Arcanaville

I will admit that rarely are our villains this:



and a bit more often this:



but I think that the devs at least try to give us this:



They just need more of them.

My first reaction was "why can't I walk into this train when the doors open?"

I wish I was kidding: I really really do.

If you're going to start tossing out Act of God, the gloves come off buster. Lets stick to the subject at hand, and not calling each other dyslexic alien psychotic nightmare fuel, shall we.

You don't call me Act of God retarded, I won't call your vision of tankers shouting "I am a MAN" and punching someone through the intestines.


(For a thread asking whether anyone here likes comic books, its tossing a lot of inside ball around; separate from the discussion of whether or not pronouns should have balls that is.)

Please continue.


Yeah, I've personally seen a few bad men ruin everything for women as well. Sad but true.


I have often wondered what would happen if the United States was ever invaded by a country that fielded an all-female army. I'm assuming it would go something like this: our men would shoot at them, but deliberately miss. Their women would get all hot and sweaty hauling their gear to the front lines, and have to take off their camos and pour ice cold water over their white undershirts. Our men would then retire to their bunks and surrender the field.

And if someone wants to remake Red Dawn for Cinemax, I expect my cut.

I don't think we need to ask if they are truly into your interpretation of it: I'll go out on a limb and say "no."

They do come closer to my interpretation of it, so at least they are batting .500 there.

Actually, that's what I said: Sister Psyche says there's a deeper cause to the origin of abilities that we normally classify as mutation, which means there's a deeper cause than just genetic mutation. Genetic mutation is the trigger for such abilities, but something changed in the world that made those genetic mutations work that way. It still doesn't change the definition of the Mutant origin, because even if mutation works with some other fundamental cause of powers, that doesn't alter the question of given the five current origins as we understand them, how should we classify the origin of a particular person's power.

Of course its possible that what we call origins is somewhat artificial, and in the past or on other worlds or in other dimensions the source of powers is defined to have different origin types arbitrarily. But of course, if the origins are somewhat arbitrary or there are even potentially more (than just Incarnate), we still can't use them in the game now, which means they aren't currently relevant to the question of either which origin to classify something as, or alternatively which method do the writers of the game tend to use, which could contradict some other alternate interpretation by the players. As mentioned, the Peacebringers are Natural. We're not guessing they're natural and we could be wrong. They are canonically natural. The writers could, in the future, introduce a storyline that changes that. But because that has actual gameplay impact - on the enhancement types that Peacebringers can use, for example - that seems unlikely to me.

Unfortunately, origin exists in a funny twilight where the devs don't want to leverage it too much in gameplay, because they want it to be a "free option" for the players. But gameplay and lore is sufficiently entangled with origin that its not a completely free choice in the sense that some things depend on it (enhancements, stores, etc) and some storylines imply particular aspects of origins canonically. That makes it difficult to integrate more than it is now, and difficult to disentangle any more than it is now. Its sort of painted into a corner at the moment.

I don't believe that contradicts what I said, unless you think I implied the rule only applies to Earth-native human beings when I said "people." Superman gets his powers because its natural for beings that happen to have his biology to have them, and more importantly Superman's backstory implies such abilities are even possible regardless of biology.

By my stated definition of the Natural Origin, Superman is natural as are the Peacebringers. Superman is not magic, which places him in the "non-magic umbrella." He's not a mutant, in that he is not a genetic abnormality. He does not derive his powers through technology. He does have powers that did not explicitly require scientific research or inquiry, but are said to be theoretically possible to exist in his reality naturally - without deliberate technological effort or the uncovering of scientific principles that would lead (deliberately or accidentally) to extraordinary ability. Therefore he is Natural origin.

You need Warren Ellis in there to complete the set. The Chair Leg of Truth commands it.

Sister Psyche implies in the Origin of Power arc that genetic mutation isn't the sole story behind people who have power that appears to come from genetic mutation: that there is some deeper thing at work. But that isn't really about whether our understanding of the mutant origin is invalid in the metagaming sense: Sister Psyche is doing what all the Origin of Power contacts seem to be intending to do, which is to imply that there is a root cause to all superpowers that transcends the five origins. Which is possibly a reference to the revelation that the Well of Furies is the source of all Incarnate power, and possibly ultimately the source of all power.

Yeah. Think one boss, two Lts, and five minions, and you're in the ballpark of the idea I'm thinking of (the spawn composition used by Circeus' Ice tanker comparisons). Then add in a two-phase computation: an average one for minion damage, and a more stochastic one for boss (higher) damage. And combine the two with a methodology that essentially uses minion damage to estimate health trends and boss damage to calculate the chance of being killed per attack superimposed on the varying health due to minion damage. Sort of a "constant damage slowly whittles you down, and at some critically low level one big hit kills you." That's sort of how scrappers tend to die now, actually. But to make it work with the simplest possible calculations is the challenging part.

Also:

I wrote one of those, but it was in python and text-only, with some ugly graphs tacked onto the side with duct tape. I'm too lazy these days to write a full-blown windows app for that kind of stuff. Also, to generate histograms you had to run tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of simulation runs to generate reasonably smooth curves. The results of that sort of thing are in my Scrapper analysis. Some involving millions of simulation runs.

A real windows app that did that, but updated and with more complex conditions; that's more the sort of thing that my European counterpart would have been up to. Dr. Rock, who I once heard described as "the Arcanaville of the Euro boards" (presumably in terms of damage mitigation, not insanity) actually wrote a windows app that did, way way back in I6, more or less what my powerset proliferation spreadsheet did in I10 in Excel, and my scrapper comparisons in I2, I3, I4, I5, and I7, but in a Windows app with graphs. But they too used average equations. In fact, Dr. Rock's equations are essentially identical to the ones I first generated for my scrapper comparison analyses from I2 to I7, but I understand he independently generated them for his own purposes.

Also, a quick search on the internet shows that his comparison app is still available for download and was last updated for Issue 11: http://dr.rock.coh.tripod.com/. Its a nice app: sort of a hybrid between Mids and my damage spreadsheet. It still uses average calculations, but a lot of the stuff my damage spreadsheet has is also there: damage type proportions and defense/resistance/regen calculations, and lots of combat assumptions I discuss but do not calculate around in my scrapper comparisons. Its not a well-known tool (and I don't know why, besides the fact that Dr. Rock was a European board member), but it is an interesting one if for no other reason than to read Dr. Rock's calculation methodology and his combat calculator options, all of which are reasonably well founded.

To be a mutant, there has to be a genetic cause of your powers. Just being born able to do magic doesn't make you a mutant, even if it runs in families (i.e. Sourcery). The same thing is true even in CoH: the Mu have familial sources of magical ability, but they are not mutants.

Since even science is caused by magic on the discworld, I'd say that all powers there have a magical cause. None of them are science or mutation. Theoretically speaking technology can work on the discworld, but only under very special sets of circumstances: there isn't that much technology on the disc that isn't controlled ultimately by magic.

In CoH, even when magical ability is "natural" that is considered magic, not natural origin. Natural presumes no supernatural ability. What it actually presumes is something tricky: that in the world of City of Heroes its possible for normal people to do things that normal people cannot do in the real world.

In the movie Last Action Hero Jack Slater can survive wounds that would kill a normal person. But he doesn't have magical abilities to do so: that is what is "normal" in the Jack Slater world. Similarly, a person who is a "natural" energy blaster has somehow figured out how to unlock the natural potential of human beings to project kinetic energy. In the real world, no such ability exists, but it does in the fictional comic book world of City of Heroes.

I would like to see the world continue to be populated by humans, and that unfortunately limits my options.

I admit, I LOLed, but it'll be equal in the sense there won't be any comic books anymore.

Well, there will still be comic books, but the readership will distill itself down to a very specific group of people. And that group is not called "women."

I'm reminded of a joke about two men in a lifeboat. One takes out a pistol and shoots a hole into the bottom of the boat right next to the other guy, and water starts leaking into the boat. He fires another shot right next to the other guy and water starts leaking into the boat from that hole. The other guy pulls out his pistol and says "two can play that game..."

Oversexualizing men in comics would be fair on paper, but not really in real life. It would be like telling a woman who got flashed on the street by someone to get even by flashing them back. Fairness is not always symmetrical, because people aren't.

That is a potential problem, but its one instance of the more general problem, because we already have a plethora of similar names with no guard against people making visually similar names. And not just the weird punctuation stuff; I can already make Dark Death Knell if Death Knell is already taken, or even if it is not. Then someone else can make Death Dark Knell. And probably already has.

And its one of the reasons I said I'm not sure I entirely like the idea, I just think this one is better than the original Global@Local one. Both ideas have the problem you specify, but my variant doesn't appear to have it to a noticeably higher degree.

The maximum cap is not on regen itself, but on regen strength. In other words, regen buffing. Just like there's no actual damage cap: the cap is not on actual damage, but on damage buffing.

Its archetype-specific, but for blasters its 2000% maximum (or +1900%). Which means blaster regen can be buffed up to 20x normal. Base blaster regen (same for all player characters except for VEATs) is 100% health in four minutes (240s). So that is 0.4167% of your health bar per second, or about 0.42%/sec. That's percent of your health bar per second.

Twenty times that is 20 x 0.4167%/sec = 8.334%/sec, or about 8.33%/sec. That's 8.33 percent of your health bar per second. The "of your health bar" is the part that is missing from the abbreviated Real Numbers display.

Most caps in the game are on strength (buffing) not values (stuff after buffing).

I mention titles only because they already exist, so its easy to point to as an example of a similar system. I wouldn't appropriate titles for this purpose for the reason you specify: people have randomly picked multiple long winded titles just because they can and it currently doesn't clutter up the name space.

But if I *want* to be The Dark Salacious Fearful Death Knell then even if we switched to Global@Local with no prefix options I can still be a relatively unwieldy name by simply setting my global to "TheDarkSalaciousFearful-" and as long as it fits in the blank that's what I would be known as. You can't really stop me from being unwieldy if I want to be (short of the maximum field lengths), but you can design the system to prevent a player from being *forced* to be unwieldy.

The point to the suggestion was that if people actually think Global@Local is a good idea in terms of making names unique, there's no reason not to simply say that Prefix@Local (or Prefix-Local, or PrefixSomethingLocal) must be unique and allow players to put in something other than their global handle in there. There's no computational difference, and no namespace difference. The fallback is always Global@Local which is guaranteed unique, but if the player can find *another* SomethingLocal combination that is *also* unique, why not allow them to use it? I can't see what problem that creates, in that it has all the benefits of Global@Local but with one more option available to the player.

Women are told to go to places they don't want to go and support an armed conflict they may not personally agree with while being shot at. They are just not allowed to be specifically tasked with shooting back. That is, to my way of thinking, an odd limitation.

In any case, what is and is not a privilege depends on what the person voluntarily desires. Just because serving in a front line combat role in the armed forces is not something you consider a privilege, doesn't mean its not a privilege that is denied to women who think differently. I wouldn't consider it a personal privilege to be told to cut open people I don't know and remove things I wouldn't want to touch while being sued by other people, but it would still be a denied privilege if we barred all women from being surgeons.

The prefix would be adjustable per character, specifically to avoid the problem you describe which would occur if Global@Local was adopted. You wouldn't want to force someone to be known as ClownPants@Death Knell. That particular bit of cognitive dissonance should be optional on the part of the player.

The statistical average models do suffer from those problems at the extremes, something I tried to quantify in my Scrapper Comparison magnum opus. But they do have at least one advantage over more accurate models: people can use them. There are more accurate models: I even suggested one years ago and did initial work on it, as did I believe two other posters: the stochastic Monte Carlo Markov model. It attempts to calculate the probability of a set of different sequences of events to generate a survivability percentage histogram. In the case where incoming damage is a low percentage of health per second on average, this model and the average calculations are in close agreement. At the extremes, the Markov diverges and closely tracks the true survival percentage provided the Markov partitions are small enough.

The problem with this model is I wouldn't bet on more than a dozen forum readers being qualified to generate it and crazy enough to expend the effort. At the moment, however, I am unaware of a more accurate model that can actually be used by most players effectively. All the ones that have been proposed have been, to be frank, utter nonsensical crap.

I keep thinking about an alternate model, one that is less complex than the Markov, but more accurate than the average one, that might be more easily computable with assistance - i.e. a spreadsheet. But I haven't found the right approach yet that generates better results than the average model without being too difficult for players to use effectively. However, the key component of this model is that it uses Spawn groups as the unit of incoming damage, which allows us to sort of "precompute" some of the complexities of the more general model. Its actually inspired by the *oldest* models of CoH mitigation that were worth anything at all: the Havok (and later Circeus) tanker spreadsheets.

I always thought the gender neutral English pronoun was "Dude!"

When CO launched and the subject of the Global@Local thing came up, I suggested the alternative of having a freeform prefix that would *default* to global, but which the player could override with something else if they did not want to be known that way. So instead of one of my characters being known as Arcanaville@Violet Rumble, I could override that and be TheAwesome_Violet Rumble or whatever. The burden would then be on me to find an alternate unique prefix. The exact mechanics of this would need very careful refinement, particularly in how players show up in chat, in teams, in team listings, in Supergroups, etc, and preserve some of the existing rules regarding names (like for example the name above would be illegal because only GMs can have underscores in their names).

We could even expand the current prefix system so that my server-wide unique name could be The Unstoppable Violet Rumble and everyone would have to pick a unique set of prefixes to attach to their local name (the first player to pick that name could elect to have no prefixes, since that would be unique at the time).

The advantage of a prefix system is that it could be expanded or enhanced to make local names globally unique without resorting to forcing people to use global handles, allow people more freeform control over their visible names, and allow for a potential future where either shardless or cross-server teaming became possible. Those are things purges can't do.

I'm not sure I exactly like the idea, but I think it has promise and would likely be more palatable to more people. It can be sold as adding more possibilities rather than allocating existing ones.

I'm still waiting for a Bowel Disruptor temp power, though.

It is rare that someone actually asks me to demonstrate improved language skills. That's the sort of set up you normally have to pay real money for.

In any case, brainstorming options for a possible purge is not something I think has no value: it may happen that a specific option for a purge will suggest a line of argument that simultaneously justifies the existence of the purge in the first place. However, I do think that most suggestions take as an axiomatic assumption that some sort of purge is necessary, and only looks at minimizing the costs of such a purge. I don't think that will cut to the core issue of justifying the existence of a purge in the first place and represents a critical fundamental flaw of all suggestions that start with that premise. A suggestion that doesn't assume a purge is necessary but justifies one without that assumption would not only be more likely to be practical to implement, it would also be more likely to be acceptable to a wider audience.

Every suggestion I've ever made to the devs has always started not by answering the question "how?" but rather answering the question "why?" Almost always, knowing the answer to "why?" automatically points to the answer to "how?" You do it in the best possible way to address the why.

For example, if you're doing it to increase subscriptions, the suggestion should logically maximize the number of players you retain by offering names they would otherwise not have, while minimzing the number of players you lose by resubscriptions to purged accounts. If on the other hand you're doing it to make some sort of statement about being "fair" to the playerbase, even if it doesn't actually solve the problem of people not getting the names they want, then the suggestion should feature as a component a very visible way for the players to know that fact: offering, perhaps, to tell the player when a name is unavailable *why* its unavailable: its currently being used by an active subscriber. Rather than have player names quietly expire due to inactivity, it might be better to have a loud, visible purge process where every six months, say, there is "name freeing friday" where those names are purged and players know to try them again. It becomes a marketable and visible mechanic. And if you are doing it so that every one can have the name they want even if its already taken, perhaps a purge is not even the best way to do that, and an alternative like a direct system of supporting name prefixes would make more sense.

By not defining the purpose to a purge, except to release the names taken by older inactive accounts, you set the stage for the justification of the purge being nothing more than targeting those accounts and reclaiming their stuff, for no other reason except that they don't deserve it. And that then guides the brainstorming process accordingly, and in a direction I find unpalatable personally. It might eventually lead to a suggestion that I do find palatable, but only by coincidence.

I gave the business logic behind how I would make the decision if I was responsible for making it. Here's my personal opinion looking at it if I was, say, the executive producer or the chief designer. I would ask myself this question: would I want to be known as the designer that allowed people to come back to the game confident that their characters would still be intact and pay the price that I would also be known as the designer that was stupid enough to prioritize people who might never come back over actual paying customers, or would I like to be known as the game designer that tried to offer the best possible set of options to the existing customers and pay the price of also being known as the designer that made the game unwelcoming to returning customers trying to reconnect with the game. That's now a strictly subjective decision as to what sort of values I would be comfortable being known for having, knowing I will be seen as both a champion and an idiot by some subset of people. And I would personally choose the former over the latter.

Even as just a player commenting on suggestions, I don't mind being someone that is known for having those values, and I don't mind being someone that is known for asserting them strongly either.

All five origins cover a lot of ground individually except for one really (mutation). My point was that these two are not contradictory when placed under the Science origin.

Science is a special case origin in another sense, and that is in some ways it is defined by what it is not. Really, there are only two explanations for all superpowers in CoH: the ones that can be explained by Science, and the ones that cannot (which we call Magic). Science, Technology, Mutation, and Natural are all fundamentally based on scientific principles.

The Science Origin, however, is essentially defined as any origin involving scientific principles that does not involve a genetic mutation as the source of those powers (Mutation), does not implement itself with high technology to effect those powers (Technology), and isn't something that requires no fundamental scientific inquiry to discover (Natural).

In other words, if its not magic, and its not technology, and its not a mutation, and its not something natural, then its science.

In terms of how the origins are typically used, there are two "Super-Origins" - Science and Magic. Technology, Natural, and Mutation are all subclasses of Science. Not in an "Origins of Power" lore sense, but in terms of how the origins seem to be chosen.