Arcanaville

I once PMed War Witch a detailed description of a set of placement problems for an AE map which was causing some item spawns to happen inside of walls. She thanked me and said she'd add it to her list of things to do. Next patch: map was gone.

I no longer try to put things on War Witch's list of things to do. War Witch 1, Arcana 0.

I'm mostly immune to the SCR, but I'm aware it probably would take some new tech.


On the general subject of the Incarnate system, and what its intent is, here's my perspective: some of this I've been saying for a while (going back to I18 beta), some of this I'm expanding or clarifying.

First of all, I've been saying since forever that the Incarnate system is *not* an extension of the Invention system. Its not just a system of super-purples. That isn't a techie-statement. Its a statement of design intent. Purples are meant to be both powerful and rare. If you don't possess one right this second, its because you haven't gotten a rare thing yet. That's sort of what rare means.

But the Incarnate system is intended to be (part of) the end game progression system. That means unlike purples, even though the Incarnate powers are intended to be powerful, they are not explicitly intended to be rare. The Incarnate system is intended to be accessible by everyone (or rather: all level 50 characters).

However, being an end game progression system, it is *not* beholden to the normal difficulty rules. It does not guarantee that all aspects of it are soloable. It does not guarantee that "average" builds will find it accessible. Its intended to be something you both build to access, and then continue to progress in to open up accessibility.

If you can't solo a core non-exempt story arc with a character of any archetype that is at least nominally designed to actually be effective at soloing, even at lowered difficulty, you have a potentially valid complaint about the difficulty of that arc. That's a statement of fact. But that avenue of complaint disappears - or rather is significantly modified - in the end game. Is Remiel soloable? Theoretically yes. But that might be very difficult for some players and some characters. That's WAI. Its intended to be difficult. And if you think its so difficult you're better off dropping the arcs, I'm afraid the problem will be that all future content designed for the end game progression system will very likely be more of the same. Not necessarily designed in the same way, but designed for similar levels of difficulty. Remiel is meant to be hard because he's the gateway to even harder content.

Does that mean the Incarnate system is explicitly meant to be restricted to only some players or only some characters? No. Its simply meant to be harder, and more complex. You're supposed to think, like figuring out the tactical secret to Trapdoor, or working around the brute force thrown at you with the Honoree. In that sense, its designed to appeal to players that want that sort of content, and that might not be everyone. But its only exclusionary by happenstance, as all content is: not everyone will like everything.

However, in this case, the *reason* for an end game system to exist at all is to create different, more complex, more difficult, more advanced content. There's no such thing as the simplified version of it, and there is unlikely to be an end game system alternative for people who want to continue to progress, but don't want the extra difficulty that comes with it. The option for such players is to wait for more *standard* content to arrive either at level 50 or at other levels accessible through exemplar.

So, while I'm conscious of the current practical limits of the size and scale of the system, and in general I'm all in favor of having more content and more options, I don't believe more options will be more easily accessible ones. They will be more variety at equal difficulty, scope, and duration. Some people will consider that enhanced difficulty cheap, repetitive, bogus, counter-productive, a barrier to entry, or alt-unfriendly. While that should be minimized to the best extent possible, there should be no compromising the core aspect of the end game system to distinguish itself from the standard game in complexity and challenge.

I doubt the devs would compromise significantly in those areas, but I'm also here to say that if I think they intend to at some point, I'm going to oppose that move strongly on principle.

Actually, that's a different geko. EG crashes business conventions in Ohio using the name "Stanley."


3... 2... 1...

If it was me, I would design the portals (all portals) so that their first waves of generated spawns grant XP, then all others don't. So the original intent of their existence is preserved: they are designed to zone in reinforcements you have to fight, unless you can somehow destroy or disable them. If the reinforcements arrive, they are a legitimate threat and legitimately are worth XP - they have to be, because the mission designer intended for the mission and its rewards to be balanced around those initial reinforcements actually existing. But after that, if you deliberately keep them around, their successive waves don't grant XP anymore, so if you are either too slow or a potential farmer, you cannot exploit their generation capability for unlimited rewards.

But that's not what the OP said. The OP didn't say they didn't want to do Remiel multiple times, he said he didn't even want to do it once. So repetitiveness was not the expressed issue, the core issue was having gated content that might be locked with content you don't want to do, no matter how many different undesirable options there might be.

Having more ways to unlock it might increase the probability that at least *something* would be desirable to the OP, but that's problematic when the OP admits they didn't actually run the arc in the first place.

Honestly, I don't remember what the thread was originally about anymore. I was just waiting for an opportunity to tell my Castle story again.

If anyone has any animation related questions, I can tell a completely irrelevant story about how I proved BaB was wrong about frame counting.


Its a shame I don't really have any dirt on our current overlord. Blackmailing Castle and BaB into doing my bidding was fun and all, but that's peanuts compared to trying to get War Witch to grant me Infinite Freem. People used to say that the devs should grant me a red name, or a job, or some other small reward like that in appreciation for what I do, and I would always say there was no need: I was just glad to help. I don't need to be specifically rewarded for helping a game I love to play and have enjoyed for years.

Well screw that. I want my Infinite Freem toggle. Just tell me who I have to kill.

I did say content, not math.

Besides, it could be worse. If it was up to EvilGeko, the solo path to unlock Incarnate progress wouldn't be an arc, it would just be a badge.

Task Force Commander.

The teamed path, on the other hand, would actually be difficult.

You would never get a "farm" checkbox past anyone.

However, you could get a "combat only - no story" checkbox in there. The only problem is that you'd have to be careful not to be looking for a map full of pushovers, and accidentally walk into the scrapper challenge mission.

Technically speaking you could farm the scrapper challenge mission, but I don't recommend it.

Maybe you just have a gigaton of accuracy and tohit buffs. Also, the combat attributes real time monitor is not ultrafast: it only updates every half second or so, so its possible for a temporarily low tohit value to zip by without you seeing it.

In your actual combat chat windows, there is a channel specifically for tohit rolls which you can add to the display. If you add that, perhaps to a new free tab, you can see every tohit roll your character makes (and for that matter, every tohit roll anything that attacks you makes). You could look at that to see what your chance to hit looks like over long periods of time.

Well, I don't think that, but I do think you're missing the point to the Incarnate system. The Incarnate system and the End Game system are two halves of a whole. They are the End Game Progression system for level 50s. This means the entire system is going to be, just like any other progression system, gated content. The Incarnate system and the end game content being developed is not intended to be past times for 50s. Its basically going to be the mythical "level 60" for the game, except instead of foolishly extending the combat level tables, they will be adding an intertwined set of content and incarnate ability designed to be used within that new content.

Not only is there content arcs gating progression rewards (Ramiel gating Alpha) there is also progression rewards gating content (end game content task forces).

If you do not want to participate, that is your prerogative. However, you will be in the same position as people who do not want to level are in the regular game but want to participate fully in the higher level content. Which is to say, the devs are unlikely to change the entire premise of the end game system just for you.


And you can add me to the list of people who do not want this aspect of the end game system changed. Its too bad Venture is (if I recall correctly) in pseudo exile. There was a time that if Venture and I agreed on something, whoever was disagreeing was probably wronger than wrong. To have Venture, myself, je-saist and EvilGeko simultaneously agreeing on a matter of content is like forum armageddon. Of course, I have no idea if Venture would agree, since predicting Venture is like beating the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I don't know how much simpler I can say it. I didn't say the merge was bad for anyone. I even reread what I wrote and there's no way to interpret what I said in that way unless someone didn't read it carefully. What I said was that if the influence flows were happening in the way I mentioned, it would be a sign that the red side had other, more serious problems.

Its like you said you were driving to a place that was giving away free money, and I said that's fine, but that sound your engine was making sounded like trouble, and you kept saying "I don't understand how going somewhere to get free money could possibly be anything but good."

I'm not saying its not, I'm just wondering if your car is going to blow up on the way back.

The difference in utility alone doesn't explain the pricing differences in all, or even most cases. In many cases, the problem is that there are two exponentially amplifying effects on prices: the first is that the strongest enhancement, even by marginal amounts, are pursued by the richest players, and second the lack of general liquidity introduces time pressure as an unrestricted price escalator. Or to put it simply: impatient people with lots of cash will pay ridiculous prices for stuff if they can have it now.

Another odd factor is that most players see the invention system as a powerrgaming tool of the rich. They don't see it as a superior slotting system even to conventional SOs that don't take a lot of time and money to leverage. I usually have a weird mish mash of franken-ventions as I level up, because why not? They drop automatically, they are usually cheap to make, they are collectively stronger than SOs and they don't expire. But while people are willing to spend months tweaking that level 50 build, they seem less willing to spend a couple minutes trying to make the best of the inventions that they are getting automatically or could buy for practically nothing.

It suggests to me that lower level crafting needs to be streamlined somehow and possibly incentivized a bit, so more players actually use those lower level and less than perfect expensive inventions. I'd be curious to see the datamining on recipe crafting and slotting for all inventions at all levels. Given the relatively short amount of time people spend at level 25, or 15, I wonder if we made it too difficult to craft at those levels. Even I won't make a level 15 anything unless its a proc and I'm often spending more time at 15 than necessary to run story arcs.

I have often wondered if inventions should stop, or rather start, at about level 25. Which is to say, if you get a drop when you are level 12, it will be a level 25 drop. If you craft it, you will be able to slot it, but it will function as a level 12. As you level, it will scale up with you until level 25, when it will stop at its native level. This would make it much more beneficial to craft and slot inventions below level 25: it would be a slot it and forget it until at least level 25, and level 25 inventions (single aspect) are natively about as strong as SOs and don't expire.

It would basically kill off TOs, DOs, and SOs except as filler enhancements for slots that don't have inventions yet, but I'm ok with that. It would also eliminate all those low level weirdos that no one uses, but I'm ok with that also.The fact that level 25s would never disappear under exemplar actually creates a strong incentive to slot them: they would be a weird analog to purples. In fact, this is so useful a feature that the cutoff might need to be level 20 rather than 25, so they are slightly less strong than a standard SO natively.

I give the short version answer to that question in the paragraph immediately following the one you quote, where I am very specific in saying the problem isn't the influence flow per se, but what it would be symptomatic of, which is essentially an abandonment of the red side markets of sellers. If that is the case, then the merge was practically meaningless: it just means rich red side players have more stuff to occasionally buy. But it also means villain-side market participation is effectively below a meaningful level. And that means even after the merge, the market isn't beneficially serving the villain side to the same degree as it is the hero side. In fact, its essentially not serving its original purpose at all.

I'm sure someone will come along soon to say "so what" so I'll anticipate that by saying: this would only be meaningful to game designers, and people who think on time scales longer than a month. The fact that there are potentially many ways to breathe liquidity life back into the markets that would primarily benefit hero side but may not be strong enough to have any effect on the red side is intellectually troubling to me. It means what you could have solved with a light tap in the right direction may now require a sledgehammer. And I hate sledgehammer solutions.

True story:

Back in I6ish, Castle stated on the forums that SR had received a small buff, of 1.875% to the passives, increasing them from 5.625% to 7.5%. I heard many people in broadcast on the test server commenting on how much better the set was with this buff, and how much stronger it felt to play.

I, on the other hand, couldn't tell the difference. Of course, it would be hard to tell the difference between 5.625% base defense and 7.5% base defense, but I was convinced the set was exactly the same, and I thought after so long playing the set I would notice such a change.

So I actually tested the defenses of SR using a method I had just recently invented, using the streakbreaker to obtain extremely accurate measurements of defense (this was long before Real Numbers). What I measured the passives being was 5.7%, plus or minus 0.1%. I told Castle this, and asked if it was possible his buff was like off by a decimal place, and it accidentally only increased by 0.1875% or something like that.

After checking, Castle reported to the forums that in fact the change had not made it into the build, and in fact SR had not been buffed at all. Oops. I often wonder how all those people that reported the buff significantly improving the performance of the set in their testing felt after that revelation.

What does this have to do with anything? Not sure: I just like telling the the story of how my math b*tch-slapped Castle. But then he became the lead powers designer and I had to kiss his butt, so I guess he got the last laugh on me. You'd be surprised how absolutely ineffective it has been over the years, when I've had a balance disagreement with Castle, to say "hey, remember that time I proved you wrong on the forums? don't make me do it again." Because Castle would just say "you know, I could knock those SR passives down to 4.5% and its not like anyone would even notice" and I would have to shut up.

I don't have a desire to remain neutral, I am in fact neutral on the subject of non-exploitive farming. I don't care much if it happens, and I don't care much if it stops happening.

I addressed your point(s), at least as I understood them. The first was that you believed farming helps the game, and any statement otherwise was merely semantical. I disagree: farming does not help the game or hurt the game, at least in terms of adding supply to the game. One could argue - successfully, because it has been done in the past and is not just hypothetical - that farmers act to keep drop rates lower than they would be otherwise, which reduces the amount of drops everyone else besides farmers get. Either way, they don't add significantly more supply to the game than the devs expect to have actually in the game in total, plus or minus some margin of error.

The other point was the question of stigma. As I said, that's mostly a matter of projection, because I personally don't assert any stigma to non-exploitive farming. During the I14/I15 debacle, I argued both that exploitive farming was a detriment to the game no matter what sort of phony Robin Hood delusions anyone had but I also argued that non-exploitive farming was not something the devs cared all that much about and wasn't in the same category of detrimental activity. I believe both. That makes me "neutral" in the sense I don't believe farming is all good or all bad. But it doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. I have strong opinions: they are just inconsistent with the two largest sides to this issue.

I never said it would. What I said was that I wouldn't perform a merge without carefully studying the economy on both sides, because I wouldn't roll the dice and take a chance on lots of potentially bad things happening.

And if you look back, assuming the posts are still there, as time progressed I specifically stated that at some point, red side trading volume had reached such low levels, its unclear if it was possible to damage the markets any further with a merge. In both liquidity terms and in terms of the original intent of the markets - which was to provide a dynamic subset of the economy under the control of the players - there really was no significant red side market to damage any more.

If you had asked me in '07 if I would have supported a merge, I would have said no and I stand by that statement. In '08 I would have been 50/50 on the fence. By mid '09 I would have been generally in favor, provided a few precautionary steps were taken. By the time the devs were thinking about a merge, I was telling them I thought it would be for the best.

The one thing I was worried about, and still have no answer to, is whether net influence is flowing *to* the red side or *out* of the red side. If the markets are functioning correctly after the merge, net inf should be flowing into the red side at the moment. If net inf is flowing out of the red side, it points to potential long term problems which we wouldn't be able to see clearly yet.

Why this is true, or I should say why I believe this to be true, is an extremely lengthy discussion. It centers on the fact that the blue side has higher overall participation and higher net influence stores. Its entirely possible for there to be more pent-up buying pressure than selling pressure on the red side, but that cannot create a net outbound inf flow for very long, because the red side cannot sustain one, unless the primary material participants of the red side are essentially the ultra rich and farmers, and there's very little lower-end participation, which is dominated by sellers. And that points to a more systematic red side problem.

To be honest, at the time the merge was announced I was (and still am) much more worried about the markets as a whole than what the merge itself might do. There are systemic problems with the way the economy works that I think are preventing the markets from being as useful to the players as it ought to be. One of the biggest, in my opinion, is the huge valuation range of items. The difference between the least desirable and most desirable items, even ignoring purples and PvPIOs, is like eight orders of magnitude, from hundreds of millions to not even worth taking up a recipe slot. It would be like going to an open market where some people are trying to sell pebbles, and others are trying to buy 747s. But that's a tricky problem to solve in a way that would be immune from exploitation and also palatable to the devs.

There was also another original target demographic: lunatic scrappers and other ultra powergamers. The audience was wide enough to make the feature worthwhile to implement. And it was widened even further by allowing players to use -1 in combo with the multipliers, which turned out to be useful to low performance squishies who could adjust their difficulty to something like -1x2, which was often more enjoyable and less threatening than the standard 0x1.

So all around, even with the potential for people to claim it "encourages farming" I think it was a good option to add to the game overall. It helps farmers, and I have no problem with that, but it helps lots of players across the board.

I personally don't have much stake in non-exploitive farming either way. I'm correcting the incorrect statements consistently made by both sides in this argument. The devs don't hate farming. They don't encourage farming. For the most part, they see it as marginal behavior, in the literal sense of behavior at the margins of what most players do most of the time.

And one of the biggest myths is that farming helps the game. It does not. If farming was eliminated tomorrow somehow, the total number of drops in the game would not decrease in the long run. It would basically be the same after the devs next rebalanced drops. The difference is that those drops would be spread out among more players rather than concentrated in fewer. But to a first order approximation, farmers neither help nor hurt the economy. They are basically neutral contributors that should be neither blamed, nor congratulated, for the state of the economy (they have second order effects that are a more complex topic: some beneficial, others less so).

Of all the topics discussed on the forums, the topic that I post on that perplexes the most people is the general topic of the game economy, including farming and marketeering. Primarily because I seem to be one of the very few posters unwilling to take a side and capable of surviving in no mans-land indefinitely. You're not alone in thinking that if I don't seem favorable to one side, it must be because I'm championing the other one.

The intent was to prevent the need to advertises for fillers or make people door-sit. It wasn't so much to help farmers as to make them less visible and less intrusive. That was a compromise between making the activity potentially easier, and making it less of an annoyance for other players.

By the way, this is one of those features that I warned the devs ahead of time that it would be used as proof the devs actually encourage farming.

Trust me: that's not a mistake I'm ever going to make as long as I live.

This is false. What would happen is the devs would datamine the total drop rate across the servers as being far lower than it used to be, and increase the drop rates across the board.

Same thing happened with XP normalization. Players leveling slower than intended when datamined. XP cranked up across the board within those level ranges.

What they cannot do is tweak the reward system player by player, depending on whether they farm or not. But the notion that farming helps the economy is based on a premise, that the drop rates are fixed and its up to the players to crank as much drops out of those drop rates as possible. That's not how it works.

Not only are they harder to hit, but more importantly the critters will be dealing 46.4% more damage to you.

(They will be 20% more accurate and deal 22% more damage per attack due to level scaling: 1.2 * 1.22 = 1.464, 46.4% more damage)

You're free to believe that, but recognize that if you take the next step and say that because the devs allow farming, the devs must honor farming, you'd be wrong. Not in a debate sense, but simply in the sense that they won't, and no one should be surprised when they don't. As I said, they won't go too far out of their way to stop (non-exploitive) farming, but they also have no problem with interfering with it by side-effect.

That's what I mean when I say they do not encourage it. You can do it, but don't expect the devs to help, and don't expect the devs to worry about hurting the activity either. It is in that sense that dev intent is highly relevant. Its relevant to all the people that act surprised when the devs act contrary to a highly inaccurate assumption of their intent.

Since its an exploit detector, potentially yes.

But the fundamental principle is that all XP takes some activity to earn. That activity is highly variable. But if you could find the right set of metrics upon which to measure activity, its possible to correlate an "activity metric" with XP. When there is a huge imbalance between the two, it implies that an exploit is being used. In the case above, while there is a sudden burst of XP as four AVs are suddenly taken down, that is at the end of a huge amount of work in setting them up for eventual defeat by attacking them, debuffing them, controlling them, etc. Theoretically speaking, that could be measured.

But there are lots of ways to defeat something or otherwise earn XP, and the trick is measuring the right set of things that collectively always happen whenever XP is earned, no matter what the circumstances. Conversely, those metrics should be things that can't be faked without doing more work than it would take to simply earn XP normally. If you could do that, then even if the devs themselves make a mistake and allow AE authors to construct missions that earn dramatically huge XP, it will almost certainly break this balance metric and generate an alarm.

Sounds simple, but it actually isn't, because so many things can be faked if you knew it would help your rewards. AE authors, as we've seen, will find and exploit any loophole in the reward system that exists, so the metrics would need to work independently of the devs deliberately making them work. They have to represent something intrinsic about the nature of earning rewards normally.

Ask and ye shall receive. First of all, paragonwiki has a description of the streakbreaker here.

Here's how it works (including some information not in the article):

1. Zoning resets the streakbreaker.
2. Autohitting powers and effects are ignored by the streakbreaker. They do not count as hits, they do not count as misses ("autohit powers are not included in the system").
3. The number of misses the system will tolerate before forcing the next attack to hit is based on the worst chance to hit during your current miss streak, including the attack being used. See the table in the Paragonwiki article.
4. The streakbreaker only breaks miss streaks by inducing hits. It does not break hit streaks by inducing misses. It can only help you hit.
5. The streakbreaker affects all entities that are allowed to attack. This includes players and critters. Nothing is exempt from the streakbreaker.
6. The streakbreaker tracks attackers, not powers.
7. AoEs roll one tohit roll per target, starting from the closest target to the center of the AoE (or the origin for cones) and working outward.
8. Damage auras roll tohit rolls, and are often overlooked when observing streakbreaker behavior.
9. Unslotted Brawl is one of the biggest killers of the streakbreaker, since it can have a very low chance to hit the target without accuracy slotting. See rule #3 above.


The streakbreaker has been thoroughly tested, specifically by me. I'm pretty sure its still in effect now, given the combat chat continues to give "forced to hit by streakbreaker" messages. If you have a case where you think the streakbreaker has malfunctioned, you can post your combat logs with the miss streak, and see if it did in fact malfunction. In every case so far, however, we've been able to spot the reason behind the apparent malfunction, and its always been due to something that specifically caused the streakbreaker to allow for a longer miss streak than the player thought it ought to, but was consistent with its design.