Arcanaville

DDR is a Res, not a Cur, and it follows the same curve as damage strength: i.e. 0.33/0.8. 0.95 DDR reduces to about 0.803 in PvP, or about 80.3%.

Defense debuffs are Curs, and subtract from defense before DR, and then DR is applied to the total. So high raw defense numbers do still offer significant protection against defense debuffs in PvP.

Fair enough. May I perform my own analysis of that data to confirm your results?


Actually, I'm using your math and arguments, not mine. You're using math to attempt to demonstrate why a tanker would be hopelessly outmatched damage-wise by a scrapper, and I'm using nothing but your numbers and your own logical methodology for comparing the two to demonstrate that even by your own reckoning, tankers are not outperformed by the margins you claimed. By your own numbers, its impossible to witness a 10% reduction in offensive kill speed when by your own numbers the tanker is reducing team damage by at most 7% and most likely less than 5%.

My own logical argument would be: in the speed runs you're talking about, its *less* likely the tanker's offensive underperformance would be noticable because its precisely in those teams that offensive firepower tends to generate overkill which supersaturates the foes - in other words more and more damage is landing more deader and deader things.

At some point, even if the team breaks up and begins aggressive leapfrogging, the offensive firepower of a fast steamroller team becomes limited by the rate of movement between spawns, which starts to become a significant percentage of the total time of the run because it cannot be compressed as much as kill speed can. Kill speed can be compressed almost to zero in extremely ludicrous offensive teams. Movement rate cannot be so compressed to nearly the same degree, because most reasonably strong teams cannot move much faster than the unsuppressed run cap, and they tend to hit that much more quickly than they hit the offensive kill speed limit.

As we used to say back in the days of perma-elude: better zero endurance than zero health.

Even for me, that's a huge stretch.

"Random" and "weighted" are not mutually exclusive. In fact one has nothing to do with the other. Normal invention recipe drops are both random and weighted: which one you get is generated randomly, but the odds of getting each one is weighted based on type and rarity.

To be precise, a random number generator generates a random number from one to the maximum number of rewards in a reward table. That number is then used to select a single reward from that reward table. That makes the selection random. Is there any way for the player by their own individual actions to either alter the result of the random roll or alter the entries in the table? According to the devs, the answer to that question is no. Other factors not under the individual player's complete control can influence the distribution of rewards according to the devs, but nothing alters the actual random roll. Therefore the choice of reward is still random, and more importantly nothing the player does can materially influence the random result.

I don't know why its true that lots of people seem to think that "random" implies "equal distribution" but neither the colloquial definition of random nor its technical definition include that property when the term "random" is used synonymous with "randomly generated." In fact, I encounter weighted random situations far more often than unweighted random ones.

I'm not sure if they are compatible, but I don't think they are congruent. I think you're suggesting that its possible having a low individual participation score plus league bonuses can generate lower component rolls than someone with a higher individual participation score plus league bonuses.

I'm suggesting that participation score itself does not factor into the random rolls at all, but its possible the root cause of having low individual participation scores could also lower your chance of getting league bonuses which means even when you qualify your random rolls would tend to be lower regardless of participation score.

Suppose you got a participation bonus and also a league bonus to your random roll of 2% for each weapon crate or containment vessel you contributed damage towards (just making up an example: I have no data which suggests this is actually true). In that case, its *theoretically possible* for a player to only hit each crate once and do nothing else and yet qualify for a drop with an otherwise very low individual participation score: the league bonuses would be helping him qualify. But in general, someone that attacks much less often and gets low participation scores would also tend on average to hit less crates: the same thing that lowers his participation also lowers his random roll bonuses. But its not the fact that his score is low that causes his random drops to be lower, its the fact that the same thing that makes his participation low also makes him much more likely to miss out on totally separate bonuses.

I think some more complex variation on that theory is likely to be the cause of most archetypal skews, and not some form of "bleed through" of the individual participation score into the random roll. Unless what we've been told about the system is in error.

I'll be honest: it might be a second-hand reporting distortion, but I found that to be an inexplicable statement to make regardless. I also have no idea how the one subject managed to get linked in any way to the mission architect.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've been saying the exact opposite.

The most compatible theory with our current best understanding of the system is that if one particular archetype, for example masterminds, tends to get a lower grade of component reward separate from any chance at getting threads, the most likely reason is that somehow something about the way some players play that archetype is somehow causing them to fail to acquire team or league bonuses that are otherwise accruing to the majority of the team or league. In other words, its not that their lower participation score is generating a lower reward, its that their lower activity level is somehow disqualifying them for at least some random roll bonuses.

Lets face it: very few people actually discuss the financials in and of themselves. Every time they are posted, people want to use them to advance a conjecture about what they mean about the financial health and future of Paragon Studios and City of Heroes. No one wants to do the hard work of numerical analysis and economic projection, cost breakdowns and revenue estimates. No one really wants to discuss the numbers. They want to discuss what it all means. That's why people keep predicting the end of the game from the numbers, and why I keep laughing at the people who keep predicting the end of the game from the numbers.

Upstream, I mentioned data which formed the basis for what I believe to be the best ballpark estimate for how much it might cost to support a game like City of Heroes, and by extension at what revenue levels the game might be profitable at. When *I* look at the numbers, that's what I see. That's what I use them for. That's what I ultimately do with them: they are facts that I incorporate into a better picture of reality. Nobody really cares.

That's not where the fun is. The fun is taking a ruler and a pencil and saying based on the trend in 2009 the game will have zero customers by June 2010, ergo the game is doomed. Or, in the last two years, particularly, the game must go free to play or be doomed.

As long as people are going to speculate, I might as well see if that speculation goes anywhere interesting. Because there's no interesting discussion going on about the actual numbers that I can see (and rarely ever is), and the less speculative doom-predicting is honestly completely uninteresting.

Oh dear god no.

The best time to convert to F2P if you're going to do it at all is when you don't need to, but you want to. Doing it at the point of a gun carries two high risk scenarios for failure: one: people will know its a desperation move, and two: you won't have enough time to do it right.

Based on my own analysis of F2P, if you're going to convert to the model (as opposed to launch with it) you should try to satisfy three requirements:

1. Launch loud. It has to be perceived that the company is both focused and enthusiastic about it. You should be promoting it as if its the best thing that you've done yet, and better things are to come. Its not the end of the subscription model, its the beginning of the new model, and the announcement is the first of many, many quality of life and content improvements that this change will bring. There should be marketing and technical information released weekly leading up to the launch, and there should be a blitz of information about all the good things coming. There shouldn't be a single five day span where you aren't telling your customers something new and interesting.

2. Launch big. The corollary is that to launch loud, you have to have enough to talk about. If you just change model, but the game itself is more or less the same the day before as the day after (I'm thinking of two specific cases here) there's nothing to talk about except to hype vague notions of the free to play model itself. Nobody cares about the F2P concept as a concept. They want to know what you're going to do, specifically, and why they should care, and why they should believe this is a good thing for them. You have to be able to answer specifically: Paragon Studios announces that as part of the launch of its new free-to-play model for just 900 SuperPoints you will get a two minute piggyback ride from Positron. And we're not even talking about in-game either: we've already fitted Matt with a saddle.

There has to be so much more that everyone is getting with the new model that everyone believes Paragon Studios believes so much in the model that they are prepared to invest a lot more resources in making a lot more game, because they know a lot more people will be playing it and a lot more people will be paying for content.

3. Follow through. Launch has to be big. The month after launch has to be as big or bigger. The perception has to be that the model isn't a flash in the pan, but a sustainable one. Every week there should be something new added to the microtransaction store that isn't BS. Every month there has to be something added worth actually promoting loudly. The devs have to be constantly announcing "check this out, this is what's coming" and the studio needs to be constantly saying "here's what's coming in three months with Issue 28: here's what the veeps get, and here's a taste of what we're adding to the SuperStore."

Needless to say, you can't do this if you're on your last legs with a gun to your head. You do this when you are dealing from a position of strength. You do this not because you have to, but because you *can*. And you prove it by making sure that the F2P launch isn't about making more money, its about *spending* more money on *the players*, money you are confident you are going to be making with your better development model.

Basically, the first step to proving to me that F2P is a good thing is the developers convincing me that *they* believe it will be a good thing. And they do that not by telling me they think it will be a good thing, but by acting as if they believe it will be a good thing by making and releasing a game worthy of a bigger and better business model. And as I said, the only way to do that is from a position of strength. You're correct that the numbers suggest Paragon Studios is strong enough to not *need* to go to F2P. I think the sub+booster model would work perfectly fine for years to come. What I'm saying is that the numbers suggest Paragon Studios is *strong enough* to convert to F2P from a position of strength, and I believe by the time everyone thinks the numbers say they have to, it will also be too late to do so.

So I don't think the numbers really tell us if and when NCSoft would consider changing models. Numbers strong enough to be sustainable are also numbers strong enough to switch. Numbers weak enough to require switching are also probably too weak to do so successfully. Right now, I think the numbers still give Paragon Studios options. The safer option to me is to extend the sub+booster model, maybe add a better microtransaction system than the way boosters are sold now. Perhaps add a two-tiered sub system with $14.95 premium subs and $7.95 second tier subs that included most of the game, but not all of it. In a sense, we already have that pseudo-situation of those with GR and those without.

But just because its the safer option, just because its the option I might consider the logical outgrowth of what's come before, doesn't mean its the one NCSoft would go with. Long ago I stopped trying to predict City of Heroes business decisions.

I'd sell an instant faction switch in theory. Although faction switching is gated, its not gated by any special accomplishment. Its more time-gated than activity-gated and it doesn't have special balance problems associated with it that I can think of. On the other hand, Task Force Commander is at least intended to be a mark of accomplishment: running the task forces to completion. Selling it devalues the accomplishment it is supposed to represent.

Incidentally, this also means that while I would sell faction switching, I would not necessarily sell the badges associated with faction switching. I might consider awarding them only for the completion of the appropriate morality mission, and not for "magically" switching by microtransaction.

The one set of badges that I think I might consider selling are the Day Job badges, maybe. Those are literally pure time-sink awards. Not even playing time-sink awards, but literally time-sink awards for not playing the game while your character happens to be in a particular spot. What I might do is sell a token that reduced the day job award time from 21 days to 7, or to put it another way the token would grant you up to 336 hours of credit to any day job badge you chose.

It doesn't presuppose the progression is automatic. It only presupposes the progression is easier when done in stages than when its attempted all at once with limited situational awareness. Whether NCSoft chooses to investigate F2P or not, they are in a better position to do so than most games that were pushed into made the jump.

First, there are things you sell to everyone: your VIP subscribers, your F2P players: everyone. Things like special enhancements, special powers, consumable temp powers, the occasional costume set. Then there are things you can earn or buy: respec you can earn or buy. Sands of Mu you can earn by being a veteran, maybe you could buy it. Then there are things VIP subscribers get for free, but F2P players would have to buy. Maybe VIP subscribers that own Going Rogue can earn alignment merits, but F2P players have to pay to unlock that feature.

Each of these kinds of things have their own set of requirements. Things VIP subscribers get for free but F2P players have to buy can be almost anything. All you need to make sure about is that the limits on F2P players don't spill over into the VIP players in inconvenient ways. For example, if F2P players cannot join task forces unless they pay to unlock that feature, that would be a pain for VIP players trying to organize them. But if they don't have jetpacks because they didn't buy them, that's their problem. On the other hand, things you sell to everyone have slightly more strict requirements: they have to be things that the VIP subscribers perceive as extra value for extra money or totally optional things: they cannot be perceived as base content that was split off into ala carte content. And things you can earn or buy have to have very accurately balanced earning and purchasing costs so that neither option is heavily devalued, and you also have to make sure that you don't completely devalue the act of earning as a process. Some things are just off-limits. For example, in my opinion if you allow players to buy any badge they don't have, no matter the cost you've just destroyed the underpinning of the badge system which is, however imperfect it is, players who have the badges have usually earned them by in-game action. Sometimes weird or degenerate action, but still actual in-game activity. There is no correct price for Task Force Commander, say.

For all gated things, regardless of the nature of the gate, there will exist people for whom a critical reason why they want to play the game requires that gated item. So its always true that all gates act as a barrier to *someone*. If NCSoft reduced the price of the game by eight cents per month, that would eliminate the barrier to entry for someone on Earth: its basically inevitable.

The question is not whether gated content is a barrier to *someone* but whether or not the ungated content is *enough* to make a reasonably playable game to *enough* people. You aren't targeting everyone on Earth, nor are you targeting every MMO player on Earth. Just by being about superheroes, we eliminated the majority of all MMO players on Earth already, there doesn't exist such a thing as an MMO genre that has universal appeal. Millions of people don't play WoW because they don't want to play a fantasy genre role playing game. They don't care, and neither do we care about all the people that don't want to play a superhero game. That's the genre we've staked out, and that's what we care about.

Analogously, when it comes to gates, the gates help in some areas and hurt in others. You minimize the pain and you maximize the gain but at the end of the day if the gates reduce your target audience because some people won't accept the gates, your decision should not be based on whether some people object, but whether the rest are enough for you.

Do I have a Shivan? Well, not exactly...

That's an interesting conjecture, as City of Heroes currently offers purchasable game enhancements that are permanent, yet not necessarily things F2P players will always feel they need to have to play. The upcoming Steampunk pack, for example, could have been released as a microtransaction item if CoH was F2P, and it would not match your requirements. And yet, evidence suggests its likely to generate a lot of interests and a signficant income, which are the actual only two properties MT items have to possess.

We've been looking at things like the Turbine model for guidance, but wouldn't NCSoft, if they decided to start thinking about an F2P conversion, look to what works *here* first, rather than what worked elsewhere and may or may not work here? Wouldn't they be asking: what do our players tell us - with their wallets - people will pay for? What is too much to ask, and what is too little to give? Where do we draw the line between the standard content and the ala carte content? Shouldn't we try to draw the line fairly close to where City of Heroes currently draws it?

Other MMOs can give us an idea of how an F2P system might be structured but as to the content decisions that go into it, I think you first start at home. We don't have to randomly guess at what the existing playerbase will accept, because the existing playerbase has been giving NCSoft data for years now on what they will accept and not accept, by virtue of the sales numbers and community feedback of every boxed expansion and booster pack City of Heroes has ever sold.

That's actually an advantage City of Heroes has that most F2P conversions did not have: a lot of data on what works and what doesn't work prior to the conversion. We've actually been living in a hybrid model for several years now, just not specifically a F2P one. The transition from a pure subscription model to an F2P model is actually two transitions in one: a transition from subscriber only to tiered access (from VIP subscription if it exists down to free to access), and a transition from buffet gaming to ala carte gaming. That's a big set of jumps. But we're already at least half way into the jump from buffet gaming to ala carte gaming: we wouldn't have to make both jumps completely blind.

Do you wait until the economics forces you to do something, or do you do it when you decide the benefits outweigh the deficits? Do you wait until you are economically forced to institute ED, to implement the invention system, to create the architect, to release an end game? Or do you do those things when you know they will be good for the game and before you're externally forced to do them?

The thing about the financials is that as an analyst there is some information I can glean from them, but there are limits. NCSoft and Paragon certainly have more and more precise information than any of us can have, and long before we saw anything in them that would suggest to us they were "forced" to do something, they would have seen the same signal coming from other data a mile away. Correlating what we see with what they do is like seeing an actor injure their arm in the news and then watching a movie that releases a few days later to see if they are favoring it.

Sometime a while ago, Issue 13ish, primary and secondary self heals like reconstruction and healing flames were made unresistable. Those heals used to be resistable, which provided a mechanism for the game to reduce the strength of those heals (i.e. MoG). Hamidon mitos apply heal resistance to the players which is how they make heals reduce in strength.

You should notice the regen debuff though, even on a regen. If I remember correctly, it should be a -300% regen debuff for 15 seconds.

There's no way to know what the name of the set bonus is without ... knowing the name of the set bonus. But the way it works is that all set bonuses are granted by invisible passive powers. The BotZ bonus is clearly different from the Basilisk bonus: even though the ranged piece is coincidentally the same, the total defense bonus is clearly different. Since the bonuses are different, they have to be granted by two different set bonus powers, so they have to have different names, so they each fall under a different rule of five cap.

The big rule of thumb exception is LotG +recharge whose set bonus power is known to have a different name than the one that typically grants +7.5% recharge in sets with that bonus.


To put it another way, everything in the little box in Paragonwiki's invention origin set listing for set bonuses must be identical for there to be any chance that two set bonuses are in fact identical. The fact that the Basilisk bonus is yellow and the BotZ bonus is green and they buff different things in total mean they are not the same bonus. The stacking limit covers the entire bonus, not the individual pieces of the bonus. To be clear, there is only *one* set bonus for having two pieces of Basilisk's gaze slotted: a single bonus that buffs energy, negative, and ranged defense. There is only one set bonus for slotting two pieces of Blessing of the Sephyr: a single bonus that buffs ranged, energy, and negative defense. Those *two* bonuses are not exactly, precisely the same so they could not possibly be granted by the same set bonus power.

That's fascinating. What specifically about Elmo did your brother's thesis focus on?