Arcanaville

In all industries, there are going to be those that want their competition to fail, either because it then leaves more opportunities for themselves, or simply because they don't like the competition.

However, I find that with long term professionals, particularly ones confident in their professional ability, that is less likely to be true. When I'm looking at "the competition" I rarely root for them to fail. I would actually rather they succeed, by my definition of success (which is to say, I want them to do good work and get paid for it: I don't consider doing shoddy work and getting paid for it "success" so much as "fraud.")

My guess is that the games industry is sufficiently small that many developers see the competition today as potential coworkers tomorrow. If you're a professional games designer, I think the last thing you want to root for is there to be one less game design company on Earth. No one works at the same company forever.

In a sense they are gear, but from a game design and gameplay perspective they are actually a form of power progression system. In that sense, they have more in common with epic power pools and even the level scalers than "gear."

The incarnate powers are what you do when you want power progression, but not level segmentation. I.e. You want people to level beyond 50, but you do not want to add a level 51. The Incarnate powers are giving us the power we would have had at level 51, 52, 53 and so on without having to introduce new combat levels. And in the process doing it in a more interesting way than adding more combat levels.

But incarnate content isn't gear locked per se. It's progress locked in a way different than standard level, gear, or content gating. But while the technology is different, the concept is no different fundamentally than anything CoH has ever had in it's design. Progressional gating is a fundamental element of this game, even if it has ways of bypassing that in some cases. It's such an obvious extrapolation from basic MMO design and how this game has always worked that I haven't had to change what I've been saying about how the incarnate system will work since the devs first hinted at it, before anyone knew anything about it. From then till now I've had to say absolutely nothing different about how the end game progressional system would work. It's that predictable, that inevitable, and that similar to what we've always seen.

I'm not saying that because I'm guessing: I'm saying that because I've counted.

People forget that the distance problems with Vulcan and the Ice planet are mirrored perfectly in the distance problems in WoK between Genesis and the Mutara Nebula. The Genesis torpedo is much more magical than Red Matter. How did the Reliant not notice how many planets Ceti Alpha had? How did the Reliant scan the planet looking for even tiny traces of microbial life and miss finding several dozen people, plus a planet full of killer worms. Also, metal structures?

Although Abrams Trek did have the ridiculous plot point of having academy students crew star fleet vessels on an actual mission. Oh, wait. But Abrams used the ludicrous plot coincidence of finding Scotty on the planet Kirk happens to land on. Its not like the Regula space station was manned by a someone with an incredible coincidental relationship to Kirk. But at least WoK didn't invent an entire relationship out of whole cloth like Abrams did with Spock and Uhura. Like a previously unmentioned wife and son.

I loved WoK: I still think its one of the best Trek movies, if not the best. But the slam on Abrams that it has plot and science holes is I think disingenuous given the rose-colored glasses that are used to view the other movies. I think it was different in tone and visual style, and not everyone appreciated the change, and they are looking for specific reasons to explain their disagreement over the overall movie.

They were a paying customer when they got the name before you. That was the only moment their interests were considered. At this moment, its not your interests weighed against that of a non-playing player. Its your interests weighed against that of NCSoft wanting the option to reattract a prior player. And their interest in the name outweighs yours.

I've been here since practically release, and I've seen uncountable numbers of reactivation weekends bring back players, and players just plain come back. I know this number is non-trivial, especially because they are explicitly targeted by NCSoft.

Given that I know it is a problem, the only question for me is whether its worth it to create a problem just to mitigate an existing problem by likely just a few percent. And if I was in charge, the answer would be an unambiguous "no." That's the default position: to change my mind you would have to convince me that the problem being created is definitely lower in magnitude than the small part of the problem being mitigated. And I don't see how that is likely, given what's been said in the past about the numbers of names freed in previous purges.

Basically, I can prove purges create a problem, and I can prove purges don't solve a problem. So that's a bad thing by default without proof the trade is a good one for the game which I cannot prove, nor have I seen a valid proof of.

I'm not saying I'm opposed to a purge because I don't believe people are entitled to those names. I'm opposed to a purge because I believe it creates image problems. I believe the entitlement argument has no value as counter to that.

I think advantages and disadvantages relative to CoX are mostly irrelevant to that game. It will succeed or fail based on its internal merits. If it had the same mount of content that CoX has now that would help, and not having it hurts, but I think that would be true whether CoX existed or not.

Therer seems to be both a quantitative absolute minimum and qualitative relative minimum amount of content that a launching title has to have to succeed. The quantitative minimum is the minimum necessary to prevent leveling gaps given all possible reasonable modes of leveling, as the game defines its normal gameplay to be. That is a deal breaker if it is not there. The qualitative minimum is a subjective level of content that allows the average player - itself a fuzzy target - to not repetitively run the current content into the ground between launch day and when the next content update arrives. There's no way to launch with as much content as an established game like WoW or CoX has had seven years to build up. But there is a minimum you have to reach to prevent player complaints about it from reaching a critical mass.

Its also technically gated by game progress: you have to be level 35 to run it.

I think its not a far cry to say the featured addition of the game in I19 was incarnates. However, it is a far cry to say that the issue was dominated solely by incarnate content.

Issue 19 added the Alpha slot, the Ramiel Incarnate arc, the Apex Task Force, and the Tin Mage Task force as incarnate content.

It also added two new story arcs, added Calvin Scott to flashback, added new alignment missions, three Praetorian zone events, six powersets of alternate power animations, an update to the train system, some additional quality of life additions tot he game (i.e. log to character select), updates to AE components, and inherent fitness.

I'd say roughly 30%-40% of Issue 19 was Incarnate-related, depending on how you want to weigh different content components. However, the *new* thing will always be the main attraction of any Issue. If Issue 22 added a hundred new story arcs, twenty new task forces, updates to Atlas and Galaxy, proliferated SR and Ninjitsu to Tankers, eliminated the pause in door clicks, rebalanced XP curves, normalized merit costs, fixed all the bugged power description text, added a dance emote that replicates the entire Thriller video, and added the ability to shape change, Issue 22 would be the shape-changing issue.

If you're waiting for Issue 25: Nothing New Here, But More of the Stuff You Already Had, I would probably stop waiting.

We will finally be united with our NCSoft brothers in hating the living crap out of it.

What CoH had was a lack of competition to make it painfully obvious what a content gap does to the game. Street sweeping helped, and in fact at one point it was better XP than missions anyway, but I think if CoH launched today with the same kinds of gaps it had at launch, it would die a quick death. It was a mistake we were allowed to make, but no other MMO will ever be allowed to make. Today you're punished for content gaps in a way totally unknown to CoH when it launched.

I knew they'd get you eventually, Nate. May god have mercy on your soul.

I have never understood this position. You're saying if you can't get the name you want you'd be upset, unless you knew for certain it was taken by an active player, in which case you don't care as much. In effect, this implies the issue is not a character naming issue at all, but an entitlement issue.

For me, this whole topic boils down to this: only one player can have a name. If you want it and an inactive player has it, the notion that freeing it will mean you can have it is spurious at best: most likely if it is a popularly sought name it only means someone else will get it, not you. Only if its a name that you and one other person, ever wanted is it likely you'd get it in a purge.

Whether we purge names or not is not a question of choosing one player over another, one paying and one not. For every player that returns and finds all his characters names messed with, that one player is going to tell others, and others. I acknowledge that the same thing is true for players that can't get the names they want. But we can avoid the purge problem entirely by simply not doing it. We cannot avoid the name-frustration problem at all because purges don't solve it.

The calculus of that tells me that purges are not a good idea for the game as a whole, and this is a decision that should be based on the game as a whole.

People seem to forget that WoK had as many if not more plot holes than the Abrams Trek, but we forgive that because a) at the time it was totally cool, and b) you know, Khaaaaaaaaan!

Doubly meaningless because the article seems to conflate "profits" and "revenue" making it impossible to know which one was meant, if not something else entirely. I haven't listened to the podcast to know for certain which was originally stated.

My guess though is that its revenue not profits. That's definitely a good thing, but impossible to know how that affects profitability because it depends on their original operating costs verses their current ones, which aren't necessarily the same. In fact, if F2P attracted a lot of new players, the costs to operate the infrastructure necessary to support them almost certainly went up.

Those are columns not rows.


There was no uncommon salvage in beta.


Ah, picking on the devs never gets old. Six years from now, I hope to be torturing developers who weren't even out of grade school when this game launched. One day Synapse' son will be working at Paragon Studios and saying "paw, was Arcana this much of a **** when you were a developer?" and he'll be saying "son, you don't know the half of it: in my day Arcana could still type fast and see out of both eyes: those were the days."

This may sound weird, but in my opinion the fault happened further upstream. Even with someone like me writing guides and posting explanations, the simple fact of the matter is if it takes someone to explain it, you've already lost: most players won't hear the explanation, won't understand the explanation, or will forget the explanation.

If you want PvP (and for that matter PvE) mechanics to be understandable, you have to start with the explanation and then implement the game to match the explanation.

Here's a generic example of what I mean. Suppose I was writing this game from scratch, and I wanted to explain what Combat Jumping did in terms of defense. I would *like* to say that it causes you to dodge 5% of the attacks that would have hit you if it wasn't on. That's simple enough: with it off: X. With it on: 0.95 X. But I can't because what it does depends on what you have. If you have no defenses, it does this. If you have a lot, it does that. And when the attacker has tohit buffs, break out the calculator. I can do all of this in my head basically instantly, but its not intuitive. The problem is that I have to *devise* an explanation for what CJ does, given what it does.

If you want to make casual friendly mechanics - which was the goal of the original dev team including Statesman - you have to start with the explanation. CJ reduces incoming hits by 5% period. Then I would make the game work that way so the explanation was accurate.

Similarly, but much more difficult given we're integrating into an existing game, I would have written out the *simple* explanation for what was going to go on in PvP first, and then made the mechanics work that way. And I would have tested the explanations on an eight year old. If he don't get it, its too hard.

That doesn't mean PvP itself has to be simple: the complexity just comes from the diversity of powers and player tactics, not opaque mechanics. Real life is governed by less physical laws than CoX's game engine enforces, and that doesn't seem to limit the complexity of real life.

Some people may find this surprising, but I think CoX's mechanics are too complicated to understand, and ironically too simple to compute. That combination of easy formulas but hard to intuit concepts means min/maxers have too much of an advantage. I would go the other way around: use very complex formulas to simulate very simple to understand mechanics. Think that is a contradiction? Check this out:

This is the current way defense works in CoX:

NTH = Acc * [BTH + HTB - Sum(Defense)]

Conceptually?

Defensive percentages are percentage points subtracted cumulatively from Base tohit prior to the application of all accuracy factors to generate a final to hit percentage.

Ok. Now try this out:

NTH = Acc * [BTH + HTB] * (1 - D1) * (1 - D2) * (1 - D3) ...

And conceptually?

Defense percentages are the percentage of attacks you'd dodge if the power was on, relative to if it was turned off.



Another observation: in its current form, or for that matter in any of its previous forms, CoX PvP has always favored disorganized PvP rather than organized PvP. I know that is not what you meant, but its still true: organized team PvP is the purview of the experts: a good PvPer will win most of the time against an inferior foe, but a good PvP team will win every time against any team not explicitly of comparable skill and experience. Skill should matter, but less experienced teams should at least be able to get lucky - not in terms of random rolls, but in terms of being able to surprise the other team with something novel. No matter how good you are, you should not be able to prepare against everything. Otherwise, no one will fight you except for the few people in your league, and that makes for a barrier to PvP all its own.

There is a place for team tournament caliber PvP, but I think the "casuals" need a more chaotic environment. Think the open mass PvP from near the end of CoV beta. Or even to a certain point the pick up PvP from that other game. You can't throw newbees into situations the experienced PvPers have full knowledge, control, and experience with, and have all the variables covered. There has to be a random element to it, random as in limited chaos or unpredictability.

I don't think I would characterize this as an argument. Its an argument in the same sense that a child asking "are we there yet" and the parent saying "no" is an argument. One of us is making a supposition. One of us is stating facts in response. That's not really an argument.

Just to be clear, and just to make sure all angles are covered, in the general case it is not true that it is easier to design, construct, operate, maintain, upgrade, or repair one large thing that performs a task relative to a lot of smaller things designed to collectively do the same task. It *can* sometimes be cheaper, in spite of that complexity, to use one big thing relative to a lot of smaller things, which is why big things are even made at all (the other reason: some tasks cannot be decomposed into smaller units).

Furthermore, this is not solely a limitation of gravity, structural integrity, or current technology.

This is not an argument. This is an observation.


I'm not sure if its possible to convince Durakken of this fact, but the simple matter is there is basically no chance of a competent engineer not drawing the conclusion that he is just making stuff up. And I have never understood why, when people are confronted with that knowledge, it does not give them pause. For me personally, its not the 99% of the population I could probably snow into believing anything I say that concern me, its the 1% that could trivially see through an attempt at fabrication that do: they are the ones whose respect I care more about, and would be forfeiting by talking crazy. Maybe its the attitude that comes from being a professional anything for a long enough period of time, but I've always felt that way.

I once argued with someone on the internet about a protocol that turned out to be one of the authors of that protocol. That argument bothered me for months after I found out that fact: I turned that argument over and over in my mind looking at it from all angles searching for either the point where I must have made an error, or alternatively the point where I failed to comprehend a possible alternate interpretation of the argument, simply because it bothered me that out there somewhere the author of the protocol thought I was bat-**** nuts. It wasn't until a couple of years later I found out that I was wrong, but in a way that a lot of people made the same error for the same reason (it had to do with the intent of a feature of the protocol, which the author obviously knew better than I, but it was documented in such a misleading way that actually *most* people interpreted it incorrectly, it turns out).

Even so, to this day I wonder if there was a way to figure that out at the time, because I hate being wrong in front of people who know I'm wrong with absolute certainty. It doesn't matter how many other people think I was right. And that's why I've always been fascinated with this sort of behavior.

Its tempting to post a face palm here, even though I know I'd be flirting with a temp ban.

How you got from:

to "I guess its the number of parts" I have no idea. Perhaps that's why you shouldn't ignore posts until you're certain you understand what they are trying to say. Take your time: you're allowed to take longer to read them than it took me to write them.

Also, if you ever apply for an engineering job of any kind, please please please make sure your employer is allowed to google search for these posts before making their decision. I believe you owe it to society. Not only are you way out in outer space, you seem to have no idea just how far beyond Pluto you are. You are so far out there that not only would I fire anyone saying this, I would fire anyone agreeing with this, and the parents of anyone agreeing with this for not bringing their child up right. There's literally no wiggle room here.

I think the kernel of truth to this statement is that the PvE game was never balanced at all originally, for teams or otherwise. PvE was designed for players to have roles on teams but it wasn't balanced for teams. PvP wasn't balanced against by any standard at all, as far as I can see, except for the trivial statement that if your team was substantively identical to the other team, you were balanced.

Although some elements of the game engine and game mechanics don't help at all, the problem was never with the game engine. The problem is that the powersets and archetypes themselves were not designed for PvP, and for balanced PvP they have to be, from the ground up. The stated design intent of Tankers is that they be able to take the damage intended for a team of four players or so. All blasters are intended to be vulnerable to mez but not all defenders are intended to provide mez protection. The only critters intended to last longer than a few seconds are Boss rank and higher, and no player has as much health as a boss critter. This is an on-paper recipe for eventual PvP disaster. When PvP was new, it was also chaotic, and chaotic is exactly the environment CoX PvP can function. Once people figured out what they were doing, CoX PvP quickly demonstrated itself to be plagued by highly optimized strategies that essentially bypassed nearly all of the functionality of nearly all powersets.

That's all numbers and spreadsheets. The real problem with PvP in CoX is this: in many games PvP is the ultimate eventual destination of everyone, or most players. Its the feature of the game: the PvE is the sideshow. In CoX, PvP is a metagame to PvE. Because of that, the goals and requirements for PvP must be substantively similar to the goals and requirements of PvE, so that players can make the jump from playing the central PvE game to playing the PvP metagame. If the build requirements, tactical requirements, mindset, and even solo/teaming dichotomy are radically and irreconcilably different between the two, then its PvP that's going to lose, both in terms of players not participating, and in terms of the developers not making it a priority. PvP must *work* like PvE in CoX in a large enough measure to not be a totally new game to succeed in CoX. Otherwise, it will always be a marginal activity, and the only question is how small the margin.

I think that was ultimately the fundamental error of the last round of PvP changes. Its one thing to upset the apple cart and annoy the existing PvP base, but if you do it by pushing PvP mechanics to be even more unrecognizable to the rest of the player population, you haven't gained anything. It will still be unpalatable to the rest of the players, and now even more unpalatable to the existing PvPers. Some changes needed to be made, but they were made with very heavy hands in many areas, and in ways that didn't attempt to bridge the PvE and PvP world, but rather rewrite the PvP world from whole cloth. Some compromise was needed because much of the PvE world is not fully compatible with fair PvP. But I think it needed to be done in a more targeted way.

In my opinion, while PvPers will say they want this mechanical change or that mechanical change, what most ultimately really want is a healthy PvP game. They want combatants. If PvP changes upset their game but bring in tons of new PvPers, I think the existing PvPers will adapt. So long as skill plays a role, they will still have the upper hand through experience. They would forgive an ugly mechanical change that generated targets. But the changes didn't do that, and I don't think they had a real chance of doing so in their current form.

Einstein's "analogy" was a thought experiment that showed that if the speed of light was not constant, different observers in the universe could observe the same region of space and witness apparently different laws of physics. Einstein believed this was impossible, and thus conjectured that, in this case, all inertial witnesses observe the laws of electromagnetics identically and thus must always measure the speed of light in a vacuum to be identical. This is the relativity principle that forms the basis of special relativity.

Its the (Lorentzian) consequences of this principle that places limits on the speed of an object under normal acceleration.

This is why your made up definition of complexity is worthless. Although the windshield is a very low complexity item of a car, removing it ought to make the car slightly less complex. There is now one less thing that needs to be maintained. You automatically lose the windshield wipers, the wiper water reservoir, the windshield defroster, etc. But even if you ignore all those things, there's now one less thing that can break. The assembly of the car takes at least one less step. The car is now in fact less complex of a machine. In terms of operation, only by a very tiny amount, but its non-zero.

This also tells me that among other things, you're not that familiar with automobiles.

You're welcome.


Although gravity is the most obvious, it isn't the source of most of the reasons why you cannot simply scale a building linearly. In fact, in the WTC towers it wasn't even the most important one. The elevator problem, for example, was a transport problem that would have been functionally identical even in a gravity-free environment. And for all the problems gravity creates, you'd be surprised how many its solves. Plumbing, for example, is non-trivial in a huge superstructure in a zero-gravity environment.


Actually, I said I was using the obvious engineering one, which is admittedly ill defined in the mathematical sense, but is colloquially very well understood to mean the relative magnitude of the number of individual systems and more importantly the number of possible interactions between them. Technically, the concept of engineering complexity is studied as either the net entropy of the engineering model, or conversely the network complexity of the systems topology, given the standard definition of network complexity.