Arcanaville

Depends. There have been occasional strong backlash periods when people have swung from "healing is not absolutely necessary" to pushing the opposite extreme assertion that "with bubbles and buffs healing is completely worthless."

How deeply that permeated past the forums to the actual game is debatable, but I have seen it show up periodically in the high level game.

Dear god no. The HERO system is not a well-balanced system. The HERO system is a system that offers GMs the tools to balance content against the players by ensuring that nearly every player power option includes an opportunity for the GMs to cause trouble for them. But that requires an intelligent GM to react to the players dynamically.

The system itself is, in computer-controlled MMO terms, incredibly horribly unbalanced. And in fact the HERO system is self-aware of this fact: it specifically warns GMs where the dragons in the system are, and even warns them that there are certain things the rules technically allow that they should feel free to completely disallow if it makes a mockery of their sessions. That's a rule that all PnP games really have, and its why most PnP games primary safeguard against munchkins is the GM, not the rules structure. A good PNP rulesystem gets close enough for the GM to get the rest of the way. MMOs don't have that safety net, and their systems need to be far more air tight.

Important to note: PnP systems first priority is to offer GMs enough tools to make controlled, reasonably balanced gaming sessions. Mathematical rigor is not a priority. But in a computer game, numerical balance has to replace GM balance, because there's no GM (smart enough to take over). The fact that the HERO system is, by numerical standards, incredibly unbalanced is not a knock: its an observation about a facet of the system that isn't critical to its success. The system is flexible enough that every GM running HERO campaigns out there can tweak the system to match their player and session requirements. The system has enough options to encompass all of that play, but no one actually uses them all to their maximum potential. That's a good thing. But in an MMO, its one ruleset to rule them all.

Nothing is impossible, but I believe to do this in a way that doesn't do some of the really damaging things I've seen in other implementations would require a more complex system than you're describing. The problem is that the powers we have contain, for lack of a better way of putting it, multidimensional qualitative benefits: things that are very difficult to value in a linear scale. Its very hard to quantify how much damage mitigation is equal to how much offense, for example, much less support powers. So its likely any such system would have to make "buckets" of benefits and allow players to independently fill the different buckets. So you could not buy your ranged blaster the scrapper secondaries at any modifier delta, say.

The custom critter system works on a more or less linear scale, and that only really works because the powersets themselves still contain the maximum diversity into logical containers. Its actually trying to fake a multidimensional system with a linear one, and is getting away with it mostly because "good enough" is easier there than it would be for players making their own characters.

It is if you assert its the only interpretation, or more generally the only reasonable one. You should be careful slinging that hubris brush when you make statements like that, since I'm not the one stating that there is only one reasonable point of view to the question of whether random reward systems are fair.

But that is *still* suggesting that the main problem with random rewards is different people get different rewards. Of course the "safety net" benefits everyone equally: if it specifically benefited the people who benefited from random rolls less to equalize their rewards then the randomness itself would be a sham.

Axiomatically the preference for random rewards is the preference to risk getting less in order to potentially get more. This risk only actually exists if people actually sometimes get less. Every single one of those people will have no actual option to eliminate the effects of that risk because if they can the risk doesn't exist.

Its actually a complete waste of time to try to prove somehow that with random rewards some people will get a lot less than others: that's an easy thing to stipulate: in a random system some people will *have to* get more and some will *have to* get less. If that specifically doesn't happen, that would actually place the randomness source itself or the system in total under suspicion for being bugged.


That's a completely separate subject, but while I have to keep mentioning (and it is often skipped or overlooked) that the actual numbers are subject to negotiation (as they usually are) the principle that the merits should be able to buy something else is actually not contradictory to the system. If they had nothing else to buy, then eventually those merits would be nearly valueless to the people that got higher drops through luck. They would then, in effect, be neutralizing (partially) the advantage of being lucky. Or to put it your way, the safety net would not be benefiting everyone equally. That's counter to the normal intent of having a risk-based reward system.

You seem to be thinking the two systems should be judged independently, as if people got to select one or the other. They are not intended to work that way. The way they are intended to work is that every trial delivers some reward X. X is separated into a fixed (depending on trial activity) reward of merits, and a lottery ticket for the component drop. We've debated the relative value of those two rewards previously, but they are not intended to be replacements for each other. You're supposed to get both, and the idea is rather than have a reward X that varies from a very low value to a very high value, X varies between a moderate value and a high value due to the merits increasing the floor of the worst case reward to a much higher level than the component drop alone.


But to loop back around and say that the players getting lucky component drops will always be ahead of the ones that don't, ergo the system is broken, is just another restatement of the same preference that you don't want random rewards. The preference that you don't want random rewards is basically tantamount to the statement that you want everyone to have no more, and no less rewards than anyone else. Its the same objection, not a deeper or more obvious one.

In the context of human beings on Earth, IE8 is totally unusable. Technically, you can use it to browse the web, but on a scale of one to ten I would place it a two. I would place calling up a friend, having them enter the URLs I want to visit by hand, and then faxing me the result to be a three.

Mostly because nearly every single security feature in IE8 (and IE9) blocks so many non-malicious activities that I end up turning them all off and losing their benefits anyway. And even then there are things I want to do that I sometimes cannot do because IE8 tells me I can't.

That's just the security side. That doesn't count all the ways IE does things in a completely different way than everyone else, and that way is dumb, and Microsoft refuses to change it. Like FTP cwd root, which I still run into on a regular basis.

True story: the last major rollout I did of IE8 was specifically for a customer that didn't want to ban web browsing in their organization, but didn't really want people browsing a lot. IE8 turns out to be fantastic for that purpose.


Its actually very easy to be perfectly secure: just don't let users do anything. The hard part is being secure while still allowing users to function. IE used to be the browser that let everything happen, and now its the browser that lets nothing happen. In the security space, that's considered a trivial improvement, comparable to the difference between an unpatched computer and an unpatched computer that is turned off.

Not really a big surprise, since IE8 and higher gain that security at the expense of being almost totally unusable. I'm actually required to think professionally about things such as browser security, and the only thing I'm usually doing with IE8 is downloading another browser with it.

I have a two by four in my office that is even more secure than IE8 at surfing web sites, and only slightly less useful.

I think you're continuing to miss the point of what the exact benefit of randomness in a reward system actually is. By definition a random result will sometimes generate a higher than average result, and sometimes a lower than average result. If you are going to automatically interpret every result that is lower than average as "taking a huge loss" and that this is always an undesirable result for a reward system to generate you're just axiomatically opposed to random systems.

The other way to interpret this situation is that the chance of acquiring less than average rewards is the price people pay to have a chance of acquiring greateer than average rewards, and even under the worst case scenario the deterministic merit rewards place an absolute floor on reward earning, which provides a safety net against the worst possible outcomes the random system can generate.

The alias that occurs at level 50 isn't a sampling problem: its a reflection of an actual fencepost in the data. Unless you turn off XP, there's a practical limit to how long you can play a level 1 before it levels and is no longer level 1. Ditto every level up to 49. However, a level 50 can play as level 50 forever. So its entirely possible for an archetype to be very popular from 1-49 and then suddenly downshift to a lower popularity at level 50. In this case, it can happen if Blasters level slower, and then are played less often at level 50 than other alts, once leveling is over. And that can be strongly influenced by the sort of invention-based end game builds that can be made with other archetypes. For example, blasters and scrappers are pretty close in popularity, so it would not take very much at all for the players that play level 50 scrappers a lot to edge them into first place ahead of blasters. The shift from blasters going from #1 to #3 at level 50 is not as dramatic a shift as it might appear. Only one archetype really has to strongly overtake blasters at level 50 given how close blasters and scrappers are, and it just has to be something people like playing a lot more at level 50 with strong invention builds than blasters. Brutes or Controllers, say (in the past, the data suggested that Controllers tended to gain on other archetypes with increasing security level).

You seem to be arguing that City of Heroes: Freedom is a free to play system like all free to play systems, because there's only one way to make a free to play system, and you're confused by the fact that they aren't making the free to play system exactly like how you believe a free to play system must be constructed.

I hope you at least realize the enormous incongruity of those two perspectives. The reason why City of Heroes Freedom doesn't do what you want or expect it to do is because its not a system that intends to be like what you think it has to be.

Which is why I said you can argue individual powersets: there are individual powersets that are specifically fairly well suited for that situation, like Fire tankers and Brutes. However, in terms of never seeing a blaster that could burn down every spawn that comes out of a door, I can do that.


That is also true, and long before the BAF came along the same argument was made for steamrolling teams. There comes a point where more tends less to improve the performance of the team and contribute to overkill instead.


I don't see how you could possibly need herding when its not actually possible. And in fact I specifically *said* that that particular situation was interesting partially because it completely eliminated the option.

I've seen leagues go both ways depending on the number of players involved. The choke points makes sense on smaller leagues and leagues with less damage dealers. Above a critical number of damage dealers, it makes more sense to go after the doors.

Above all else my blaster has far more flexibility than any melee character I could bring to that situation. I can shoot AoEs at a door constantly and still react to runners passing behind me if a leak develops. I can shift to being a floater far more easily and help different groups that might be having problems. I can cover far more area, and I can shoot at a larger number of targets overall, and I have plenty enough damage to kill them when I do before they pass me by. Nothing in my experience suggests anything other than in terms of shooting runners where ever they pop out from or where ever they are going, Blasters as a group will have the best overall performance.

I will admit, it makes it far less likely that subscribers will be encouraged to buy the game.

The BAF escape phase is probably one of the purest situations that require the best possible *application* of damage, rather than contrived situations like pylon farming: targets that you can only stop by killing them with direct fire, from whatever range you can engage them in, that can't be easily herded. Blasters generally outperform everything else in that phase.

If that was the *only* place blasters outperformed everything else, then that would just be a curiosity. But it suggests, because that situation isn't really obviously contrived to somehow favor blaster offense over anything else directly, that because its so difficult to judge who is really delivering the most damage most effectively in team situations, that paper analyses of those situations might not be as trustworthy as we think they are. There's nothing about BAF that says those paper analyses would necessarily be totally inapplicable, but they clearly are.

I actually happen to think that the BAF escape phase probably says more about how blasters perform as damage dealers for most of their existence leveling up for the average player than most other things do. The one thing that the escape phase does is allow people to see the true ability for a blaster to deliver damage when they can focus entirely on that, and not have to focus on trying to stay alive while under extreme fire. If they aren't at risk of death, they actually do quite well at delivering damage.

Which suggests that in teams where there is enough support to eliminate the chance of death, blasters might also be excelling at damage dealing over other archetypes in many situations where the optimum on-paper circumstances don't occur frequently enough.

Its interesting to note that in the super-saturated optimal conditions most people talk about when comparing blaster damage to defender or corruptor damage, or any other archetype, the blaster shouldn't be at high risk of death. But we know in actuality, blasters die very often, and that is what causes much of the performance lag for them. But if they are dying that often, that suggests that perhaps those optimal situations that trivialize blaster damage don't occur often enough to negate blaster damage. There may be many situations where there are enough buffs to keep the blaster alive, but the optimal situations don't occur where blaster damage is trivialized. And conversely there many be lots of situations where there aren't enough buffs to keep the blaster alive but there are enough situations that occur that neutralize blaster offensive advantages. Its very difficult to say, because these are areas that the very people who debate these topics never seem to find themselves in: highly suboptimal and situationally inconsistent situations that apparently nearly everyone else but forum posters find themselves in almost all the time.

Lets just say I was in the beta from the beginning, albeit anonymously (double anonymously?). Of course, I thought when I started posting a complete analysis of all the defense passives my cover would be blown, but apparently not.

I have a PM from someone thanking me for proving that game did not need an "Arcanaville." I kid you not.

I should point out, there's a lot of good ideas in that game, and a lot of lessons to learn on both sides of the ledger. Its just that for some reason Cryptic has issues with power systems, at least the data side. The actual *mechanics* are actually a significant step upward from ours in many respects. But the spreadsheet jockeys didn't do as good of a job leveraging the potential of the mechanical systems underneath.

Actually, I think studying CoH, CO, and STO is a unique opportunity. Are there any other opportunities to study three MMOs designed by essentially the same development company and launched within six years of each other, all of which are still being actively developed (albeit by a successor studio in the case of CoH)? This is the sort of thing doctorate dissertations are made to take apart.

Clouds?

The players who like randomness are intrinsically willing to take a chance of getting below average rewards for a chance to get above average ones. They know the difference between those two possibilities can be high: that is the point. The players who like deterministic rewards aren't willing to make that trade: they do not want the possibility of getting sub par rewards even if it offers the chance for higher rewards.

I believe in most circumstances, and especially the high reward ones, the reward system should address both desires by having a predictable component that is itself highly uniform, and a random element that has the chance for high variability between the best and worst case. This will satisfy people who want one or the other and are willing to concede the other to the rest of the player population.

Who this will piss off are *both* the people that want all random rewards, and all deterministic ones: the people who aren't satisfied with having a component they can count on to behave the way they want, but cannot tolerate any other part acting contrary to the way they want. If you're asking me if I'm aware I might lose such players, I am.

You're a strong advocate for all deterministic rewards, and you either are aware that will cost customers that find that boring, or you're unaware that there even exist such people in large numbers. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that it is the former, which is why I find your question just a little puzzling. It comes down to the fact that I think you are assuming that people advocating randomness just don't understand why their preference is unfair, when its actually that people who prefer randomness have a different definition of fairness. Your definition of fairness is everyone gets the same thing. The other definition of fairness is everyone has the same chance and/or opportunity to get anything, but the person by person results can be different.

We've covered this before, but my design requirements for a system analogous to the trial rewards is that the rewards should have some built-in minimum reward level that meets some earning standard (which might itself be debatable) and it should have some opportunity for luck to play a significant role in what the player can achieve beyond that minimum. The deterministic path satisfies the minimum requirements (or should) and the random drops satisfies the element of chance, and they also present a random and deterministic reward path for people who prefer one or the other (and aren't strictly opposed to the alternate one). Such a system satisfies my requirements for fairness, it satisfies my requirements for being sufficiently appealing to a sufficiently large percentage of the player population, it satisfies by general principles of diversity, and it is consistent with my general philosophy that you should design MMOs for people who want X in some form, and not people who need to avoid Y in all forms: people who want something for everyone and not require everything for anyone (note that none of this addresses whether the specific *numbers* are correct, just the structure of the system).

If this was just my personal preference, it would stop there. But I also believe this is the correct strategy to create a healthy game and appeal to the widest possible audience. Which is why I don't just say its my preference, I also say that if it was my decision to make, that's the call I would make and I would override subordinates to make it without hesitation.

For some context, I mentioned missing. Personally, I think missing is the price you pay for having a game that allows for evasion, a fun mechanic unto itself. You could replace it with an autohit system and pseudo-resistive crap, but you'd lose the mechanic's intrinsic quality if you do so. I'd fight personally to keep evasion in this game, and to add it to any other game. *However*, if I were in Black Scorpion's position, I would *not* apply that personal preference in an overriding nature. If Black Scorpion removed Defense and made all attacks autohit tomorrow, I'd be disappointed, and I would probably at least break one of his less useful fingers, but I would understand: I know my opinion is a minority opinion. I would respect the business decision every second that I was toilet papering his car. And if it was my call to make, I would not override the collective decisions of the other people involved: I would leave that one up for discussion. And if the collective decision was to remove missing, I would allow the group to go that route, and I would only accidentally mail their paychecks to Tahiti once or twice at most. Consensus would be more important here than my own personal preferences, particularly when there is a contrary business interest involved.

So its not enough for me to believe in something strongly enough to actually be willing to fight for it to state that if it was my call then screw everyone else we're doing it my way. But if it was my call to make on the subject of random and deterministic rewards, screw everyone else we're doing it my way. That is how absolutely essential I believe that balance to be.

That is totally not going to happen you know.

At least not for a while. Cheat them out of their exclusive, and next time they won't cover you. If it was me at PCGamer, I'd be plenty pissed if NCSoft promised an exclusive and then reneged on that promise. Those pictures probably come with an embargo period where they can't be released to other channels. When that has expired, we'll all get to see it. Until then, you'll have to wait.

All I can say is that if it was my decision to make, I would bet the entire game against the supposition that the absolute best and absolute worst case statistically likely scenarios would have to have a very small gap, which implies the randomness factor would have to be trivially small. I don't say that lightly, because I would not only be betting the game, but the future employment of a lot of people on that judgment.

Which is exactly, precisely what a reward system for this sort of content should be. The randomness offers an element of chance, and the deterministic path offers an absolute floor. You can quibble over the precise level of reward of each path, but I consider it practically axiomatic that any system that offers only one or the other consistently is intrinsically broken.

Yeah, because that is what NCSoft is in the business of doing: working hard to get you to buy gaming magazines.

They gave PC Gamer the exclusive so PC Gamer would print and promote the article prominently, so that the people who read PC Gamer would hear about City of Heroes. Because *that* is what NCSoft is in the business of doing: finding ways to get other people to publish information about its products, hopefully encouraging people to give the game a try.

If giving PC Gamer an exclusive gives us better coverage, the fact that they aren't just making that information available to download on the internet or trivially easy to access for people already playing and paying for the game is something I don't give even the tiniest bit of thought about. Actually, I was thinking a different word than "thought" but it will do for discussion purposes.

Probably more than a little.

I know someone long ago who told me they were going to quit because they couldn't stand missing in combat and hitting a target shouldn't require luck.

It is what it is.

Or a subscription.

Well, I'm not sure there's really anywhere to go there. That seems to be mostly a matter of preference than anything else at this point.


I tend to see things a bit differently. For example, I know someone that won a major lottery, but I don't express that fact as saying I know someone who has a 100% better chance of winning lotteries than I do.