Arcanaville

All that would do is eliminate any confidence by sellers that they won't be swamped by cheap market influxes, and destroy the sell side of the market. You might as well replace the markets with stores at that point: what's the point of having players set prices in between the periods when the devs swoop in and destroy that economy.


I have some thoughts on how to improve market conditions, including addressing influence sinks, but at this point you can't just implement half-baked tweaks: the players will just trade their way around them. You need a combination of two things: increased participation and rational influence sinks.

There needs to be lower barriers to participation and better incentives to participate. By creating off-market merit-based purchasing systems, the devs kicked the legs out of the markets. That was a mistake. Not in adding them in the first place, but in not thinking through how they would affect the markets and how they might be integrated into the markets.

Consider this: when we use merits or tickets to buy a specific item, rather than *create* the item and give it to the player, the system could have created a "coupon" that allowed you to buy it from the market at the current best price, and essentially buy it from a player rather than the game. In isolation, this would have issues because there would be the possibility of exhausting supply, but its an example of a way to integrate the merit systems with the markets rather than distracting from or diverting away from them. It prevents the merit and ticket economies from sucking demand away from the sellers, but the players get their stsuff all the same.

Inflation is actually a minor problem relative to the bigger problem of liquidity. The more items being traded, the easier it is to apply fixes to other problems such as inflation. But one way to draw significant influence from the player population is with controlled selling of high-priced items that are very thinly traded. Hypothetically speaking, suppose I was in charge of the markets, and I had an in-game alt specifically designated for this purpose that received daily a set of items in roughly the same proportions that they drop in game, and my job was to seed the markets with these items. Rather than flood the markets with them, though, I would act as a market maker, trying to facilitate sales by reducing spreads and creating just enough order flow to make players confident that orders would execute in reasonable amounts of time. Adding liquidity and confidence in that manner could draw in more participants, and certainly reduce wide bid/ask spreads by forcing players to meet in the middle (without giving any preference to bidders or sellers). If such a process could be automated, or at least automated to some degree with dev oversight (it would have to be someone that understands market making), that could simultaneously be an influence sink (rather than trading items for influence with some overhead, the market maker in effect converts influence into items, destroying influence in the process) and encourage more people to use the markets.

This presupposes, by the way, that the number of items goes down. The whole "recipes at every single level" thing was a bad idea: I would downscale it all to recipes only at five level intervals, with the caveat that you can always slot inventions at the next tier (level 16s could slot level 20s because level 19s don't exist any more). If we had a million subscribers, it might make sense to have ten thousand different recipes for sale. We don't have the volume for that to be sane.

One more peculiarity I'd like to mention. One thing that screws with the influence/item ratio that isn't talked about too much is that its easy to max out your item slots (salvage and recipes) but not as easy for most players to max out their influence. So its often the case that players are running around no longer getting drops because they are full, but still getting influence because they are not capped. I'd want to fix that. One interesting way to do that is to set up a system so that any drop you get that you cannot accept because you are full automatically gets sent to the markets and listed for some fixed price based on the item. The price would be deliberately low so it executed fast, and even if it doesn't sell for some reason this special sale doesn't take up any of your limited market slots. In this way, none of these drops gets "lost" to the playerbase as a whole. Someone somewhere would get them (except perhaps for common salvage that no one wants, which would just accumulate in the markets - a different problem to solve). And you would never know what they were: the system would not show them to you. So no "oh my god I lost that purple because I forgot to sell, holy crap!" moments. And no matter what the item was, you would only get the standard rate for them. If it was a expensive item that someone just paid 100 million for, that influence would be quietly destroyed by the markets. You still get more than what you would have gotten for those drops, which would otherwise get lost, other players get to benefit from a drop the game should have generated but the limited inventories would have ordinarily prevented from coming into existence, and even more influence would get destroyed.

There are lots of potentially creative ideas that attempt to work with the markets to improve their functioning rather than simply swamping or destroying them.

Backstories are always more interesting, and less interesting, than people tend to guess.

An amusingly esoteric way of illustrating the two possible meanings for the phrase "negative subscribers."

Actually, its a continuity glitch that in the Abrams timeline, Vulcans and/or Humans must have made some contact with the Romulans that did not happen in the original timeline. In the original TOS timeline, humans had not seen a Romulan (in a manner that was widely reported) until the incident with the Enterprise. Spock theorizes at that time that Romulans might be an offshoot of Vulcans, something he implies is not a certain fact. But in the Abrams timeline, Spock states to Kirk that Romulans and Vulcans are related as a matter of fact statement without any controversy or doubt. That suggests events happened a little differently after the Kelvin incident than just Kirk's childhood history.


I would imagine that a planetary evacuation is not something that happens often, if almost ever. There was no evidence of a threat to the entire planet, and at the time the technology probably didn't exist to destroy a planet so completely. When a mysterious starship appears overhead and starts firing a weapon at the ground, I really don't think your first option is to evacuate the planet. You'd think that the big scary ship that just destroyed the starfleet expeditionary force might obliterate your evacuation fleet as well, or at least sizeable fractions of it.

As soon as Spock realized what Nero was doing, he ordered Uhura to signal a planetary evacuation. The planet was destroyed just a couple of minutes later. That's not a lot of time to evacuate an entire planet. And as far as I can see, there were only two modes of escape from Vulcan. One: board a shuttle and take off really fast. Two: find a transporter room that can beam you on board the Enterprise. And they didn't have long: even before Spock beamed up its clear large parts of the planet were already unstable or uninhabitable.

If you pick and choose what parts of canon to accept, you're writing canon, not critiquing in.

I know my own Claws/Dark Melee/Fiery Aura/Shield scrapper is totally awesome, and doesn't even have build up.


Jeez, that reminds me: all the time I've been spending collecting shards to fill alpha slots has distracted me from leveling that KM/FA I was working on. I have to get that to 35 so I can see the PS/FE combination in action in real leveling play (as opposed to an autoleveled 50).

But that's a bit of a semantic quibble, because the Vulcans themselves don't consider those people "Vulcans" (and neither do those people) so when Spock estimates that only ten thousand Vulcans survived, that's a reasonable estimate that doesn't count Romulans or other ancient Vulcan offshoots.

Technically, the movie never asserts that only ten thousand genetic Vulcans are still alive. The character of Spock states his belief that only about ten thousand Vulcans, as he considers Vulcans, are likely to be alive. The reasonableness of his assertion has to be judged based on his perspective when he made the statement.

A perfectly reasonable theory is that colonization itself was an aggressive behavior suppressed after the time of Surak, and all those that rejected that philosophy basically left and became Romulans. So while there are small outposts here and there (i.e. P'Jem) its possible that the Vulcan and Romulan split actually divided the race into the empire builders (Romulans) and the isolationists (Vulcans) and that explains why Vulcan wasn't very colonial post-Surak, and why so few Vulcans don't live on the homeworld at the time of the movie.


The European colonial model of expansion is so ingrained, its often seen as the obvious inevitable one. But historically, it has not been the only model. Polynesian Pacific migration is another model, for example. It was simultaneously wide ranging and rapid, but left behind isolated and culturally distinct settlements, most of which eventually lost the technology or the will to continue such exploration and colonization. Vulcan may have been the pseudo-Polynesians, while the proto-Romulans that left were the pseudo-Europeans.

This game is also designed with the intent that random, pick up teams should work reasonably well in most content. So if all you've got is a healer, and no bubbler or defensive buffer, its perfectly acceptable if the character with the heals goes nuts with his or her heals. There's nothing wrong with that per se.

Even on my Ill/Rad there were days when I was leveling up that I was spamming the heal to keep the team in the fight. And looking back with six years more experience, my tactical evaluation is that I was doing it right.

Probably, but there are a lot of special cases like this that each require special code to handle in real numbers: this just happens to be one of those not currently handled.

What matters for Rain of Arrows is that its a location power: it doesn't actually have a target, so obviously accuracy is meaningless. Is there a summons power that actually makes a tohit check? Oooh, that sounds like a great trivia question. Off the top of my head, among player powers I can think of... eight, not including archetype variants. Three in one set, two in another set, one in a related set, one in another set, and one that I bet most players don't even realize summons a pet at all.

If anyone wants to test their game knowledge, I'll post the ones I'm thinking of tonight unless someone guesses them all.

It depends on what you mean. I know that often, when people say "Empathy is a healing set" what they mean is "Empathy's sole important contribution to a team is its heals" which is not true. But it is the set with the highest source of healing: if you want healing, Empathy is the best place to get it. If you need a healer, like "we need a healer for the Hami taunt team" then its no insult to say Empathy is the healer for you. In that sense, it is a healing set.

The number of powers shouldn't matter, for or against. Invuln is often called a "resistance set" because it has five resistance powers (not counting unstoppable) and only two defense powers. But one of those defense powers is called "Invincibility" and its almost singularly as strong (when saturated) as all the resistaqnce powers combined. Similarly, the set has only one +health power, dull pain, but its slotted strength is equivalent to 37% resistance to all (including psi). You could argue that Dull Pain by itself is also almost as strong as all the resistance powers combined. So even though Invuln has five res powers, two defense powers, and one +health power (and unstoppable) its actually a balanced set: it has resistance, defense, and +health/heal in sizable quantity.

Honestly, when I think of Empathy, the first thing that comes to mind is healing, followed immediately by Fort. And then Clear Mind and recovery. And not in terms of what it can do for me, but actually in terms of what I'm likely to be doing with the set when I'm playing it.

Of course, I'm using my secondary as well, it would be stupid not to. But this is just a personal opinion of mine: when I'm playing a defender, or any character for that matter while on a team, I'm always about what I can do to best benefit the team. If a team member has low health, there is a much larger return on cast time if I heal him than if I fire neutrino bolt at someone. I considered it a point of pride, actually, that back in the day I could teleport to a spot with my Ill/Rad and hit a group of scattered players with my AoE heal because I knew its precise radius visually.

It is equally my opinion, however, that this is player choice. You do what you think is right, and the team will decide if they want to keep you around.


The reason why healing is often valued higher than things like, say, bubbles, often comes down to play psychology. You do not "see" force fields save your life. You see force fields prevent your life from being jeopardized in the first place. Its heals that always "save" your life in the sense of bringing you back from the brink. Furthermore, teams often automatically put themselves into a position to need heals. If you're just steamrolling everything and no one is remotely in danger, the tendancy often is to up the difficulty.

It takes significant experience to know that a situation that should be vaporizing the team is being held in check by force fields and sonic bubbles and controller mez and a good tank, and all those things should be getting credit for making heals superfluous.

If you keep increasing difficulty to the point where preventative defenses eventually get overwhelmed, then by definition you will eventually need heals. If you're the kind of person who gauges the correct level of difficulty as "the point where I start to take significant damage" then healing is essential. In a sense, if you think you need heals, you probably do. If you think you don't you probably don't.

We don't actually know that. Its plausible to suspect that the proto-Romulans that left Vulcan took basically most or all of the exploratory types with them, leaving behind a much more insular society. And we know Vulcans are not as diverse or as evoutionarily progressive as humans are: in Enterprise its revealed that Vulcans are actually afraid of humans, primarily because they are amazed that humanity was able to recover from a global nuclear war that destroyed their civilization in less than a century, something that took Vulcans over a millenium to accomplish. Vulcans are smart, but they were only a few decades ahead of humanity at the time of Enterprise after having more than a thousand year head start. They are not progressive people.

In many ways, Vulcans are analogs for historical Chinese. At one time China had huge exploration fleets and the best science and technology in the world. But it was Europeans who colonized much of the world, and when they did they didn't find very much in the way of Chinese outposts in their way. China withdrew, much as Vulcan could have.

10,000 does seem low given that Starships would still be out there, but if all Vulcan ships were primarily science vessels, its possible that such ships only contained crews of a hundred or so each, not a thousand like a ship comparable to Enterprise.

The bug was that someone got the bright idea long ago to write their own random number generator that was not so random. pohsyb fixed that one a while ago and the drop generator should now be very random and randomly seeded, so no more predictable drop sequences.

My recollection is that Eye of the Magus used to also incorrectly say that it debuffed recharge.

Similarly, Crippling Axe Kick used to lie about the same thing for years: the combat spam used to say it debuffed recharge, but it never did.

Here's the unusual twist to this: occasionally the game engine tells the truth and no one, not even the devs, believes it. For years the game engine was telling players that Quickness was shutting off and turning back on when you zoned. Back then, passive powers didn't do that, which meant the game engine thought it wasn't a passive power in some way. Turns out, Quickness had been bugged from release to cost endurance. Just a tiny amount, but enough to cause that combat chat message. This wasn't corrected for a surprisingly long amount of time (like I3 or I4ish is my recollection, but its been a long while).

In the early days of the game, some of this was unavoidable. For example, I ran into a lot of people who didn't take Nova because it was supposed to disorient you. Which of course it didn't, but the manual said it did. My favorite example of a misinformed player, but not actual misinformation, was way back around I1 when I was on a team with a blaster who used to dive straight into the spawns and attack with reckless abandon, and get killed a lot. When questioned on his behavior, he said he ran cloaking device, so the critters couldn't see him to attack him, so he was perfectly safe. Being dead a lot didn't seem to convince him otherwise, he thought he was just getting unluckily hit by AoEs.

Because you can't target what you can't see, stupid. I still remember this quote. It was not the first, or the last time I was called an idiot in-game, but it was the most inexplicable time. The team I was on actually decided, behind his back, to start keeping count of the number of times he died. We stopped counting around twenty-five.

It didn't start that way: the rumor goes all the way back to the original beta test of respec when that was not an issue.

And on the subject of Vengeance stacking. Yes it does. All it takes is one x8 Nemesis mission to confirm that one. When all their attacks start looking like they are autohitting through Elude and a couple of purples, and they all seem to be shooting out of a PFF bubble, it'll become painfully obvious.

When the devs were thinking about making this change, I discussed the ramifications with a red name involved. I specifically stated that (some of) the players would claim this was proof the devs support farming.

This gist of the reply is that what the devs accept as inevitable is the players misreading the devs intentions when it comes to things like farming, even when there are explicit statements to the contrary.

When the setting came out, I made it a point to state that I discussed the devs intentions about this setting, and I was told it was not intended to help or hurt farmers. It was intended to allow players who wanted a wider range of challenge settings to be able to get them without having to resort to things like dual boxing or broadcast spamming for fillers. Spamming for fillers in particular was considered a bad thing, because it gave new players a very bad impression of the game. Of course, anything the devs do to make it easier for players to adjust their difficulty settings will unavoidably help farmers, but that was not the direct intent.

To this date, that public statement seems to carry exactly zero weight, given how often people believe the devs' intentions are still unknown.


You know, if the devs increased the purple drop rate, that would help farmers because they could get and sell more drops. If the devs reduced the purple drop rate, that would help farmers because they could charge more for the drops they farmed. The only way to hurt farmers is to make everything cost one inf and generate an unlimited supply of it for players to buy. In any system where there is limited supply the people with more stuff win. They always win. They cannot lose. That is intentional in the same sense that the devs intentionally made a game with only three spacial dimensions rather than four.


TonyV:

This is true, but there is some context to that statement. What Castle meant, and he elaborated at the time, was that he didn't dislike the conduct of farming, rather he believed that it suggested a potential flaw in the game design. If people are doing the same things over and over because the enjoy them, that is why you become a game designer: to make things people will enjoy playing. If people are doing the same things over and over even though they dislike doing them, just to get the rewards because they think they must have them then that suggests a potential problem.

Some of your players will just be psychotic, and there's no helping that. But in general, you want players to enjoy playing your game. If somehow the game psychologically encourages them to do things they deliberately don't want to do, the game itself is damaging its own players. Again: some of that is unavoidable, some players will torture themselves even in well designed games. But its something to be aware of, and strive to fix.

It is in that sense that I believe Castle "hated farming." To put it colorfully, Castle believed that players should farm entertainment not rewards.

Ah, but that assumes the "most logical manner" for everyone to use the markets is to make influence. That's not true. Specifically because influence doesn't have the same value to characters of different levels, and not every player has characters of every level. When a level 50 buys low level common salvage from a level 15 for 100k inf, that level of inf is meaningless to the 50, but a significant amount to the 15. Also, value is highly situational. If I spend a billion inf to buy the last IO I need to soft cap my scrapper, I've benefitted greatly by that transaction but so (presumably) has the player getting the billion: that could theoretically fund a half a dozen medium-grade IO builds.

The efficient market hypotheses don't work on the CoX economy because there isn't a consistent way to value anything. It would be like if a loaf of bread was cheap food for 95% of the population, but in 5% of the population it cured cancer. Imagine if this were true for every frisbee, umbrella, and 747 on Earth.


The markets can theoretically make everyone rich, for some personal definition of rich. It cannot make everyone richer.

I think it was a bad idea also, but that's a separate issue from the issue of level shifting affecting pets.

Of course, it isn't just mastermind pets. There's also controller pets. There's interesting untouchable (and thus normally unbuffable) pets, such as the phantom army. There's pseudo pets, like rains, or fulcrum shift. All have solutions, but it'll be potentially a lot of little solutions rather than one holistic one.

But that's why I'm reasonably certain the devs have or are working on a solution to this issue. Because its not just masterminds: its a lot of things affected across the board.

Fortunately, this one will be quick.

Your calculations overlook two important qualifiers. One: if I remember correctly each kill has a chance to drop a shard for every member of the team. In a full team of eight, this means your calculations could be off by a factor of eight. Two: it doesn't factor in the time to set up a task force. It can often be a significant amount of time factored into the total time to run a task force during which you aren't earning anything.

Sanity check time: if we factor in your factor of eight error, it should actually take only about 2.5 minutes to earn a shard for each 2.5 minutes that a full task force is engaged in combat. Perhaps a bit more, because a team doesn't always have perfect kill synergy like that. Factoring in time to move between spawns, I'd say in a full team with a lot of offense blitzing the critters you should be earning a shard about once every three to five minutes of task force time, not counting end of task force rewards depending on how much of a steamroller you're on. That actually sounds about right to me.

So including the time to organize it if you can complete a task force in about thirty to forty minutes, you might do better stealthing it. Otherwise, go nuts and kill everything in your path. Its probably better.

But not so much better its worth fretting over. Just being on a task force is a bigger benefit to you than any possible benefit you could gain by debating task force strategy, due to shard drop mechanics**. I keep hearing people claim to see players quit teams that won't do it "the right way." These players cannot possibly be gaining anything from that act except looking like ***-hats.



** My memory is a bit fuzzy on shard drop mechanics, but the last Hami raid I was at I received 10 shards including the four at the end. That's six shards for me personally due to mito defeats. 72 total mitos and about thirty raiders suggests more than 180 shards dropped for 72 kills, assuming I was average. That's consistent with my recollection of each defeat having a chance to drop a shard per member of the team, because that's more than one shard per defeat.

All this time we had a mod named E. Cleaver? Seriously?

I can't believe we named a forum mod "Mod8" when we could have been calling him "The E-Cleaver" all this time.

Ah well, good luck to you E-Cleaver, and take care of yourself.


So what's Mod5's name? Max Banner?

Its really the stacking mechanics, not the complexity of the mitigation system, that makes it challenging to balance mitigation across the entire game. With proportional multiplicative stacking, it would be almost trivial (regeneration would still need to be qualitatively balanced).

The system is actually too *simple* for its own good. Its easy for number crunchers to calculate what's going on, but its non-intuitive. I would have made it intuitive, even at the expense of making life more difficult for the number crunchers.


From a mathematical point of view, the mitigation balance issue in CoH can be summarized as being inevitable consequences of three things: attack rate, pace of combat, and linear defense/resistance stacking. You can play games working around the issue, but to actually solve it you would need to break one of those three elements of the current game design: make combat last longer, make attacks shoot faster, or change stacking.

The combination basically means bosses need a level of mitigation guaranteed to reach stacking problem levels, because they have to hit harder than the minions that are already designed to hit pretty hard per attack, because the minions must be able to generate a reasonable amount of damage per attack, because they are not intended to last very long because of the pace of combat. Thus, critters do enough damage to force the players to build enough protection to last against them, which forces the devs to provide those levels of protection, which then allows players to stack to unreasonable levels of protection.

By the way, people comment a lot about why there's so much defense in the game in terms of optional powers and features (power pools, inspirations, etc) and so little resistance, when oddly powersets are almost opposite: there's so much more resistance than defense in primary and secondary mitigation sets.

That's actually a reflection of the problem with stacking. Resistance is so much easier to control and balance for, because its less "bursty." That, combined with healing or regeneration (or a little defense) tends to make a stable, easy to balance powerset. Defensive sets are harder to balance for, because their bursty nature means they don't always behave as the average calculations suggest, and the devs had an initial reluctance to couple defense with healing or regeneration. So there's more resistance sets than defensive ones: they are easier to make.

But if that's the case, why lucks but not (originally) sturdies? Why are lucks stronger? Why so much defense in the invention sets? Answer: because defense has active counters, while resistance doesn't. Defense can be debuffed in a way resistance cannot, unless you make the debuffs unresistable (which the devs do not want to do). Defense can be neutralized by the attacker with tohit buffs that do not need to affect the target to work. Defense can be neutralized by giving the critters higher intrinsic base tohit. The devs can give away defense in the power pools and the invention system because defense is the easiest thing to take away if they need to. And the devs have to be able to counter those buffs, because the stacking rules mean that whenever they add a tiny resistance buff somewhere, they have to assume someone is going to stacking it up and head for the resistance cap, and the value of that tiny amount of resistance can be very high stacked on a high resistance character. Basically, they can let us soft cap, because they can knock us off of the cap easily. They cannot let us easily res cap, because its very hard to knock someone off the res cap without resorting to exotic mechanics.

Summary: defense sets are hard to balance for, because there are so many counters to defense and defense is bursty. So more sets rely on resistance than defense. But for the exact same reason, they don't mind optional powers having more defense than resistance, because those don't need to be explicitly balanced for, they need to be able to be neutralized when needed. This is oversimplifying, but its the main cause of the situation we're in.

People often ask the devs to add more resistance buffs to the invention system, because its "unfair" to "resistance sets." The great irony of that request is that if the devs ever acceded to it, it would probably be at the cost of adding unresistable resistance debuffs to the game to compensate, or worse unresistable damage, in much the same way the defense in the invention system is counterbalanced by the current level of defense counters. And not even that, since we now have the DE in tip missions with 64% base tohit. I don't think players want to start seeing DE in tip missions packing unresistable damage just yet.

It weakens mez strength of the target. That means all powers that the target uses that apply mez effects are reduced. That includes the mez powers they shoot at you, and the mez protection powers they "shoot" at themselves.

(The mez in) Mez attacks is duration-based: strength (aka enhancements) makes their duration longer. So benumb does the opposite: it makes those mez durations shorter. Mez protection powers are (tend to be) mag-based: strength (in theory) makes them have higher or lower mag. So Benumb reduces the magnitude of mez protection powers.

Because we can't slot mez protection powers for mez, and usually can't debuff enemy mez strength, we usually don't know or notice what strength does to mez protection. But Benumb knows (Weaken does the same thing).

Having said that, most mez protection effects in purple triangles are tagged to ignore strength - i.e. to be undebuffable. So Benumb cannot debuff the mez protection in purple triangles in the general case.

Quite possibly, but seriously: never ask the devs to take a balance pass at Dark Melee. Never.

The problem was actually that you really had to know what you were doing to fully leverage Defiance 1.0, and even if you did not flirt with death while using it that just meant you didn't benefit from it, which put you back to square one (I did fine with it, but I've been playing blasters since release, and blapping for most of those years. Also, I knew to keep as many oranges running as possible).

The biggest difference between D1 and D2 has nothing to do with the damage buff mechanics, or even that there is a damage buff at all, in my opinion. Its that you can shoot through mez on your tier 1/2 attacks (and tier 1 secondary). I believe that saves more blaster lives than anything else.

The thing about getting low is that even if you survive, its only good once. Unless you have an Emp following you around to reset you, you can't really get low often and see that damage buff, because you can't start the next fight in that condition and consistently expect to survive (again, unless you are a very experienced player that has insps on the twitchy finger).


One of the things I'm trying out in my experimental I19 build for my Energy/Energy is to go back to ranged blasting, take both bolt and blast (I respeced out of bolt years ago when I made my I9 build, because back then it sucked big time) and slot them both with Force Feedback procs (actually, I have them slotted in torrent and explosive blast also). That, plus a build with a lot of global speed, and I can almost just cycle bolt and blast constantly (bolt, blast, and torrent are almost a complete chain, and probably will be in the final build). When you can cycle bolt and blast almost continuously, mez becomes much less of a problem. It drops my defensive toggles, but hardly dents my offense, and with it my offensive (kb) mitigation.

Clearly, I believe you've missed the point.

Kinetic Combats put soft-capping s/l within the reach of almost anything with enough melee attacks. The theoretical rule of five cap on KC's s/l set bonuses is an astounding 18.75% defense and you don't even need to slot full sets to get it.