Arcanaville

None of the missions I tested worked that way. They allowed me to enter at level 1, without scaling me up to 19. If there are others that force you to autoSK to 19, that would be even better than the versions I saw, although it would be all moot within a few minutes either way.

It can be tricky to detect these sorts of missions in real time, but I think I have an idea for how the devs could unequivocally detect an exploit mission in the AE which would *always* locate exploits about a certan level, and *never* accidentally trigger on a mission that did not have exploits. Its not as simple as just looking for a mission that gives a lot of XP, or even a lot of XP fast. If you fight four AVs for ten minutes, you can still get a big burst of XP within a small one minute window if you defeat them all at once. I believe I have a solution to that problem that would work in theory. But its a bit tricky, and I'll need to think about it carefully to see if there are any loopholes.

Without getting into the details, I'm not sure why you'd want to set to +4x8 at level one, unless you were sitting at the door while something else cleared the mission. If you're doing it solo, which is how I have been testing, there's no advantage to scaling to +4, and you won't be in the mission long enough for x8 to be meaningful. I'm not even sure if its ever a good idea to set for x8, because you might end up skewing the mission towards bosses and Lts which would fill up spawn allocation points.

Setting higher than even might be helpful, but I'm not sure if its helpful to go all the way up to +4. At +4, you might be forced to use two attacks when one would do, especially AoEs, which effectively slows you down by 50%. The bonus XP doesn't compensate for that.

If you start at level one.

Unless I'm testing a completely different exploit that generates fifty times the rewards as normal play, while you will eventually reach a point where leveling is irrelevant, that doesn't happen at level one. It would be suboptimal if it did regardless, because you wouldn't want to deprive yourself of having at least a minimal complement of attacks besides the veteran ones.

Trust me when I say I've tested the exploit at *all* levels.

I know they have thought about it. I don't know if they did it or not. I presume they did, but may not have the resources to monitor that data continuously. Suffice to say, if you're leveling fifty times faster than the average rate, they can figure that out if they want to. The question is less whether they can detect it, and more whether they want to take action to stop it at that particular moment. In my personal opinion, they need to be more proactive, but I'm not the one that would have to monitor those statistics and then make daily decisions on what sort of actions to take. Keep in mind the devs do not, as a rule, have 100% control over the live game. Customer service does, through the CSAs and GMs and service operators. A lot can get confused in translation between dvs and customer service.

Pretend you're War Witch for a moment, and you have to write a memo explaining what *specific* data you want some other group of people to monitor, and what specific actions you want them to take based on what they see in that data. And once you write that memo, some completely different group of people you have no direct authority over is going to read that memo, interpret it however they see fit, and then execute its instructions without your oversight. Consider all the possible things that could go wrong there.

Consider all the possible things that might have already gone wrong there.

When I suggested that, a really long time ago, the specific reason(s) Castle gave for why that could not be done are what I called the powerset rebalancing commandments**, and we know today as the cottage rule (I also recommended strengthening the passives, to levels close to what they are now, and making a change to Dull Pain).

In the same post, I suggested combining Focused Senses and Evasion, and Agile and Lucky, and replacing both Lucky and Evasion with utility powers. My two top candidates were a travel power toggle and a conserve power-like click, although I was also thinking about a scaling power in place of Evasion - which would be necessary today given the Brute version of SR (which did not exist at the time I made the suggestion, because Brutes did not exist at the time I made the suggestion). Today, I would probably recommend more exotic and interesting substitutions.


** They were:

I. Thou shalt not change the order of powers in a powerset unless absolutely necessary
II. Thou shalt not delete an effect from a power unless required by balance mandate
III. Thou shalt not change the mechanics of a power in terms of activation or usage

Snaptooth encourages farming in the same sense that mito respawns encourage farming. For that matter, saying a defeat badge encourages farming is like saying yellow lights encourage speeding, because they force you to go really really fast to beat the red.

I'm not really arguing, or guessing. I'm just describing. People keep claiming to be perplexed about the devs' behavior when it comes to farming and exploitive behavior. When that happens, I provide the same explanation I've been giving for years. Beyond that, if you think I'm wrong, I'm not in a position to prove it to you. I can say the odds of public debate changing the devs' mind about what is and is not an exploit, or whether to act to correct them or not, has an extremely low probability of success.

The devs never deliberately and intentionally encourage farming. Never. The devs look at farming as an unintended but not explicitly barred behavior. You can do the same thing over and over if you want, but the devs are never going to specifically encourage or condone it. On more than one occasion I've mentioned to the devs that a particular feature would be held up as "encouraging farming." In every case, I was told that essentially that was an unavoidable side effect, not the intended purpose.

Here's the bottom line on farming. Unless it involves exploits, the devs won't usually go out of their way to stop farming. On the other hand, if something they do hurts a particular kind of farming, they also won't shed a tear either. Farming is an unprotected activity.


On the subject of the most egregious farming exploit currently being farmed in the AE. I'm aware of it, and I'm aware of its mechanics. But I never really tested it myself. So I decided to do just that this weekend. I deliberately did so in a secondary account I use for testing purposes, so that if I tripped an anti-farming trigger, it wouldn't compromise my primary accounts. I also collected a lot of data on what you can do with that particular exploit. If there is anyone who says they didn't realize within seconds that they were in an exploit farm, even someone who just started playing the game yesterday and is over the age of ten, frankly they are lying or completely oblivious to external stimuli. I mean, you have to exit these maps within a minute or so of entering them if you start at level one, because you level so fast you'll stop earning XP before you reach the end of the mission.

My rough estimate is that you can earn XP at 30 to 50 times the normal rate, if not more. I have some pity for someone that doesn't realize some marginal AE exploit is earning them 25% more XP than normal. But not 5000%. That would be like someone starting up the game client, having it crash and shut your PC off, and sitting there for an hour thinking that perhaps its just night time in Paragon City.

If I log in this evening and all my attacks started one-shotting everything - Bosses, AVs, Hamidon - I would /bug it. I wouldn't assume it was One-Shot Cyber Monday or the devs were just rewarding my one billionth forum post word.

Okay, I would also go out and solo Lusca. But only once for the fraps video. Not a hundred times in a row for the drops.

There is a wider range in reward earning rate within the actual dev-created content than that. The AE just has to exist within the range of reward earning the standard content generates and it'll be fine. Some of the players that *only* play AE arcs because they are massively more profitable than the standard content will stop playing AE arcs, but frankly I honestly don't care that much (or, actually, at all), and neither should the devs.

Of course, regulating AE rewards goes hand in hand with improving the quality of published AE arcs, but as long as the devs see the AE as a tool for mission writers as opposed to a tool for mission players and focuses on promoting the maximum number of players to write arcs as opposed to focusing on getting the maximum number of players to play arcs, reward regulation will not have much of a point to it long term.

For me, the set to look at for inspiration is Dark Armor. Dark Embrance, Murky Cloud, Obsidian Shield, and Dark Regeneration, and you're basically set. You have basically all your resistances, all your status protection, and an extremely powerful heal. You can take Death Shroud if you want the damage, or not. You can take Cloak of Darkness, or not. You can take either of Oppressive Gloom or Cloak of Fear, or neither, or both. But taking both is not quite as good as the sum of both since there is a slight non-synergy between them. And of course there's Soul Transfer, one of the best rezzes in the game if you like rezzes, or very skippable if you don't.

Four "core" powers, and five powers that are simultaneously not necessary, but also not worthless. They are almost the perfect balance between being useful in interesting ways, but also optional depending on the taste of the player. In many ways, I consider Dark Armor to be the most beautifully designed set, and its almost completely by accident.

The worst, by the way, is Super Reflexes, at least in terms of the way the power choices are presented to the player. Setting aside any discussion of how good or bad the set is, Super Reflexes has three toggles that are basically mandatory, and Practiced Brawler. And then it has three defensive passives that are each *doubly* synergistic: they synergize with their respective defensive toggle, and synergize with each other due to the scaling resistances.

By "synergize" I mean the value is more than the sum of the parts. For example, the difference between just having the slotted toggle (~21.6% defense) and having both (~30.4% defense) is the difference between 28.4% of all attacks landing and 19.6% of all attacks landing. That means losing the passive increases incoming damage (through that type) by a whopping 45%. Considering the toggle is numerically more than twice as large as the passive, losing the passive essentially cuts your protection nearly in half.

In a more complex way, the scaling resistances are also only about half as strong in terms of protection when you have two as when you have three. So amazingly, you have six powers (three toggles and three passives) in which ALL of them have the property that losing any one of them costs you significantly more than 1/6th your total protection. That's actually unique among all defensive sets in all of the powers being essentially "necessary."

Seven necessary powers, and two optional ones - Elude and Quickness. And Quickness is actually not so simple: the recharge and movement debuff resistances in Quickness were actually put in there to solve certain balance issues with the set. In particular, the movement debuff is there almost specifically to serve one purpose: to allow SR to run more quickly out of autohitting debuff patches. Its there to prevent Quicksand from eviscerating SR, and to prevent Caltrops from autohitting SR to death right through their defenses.

One of the reasons I wasn't so crazy about the most recent (~I13) buffs to Invuln is that it pushed Invuln closer to having the same problem as SR.

I doubt that will help Black Hole and its cousins much. Although, while typing that post above, it occurred to me that the *ultimate* in situational usage intangibles that would *never* be questioned when used is this one:

1. Toggle.
2. 15' radius PBAoE.
3. Usable while dead.

As a toggle and PBAoE, it you could turn it off and on, like Choking Cloud. You could maneuver around and only affect the targets you wanted to. And if you could use it while dead, you could theoretically intangible away all the critters around you when the team wiped, allowing them to rez in perfect safety. It would be like an inverse Soul Transfer.

Few people would take it still, but no one would complain about it anymore. At worst, team mates would tell you to turn it off if you were using it while everyone was still alive. Although to be honest, a controllable toggle foe intangible might actually be too powerful.

But that has nothing to do with geko's statement, at least the part you quoted:

He's saying:

1. Don't use it all the time.

2. Use it specifically in situations where without it you'll die.

All I said was that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that statement. All the problems you mention about the power are lesser evils to the alternative, which is to die. If you're not going to die in that situation, you were really not supposed to be using the power.

The real catch to black hole is that many CoH players simply do not like highly situational powers. And that actually traces back to a totally different error on the part of the devs: balancing attacks with long recharge, and balancing defensive sets with power layering. If players could make full attack chains with fewer attacks, and enable the core protections of their defensive sets with fewer powers (for those with defenses) there would be less antagonism towards situational powers, I think.

The other catch is that when you compare Black Hole to, say, Mutation, no player gets blamed for using Mutation, because obviously Mutation virtually always makes sense when its used, even with its drawbacks. But if you use Black Hole, it can be almost impossible to prove that its use was necessary rather than punitive. But both powers are only intended to be used when players are about to die, Mutation later than sooner.

I'm well aware of the mechanical flaws in the power, but geko's statement wasn't addressing its flaws, just the intent of its usage benefit. And while we might question that benefit in retrospect, I don't think its fair to knock that statement at the time, when it was unclear if it really would be seen in the long run as too punitive given its situational nature.

I should point out that there was a debate for months on the forums (and in-game) about whether Elude was too punitive for its benefit - the I2 click defense version that is more or less the version we have now, as opposed to the toggle PFF/Superspeed odd ball. The end crash was seen by many as so detrimental to offense that it made the power almost pointless (I should point out that at the time SR scrappers were often running toggles inside of Elude - there was no such thing as a "soft cap" back then with critters easily reaching 100% tohit and more). And in a crazy twist you could never have predicted, with so many high-end SR scrappers aiming for soft-capped defenses with inventions, I'm sure some of them would actually consider the old I1 toggle Elude to actually be more useful - it would be a better panic button when soft-capped defenses fail, and it doubles as a travel power.


Edit: on the subject of foe intangibles in general, back when this was being discussed for the 38,714th time in I14 I suggested the following:

1. Add a visual effect that was obvious to intangible foes.
2. Add a way to tab through non-intangible foes, skipping intangible ones.
3. Add an effect to foe intangibles which temporarily stopped their powers from recharging and halted regeneration and recovery, so that in effect they are time-stopped within the intangible effect (so they do not emerge stronger than when they went in).
4. Add a random foe effect on emerge from intangible, random damage in particular, as an effect of returning to normal space that could be enhanced. This makes foe intangible powers attacks with an intermediate intangible, rather than a pure intangible effect only.
5. Replace AoE intangible with cones, or some other directional effect, so they can be aimed.

What I was saying, and it seems it was worth saying because I'm now repeating, was that after careful consideration the OP really isn't interested in anyone correcting his understanding of game mechanics, as you were pointing out in your post; he is convinced that accuracy was nerfed, and that if his understanding of the mechanics is at fault, all it means is that the problem lies elsewhere. I'm pretty sure that's what he meant when he said:

"Accuracy reduction is not a myth. And I will be the first to acknowledge my own in-game testing seems to point that the "math" being presented works out correctly. The point of what I posted is that we noticebaly began missing suddenly, like 3, 4 and 5 times in a row and now requiring 2 accuracy enhancements or a higher level IO to compensate for it. I have been here since CoH Beta and this was never the case."

So when you said:

"B_D, please, you were mistaken. It's totally forgivable that you got this stuff mixed up. It's not rocket science, but it is kind of complicated. There was no nerf. You've got some of the people most knowledgeable about game's hit-chance mechanics that exist in the player community responding to you in this thread. They're correct here.

Think about it. If Mid's contained information showing the kind of discrepancy you're describing, and if the makers of Mid's really trusted their powers info enough to believe that discrepancy was valid, do you really think the makers of Mid's wouldn't have come to the forums posting about it? Or that someone using Mid's wouldn't have noticed by now?"

I don't think it matters to the OP. Either our information proves accuracy was nerfed, or our information is wrong. Either way, I don't think our corrections are meaningful to the OP. I'm not even sure the OP is reading my posts at all.

Actually, its due to a different rule most players have forgotten, but which the devs also acknowledged. Its the "three shots rule." The game was originally designed around the basic premise that three "standard" attacks (read: three tier 1/2 blaster attacks at the original 1.0 modifier) would defeat a normal even con minion. That speed, coupled with unbalanced AoEs, originally promoted the sense that killing was better than mitigating.

But while that explains where the original encouragement came from, it doesn't fully explain why it took root so quickly and so pervasively. It didn't start that way. It wasn't until maybe I2 when this concept fully solidified in public opinion.

In fairness to geko, there's nothing intrinsicly wrong with what he said. The problem is really something that you couldn't predict, which is that for reasons not completely understood (at least by me), CoH players quickly and uncommonly came to believe, on average, three things that are not universally believed in other MMOs:

1. If you are facing too many things, its because you just aren't killing them fast enough.

2. If you aren't killing them fast enough, its your fault for not dealing enough damage.

3. If there isn't enough damage to kill everything faster than they can kill you, its the devs fault for not making enough damage available, because they hate us and have no idea that the point to a superhero genre game is to be massively overpowered relative to the game environment.

This overwhelmingly offense-skewed perspective seems to be unique to City of Heroes, and its ingrained in the culture. Defense seems to be there just to defend against alpha volleys and allow scrappers to solo entire zones. Otherwise, if your defenses are doing anything at all, its probably because you don't have enough AoEs.

I do not fault the devs for not seeing that one coming. I will fault any dev team in the future for not preventing it from happening ever again, because for all the good things in this game that happened by chance, that one cost us more than most players will ever know, but any dev team with a brain should know.

Granted, the mechanics of Black Hole were problematic, but geko's statement itself is not totally off the wall weird. The devs saw a thirty second break as being a defefnsive advantage; the players saw it as an offensive disadvantage.

I did my time in the market forums as well. When you start arguing over the definition of terms like "arbitrage" and the way actual economists use the term is not considered credible evidence, you know no good can really come of it.

To me, the big difference is that when people assert misinformation about the game mechanics, that's a potential source of confusion and being misled: its worth taking the time to correct those, just in case a random forum reader thinks there might be something to it.

On the other hand, I don't really care if someone wants to try to prove to me that, say, temporal arbitrage can exist or not. I don't care if its impossible: I only care if I can do it. If I can, I'm ok with doing the impossible.

My only real concern about the markets is that everything the devs have done to tweak the economy has tended to stifle order flow. That's unhealthy and should be looked at. Other than that, although I'm not really an active marketeer, if its doable, I've probably done it at least once, just to see if I could get away with it. And probably on the first day of trading at I9 launch, too. So unfortunately, I'm probably part of the problem.

If someone put an atmosphere there relatively recently through some kind of terraforming, Mars would still take tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years to lose it to atmospheric escape at its current size.

Eh, that doesn't really bother me. It does perplex me, however, that the OP seems to be using what is essentially my information in an incorrect manner and ignoring my corrections of those misunderstandings completely. I mean, I'm pretty sure I know what I meant when I wrote the attack mechanics guides and documented the tohit algorithm.

Also, players have been testing accuracy and tohit formally since a least I3, and informally since at least I1 if not earlier. There's no way that at any time the base chance tohit an even con critter without defense was anything other than about 75%. There's no way it could have been significantly better, and there's no way it could have been significantly worse. So to be honest, I'm really at a loss. This might simply be one of those cases where a player has an intractable belief that something is amiss that cannot be disproved with any factual information. It happens.

It has nothing to do with mechanics. The OP sees that the unenhanced chance for a standard attack to hit an even con target is 75%, and he thinks it didn't used to be, so something must have changed some time.. But it always was that, so nothing has changed in that regard. And its never been a secret that it was 75%, because the devs announced that fact many times, including but not limited to discussions of the purple patch.

Just for giggles, I dug up some of geko's posts from long ago regarding this topic.

geko mentions base chance to hit is 75% (and as the devs did in the past, he says "accuracy" colloquially, but the point is clear). Also, note geko's sig. - March 2005

geko says chance to hit a target with no defense with n archery attack - 1.16 acc - is 87% (75% * 1.16 = 87%). - November 2005.

Some place somewhere I think I have that really old post of geko explaining the accuracy of Gale, which I think predates both of those posts above, but I think it was purged and I can't find it at the moment. But I know that base 75% chance to hit was something so common knowledge that this is actually the first time I can recall someone even questioning it.

Base tohit for players attacking even con critters has always been 75%. Its specifically designed into the purple patch - both versions of it actually - which means not only has it been 75% since release, the devs have been *saying* its 75% since practically release. No attempt to hide that fact at all. This is something we all knew in June of 2004 if not earlier.

The change you're trying to convince us that just slipped by us is something we've all known to have been true since the beginning of time. It hasn't changed to be that, it was always like that.


As to your contention that accuracy was recently nerfed in a visible way, regardless of the mechanics surrounding such a nerf, I have a standing offer to analyze any proof of such a problem. Such proof can be collected by any player with zero effort: just turn on chat logging in your game client options and make sure that tohit rolls are being sent to at least one of your chat windows (the global one, say). If you are experiencing miss rates statistically improbable for your circumstances, the chat logs would have a permanent record of that fact.

However, I find that the act of turning on chat logging or loading herostats seems to fix the problem for pretty much everyone that does so. Fancy that. The offer nevertheless stands.


To be honest, I'm almost beginning to wish *one* of these problem reports would turn out to be related to an actual problem. The last time one of them did was a really really long time ago.

If it is, it is, although a reference for that fact would be helpful. Either way, I don't think its credible that the DCU earth could be four times larger than the real Earth in either radius or surface area (implying double the radius). That large of a discrepancy would create a cascade of blatant differences that I don't think could be marginalized.

Tohit bonus.

Also, I didn't realize until now that the links to all three reference articles for the attack mechanics wiki page were broken. Probably because of the forum move. The I7 guide is here and the I10 beta guide (which I never fully updated) is still here (one of the reasons I didn't fully update that one is because I became increasingly convinced the wiki was the better place to put that info, actually).

The Elusivity post appears to be gone, although the Fix Defense post that is its antecedent is still around (protected from purging by being a guide).

I suppose it should be a cautionary message to the uninformed that I was the author of all three references for that wiki entry.

To repeat: Mids is not showing intrinsic accuracy: its showing calculated accuracy based on the base to hit you set in the program, which is 75% by default (the base tohit of players vs even con critters).

But don't take my word for it (since apparently you aren't going to), take Mids word for it. Here's the database definition for Tanker Jab:



Taken directly from Mids, right from the database editor.


If the devs tampered with intrinsic accuracy, I would know, the City of Data people would know, the Mids developers would know, and half the quants in the game would know within a week. This would be the *worst* way to stealth nerf anything. It would set off alarms all over the place. This would be like the devs trying to hide the fact they were mad at me by subtly putting a 1024x768 picture of a middle finger on all the loading screens with Arcana sux in big purple letters right below it. Someone somewhere would eventually notice that sort of thing.

Also, I should respond to this specifically. Most ways to do this are detectable by the people who monitor the numbers in the game. Almost no ways of doing this would be undetectable by me personally. And the devs have no motive to do this, much less keep it a secret. If it was to slow down the amount of kills we generate by a small amount, they wouldn't have increased the amount of rewards we earn per kill the last time they reviewed the leveling curve. If it was to make specific things tougher for us to kill, they would just do what they always do: give those things +Defense. And if it was just to annoy people, they have all sorts of ways to do that besides messing with decimal points on intrinsic accuracy.


Edit: triple checked Super Strength for both Brutes and Tankers. All attacks have intrinsic 1.0 accuracy except Hand Clap which has 0.8 (standard for AoE mez powers) and Knockout Blow which has 1.2. This also agrees with Mids, which has the correct data when you factor out the 0.75 base tohit that is set by default in options.

Ignoring the fact that Superman moving at or near the speed of light anywhere near the ground would kill everyone anywhere near his flight path, and kill Batman whether he had a way to kill Superman or not, Superman could reach any point on the Earth from any other point in less than seven hundredths of a second. Assuming Batman could react and actually do something meaningful in about a quarter of a second, Superman would need to be about seventy five thousand kilometers away. Significantly farther away than geosynchronous orbit, and about a quarter of the way to the moon.

Since when is the Earth in the DCU four times larger than Earth?

There's no way Batman would make a Superman fail safe that was contingent on him being able to out-react or outfight Superman. I'm sure he'd give it a shot, but the real failsafe would be something that would be triggered upon some sequence of events, something which would work even if Superman killed or incapacitated Batman. However, it would also need to correctly sit idle if Batman were killed or defeated by someone other than Superman. What that could possibly be, or have been as the case may be, I don't have a guess.