Arcanaville

My view on what things actually "cost" specifically for VIP players.

(Excuse the formatting: these forums absolutely suck at that)

I think most people think you're always happy and optimistic, and complain too much.


Don't feel bad. Years ago I wrote an entire multi-thousand word post deriding the trend towards spreadsheet analysis in the game (remember when I used to complain too many people were trying to build characters in Excel) and within six replies someone said my opinion on game balance was irrelevant because it was (presumed to be) based on spreadsheet analysis.

Fortunately, there's now an emote for that.

I... err... nevermind.


Perhaps you need a more comfortable gloat.

People who have looked at the chains carefully say that even if you apply EC's crit buff in the best possible way in an attack chain it will still end up slightly lower than the best chain without it. It is very close in the optimal case, almost unnoticable, but still very slightly lower.

However, that is the single target case. Its virtually always a good thing to use it ahead of Dragon's Tail if you can hit multiple targets with DT, because MA has no other AoEs and the crit boost on DT is significantly higher than the small increase in single target damage you'd have by not using EC.

At the absolute recharge cap Elude recharges in 200 seconds and has 180 second duration. So without something like Burnout that bypasses the recharge cap and just insta-recharges Elude, there is no amount of recharge that can get Elude to be perma. And since Burnout itself cannot be up every time Elude crashes, at some point you will have an Elude crash and at least twenty seconds you will have to cover with something. But you might be able to have Burnout available every two Elude cycles, which means you can get two Elude runs back to back once, then have to deal with the crash, and then get two again. Something like Hibernate will still be necessary for the times Burnout isn't available, which is about every other time.

Maybe there's an app for that.

Looking at that build, at least in terms of Elude itself you can get *very* close to the recharge cap: maybe even closer than you think. By my calculations if you take Ageless Core Epiphany and cycle it continuously, you should drop Elude's recharge time to about 204.5 seconds, which is effectively an average recharge buff (on Elude itself between slotting, Alpha slotting, and global recharge) of 4.89. That's just 0.11 (11%) from the recharge cap, and that does factor in the fact that when Ageless initially buffs by 70% most of that buff is wasted because its above the cap.

Either way, its a strange, strange build, and I've played some strange builds. And here's something to contemplate. Burnout is coming, and it will insta-recharge Elude. It won't recharge itself, and its recharge is going to be huge, but at the absolute recharge cap it will recharge in about six minutes (I'm assuming that's no longer embargoed because its being demoed at Comicon). Theoretically speaking, then, it might be possible to construct a build that goes Elude -> Burnout -> Elude -> Hibernate -> Elude-> Burnout -> Elude -> Hibernate -> Elude -> Burnout -> Elude... In other words Hibernate every *two* Elude uses instead of one, if you can get enough recharge in there and still fit Burnout.

Burnout will cost half your end bar and cut your max end by 25%, but just looking at the endurance recovery rate for the Elude-build that might not actually matter.

What's interesting is that before the internet became big, people were talking about the fact that based on the accelerating rate of scientific publication, the vast majority of "knowledge" being discovered was actually known increasingly by absolutely no one except its discoverers, since it was quickly becoming impossible for even people who specialize in very narrow fields to keep up with it all. So in effect, individual people were discovering new knowledge but the sum total of knowledge that mankind as a whole actually knew collectively was essentially reaching a bottleneck.

Yes, it did.

Well, I'm no Iggy, but I can make a build that has near-perma hasten and 59% positionals for MA/SR:

It gets there, but its a bit problematic in some areas. In my opinion its underpowered on regeneration and especially endurance, it isn't quite perma-hasten because it only has 167.5% global recharge with Hasten up - you'll be a couple seconds short. And it uses the Enzyme cheat which I tend not to use.

But I think it would be playable, and with Incarnate buffs probably very much so. You can go perma-hasten with Spiritual Alpha, or maybe improve endurance management to sustainability with Cardiac: I haven't done the calculations there. But if you want to know the primary tricks the build uses, its basically a combination of leveraging Red Fortune which provides both significant ranged defense bonuses *and* recharge, going with an epic that gets me a pet for AoE defense and a ranged power for another purple set, and uses Gaussian.

Its not optimal, I know that: its just what I could whip up off the top of my head. I'm sure there are lots of ways to improve it. But it is a proof of concept that fast recharge and 59% defense can co-exist in an MA/SR build at least. And I'm actually thinking most other primaries would be easier than MA.

That other game's costume slot purchases unlock one additional costume slot for one character only per purchase of 140 points, not account-wide. You can buy 2 additional costume slots for *every* character you have simultaneously for 450 points. However, that will take you from three to five (if you are a gold player you have three costume slots per character by default) for all your characters. Which is what I get right now for no actual cash purchase in CoH: four standard slots and one unlockable with Halloween salvage.

I would think that if you actually played that game and bought the things you were talking about, instead of just quickly browsing its store, you'd know these things. I'm vaguely familiar with that other game, being a lifetime subscriber from launch and currently sitting on a couple thousand of those points since conversion myself. I wouldn't describe the relationship between the two games as this game trying to "catch up" with that game. I don't talk down that game except in areas I really think are broken (like the powers system, but then again I talk this game's powers system down at times also) and I think for its situation its own F2P model works fine. But in no way is it objectively better than what I know CoH:F is designed to be. I actually think I'm getting slightly more value here than there. And keep in mind I don't even pay to be a VIP over there at all.

I assume you do that by asking Iggy to make you a build that has all that.

What I want from a browser personally is something that works fast and doesn't crash. What I want from a browser professionally is one that people aren't constantly calling me up to ask me why its not doing what they want. IE scores a zero on the first one, and a negative five on the second one. Its actually average normal people who give me more IE8 headaches than my own usage. Given that I don't, in general, use it personally.

So when most human beings on Earth fire up IE8, they wonder why Adobe's installers for Acrobat and Flash silently fail without warning or error, they wonder why FTP links sometimes mysteriously fail, they wonder why they need content ratings on intranet sites, they wonder where the hell all their memory went, why it doesn't always restore page tabs after crashing, where all these stupid toolbars suddenly came from, and what is this Antivirus 2011 thing that keeps telling them they have to buy something to use their own damn computer again. And I load Firefox on their system and call it a day.

Most normal human beings on Earth don't complain very much about these things because they don't know any better because they don't know they are all 100% avoidable.

I suppose its better than the IE5/6 days when the security community was actually *this close* at one point to declaring IE to be essentially malware, and auditors were starting to tell corporations with any security requirements to ban it from the premises.


Mind you, referencing where this topic came from, I don't actually mind using the IE engine as an embedded browser in controlled environments like the NCSoft launcher in theory. Its actually the only place I *would* specifically use IE without much objection, because in that situation virtually all of its flaws are maskable. But as an end-user tool if I owned the button that would vaporize it from the Earth, the label on the button would have been worn off the top of it by now and I would be dancing on its grave.

Its not, say, ASA 8.3 bad, but its close. I only contemplate destroying IE, not murdering its dev team like I do with 8.3.

If you can even find the rules, technically. Except since Facebook itself actively promotes the fact that fictional entities have Facebook pages, its a bit of a grey area when a company actively advertises activity to promote itself it purports to disallow.

So literally make a Facebook page for one of your characters in all honesty, with all personal information tied to it rather than yourself. I can't see how that could be interpreted as a violation of Facebook policy, given they explicitly promote such usage.

The devs have never been accused of possessing precision of language. In this case they are tending, not just here but all over the place, to trip over the distinction between things that are not gated by purchasable unlocks and things that are free to acquire. The first is "free from additional prerequisites" and the second is "free as in beer."

To be honest, sometimes I'm not even sure which they mean, particularly when they've potentially changed it since inception.

I can say that as far as I know, the 150 extra Paragon Points is an automatic benefit for reaching tier 9 status. It was not an unlockable reward when the system was first described to me in detail.

Since my characters got the emote and not me (I've had that emote for years), my characters signed up for the Facebook account. They did so under an alias, but that apparently was consistent with their ethical standards as masked vigilantes who have saved the Earth and most of the dimensional plane of its existence numerous times.

I tried to explain to them that this might contravene Facebook's terms and conditions, but they just slapped their foreheads and walked away.

Actually, I don't use Facebook either due to issues I have with it, but Arcanaville now has one just to get the emote. Which I got under an alias as well. So I now have an anonymous Facebook page for an anonymous account for an anonymous video game. I'm pretty sure if I am caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions.

Not especially. Although that sounds like a good use for a Premium account come CoH:F.


Well, that's just waving their stupid around like a flag, not specifically handing it to you and asking you to beat them to death with it.

The last time I saw someone commit suicide by stupid was years ago when a /Dev blaster actually begged the team to hang back and give him a chance to stealth in and lay mines. In a Rikti mission. With drones.

My understanding is that Rhode Island has a law requiring the registration of sweepstakes where the total prize value exceeds $500, and that registration comes with a fee of $150. The codes have a stated theoretical cumulative value of $5000 according to the Official Rules and Conditions page, which means if the offer was good in Rhode Island they would have to register the sweepstakes and pay a fee. If the value exceeded $5000 they would have to do the same thing in Florida and New York. I doubt its a coincidence the total value of the promotion is exactly $5000.

Actually, thought the same thing when I saw this. I don't have a facebook page. But my game account now does. Facebook still knows less about me than they do about D.B. Cooper.

Its been a long time since someone has explicitly asked me to help them commit suicide by stupid. I almost miss it sometimes.

In fact, the exact opposite is true. Regardless of blaster archetype popularity they've always been datamined to have the most problems with leveling, going essentially back to the beginning of time, which is why they are, as far as I know, the only archetype to have been revisited on three separate occasions and targeted for archetype-wide buffs. The first time, their health was increased to its current level and its damage strength cap was increased to the current level (blasters originally had lower health and only a 400% damage cap). The second time, they were given Defiance 1.0. The third time, they were given a revamped Defiance that allows them to shoot some of their powers while mezzed and replaced the health-scaling damage buff of D1.0 with the more follow up-like damage buff of D2.0.

You can argue the devs never did what you personally think they should have done, but you can't argue the devs have ignored the archetype.


Now let me ask you a question. You quoted an entire post of mine that discussed some statistical analysis process that is involved in measuring how popular blasters are or might be, in response to another poster. Where specifically in that post do I give you any hint whatsoever that the devs balance the archetype based on primarily on, or even at all on, creation popularity? I've reread what I type and I don't see how anyone could possibly make that inference.

This can be very difficult to extrapolate out of the data in the general case, but fortunately I have an out: I happen to know (although I cannot specifically repeat) how "clustered" the average leveling rate is across the the powerset combinations and archetypes across the entire playerbase. I don't know specifically how fast anyone levels, but I can say that, for example, taken across the entire playerbase no archetype is leveling twice as fast as any other. Its actually tighter than that, and that allows me to make judgment calls as to just how much actual spread is being induced in the data by leveling disparities. They have to be low at lower levels and cannot exceed certain values even at higher levels, which means its possible to extrapolate within some moderate error bars how much of an archetype has to be rolled, given how popular it is in the lower levels vs higher levels. In fact, to a first order approximation if 35% of all characters below level 15 is a blaster (just making up an example) then blasters have to be rolled at something close to that rate, because if they weren't that would imply they leveled even slower than they do relative to everyone else that was outracing them.

Furthermore, if everyone was outracing them by a larger than expected amount (we know everyone outraces them by at least a little on average) we'd expect the percentage of characters playing blasters to actually rise a bit with increasing level, and that doesn't really happen to a degree you'd expect. Alternatively, they would have to be abandoned at high rates even at relatively low or moderate levels, and that doesn't seem to happen either.

I discussed this a bit when I did my last analysis of archetype popularity, but given the data we have it would be extremely difficult to directly derive a conclusion based on the data but it is possible to indirectly derive conclusions by eliminating extreme cases the data excludes or strongly disavows. We can say with more certainty what the situation is not, and that provides at least some limits on what it is. For example, I can't say how often blasters are rolled (or were rolled when I last looked) but I can say they were not rolled more than half of all characters (dev statements contradict that) and I can say they were not rolled less than 25% of the time (this would contradict them being the most popular at all levels by a wide enough margin). The data strongly implies blaster creation rates have to exceed 30% and probably lie below 45% of all new characters. Given the maximum leveling spread, the data strongly suggests that the lower limit is even higher: at least 35%. The upper limit is probably marginally lower for the same reason. That means its between about 35% and maybe 42%. By process of elimination, we can get a fairly tight window.

It is possible even this analysis is wrong: this is just what I believe to be the most likely correct interpretation of it. Its not mathematically impossible for the number to exist outside that range, so I can't prove that analysis must be correct (I mentioned that as well in the last analysis I did). I'm about 85-90% certain its in that range though.

The devs are aware of this issue with the system and unfortunately there appear to be technical, not preferential limitations that make this difficult. Don't bother telling me there shouldn't be technical limitations, because I know what they are and I still don't actually know why there are technical limitations. I'm just mentioning the fact that the devs would actually do this if they thought they could, but currently think they can't for reasons I can't articulate.

The unfortunate limitation is that while you do have the freedom to take all the rewards in a tier in random order, you still have to take them all. I have a suggestion into the devs that may provide a future remedy, but at the moment I do not believe this is currently likely to change prior to launch. I really, really wish it would, though.