Arcanaville

Heh. I'll be honest: I said almost the exact same thing to myself when I first signed up to the CO pre-beta. I think it was worth it, but while I'm ok with being the Arcanaville of City of Heroes, I really didn't want to be the Arcanaville of Champions Online. If you're not careful, it can suck the enjoyment out of the game just as surely as grinding yourself into a stupor.

I've spent a couple billion on my EN/EN blaster build to make something that actually has nearly capped recharge. Was this to min/max offensive output? Actually, no. It was to give me that same freeeem experience of shooting energy almost non-stop. Lets face it: its Energy Blast. Its not going to be winning any pylon races. But its fun to be able to just shoot at everything without pause like you're trying to vaporize your own fingernails. I actually respeced back into power bolt and out of power burst (which is a net reduction in DPA) to get that bolt/blast/bolt feel.

So on the one hand I set a pursuit target for myself (three, actually: I'm currently updating three builds). But that target was a fun target, not an antiseptic paper target. I want freem-speed blasting. That's how I balance my need for a progression target with my need to have a fun interesting gameplay experience. I've never seen min/maxing and concept building to be intrinsicly exclusive, and that's probably why. I don't accept (some) other people's definition of "min/maxing." I pick a concept, and then I optimize myself into the best possible execution of that concept. And some of my concepts can be a bit out there.

The DR curves could probably be a little ... better in some respects.


Having said that, DR isn't too harsh at normal buff levels for most things. Its particularly harsh against some things like tohit and defense. But looking at, say, damage: +95% damage slotting gets reduced to about +80%. Stacking +100% from build up generates a net buff of about +138%. In effect, BU can still buff +58% damage stacked on top of ED soft-cap damage slotting. Lower, but I wouldn't say useless.


Also: if you want +400% recharge in a PvP zone, all you need is... +1244% recharge. 25 Kins speed boosting you tops and you're there.

Whether there are quantifiable numbers or not, I'm pretty sure it will still be based on baseless stupidity. Baselessly stupid people don't suddenly grow a brain when confronted with numbers.

Depends on how much level shift we're talking about. Right now, people do SK other people into task forces, even though that means they are -1 to the leader: not having level shift in a team where everyone else has one level of level shift would be similar. Now, if you lack level shift and the entire team has four levels of level shift, that might be a different story. It depends on what they are attacking. If the critters don't have level shift, then the team would be even to the critters and you would still be -4 (in a TF with level 54s). That's bad, but not nearly as bad as when you lack Alpha and you get shifted down -4 fighting 54s and end up -8 to the content in Tin Mage. At that point you are a pinata soaked in gasoline packed with rocket fuel.

We don't know how much level shift is in the total Incarnate system, or whether there are caps or limits to it, so its hard to extrapolate.

The way I look at it, they are doing it for a very good reason: namely to lock themselves into an addictive behavior that subsidizes my fun.

As long as EvilGeko continues to spend his hard-earned wages paying people to make Excel spreadsheet entries for him to spend years hunting down, and I get content created during the other 95% of their day, I don't see a problem.


Then again, I've been updating three separate alts to I19 builds lately, and I think even EG's eyes would bug out when he sees the level of expenditure on them (this is actually the first time I've spent more than about a hundred million inf on a build, and I'm blasting through pent-up influence like it was silly strings).

Actually, nothing I know about level shift is technically covered by any NDA. I discussed the mechanics of level shift with Castle long (long, long) ago, and that was covered by my normal "I won't blab until the devs break radio silence first" informal agreement with him. I stayed silent until a player guessed at the mechanics *and* Positron basically confirmed that guess. At that point, I was free to discuss, and after I18 beta was over I was free to repeat outside of beta. I'm saying this partially so the mods don't think I've gone off the reservation. I'm NDA covered for lots of things, but level shift isn't one of them. And Positron confirmed the mechanics once, and even if that's not easy to find, its still technically publicly outed.

What I know is not everything, but I will correct some discrepancies between what I know and what was said in this thread. Level shift does not make the critters lower. It *also* does not make us higher. Changing actual combat levels changes a number of things for players and critters: it makes our health higher, our damage higher, etc. It *also* affects combat modifier tables: what most players call the purple patch. When we are a different level than our target, there are modifiers that kick in to make us hit harder or softer, and vice versa, depending on whether we are higher or lower than the target. This is a completely separate and independent effect.

Suppose I'm a level one attacking a level 49. Obviously, there are problems. I've got about 100 points of health, and I'm hitting for like two points of damage (with brawl no less). Worse: I am -48 to the target, so on top of everything else, my base chance to hit the target drops to 1%, my damage gets reduced to 1% of normal, etc. By being so low, everything I do gets muted against that target. I'm going to probably be doing 0.02 damage every twenty swings (the 5% floor would still apply).

If I side kick to a 50, I *become* 49. That means my health increases to above 1000, my brawl starts dealing about 10-20 points (depending on archetype), etc. I'm also even con to the critter, so there are no combat modifiers. If I were to somehow acquire 48 level shifts, I would also be even to the critter relative to the combat modifier tables. That means no penalties. But I would still be level one. So that means while I have no combat modifier penalties any more, I still have only 100 points of health, I still have only a couple points of damage per brawl. I'm not a level 49 with level 49 numbers. I'm a level one that acts like a 49 for the purpose of the purple patch only.

So, to reiterate, as far as I know, level shift doesn't make the critters lower, and it doesn't make the players higher. It will not make us level 51: there is no level 51 for players. The numbers don't exist. What it does is muck with the level difference calculations in the purple patch, and as far as I know that's all. Whether it also affects things like rewards is something I do not know at all.

All of this is a direct consequence of the devs saying level shift affects combat modifiers, by the way. That sounds like it could be open to interpretation, but it isn't. It is, of course, subject to change until its released.


One other thing: we're likely never going to see level 60 critters to challenge us when we have level shift. That would require the devs to add critter tables for level 56, 57, 58, etc. Instead, they will likely add level 55s with +5 level shift. That makes more sense: critters will eventually get level shift to counter our level shifts and even the playing field again, but probably only in content designed for highly slotted incarnates.

The little blue book that came with the game when it was first released doesn't say that. And while you're technically correct that NPCs don't have an origin in the same way we do, they do have one conceptually to determine what they drop.

Consumer watchdogs forced Neimen Marcus to cancel their line of bullet proof jewelry.

D) Stupid. I was thinking of a different power. Dark Servant is only slottable for hold, end, rech, immob, heal, tohit debuff, and accuracy, exactly as the real numbers pic shows. Zombie Man even said as much and it slipped my mind.

And as far as I know, there is no change coming to fluffy, so this was not an accidental leak. I'm under NDA not to disclose any of the changes coming in 2011 like the new grenade launchers the buffing pets will be packing, the tier 10 Winter Lord Ice control pet, the freeeem inspiration, the ultraviolet enhancements that are so powerful only one character per household can slot them, and the change to Swan where she's now jumping on a trampoline in Bricks.

Nope, its all just another boring issue in the works with some sort of end game thingy in there somewhere.

It isn't easy to simultaneously insult the devs for wasting time, and spending no time, on the exact same thing. I would have thought that was semantically impossible until just now.

Our players are the bestest ever.

Or Airwolf, after it moved to the USA network.

Wonder Woman has always been a paradoxical icon. I think she's the uncommon example of a bridge between classical feminine values and more modern empowered values, and that has always made her a complex subject. Look at all the feminists lining up on opposite sides of the debate on her costume revamp. Some say it was long overdue because her appearance is an obviously insulting impractical image. Some say it is insulting to change a cultural icon that was a positive role model for many girls growing up for superficial reasons, and it also suggests that strong women have to "dress down" to be taken seriously.

I think what sometimes gets overlooked in debates over Wonder Woman's appearance is that she has, generally, projected a "I don't give a **** what you think I look like" attitude: she looks like that because she wants to look like that, and she would look like that even if she was the last person on Earth. And that resonates. Its not really a bad message to send. They say only Nixon could go to China, and I think only Wonder Woman can be portrayed as attractive as the artists and writers want and few people would question whether she was selling out to men, given the fact she's so often portrayed as thinking of men as pets who can talk.

Wonder Woman makeup is just another in a long line of difficult to classify circumstances for a bondage princess that is the equal of Superman. Personally, I have no problem with it, although I can also see the humor in it.

You are basically correct. The Alpha buffs are explicitly designed to only affect powers that can literally be slotted with that kind of enhancement. So if you have an Alpha power that buffs damage, only powers that can be slotted with damage literally can benefit from that buff. This is different from multi-aspect enhancements that can "sneak" a buff into a power by buffing two things: one of which the power is designed to allow you to slot, and another that the power is not designed to allow you to slot, but it still benefits from it all the same. Alpha doesn't have that loophole. When you slot, say, Musculature Total Core Revamp that buffs damage and immobilize. That Alpha behaves like two separate "universal enhancers" - one damage and one immobilize strength. Each one follows its own rules for which powers it can go into. That's how Alpha avoids the "multi-aspect loophole." Alphas are not multi-aspect buffing: they actually are a set of individual single-aspect buff effects.

But Zombie Man is thinking about a separate, distinct loophole. Dark Servant can be slotted for Damage. So Musculature's damage buff should "find its way there." The question is whether Alpha's damage buff will simply buff all of fluffy's damage-dealing powers, or whether Alpha's damage buff is clever enough to take a second look at each fluffy power and only drill into the powers that themselves are slottable for damage. Dark Serrvant's Tenebrous Tentacles is slottable for Immobilize, Tohit Debuff, and Accuracy. It is not slottable for damage. If Fluffy was a player, Musculature would not buff the damage of TT. But Fluffy is a summon, and whether Musculature continues to obey the same rules for summons that it does for players is an open question (if someone has tested this, I haven't heard about it yet, and my understanding of the game mechanics gives no clue as to which way it would be by default).

My *guess* is that the intent is for Musculature to *not* buff fluffy's TT, and if it does that is likely a bug that will be corrected. But I don't know what it does *now*.

Sent it to me, and I'll see what I can do.

I've soloed more task forces on my blaster than I have my scrapper. To eliminate what is apparently example out of context fodder, I'll state categorically that if I can solo it on my scrapper, odds are I can solo it on anything given sufficient effort. I don't judge "soloability" based on whether or not I can personally solo it, because that's not a design-relevant criteria. I am nowhere near the capabilities of the average player. But I do consider it to always be an appropriate counterexample to assertions that something is impossible to solo.

In any event, your assertion that all content that is not a task force must be soloable for all characters is currently not true for this game, either in actual practice or in its design philosophy. The game has never promised that, and has never implied that in its design or implementation. The game has only stated that core mission content should be soloable by all reasonable characters built to solo for players of average skill or better.

The game does not promise that a player that builds a character in a way that makes it suboptimal to solo will be able to solo everything considered "soloable." The game does not promise that players of below average skill - as judged across the current playerbase - will be able to solo everything considered soloable. And the game does not promise that everything will be soloable that doesn't explicitly have a minimum team size.

Maria is not easy to solo for everyone: that's considered working as intended. Pither may be soloable in the sense of being completable, but maybe not be completable successfully by all solo players. That is also working as intended. Not all Rularuu missions may be soloable by all characters and all players. The game has always had exceptions for the general soloability of its content, both in terms of exceptions in content, and exceptions in the requirements on players wishing to solo. The degree to which this has been and will be true is debatable. The fact that it is true is not.

You're seeing one of the fundamental challenges to adjusting drop rates. To provide for a teaming bonus, the shard drop mechanics are such that the difference between a fast team and a slow soloer is better than 8 to 1. The problem is the factors start to multiply rapidly.

Lets leave both precise mechanics and practicality aside, and just talk about what the drop rate should be, but lets break it up into stages.

First, what do you think the difference should be between a slow soloer and a reasonably fast one. Do you think it should be possible for a fast soloer to earn shards at least twice as fast? Three times as fast? Five times as fast? Do you think there should be some enforced limit, such that no matter how slow a person solos, within some reasonable boundary, he or she will still earn no less than half the average rate? A quarter the rate?

Next, independent of kill speed, do you think a team of two should get a bonus in terms of earning faster than the two would separately? The current system implements that. How much faster should a team of two be than a team of one. And should a team of four be that much better than two teams of two? And how about two teams of four?

We now have a computable value for what you think is a reasonable spread between a fast eight player team and a slow soloer. Now the question is do you think its reasonable for high end task forces to award components, something single player arcs will not do? That is an additional four shard bonus, in effect.

And when all of this is done, we then have to place a limit on the rate at which a reasonably fast team of eight will earn stuff, and set that to be the upper limit of the shard drop rate. And then we have to come up with a lower limit for the single slow player case. And these two numbers have to be in the same rough ballpark or there's no way to make the drops work. So you have to compromise on both ends. But if we calculate a very high spread above for what is fair, and we end up with a number that is a factor of ten or more, its unlikely that no matter how you design the system, random or deterministic, you won't either make it too trivial for teamed players (which is bad) or too slow for solo players (which is problematic). You will have to pick your poison.

Its worth the mental exercise, to see if what you want is numerically possible without violating one of your own constraints on fairness. If it is, then at least you have a suggestion you could make in theory. Its where I got the factor of two number from: I didn't pick that number randomly.

Here's a fun little story about my main, Lady Arcana. When I first rolled her my knowledge of the game's backstory was extremely rudimentary, and because she was my first character, I knew exactly zip about the game itself (my brother's first character was actually called "Patient Zero" and that set up a very funny moment when I first got the mission "find Patient Zero"). I did decide to invent a backstory and write a bio for her. I decided that, having read the origins section of the manual and wanting to have a little fun with that, that she would be the result of a secret experiment to combine magical energy and Rikti technological portals as part of some vague skunk works project (thus basically making her technically a magic/tech origin in defiance of the partitions: I selected magic). Over time, I refined that concept: she became someone from an alternate dimension where the Rikti had won the war, and these experiments were a last ditch effort to make magically infused soldiers to fight the Rikti. The experiments were trying to find a compatible person that could survive the experiments, so they found a suitable target and cloned her over and over again so they could reuse her. However, instead of the experiments destroying each test subject like they thought, they were actually transporting them to alternate dimensions. My character was one such experimental clone. I made the ultimate source of these experiments the only corporate entity I was really aware of at the time: Crey.

I thought that was pretty original, at least at the time. And then, of course, I ran the Revenant arc. Which is about Crey using cloning technology to make a super soldier army of Paragon Protectors. Of course, if you're going to use cloning in your backstory, you have to expect that's going to come up in the game some time, and Crey is the obvious target for conspiracy plots. What's that you say? Crey was experimenting with Rikti technoloogy also? And trying to replicate portal technology? Hmm. Well, I guess that could also be a coincidence.

Then CoX introduced doppleganger technology, and now there's a mission in which I meet an alternate version of me from an alternate dimension hunting down an evil clone version of me. This all meshes so well with the backstory I invented for my character over six years ago that its actually really really odd. I wonder now how many people put magic, Crey, Rikti, portal technology, alternate dimensions, cloning technology and multiple duplicate selves into their backstories and are now having the same sort of odd feeling I'm having. Maybe magically infused portal generated alternate dimension displaced Crey experimental clone copy is just a really obvious comic book origin.

The ironic asymmetry here is that I can't point to what you champion as being bad for the game, because the game doesn't contain anything you champion. Conversely, I can't point to the best examples of what I champion as being good for the game, precisely because it does.

But I'm ok with that.

I was responding more generally than specifically, and just pulled an example from the thread. In general giving more specific feedback is more useful to the devs. Its not just me saying that: its drilled into every closed beta tester in every closed beta test that this is how the devs weigh feedback.

Since you asked directly, I will answer directly. That question cannot be answered generally. It can only be answered for a specific example. "Higher" isn't specific. However, the target drop rate was selected to meet a set of criteria. I can extrapolate what those criteria probably were:

1. They cannot drop so quickly that the least efficient methods of acquiring them are still so fast that there is no legitimate way to incentivize incarnate activities.

2. They cannot drop so quickly that the teamed rate is too fast to be a legitimate progression system.

3. They cannot drop so slowly that it is impossible for players to earn on time scales comparable to earning the combat level from 49 to 50.

4. They cannot drop so slowly that they force people to use only the most optimal methods of acquiring them, in the game design sense (and not in whatever arbitrary meaning someone chooses for the word "force")

5. They must drop faster on teams than solo, scaling based on team size.

6. They must drop at a rate that does not make the pursuit of actual components redundant.

7. They must drop at a rate that is consistent with future requirements of the system.

8. They must drop at a rate that allows for the fact that shard acquisition rates will likely improve over time as players become better overall at earning them, as has been true for most rewards.

9. The target rate must meet certain reasonable requirements for the average player, based on statistical average play. This means the player that solos as much as the playerbase does on average, teams as much as the average player does on average, and earns rewards at about the average player rate.


My estimate is that the current drop rates are within a binary order of magnitude of the necessary rate to satisfy the likely requirements of the system. Meaning: what gets hurt if the system was more than twice as fast or twice as slow is the ability for the system to function properly. How much latitude the devs have within that target area is something difficult to judge. But there is a point beyond which the system becomes trivialized, and thus a waste of time, and a waste of an opportunity to develop this particular direction of the game. That ultimately hurts all players of the game at least indirectly. The designers of the game must be cognizant of this fact, and they must understand that this is not one of the areas they will get very many chances to get it right. There are real risks to setting the drop rate too high or too low.

Technically, you have no obligation to give feedback either. However, when it comes to quantitative topics such as drop rates, my experience is that quantified feedback tends to have far greater weight than unquantified feedback. Unquantified feedback is only meaningful when there is a consensus. When there isn't quantified feedback overrides unquantified feedback. Take that for whatever its worth.

Also, its unlikely that the current drop rates are inconsistent with the design target, since they've already been verified by a number of player-testers. The devs don't have anything to datamine. What I'm suggesting is that a complaint about drop rates would be more interesting to the devs if it was quantified at all. If you say "I haven't gotten a drop in a month and that's not fun" that doesn't tell them if your activity level is so low there would be no expectation to have a drop in that month. And the devs cannot address the issue of players wanting to put in vastly lower levels of activity and still get a high frequency of drops for something intended to be difficult to acquire. If you say "I've run about a hundred missions at 0x1 and been trying to clear them all and I've still not gotten a shard" that is a much more meaningful complaint to the devs. It explains at least what you think the minimum activity level required to achieve a shard should be, and states that you are seeing a much lower level of drops. "I've only seen three in a month and a half" doesn't communicate meaningful information from a design perspective. We're not talking about datamining the game mechanics (technically, players rarely have access to data that they can legitimately "datamine" anyway - datamining is not the same thing as "collecting data"), just being more specific about your observations.

Its like saying "I die too often." Well, how often is too often? "Its not my job to count, its just unfun and the devs should fix it" is not a reasonable response to the question "how often is too often?"

Now, I'm only suggesting a way to make feedback more effective. Posters are still free to provide feedback in any way they see fit. Keeping in mind that this right comes concurrent with the right of other posters to either disagree with that feedback or question its foundations.

Your perspective on tankers is Superman punching a hole through intestines and your perspective on blasters is Superman packing Macross Missile Massacre firepower. I now have a perverse need to know what you need to enjoy Defenders. I'm guessing Red Kryptonite is involved.

Being interested in Asian entertainment doesn't make you crazy. Being crazy helps, though.

I think the word you're looking for is "deterministic" not "objective." And any system that rewards kills, deterministic or statistical, will favor those who can kill faster. XP is similarly "skewed" towards mass killing. Ultimately, any system that rewards combat is going to reward the players that a) player more and b) kill faster.

The system is actually skewed towards teaming, not "mass killing." Shard rates jump roughly proportionately to team size due to shard drop mechanics, and task force activities have deterministic guaranteed component rewards for completion. The only people that could possibly be experiencing a low drop rate are soloers that do not run (higher) task forces and kill very slowly. *All* of this game's reward systems reward that subset of players vastly slower than all other players.

I'm not sure how to evaluate how unlucky you are because shards don't drop based on subscription time, but based on kills. If you've racked up fifty thousand kills in a month and a half, I'd say you were terribly unlucky. If you've only generated two thousand kills, you might even be ahead of the game. You could run herostats and start checking on the number of kills you make per session and over a week or month, and see if the drops per kill (which would be fuzzy because shard drop rates vary by rank) are unreasonably low. And you should be sure you're actually killing targets capable of dropping shards, which are basically targets level 50 and higher.

Thinking very conservatively, I'd expect a soloer running at base difficulty claering (or nearly clearing) missions such as newspaper or tip missions to be defeating 30-40 targets, plus some boss-type thing at the end (which could be scaled to an LT). Assuming an average of 35 minion targets only, and one LT on top, you should average one shard every 25 such missions. At a reasonable 15 minutes per mission, that's about 6 hours of play per shard. It takes 12 shard equivalents to craft a common alpha, and you're guaranteed one from Ramiel. Assuming you have enough vanguard merits to craft a Grai, that's 7 shards remaining or 42 hours of play. Assuming you start from zero, that's 11 shards remaining or 66 hours of play.

This is the floor. No one who teams will take this long. No one who plays at higher difficulty will take this long. No one whose missions actually spawn LTs will take this long. Only soloers who never team, never run at higher difficulty, never fight Lts in their missions except maybe at the end, don't have enough merits to craft a Grai, and average 15 minutes per standard mission will take this long on average.

Such a person would have also taken over ten hours to level from 49 to 50. And I should point out that if I make the more reasonable assumption that one in five targets is an LT, the time to level decreases by only a few percent, but the calculated shard rate more than doubles (cutting the earning times down to 17 to 26 hours).

I would be interested to see recorded statistics that imply a reasonable scenario generating a far lower shard drop rate than this.