Arcanaville

Of course, I can't explain why everyone likes every MMO: there's a lot of diversity in how people approach MMOs. I'm thinking more of the trend. I'm sure there are a lot of people who prefer one MMOs character creator over CoHs, for example, but no other game is as identified with its character creator as CoH. Why its a strength of this game, and why no one else tries to figure that out and steal it, is an interesting question.

Part of it is that this is not a plug and play decision. We have "gearless" costumes. For the most part, our appearance isn't driven by our capabilities. That means we can envision our appearance almost from the start. Sure: there are unlockables and such, but if you want to wield a sword, you wield a sword. If you don't, you don't. If you want armor, you have armor. If you want to be half-naked (or, possibly 99.836% naked) but still be invulnerable, you can be. You don't have to earn armor because armor is functional. You wear armor because you envision yourself wearing armor. Even if you're an empathy defender.

You can't really have our costume editor and have functional costumes in your game as a practical matter. You have to choose. If you choose to have gear be visible - which is not a bad choice in and of itself - you lock yourself out of having nonfunctional gear appearances (STO tried to have it both ways there, but I don't think they were really successful at it). Similarly, you cannot say "choose carefully after careful deliberation, but if you want to change it later no problem." You can't have both. So maybe the problem is that the lessons CoH has learned are lessons other games don't even want to learn.

Since I said what CoH figured out, I'll tell you what WoW figured out that CoH sort of did as well, but WoW took it to astronomical levels. WoW (Blizzard) figured out that while the hard core players are your evangelists, the casual players pay the bills. WoW does not have twelve million hard core raiders. If even one percent of them are hard core players I would be amazed. WoW is eleven and a half million people that play because their cousin Vinny plays, and half a million people maybe that fall asleep at the keyboard. And this only works if, in spite of what some people say, in spite of what CoH players used to say way back when, WoW is very, very, very friendly to casual players. Not in all areas, but in enough of them. WoW is an MMO ramjet. WoW makes so much money on the 99% casual players that it can afford to make content targeted at the hardcore 1%, who then become the people who evangelize the game to other casual players who become the fuel for the WoW engine.

There's a reason the system requirements for WoW are still almost pathetically low. Higher system requirements would starve the ramjet of fuel.

Have 2250 points of health, for one thing.

Actually, part of the problem is a personal pet peeve of mine that most of the "percentages" in this game are not percentages. "+60% accuracy" is meaningless. "+35% defense" is meaningless. "+20% tohit buff strength" is meaningless.

Well, it has meaning to me, insofar as I know what they mean, but what they say is both mathematically and intuitively incorrect. When math says you're wrong and human instinct says you're wrong, unless you're making a game for fish you're probably wrong.

DR takes the additional leap of having no intuitive combinatorial. Which is to say, if I ask you what a "5% buff" does, intuivitely I expect you'd say it makes something five percent bigger. And actually, a 5% intrinsic accuracy buff does that. Its like the only thing that does that. a +5% damage buff does not do that. A +5% damage buff increases damage by five percentage points which is something completely different. Its like if you're paying 5% interest on your mortgage, and the bank says they will lower your rate by 20%, you don't think the rate will become negative 15 percent. You think it will drop to 4%. But in CoH, a 20% reduction is almost always twenty points subtracted from the phony percentage value.

But that's only a small intuitive glitch. 5% buff to resistance is also a five percentage point increase in resistance, not a 5 percent increase. But it is, if you started with 85% resistance, a 33% increase in survivability. That's intuitive if you live in a hyperbolic reality I guess. That's a big glitch.

DR adds an additional tier of abstraction which I do not approve of: you can't even guestimate what a 5% buff will do, unless you do trig in your head. That's a really big glitch.

Just to present a simplified example - I'm not recommending this specifically - suppose I were to say that the DR effect for damage buffs was such that *approximately* for every +100% buff you had, an additional buff on top of relatively small size would be worth about half as much. So a 5% buff would be worth "about" 5% at zero, "about" 2.5% at +100%, and "about" 1.25% at +200%. The precise formulas to implement that would be not simple expressions. You would need to have some skill in math to compute them. But an intuitive explanation would exist. Simple math does not equal simple explanation and vice versa: the equations for tohit and defense have nothing but addition, subtraction, and multiplication in them, and most people *still* don't have a complete grasp of it. Ironically, I believe the best compromise between a workable DR system and one that had a reasonably accurate intuitive explanation would probably have very complex equations to fit those requirements.

And the one group of people we're not supposed to care about are the quants. If someone wants to calculate the numbers of the game, they're volunteering to do math. So they should go learn some. The people who don't want to calculate, don't need precise numbers, but are willing to function with close guesses, those are the people we are supposed to care about. The quants are supposed to serve them, not the other way around.

This is an issue that goes far beyond DR, and far beyond PvP. And I wish I knew how to fix it. You know how Real Numbers shows accuracy as "x1.4" and not "+40%"? That's because the devs got tired of hearing me cry over it. But I don't think I can whine my way into a better resistance equation or DR curve.


As I said: pet peeve. And I've been moaning about it to several generations of CoH developers and players by now.

At the moment, no.

I always forget that part. Fortunately for you, the devs didn't take my advice and implemented DR instead. There always has to be a winner, and a loser. I lost, you won. Gratz.

I also lost the fight to eliminate heal suppression, to replace movement suppression with a different mechanic, to tweak Elusivity per powerset rather than use a blanket 30% value, to replace base resistance with archetype-specific +health and normalized (reduced to normal) regeneration, to add arena options to disable all PvP changes, and to consider launching PvP changes with cross-server PvP to soften the shock of all the changes. Aren't you the lucky one.

(Yes: I suggested every single one of those things to multiple developers and producers. I probably would have fought harder for them if if wasn't for the fact that my number crunching ignorance disqualifies me from having a valid opinion of PvP.)

Or, for at least three minutes at a time, Elude. Slotted SR + Elude + CJ + Weave gets you to about 109% defense. 130% defense is probably within the realm of possibility, and if you figure out how to get to the recharge cap you can have it 90% of the time. With a top tier alpha slotting and a really strong build, I think you could find yourself running around with 145% defense for three minutes at a time under Elude. It would be mighty expensive to get, though, and every time it crashed you would need to run for the hills.

I have a love-hate relationship with the UI, but I will say that I have never had to look up how to do anything with it. I can't say that for most MMOs I've played.

I think an example would be helpful here. Suppose you had an actual power that buffed you with 35% defense. In PvP that would be reduced to about 17.0%, assuming you had no other defenses running. But suppose you had a power that buffed you with 21.875% defense, and you had slotted it with +60% enhancement, for a total of 35% defense. In that case, the +60% enhancement would be reduced to 54%, which would then reduce the power to only 33.7%, and then DR would hit that to 16.7%. The difference is usually small, but it can throw numbers off if you do not know how much of the value is due to enhancements buffing a base value, since DR hits enhancements first, then the total second.

Also, those calculations were for a blaster. For a scrapper or tanker 35% (base) would be reduced to 27.5%. In general, stalkers, scrappers, brutes and tankers have weaker DR curves for damage mitigation related attributes. Squishes have steeper curves.

Now, what would it be if you had 35% defense from a couple of slotted powers, plus some set bonuses that are not enhanced. That's when it gets tricky.

Canonical MMO design theory is to addict players to gameplay: to the pursuit of loot, to raiding, to PvP, to running dungeons. To acquiring gear, power, and stats. CoH attempts to addict players to characters. From the very beginning it asks the player "who are you" and "what do you look like?". It asks you to create a unique name, and make up a bio. Even if you don't want to write one, you are subtly asked to think about what kind of character you are when it asks you to pick an origin, and even an archetype. The fact that the game basically says "you can't change origin or archetype, so choose carefully" forces you to actually think about who and what your character is going to be before you even play a single minute of it. The game asks you to make a personal investment.

One of the great ironies I think about CoH is that when people say "my character is such and such, and I don't want to be limited by this or that" and in particular complain about not wanting to play the early levels before you get "the powers you are supposed to have" or want to be able to change power sets or archetypes because "they're wrong" I think they are indirectly and not deliberately confirming why those things are so important. They make players conceptualize their characters before they ever log in. With most MMOs you don't know, and have no preconceived notion about what your character is eventually going to become. But in City of Heroes, you know. You know because the game *asks* you. And that sort of personal investment in characters and not gameplay is something that I still think is unique to CoH. It's something I don't even see to the same degree in CO, CoX's kissing cousin. CO takes the critical detour of saying "you can be whatever you want to be, so don't worry about it now." There are pros and cons there, but I believe the critical con is that you lose that early opportunity to ask the players to make an investment up front. The character costume editor is often lauded as part of the reason for CoX's success, but I believe that it is only a tool serving the larger purpose: it asks you to invest in your character. It's part of a whole.

The other thing I think CoX does right is to recognize that the fundamental unit of community isn't the team, or even the guild. It's everyone that plays at about the same time with shared interests. In other words, it's the friends list. It's the global channel. For a game as fragmented as it is, and with a relatively low population, and heavily instanced, it would be easy for the
playerbase to disintegrate. It doesn't even though the game doesn't force us to be in a supergroup to get anything done, and it doesn't force us to find perennial team mates that we can build constant teaming relationships with, because teaming is critical. It let's us play however we want, but still reach out and find other nut jobs like ourselves. It let's us badge hunt, or LFT, or just ask what's happening. Or we can be totally silent but join teams being announced. The game probably owes more to global channels for it's continued survival that it does expansions.

Whenever you see an MMO claim that "character customization" is a priority to them, but the game does not ask the player the Vorlon question: Who Are You? within one minute of starting up, it doesn't understand the point to customization. The point is to make a connection between the player and the character and to do that, apparently not so obviously, THE CHARACTER HAS TO EXIST, at least in the mind of the player. It cannot be an amorphous lump of possibilities. And when you see an MMO focus on raid queues and voice acting but is weak on ways for it's players to communicate with each other, you know they aren't trying to give players the tools to build communities of their own design. For all of CoX's weaknesses, and it has more than a few, these are it's two greatest strengths in my opinion, and no one has yet thought to really steal them and especially improve on them.

I'm not saying, by the way, that all MMOs have to do these things to be successful. WoW took a different path to success entirely (but still shares similarities with CoX in other areas I think CoX also does well in). But I think many MMOs don't just fail to steal these ideas, they don't replace them with anything interesting of their own. They don't steal, and they don't innovate. They leave it to chance. And chance is not generous.

The important thing is to remember that the camp was a reflection of the period, and not a critical aspect of the show. There was otherwise nothing specifically "wrong" with the interpretation of WW in that show.

I look at it like I look at the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno tv Hulk. In many ways it was nothing like the comic book at the time, but in some ways it was also better than the comic book: the comic book took years to catch up to the show in terms of being taken seriously. Do I care that Banner's name was changed to David? Nope: could care less. It was also late-70s melodrama, and just like late 70s camp wouldn't play today, late-70s melodrama wouldn't play today either. But that doesn't mean there isn't something to trying to capture some of the essence of that show for the benefit of the many people for whom that is their first and last iconic contact with that character.

Its a question of knowing what to pay respects to.

I dunno, I actually thought the writing in Xena was pretty good given the constraints of episodic television most of the time. The mythology built up by the show was an interesting blend of pseudo-serious swords and sorcery stuff and weird anachronistic fourth wall-benders. The show did get weirder as time progressed, but it was not a bad show by any means.

Of course, I also watched Silk Stalkings so I'm not above blatant guilty pleasures either.

I think its Sam doesn't need to team, because money just keeps falling from the sky around him.

If I was giving away my purple drops, because I just sold a bunch of other purple drops, I wouldn't team with any of you people either. I would sit in my purple wallpapered base stroking my purple cat while thinking of alts I could create that could use all ten purple sets.

Jeez the last time I got a purple drop was months ago and I accidentally sold it at a store. I don't even remember what president was in office the last time I got a purple drop before that.

One of the things I suggested to alter the tactical equation of gathering for buffs then scattering to leverage them was to make all buffs decay in PvP, so that they could retain a significant percentage of their strength, even stacked, for a short while, but not for long periods of time. This would encourage meeting engagements where combat would happen when there was a high density of players, and buffs worked better when used during combat and their activation costs would have to be paid, rather than away from combat and essentially eliminated. It better balanced stand and fight as a legitimate tactic to scatter and spike, which opened the door to reexamining tankers in teamed PvP rather than attempting to balance everyone around tanker survivability generically.

That would have either taken additional tech or a lot of extra work to redo the buffs for this kind of effect. I was told that would be impractical to attempt. I will now stand here and whistle to myself, because that's the extent of what I'm currently allowed to say about the subject.

In my opinion, both CoH and WoW for that matter had the good fortune to not know what they were doing, and ended up targeting an MMO space no one else even to this day even thinks *is* a space, and doing it first. CoH ended up carving out a niche, and WoW, with about a hundred times the resources, ended up carving out the Grand Canyon.

No one seems to have learned the lessons of what makes *either* game work yet. Not even Cryptic. CO adds some genuine improvements, but it also deletes things that work well that suggest they didn't understand what the advantages of those things were in the first place. DCUO, well DCUO was designed on another planet that doesn't have MMOs yet. And every non-superhero MMO that followed WoW seems intent on doing WoW, only not as good.

I keep waiting for someone to learn the lessons without emulating the behavior of CoH, or since they make a billion dollars a minute, certainly WoW, but no one ever does.

Well, its more "inspired by" as opposed to the character actually shilling for the products. And this is MAC we're talking about: they are kind of upscale and a bit avant-garde with their marketing. Its actually almost like a french restaurant offering an appetizer platter "inspired by" Wonder Woman. Its not going to be gingerbread cookies shaped like her silhouette. Its going to be her colors, an occasional star or stripe, and maybe a golden pretzel evoking rope.

This is definitely not going to be My First Makeup Kit sold at Walmart next to Wonder Woman lunchboxes.

Actually, the match is a subtle mismatch, but not because of appearance vanity. MAC doesn't focus on that exclusively in their marketing. They tend to focus on celebrity and that's also slightly tangential to Wonder Woman. But not in a jarring way: in the DCU she *is* a celebrity, if an often reluctant one.

Actually, technically speaking to fully understand the SR scaling resistances you need calculus. And they just say "offers resistance from zero to 20% per passive, as health decreases from 60% to zero." The formula is (60 - Health%)/3, but that actually requires calculus to fully determine its effects.

DR just requires a trig calculator:

DR = Value * (1 - ArcTan(Value * Alpha) * 2 / Pi * Beta)
where Alpha and Beta are the DR tuning parameters for the attribute and aspect in question (i.e. Defense Strength)


I think something like that would be a good idea in theory, but that wouldn't work in practice without a lot of extra features. First of all, DR doesn't work per power but per attribute, so that's basically out. Second, if you wanted to know what your precise Smashing Defense would be in a PvP zone given a hypothetical set of powers and slotting, you'd have to specify all powers that offer Smashing Defense, plus all defense slotting for all of those powers. No shortcuts.

The game could tell you, given what you have now what those values would be in a PvP zone, since the game can tell everything it needs to figure that out from your build. But it cannot easily do that with hypotheticals without asking the player a lot of questions.

If I knew a good way to add a "what-if" calculator for PvP DR that would tell you what a given power would add to you in a PvP zone, believe me I would have gotten it put into the game by now. Or made my own: I only made a spreadsheet with the formula for manual computation. I'm not even sure where to begin with something like that which would work with all powers and effects, short of adding it to Mids (and Mids is working on improving that). And it can't just work sometimes, and give bad results at other times: its better to be blind than misled.

The catch is that not only are rewards limited to being balanced against acquisition effort, but as a practical matter reward diversity can only be supported by having the different rewards not all acquirable by exactly the same methods. Basically, if you want something other than one-dimensional effort-unlocks, different rewards will have to be earned through different activities. And then you get into the situation where not everyone will enjoy all of those different activities regardless of production quality, but will want the rewards associated with them. That's impossible to avoid.

Its not as designed: its as implemented. Its considered a bug, just not a priority bug to fix.

Its worth noting the technology to fix this bug has not existed in the game for the entire history of the existence of multi-aspect enhancements.

Until now.

Take that for whatever its worth. I have no knowledge of the devs going back to fix these, but I wouldn't bet on them never doing so eventually.

And just to be clear, a lot of people will probably complain if they ever do, and they'll say once its been like that for a long time without the devs specifically saying they will fix it and give a timetable for it and sign it in blood, the devs have no right to change it and they need lessons in how to run a company and with everyone quitting the game they should spend their time fixing the real problems in the game. And I will, without passion or compassion, explain that bugs have no statute of limitations, and that this fix should have come as a surprise to no one, because everyone is supposed to know its a bug. Inferring that a bug unfixed is a statement that its working as intended has *always* been wrong in the whole history of the game. No one should expect that inference to suddenly be right now.

The only thing you can say is that using membranes in this way is not an actionable exploit. There's no punishment coming for someone that does this. But there's no guarantee the devs won't change how it works in the future to eliminate this feature. Use it this way only if you're willing to take the risk of expending influence on something that might change later.

Both Damage changes and Mez changes could be toggled by implementing extended isPvP flags: isPvPdamage?, isPvPmez?, etc, and having zones and the arena set those smaller flags off and on rather than a global PvP flag. The arena could then control them. Its almost certainly easier than mucking with the entity target flags.

Its how I would have done it in I13. I always thought the system should have been built for this type of thing from the start.

That's a tough list of requirements to satisfy. The first thing that jumps to mind is Warshade. They have a little bit of everything and with a strong IOed out build they can get very powerful.

Fire/DA brute or scrapper might qualify. Lots of damage, pretty tough, has defensive auras, no weapons. Not too many conceptual entanglements.

Fire/Therm controller has damage and control, and an easy conceptual foundation. It also has a buffing secondary. And no weapons.

Another possibility is to go ranged-capped blaster. Ice/Ice has decent damage and Ice Patch to prevent most things from getting into melee so you mostly only need ranged defense. You do need to avoid taking Ice Sword to be weapon-free though. But its the most control-ly blaster out there and you get blaster-level damage.

There's others. There are Electric themed pairings that might work, for example.

Then draw another circle inside the first circle but excluding the second circle and label it "does not like them here or there, does not like them anywhere."

City of Heroes: fighting the war against literacy since 2004.

For the record, I've tried out lots of MMOs since starting to play CoH, and read a few (dozen) books also. I don't think these are bad things for CoH players to do. Which probably explains why I don't work for NCSoft's marketing division.

Some of this is repeating what others have said, but:

Yes and no. For most critters that exist today, yes. Most critters have base 50% chance to hit, possibly with accuracy bonuses, and that means you cannot benefit from more than 45% defense (due to the 5% intermediate floor before accuracy).

However, before you go ripping out that defense, keep this in mind: you're a tank. You will be drawing more than the normal amount of aggro. You will be in situations you cannot just run and reset from. These things all create problems for a "soft-capped" player that a tank cannot easily escape from (that a scrapper, say, could just run and temporarily break off contact to mitigate):

1. Summoned pets and turrets. Like the turrets created by Malta engineers, or Frostfire's pets: stuff like that. These things all have 75% chance to hit.

2. Tohit buffs. Some you can't do anything about, like the +100% tohit from DE quartz crystals. 45% defense, 65% defense, either way you're screwed. But another common source of tohit buffs is Vengenace, aka Nemesis Lts. Having more than the soft cap can help against one or two stacks of Vengeance before it all goes pear-shaped.

3. Praetorian DE. There's a new critter in town, and the first we're seeing of him are the DE in tip missions. They are the new Praetorian special class critters that have base 64% tohit, not 50%. Walk into a full team-scaled DE tip mission, and you will be in serious trouble if your primary source of protection is soft-capped circa 45% defense. Even con DE bosses will be hitting you like 25% of the time: nearly four times more often than a truly soft-capped player would get hit by an even con boss. Your current positional defenses would floor these guys (at least until something spawned a quartz) and believe me: you will notice the difference. My MA/SR can tank the aggro cap of an assortment of minions, LTs, Bosses, and EBs in something like the ITF, and she melts in these DE missions in seconds unless I use lucks (at x8).

You'll have to decide if the build choices you've made are reasonable to get that defense, or if you want to give some of it up to build for other things. But on a tank, I would be cautious: the soft-cap is situational, and could get more situational over time.

Even if you choose to go for "the soft cap" I would leave some margin for debuffing. My MA/SR goes for about 47ish defense because even with 95% DDR I want some leeway for defense debuffs. At 47% I can eat up to -40% defense debuffs without noticing (against standard critters). -40% * 0.05 = -2%. That's still useful: defense debuffs will still hit you occasionally, and there are autohitting ones out there (i.e. Antimatter).

Batman concealer:

I seek the means to fight injustice. To turn fear against those who prey on the fearful. To eliminate dark circles and puffiness caused by late night crime fighting.

1. Play more DE tip missions. Nobody soft caps those all by themselves (ok: very few).

2. 11.9% for the small bubbles based on SO slotting and no prior defense buffs.

3. I'll grant this though: tohit and defense is one of those few areas where DR almost does exactly the opposite of what its supposed to do.