of balance is that no matter what random options are made available to the players, both sides have the same opportunity to select the same options.

That's not a useful metric of balance for most MMO designs.

Incidentally, my own personal favorite corewars tactic from the late 80s was what I used to call hijacking, and was later more commonly known as vampire bombing. Between Corewars, Conway's Life, Fractint, and DKBTrace (aka POV-Ray) I don't know how we got anything done in the 80s.

Level up an Ill/Rad: they are about to become extremely useful in Hami raids.

Don't get too used to all those HOs, though.

If you believe the comparison is unfair because of the word "threatened" there are many other synonyms I can use which eliminate the objection.

Similarly, I don't think people enter into combat so they can celebrate the fact they are still standing after each fight, but that's also not relevant to my point. My point distilled to the essentials is that you cannot remove the negative impact of the inability to execute a gameplay objective without diminishing or eliminating the point of that objective existing when the objective is specifically designed with a failure condition which is materially concomitant with its situational gameplay imperatives.

Oh sure we finally get boomerang fish and it turns out to be a pet power. Its like dual pistols all over again. They'll probably just blame it on the fish somehow clipping with female skirts.

Although, it just now occurs to me that in all the time since I first suggested boomerang fish, I don't recall anyone so far mentioning the enormous opportunity for powerset customization.

The point is, the devs don't make missions where the objectives are scattered around to make people hunt around for hours for them. They do that because the threat of not finding them quickly is the only way to make actually finding them quickly meaningful. In the same way surviving combat is only meaningful if the threat of death is real.

And you can't make dying optional, because it trivializes it for everyone. You can't just ask people to volunteer to die. Not all gameplay limitations can be made optional as a consequence or they become pointless.

For people for whom chat and trade are the minimum functionality necessary to test drive a game they are getting to play for free, City of Heroes will not initially be the game for them. There are many, many people for whom that is not true.

I didn't use chat or trade in any significant manner for nearly the first 30 days of my game play. People who can test drive through soloing will have no problems. People who can work within the strict limits of teaming will have no problems. People who can spend five bucks on discretionary entertainment will have no problems. Lets get all of them first before extending our reach to all the people who will refuse to try a free game because you can't collect the prize of a costume contest.

The goal of City of Heroes Freedom is to get more customers. Not all of them.

Do you enjoy dying?

Its the new holy trinity of MMOs: the warrior, the gunslinger, and the incredibly stacked furry. One takes aggro, one attacks from range, one gets all males ages 13 to 55 to sign up.


The gameplay actually looks interesting, but while watching the gameplay video I couldn't shake the sense I was watching the result of Space Ace and Gauntlet hooking up and having an MMO love child that was being covered by the Golf Channel.

It bears repeating that a designated free player has literally made *zero* investment in this game, and it takes only the minimum purchase of points to become premium.

City of Heroes Freedom is not, I repeat NOT becoming a pure F2P game where the priorities of NCSoft is to rack up as many nameless faceless bodies as humanly possible and steal a quarter from them. It is to *add* to the *existing community of City of Heroes players* an option to play the game for free that is limited, with a path to either an ala carte gaming option or a VIP subscription.

We should keep in mind that while we have an obligation to integrate the new players that arrive with Freedom, we have no obligation to hand the game to them.

Powers have to be unique in the powers system, but in fact the first cut option to proliferating a power is simply to copy it to a powerset used by another archetype. Power effects are in fact calculated relative to the entity that uses them. Power Bolt, for example, is a "scale 1.0" damaging attack. Its pretty much scale 1.0 for everybody, but scale 1.0 damage is different for a blaster at level 50 (62.56) than a blaster at level 20 (31.94) than a defender at level 50 (36.15). You can even give it to critters, and that scale 1.0 attack will do different damage for a minion, an LT, a Boss, or an AV.

The problem comes in the fact that sometimes the devs don't *want* to give a different archetype the same power or powers. For example, you port a melee attack set to Stalkers, you have to make room for placate and assassin's strike. Conversely, look at the more recent example of proliferating Martial Arts to tankers. Storm Kick has an enhanced chance to crit, and Eagle's Claw boosts the chance to crit for Scrappers. But when you give the set to Tankers, the problem is that Tankers shouldn't crit at all, so you have to remove the crit. But then you've nerfed the damage of those powers and not given anything back, so the devs decided to add a self damage buff to EC and a self defense buff similar to Parry to Storm Kick specifically for Tankers.

This happens all the time, and actually it should probably happen more often than it does, because different archetypes need different things. And that sort of archetype customization tends to become problematic in a powerset free for all, which is why I wouldn't do it that way.

You're going to have to be more specific. The only core wars I'm aware of was the redcode core wars: I used to participate in that one myself. And most starfleet battles-like games, including literally StarFleet Battles were not remotely open powers systems by any reasonable definition, including the one I list above.

If there are really that many, you should be able to name at least one specific example that can be reviewed. But unless you're talking about another Core Wars (and you have to be: the one I'm aware of wouldn't make sense to mention here), both types of games are actually things I'm very familiar with, moreso than just wargaming in general, and I cannot see how either is applicable.

Its an attempt to say "we have an incredibly rich history and universe of characters and events, but feel free to ignore all of it if you like." They want to have their cake and eat it too. Getting in on the "ground floor" is really nothing more than saying we are still the DC Universe, except we want the right to override any part of it if we want. In effect, the old history is basically legendary and not canonical (and I understand there is an actual new 52 bible that states what is and is not canonical moving forward). They actually want the ability to in effect plagiarize their own content without being beholden to it.

Will it work? I have my doubts. Not because I think it can't work, but because I think the very discipline it would take to pull such a thing off is the very discipline DC is announcing to the world they lack by doing the soft reboot. They should have simply done more self-contained stories. But they lack the discipline to not make super duper cross title self-referential hyper event stories. Self contained stories are self contained stories: they present no daunting backstory to intimidate readers. But its too tempting to be "epic." And that temptation will eventually unravel the new 52. Because all that daunting backstory history is still out there, and writers and editors are going to suck it all back in eventually.

Suppression as a power effect mechanic turns an effect off completely. When the devs want a power to partially suppress, they give the power two effects that stack, one of which is set to suppress. And that is shown in the example in above:

• DEF(All Types, Melee, Ranged, AOE) +1.75% for 0.75s
  Effect does not stack from same caster
  Suppressed when Attacked, for 10 seconds (Always)
  Suppressed when MissionObjectClick, for 10 seconds (Always)

• DEF(All Types, Melee, Ranged, AOE) +1.75% for 0.75s
  Effect does not stack from same caster

1.75% suppresses, and the other 1.75% doesn't. Its half suppression only because the devs made it that way. They could have made it one quarter suppression, or 90% suppression, or whatever they wanted by simply rewriting those two effects of the power.