Arcanaville

(Of course its a joke. Practically everyone with Empath and Immortal will have similar stats. I just happened to notice I crossed that mark this weekend. Interesting to note: the game has only been live for about 62000 hours. In actuality, about 2000-2500 of them are real play: it took my main 908 to get to 50, a number still burned into my memory.)

The way I read the suggestion, if you had, say, 40 characters on the servers to be merged, the merged server would have 40 active character slots. You couldn't make any new characters on that server but you could access all 40. It didn't say characters above 36 would be inaccessible, so I should give the suggestion the full benefit of the doubt in that specific circumstance.

The concept of temporary overflow exists in other parts of the game: you can have more transaction slots than the maximum if the game requires them to, say, split up a group transaction, and we know from past testing that if the game is forced to send more recipes or salvage than you have space for for some reason, you're simply temporarily allowed to have more than the limit, but you cannot do anything else except remove items until you drop below the limit. I'm assuming the suggestion follows similar lines.

Its possible, but not nearly enough to avoid the huge number of problems a merge would cause, because most of the problems with a merge are inherent to the merge itself, and not its collateral damage effects. Some players fundamentally do not want to see their server community and its assets merged with another. That's an intractable problem with no real problem-free solution. Some people fundamentally do not want to change character names. That is an intractable problem with no real problem-free solution in a merge.

In any case, if I was of a mind to do a server merge, I would go all the way and go shard-less. Rather than have to deal with this problem multiple times, I would go all the way once and come up with a way to preserve server communities within a singular global structure. And I wouldn't claim it would be problem-free: I would only do this if the problems I know would occur were worth the benefits.

Is it possible? Well, hypothetically one way to do this would be to put everyone into a single global space but tag all players with a shard tag of their original server, and then use phasing to allow players to see essentially only things with the same server tag. In effect, Freedom, Virtue, Champion, Triumph, and all the other servers would be occupying the same space but invisible to each other. Voluntarily, however, people could unlock their phase locks and see everyone and everything on the global server, either permanently or temporarily for cross-server teaming. If you're on Infinity and you want to team with someone on Virtue, you could unlock your tag and see the Virtue people, join their team, and run with them. You could stay permanently globally visible and see everyone globally, or return to your own "Infinity dimension" once that was done. While teamed, your Superguy character would appear as Superguy: Infinity to avoid name clashes with Superguy: Virtue. It wouldn't appear like that: it would appear as Superguy with the server tag below, so it actually looked like a tag rather than a continuation of the name, so we don't mess with players' character names.

There are a ton of problems with executing such a thing, I won't deny. But I would explore ideas like that before contemplating a server merge. Because while a server merge might be more technically easy, it actually might be far more disruptive because in a normal server merge the problems of name space and community just get punted. In something ambitious like the above, those problems get addressed front and center.

Why do people continue to quote how long it would take to do something with only one specific reward like there's a badge for doing it with your hands tied behind your back like that. It would take 184 trial runs minimum to get 184 empyrean merits, and long before then you'd probably have enough components to upgrades them into very rares.

Empyreans help, but the point is you're supposed to use your thread drops, your astrals, your empyreans, your component drops, and your earned iXP to unlock those slots and then slot powers into them. It is extremely difficut to contrive a scenario where it takes hundreds of trials to do that. On average, its going to be dozens to fill everything with tier 4s. Which is four times the effort it takes to fill with tier 3s, which almost always have an analog that is close to the strength of a comparable tier 4. In the worst case scenario where you're getting component drops at all, its still highly unlikely its going to take you a hundred runs to reach tier 4 in all slots. My blaster has enough resources to make at least three very rare powers in theory, having done less than 60 total trial runs and having never gotten a single very rare component drop. I was tier 3 slotted after less than twenty runs.

Exactly like that.

Of course, there's always Sword-Blast for Blasters.

Actually, he's saying if you have more than 36 characters total among the servers being merged, none of those characters get deleted: you simply cannot make new characters on the new server because you're over the limit.

Having said that, the notion that such a merge under those parameters wouldn't cause problems is an interesting blend of scary and funny. It would be the single largest disruption in the game in its entire history. For every issue listed in Memphis Bill's post, I can think of one more not listed. Its a huge can of worms.

You can have Ninja Scrappers after I get my Dual Archery Corruptors.

There's always perk packs.

True story: someone long ago once told me that I only thought other people would believe what I had to say because of my excessive post count of twenty eight hundred posts. I've come to believe that post count is what you attack when you run out of things in the post to attack and you want to attack the poster, and you just don't know the poster well enough to have good material to land. Someone who's been around the forums even for a few minutes would at least hit me for being too focused on numbers, or being a suck up to the devs, or having a cult, or being literate, something like that.

But I think the guy with nine posts will accuse the guy with forty seven posts of spending too much time on the forums if they run out of things to say. It means exactly that much, and is exactly that funny.


Besides, everyone knows its not post count, but word count that matters. Unfortunately the boards don't track word count, or I would currently be the Supreme Overload of the forums.

A lot of people have very weird ideas about how this game works, but at least the people who express that on the forums find out those ideas are weird. People in-game don't find that out unless and until they voice them on a global channel or broadcast, and they are usually much more indignant about it in-game.

Part of the problem seems to be that while some players will concede that the way the game works in general might be different than what they know, the way the game has worked for them is the way they know, as if the game is something mysterious that can work differently for different players. Unfortunately, that too is usually wrong.

That actually approaches level 50 monster-class regeneration (353.4 h/s). With reconstruction and dull pain's heal recharging fast enough, I think you could conceivably exceed that.

I told him my Ion Judgment looked cooler than his Shockwave, and it forced him back out of retirement.

Works every time.

In all those cases, you would be changing very fundamental aspects of the game, to the point where making those changes would require you to in effect rewrite virtually the entire game. And it is at that point that it makes sense to make a new game, because the new game would be incompatible with the old one, and require virtually as much work to create whether you retrofit or start from scratch.

If your *intent* is to preserve as much of this game as possible and just add one thing its better to add that one thing to this game rather than replicate all of this game's features except for that one thing. But if you're going to make an entirely new game, its obviously time to start fresh and make an entirely new game.

That's why the issue of character portability is a logical one, not a player preference one. If enough of the game survives to make character portability reasonable, you're almost certainly better off just adding those features to the existing game. Character portability as a practical matter requires a large amount of the fundamental game to remain intact. Conversely if you are changing enough things to justify a new game in the first place, character portability is likely no longer relevant. It wouldn't really be character portability: it would be offering your old customers the right to start at the level cap with new characters. Nobody does that.

Since that post above, my current recommendation to masterminds that are having frequent occurrences of not qualifying is to try to use as many foe affecting powers as possible without running out of endurance, try to stay close enough to your team or teams to be theoretically within the range of buffs and heals (keep to your assigned group if possible when the league splits up), and try to not spam the same power over and over if that is possible.

And if you are running out of endurance a lot, consider crafting and slotting a Cardiac Alpha during the trials, even if it is just the cheap tier 1.

More likely they are generating a random real between 0 and 1, multiplying by 100, and rounding off to nearest 0.01. So all rolls lower than 0.005 round down to 0.00, and all rolls higher than 99.995 round up to 100.00.

Technically speaking, the devs have never to my knowledge stated that the Praetors are cosmically powerful just cosmically empowered. They are empowered by Emperor Cole, who himself is empowered by the Well of the Furies. So they are getting power from a cosmic source. But they are not specifically stated to be cosmically powerful, like as in Galactus powerful or even Silver Surfer powerful.


Plus, its always difficult to translate MMO power levels to real world or even fictional comic book analogs because of the oddities of mechanics. For example, surviving a nuclear blast sounds like a big deal when we say Statesman survived one, but then again the players actually *get* something called a nuclear blast that half the game can survive. Setting that aside as being somewhat hyperbole, Marauder in Lambda has 100% resistance to everything except psionics when enraged. This means within the limits of the game mechanics to represent, unless nuclear warheads are unresistable Marauder can not only survive a tactical nuclear warhead, he can survive a fifty megaton bomb. He can survive Mars falling from the sky and vaporizing North America, because nothing except psionics can scratch him.

And yet, he could not survive a Steel Canyon building exploding, because that detonation *is* unresistable and *guaranteed* to deal more damage than you have health, no matter how much health you have. If Galactus landed in Steel Canyon and accidentally stood on one of those buildings when it blew up, even if Galactus had 100% resistance to damage and a billion points of health he'd be kaboomed.


There's also the small matter of the fact that in-game, all of the signature heroes and villains are plain retarded on their own. If you put players into the driver's seat of the Freedom Phalanx and they played that group like a real team, that team collectively could probably wipe out any conventional army you could assemble in the City of Heroes world. And that's because another rule of the City of Heroes world that is somewhat different from either the comics genre world and the real world is that force multiplication doesn't fool around. An army of conventional abilities with no super powered stacking buffs or debuffs will lose to any strong team of anything with those. That sort of thing doesn't really happen in the real world, and doesn't really happen in quite the same way in the comic book genre usually. Singularly, most of the most powerful heroes and villains in the Marvel and DC Universes can probably take on anything in the City of Heroes universe one on one. But a team of eight, twelve, or twenty four of the strongest things in the City of Heroes universe playing by CoH rules could probably lay waste to the DC and Marvel Universes faster than the Marvel Zombies, no matter what the numerical odds were, short of facing the entities in both universes capable of rewriting all of reality.

Actually, you are basically right on the money here:


Basically correct. You cannot compare your DRed KB protection to incoming KB magnitude because that's not how DR works. DR works on *totals*. So while your 45 mag KB protection is reduced to 10.5 in PvP, when you are hit with a KB the game engine adds your KB protection to incoming KB magnitude *and then* applies DR to the total. So in this case we have force bolt on a controller dealing 18.694 KB at level 50. Then we have 6-slot Kinetic Crash which gets you +173.95% KB enhancement strength after ED. That gives you a net PvE KB magnitude of 51.21. However, in PvP that enhancement strength gets reduced to about 127.78%, which reduces the total KB magnitude of that attack to 42.58. The total KB effect on you is -45 (protection) + 42.58 (attack) = -2.42. This is still below zero, so you are not knocked. Its close enough, though, that shutting off Acrobatics brings your protection too low to protect you from that knock.

The kicker is that DR will affect that total, by bringing it down to -1.59, but that's still below zero. The point is that since DR only reduces the *magnitude* of the total (bigger or smaller), but whether you are affected or not depends solely on the *sign* of the number (plus or minus), DR cannot change whether you are affected or not, *except* by messing with the strength modifiers. For example, if the total had been +2.42, you'd have been knocked, and DR would have reduced that to +1.59, and you'd still have been knocked.

These days most random number generators in systems like this are either seeded with the time as a 32-bit integer, or with an entropy pool. And most random numbers don't work quite the way you describe. Most use functions over modulo arithmetic, and many are based on FSRs - feedback shift registers. A well known example is the Mersenne Twister for those remotely interested.

Actually, its 0.00 through 100.00. 10,001 possible results, due to wraparound roundoff. 0.00 and 100.00 are about half as common as the other rolls.

For any feature to be easier to implement in a new game rather than in the existing game, two things must be simultaneously true:

1. The existing code is sufficiently poorly understood that tampering with the parts that have to integrate with the new code would be dangerous and slow.

2. Parts of the existing code actually make the desired feature *impossible* to add, forcing parts of the game unrelated to the new feature to be modified in non-trivial ways.

Without these two factors in force, the amount of code necessary to implement feature X is usually the same whether it is in a new game or an existing game. Where the existing game can make it harder is usually by the collateral effects of adding the feature, which the above two create.

In very rare cases its possible for a new feature to require such a fundamental change in the way the game is designed that as a practical matter it simply cannot coexist in the current game and can only exist in a game that is designed around that feature. However, lets take your example of growth powers, one point at a time:

The fact you can express this in terms the existing game would understand implies the current game engine is mostly adequate: the problem is the data resources in the game itself, not the codebase (if there is a problem in the codebase, its likely in the *dev tools* to make environments, not the game engine itself).

And actually, I think the problem is less the bounding of the environment, and more the bounding of the characters. Our heads protrude into spaces not because those spaces aren't bounded, but because our heads are outside our own bounding box.


I'm not sure what you mean by the latter, but the former falls within the realm of the power database and the powers system, and *presuming* growth powers affect things like damage or resistance, it would almost certainly happen with scalable powers. You'd have size tables within the appropriate archetype, and you'd scale the strength of those powers based on a size scaler. Basically, the same way some powers scale by combat level.

You don't need as much content as CoH. You just need enough. And it isn't just CoH you're competing with on that score, its every other MMO out there that has been around more than a year. I don't know why this is, but MMO dev teams either believe content gaps are something they can fix after launch, or something they don't want to launch with but are forced to do so by publishers, or something they just can't make fast enough for some inexplicable reason.

Are you suggesting a free to play model implies an MMO cannot compete with its peers any longer? Because there are people who believe strongly enough in that model to believe all MMOs should *launch* with that model in this day and age: that it is the stronger model for future MMOs to follow.

If Paragon does make a new MMO, whether it is CoH2 or something else entirely, I think there is a better than even chance it will be free to play. If Free to Play would be CoH players acknowledging their game has limitations, what would the new players of the new game be acknowledging?

Most of those would need new code. None need a new codebase as far as I can tell. Some would require very large amounts of code. But less than writing a new game from scratch.

To require a new codebase, those features would have to not just require new code to implement, but be either impossible to implement or excessively encumbered with the existing code to make them far more difficult to implement within this game than implementing the feature from scratch. Which of those features do you believe have that property, and why?

Let's take four-legged player rigs. What's wrong with them? What's wrong with them is that the animation system isn't designed to handle them, and all existing animations aren't designed to deal with them. All four-legged critters would basically be starting from scratch, without even standing and walking animation cycles. You'd have to make every single animation again, including Dragon's Tail, Backflip, Jump Kick, Hover, Knockback, Walk, Ready, Slide - everything. Adding that feature would take an *enormous* amount of animator time.

But a new game would be in the same position: it would also be starting at zero. In what sense would this game actually *prevent* the implementation of that feature, except in terms of the huge resources involved - keeping in mind a new game would also require huge resources to implement?