Arcanaville

The thing that actually most bothers me is the assertion people are making that the end game system turns this into a fundamentally different game. I've been around since release, and I've seen and participated in pretty much every single "fundamental change" this game has enacted. If there's one thing all of these fundamental changes have in common, its that nothing fundamental changed.

First of all, the notion that the end game is fundamentally antithetical to alts is unoriginal. The same charge was made against the invention system, which was the previous "thing for 50s to do." People complained that in effect the invention system was *the* singular way for level 50 characters to develop, but the time and energy necessary to make the perfect optimal invention build was too high to be able to do it for the X number of alts they had. The invention system "fundamentally changed" the notion that when you hit 50, you were "done."

Before that, the fundamental change was Hamidon, and Hamidon enhancements - once the pioneers spent all that time and energy figuring out how to do Hamidon in a way that was reproducible in open raids. Level 50 progress was doing that one raid over and over again until you had a character with 80 HOs. And that was grindy and time consuming and required doing things not everyone wanted to do. It was a "fundamental change" to the way players managed alts and level 50s.

Before *that*, the complaint was that it just plain took too much time to level to 50. If the game encouraged playing alts, why did it take so long for people with lives and kids and jobs to get to 50? Why couldn't someone get to fifty in a reasonable amount of time, like say a couple of weeks of a few hours a week, which is all the time these busy people had? The game was unfriendly to alts for people who could only spend "normal" amounts of time playing it.

Now its "the devs added something, and its something I must pursue, and this will cause me to spend time doing something other than what I was doing before, ergo this is a fundamental shift in the game." forgive me for generalizing, but people who think this is a fundamental shift are quite frankly only noticing the fundamental shift from the changes in the game being about things they liked or didn't care about, to things they just coincidentally happen to. Its happened non-stop throughout the history of the game. It happened with the release of City of Villains, and people saying the red side would detract and distract from the blue side, which was the "real game." It will happen in the future with game additions beyond the end game and the Incarnate system.

Its a change, and its not a change you have to like. But all this talk about this being a "fundamental" change really makes me wonder how short the collective memory of this game actually is.

We've always had level gated content. Even with side-kicking, its very hard to get your level 30 onto an ITF. Even when this game was just two minutes old players were finding out that Perez was level locked and you couldn't enter it to team or even run the missions you had that were inside it until you reached its minimum level. The game throws gates in your face from birth, and they never go away.

I'm not saying not to voice displeasure when the game does something you don't like. But attempting to characterize the end game system as being so fundamentally unique as to suggest its obviously problematic contradicts the entire history of the game. This is not a fundamental change. What I'm finding personally is that increasingly, I'm prepared to fundamentally disprove that point, which is a step I'm usually not willing to do for emotionally charged issues, but I'm increasingly less concerned about.

I'm not worried about converting people to the cause. At this point, the people who don't like or want an end game aren't going to be convinced by any any argument to like it: you can't be convinced to like something anyway. But while I think there are lots of details that can be and should be improved, this notion that the core fundamental nature of the end game system as an end game system is somehow going to critically damage the existing playerbase is a notion I reject as being probable. The players who actually liked playing the game will still like playing the game. The players who needed a specific set of circumstances to be encouraged to play may or may not. I believe at this point the former are more important than the latter.

Its not that I'm not concerned about the potential social dynamics. In fact, I tend to be far more concerned about those than I am about any set of numbers in the game. Something I think almost no one suspects is that my strongest feedback to the devs over the years hasn't been over numbers for numbers sake, but player interaction with the game: how will something affect the accessibility or playability of the game. How will it affect the dynamics of grouping, mass perception, peer pressure, or social constructs. So when I say that I don't accept the notion that the end game is going to damage the playerbase to anywhere near the degree some people seem to be claiming, its not because I don't know, am not aware of, or don't fully understand those issues. Its because I've thought them through carefully, and I've come to the conclusion those concerns are not sufficiently warranted.

My guess is that whatever we may think of the power, the devs datamined that lots of players take and use it. And that's why the devs can't cavalierly delete it.

You say that like its a bad thing. In my opinion, powerset diversity is far, far more important than quibbling about which individual power in which individual powerset is better or worse. As long as the powersets as a whole are sufficiently well balanced against each other in performance given the game requirements, powerset diversity is overridingly more important than homogenized equality.

Homogenized equality is, in fact, something to explicitly go far out of your way to avoid. You do it only when you absolutely have to, and you virtually never actually have to.


FYI, when Energize and Power Sink were being tweaked, I calculated the best balance point for Energy Drain's heal from a setwide performance perspective to be about 4.2% per target. Slightly higher than Castle's value, but not extravagantly so. I wouldn't argue if it was increased to 4%, but I also wouldn't argue that its worthless or wildly improperly set at 3% either. If you hit four targets with ED, and it autohits, you're already at essentially half the strength of reconstruction in a set that isn't focused on heals.

In fact, the 4.2% number was a nearby number to the calculated value that happened to work out to the fact that if you slot it for heal and hit three targets, which is the size of a standard solo spawn, it will heal for about 25% health.

Also, historical fact: I originally suggested that Energize (or rather the power that would become Energize) get the 4.2% heal per target. Instead, Energize got set to what it was set to and then ED got changed later to approximately what I suggested for Energize. At the time, I thought (and still in retrospect think) that Electric Armor was in greater need of the buff than Energy Aura (although both needed attention at the time).

As to any change that would alter Energy Drain dramatically: any suggestion on changing ED has to factor in the fact that it is autohitting, and thus its strength is moderated because of that. And any suggestion asking to revoke its autohitting status is, in my opinhion, a non-starter. It runs afoul of the cottage rule, which I will remind everyone is not there to protect cottages, but to protect the rest of the playerbase from unnecessary and unjustified meddling. The people who like ED as an autohit power are more important than any and all players that are disappointed with the power unless they can provide compelling evidence that not only is the power unbalancingly weak, but also that there is no way to address that weakness without fundamentally altering the power. That's a very high hurdle to attempt to overcome.

That's actually what I thought the rule was going to be when they tweaked interruptible powers, then it wasn't. But since it primarily affected /Devices, and /Dev has some problematic issues with defiance, I didn't think it was all that important to redress at the time.


Another one of those glitches I thought was technically wrong, but might be inadvertently compensating for /Dev's (at least perceived) lack of damage in general, outside the corner case of carpet mining, so maybe no harm no foul in that case. If the devs decide to revisit the entire set with the intent of re-examining the summons, Defiance can be tweaked at that time.

I tried to be specific in saying that this was the most obvious situation in which the scaling was true, but its just an example of the general statement of multiplying mitigation. The previous paragraph makes the same case for regen and defense.

I would say its universally true that layering will tend to be good, but it may not be optimal.

And there is another complicating factor not normally discussed in this context at all, and that's the issue of typing. Heals, Regen, and +Health are obviously not typed, but defense and resistance are. Which means you might not be choosing between heal and res, you might be choosing between res and res of different types.

And this poses a meta question that has strong real world implications. Suppose you have 80% resistance to smash/lethal and 50% resistance to energy/negative, and you have the option to get 10% more smash/lethal resistance or 10% more energy/negative resistance (numbers chosen to make example simple: this situation doesn't really tend to occur in real life this simply). The knee-jerk reaction is to say that 10% s/l is "better" because you're closer to the cap. Against s/l foes the 10% more s/l resistance will be better than the 10% e/n resistance will be against energy/negative wielding foes.

But the catch is that there are lots of foes that wield both. Energy blast/energy melee foes, for example, wield both. And some critter groups have some energy wielding foes and some s/l heavy members in combination. In practice, you're going to be facing both. So the question there might be which choice offers the best *overall* survivability. And that's a much more complex question, because it depends on two factors: first the prevalence of both types (smash/lethal is more common than energy/negative) and the difference in survivability between the two types. In mixed company, the type that is more common is the type you should take. But in segregated situations where you'll face a lot of one then a lot of the other, its better to even out your protection or you'll be ultra-strong in one area but then die in the other, which makes the extra strength sometimes irrelevant.

Numerically better is a question of calculation. Survivably better is a much more complicated question. And the question of balanced survivability vs optimum situational survivability is as much a philosophical one as it is a numerical one. If you're a scrapper, you might be able to pick and choose the situations you're in, making it valuable to be very strong in many areas, even at the expense of being weak in others. If you're a tanker, you might not be able to pick and choose your situations, and its more important to be strong everywhere than stronger in some at the expense of being weaker in others. It depends a lot on how you choose to play your character, because you can sometimes eliminate some of your weaknesses by avoiding the situations in which they occur. But not everyone plays that way.

But even when you factor out the subjective element, you're still left with the quantitative problem that comparing 90% s/l + 50% e/n vs 80% s/l + 60% e/n depends greatly on how you choose to determine the situations under which you will compare the two under. Its often the case that the average situation is not the same thing as the average of the best and worst case situations.

That's two question, not one. I answered the first one, by saying that if the tank can't taunt aggro off of you, something must be horribly wrong because taunt's range is 70 feet. Of course, that presumes we're talking about tanks that have taunt.

Dragonkat:

Its higher than that (39.6%) and lasts for only 13.5 seconds. But I guess when you take your head out of the numbers and just eyeball what's happening in the game, its easy to mistake a buff for one that is only half as strong and lasts seven times longer.



I dunno. For things like sniper blasts I think defiance is calculated based on the non-interruptible part of the power. So for example sniper blast in the Energy Blast set has the defiance numbers you'd expect from a power with 1.33 cast time: its cast time is actually 4.33 with 3 second interrupt. Gun Drone, on the other hand, has the defiance you'd expect from a six second cast time power, and its 7 second cast 6 seconds interrupt.

To be honest neither of those seems like the right logic to me. Defiance was supposed to be balanced around true cast time, because it was supposed to be normalized around activity: what percentage of the time were you actively using "attacks" (powers other than self buffs really for blasters). Not counting the interruptible part of sniper shots seems wrong because you pay the cast time either way, and not counting the non-interruptible part of Gun Drone (and for that matter Time Bomb and Trip Mine) seem odd.

It may be specifically because the devs felt devices was underperforming and gave those powers special rules, or it could be an error. Either way, I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth on those three.

I'm going to flip this around a bit. The legitimate premise behind layering is that the more of one kind of mitigation you have, the stronger all other layers become.**

What I mean by that is that +400% regen allows you to survive a certain number of stuff, but adding 400% regen to a soft-capped scrapper doesn't add the same number of stuff to what you can survive, it multiplies how much you can survive by 4, probably a bigger number. 400% regen and 45% defense is stronger than the sum of its parts, if you judge the sum of the parts by how much stuff each can survive. So if you're looking at, say a +10% regen bonus, that means something to someone with no mitigation, it means more to someone with 50% resistance, and even more to someone with 45% defense.

This is most obvious when looking at regen and +health. Obviously, the more of one you have the more the other is worth. +Regen scales with max health, so increasing max health automatically increases the value of +regen. Conversly, the more regen you have the more benefit you get from adding +health.

Layering would *always* be the best strategy, all other things being equal (more on that in a second) if it wasn't for the peculiar mechanics of defense and resistance. Both of them have accelerating returns, which means adding more defense to defense increases the value of each point you add to a cap, and ditto resistance. They accelerate very fast as they reach their respective caps, so at some point their stacking strength overrides all synergy between other mitigation types. If you have 40% defense, getting 5% more defense is going to be worth far more than getting 10% resistance, or 20% regen, or 5% more health. Its going to double your survivability against critters with standard tohit (50%).

So its really defense and resistance that are the exception to the rule that the more X you have, the better Y will also be so its worth getting more Y, where Y is different than X. Usually X plus more X linearly increases the value of X, but X plus Y multiplies the two. The exception is defense and resistance, where X plus more X can be worth *vastly* more than in all other cases near the caps.

Getting back to the question of "all other things being equal" one complication to this rule is that for *all* situations, its *always* true that adding some mitigation X is *equal* to adding some other kind of mitigation Y provided Y is strong enough. Getting back to the example above, if you have 40% defense, adding 5% to get to the soft cap seems like its the obvious best possible option. And it is in practice. However, in theory it doubles your survivability, so its *equal* to adding 50% resistance (assuming you have none) or 100% regen (assuming you're starting from base) or +100% max health. All those things do the same thing in terms of basic survivability. However, in practice you never have that option. You're almost never choosing between 5% defense or 50% resistance. You're choosing between the 11% resistance in tough or the 2% defense in combat jumping. You're choosing between relatively small numbers. And in those cases, stacking to the caps for defense and resistance if you can do it generates better returns.

But when you cannot, spreading it around tends to generate better results most of the time, given the practical options the game gives you. For similar numerical values layering tends to be better than stacking, because different layers multiply, while more of the same just adds. Again: the exception is defense and resistance near the caps. They are just really, really big exceptions.


** The illegitimate reason often offered is to use examples of layered mitigation in which the individual layers are so strong, obviously the total is going to be much stronger than what most people can get in any one layer at all. If you have an Invuln tanker that has 90% s/l, saturated invincibility, and perma DP, you're talking about something that has the best possible resistance to the most common damage type, probably soft-capped defenses which are the best you can get in most circumstances, and about the highest health a player can possess as a character in the game. Obviously, having the best of everything is going to be better than having only one layer, because the best in one layer can't beat the best in three. But that's not really making the case for layering, that's making the case for capping out everything when you can.

Interesting question. I would imagine that if you believe the autohitting unresistable patches of death make your blaster's secondary useless, there are several other archetypes that are going to have issues with either secondaries or primaries being a bit shaky as well.


The absolute best case for defiance is somewhere's around +45% damage. Stacked onto just ED slotting that's only an increase of about 23% in total damage. Brute fury, by comparison, reasonably tops out at about +160% damage or so, a net increase above slotting of around 82%. The situation is slightly different, insofar as I doubt the average blaster could even notice the difference without the combat monitor up, whereas cutting your damage almost in half is the sort of thing a lot more people would notice.


Taunt's range is 70 feet. If the tanker can't hit BM with taunt, she's surrounded by more blue than the Blue Man Group.


If Apex isn't hard, you should also have answers to all of your objections above as well. If its not fun for you, its not fun for you. That's a subjective position on the design of the task force. Attempting to amplify that objection by first suggesting that the encounter has intractable problems, then implying all of those intractable problems have easy solutions, is not likely to support your point very well.


Are you worried that you will continue to dislike future incarnate content, or do you believe your dislike of it translates to a likelihood that enough other players will not like future incarnate content to be problematic? People said similar things about the LRSF, and Hamidon Mark III. In retrospect, I think those objections failed to hold up.

Murdok's description says to me that he's probably got Elude down to somewhere around 220 seconds of recharge, which is 222 seconds of cycle time (with cast time), which is about 42 seconds of downtime before Spiritual slotting. At that level of global recharge Eye of the Magus should be recharging about every seven minutes, which means theoretically you could cover every other crash with that. That leaves one crash every eight minutes or so when you're basically out of the fight for about 40 seconds unless you cover that with inspirations.

A little too staccato for my tastes, although some primaries will benefit hugely on the offensive side. But then again, when perma-elude first came out there was debate over that as well. Some people really didn't like the crash, even though it only affected offense and not defense in a true perma-elude build. You could be sucking wind constantly if you didn't slot have enough endurance reduction slotted in attacks.

There are times I miss having all my protection focused into PB and Elude, neither of which could be detoggled. But not enough to go with an Elude-focused build these days.


Another thing I was thinking about in terms of ultra-high recharge, and its something I'm occasionally leveling now: Kin/Fire. Pseudo-perma Power Siphon, and Fiery Embrace up over half the time. Circa ten second cycle time on Healing Flames wouldn't hurt either. 50% heal every ten seconds is starting to edge into Dark Regen territory. Not sure what the best you can do on recharge for Kin/Fire is, though.

The thought crossed my mind when I was kicking around ideas for my current MA/SR I19 build, but I decided that MA/SR was not the place to make a sell-out-to-recharge build, and it would have been incredibly expensive for me to build just to play around with. I'm still trying to complete primary I19 IOed builds for the five alts I've selected for that treatment, and I'm both billions into the process and billions to go. Tens of billions in both directions actually.

Plus, if I was going to go all out on recharge on SR, I'd roll a DM/SR to do it with. Or maybe Electric/SR. Lightning rod on a 20 second timer is worth a few (dozen) billion inf. Actually, Elec/Shield would be an even better combo to try to recharge cap, now that I think of it.

Oh well, I guess that's another hundred billion inf I need to go find.

Twice my defense is meaningless outside of tohit buffed attackers, the exception for which I acknowledged. Conversely, I have psionic defense (from power pool defenses) which you're unlikely to have (SR has zero protection to non-positional psi: no psionic defense, and the scaling resistances do not resist psionic or toxic damage), smash/lethal resistance (from tough), and about 400% regen. Also, +23.6% max health before accolades.

I'm not sure what the wedding band or ethereal shift have to do with anything: a soft capped build can use those just as much as an elude-focused build can.

Also, if you're "tanking" for a team and ducking into hibernate or ethereal shift often, well, I don't judge playstyle but I wouldn't call tanking from phase shift "tanking."

In any case, Elude is just not stronger than a well-built soft-capped SR except under moderate tohit buffs. Its simply impossible for it to be. If you just like the ultra high recharge, that's cool. But Elude is not defensively stronger than soft-capped defenses except when the critters are tohit buffed, because Elude's defenses cannot reduce interim tohit below 5%.

I2's Elude - the true perma-elude - was in a sense stronger than the current Elude because it could floor critters to a guaranteed 5% minimum whereas modern Elude (and soft capped defenses) can only do that prior to the application of critter accuracy. Against critters of higher level or higher rank or both, I2 perma-elude was stronger than Elude is today. But modern Elude is forced to be no stronger than soft-capped defenses for all critters with base 50% chance to hit. Which is basically everything in the ITF.


You know, unless you are the luckiest person on earth, if you place your SR scrapper into high stress situations, bad luck will eventually do you in. Its just inevitable. If you've never died in years, it cannot be just because your build is just that good. There is no such thing as a +DEF based build that doesn't die under high damage at least once in a while.

And since Numina is the WST of the week, you'll have your chance to die on a task force. Tank for Numina, and dive right into those DE spawns with the multiple guardians in the last mission.

There are places Elude would be stronger than the soft-cap. The ITF is not one of those places. If your Eluder has better performance in the ITF than your soft-capped build, something is amiss with your soft-capped build.

The only reason my soft-capped SR doesn't tank ITFs is because she doesn't have taunt. There's nothing in the ITF that can penetrate her defenses except a bad-luck string of hits that Elude would do no better at deflecting.

My guess is that your "soft-capped" SR is *too* soft-capped: its dead-on 45% defense (you say "a little over 45%"). Mine sits at about 47% defense, which means I have a 2% cushion against defense debuffs. Which translates, after 95% DDR, to perfect protection against the first -40% defense debuff. If you are at exactly 45%, then even with 95% DDR some defense debuffs will leak through and elevate your tohit from the 5% floor (before accuracy) to something like 5.5% or even 6%. That's a whopping 20% increase in incoming damage and a significantly higher chance of having a string of hits take you out.

Some primaries can benefit a lot from ultrahigh recharge, but martial arts is not one of them so I went with a high survivability MA/SR build. It has about 47% defense to all positions, 14% defense to psionic, 19.9% resistance to smash/lethal before passive scaling resistances, 403% regeneration, 143.6% health, and aid self is recharging in about 7.1 seconds after cast and healing for 42.6% health (with Spiritual Core Paragon slotted).

My guess is that except for high tohit areas (which the ITF is not), selling out totally on recharge will radically outdamage my build, but it will come at the cost of being far less survivable. Every one of my SR builds prior to this one had Elude for those high tohit cases. This one doesn't, and to be honest what I've lost in those cases I think I've made up in being almost indestructible in most others.

Honestly, stop payments are not a big deal. They are a hassle, but they don't cost the merchant banks (that process credit card transactions) or the credit card companies (that ultimately underwrite credit card transactions) actual money. The only thing that can cause real trouble for a vendor are large numbers of fraudulent charge claims. Claims where the customer claims a charge on their bill is fraudulent and requests the charge be reversed. Enough of those becomes a payment card industry red flag and can trigger a mandatory audit of the company.

That is an amazingly specific yet completely unhelpful description.

It takes 24 seconds to start the game client and have it show the login prompt from the NC launcher on my i870 with 16 gigs of ram. The fastest I can run the sequence of quitting the game client, relaunching it, logging in, and returning to the character selection screen is about 29 seconds. The only way I could make it go faster is probably to copy the entire game into a ram disk. Even then, I'm not sure most of the game isn't cached already after running the test the first time.

My guess is that most people's round trip travel time is likely to be much longer than that.


Damn, now I'm curious to know what the fastest possible load time I can generate on my system is. Grr...

The legal intent of the user interface design is to guarantee that no player could argue that they did not have ample opportunity to read the terms of service agreement and were required to acknowledge it every time they played the game. If someone were to argue in court that they saw it, acknowledged it, but deliberately didn't read it, that would serve as a lack of due diligence on the part of the player and weaken any claim that they were unaware of the terms of service.

Its debatable as to whether a specific intent of the system is to guarantee that changes to the EULA are highlighted in as clear a manner as possible to simplify the task of reviewing the terms of service incrementally. I've never specifically been given that priority in over twenty years of writing software by anyone, actually.

I have a Sonic/Energy that I occasionally play. Its not a good AV soloer or anything like that, but its actually almost unfair to Siren's Song everything and then blap them to death. Its a totally squishy build, if anything actually shot at her. Even with just DOs the combo borders on the ridiculous for a blaster.

Salesforce.com is a cloud vendor that people outsource CRM data to. Its often quite sensitive information: a breach of salesforce would be significantly more damaging than a breach of NCSoft master accounts. They use IP filters also. And the way you add a new location to the IP filter is to click on a link that says "activate this location" and they send you an email with an activation link. That's it.

Now, this isn't bullet proof security by any means. But its better, simpler, and much more convenient than the system NCSoft implemented, and probably protects several orders of magnitude more information than NCSoft owns. They also recommend if you actually care about security, request two-factor authentication.

It would also never occur to them to lock out their customers by changing their security protocols without warning. I asked a CSO of a rather large cloud vendor (not salesforce) what his opinion was on this particular roll out, after describing it to him. I can't repeat what he said, except to say there was a lot of laughing involved.

So far, that's been the general trend among people I've asked to comment.

I seem to recall that post when it first came out (although it could have been a related post). The poster in question sounds like a peon in game support, not a decision maker.

If a GM, someone presumably hired to be a game support tech, made this sort of decision and approved its implementation, then it wasn't a professional security person, it was someone who thought they could play one on TV.

The actual professional security community is not all that big. If there is a CSO at NCI I'll eventually find them.

1. I'm not sure if you are saying this or not because your wording is a little vague, but just to be sure: MAC addresses are not sent in standard IPv4 packets, nor in TCP headers. There's no way for a web site to know what your MAC address is unless you do something tricky like use special code to set a cookie which contains the MAC address in it. But that's no different than setting a cookie with a random hash in it.

2. Its actually easier to capture MAC address than keystroke log a password.

3. MAC addresses are trivial to spoof, unless you are on Windows 7 in which case its just a little harder (because of that stupid prefix lock). Every other operating system on the planet doesn't lock that, and many NIC drivers helpfully provide a way to override local MAC within the driver itself. And if your driver doesn't have a way to do what with point and click, the industry tool for doing this is called SMAC. Costs like twenty bucks if you choose to actually pay for it, and most serious security professionals I know have this tool in their standard set of tools.


There's a reason why its a good idea to hire real professionals to do this. Its very easy to make errors on implementation based on incomplete knowledge. The guys that wrote Netscape put a pseudorandom number generator in the SSL code that improperly set an initialization vector. The net result was their version of SSL was trivially crackable and had to be quickly patched. Kindergarden mistake, but it happens all the time.

I know it might have seemed like it, but I think you're thinking of one of the debt badges. Immortal used to be for one billion points of damage, and there's no way anyone got Immortal by accident. Only two ways to get that badge before the badge adjustment patches: tank Hamidon as a full time job, or farm it. I think the way I invented doing it on my blaster is still the fastest reasonable way for a blaster to get it, and it took months of non-stop damage farming to get it.


My first three alts were, in order, Energy/Energy blaster (apparently a thematic favorite), MA/SR scrapper (also a thematic favorite, but totally gimped at release), and Ill/Rad controller (not a thematic favorite at launch, and not really a favorite anything until much later). I leveled them to 50 in that order.

Interestingly, blasters, scrappers, and controllers are my three favorite archetypes to this day, and in roughly that order, although I play everything. I still play those three characters as well (my En/En blaster is still my main badge hunter and my first Incarnate).


I've changed a little since rolling those, but so have the characters. At one time my MA/SR was squishier than my En/En. That's not quite true anymore.