Arcanaville

I'm critical of it because I believe in Scott Pilgrim's case, its the singular reason its failing to find more than a tiny audience. If that was *intentional* then I have to question the enormous amount of money spent on production and marketing. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make a very specific story you know is only going to connect with a very small audience. Its not like Christopher Guest thought A Mighty Wind was going to make a hundred million dollars. But people don't criticize movies like that for being insular, because they are being deliberately insular. Best in Show probably targets almost as small a niche as Scott Pilgrim does, but it does so consciously. If Scott Pilgrim was deliberately made intended for that small of an audience, there'd be no problem. But it aspired to reach a much larger audience, yet made absolutely no attempt to engage them. That's a mistake worth pointing out, because if the lesson Scott Pilgrim teaches is just "the movie going audience is too dumb to recognize its genius" then its really Scott Pilgrim's fans that haven't learned the lesson.

The real lesson is that the storyteller must always target their audience, and must always speak their language. Its asking a lot for the audience to keep an open mind and hear what the storyteller wants to say. Its asking too much for the storyteller to force them to learn a different language just because he doesn't want to translate for them. Its a cop out to sit around and wax poetic about how great the movie was, and therefore the problem has to be with the audience. Whatever else the movie was, it failed to reach the audience it seems to have aspired to reach, and it failed for obvious reasons. Its worth coming up with a more nuanced lesson other than "we should never make these movies ever again" or its polar opposite "we should keep making these movies until the movie going audience grows a brain." Both of those are equally bad lessons to learn.

My guess is that its a weird race condition on the hidden meter that sometimes allows both criticals to go off (the hidden state should only ever be set to zero or one, which means only one of those criticals should go off, ever. But its possible the meter is in a funny state under those conditions for a brief instant and allows both to go off. this could happen if, for example, the meter was actually momentarily set to 0.5 as the assassin's strike went off, or if it was changing state from zero to one at the precise moment the assassin's strike power was processed).

More precisely, Cur modifiers alter the target's attribute by a percentage of maximum. "Abs 10.0" means "deduct 10 points of damage from the target. "Cur 10.0" means "reduce the target's health by 1000%."

Because in Scott Pilgrim, those details are critical to relating to the characters. Its never really explained how anything works in, say, Ghostbusters, but its not necessary because the audience is willing to accept the setup because the characters all make sense to the audience. We know who Venkmen is from the very first scene we see him. Egon is not a big mystery. When they hire Winston, without knowing anything about him the audience immediately connects with him as the everyman tossed into the bizarre mix.

Most people just aren't going to get Scott Pilgrim. They aren't going to get Ramona. The exes are archetypes of things most of the audience doesn't even know: they are inside jokes told to outsiders without enough explanation in most cases. In most stories, you can have impenetrable characters that are revealed through a relatable story. Or you can have relatable characters that are set in a wild story. Unrelatable characters in wild story gives the audience no touchstones to connect to. And that's why the unexplained elements of SP are so harshly criticized by some. Its too much unexplained on opposite sides of the ledger.

Compare to Inception. Inception has an equally high potential for disorientation. The plot isn't linear, the world rules are unconventional, and the characters aren't given a lot of backstory initially. But the movie does a good job of taking the audience by the hand and walking them through the movie, so even people who don't fully get the movie at least get from beginning to end feeling like the movie didn't pass completely over their heads. Inception eases us into the character of Cobb, first with the scene with his father in law, and then with the scenes with Ariadne, which give you insight into why this character is doing what he's doing. We can relate to Cobb because at the heart of all the wild crazy stuff is someone guilty over the death of his wife, and seeking a way to return to his children. People can connect to that.

Similarly, Cobb introduces the audience to the dream world by introducing Ariadne to it, and Ariadne becomes the proxy for the audience to explore the rules. We find out very quickly how much control a dreamer has over his dream, what happens to people within those dreams, and even why certain rules exist, such as the need to avoid antagonizing projections. This creates a mental short-hand for the audience so that when the actual inception begins no one has to explain anything. We know why they are being shot at. We know why projection-Mal is trying to disrupt everything (at least to some degree, so the deeper explanation makes sense further in). We know why there are multiple levels of the dream, and we even know what the critical risk is in the "Mr. Charles" gambit and what the whole payoff is supposed to be at the end. And we know well before we get there what Limbo is and why its so critical to Cobb's story.

Nolan could have gotten millions of people to watch any blockbuster movie he wanted to make at this point. But he took great pains to make sure that there was a learning curve for the audience to connect with both the characters and the story, and given how unconventional the movie actually is, it shows in how many people it ultimately connected with. A lot is still left unexplained. But enough is to make it possible for the audience to get to the end of the movie with some sense of what was going on.

Its not a question of having higher standards. Its more a question of meeting a threshold. Everyone's threshold is different, even situationally different at times. But its apparent that SP was not going to meet very many people's critical comprehension threshold, and if you're going to spend that much money on a movie you probably should try to.

City of Data is wrong: that is a mistranslation of the power. Actually, the I Win Button does damage in a manner comparable to the Steel Canyon buildings because its damage is a Cur not an Abs (game mechanical wizards will know what I mean by that). The I Win Button is actually designed to deal 4283.6 times the target's health per tick for eleven ticks. That's far more than the Steel Canyon buildings, but its something players should essentially never see, since that power is never supposed to be used around players.

So far as I can tell, its not the rand().


Chance to hit all four targets when tohit is at the 95% ceiling: 81.45%. About four out of five times you should hit four out of four targets. One time in five you should miss at least one.

You're probably just remembering the times you miss more often than the times you hit. But you can always turn on chat logging and see for certain.

I believe Follow Up's buff beings 0.5 seconds after activation not after cast time concludes.

All effects happen some finite interval after the power is activated: that is how critters get stunned and "zip" off while you are in the middle of the total focus animation, and for that matter how things like the damage ticks in One Thousand Cuts occur while the power is animating. There is an offset built into the power definition that tells the game how long to wait before starting the power's effects, and its a separate value from "delay" which is a per-effect setting (to allow different effects to happen staggered from each other).

In the case of Follow Up specifically, this delay is set to 15 frames of animation, so I believe the buff happens about half a second after the activation of the power. Its very difficult to say if it happens *exactly* 0.5 seconds after activation or some offset from that because the difference wouldn't be easy to detect at the client. But that is my best guess on the matter.

If you want to test my understanding, I believe Total Focus is designed for the damage (and the stun) to land 69 frames after activation, or 2.3 seconds after activation, which is 1 second before the animation completes. That kinda sounds right to me, but I honestly haven't measured that carefully in a long time.

No, I don't think they do. I think at worst gaps round to the nearest 0.125 seconds. The 0.132s ArcanaTime gap considers having to expire both the combat clock and the animation frame clock in conjunction. But during an attack chain gap, the rooted time window bound to the animation clock will have already expired.

Probably, in which case I believe Siolfir's post represents the best that players can do. I don't think anything exists that can compete with the theoretical scale 18 damage that Blizzard can pump out if all ticks land and all ticks Scourge. Nothing else really comes close to that.

The normalized value of the AS double crit is equivalent to a scale 4.75 attack criting at the damage cap. That too seems to be higher than anything else I can think of that players wield in terms of non-rains.

I'm sure someone will add it. Its basically the real life version of "act with integrity, no regrets." Very sad that it sometimes takes the very worst of us to illuminate the very best of us.

The calculations in this thread were based on the current values for things (but not factoring in the latest announcement of fitness, obviously). Changes from way back then wouldn't have an impact on the numbers in the original post.

I haven't done the math yet, but its likely to be tens of percent faster on average between the added endurance of stamina and the lower health downtime of Health. But it depends greatly on two factors that this thread originally sidestepped. The first is what percentage of people deliberately seek out teams that have sufficient buffs to eliminate downtime as a major concern, and for what percentage of the time. And the second is what percentage of players deliberately power level themselves through a significant fraction of this level range in the first place.

Really, there's nowhere to turn such data in. After all these years of such observations never panning out**, I doubt anyone will take them seriously. Particularly without statistically air tight evidence. The only person that continues to take this remotely seriously is probably me, and even I will not conduct an investigation based solely on observational evidence unless the observer is known to me to be a trained observer of such things. I'll only investigate actual combat logs, and only if they are long enough to give me sufficient context to rule out all other possible sources of the problem.

As to your specific observations, most of my observations are NPC rolls, not player rolls, and in those cases the NPCs are rolling every range of numbers equally often. Furthermore, their last roll doesn't bias the next roll: the odds of rolling high or low are equal regardless of the previous roll. Its theoretically possible that player tohit rolling could be different than NPC player rolling, but I consider that highly unlikely due to the way the game actually performs tohit rolls, which is to say to the best of my knowledge the game engine doesn't know when its rolling who is doing the rolling.


** As far as I know, reports of accuracy or tohit "not working right" have only panned out twice in the history of the game: the first time long ago when the type-stacking bug was discovered, and the second time when I investigated the mechanics of luck inspirations. And in both cases, the random number generator itself was exonerated as being the source of the problem.

No, that's not what's happening. Look closer. If an attack actually lands on you while Hibernate is up, the combat chat doesn't print anything at all. I think that is a bug, in other cases where the target is unaffected by the attack something prints (at least as of the last time I recall) but I confirmed the behavior of Hibernate just now. If the attacker misses you'll get a combat spam message with the miss message. But if it hits you there's no message at all. So you'll only see the tohit rolls that happen to miss, not the ones that happen to hit.

As far as I know, nothing "modifies" the tohit roll. its the chance to hit that is modified. There's only one exception to that rule, and its not an exception that you'll likely see direct evidence of, and won't show itself in the combat spam as a modified tohit roll (that exception is tohit rolls used in special formulas within Requires or Magnitude clauses: people familiar with the mechanics I'm talking about will know what I'm referring to).

I thought this was my advice column.


Also: nice hat.

I didn't say "would" I said "could." And I have specific reasons for thinking its within the realm of possibility.

True, but a lot of players seem to not take that NDA seriously. Some think its not even enforceable. Most believe the worst that could happen is they could get banned, maybe. The terms of the closed beta NDAs have always lacked the rigor of an actual contractual NDA.

There would be absolutely no question about the intent or enforceability of an actual signed contractual NDA the player had to physically sign and send to NCSoft. Because an actual nondisclosure agreement is essentially a contract between the two parties, violating an NDA is a breach of contract that theoretically exposes the violator to almost unlimited liability. Its not the same thing as violating the EULA.

It might just be a more elaborate electronic acknowledgement of the NDA rather than the informal one in all the other closed betas. Or if they are really serious about it, it might be a "download this and sign it and send it back to us" kind of thing. It depends on how seriously they intend to protect the integrity of the I20 beta.

It has nothing to do with pandering. If you want to target a niche audience, that's fine. Just don't spend a hundred million dollars on something that targets a niche audience: that's stupid. And don't expect people to go see it just to subsidize your taste, no matter how smart or well crafted it might be.

The problem is that geeks aren't honest about geek culture. Sometimes it has crossover appeal, sometimes it doesn't. But they (we) rarely admit it. I had a pretty good idea that Scott Pilgrim wasn't going to be a $200m movie, and even $100m was going to take a miracle. Its crossover potential was iffy. Even Inception wasn't well received by everyone, but I had a pretty good idea that Inception was going to appeal to about ten times more people, even though it too was a fairly intelligent and well-crafted movie that wasn't typical summer blockbuster fare (turns out the number is more like thirty times as many, not ten).

It shouldn't be hard to understand why a movie like Star Trek did so well and a movie like Scott Pilgrim didn't. And its not because the movie going audience is "stupid." They sometimes are, but that's not the reason. That same stupid movie going audience turned out to see Gran Turino, they turned out to see District 9, and they even turned out to see Coraline. And I think the fact that it *is* virtually impossible for some people to come to grips with why Star Trek did well against the geek backlash and Scott Pilgrim did poorly with the geek support tells you why Scott Pilgrim failed. Its because people don't get this that they can't ever learn from it.

The bottom line is that Scott Pilgrim's audience was presumed, but Scott Pilgrim isn't even a wide-audience item in the geek culture. Its a subculture of a subculture of a subculture. Its basically a replication of the Speed Racer mistake.


Still, I think the final verdict on Scott Pilgrim isn't in yet. I always thought the very audience that would most want to see Scott Pilgrim would probably buy it on DVD or Netflix the thing. If it does exceptionally well in the home and rental market, it could yet end up being ultimately something of a success.


The amazing irony is that the reason why it isn't connecting with a cross over audience seems to be, at least in my experience, the characters are almost totally unrelateable to people outside the subculture. And that means if you aren't a fan of the work, and you can't connect with the characters, the movie is a bunch of random special effects with no story. Ponder that the next time someone says a big budget action film is just "pandering" to the stupid sheep movie going audience by just having dumb action stars blowing stuff up. What does it mean or matter if you write the smartest script in the world and its about characters so alien to the movie going audience that it might as well be about saguaro cacti.

That is how regeneration debuff resistance would work for the duration-based debuffs. The problem, as has been mentioned above, is some of them are duration based and some are magnitude based.

Every effect is either duration based or magnitude based. This means the "strength" of the power either determines the duration of the effect or its magnitude. When the effect is magnitude based, the duration is hard coded, and vice versa. Damage is always magnitude based, so buffing and debuffing damage increases or reduces its magnitude. Mez effects are almost always duration based, so buffing and debuffing mez effects generally increases or reduces its duration.

Some regen debuffs seem to be coded as magnitude effects, which means regen debuff resistance would reduce their strength, but their duration would be constant (and unaffected by anything, including combat modifiers). Some are duration based and debuff resistance would only reduce their duration, not their magnitude (which no effect would be able to change). It is unpredictable what resistance would do for a random attacker unless you know how that attacker works.

Its actually probably something the devs will have to resolve at some point, because its a potential cause for undesirable complexity. But it would probably require, or rather should require, a rethink of a unifying design principle for those debuffs.

Those *are*, if I remember correctly, magnitude debuffs (with fixed duration). Because the devs seem to be rewriting some of the critter balance rules for Praetorians, it will be interesting to see how all of that plays out, and not just for -regen debuffs specifically.

Ironically, I agree. That is in fact the end of the story until everyone who thinks that is the end of the story either changes their minds or isn't around anymore. I would really prefer the former over the latter, but that is the cold hard truth of the matter.

If you figure out a way to dictate uncompromising terms to the devs on the development of the game, let me know what your secret is. That's far outside my capabilities. What I'm describing is something that might actually work. Take that opinion for whatever its worth.

I think that is unlikely. My recollection is that most of the -regen in the game was put in after toggle IH went away.

The reason -regen has such high magnitude is probably because its not balanced based around magnitude but on duration. And the reason for that is probably for the same reason the devs got into so much trouble trying to balance movement debuffs: the game engine only supports linear debuffs and not proportional ones (at least, most of the time). So a -X movement debuff stops most players dead, but a player with superspeed doesn't even notice because his movement buff is so high that the debuff is small by comparison. Similarly, most players have low numerical regeneration, but some things have ultra high levels of it (on a relative basis). Trying to balance a linear debuff against the levels of regeneration out there would be extremely difficult.

Instead, the debuffs often simply zap the player's regen tick rate to basically zero for X seconds. In effect this removes a certain window of health recovery with each debuff which is proportional to the intrinsic rate of regeneration. Its an attempt at a proportional debuff the long way around. This would probably be too harsh if there existed powersets that relied almost exclusively on regeneration, but there are no such sets. Just like if SR, FF, and Ice didn't exist as powersets, cascade failure would be just an odd trivia observation rather than a game-balance significant phenomenon.

Its really this aspect of regen debuffs that make the notion of regeneration debuff resistance an indirectly futile pursuit. The debuffs are often intended to be balanced around a presumption of debuffing to zero, so the magnitude is set high enough to ensure this. Adding regen debuff resistance to any powerset would be virtually meaningless. The question to ask isn't whether players should resist them partially, because there's basically no such thing as partially resisting something intended to always drop you to zero. The question is whether there are too many of them or they last too long. Those are the only two dimensions of the problem that feedback could likely change. And of the two, I think the stronger argument can be made against the duration of the debuffs, not their frequency.


On the related subject of recharge debuffs, those aren't balanced that way. So resistance to recharge debuffs is on the table from a discussion perspective. But I think people would be generally surprised as to what the actual numbers say. For example, the last project I started with regard to the mitigation spreadsheet (but didn't finish) was adding debuff resistance and debuff analysis to the mitigation spreadsheet. I kinda had it working, but it was an ugly hack and I didn't have the time to clean it up. Perhaps I should. I did get -recharge working on a limited basis specifically to compare powersets like Fiery Aura, Regeneration, Ninjitsu, and Dark Armor. The comparison curves between FA and Regen were especially interesting. I can dig those up, but the bottom line was that at SO-slotting (which is the starting point for any powerset balance discussion) Regen outperformed FA's mitigation from 180s windows down past 60s windows for all levels of -recharge debuff. It was only at 30s windows that Regen crossed FA's mitigation line, and it did so somewhere around -70% recharge. In other words, Regen outperformed FA until both were experiencing the equivalent of -70% recharge debuff constantly on average. Then FA outperformed Regen.

Clearly, Regen did "suffer" from recharge debuffs more than FA, but its also true that the amount it suffered more than was irrelevant for the most part. Only at 30s windows (the lowest I even acknowledge as balance-significant) does it play a factor, and only at very high levels of debuff. And for bonus points, when I factored in FA's recharge debuff *resistance*, that curve shifted so that the breakeven point was closer to -30% debuff, which made a lot more sense.

Interestingly, the only counter to this analysis is that FA shouldn't be balanced solely on the basis of mitigation, because its presumed to have compensating value in its offensive and utility powers, which is true. But when you toss in Burn and Consume, you end up with the converse situation where you can no longer make the case that Regen's performance curve is steeper than FA's under recharge debuffs. Regen's is basically a product of its recharge-dependent heal(s) and its recharge-dependent +health mitigation, which means its dependent on the square of the recharge debuff. But the coefficients are so small that the curve is almost linear. Not so for the coefficients of offense to recharge. Recharge has an almost direct proportional effect on the offensive output of Burn (and consume) and the endurance recovery of Consume. Quick Recovery basically beats Consume (even with the new buffs) under recharge debuff, greatly increasing the recharge dependance of the utility value of the set. And likewise Burn for offense. The proportionality as so much stronger that even if you heavily devalue offense relative to defense (and most people are inclined to do the opposite) the recharge dependancy swings over to FA.

So either FA is more dependent on recharge than Regen, or Regen is more dependent on recharge than FA but outperforms it by more than the dependency. Separate from the threshold requirements for recharge resistance, there's the separate numerical argument that Regen doesn't actually suffer relative to peer sets in this regard by enough to make it significant except in extreme cases. And no powerset is balanced at those extremes, even if melee players enjoy throwing themselves into them.


I'll see if I can dig up those numbers: this was a while ago. Maybe I can google docs the numbers and the associated charts this weekend if I can find them and correctly excerpt them.

True, but that's not relevant to the context in which I made the original statement, which was whether there was any evidence that the devs design philosophy is consistent with making task forces scale to any level. Level gating plus exemplaring is consistent with what I said: content is targeted at a particular level but there are compromise solutions that sometimes allow players outside that level range to be brought *into* that level range. But that's not the same thing as bringing *the content* into the range of the *player*. They may sound similar, but from a design perspective those are night and day differences.