Arcanaville

I believe in one of the recent coffee talks, if not the most recent one, the devs strongly recommended that people who were interested in having *all* the items within a booster pack buy it now rather than wait for Freedom launch, because its likely to be cheaper than buying every single item ala carte in the new store.

This doesn't factor in the fact you'll be getting free points as a subscriber, of course, so YMMV.

I read the entire document. The ratio of 5:1 is inconsistent with their measurements, but by their own admission the ratio of 5:1 is approximate. Either you accept my ratio of 3.75:1, or you accept the fact that their actual measurements for couples has huge error bars, or you assert your belief MMOs are dominated by lesbian couples.


No, because once you decide that CoH is qualitatively different from the members of the study, you don't get to extrapolate its results in that way. Since the ratios are coupled mathematically, you cannot arbitrarily state that our ratios of male to female players might be very different, but our ratios of players for whom this type of conjunctive play is critical is similar. And the reason has to do with a fact I don't think you're giving sufficient mathematical attention to: for every woman who plays a particular MMO with a romantic partner, there has to be a man who can make the same claim within that MMO. It is, for example, equally likely that in MMOs with sparser female populations a far higher percentage of females that play those games are encouraged to do so by partners, whereas in MMOs with a more equal population it is more likely females seek out and play the game regardless of partner interest.


Actually, you're talking about couples who want to play City of Heroes such that neither member of the couple are willing to pay to become Premium or were ever paying customers in the past, *and* for whom teaming with each other is a critical requirement for trying the game, *and* are completely unwilling to pay any small fixed amount to unlock that ability. And you're saying the loss of such people is materially important to City of Heroes, because these people still have a very strong likelyhood of ever becoming either paying Premium players or VIP subscribers. That's a lot of maybes given:

Why? What value do they actually have, that makes them so important you're willing to apparently very cavalierly allow for additional imposition on the existing players, when such impositions are currently considered only when absolutely necessary to minimize such disruptions on actual paying customers.

Paying customers still come first, second, and last in City of Heroes Freedom. Non-paying "customers" get a really, really good trial of the game.


If you read the document thoroughly, you'd know that while the document states this for romantic couple play:

it states this for family member play:

This suggests that family member teaming is not an important decision factor relative to romantic teaming, and therefore isn't relevant to your point either way.

I'm not sure why you would think that. Some AoEs are not typed smashing or lethal, but others are. For example, the fragmentation grenades thrown by Malta are AoE attacks, but smashing/lethal typed.

Getting five hundred people to agree on shifts when they could play on this private server probably scaled for one person would be interesting to say the least. Just getting a full team of eight to run a task force would probably lag you into oblivion.

I mean, you didn't actually think your private server was going to be Freedom or something.

Traditionally, we've always gotten exactly zero percent of those people.

And if you're going to toss those numbers around, lets see what they actually mean. Unless MMOs are dominated specifically by lesbians, lets assume that approximately the same proportional amount of couples are same sex female as same sex male and do not alter the distribution by much. For 60% of the female population to roughly equal 16% of the male population means males outnumber females by a ratio of 3.75 to one. Out of every 1000 potential customers, about 210 are female and 790 are male, and of those about 126 males and females play as a couple (again, factoring out same sex couples just for simplicity, not because they don't exist).

That means even if every single one of those couples was comprised of a male that refused to become a premium or VIP player *and* a female with the same property, we'd be losing access to approximately 25% of all possible prospective customers. That's the worst case scenario under these numbers, assuming absolutely *none* of those prospective customers happens to be dating someone that is currently either a VIP player or someone who would be returning to the game as a premium player.

I'm not going to lose sleep over that. That isn't a make-or-break thing. If they allowed free players to send blind invites, I wouldn't complain too much either, but to lose at most 25% of players who would not be paying to play in any capacity for at least a significant amount of time if ever seems rather insignificant.

Keep in mind, City of Heroes Freedom is not out to pad its player numbers with as many free players as possible. It is offering people a chance to play for free, with the full understanding that the totally free experience is significantly limited, and the premium experience will always be less than the VIP subscriber experience. We're offering a chance for players to play the game, try it out, and decide whether they want to pay to gain further access. What we're offering is a lot, but absolutely nobody cares if its not enough for some people. It only has to be enough for enough people, because we're not giving away the store, and we have no need to give away the store. This is an attempt to attract more paying customers. Its not some last gasp attempt to attract every freeloader in town with a free beer sign.


So when you say we're "not going to get very far" are you saying that if we target 75% of all potential subscribers rather than 100%, the entire exercise is not likely to come anywhere near achieving its goals? Or are you saying if we fail to find a way to encourage people who are predisposed to not pay anything at all to play the game then this business model is not likely to succeed?

You aren't being serious, are you?

If we're going to argue that the blaster damage cap is feasible to reach solo, and therefore an increase in the blaster cap can reasonably benefit blasters, we have to assume the defensive soft cap is also feasible to reach for solo blasters, since it takes far less inspirations to reach it even with the current damage cap.

Mathematically I understand its reachable. But to actually say that increasing the blaster damage cap from being 6 damage insps away after using BU and Aim to being just 14 damage insps away and that's a credible buff to solo blasters is venturing far outside the realm of conventional game balance.

When Freedom launches, we'll be able to buy inspirations on the fly. That means we'll actually have an unlimited amount of inspirations at our disposal, all the time. We'll just have to pay for them. Anyone who therefore presumes blasters to be at the defensive soft floor, the resistance cap, the damage cap, and constantly mez-protected at all times for the purpose of balance discussions, or any discussions really, is free to do so, but they will be talking exclusively to a highly limited pool of like-minded individuals.

There's no way your brain is made of meat like the rest of us.

And in the hands of a lesser player that might be a problem.

Fine, swap the Obits for a full set of Multistrike. You lose some recharge (which would make the build 2.5% less as opposed to 2.5% more) but you'd gain some AoE defense out of the trade, dropping melee to 42.5% and increasing AoE to 38.7%.

That's still a great deal, and Multistrikes cost nothing last I checked.

Solo blasters can barely reach the 500% damage cap: you could increase the cap to a million percent and that wouldn't help solo blasters at all, unless they wanted to hunt around contacts while burning inspirations.

Which, by the way, is what Super Reflexes scrappers used to do back when their defenses were tissue paper.


I was thinking capped, but "capitated" seems to get transposed for capped a lot when I'm working on medical billing-related projects.

Well, try this on for size:

It literally changes *none* of the powers, and even keeps them in exactly the same place. It rearranges slots here and there, and although I don't know if its the best I can do given I only spent a short time thinking about it (but I have been thinking about builds in general these days, so I'm not approaching the matter cold) I do pull deeply from my bag of build tricks. I believe the endurance balance is very similar to your build with and without Focused Accuracy toggled on, the endurance balance of all your primary attacks is similar, I use no more purples than you do and I use no PvP recipes.

I end up with 44.3% melee/ranged, and 36.8% AoE. A hair better than your build's AoE, and a lot better on melee/ranged. I do have slightly less regen and max health, but I did manage to pull out a fraction more global recharge. My guess is that this build should play just about exactly the same as your current build, only you'd get hit a lot less often. I even left your Energy Torrent slotting completely alone.

I think the biggest differences will be in the endurance slotting of Flashing Steel and Lotus, which are much lower in my build. I'm not sure if that's critical. Flashing Steel was so underslotted for damage I wasn't even sure you used it all that often. Oh, and by the way I did get global +DMG up by 7.5%.

The most expensive part of trying to make this build, given your current build, would be the Kinetic Combat set in Sting. Also, if you're really concerned about the endurance slotting in Flashing Steel, I would replace the Obits with another set of Kinetic, basically duplicating Sting's slotting, which would reduce your melee defense by about 2% but allow you to slot that attack with a lot of endurance reduction *and* still slot aggressively for damage, accuracy, and recharge.

Personally, I don't subscribe to the entire EvilRyu rant above (in particular the "pre-nerfed" part) but I do think the red side experience is hampered by two critical flaws:

1. The PvE content is significantly harder on the red side, and specifically in ways not conducive to attracting new players. Consider that the red side sees far more endurance drain in the early game than heroes do, and endurance drain is notoriously annoying in a number of ways. If inherent stamina is intended to be attractive because you get enhanced recovery from the start, the red side is almost the equivalent of having inherent anti-stamina. Its also much more mez-happy, and critters statistically have a slightly higher number of attacks (critter offensive threat is almost directly proportional to the number of attacks they have, because unlike players they can't slot for recharge: the more attacks they have, the more offense they have, almost proportionately).

2. The red side content doesn't - at least overall - revel in being "evil" its more a caricature of evil seen through good's eyes. Evil almost never actually wins, and when it does it does in a way that makes the skin crawl on probably a majority of the players. The way I put this to the devs recently is that the red side doesn't range from Magneto to the Joker, it runs the gamut from Cartman to the Human Centipede.

I can see myself being Magneto. All I have to do is believe one thing: if I stand back and do nothing but hope for the best, all of my kind will one day be put on trains and disappear. Again. I could even revel in being the Joker: I'm nuts, and I'm out to prove everyone else is just as crazy as I am.

I just cannot relate to Phipps. This is a high level contact asking me to crush a school teacher. And whoever wrote the arc - which is well written for the most part, by the way - wasn't writing an arc intended to make the player happy. Here's what the souvenir says:

Yeah: this is someone who thinks people should enjoy being a villain. I say its well written because I honestly believe the writer really wanted me to feel ill after "succeeding" in this arc, and I did. Well done.

As long as the writers don't believe in it, the players won't either. And this arc is an example of my belief the writers didn't really truly believe in the red side being legitimate.

No, yes, yes.

The damage an attack does has no explicit effect on what types of defense work on it. All attacks are actually explicitly typed as to what kinds of defense work on it, and the game looks at that and only that. Take Fireball. Fireball does both fire and smashing damage, but its typed AoE_Attack and Fire_Attack. Therefore, only AoE and Fire defense work on it. Smashing defense does absolutely nothing. Whether Fireball *should* be typed that way is a separate question, but that's how typing works. *Usually* if an attack does damage X then the analogous defense type will usually work. When an attack does *no* damage then usually, but not always, the attack is positionally typed only. One big exception: confuse powers which are often typed Psionic even if they do no damage, psionic or otherwise


Ranged defense will block more ranged attacks than S/L defense will. However, the thing to keep in mind is that while most ranged attacks are typed Ranged, the really big exception are AoEs and Cones which are generally typed AoE, not ranged.

I know many credit card companies' fraud detection software is designed specifically to look for lots of small identical transactions over a small period of time. In and of itself that wouldn't be automatically considered a potentially fraudulent red flag, but taken in combination with other factors that may surround the NCSoft store it might generate enough problems to make the practice problematic on a large scale for them.

Free players aren't subscribed.

No, I get your point precisely. My point stands. Free players aren't subscribed. The free game is there to encourage people to subscribe, or alternatively go ala carte as a Premium player. To the extent that free accounts and premium accounts are missing features that would encourage them to subscribe, that is because they are missing features that would encourage them to subscribe.

We will lose people who say "I would pay to have more if I was given more for free, but since I'm not given enough for free I won't pay for what I want" and frankly, that's a good thing.

Increasing the damage cap of blasters would have more of a psychological impact than a numerical one, given the scenarios discussed in this thread. In situations where blasters are being out damage-contributed by force multipliers, the difference is large and not small. An increase in damage cap from 5.0 to 7.0 is basically an increase in total damage of 40%. Which is a lot if you can buff yourself that high, but its worthless until you do, and when you do you still have to compete with force multipliers delivering several times the damage you do.

Although, personally speaking I don't buy into the optimized force multiplier numbers as being representative, simply because I don't ever actually see those situations in a sustained fashion. And I play both sides of the force-multiplier fence. Also, I really honestly haven't seen this prejudice against blasters as damage dealers. I have never, in seven years, heard of someone advertising for a damage dealer, and by that they meant kinetics defender. I've seen people advertise for strange stuff, but that would be a first for me. The only times I've ever seen blaster-prejudice has been in situations where people think they are too squishy, and no amount of damage cap increase would make them less squishy.

In spite of forum conjectures to the contrary, there's no evidence blasters have trouble finding teams. But since no solo blaster can really breach the current damage cap with any practicality, an increase in the cap doesn't help solo blasters. In fact this was my original complaint when the blaster damage cap was increased: it was increased at the same time the scrapper damage *modifier* was increased to its current value and both changes were described by the devs (i.e. Statesman) as an "increase of damage." The scrapper mod increase was an increase of damage. The blaster damage cap increase was eliminating the BU+AIM capitation issue which was going to go away anyway when ED went in.

I would sooner take a blaster mod increase to 1.25 than a strength cap increase to 7.0.

Hmm. Well, in general Mo runs can be tricky for any melee that is not defensively optimized, because one unlucky break and down you go.

Still, try figuring out a mathematically possible way to solo the Heroes in RV with an energy blaster.

Great googly-moogly, Chad Gulzow-Man has 1234 badges. What sort of badging metagame goal are you considered inadequate for?

If I had known then what I know now, I would have made my Ill/Rad my main all those years ago. I'd probably have every single badge except the Master of Keyes ones by now, with probably half the effort. But nooo, I had to play my Energy/Energy blaster first.

I wouldn't say no to a damage cap increase, but I will point out it will only help the blasters least in need of help: blasters on teams with ginormous amounts of buffing. It won't help solo blasters or blasters on most of the sorts of teams where they are likely to die.

Concept-optimizers are some of the hardest things to work on. Basically, the player doesn't want to change what the build does, they just want to make it do those things as well as possible. We all have a little of that, like if you want to min/max your brute but you don't want to trade flight for super jump even if the rearrange makes the build a little stronger. Taken to an extreme, though, it can feel like your hands are completely tied.

The great irony about concept-optimization is that it can often require a lot of experience playing other kinds of concept builds before you can really do a good job with the one. You need to be know intuitively what you're losing and what you're gaining with each power pick change, and someone that is not experienced in playing not just their build but different versions of their build won't have that intuitive grasp of the trade offs.

Another great irony is that it can be difficult to explain to a player that their build doesn't actually convey how that build is played, and its how a build is played that determines the best way to min/max it. It often seems to new players that their playstyle feels dictated by the powers they have, until they find someone with the exact same set of powers and plays their character totally differently.

From I9 to I19 my MA/SR scrapper ran with about 40% defense and was not soft-capped. I just popped lucks if I needed to.

You can play SR without even running the toggles and get by, and I've played some really odd concept builds in the past. If you don't care about maximum performance, there are lots of ways to get *decent* performance.

But if the question is put to me: is it important to build for the soft-cap with SR? My answer is: if you care about performance, yes it is, because its the easiest first target to reach for. Its so close a target for SR specifically that it's highly unlikely you can come up with a specific performance-based rationale for not going for it.

In the first case, if a large number of players are walking away, this wouldn't be the first case but the second case. The first case specifically requires very few people exiting the tutorial as a villain.

A free player that wants to team can spend a couple bucks and become permanently a premium player for life, whereupon they gain access to private tells to seek out potential team mates.

In any case, the best way to address the problem of low population red side in the short term would be to get more players. Somehow magically making the red side very attractive without adding new players would, under best case circumstances, simply decimate the blue side of players.

All game features in closed beta are to be treated as subject to change without warning. If people were seeing previews of a game build that was still in closed beta, all of its features should be considered equally subject to change without warning. That's one of the reasons why we have closed betas: to allow for changes at any time for any reason without having to justify them as changes to expectations.

Positron did not say that because powerset respec was a lot of work it was not the development schedule. Positron said powerset respec was not on the development schedule which is dev-speak for "we're not working on it" and separately from that said it would take so much work to implement he had no idea what they could possibly price the feature at (assuming it was a Paragon Store feature).

In jest, he suggested agreement with a suggestion by a ustream comment that suggested $50. Although that was obviously a joke, it nevertheless implies in broad strokes both the level of effort involved and the likelihood we'll be seeing this feature anytime in our foreseeable future.

Positron did seem to not be unilaterally opposed to powerset respecs, but that represents only the first of many other non-technical barriers to them being implemented.

If you see a downward trend from creation through combat progressional levels, it could be a sign, depending on how strong the trend is, that the archetype is disappointing players in some way as combat ratchets up in the higher levels. There is a small downward trend noticable in the numbers BaB released long ago, small enough that there's no obvious calamity there, but large enough to believe its probably statistically significant and says something about the archetype's level of difficulty in play.