Arcanaville

If a solo player is capable of doing what an entire team of players is capable of doing, they are not going to have any problems accumulating the resources necessary to craft Incarnate abilities at almost any cost.

I don't have any problem with the existences of subcultures dedicated to optimizing particular things. Where I have the problem is when that subculture forgets they are a subculture and starts thinking they are the One True Way.

A while ago I started a thread half-joking and half-serious about a new build I was thinking about for my MA/SR scrapper. Among a lot of interesting ideas, two of which I adapted and incorporated into the build actually, I got one joker claiming that what I was doing wasn't "min/maxing" because they knew what min/maxing was, and min/maxing was all about generating the maximum amount of recharge to power the maximum rate of AoEs. If I wasn't looking for advice and discussion, I wouldn't have started the thread. But if you think its your mission to explain to me what min/maxing is and what it specifically involves, you better have a better story to sell than "min/maxing is about high recharge" or I'm not going to be impressed.

Just like with min/maxing, there are lots of optimization possibilities for farming. Not all of them are acceptable to all players. I invoke the scrapper challenge rule, which is if you can do it at all, you're ahead of the game. The rest is details.


Interesting side note: the majority of good min/maxers I know in the game are almost paradoxically non-elitist.

Again, it has to do with thresholds. Although I don't fully agree with all of the collateral sentiments, the discussion above mentions that at some point, the difference between a -1 and a +1 can become too small to be significant. The same thing is true for minions and Bosses.

Important to note that the rewards that critters give is tempered by two factors: how long it takes to kill them, and whether or not they themselves pose enough of a threat to slow you down (or outright kill you). If you're a blaster, the latter is more important than the former. If you could shoot from phase shift, the best thing to do is run a mission full of bosses: setting AoE aside for a moment, Bosses return more rewards (in most cases) than the increased time it takes to kill them, particularly because of the high level of overkill involved in killing minions (you tend to deliver far more damage to a minion than it actually takes to kill them, which means some fraction of your damage output is "wasted" and doesn't generate actual rewards). But bosses are a far higher threat to a blaster: a boss can easily kill the average blaster. For most players playing blasters, bosses offer a higher reward for an even higher risk, and therefore they become a once in a while target, not a continuous target.

But at some point, the amount of personal defense you can put on a character can break that risk calculation. My MA/SR scrapper is soft-capped, has aid self, runs tough, and has over 300% regen. No boss can kill her. No boss can even threaten her outside of some Rularuu and Master Illusionists, and things with high enough tohit buffs. The only difference between running a mission full of minions and a mission full of bosses is how long it will take for me to clear it. The risk side of the equation disappears and it becomes purely a matter of kill-speed: what is faster to kill per unit of reward: minion, LT, or Boss.

Very few games that allow the players control over character development can fully avoid this from happening: players can drive themselves into degenerate areas of the risk/time/reward space. So on top of the general rules governing how much risk is required for what level of reward/time, most reward systems including ours have boundaries: rails that prevent the players from venturing outside some maximum reasonable limits. Farmers are always trying to push the limits of those boundaries, because they've already figured out how to break the risk/time/reward tradeoffs. The devs, in return, have two choices: alter the reward systems globally to force everyone back into the box, or put a fence at that location to prevent people from exiting the box. Usually, they opt for the latter so that players still have maximum freedom within the limits proscribed by the reward system, while still limiting the ability for players to escape it completely.

This is often interpreted by some as "punishing" players who the limits affect. Its not. Its really an artifact of the fact that designing reward systems that have implicit limits such that the system itself simply doesn't have the ability to exceed certain limits is hard, whereas its much easier to create reward systems in which the system in most cases keeps most players within certain limits averaged over time and which have exception rules to deal with deliberate attempts to exceed those limits.

So: bosses tend to have higher rewards because the devs want players to feel rewarded extra for dealing with them when they come up. They do not want the players who can explicitly ignore their threat entirely to be able to set them up like bowling pins. Preventing players from arbitrarily farming maps full of them is a compromise solution.

You agree Nate's lucky he gets to work with all the rest of you great people?

The target cap is independent of the fact that some buffs affect everyone on your faction (i.e. Accelerate Metabolism) and some affect only people directly on your team (i.e. Grant Invisibility). Positron may be implying that some powers currently set to only affect Teammates may be set to affect an entire League while in a trial or raid. Or he might just be hedging his statement.

That also doesn't always work for me.

I don't think that'll be a problem around here.

That doesn't always work for me.

And the problem with that door has to do with logout logic. If you happen to be standing at or near the Natural store NPC at the back and decide to log out, on login the game will do what it always does: if you are near a door when you logged out, it will instead of logging you back in at that spot it will perform an animation that has you exiting the nearest door. The problem is that in this specific case, that will place you coming out of that back door and entering the store behind the counter. The counter, as Patteroast mentions, has an invisible force field around it. A new player that does this, which isn't a completely unlikely thing to do, will find themselves stuck in a box they cannot get out of without something like a zone teleporter (Ouro, Pocket D, mission teleporter, market porter, etc). Or, there are supposedly tricks you can use to jump out of it, like Patteroast mentions, but they do not seem to consistently work for me. And because I sell at that store a lot, I still find myself occasionally slipping up and logging out at that spot and then having to port out of it the next time I log in.

1. The point to spawning level 54s is, in fact, to make it harder to defeat the critters.

2. Not only does it "draw out the fight longer" it also seems to actually kill players on occasion. That's part of making it harder.

3. The devs are well aware of the effects of the purple patch on targeted effects vs self buffs. We went through this discussion when discussing tohit debuff enhancements years ago.

4. +DMG is not a "workaround" for -RES. It doesn't work like that.

5. I've never seen a task force team attempt to "work around" the purple patch by carefully constructing the team to replace foe debuffs with analogous ally buffs. That sounds like a hypothetical made-up objection that doesn't actually happen in real life.

6. The LRSF does not need specialist teams. In fact, the entire week it was the WST I did not personally run on one "specialist" team, nor did I have a single failure. I'm not saying everyone succeeded, only that non-specialist teams succeeded every time I was on one, which means specialist teams are not necessary. Right now, Tin Mage and Apex seem to require strong teams. They can't have a lot of people without Alpha. They can't have players that appear to have trouble just getting from point A to point B without drawing aggro from several different spawns and getting killed. They need characters designed to kill things quickly, or support a team strongly, or both. The margin for error on character strength right now is very low. As players progress in Incarnate ability, the margin for error overall will rise.

I'm not specifically saying the devs have thought this particular situation through, or have necessarily done this in this case, but there are sometimes very good reasons for decoupling the earning rates of different rewards.

Consider XP and Inf. XP and Inf are not linked. They could be. But in at least one significant aspect they are not. If you die, debt ultimately means your XP earning rate drops in half for a time. Inf is unaffected: you continue to earn inf at the same rate as before. Interestingly, this means a player that dies more often than one that does not actually has *more influence* at a particular level than one that doesn't die, all other things being equal. And this means that player is in a position to buy better gear, and be in a better position overall than the player that blitzes through everything. That might actually be desirable. That negative feedback is a form of "friction" that adds an additional element of difficulty to the fast player, while not double-penalizing the slower player for dying.

In practice, this effect has been swamped by various other reward rebalancing in the game and especially the invention system in I9. But I mention it to illustrate the theory. Sometimes you want some rewards to be awarded on the basis of difficulty and others based more on activity and have them counterbalance each other to prevent wild imbalances in the game. You want some element of meritocracy in the game, but you often have to dampen it because the absolute difference in ability between the best player and the worst one is far higher than the absolute difference in either power or reward earning ability you want to represent in the game.

If the game has too much positive feedback, you get a situation where the best players earn the best rewards giving them the ability get even better, and you amplify small differences in players and your own game balance into huge disparities. Some negative feedback is a good thing here. Or in this case, zero feedback.

Should higher level critters drop at a higher percentage? Well, it depends. Do we want all drops to be based that way? Even insps? SOs? Costume recipes? Is the purpose of purple recipes to be a lucky lottery win for the player, such that its ok if some players have a better chance, but we don't actually want the skew to be too high, or is it essentially just another form of payment for executing content, like Inf? Those are fundamental questions about the reward system that don't have just one right answer. In-game rewards are not just about judging difficulty and rewarding combat merit. That's not the only kind of carrot in an MMO.

Some are expensive. Some are cheap. Some are significantly cheaper, even when factoring crafting costs, than SOs relative to the buffs they provide (for example, if you're slotting a sniper attacks you can probably buy the recipes and salvage for many of those essentially for nothing: the only thing you have to pay is the actual crafting cost to create them).

A large subset of inventions are only somewhat more expensive than SOs relative to their strength, and still provide significantly better performance than just SOs. So there are options for every budget, from SOs, to the very cheap set IOs and common IOs, to the mid-range IOs, to the ultra-expensive inventions.

Some of the bargain basement and budget tricks are things like slotting two cheap Accuracy/Damage combination IOs instead of one damage SO and one accuracy SO. Those can often be reasonably inexpensive and provide a substantial benefit over slotting pure SOs (at high enough level). Expanding that trick, higher levels one damage IO and two damage/end IOs get very close to the benefit of three damage SOs but significantly reduce the endurance costs of using that attack.

Its called "frankenslotting" and its something some players do to squeeze a lot of benefit out of the invention system without spending a lot of money. You get something that is better than standard SO slotting, not as good as the best optimized builds, but pretty cheap to make.

One more thing about inventions and standard enhancements. All enhancements have an intrinsic level. You must be no lower than three levels lower than the intrinsic level of the enhancement to use it: if you are too low you won't be able to use it. Conversely, standard enhancements degrade as you level: when you get more than three levels higher than the enhancement, it shuts off. However, inventions do not do that. Once you slot an invention, it retains its strength indefinitely as you level up, which means you do not ever need to replace it (unless you want to trade it for something more power). So sometimes some players will slot cheap ones as they are leveling up just because it means they don't have to worry about replacing them every three to five levels.

When the devs added purple recipes and adjusted MoG, I'm pretty sure they broke EvilGeko.

Wait, Taser is an optimist now? I need to go lie down.

Its an exception because I said "You should compare the total endurance per cycle second of all the attacks you tend to cycle as often as possible..." Even if that is not true of your AoEs, if you use them profligately, their high costs will almost always make them the best slotting opportunity, even if they are not used as often as possible.

Merits are assigned to task forces by datamining the average time to complete them. The less time it takes the average team to complete the task force, the less merits it gives, the more time it takes the average team to complete, the more merits it gives, based on a formula. There is no specific reason for the RSF to "mirror" the STF if it can be completed much faster (or much slower).

But the door at the back of the Natural store has an especially nasty gotcha associated with it.

You confuse the best defense with a really good offense.

What makes you think you need forgiveness from me, when you're disagreeing with something I wrote you admit you didn't actually read. I'm not even sure that counts as actual disagreement here on Earth. I'm not even sure what specifically it is you're disagreeing with, much less whether I actually said it.

What do you mean, "too?"

If you're going to take the time to respond to my posts, I would prefer if you took the time to read them first. This is either a deliberate non-sequitor or an accidental leak of illiteracy.

Jack tended to oversimplify a lot. Jack once said that increasing the Scrapper damage modifier and increasing the Blaster damage cap were both "increasing the damage of the archetypes." That's not an out of context quote: when asked why the scrapper modifier was increased, you may remember me calling him out specifically on the public forums for saying that increasing the blaster damage cap was basically the same thing.

Then there's the Prima numbers.

Honestly, though, Jack never to my knowledge said that reward was always proportional to risk, and for that matter never really defined risk. He was speaking generally, not specifically, as he was doing 80% of the time. Moreover, he specifically never said that a player that goes out of their way to experience more risk was entitled to more reward. The devs always have the discretion to decide what actions to reward, regardless of risk, and Jack never contradicted that. In fact, he reinforced that thought (albeit ambiguously at times) on more than one occasion.

The simplest way to describe CoH risk/reward is that if you want more reward they have to give you more risk, but if you yourself take on more risk they don't have to give you more reward in exchange. That's more or less consistent with what Jack said back then, if you spoke Jack.

I don't know if super-trout are going to be quite as impressive.

Maybe it will be Queen-themed instead.

Its a common misconception that this game *ever* followed anything remotely like a static Risk=Reward equation. It never has, to my knowledge, because reward systems aren't designed that way.

Reward systems are designed by constraint logic not proportionalities. First of all, except for certain corner cases, most reward systems are designed around reward rates not actual rewards. Influence and XP in particular are not balanced around how much XP an LT should give, but on how much XP/hour the average player should be able to earn in combat. The "reward" is not the big chunk of XP that a kill grants you, but the ability to earn a particular rate of XP and Influence over time. Its actually more correct to say that minions, LTs, and Bosses grant the opportunity to earn a certain XP/hour while killing them in terms of reward system design.

Because the currency in this game is XP/hour, not XP, time is always a factor. The devs have a target, as do all MMOs. The average in combat should be X xp/hour and Y inf/hour. Players are allowed to go higher and can go lower, but on average they should be somewhere around X and Y across the entire playerbase and across the game (normalized by combat level of course).

Risk actually matters almost not at all to how much rewards we get, or ever got. Risk is not a "factor" in rewards. What it is, is a threshold. To earn X xp/hour and Y xp/hour, you must tolerate some Risk R. If the encounter offers less than R, it cannot be allowed to grant X and Y, except by special dispensation. What happens if the encounter offers *more* than R risk? The devs can decide to offer more rewards or not. It depends on whether they feel they can do so reasonably, and if the encounter is a reasonable one to reward. Attacking Lusca solo exposes the player to a lot more risk than normal, but the devs have no requirement to reward that extra risk with sizable increases in reward rate. Soloing Lusca, even if you can, probably offers an incredibly low reward rate even if the reward itself is actually kinda large. And that rate is low because the devs don't care if you can solo Lusca.

Lower risk can, if it drops below a certain minimum in certain situations, force lower rewards. Higher risk does not automatically mandate higher rewards. And that is because higher risk only matters if it creates a new threshold of risk that the devs decide to explicitly reward. If it does not, its just extra risk.

And as Positron mentioned, relative risk is also highly variable. That's why risk only creates lower bounds on difficulty, it does not affect the upper bounds of return on activity. Because if it did, the natural variability in archetypal builds (separate from things the devs explicitly want to reward, such as investment in invention or incarnate builds) would create wide imbalances in reward earning rates. Those exist, but are tempererd by the limits placed on the ability for a player to increase their "risk" and commensurate proportional reward. In fact, an analysis of the purple patch suggests that somewhere between +2 and +3 the system has an intrinsic diminishing return on escalating risk settings. The purple patch advances difficulty faster than the reward table increases rewards at that point. That's difficult for people to understand if they believe there is some risk/reward proportional formula. Its not if you recognize that risk is just a constraint on reward rates and not a factor in directly determining actual rewards.


And by the way, the entire premise of MMO reward systems represents one way, and possibly the most important way, in which CoX AoE mechanics are broken. Because while the purple patch combines with the reward level scaler to create diminishing returns, CoH AoE creates a reward system loophole around quantity scaling separate from combat level scaling.


On the subject of risk: what is risk in CoH? In CoH, risk is very roughly quantified by the amount of offensive power that can be brought to bear on you. Put more simply, risk is damage. The ultimate risk in CoH is that you'll die or be sufficiently damaged to force you to rest. Both incur time penalties, inactivity penalties, and sometimes debt. Damage is a way for the game to slow you down and thereby reduce your reward earning rate, or kill you and slow you down even more, possibly to zero. Its also a way to potentially create a situation you cannot pass without some modification in tactics or tools (i.e. inspirations). If something in this game is going to offer you more rewards, it is almost always going to be something that can kill you faster than normal. It is almost never something that is (only) harder to kill itself. The only reason things in this game are hard to kill is to allow them to live long enough to have a chance to kill you. That's actually the implicit theory behind AVs being "big bags of health." The design presumes that staying alive forces the team to have to endure more offense, which equates to a higher risk as the game quantifies risk. Its not in and of itself to make them take forever to kill (for some teams). That's almost incidental (but not totally, because their rewards are also reward rates just like everything else).

Technically speaking, you should slot what will give you the best return. Toggles are up all the time, but attacks burn more. How much attacks burn on average depends on what percentage of the time you're in combat vs just running around, and whether you use that attack as often as it recharges or not. Usually, unless you're running really sparse missions, slotting attacks win. You should compare the total endurance per cycle second of all the attacks you tend to cycle as often as possible, and slot from highest to lowest. That's almost always the best return on slotting.

Exception: if you spam AoE, you slot AoE. AoE always wins endurance slotting, period.

Actually, the second most annoying trend I've seen are installers that without warning attempt to download massive amounts of additional files from the internet in the middle of the install. If your installer is 281k, I can take a guess. If your installer is 157Mb, and then it downloads an additional 382Mb in the middle of the install, and you don't say this anywhere, I will make your developers pay.

The *most* annoying trend I've seen are installers that get 90% of the way through an install, check for something, fail that check, and then completely back out of the install automatically.

On a scale of one to ten, that one's a twelve.

Its a question of degree. We didn't used to have loot in any significant form, standard enhancements notwithstanding. But I think its fair to say the invention system was a good addition to the game. Sure, as with all loot systems it can encourage bad behavior in some, but it doesn't *require* players to expend huge amounts of inf making builds that everyone else now considers mandatory in performance. Heck, one of my strongest builds is one of the cheapest in my Kat/Invuln. No purples, no PvP, and at the moment maybe one LotG (more coming eventually, but I keep forgetting to go back and buy them). The build is still the same build I put in at I9 release in fact.

We also did not have non-tradeable items, or bind on pickup/bind on equip logic. But I don't think things like Candy Canes, Vanguard Merits, or even Shards (in and of themselves) have significantly hurt the game. They've been subsumed into the culture of the game without significantly damaging it.

In a sense, what the devs are doing now isn't just a change that can be argued to be "like other MMOs" in terms of the details which we are discussing now, but even in terms of existence. One way this game was "different" was in literally not having an end game at all. I'm sure some people interpreted that absence as both deliberate (rather than a lack of resources) and beneficial. No matter how solo-friendly, no matter at what difficulty, and no matter with what benefits, there are actual players that think the lack of an endgame itself was a way we were better than other MMOs. No treadmill at 50: you can "complete" an alt, and move on to another one. The question is never just a question of being different, but being different in the ways you want to be different. Do we want to be different in always having a solo path introduced simultaneously with all teamed paths to all rewards within the end game? Why not go all the way and decide to be different by never adding any further progress to the game? That's not a rhetorical question. There's at least one player that makes the argument that the existence of an end game in and of itself detracts from the game's simplicity. And in the past there were many other players who, prior to the devs actually announcing they were going to make an end game, would have agreed with him that this was a strength of the game.

Its so easy to say just make sure that whatever you add to the game is something no one will object to, because a lot of people implicitly assume that while different people want different things, they all want more things. Not everyone does. Are the people who don't want endless progression at the top less deserving than the people who want an explicit solo path at the top? That is a rhetorical question: of course they aren't. Because its not a question of deserving. We don't decide who's deserving of attention when we update a game. We decide what will be in the best interests of the game overall, knowing we can't please everyone.

MMOs are a diverse set of games. No matter what the devs do, unless they never add anything new to the game ever again it will always be possible to point to another MMO and claim Paragon Studios is "just" copying them. I think, however, the Incarnate system itself is unique (so far as I know) in terms of what its going to ultimately do, and the end game constellation as a whole is unique in many ways. The fact that it contains raids can't be just dismissed as genre copying: MMOs have only so many kinds of content in terms of cooperative play: there's solo content, teamed content, multi-teamed cooperative content, general cooperative content, faction play, server-wide cooperative content, and player vs player content. And every single one of those existed in some form prior to City of Heroes even launching. No matter what we do, we will be using mechanical elements that have already been invented. And dimensionally speaking, at some point when you add more challenging content, it has to be balanced around teams. The reason is fundamental, particularly in City of Heroes: every archetype and every powerset combination has weaknesses. Once content gets beyond a certain level of complexity, it begins to target too many of them for a single player to be able to overcome. The only way to make content harder without making it more complex is to simply scale the numbers bigger, which is what the difficulty sliders do. But that's not the sort of challenge many players find attractive.

None of this precludes a solo path alternative. But its not easy to build for a number of reasons. It can quickly degenerate to trivial farming (something that is often completely unavoidable) and it can be very difficult to balance against the reward generation rate in the teamed content. It can be easy to make the mistake of making a solo path that is tuned for solo progress rates that inadvertently creates an exploitable teamed path that is even faster, and contrawise it can be just as easy to make a solo path that exists but is impractical to execute. And everyone thinks they have the easy solution to this one: just make one they are personally comfortable with, and handwave all other problems away as being unimportant.

The devs don't have that option.