Arcanaville

That's an implementation detail. I mentioned ways to address this issue that are not incompatible with hybrid F2P models.

Its occasionally been their hobby, though:

It does say that, but it doesn't say that is the *only* thing you can buy them with. Its commonly stated that the alignment vendors allow you to purchase recipes with alignment merits, which is technically true. But they also allow you to upconvert normal merits for alignment merits, which means in a functional sense they allow you to spend normal merits as well - with a time gate. Its possible Astral Christy and Empyrean Michael will work similarly (I would have called them Astral Amy and Empyrean Edward myself).


No, which is why I said it was weird. If they accepted other currency, you'd think that would be something marketing would want to hype. If they don't, its not really "a boon" to people that prefer to solo. I know its weird for one of those two reasons, but not which one.

Actually Bill, that specific statement was due to a very specific league mechanic change that was doing something so bad it was hurting leagues all over the place, not just trials. It made a mothership raid on Triumph I was on look like it was a PowerPoint presentation.

Tony doesn't have to be lying about not experiencing lag in the trials, because I don't experience lag in the trials sufficient to impair my ability to function most of the time. In fact, except for the aforementioned case where the devs literally turned City of Heroes into an email-based turn by turn MMO I've only experienced serious functional lag during BAF escape phases, and maybe twice in Lambda collection phases. Whatever is causing lag in Lambda collection phases is not universal server-side lag, because I keep track of that.

My system is powerful enough and my internet usually fast enough (bandwidth and latency) that I'm usually no longer a victim of any source of client-side lag, so its possible what people are experiencing is a combination of the two and the buff thing mentioned in the thread (I have that enabled, incidentally, because I haven't experienced the problem yet). Weird interactions between some server side lag, client side lag, and data streaming issues can explain why some people seem to have extreme lag problems and other people seem to experience none of them. It would be more complicated than tracking down any one root cause, which would make it difficult to isolate and correct.


As to the topic at hand, I've read the announcement and it doesn't say the vouchers are a "solo path" or a "solo option" even though people are using those phrases in quotes like they are quoting someone. It says:


It says if you prefer to play alone, there will be a way to unlock alpha and make some progress on other slots and powers after completing the trials once on one character. That is a very strong improvement in the situation if it stands for people who prefer to play alone. It doesn't help people who refuse to team ever but the devs did not say they were presenting a solution for those players. Their wording is specific: people who prefer to play alone.

The only weird thing is that the way the entire article is written its implied that Astral Christy and Empyrean Michael sell things specifically *for* astral and empyrean merits, which players who run the trials once cannot currently earn any other way. If that's not the *only* currency they take, its possible that once unlocked those two vendors will sell vouchers for other payment: shards, influence, etc. If that is so, then it is still a way for a player who prefers to solo to have a way into the incarnate system for their characters that only involves running a single trial, which means they can continue to exercise their preference after running only a single prerequisite trial. That's more than fair to those players specifically.

But if Astral Christy and Empyrean Michael only accept astral and empyrean merits, then I would have to concur that the devs misspoke, again. They really should take me up on that offer to sanity check these things.

In what way is this relevant to what I was responding to, which is your prior statement that its obvious the implementation of a F2P option is always associated with a discontinuation of the subscription option. You said F2P means subscriptions die, and that everyone knows this. I'm challenging that statement specifically.


Changing subjects completely, I don't see how we can be "conditioned" any more than the players of other MMOs that implemented F2P options, and I don't see how discontinuing the subcription model helps a company make money. Some people want to pay a flat rate, and some want to pay ala carte. Hybrid models provide options for both kinds of players, which means there is no incentive for a company to exclude one set of those players.


The problem intrinsic in the flat subscription model is that you can land in a local attractor. Basically, the number of subscribers you have is somewhat related to how good a game you can make, which is itself based on how much resources you can devote to the game. With momentum, you can end up with a million subscribers and the resources from a million subscriptions to fund a game worthy of a million subscribers. But if you have a hundred thousand subscribers plus or minus like we do, you have less subscribers and less resources, which means you can make only so much game, and since the only way to make more money and thus get more resources to make more game is to attract more subscribers, you can get locked into that situation.

We already aren't, and haven't been in a flat subscription model for some time now. City of Heroes has been operating in a subscription + booster model whereby they can directly make more money for making more game. They make a booster pack, and they get additional revenue over and above the subscription fee to fund more booster packs. That is a way to improve *both* the financial situation and the game situation without the more difficult requirement of radically increasing subscribers, which is difficult for a long-established game.

The F2P model is really an extension of that same thought process. The idea is that the incremental costs to support a single player are very low, so allowing people to play for free doesn't cost a lot more. But if it opens opportunities to sell those players game enhancements, they can pay for themselves and then some. And this isn't a wash: if the ala carte players generate enough revenue to fund more game development that benefits everyone, including subscription players.

The key is to make sure you give the subscribers enough game to ensure that players already used to paying a subscription will still think it is worth it, while creating enough optional extras to ensure that enough of the ala carte non-subscribers buy enough things to pay for their incremental costs and fund more development.

The playerbase has already proven to NCSoft that we're willing to pay subscriptions, and we're willing to pay extra for game enhancements if they are deemed worth the money. So in terms of transitioning to an F2P game, the subscribers have already proven with their wallets that the subscription option of the F2P model already works here. The challenge would be on creating a compelling F2P option that did not devalue subscribers. It would not be in convincing subscribers to do what they already do.

I don't know that, because ALL evidence out there says the most likely way for a subscription MMO to add a F2P option is to create a hybrid tiered model. I say all evidence because I can't find an MMO in recent memory that launched as a subscription service and then threw out its subscription program while it actually still had subscribers and converted 100% to an ala carte play model without actually shutting down first. Certainly, none of the high profile recent conversions did that.

I was standing at the entrance, not the exit. And I was throwing myself at the train, trying to time it for when the doors opened.

Tankers aren't supposed to sprint. They pull the Earth towards them until their destination arrives underfoot.

There's absolutely no excuse for not taking the time to check with a dictionary, forum search for articles, google search background topics, consult with an oracle, and boil a pot of tea to read the leaves to triple check your post -if- -you- -have- -that- -kind- -of- -time- -at- -your- -disposal-.

It may be safer and easier to test Freedom at load X than any other server, but that doesn't address the original question of why test at all. What would be the intent of verifying that Freedom can handle the load they are trying to generate? The question seems to be less why test Freedom rather than any other server, and more why test any server at that load.

The most straight forward answer to the question of why test Freedom is probably no more strange than the fact that Freedom has the most subscribers and Freedom probably has the most hardware dedicated to it. So if you are going to test the limits of the software architecture, the best place to do so is the place that has the most hardware and the most players to fill it.

Speaking in terms of game theory, lotteries work on the assumption that their maximum reward is high enough to invalidate the normal calculus of estimating average return on investment, and the lesser rewards are there to provide positive feedback to promote repeat re-entry, all while the average expectation per entry is less than the entrance fee.

In other words, lotteries have a really big prize and a ton of tiny prizes to confuse monkey brains not evolved to properly evaluate the return on investment in such a situation.


I think you mean ameliorates that. The merits don't assist the random rewards, they parallel them to provide a constant reward path that contrasts the random one.

You don't have to pick only one. I wouldn't. Lottery wins matter most when they offer the potential for dramatic rewards. Winning a two dollar lottery is meaningless. Lotteries where people only win things everyone can get whenever they want quickly is equally meaningless.

If they were thinking of a server merge, it would be illogical to be thinking about merging servers to a high enough density to *exceed* the load of the highest density server at the moment. That would suggest that Freedom itself has lower load than the devs feel justifies the existence of a server, which it extremely unlikely.


But it wouldn't be an increase in load over time. It would be an immediate increase in load.

Why would you need to stress test the server with the highest population when you're planning on merging the lower pop servers? Freedom already proves you can contain as many players as Freedom already has normally.

You stress test for four reasons:

1. You want to hammer new code with as much load as possible to try to break it, regardless of whether you think you'll actually have that much load normally.

2. You expect the server load on Freedom itself to increase over time for some reason: either more players, more player activity, or more CPU intensive activity per player in the future (i.e. more high density events).

3. You expect to merge Freedom itself with another server.

4. You're stress testing something else invisible, and using Freedom to do it.


#2 seems the most likely possibility: the devs have specifically stated they are testing new server code which eliminates #4, #3 seems perversely unlikely, and #1 seems uncharacteristic of the devs without some specific reason behind it. So they are probably trying to see a) how stable the server is with lots of characters logged in, b) how much actual activity load they can place on the server and what happens when it exceeds certain limits, and c) which things hurt the server the most in high load conditions: which powers, which effects, which archetypes, which critters, what AI modules, what server events, etc.

Probably part of an overall long term project to make the servers capable of doing more of everything with the least amount of lag. And sometimes they step in the wrong direction and *increase* server lag and load, but that tells us specifically that they are experimenting in that area, or else they wouldn't be making mistakes in that area.

There's lots of things that could be done, but the problem is that the devs created the tier 4 powers specifically to be long term targets to reach for. That's why their costs are set *massively* higher than the tier 3 powers, but have only very small extra benefits in most cases (ironically, Lore has the best jump from tier 3 to tier 4, a power many people skip).

Some things in this game are specifically meant to be chased, and the chase is meant to take a long time. Tier 4 incarnate powers are explicitly designed to be pursuit targets. Players that do not enjoy long term pursuits are actually supposed to stop at tier 3.

Put it this way: if tier 4 was easily accessible, the devs would add a tier 5 that wasn't. Get that reduced to being easily accessible, and they would add a tier 6. The last tier is always going to be the one many people can't get without a ton of work, because in the end game system there is always going to be some fraction of it specifically intended for the players that want to pursue a long term reward and are fast at it. By making it have only a relatively small incremental benefit, they make it an unnecessary pursuit for those that don't want to pursue it.

Are you serious?

1. The group of people who would have the best chance of being in favor of a merge are the players with the least amount of psychological investment in the current state of the game and its environment: the newer players.

2. Statistically speaking these will be the people with the lower post counts automatically.

3. Also statistically speaking, its known that only a small fraction of all players post on the forums at all, and only a fraction of those represent the bulk of all posts. Which means the frequency of posting cannot be usefully extrapolated backwards to the servers those players come from. They are the self-selected publicly active players. By definition they are different from the rest of the players that self-select to not get involved with the forums. The vast majority of Infinity doesn't post and the vast majority of Freedom doesn't post. There's no way to state that Freedom players obviously satisfy their social interaction in-game, while Infinity players obviously don't.

4. Furthermore, there's evidence to suggest that the server with the higher percentage of forum participation is Virtue. And that's because players who want a lot of social interaction with other players *might* act as you describe and get that in-game, and therefore not need the outlet of the forums. But its equally likely that players who seek interplayer interaction would deliberately seek out *other* avenues of interaction. So its not a good idea to extrapolate psychology casually.

I wouldn't rely on that: the one shot rule ignores DoT and multiple damage components.


The trick is to recast the phantasm about 15-20 seconds before the PA will despawn. One of the first things the Phantasm will do is cast his own decoy. That decoy taunts, and will therefore be next in line to get aggro when the PA despawn, and before the next cycle of PA reacquire aggro.

To make this work for long periods of time, the phantasm should have about the same recharge as the PA. Otherwise eventually the system will stagger itself out of sync and you'll be exposed. Note: the phantasm decoy lasts only 30 seconds. The Phantasm will eventually recast it, but there will definitely be a gap between. Thus the recommendation above to cast the Phantasm about 15-20 seconds before the PA is going to despawn. Too much earlier and you could have both despawn at the same time. Too much later and the Phantasm might not cast it quickly enough to lock in aggro. Which is why this takes a small amount of practice to get the timing right.

1. The bonkers tennis court strategy is how I've seen 95% of the runs on Triumph go since day two except for the ones where the league mutually agrees to go for a badge, such as separated. It basically never fails. I've never personally seen a BAF fail at that stage with Nightstar and Siege pulled together. I've only seen BAFs fail during disorganized escape phases and separated runs that go horribly awry.

Actually, I've seen leagues also pull both AVs basically right onto the reinforcement spawn point on the helipad, which also works.


2. The triple team option grants most of the iXP to the players on adds, which creates friction in some leagues. Shifting players from one team to another team doesn't solve the problem, because iXP is tracked in large part by *personal* damage delivered. Meaning: if you send someone from the Siege team to help with the adds team, that one player will get a lot more iXP, but the rest of the Siege team will get only a tiny additional amount from that shift. I've tested this directly myself. Different people on the same team can get radically different amounts of iXP based on which one does more AoE damage to more targets: iXP is not evenly shared. Unless they changed this with a very recent patch, it was like this from release until the beginning of May.


Of course, *if* your league is strong enough to get both separated and strong and pretty its better to go after those and basically ignore any iXP balancing problems, because each Astral Merit you can earn above the baseline for BAF is essentially worth in conversion 13.3% iXP for Interface and Judgment, and 8.9% for Destiny and Lore. Getting both and just a small amount of iXP is about the same or better as getting a really good iXP run without those two astral merits, and the astral merits are better for everyone that already has all their slots unlocked.

Well, not anyone. I've seen Illusion controllers sniped out of the sky during that moment in perma-PA when aggro hands off to the new pets and for a moment LR sets his sights on the controller.

In fact, I was one of those Illusion controllers a while ago when I was on an LRSF and found myself trying to control LR aggro while very much out of practice on my Ill. It took a few zaps before I recovered my double-decoy timing.

(Perma-PA isn't a guaranteed method of holding aggro, because the old group despawns as the new group spawns, but the new group doesn't get aggro until they actually attack the target which can sometimes unpredictably create a couple of seconds of gap no matter how solid your perma-PA recharge is. The only surefire way to permanently lock aggro on the pets and not have it spill to yourself is to use the Phantasm decoys as the bridge across PA castings, which takes some practice to get the timing consistently right.)

Except you realize that in virtually all cases of super hackers breaking supposedly impenetrable security, it turns out to be something trivially stupid that lets them in. *Decent* security and proper training against social engineering would keep out 99.99% of all the supposed hackers out there.

Worth noting: stuxnet the nuclear superworm probably reached its primary target via social engineering: lax security for thumb drives. If a really powerful hacker group wants to get you, it would take incredible security to keep them out: the APT attack against RSA is I believe an example of such an attack. It was possible but very difficult to defend against - but it too hooked itself into the network via social engineering.

Anonymous' attack against HB Gary? Social Engineering.

The thing is there are only so many people competent enough to spend six months trying to crack good security. So if I implement good security protocols and good training, the only people that can get me are people who probably have better targets to get.

The people who say perfect security is impossible also don't seem to realize there are some really juicy targets out there that would be the feather in anyone's cap but no one has come close to getting. Its just not that easy when there are no social engineering vectors to gain leverage with, and there are some places where social engineering doesn't work. Sometimes because people are very well trained, and sometimes because they shoot you, limiting the number of times you can attempt the same attack.

You know how it is whenever a subject comes around that people, for various reasons, have an emotional investment in engaging in.

The vast majority of players probably will simply continue on, noticing but not especially caring, about whatever business model NCSoft decides to implement for City of Heroes into the future. Its we the vocal minority that will always be the challenge for Paragon Studios. We might be an asset in some ways, but we're a liability in others. Being vocal, emphatic, and involved are all good things most of the time, but when we're set in our ways that can be a problem as well.

The bottom line is that I like this game and I want it to succeed. That means I will do what I can to help it succeed. I won't lie about my dislikes and my disagreements with the developers: I won't spin something I know to be bad into something that seems good. But regardless of what I like and dislike, I will try to make the game better, not just for me but for all, or at least the majority of its players.

And the important thing about F2P, or any other commercial business model, is that its not the model, but the execution of that model that determines success or failure. So anyone saying things like "if the game goes F2P I'm quitting" is free to draw their line in the sand, but its a line I don't afford much credibility towards. I don't think it means much, just as most I'm quitting statements don't mean much. But even for the players that do ultimately quit, if you'll quit over something you don't know and don't understand, and cannot possibly predict its impact on the game, well I hate to lose you, but I'm also convinced we never really had you.

Speculation is fine, as long as everyone realizes that their speculation is just that. No one really knows what NCSoft is going to do with City of Heroes next week, next month, next year, unless they are an actual Paragon Studios insider with first hand knowledge. Everyone else is just guessing. And guessing what you'll do after NCSoft does what someone else guesses they'll do in response to someone else's guesses about what NCSoft will decide is premature at best.

Discussion along these lines should be thought-provoking, not unnerving. The future will be waiting for us when we get there.

Because of the way its written, I doubt it. But I will 2to3 the thing and make sure it still works, and figure out a way to get it to you. Perhaps you can give it a better graphical display, because I just hacked one into it with pygame. It used to be downloadable, but the download link seems to have gone bye bye, so I will have to upload it somewhere again. Fortunately, the primary engine is only 846 lines long.

Its also a damage mitigation simulator, not an attack simulator, so it might be even less useful. I was going to get around to reversing it and simulating the other way, but that code was never completed. But I would recommend stealing the clock trigger trick at least: it gives me millisecond time resolution but without having to simulate a thousand clock ticks per second.

As long as I'm going to do that, I should update the scrapper numbers in there as well. The thing dates back to I7. I should also clean up the code, but nope, still too lazy to do that.

How do you know your tactics haven't landed you into a suboptimal local maxima?

Then you would go to a simulation, like I said you should if you reach that point. But your current system isn't there yet.

Simulations are not all that easy to make. People have mocked up things that were claimed to be simulations but they got caught up in the calculations: what they made were basically difference engines, not simulations. And to get proper statistical information out of them, they have to run fast enough to be able to do thousands, really millions of runs.

I keep telling myself I'm going to rewrite mine in C, but to be honest that's unlikely given the fact that I put so much algorithmic efficiency into the python one, it already runs billions of simulated seconds per hour. I should shoot it through 2to3 though, since I don't have a python2 on my system anymore.

But that conclusion is based on numbers that seem selected to derive that conclusion. For example, the value of a resistance debuff is actually based on the intrinsic damage output of the rest of the players on the team Swapping a tanker for a brute, for example, costs you the difference in damage between the brute and the tanker, but then adds about 20% of the total damage of the rest of the team.

Your calculations assume that "debuffers" have extremely low intrinsic damage. In fact, they assume the debuffers in question will have only 40% of the damage of scrappers (scrappers: 75, debuffers: 30). And that is base, not damage capped. Is that remotely likely if we pick, say, corruptors as our debuffers? And even if we pick defenders, that is a huge gap in damage when scrappers do not tend to have a lot of ranged AoE, even with epic powers. Defender damage mod is 0.65. Even assuming a 10% crit rate, if Scrappers are 75, defenders should be at least 39. Corruptors should be at least 45 even if we don't count Scourge, and we should. And what to make of your assumption that the base damage output of a Kinetics defender is only 27% that of a scrapper? (75 vs 20).

Those very low numbers reduce the benefit of swapping pure damage for lower damage and a debuff. And that's what makes your calculations not in fact giving the tanker the best possible case. In some of your assumptions you are counting the tanker contribution generously, but in others you're penalizing the tanker contribution severely.