Arcanaville

I don't know if its totally infeasible; I'd consider it a variation on the 24 hour comic challenge actually.


As an aside, it would be cool to one day be known as the Alton Brown of City of Heroes.

I was never a fan of C++ personally, although I've done my time. If I was considering a career change, I would probably be most interested in the Senior Gameplay Engineer position, although my weak spot on those reqs would probably be OpenGL: the last time I seriously looked at OpenGL code it might have been on an actual IRIS.

Then again, this is puzzling:

First of all, don't all office jobs involve long periods of sitting, standing, or walking? Are there alternatives at Paragon Studios I need to be made aware of? Does the art department do most of their work while tumbling?

Second of all, "usually?" As opposed to driving to a Dave and Busters and discussing animation rigging over skeeball?

Also, this:

Translation: your coworkers suck, our customers suck, the job sucks, there's too much of it, not enough time to do it, and we'll keep changing it until you go insane. Sounds like my kind of gig.

It also probably still beats applying for the forum moderator position.

They showed him early concept art for Desdemona.

What about them?

The best strategy I find for using Mids to make strong builds is to think in terms of threshold targets. Most strong builds try to get at least X of something, and then as much of something else as possible. For example, if you are making a defensive build, the goal is usually to try to reach a little more than the soft-cap - 45% defense, and then get as much something else as possible: recharge for an offensively minded build or something with click defenses, or regeneration if you're going for a very strong defensive build say.

If you find you cannot reach the target you pick, you scale the target back and try again: if you have a mitigation set that does not specialize in defense but you want as much avoidance as possible, you might try building for 45% defense to some types of attacks - all melee attacks, or all smash/lethal attacks for example. Alternatively, you might decide to aim for 32.5% defense to all types, thinking that one small purple inspiration will then get you to the soft cap (small luck inspirations are +12.5% defense).

It can be overwhelming to try to get as much bonuses as possible in every direction. Try to focus on what you want the build to be good at, and then slowly add capability to that core specialty. It takes practice, but that's what Mids is good for: practice.


Its also useful to know what the powersets are known for. I think most people familiar with the swords know that Parry from Broadsword (and Divine Avalanche from Katana, its kissing cousin) are incredibly powerful powers: they can single-handedly keep you alive in a lot of otherwise hairy circumstances. And most people know that the best way to improve Regen's survivability is to try to wrap a lot of defense or resistance around it. Thus, Parry and Regen are a match made in heaven: taking Sword/Regen and not taking Parry or DA is a huge opportunity lost for survivability synergy. Its a lost opportunity bigger than anything the invention system itself can give you.

I actually don't think CoH did archetypes correctly. But I also know that the second superhero MMO proves a completely archetype-less game is worse.

The third superhero MMO proves it can get even worse than that.

The way I would do it is the way CO *almost* did it, and then for some reason they either changed their minds or never intended to do it that way and it was all a huge miscommunication. I would steal the concept of frameworks from the HERO system. Thematic synergy would be awarded, but scattered power collections could still be made for the most part. The important thing is you could not have everything. When you can have everything, you're basically self-nerfing yourself hard not taking everything. That's why CO originally had a huge problem with melee-focused characters: melee characters were just ranged characters without range: a self nerf with no commensurate benefit. Here, being melee is meaningful. There, unless Superman has heat vision on auto he's an idiot.

So in other words, if you wanted to be physically resistant to damage and have physically strong melee attacks there would be a framework for that, and those correlated abilities would cost less as a package deal. On the other hand, if you want to be resistant to physical damage but deal ranged lightning attacks, that would cost more ala carte. *What* you specifically correlate is the tricky question. CoH essentially correlates personal defense and melee offense: to get range you have to give up personal defense, or give up damage magnitude and trade personal defense for support powers, that sort of thing. A framework system would have to make more intricate tradeoffs.

I've thought about the idea for a long time, but I have Cryptic to thank for implementing a version of it in one of their MMOs that proves to me its workable if the rest of the game is designed around the concept.

My guess is that they believe the interface stacking limit acts to moderate this properly.

I'm not sure that's correct. Actually, I'm not sure the stacking limit really moderates this as it should in high-rate attacks, and I'm not sure the stacking limit is what its supposed to be for the damage part of reactive regardless. I haven't had a chance to test this carefully, and its tricky to test, but I'm not convinced the DoT follows the same limit as the debuff.

If you can't make it on the 27th or over the Memorial weekend, we will absolutely give you another opportunity to get the badge in a few months

Sanity check. Suppose you intended to get at least a rare power in each slot including Judgment and Lore. It takes seven common, 1 uncommon, and 1 rare component to make that rare power. Suppose further that the best you get is 50% common and 50% uncommon, and you never get a rare. That means the one rare you do need will cost eight Empyreans or four uncommons (and inf). Suppose you want to save the Emps. That means it will take a total of seven common and 5 uncommon components to craft that rare, 12 components in all. 12 runs will get you that at 50% common 50% uncommon. Past that point, you'll have more components than you need to craft that power.

That's significant, because that means if it takes more than 12 runs to unlock a slot, you should probably consider burning astral merits for iXP if you are impatient. You're bound to have at least 36, and probably closer to 48 astral merits in 12 runs. It only takes 30 threads, or about 8 astral merits to unlock Judgment and only about 45 threads or 12 astral merits to unlock Lore: 19 astral merits total. That's achievable in about 6 runs, and you will still end up with plenty of them left over once you have enough components to get rare powers everywhere.

iXP is really not the major bottleneck in the system. In fact, 38 astral merits is capable of unlocking all four powers, which takes only about 10-12 runs of *either* trial to get. In thread terms, that is about the number of threads necessary to buy about 8 common components.

To put it another way, the player that gets *no* iXP at all can fall no further behind the player that gets *huge* amounts of iXP per run than about 8 total trial runs across all four slots. It cannot take you twice as long or three times as long: it can take *at most* eight more runs.

I don't believe there is anything you can do to personally improve your own drop by any significant amount, except to actually qualify for any component drop at all. The only thing you can do is help your league perform well, and have *everyone* get a somewhat better chance of getting a better drop - you and everyone else. But there's no magic target you have to hit to get the rares or anything like that. If you qualify you qualify, and past that point the entire league can sometimes do better. But once you qualify, you have a chance at every component reward, including the rares.

My only advice there is try to follow along with the rest of the team: whatever they are shooting at, you shoot at. Whatever they are doing, follow along and help. When the team breaks up, stick with your subgroup. Logically, if the system is awarding league bonuses, the best way to ensure you are getting them along with everyone else is to help do what everyone else does. Whatever the system is looking at, you want it to think that if you're doing it, everyone else is also.

But I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you're getting component drops consistently, you're already doing enough for the system to count you as a full participant. No sense going nuts trying to figure out how to do better than that, since there really isn't anything better than that according to the devs and so far as I can see. If you're getting threads a lot, that's a different story.

Two answers. First, there would be design rules which were themselves designed to enforce the appropriate balance requirements that the powers designers would be required to follow most of the time. CoH designers have those now, and they were intended to perform a similar function - although they don't. The damage/recharge rule, for example, attempts to codify this game's qualitative judgment on the relative benefit of damage over time and burst damage. Attacks that do more damage per activation obviously do more damage upfront, but due to the recharge rule they generally do less damage over time. Other factors conspire to blur or even destroy this distinction, but that is what that rule attempts to do.

The more interesting second answer is how would those rules themselves be crafted. And the short answer is that they would be designed around mechanical bottlenecks that guaranteed certain aspects of performance were constrained to reasonably narrow ranges, while other aspects of performance were allowed to range wildly. The power design rules would ensure that the game's explicit bottlenecks were honored, while allowing higher latitude to the designers to implement effects unrelated to them.

Important to note that this game was intended to have lots of bottlenecks: endurance, recharge, etc. However, due to the way the designers implemented the powers and enhancement system, it only really has one: cast time. That's why so much of the fundamental balancing design rules in this game fail. They factor in bottlenecks that aren't actually enforced, while ignoring completely the one bottleneck that cannot be manipulated by the players.


There's another thought I've had for some time now, and that is that another way to ensure that power choices are less quantitative and more qualitative is to simply decouple combat from rewards. Or to put it more simply, design your reward system so it rewards accomplishments more and kills less. Its almost MMO heresy to suggest that the majority of your rewards come from anything other than killing things, but it was also MMO heresy to make a game that is mostly instanced. If we are spending most of our time running instanced missions as opposed to street sweeping, our time is mostly spent running highly controlled mission environments with a much higher diversity of possible objectives. As far back as CoV beta I questioned why it was that a stalker stealthing to the end of a mission and clicking on the blinkie at the end was considered an exploit. Isn't that what stalkers do? Perhaps the reward was too high for that specific behavior, but why is it essentially *disallowed* in this game? Because it seems to be an obvious rule that if you don't have to kill anything, you're somehow cheating, because this game is balanced on the premise that your performance should be related to the speed at which you kill things.

But if rewards came from a much more diverse set of objectives by design and intent not only would that make for a more interesting game in my opinion, it would lessen the advantage of quantifying the precise offense and defense of every power. When all is said and done, all of those calculations would have to somehow be compared to the potentially large qualitative but difficult to quantify benefits of stealth, fast movement, object manipulating powers, alternate damage types, etc. That would be like figuring out the optimal way to slot Combat Jumping without knowing how to determine the relative strengths of Dark Armor and Invulnerability.

Most choices would be either equitable or qualitatively obviously explained. If you deliberately choose to take little or no offensive options and load up on defensive ones, you would be a more defensive and less offensive character. You may kill a lot slower, which would affect your performance relative to more balanced characters. But it would be a blatantly obvious decision on the player's part.

Similarly, if there was an ability that increased your frontloaded damage but did little for sustained damage, and another ability that increased your sustained damage by a lot but didn't frontload that damage, those abilities would say, specifically, that they did those two things. This one increases your immediate damage by a lot, but averages out to a low overall damage. Your kill speed only goes up a little, but you kill more stuff faster at the start of combat. The other increases kill speed a lot over time and you will kill more stuff faster, but you won't kill very many things up front so you will have to deal with more punishment at the start of a fight. You get to choose, but the choice is presented in an obvious manner. What's better: increased kill speed or increased frontloaded kills? Depends on what you want, not on what's "intrinsically better."

That was happening in beta, but it was mostly fixed. I have heard reports that it can sometimes happen under extreme lag or activity situations infrequently, but I haven't heard of a case where this was happening regularly recently. I haven't seen it myself in normal testing.

I believe the damage buff bug was fixed. The jumps *can* fail: specifically when someone launches Ion at the same spawn as you within the same second or so. If a target is flagged for an Ion jump, no other Ion powers can jump to that target until the flag expires. This prevents Ion from jumping to the same target over and over again, but it also locks out everyone else's Ion jumps from landing on that target also.

If you use Ion slightly after someone else, their jumps will probably propagate out to all the targets in range, and yours will be suppressed. The lack of *orange* jump messages tells you your jumps failed: the grey jump messages are someone else's.

Actually, my suspicion is that the iPad 2 would probably be able to run CoH in the 15 fps range under lower detail settings if a native optimized port was done. I don't think that is efficient use of developer resources, but I think it would work if it was actually attempted.

The real problem isn't compute speed or rendering speed, its rewriting the game client so it uses memory far more efficiently than it does now.

How do you currently choose between Fire Blast and Ice Blast?

The good news is that War Witch is adding a Moon Base in Issue 23.

The bad news is that Television isn't scheduled to add a way to reach it until Issue 29.

The worse news is that Protean is destroying the moon in the Coming Storm in Issue 26.

Its better to think conservatively. I think it makes more sense to people to see the progression visually: 100, 200, 300 = 1x, 2x, 3x. And its *possible* very special effects might reduce base resistance below 100 (1.0) and it would be better if that was expressed as a smaller positive number rather than negative numbers.

In fact the whole scale up to 100 instead of 1.0 is a convenience item to make the numbers people see feel more intuitive: people seem to like integers more than fractions. The game engine wouldn't care either way, and its another example of designing essentially for the UI and the documentation first, and the underlying math second.

The problem with this line of thought is that *unless* there is an alternate way to achieve the badge, the devs cannot close the bug itself. Doing so would mean this was a true statement: its valid to achieve an ordinarily unachievable badge via a bug so long as the bug exists, but only as long as the bug exists. This would mean it would not be in the best interests of the playerbase to report a bug that allowed access to ordinarily unachievable badges.

To put it another way, a badge achievable by a bug that is fixed by the devs is in effect an unannounced time limited badge. There should never be unannounced time limited badges.

One of the many reasons why, in an MMO where players have significant control over the content they experience (as opposed to a PnP game where that control rests primarily with the GM) you shouldn't give out bonuses like "+3 vs undead" in isolation. Its too narrow of a bonus to avoid being problematic. You want something more like how the game tries but only partially succeeds in leveraging damage types. You want something that has a higher chance of delivering a shattering effect, which has a certain bonus effect on robots, on crystal entities, on rock monsters, etc. You want conceptually interesting effects that have a wide range of effects against a large subset of everything you might encounter, so that incendiaries have benefits against lots of things in different ways, psionics have benefits against lots of things in different ways (robots might be intrinsically hard to damage with pure psionic damage, but they might also have very few ways to protect themselves from psionic attacks for the exact same reason: robotic armor plating might have zero effect against a psychokinetic attack that scrambles their wiring) and so on.

You want to make sure that things aren't too binary: this does a lot here, and nothing anywhere else. You want things to be more general: this affects lots of things, but some more than others.


Incidentally, this is where I should mention: in my CoH2, there would be only three power origins - not character origins. Your character origin is whatever you want to write in the biography box, and I don't care. But your powers themselves would have to obey power rules: Science and Technology, Magic, or Psionics. And these power origins would dictate how your powers worked, and how they interacted with powers and entities of other origins.

Yes: in my CoH2: Superman could be nearly invulnerable to physical damage, but vulnerable to magic. This also has very specific consequences for balancing PvP.

I make it a habit of almost always saying, very explicitly, to check your temp power *listing* and I also very explicitly state that temp powers don't always drop into your tray. I even go so far as to sometimes imply by wording that the game is *bugged* to sometimes not drop them in your tray, so you actually *have to* check your power menu listing to be sure you don't have them. I also specifically tell *everyone* to check for *every* temp power, and again I have sometimes implied that the game could just randomly drop them there, even though I know that doesn't happen, just to force people who "just know they don't have them" to check for them anyway.

I find an incredibly high percentage of the time doors magically disappear when I do this.


Having said that, I have no problem with league/team leaders kicking players for failing to acknowledge or follow instructions in ways obviously detrimental to the team as a whole. Unfortunately, that does sometimes mean by the time you know this the damage is already done. Having said that I simply do not agree with the principle that MMO players always have a right to isolate themselves from other players, even if those players may generate a suboptimal experience. Some content is meant to be shared with everyone that wants to experience it, and dealing with other people is the price of admission. If you were to 1-star those players and kick them pre-emptively from the next league you were on, you'd get no argument from me. But to essentially indict the entire playerbase preventatively is a bridge too far for me.

Its worth repeating that arguing about whether the team leader or anyone else has the right to exclude other players from their teams is a moot point. They have the power to do so and the responsibility to exercise it judiciously. League leaders have the implicit right to decide for themselves what a judicious justification is, but they have to accept the fact that other players have the right to judge for themselves if that justification is judicious by their own definitions.

I direct you to this post in that other thread you're reading, which eliminates the "small numbers problem."


The short answer is, and your example is more extreme than is necessary, to make the choices less one-dimensional. Even if they aren't intrinsically min/maxable, one-dimensional choices tend to *encourage* min/maxing psychologically. Consider: the 1acc5dmg slotting pattern was *not* necessarily the optimal slotting pattern at the time it was being used in all the situations it was being used in. What it was, was easy to *claim* was optimal with a trivial statement about damage. More complex choices don't just make the choices more complex, they eliminate the ability for people to incorrectly simplify them with misleadingly simply language. Its "obvious" more damage is better. Its not more obvious that more damage against undead is better than a higher critical chance against robots.

To put it bluntly: the math has to be impervious to the intelligent. The language has to be impervious to the easily misled.

Plus, some simple choices the game currently gives us simply *are* better than others. For example, both accuracy and damage enhancements simultaneously increase DPS and DPE, while recharge only affects DPS (and in a complex way) while endurance enhancements only increase DPE. And the DPS and DPE effect of accuracy enhancements is capped very low relative to the effect of damage enhancements. That's due to oversimplistic one-dimensional effects having obvious easy optimization angles. You'd have to get rid of that specific kind of simplicit in any system that attempts to do what I've suggested I would do.

Like this:

Net damage = Base Damage / (Resistance rating/100) * (Total Debuff Rating/100)

Also, just for completeness:

I'll assume the second "100" is a typo and you meant to say "200" but just to be clear, there's no such thing in my system as having "no" resistance rating. The base rating is 100. Only unusual circumstances would cause something to have less than that.


But now I have to take several steps back and mention something else. You might be presuming that resistance debuffs would, in my system, at least be *used* in the same way as they are in CoH. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Sometimes there would be what I would call power neutralizers. These would actually work they way you thought debuffs would work: they would subtract from resistance:

Net damage = Base Damage / (Resistance rating/100 - Total Debuff Rating/100)

But with a catch: they could only subtract against powers. They could not "debuff" something that doesn't exist. So if your resistance looks like this:

100 (base) + 100 + 75 + 50 + 80 = 405

A 100 point power debuff would reduce that to 305. But a 500 point power debuff would only reduce that to 100: it could debuff the 305 points given by powers, but not the base value. Its intended to answer the question "how do you debuff a power that isn't there?" My system gives an explicit answer to that: power debuffers can't: they can only debuff what you buff, at most. They can only nullify powers. Global debuffs don't attack powers they are in effect global amplifiers for effects, and affect you the character. Thus they can in theory debuff your resistance to "below zero" but only mathematically. In "reality" they aren't doing so, they are just "encasing" you in a debuffing envelope that essentially amplifies all damage that enters it.

This sounds complicated but only because CoH doesn't have a notion of "enveloping effects." My game would have such effects, and in a game where this was clearly spelled out I don't think it would be difficult to intuit the difference. The number one enveloping effect I would add to my repertoire would be Ablative Armor Effects. I.e. external hit point shields, or if you are familiar with that other game, Force Fields.

So if the enemy enveloped you in a resistance debuff bubble, it would work like the first formula: it would look like a straight up amplification of all damage, which is easy enough to understand. If an enemy targeted you with a power neutralizer that would temporarily strip some of your protection away, but only if you actually *have* such protection, and only up to the maximum amount you have. Power neutralizers would tend to be uncommon, though.

Not quite. More specifically: damage buff increases damage strength. Resistance buff increases damage resistance. But to buff a resistance buff power requires a *strength* increase.

In other words, picture one power dealing smashing damage, and another power buffing smashing resistance. Clearly, both do completely different things. But how do you magnify each so they do more, such as what an enhancement might do? The answer is, to buff the smashing damage power you need to buff smashing strength. To buff the smashing resistance power you need to buff smashing strength. The same thing.


So to put it another way: damage buff and resistance buff are two different things. But damage buff and resistance buff-buff (buffing a resistance buff) are the same thing: a strength buff. That's why without special exemptions (which exist in a variety of ways, but are not perfect) damage enhancement and resistance enhancement are synonymous: both require doing the same thing, so each actually does the same thing as the other, and each actually affects both.