Arcanaville

You're saying you can touch anywhere on your body in the same amount of time these world-class quick draw shooters can move their hands about three inches. Quick draw holsters do not require two different motions to draw the pistol out of, and then aimed towards, the target. They are open in the front and the gun can basically be pivoted forward and drawn in one continuous motion.

For reference, you're saying you can reach any part of your body in the same amount of time that this guy quick draws. The numbers being called out by the announcer are, I believe, the firing times in hundredths of a second (usually he doesn't say the decimal point). So they are firing on timescales of about 260 milliseconds, or a quarter of a second. That includes the reaction time to see the starting light and begin to draw. The actual draw is taking about a tenth to a sixteenth of a second.

And just to head off a potential objection, they aren't actually precision firing at those balloons. They are basically firing blanks and the hot black powder from the cartridge breaks the balloon as long as the pistol is pointed in approximately the right direction. So there is zero time being spent actually "aiming" - the balloon will break as long as the gun is fully drawn at the moment it is fired.

To be able to touch any specific point on your body in the same amount of time requires moving several times the distance in a similar or less time. Assuming infinite reaction speed, you'd have to be physically many times faster than these guys. Factoring in reaction speed, you'd need to be a cyborg.

It sounds fast because it is. 63 milliseconds is faster than human reaction time, even for very fast people. And even discounting that, being able to move your arm just straight out in a punch in 1/16th of a second would be fast, much less trying to make a coordinated move to touch a specific part of your body on command.

Just moving your hand two feet in a straight motion in 1/16th of a second requires an average speed of 32 feet per second (22 mph) and at linear acceleration requires a minimum of about 32gs of acceleration to cover that distance. Your hand should be moving at about 44 miles per hour when it reached that point, and if that point was a point on your body it would strike with about as much force as a martial arts punch.

I have my doubts. For reference, according to wikipedia, the world record for open style quick draw is 0.208 seconds. Given the reaction time to the start signal, this implies drawing and firing the pistol in about 0.06 seconds, just about 1/16th of a second. The hand motion of the world record holder for quickdraw is an order of magnitude lower than what you're claiming you've clocked yourself doing personally in the same amount of elapsed time. I think your timing methodology is likely to have a flaw.

A few:

1. Most of my understanding of what the devs datamine and how they datamine it comes from information gleaned from the pre-I11 blaster buffs. In relative terms, that was very recent. Certainly it post-dates things like the difficulty sliders. Although, knowing what I know now, I can also reasonably extrapolate a lot of what the devs said about performance and datamining going back all the way to release.

2. To the extent that I was able to learn (which is limited by the fact that the devs do not want to discuss the specifics of precisely how they datamine performance, lest those metrics get "gamed" or overanalyzed - not even with me) I did learn, and did state back then, that the devs datamining is capable of seeing the difference between solo and teamed performance, and performance at different combat level ranges. Its not apparently "blurry." Although Castle would not give me specifics at the time, he was willing to answer yes or no question about whether his datamining data could tell *where* blasters were having the problem: was it at certain levels, with certain powerset combinations, while solo or teamed. The answer was basically yes to all three.

3. The devs usually look at a date range of performance that is long enough to provide enough data, while still being temporally relevant. My guess is that they are typically looking at performance numbers from six months to one year from the moment they are looking at performance, unless they have a specific reason to look at longer term trends. That is an educated guess, however, not a specific thing told to me.

4. Individual weird players and playstyles are unlikely to affect the statistics enough to matter. Even for our playerbase size, the numbers are simply too large to be influenced in that way for most cases, except maybe at level 50 where there is a logjam of players and much more farming than at any other level. This too is an educated guess, based on the (very) limited information I have about the kinds of statistics the devs gather. Which mostly revolve around how fast players earn rewards (i.e. influence, XP, drops, etc). That is, in fact, the very definition of "performance" to the devs when it comes to game balancing. How fast you can earn rewards, including XP.

That's true, but there is in fact a reason: they aren't actually balanced. That's why blasters keep getting buffed, over and over again. Its because they keep lagging in the devs' datamining, usually because they are dropping dead a lot. Although I don't know if that was rectified after the I13 buffs, although I have my doubts.

Every archetype's health is different for pretty specific reasons. Originally blaster, controller, and defender health were all identical, tanker health was much higher, and scrapper health was in between. That was reasonable given the archetypal requirements. Blaster health is different now because blasters die at rates far, far higher than defenders and controllers; far higher than is consistent with their archetypal design.

Its actually questionable as to whether "offense as a defense" in terms of damage itself is even mathematically possible. I personally don't think it is. Offensive mitigation in the form of things like mez effects *can* substitute for actual defenses in a balanced way, but not direct kill speed. By the time kill speed is balancing defense, its so high its overpowered in terms of actually killing things too fast. There's no comfortable middle ground to place blaster offense to make that concept work.

That would be a neat trick.

The most important distinction seems to be that the first one seems to work and the second one doesn't, at least for the average player, to a high enough degree to be comparable. That's why the highest damage archetype has had its damage buffed every single time its been revisted and has *also* had its survivability increased nearly every single time its been revisited. And its still unclear if its enough.


Although some defenders have resistances, and some have damage debuffs high enough to actually swing the scale in favor of the defender. If you are a Dark or Rad defender for example, and have the appropriate toggle active, you'll benefit from -37.5% damage, which makes defender health effectively larger than blaster health for the purposes of one-shotting and alpha volleys.

Of course, since neither archetype is explicitly designed to be guaranteed to survive such attacks, this is not really relevant to any significant or game-balance-relevant issue. Its a corner case of a corner case.

Defenders and Controllers were not penalized, Blasters were buffed. They used to have the same health, actually, but what changed the situation was the fact that Blasters kept dropping dead, while Defenders and Controllers simply refused to die in large numbers just to get the devs' attention.

If Defenders or Controllers would simply die more often or fail to level quickly for a couple of years, they'd probably get a health buff also. But they are simply too stubborn to do what is necessary for the good of the archetype. Its sad, really, that the few have to suffer just because of the competency of the many.

Boss melee damage modifier at level 50: 385.52
Elite Boss melee damage mod at level 50: 481.9
Lowest player health maximum at level 50: 1017.35
Highest standard critter damage scale: 2.0

Best case single target melee damage (Elite Boss or lower), without crits, bonus damage, or DOT: 963.8

So yeah, without bonus damage, crits, or damage buffs, critters are usually designed to be incapable of defeating a player with a single attack below the rank of Archvillain or Monster at even con. But bosses and higher that can crit are capable of defeating a player from full health with a single attack.

Also: Ninjitsu and Energy Melee are a combination to avoid in the AE if you aren't deliberately trying to assassinate your fellow players.

Also, because those problems tend to be exaggerated. If the disparity was as bad as some claimed, this would show up in their datamining as penalties in performance. To the best of my knowledge, it does not.

If it did, the devs would be essentially forced to address the issue, as they were forced to with blasters. If you asked someone in I10 who soloed slower on average, solo defenders or solo blasters, probably most people would say defenders, particularly the non-debuffing ones. And they would have been horribly wrong. That discrepancy between what actual players do with the powersets on average and what forum analysts predict happens often produces a very strong credibility gap.

When the devs have said in the past that defenders were the "most balanced" archetype, we now know (or at least I do) that what the devs were hinting at is that the defender archetype has the fewest performance outliers - high or low - across all of its powerset combinations and across all playing conditions (solo, teamed, at different level bands). That contradicts most commonly accepted views of defender performance: that there are big winners and losers in performance with regard to primaries and (to a lesser extent) secondaries.

True (and previously noted), but as also noted you can't see that happen anymore. Ditto the Kheldian slotting bug, and the falling damage bug. I think in terms of the most damage caused by a single power activation that can be witnessed by the players in the game under relatively normal circumstances, the Steel Canyon building explosions are still the highest. Hitting the Kronos Titan with the boom is just the extreme corner case. Being hit for a hundred times your own health is pretty high either way, though.

What would be better would be if I got 0.01% of the XP and Inf earned by every player that played a defense set. I should go talk to Television about that.

If one day you see a level 50 named Peter Gibbons giving billion inf costume contest prizes every day for a month in Atlas, well, you'll know who to thank when you log in that defense character.

Everyone seems to think this is either easy or impossibly hard. I happen to believe its difficult, but not intractable. Its a question of designing on good foundations to begin with, so that you aren't resting on the crutch of iterative rebalancing, which *is* doomed to fail if you were to attempt to implement such a system with its precepts.


Just to be clear, the most important aspect of skill trees, in my opinion, are not the skills but the trees. The forking decisions implicit in that structure provides the *potential* for complex distinct build differences in theory.

But really, skill trees are actually the pretty wrapping paper that rest on a much more complex (if they are built correctly) numerical balancing system. The system that generates the tree options, basically. And its entirely possible to dispense with the trees and go straight to a flatter points-based or synergy-based ability system that would be even more powerful. But you'd be flying without a net: a skill tree can hide failures to properly counterbalance certain kinds of options. A points based or synergy-based system can't: you'd be hit in the face with every mistake by reasonably intelligent players constantly.


By the way, I've often stated, and still assert, that the HERO system (Champions PnP) would be an awful system to base a combat-centric MMO on. But that's not an indictment of points-based systems, just the HERO system itself, which was designed for role playing paper-based d20 gamers. I'm pretty sure, for example, that I could convert the CoX framework into a points-based system without too much difficulty. It wouldn't be as balanced as one built from scratch, but it would be any worse balance-wise than what we have now; maybe a bit more balanced actually, because that balance would be enforced at a deep design level.

That's not an idle guess. Its something that, off and on, I've put actual time into thinking through. I even have a rough idea of how the framework would work. It all comes down to normalizing the value of every kind of attribmod of every power in the game relative to the primary balancing metrics of the game: specifically kill speed and survivability envelope. Rather than trying to balance thirty thousand powers in the game, you'd only need to balance about 50-60 "micro-powers" that all other powers are constructed out of. That's like a six month project, rather than a sixty year one.

I understand what you're saying, but that's not the point I was getting at.

In City of Heroes, some build choices have strict unavoidable consequences. No such choice has more unavoidable consequences than your choice of archetype. If you choose to be a blaster, you've made a serious decision about the level of personal defense you will be able to buy. If you choose to be a scrapper, you've placed fairly tight limits on the amount of effective ranged offense you'll likely be able to possess. Your level of control will be limited unless you choose to be a controller or dominator, say. The *reason* those choices are meaningful is that they have *limits*. You can't just have whatever you want.

When you remove those limits and attempt to laudably give players almost unlimited discretion to choose any power and any ability, you have the strong potential to destroy the meaning of some choices. Which means ironically, by trying to eliminate the restrictions on choices, you can eliminate many of the actual options to choose from. For example, in CoH there is a distinct and obvious choice between becoming a blaster and becoming a scrapper. In that other game, there is no such thing as a blaster *or* a scrapper. You might say that there is: you can pick ranged attacks and no defense, or all melee attacks and a defensive passive. But that's missing the point. The game doesn't present that as an either-or option. It actually allows people to make ranged scrappers. To make a CoH blaster or scrapper, you actually have to deliberately self-nerf the prototypical ranged scrapper that that game presents to players.

In effect, CoX has fourteen archetypes (or sixteen, depending on how you count) and that other game has one. *IF* that one had a number of different local maxima of effectiveness then that one archetype could conceivably simulate a wider number of archetypal choices but without CoX's power choice limits - the best of both worlds. But although I'm simplifying greatly, it doesn't.

If that doesn't make sense, this should illustrate the point. Suppose I were to add a new archetype to the game, called ranged scrappers. This archetype was exactly identical to scrappers, except on top of all the melee primaries this archetype could also pick powers from the blaster primaries. In all other respects, the archetype was identical to scrappers. Question: have I added an additional archetype choice to the game? In the literal sense, I have: hero side now has six standard archetypes instead of five. But in a real sense, I haven't: I've replaced scrappers with this new archetype. Scrappers are no longer a legitimate choice, because they are a subset of the new archetype. The new archetype makes the old scrapper archetype completely redundant. Scrappers offer nothing the new archetype doesn't, while the new archetype offers everything Scrappers do, and more. So even if the Scrapper archetype still exists, in a real sense from a game design perspective, they don't any more. They are a design vestige.

Analogously, by eliminating archetypes without carefully engineering a different means of generating local maxima of choice, that other game eliminated fourteen choices and replaced them with one. For people who want that one choice to have the maximum number of options, that would be attractive. For people who want many different such initial choices, that would be highly unattractive. The notion expressed often on these very forums was that this was a ridiculous notion: that the former would be the far more common reaction than the latter. They were wrong.

Overpowered is only one reason not to do something. In this case, I don't think its even the most important reason. That's why comparing what a self-buffer could do to what some other thing could do hasn't been convincing to the devs for over six years. Its because its not really the critical issue.

That other superhero game that blithely discarded archetypal boundaries without fully appreciating the function they served - which was not the function they were originally designed to serve, by the way - proved unequivocally to me that my assertion that eliminating restrictions on options without providing an alternate way to distinguish options is at best a neutral option and at worst a poor one was absolutely correct. You'll make the game more attractive to some, but make it less attractive in the long term to at least as many people, if not significantly more. I consider it a settled principle.

I think the powers team has better things to do than try to fix all the problems and rebalance all the powers that would be affected by the change. I just don't think its a technical limitation. Its more of a practical one.

By the way, my own favorite self-buff anomaly seems to be missing from the Empathy laundry list. Heal Other grants approximately a 25% heal with a base cycle time of 6.27 seconds, plus or minus based on combat level. In regeneration terms that's equivalent to over 900% regen, which is stronger than Instant Healing.

And you'd get it at level one (its endurance costs are also curiously close to Instant Healing's old costs when it was a toggle).

Of course, as ridiculous as empathy self buffers are, I think there are other interesting corner cases. Cold, for example, does not have status protection. But it does have frostwork. A cold defender could easily perma self buff to the health cap, which would be somewhat higher than brute health. That, plus the ability to soft cap (it would be easier for cold defenders than SR scrappers, and we know how easy it is for SR scrappers) and the fact that half of their defenses cannot be detoggled, makes for some interesting possibilities.

Frostwork kinda takes a lot of the sting out of the alpha strike vulnerability implicit in a low health archetype.

Neither. Its because the game's original powersets were designed at a time when classical MMO design theory was in place, which was skewed heavily away from rewarding soloing and more towards rewarding teaming. A power that cannot be used on self but can strongly benefit an ally is in effect a teaming bonus.


Actually, one of the reasons you cannot target yourself is to prevent targeted powers from being used boomerang-style on yourself. Cause and effect are reversed here.


PBAoE powers can affect allies and not self. An example is Grant Cover (Shield Defense) which offers +DEF to allies but not self.

Interestingly, you can also have PBAoE powers that buff self but not allies, but still have to be PBAoEs. An example is Invincibility which only buffs one target (self) but must be a PBAoE so that it can hit *foes* and buff the player with each foe hit.


This was never the case. In the old school design philosophy, buffs tended to be stronger when restricted to being used only on allies, because the notion was that this was consistent with rewarding teaming. In a team you give buffs to allies and you take buffs from them. Buffers do not have to be "weaker" than their team mates. In the current design philosophy, its less about teaming vs soloing, and more about maintaining the archetypal fences between self buff-centric archetypal features (for example self-buff damage for blasters, self-buff mitigation for melee archetypes) and team buffers (i.e. defenders and controllers).

Honestly, this is the only one I've been really interested in making that sort of contribution for. I sorta did for that other superhero game for a little while, but for a variety of reasons I didn't pursue it further. I'd actually rather play anonymously than be the numbers guru: that sort of happened by accident here, and unlike in essentially every other MMO I've played since I had a direct channel to provide feedback to the devs almost from the start, even if it was only the QA people originally.

Once upon a time I was one among many: Havok, Circeus, Buffy, Picrow, many more that aren't around anymore. Some others are in semi-retirement: Stupid_Fanboy, Stargazer, etc. I just happened to have invented a lot of refinements to what people were already doing, and cast the widest net across the whole game. But I wouldn't have done it if I was doing it alone.

I'm not too worried about what I'll do with all my free time once this game shuts down for good, firstly because I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, and second because its not like I don't have tons of things waiting to suck up my time.

I will admit that the thought of being able to design the mechanics of an MMO from the ground up is attractive. But you have to be very lucky to get a chance like that. I've been pretty lucky in terms of being able to put my theories** into practice, but not that lucky.


** I believe when it comes to game mechanics, the best changes are ones everyone quickly forgets about, if they even notice, because the change seems so obvious people start to think it just always worked like that. It used to be a conjecture of mine, but now its a theory. Take that for whatever its worth.

That's correct. The myth that blasters or blaster power sets are *intended* to keep blasters out of range as an archetypal requirement is canonically disavowed. Blaster powersets are specifically intended to deal damage, or help blasters deal damage. *Some* preferentially skew towards staying at range, and some skew towards engaging at range, and some are more balanced between the two.

Having said that, a blaster secondary with nothing but melee attacks and the odd self buff (i.e. Build Up) is highly unlikely. All blaster secondaries have more variety than that, even Electric Manip, and the trend is likely to be more towards utilitarian blaster secondaries rather than blapper-focused ones for practical reasons: blapper sets already exist (Energy, Elec in particular) and the devs don't make new powersets frequently, so new sets tend to expand beyond what existing sets do rather than rehash what they already do in cosmetically different ways. The correct approach to acquiring a "natural" blaster powerset is probably to advocate powerset customization for a set like Energy to remove the pompoms, and then just stay away from the conceptually jarring powers such as boost range and power boost.

A devices/ninjitsu hybrid possibly stands a better chance, but still not a good one. But then again, you just never know with blasters. How we ended up with powers like Drain Psyche or the ultimate nerf-bait-survivor Siren's Song I really couldn't explain.

I19 has giant invisible mutant robotic laser-guided pyrokinetic shark ninjas. I'd recommend slotting debt protection.

I hear you. Unfortunately, this specific subject is not one I'm comfortable speculating upon openly, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Since personnel decisions are something entirely out of our hands, I'm not sure if there's anything to gain by worrying about the logical consequences of those decisions.

All I can say is that regardless of which developers are no longer here, I'll still support the developers that remain. That's all any of us can do. Beyond that, I am aware of the concern(s) you're expressing, and I hope it doesn't come to that. We'll just have to see.

At the risk of saying more than I should, I will say I have no evidence that NCSoft's decisions reflect a lack of support of the product itself. I can honestly say I've heard there are still long term plans for City of Heroes, and I have no idea what those plans are specifically. Take that for whatever its worth.

no

My memory is a bit hazy, but I think back in I14 I posted information from pohsyb that ended up in a ZM guide that might have been used by fearghas who is now Dr. Aeon.

The circle is now complete.

So far, this game is the only one that has kept my attention for more than a couple of months at a stretch. But I do honestly like beta testing new MMOs. Not just in terms of playing the games themselves, but also to see how different dev teams think through (or fail to think through) game design problems.

This is still my MMO home. And not for lack of exposure. I never got into WoW, in spite of lots of people trying to get me into that game. I thought MxO would have a shot, but the designers were on too much drugs. AoC was just, well, AoC, and WAR was, well, WAR. CO was CoX without all the lucky mistakes, and STO is still fun, but not really engaging. TR had promise, but then rocks fall everyone dies. Eve is too much like work. I'm going to give DCUO and SW:TOR their fair shot, but I suspect when all is said and done here is where I'll end up again.

Besides, I have this great idea for an epic archetype...

Zombie Man works as a lemur in the industry? Where does he find the time to write all those guides?


Honestly, except for new powerset descriptions (which I still try to do), I pretty much stopped collecting information in closed betas many issues ago and just bookmark ZMs guides now. In fact, because I tend to do focused testing rather than test everything in sight, I'm usually using ZMs guides to let me know what's going on in parts of the beta I'm not otherwise seeing, or as release documentation when an issue goes live.

I'm in no position to confirm anything. I just offered my opinion that the claim was not absurd on its face. I have no idea how anyone gets into a closed beta besides myself. And to be honest, I'm not sure I've gotten into two closed betas in exactly the same way twice. I've learned to stop thinking about it too much and just go with it.

Still, if I were J. Random Player and was interested in getting into closed betas either by specific invite or by random wave, I would probably check the box no matter what the community reps say. If I were concerned about the spam, I'd just make a special gmail account for my NCSoft contact address so it would all funnel in there (and in fact, I do have a special email account for all of my MMO registrations).