Arcanaville

Keep paying subscription dollars, and you can keep complaining all you want. Mine are paying for the privilege of saying you aren't likely to get what you want. Its simple, and its fair.

Keeping in mind that this is just for discussion purposes. I don't discuss changing the game to try to change the game. I try to change the game to try to change the game. Its more efficient.


I can't honestly answer the question of why you should support a game you don't like the development of. I wouldn't. But I don't have that problem. No one can credibly accuse me of either being a munchkin or a difficulty-*****. The vast overwhelming majority of my contributions to this game have involved making sure the average joe isn't screwed by something odd in the game, or making sure standard content really is matches standard content rules. I'm one of the few people that both understands and practices min/maxing, but keeps reminding people that most players in this game cannot play blasters for more than a few minutes without dropping dead, and that's the target audience. I'm perfectly fine with that being the current state of standard content.

The end game is not standard content, and not bound by standard content rules. I'm also fine with that. I'm not saying there isn't large room for improvement, but I'm also not going to apologize for wanting the end game content to not be a rehash of standard content rules that we already have a gigaton of content for, and are continuing to develop content targeting. In that respect what I want personally and what the devs appear to be targeting are pointed generally in roughly the same direction. That's a fortunate coincidence, but anyone who wants to try to make the case that supporting the current end game direction is all about a personal desire of mine to hijack the soul of the game, please by all means give it your best shot. Aim at someone that can shoot back and is packing nuclear weapons.

Let me see if I get this straight. You've already beaten Battle Maiden, so that's it. She can't come back in later content stronger, because that's just cheating. We're supposed to get increasingly stronger until she's completely impotent, meanwhile if the devs want to add more difficult content they have to invent all new characters you've never seen before, because once you've beaten the existing characters, they are supposed to run away and never come back.

By the way, you forgot something:

If you make player characters 5% more powerful but make the enemies 400% more powerful, you didn't really make player characters more powerful AT ALL YOU ONLY MADE TANKERS MORE USELESS.


Glad to be of help.

Thanks for saying it so I didn't have to. I would have risked the ban-hammer to face-palm this one.

Actually, I got killed by caltrops a couple of weeks ago testing a build at x8. Soft-capping has weaknesses, and that's one of them.

Even if they don't kill you outright, I'm absolutely certain there are a lot of players for whom KoA caltrops have been a contributing factor to getting killed. Unless you have high resistances to lethal, their trivial damage actually starts adding up fast in large numbers, and its easy to get trapped in the middle of a bunch of KoA because their AI tends to be melee-preferred.

I actually had this discussion with the devs when Real Numbers was in development. Given the complexity of the powers system, it was never going to be perfect. So the question was: accept it was always going to be giving misleading information sometimes, or give no information.

Those are still the only two choices you have. To eliminate all sources of misleading information from Real Numbers would actually take more time than it would take to redesign all those powers to be less misleading in Real Numbers. This is especially true given that different people have different thresholds and definitions of "misleading." Most players - not just the ones on the forums, but the majority of all subscribers - probably have no correct notion of what to do with any of the accuracy or tohit numbers in Real Numbers. I would bet real money that more than half misinterpret the defensive percentage numbers as percentages of attacks rather than percentage points of defensive modifier. Accuracy is listed as a multiplier (i.e. 1.4x) because I won the argument that listing as a percentage (i.e. 40% or 140%) would be all sorts of misleading.

You can try to eliminate as many sources of misleading information or descriptions as possible, but in a sense the system will always be "bugged."

Technically, the correct answer to "what is the accuracy of Rain of Arrows" is: Rain of Arrows is a location power, and thus does not actually check a tohit against anything, and thus its accuracy is irrelevant because its never used. Rain of Arrows does cast a pseudo-pet that itself attacks anything in its radius, and that attack does have an intrinsic accuracy of 1.0. Any other answer is technically incorrect. But you're unlikely to see that show up in Real Numbers anytime soon.

Of course, its easy to say that "obviously" the correct answer is "1.0." Until you ask the same question of Chain Induction.

In a very real sense you're wrong. The intent of the Real Numbers system is not to be accurate. Its actually to be as useful as possible, being accurate only when accuracy itself is likely to be useful to the average player. Take "base tohit." We often talk about "base tohit of the player" as if this actually exists. It does not. Base tohit is a function of the target. When we say "base tohit" we really generally mean "base tohit of the player if the player targeted an even con critter (without level shifting) or a combat-modifier-neutral giant monster." So technically, the number shown in Real Numbers is not just erroneous, its actually completely fictional. However, if it instead only showed tohit *buffs* then "base tohit modifer" would often be zero. That would also be less than useful to the average player, who doesn't know the purple patch by heart. So it shows 75%. Which is wrong in the technical sense, and also wrong in the colloquial sense, and often just plain wrong period. But its wrong in a way that is probably useful to many players.

My guess is that any tanker that can cap resistances to smashing, lethal, and energy (toxic would help also), and has a good heal or strong regeneration, has a chance. Well-built Electric Armor might be able to do it, toss in Dark Melee for insurance and I think well built Elec/Dark would work.

If you're going to try to do it with defenses, then while the buffing towers are up you're going to need 75% defense to LR's primary attack types: Smashing, Lethal, Energy or Melee, Ranged. That's not easy to get, even with inventions and tanker mods, outside of inspirations and ally buffs.

And posted without even a hint of irony.

That's more a matter of preference than good or bad design. Point is, MMOs can be very successful violating those game axioms. The most successful of all breaks both. You could argue that it is poorly designed as well, but then we get into the semantics of what the intent of good design even is. Its generally, in my opinion, to make a successful game, as judged by the number of players willing to play it for extended periods of time, and gain significant enjoyment from it.

What I will concede is that in the general case, its more straight-forward to design an MMO where things interlock together in explicitly designed ways which inevitably lead to fixed roles and fixed trade-offs that tend to include solo ability as a potential trade off. But while its easier to do it that way on paper, I think its the least interesting way to do it. I wouldn't leverage the game mechanics in that way. I'd keep soloing off the table and push team synergy in other directions. You just need a sharp enough pencil.


Increasing difficulty is neutral to issues of soloability. And so long as that difficulty is spread out in such a fashion that it on average doesn't disadvantage specific archetypes more than others, I don't see this as being true, at least in the sense you're implying. Some other fundamental principles are already being amended that some players currently don't like, such as the actual threshold for judging soloability. The devs' standard has never been "place drinking bird on keyboard and wait" but some players' thresholds are not that far removed from that. In the standard content, the difference between the two was not large enough to make a big deal out of though. However, in the end game, that no longer holds. In the case of Trapdoor, for example, if you are not a genuinely strong soloer and not a strong player yourself, the encounter might be sufficiently difficult that you personally might not complete it. But that alone is not proof of a problem: it only has to be theoretically completable. Some players might not recognize (although I can't imagine how) the significance of the bifurcations and try in vain to plow through them. Some might think that inspirations are "cheating" or "shouldn't be required." Some might have explicitly built their characters to be highly focused on ally assistance to the point of fracturing their solo ability. All of these things simply mean the player might not complete it the first time, or even the second or third times. That's what it means to be "difficult" - the chance for failure is non-zero. But as long as its possible to do, the fact the player cannot find and use one of the available tactics that would work does not mean the encounter is improperly designed. That is something the players will have to start getting used to: failure is an option.

The devs have also stated repeatedly that large sections of it are not targeted for solo players, and even the alternate paths that are soloable are not intended to be equally easy to solo or equally rewarding to solo. Shard drop mechanics, for example, provide for solo access but tend to reward teamed play by an order of magnitude. In the end game, that is considered an acceptable compromise between soloability and the higher-end targets of end game play which generally require or promote teaming.

I don't mind those changes to the fundamental design principles of the game as it specifically pertains to the end game. There's still the other 90% of the game that is still highly solo-friendly and will be basically unaffected by those design foundational changes.

The first time I played the arc was with my energy/energy blaster. First, I went in cold - no proactive insp use - just to see what the worst it could get was, and of course I got bonesmashered to death. Second go around, I bought two break frees, six lucks, and four respites, shot the bifurcations as they spawned, and took him out just fine.

This is advanced content, and smart inspiration usage is considered a reasonable expectation from the players. Only if that fails completely do I think the players have a legitimate difficulty-based gripe.

When you say pulling is a perfectly acceptable tactic, it is - BUT not always. The exact same thing happened in the STF with Lord Recluses and the towers. The design was not intended to allow him to be pulled completely out of sight of his buffing towers, but the critter AI isn't sophisticated enough to program the behavior they intend. So they added the teleport bungies. Knockback is a perfectly acceptable tactic, but the devs don't allow us to knock mitos out of the way. Slotting range into melee attacks used to be *possible* due to a game engine limitation but clearly not intentional, and when the tech became available to fix it, it was fixed.

It would be nice if the devs never made design mistakes like this or could prevent them from occurring at all, but my clout with the devs doesn't really have enough pull to order them to not make mistakes anymore. It certainly isn't strong enough for me to convince them not to fix them any more.

Honestly, when I test things I test them with the full knowledge and awareness that not all players are as knowledgeable as me, and not all players build characters as strong as I can build them. So I rarely test with optimized characters, and I'm always looking for potential problems that could hang average players with average characters. My evaluation of Trapdoor is that its advanced content: the average player will have difficulty completing it on the first try, but few if any characters that are at least average in solo capability will be unable to complete it with smart inspiration usage. If you can give me a powerset combination that you believe cannot complete Trapdoor with just smart inspiration usage and no temp powers, let me know. If I can figure out a way to test that combination in some fashion, I'm willing to try eventually. Keeping in mind that testing will be difficult and may take time, because at the moment you can only run it once per 50, and my supply of 50s is not infinite.

(In fact, its on my list of things to bug someone about: getting the arc put in flashback minus the incarnate rewards so it can be retested by people like me)

Point of order: Castle did not add number crunching to the game, so he should only get credit for ruining the game for hundreds of players.

If that's the prerequisite for talking to you, I hope you own a pet.

I would have gotten him for you, but my recollection is that at the event I was at pohsyb shot me in the back as I was trying to line up an assassin's strike on Castle, then the power suppression bug prevented me from attacking for the rest of the time.

Seriously, he didn't even know I was there: it would have been sweet.

That is not true. Just because all "competent builds" are supposed to be capable of soloing standard content, does not mean either that everyone should be capable of soloing standard content equally well nor does that rule apply to all content.

Normally, melee has a significant advantage over range, because melee is generally coupled to personal defenses. Scrappers have a much easier time soloing practically anything than Blasters, for example. The fact that this is sometimes reversed is not a design failure. The fact that this is not always true in non-standard content such as end game task forces is non-relevant to the design rule.

As a matter of degree, there are limits to how large the disparity should go. But as a matter of principle, I'm forced to state that the blanket assertion is not consistent with good game design. In fact it actually represents bad game design to forbid outright without qualifiers that which would have to occur at least to some degree in any good design.

I wouldn't say pulling is a cheap trick: in fact I used to teach pulling back in the day and at one point I was responding to every single "you can't pull like that" post by figuring out how to pull like that and posting my results. I figured out how to pull bosses apart, which is supposed to be impossible, just on a dare.

But having said that, there's the converse question of whether pulling in this case was a tactic exploiting a weakness Trapdoor was intended to have, or exploiting a weakness in Trapdoor's implementation he wasn't supposed to have. It seems apparent that the original intent of Trapdoor's design conceptually was that Trapdoor would be stronger if the bifurcations lived. *How* that was implemented allowed for pulling. But that's a game engine limitation being exploited, not an encounter weakness specifically or implicitly but there by design. The devs could have simply made the Bifurcation buffs map-wide, which would mean there was no way to pull them out of range, because the Bifurcations would have no range limits. Its also clear the Bifurcations spawn at specific locations so the devs don't have to worry about them accidentally spawning in places the players can't easily reach or shoot at. By saying the devs aren't being fair in taking pulling away, the players are saying the devs should have just said screw it and let them spawn where ever they wanted to spawn and with zone-wide buffs and said here, you guys go figure out how to kill them.

The compromises that go into engineering this sort of encounter mean that sometimes, either for performance reasons or because of design limits, the encounters may have weaknesses that aren't just unintended, but actually contrary to intent. Its one thing to defeat something in a way other than what the devs intended. Its another thing to defeat something in a way the devs intended to be conceptually impossible.

I do not believe in the meta game principle that says if the devs make a mistake, the players should be allowed to exploit it freely without correction: that the players should be free to defeat the devs rather than the critters. Because if that principle was to be honored, it would force the devs to design around it. In doing so, encounters would be forced to live under much harsher limits, and what little latitude we now have to find alternate solutions to game challenges would go away. I can tell you this: if I were to design an encounter that was intended to have only one way to beat it, it would have only one way to beat it, period. I wouldn't rely on implicit game features to limit all other ways: I would just negate those other ways explicitly in the design. Nobody wants that, but in crying foul every time the devs correct something like this a lot of people are implicitly begging for it.

I think where the line is drawn is that I think its perfectly acceptable to tell the devs you want encounters with more variety in accomplishing the tasks. Trapdoor's basic "problem" is that you have to deal with his bifurcations, because each one of them makes him stronger. If he was explicitly designed so that holding the bifurcations would also shut off the buff, you could argue that is consistent with the design of the encounter but also provides an alternate method of defeating Trapdoor that isn't massively easier. Or maybe if each Bifurcation that occured reduced Trapdoor's max health by a small amount, the players could either try to defeat Trapdoor head on or simply survive him and take out enough clones to eventually weaken him to the point where he was easier to take out (in fact, it would seem to make sense that there would be some critical weakness to Trapdoor's incarnate power, since its not supposed to be perfect - but his clones are actually a pretty darned good power when you first meet him). But these would be not just mechanical trickery: they would be rooted in making a design for Trapdoor that made sense logically. Deliberately designing Trapdoor so he has the special incarnate ability to make clones half a mile away from himself that don't help him at all while he stays away from his massive power source and chases the player over a cliff is not logical. That sort of thing should only happen unintentionally, and be corrected whenever possible. And in this case, its possible.

Or, that ranged characters would sometimes have an advantage over melee characters.

Admittedly, this might arguably be too severe of a case, but the blanket statement isn't automatically true.

Just the first three slots alone, given what I know about them, would be ludicrous to be handing out to the players without a commensurate increase in difficulty. Alpha itself is, with level shift, just barely within the realm of being not stupidly overpowered to use on standard content.

Seriously: I haven't even seen the specific details of its implementation yet, but I'm already worried about Judgment all by itself. There have to be incredible restraints on Judgment's usage just to make it remotely non-retarded, like "usable only when your birthday falls on a wednesday."

Even if individually someone tried to make a case that Alpha wasn't a big deal, or Lore, or Judgment, players are going to have all ten. Alpha with level shift is going to get everyone five percentage points closer to the soft cap. Its going to give them as much recharge as some of the most expensive invention builds, or significantly more damage. And those who've seen the peeks know what Lore and Judgment are going to be adding in combination with that. I can't imagine anyone thinking that's remotely appropriate for standard content. And that's just three out of ten.

Its really not humanly possible to make an MMO that doesn't frustrate you.

For a 3D modeller, this would be easy. For a 3D animator, this would also be mostly irrelevant. On the one hand, this would introduce a ton of problems: problems with the new mesh interfering with female top costumes with actual geometry instead of just textures, issues with placement of shoulder items and actual arms (which are segmented from the body), and probably issues with integration with the body sliders. On the other hand, if your focus is on cleavage, why not simply adjust the geometry of the actual female breasts, which are themselves somewhat independent geometry as they have to be to work with the chest sliders. You're going to have to do that anyway, as the male and female chest sliders don't exactly do the same things.

I'm assuming an experienced games programmer with knowledge of 3D animation rigs would know all of this. And before you ask, its safe to say I have a pretty good understanding of how this specific game works, and that includes the animation system.


Incidentally, against my better judgment I actually analyzed the female chest geometry a while ago in reference to another thread about this subject, and discovered that at the lowest the chest slider would go the female breasts were about an inch above the chest in relative scale inches, for a standard height model. They were maybe a B-cup in volume, although that was an estimate (its not like I can have them try on bras to be sure). What makes them look larger than that is partially texturing, and partially the fact that the female torso has a significant arch forward. The model would probably look like it had more than A-cup breasts even if you literally removed the breasts due to that arch.


Personally, I don't have any problem with increasing the range of the chest slider to further decrease the size of the female chest. However, I don't think that will always have exactly the effect some people think it will, especially given how much the appearance of cleavage is often due to visual textures and not geometry, which can't be so easily messed with. Adding a more muscular torso, though, would almost certainly require adding a new model in the general case. It would be too much of a pain to add it to the existing model and keep everything else consistent. As for the rest of the thread, good luck with that.

The difficulty level of the end game is no more a "new development direction" than Praetorian Clockwork are. The end game content is being simultaneously designed for escalating difficulty to be commensurate with the Incarnate system and more complex content introducing new mission technology: the Incarnate intro arc is just a hint of that new difficulty level. If you don't like it, don't play it. There will be other standard content developed with the conventional difficulty and complexity downstream.

I would expect, still this soon after the Alpha slot was introduced, that people would still be farming shards. If the ratio of ITF to Apex was less than 100 to 1, I would be surprised. I don't consider that to be a reasonable metric of the success of the end game this early in evolution.

In any case, we'll eventually know if the playerbase actually wants an end game progression system that is fundamentally different than the current content. If they do, this is it. If they don't, we're not likely to be getting a progression system that is the same as the standard content, we're just not going to get a progression system at all. A progression system without actual progress is what is known in the game industry as "retarded." And if all the playerbase wanted was more of the same, there would not only be no need for the Incarnate system, there would also be no possible balance-proper way to *add* the Incarnate system as it is remotely envisioned. Its a ludicrous amount of net power to be solely used to stomp on level 50 tip missions.

I'm confident that over time the playerbase as a whole will adjust to the new difficulty, it will just take time. They've done so in the past on smaller scales, vis-a-vis LRSF. Its just a question of culture. The current player culture is heavily influenced by quick Katies and broken AE missions. Future players will grow up in a game with a constellation of content with Trapdoors and Tin Mages, plus ten levels of Incarnate power, and will not consider either of them quite so out of the ordinary.


In any event, the same masses that think Apex is not worth playing as much as ITF also think your tanker theories are tapioca, based on my informal count of players actually playing tankers and thus validating the tanker "direction." Don't get cozy with the mob, the mob is notoriously fickle.

I was going to suggest that in the general case these are non-trivial problems to solve, but while thinking about that reply it just occurs to me I think I might know what Real Numbers is doing with Rain of Arrows. I'll put that theory to the test and if its true, I might be able to discuss a fix with pohsyb tomorrow.

In the general case, it is in fact non-trivial to parse the powers database into meaningful descriptions, given all the Rube Goldbergian twists many powers have (for example: Jolting Chain, Phase Shift, Soul Extraction). However, its possible with enough effort for Real Numbers to show meaningful information. Enough effort might be a very large amount of effort, though.

That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Castle was not fired for posting on the forums too much. Its obvious NCSoft is actually terminating people in alphabetical order.

The increased difficulty of the end game content is not incidental, its the reason for the existence of the end game content. The whole point to having end game content is to have content that is more difficult and more complex than the standard content. Asking for status quo end game content is actually a contradiction in terms.

Not everyone will want or appreciate the higher difficulty, just like not everyone wants to team for task forces, or PvP, or participate in raids. The end game is going to be another optional element of the game you can choose to participate in or not. But just like it would be odd to ask for the devs to design the raid content so it can be soloed, it is equally impractical to ask the devs to make the end game content have status quo difficulty and complexity. That's a failure to recognize what its purpose is. A soloable raid is theoretically possible but highly impractical. End game content indistinguishable from the rest of the game is also theoretically possible but equally pointless.

If anything, Trapdoor represents the very beginning of the incarnate difficulty curve, not the middle or end of it.

You have no idea. For reasons even I've kinda forgotten, when I test powers in the AE, its always Castle shooting at me. I think it has something to do with something I said a couple betas ago, but regardless just know that somewhere, sometime, "Castle" is on the job. Here you are testing Fury generation:



On that day, Castle was an archer. Eventually, Castle is going to respec into every power in the mission maker sets.

I suspect that's what the game engine does, because its the most straight-forward way to implement recharge, but I'm not certain.

What I am certain about is that its the easiest way to calculate recharge.

Ironically, it seems to have distracted players from watching the big flashy numbers everyone is usually focused on.

Trapdoor's clones also buff resistance. At least, they did when I last ran Trapdoor, which was admittedly before the latest patches. This could be not so easy to detect when there's just one or maybe two clones out there and you kill him fast, but I'm surprised the people that let the clones go nuts didn't notice that. The first time I ran the mission, it was actually the first thing I noticed, even before the regen.