Arcanaville

I'm not sure what that says, because I'm not sure the devs ever completed the original level 50 Hamidon either. I do know the +4 LRSF was completable, even if the devs themselves never did it, prior to I9 (when inventions were introduced).

That's actually not precisely true. For example, in Star Trek Generations Picard has no problem with deliberately using the Nexus to return to his own timeline prior to when Soren fires his rocket in order to change (what is for him) the past. Technically that would be a violation of the Temporal Prime Directive, but no one seems anxious to correct it.

A potentially even bigger one: Picard sends the Enterprise-C back in time to Narendra 3 to defend the Klingons. Time travel *forward* in time is not a temporal violation: it would be no different if the explosion shoved the Enterprise-C forward at ultra-high relativistic speeds and ended up in the future. Picard sending the Enterprise-C *backwards* in time could be interpreted as a huge violation of the Temporal Prime Directive from his point of view, and all because Guinen decides that the altered timeline is the more appropriate one than the original one where the Enterprise-C wasn't sent back.

What's more Picard allowed Tasha to go back, another huge timeline violation because ultimately she survives Narendra 3 and her daughter becomes a historically significant figure. No discussion is ever made to consider for a moment attempting to return the timeline to its original form, even though Sela is a living, breathing temporal violation.

Thas wight, I in your base steewing your goldz.

You seem to be arguing strange tangents, and handwaving away the fact that the current minions and bosses actually look visually distinct while the updated ones do not, and the death mage looks visually distinct from the other bosses and the minions, which means its possible for the bosses to look distinct without violating the artistic boundaries the artists have for the costumes.

So just to be direct: the current minions and bosses are visually distinct: they have radically different silhouettes even if the difference can be described on paper as just a few parts. The proposed update radically reduces the visual difference between minions and bosses for all but the death mage. That's an undesirable feature both in artistic terms and in gameplay terms. The death mage is an example of a visually distinct boss, and while it may not be the best model to use to create that visual distinctness across all the bosses, its being noted for the fact that such visual distinctness is ipso facto possible given the current artistic guidelines for the CoT update.

After being on several MoKeyes runs this weekend, I got a pretty good hang of avoiding the green patches. So good, I relaxed for a moment and took my eyes off the clock and the ground to check on something else going on in the trial and promptly ran right into one. That was not the fault of the trial, that was clearly my fault for being, momentarily, a horrible player.

The green patch is actually not that hard to see, and its actually virtually impossible to be obscured if you are using proper strategy. The proper strategy is to move away from other players and get some breathing room just before the Obliteration timer expires, or just all the time really, so you can always see the ground around you. The green patch is a hazy green circle maybe thirty feet across, but with a green cross hair at the center: you can't miss that detail. If you aren't totally surrounded by players when it appears, you should see it easily and be able to move away. If you are totally surrounded by other players it'll be hard to avoid even if you do see it, which is why its important to keep some spacing around yourself.

It helps if you are not running a full league for this, because the less players the less crowded the area around AM is. AM himself is a relative pushover, and does not require 24 people beating on him to take him out.

For people who like it, Keyes is there to provide an enjoyable trial.

For people who don't like it, Keyes is there to provide an incentive to not complain about Lambda and BAF so much. The devs are doing a really great job of slowly ratcheting expectations upward. Remember when Lambda and BAF were super-hard content that had no business being in a casual-friendly game like City of Heroes? People were saying that less than two thousand hours ago. Now, people talk about BAF and Lambda like they were talking about running Maria's arc at +2.

Also because players always overestimate the difficulty of trials

Well, I don't agree it can't be helped in theory, because clearly the Death Mage didn't get that memo: he's radically different looking. I'm not suggesting all the bosses look like the Death Mage, but I am suggesting the artists are clearly creative enough to stay within their "thorns for everyone" motif and still distinguish the bosses in some way, both from the minions and from each other.

LordKat was naive in his own way:

Because game balance doesn't matter in PvE MMOs? LordKat seems to suffer the same problem many people suffer: using the word "balance" within the context of "game balance" to mean something far more limited in scope than what game designers mean.

I hear this a lot in online discussions:

Its amazing how many outside observers think this, given how almost no actual game designers believe this. Its almost like the people who think this get weeded out of making the kinds of games for which this is tragically wrong.

But just to close out the idea, I'll look at an exception that proves the rule:

There's a reason Farmville sells "power." And that is because the "game" has no balance requirements. The game is solely about participation and there is no amount of stuff you can have that alters your ability to participate in the game. The whole point to Farmville is something I don't think most people - even most analysts of gaming - really appreciate. Farmville makes money by taxing impatience. Everyone can have almost anything with very little effort: the *only* thing you need is time, and patience. And the only thing money can really buy is speed: you can get to where everyone else is by buying resources that speed things up. And Farmville makes no attempt to hide the fact that people can buy their way to big farms. Balance is a binary metric: it compares something to something else. In PvP you have players vs players: one player's power must be balanced against another player's power. In PvE, you have players vs the environment; you have to balance one player's power against the threats they face in the game. But in Farmville, there is nothing against anything. It is, at most, the player against his or her own patience and expectations. And Farmville has no incentive to prevent a player from paying money to play the game for less time. That is, in fact, the only way Farmville actually makes money.

Because there is no balance requirements in Farmville (in this sense) there is no balance to break in selling "power." Its not that the rules don't apply to Farmville, its that Farmville doesn't implement anything the rules talk about.

Well, the differences are kind of exactly as much as I think, because I double-checked in-game first before posting. Those two are easily distinguishable because the boss hats are much taller and only the bosses have the exaggerated spikes. The difference now is very minimal for every boss except the Death Mage. In my opinion the Bosses should look different from the minions in at least one or two overt visual ways beyond just color scheme.

Actually, the problem here is that the notion of an "advantage" is vague. Let me be precise. The reason why you should be cautious about selling "power" is specifically because most MMOs are built with a design principle of game balance: balance between the power levels of players and other players, and balance between the power levels of players and the content. If you're going to factor these metrics into the design of your game, then selling power that can directly affect these metrics is, essentially, selling the ability to affect those design metrics to players. Its, in effect, selling your design soul.

That's why you have to be extremely careful. But I think the Extra Credit video is being extremely oversimplistic, because even by their own reckoning there is a difference between "convenience" and "power" when that line is actually very blurry. They also specifically mention the issue of earning in-game *real* money, and and if anything equals power, its cash. They say its fine to earn actual currency that is equivalent (if not directly exchangeable) to cash, so long as the time cost is balanced to be extremely long.

If that is the case, then as a corollary it should be ok to sell "power" provided that the boost that is sold is counterbalanced by their effective monetary cost. For example, no one would care if players could buy small insps from the store at almost any cost however small, because those things fall from the sky and can be earned in-game trivially. Their monetary cost is practically zero. You'd only be selling convenience. Access to much more powerful inspirations, on the other hand, has to be more carefully considered because those are things that can grant to the player more effective power than they otherwise could have. But that's tempered by the fact that inspirations have limited lifespan, ones you can earn in the game are already pretty powerful anyway, and in terms of overall impact they can't do much more than affect a single fight or two.

There is a huge grey area that I think the Extra Credit video bulldozes over. Perhaps that's because its been radically oversimplified to target a relatively uninvolved audience. But if that is the case, its basically saying nothing interesting to me I haven't thought about myself for a long time.

Welcome aboard, El Topo.

A couple of comments about those.

1. For some reason I feel like suggesting swapping the Madness and Death Mage costumes. The Madness Mage has the darker, leaner costume and the Death Mage has the more wild one, and that seems backwards. You almost get the sense the Death Mage's costume is trying to reach out and grab you, and that makes more sense for the Madness Mage in my opinion. You're changing the look of both the Madness and the Death Mage anyway, so there's some latitude there.

2. There doesn't seem to be enough distance between the thorn caster minions and the bosses. The original group had a visual progression of formless robes for the minions, the robes with exposed head for the LTs, and the spiky robes with head dress for the bosses. Here the minion looks kinda close to the LTs, but the caster minions look really close to the bosses. I think that is an important visual cue that will be lost in combat. The casters should probably get shorter, less impressive head gear than the bosses to visually distinguish them.

3. Something about the necks on the LTs looks a little off. I think its the fact that the original costumes obscure the neckline with face gear, but here it looks like they are wearing high necked sweaters. Something about the look feels off to me.


I think its a lot better to see the costumes in progression like this (although were the Force and Soul Mages on a lunch break at the time?) but I think seeing them like this also cues me in to some additional tweaks that I think need to happen to make the costumes work when we're seeing many of them at once, rather than just one at a time.

Hmm, my blaster's been on lots of LRSFs (weirdly, more than STF) and I even have the MoLRSF badge. I was just picked up on that run because I was available at the time. Also possibly because I'm just that awesome, but mostly just because I was available at the time. No one questioned my bringing a blaster at the time.

Maybe one of the interesting advantages of playing on a lower population server is that you can't be picky, so you learn over time that any group of anything can do anything, so you eventually get the attitude that any group of anything *should* be able to do anything.

Just a note: the +4s in the trials do not have higher tohit for being higher level: as of Issue 7's accuracy change critters get accuracy bonuses and not tohit bonuses for being higher level, up to +5. At +6 and higher they start to get tohit bonuses. But some critters in the trials are "Praetorian class" critters, and those have an intrinsic 64% base tohit, effectively 14% higher than normal critters.

Your biggest source of tohit in the trials are the 9CUs with their self dmg/tohit buffs. Every time they shoot their weapons they self buff their own damage and tohit, and that buff is essentially permanent (it lasts 10 minutes per buff). They can, if they live long enough, eventually have +20% tohit, +40% tohit, even +100% tohit. It will take extremely well-slotted Elude to have any chance against those when they get out of control

Otherwise, the "praetorian soft cap" is 59%, and alternatively people can build towards 46.5% and use one small luck to cap against Praetorian tohit.

Harry Potter is not anywhere in the same zip code as Twilight. By no means is JK a stellar writer, but she's a decent writer and more importantly she had a story to tell that was engaging. I think people will look favorably upon Harry Potter in twenty years.

Twilight is primarily interesting for its ability to be the canonical example for the phrase "this writing hurts my teeth."

That's basically impossible. The moment they buy the minimum batch of points, they become Premium players. Free players are players that have spent nothing on the game. Premium players are non-subscribers who have spend some amount of money greater than zero.

The question is not whether *you* regret buying a lifetime sub, but whether the company that offered it did. And almost by definition, every time you didn't regret it, they did.

Also, CO offered lifetime subs prior to launch.

Incarnate powers have fixed recharge. You can't speed them up with recharge buffs.

People who do not pay to play the game are not customers.

The reason City of Heroes: Freedom asks for an investment from the player before allowing them to participate in activities that can be socially damaging is that this then creates a material cost associated with account banning. If I can abuse the community or the game with a completely free account, there is zero cost to making another one if its banned. If there is a cost associated with equipping that account with the rights necessary to produce that abuse, it will tend to discourage players from risking a ban, and it will increase the costs associated with chronic abuse.

The more likely a particular activity can be abused to the detriment of either the player community or the game in general, the more likely it is a restricted activity for free players. This is a logical precaution for any MMO to take, but specifically mandated for City of Heroes Freedom, because as I keep saying the emphasis is on the subscribers and the paying customers first.

The devs can ignore RMT in the same sense they can all hold their breaths until they pass out and then reorganize the company based on who regains consciousness first. That it is possible does not make it any less stupid.

Hard to predict what a poll would say, but I would say if you're a blaster you should be *burning* reds as they fall. You should never even *be* in a position to wonder whether now is a good time to burn those six reds, because you're not supposed to ever have six reds.

I'm not one to tell people how to play, but my advice here for blasters has been pretty constant for years. Burn reds as they fall. Save defensive insps (lucks, breaks, respites especially) for when you will likely need them. Use lucks in bunches: if the situation is bad enough to need a luck, use at least two. Four is usually temporary immortality.

I manage insps automatically on my blaster. I accumulate lucks, and try to keep a couple greens and a break or two. I burn everything else. When I get full, I start burning the little ones to slowly upgrade to the bigger ones. Eventually my tray looks something like eight or nine large lucks plus some mediums, three or four large respites, and two medium or large breaks. So when it hits the fan and I start popping insps, sometimes I forget I'm supposed to be squishy and go a little nuts.

Couldn't justify the collector's edition. Registered pre-order a while ago though.

Which is why I pack lucks not rages, and I don't have problems. Are we discussing my problems playing blasters, of which I have none, or the balance problems of blasters, which have been unambiguously datamined by the devs across the entire playerbase of players that play blasters?