Arcanaville

Ironic question to ask Television, because when the devs say they can't implement something because of "technical issues," they probably mean "because Matt said oh hell no."

I don't think most people who propose such things actually think it would make the markets "work." I think most people who propose such things don't care if the markets work, they believe the primary purpose to the markets is to supply players with what they want at prices that make it easy for them to get it, without regard to the desires of sellers. And they almost certainly believe that if players won't sell at those prices, they should just cut out the middle man and convert the market into a store that doesn't rely on sellers. Because a corollary to this assertion is that there should always be enough supply for everyone to have whatever they want if they decide to acquire it.

I would bet that if you asked most people who believe in extremely low caps if they would care if the markets were replaced with stores that just bought and sold everything at fixed prices, most wouldn't object. Most would probably consider it an improvement.

Triumph is especially dead?


Oh my god they killed Triumph!

You bastards!

What are you being all sorry for? I haven't seen you abuse my numbers. Not yet, anyway. Give it time. I hear there's even a badge for it.

Welcome to my world.

Even in this game, customer support actively encourages players to take certain kinds of problems to the forums. Blizzard seems to have similar policies.

Even so, my exercise of control would not have been by simply electing not to post. Knowing that information was linked in the manner it would have to be, and knowing how fantastic the security surrounding such systems tends to be, I would exercise control by demanding that personal information be revoked from their databases. What I'm being told by others that know a lot more than me is that there are a lot of other loopholes in RealID than just forum posting, and lots of ways to accidentally trip over them if you don't know they exist.

I don't know, so I wouldn't take the chance until I knew for certain every way that information is used under all contexts. Which is an awful lot of research just to decide whether to sign in to play a game.

My control over my personal privacy is more important to me than my money. Also, my bank deposits are insured by the FDIC.


To be clear, I don't oppose the use of real identities on the internet as an absolute. I participate in many mailing lists and public forums under my real name, and I am really googleable. But those are all voluntary choices, and for every one I opt into, there are many more I decide to avoid.

If Blizzard had made real names and identities mandatory from the start, I would have avoided the game like the plague but I wouldn't consider them an evil company for doing it. Its your choice to play WoW or not. And it still is. But when a company reverses their privacy stance and shows absolutely no sign whatsoever that this is a controversial decision or that it will have a negative impact on their customers, that tells me whoever made this decision really doesn't care about customer privacy at all. They are a legal-eagle that only cares about what the letter of the law lets them get away with, and not the values their customers might hold dear.


What angers me most when something like this happens is that its usually some ivory tower person that thinks they are personally untouchable. It never occurs to them that the only reason why people like them can get away with what they do is because there are a lot of other people that aren't willing to play the game with the same utter lack of ethics.

There are days I wish I had no ethics and no conscience. Or an evil twin.

They were damned the moment they decided this was a good idea. This is not something you can chalk up to a borderline grey-area mistake. This says something about their core attitude towards player privacy.

Backpedaling is just the difference between attempted robbery, and robbery. You shouldn't get accolades for being a failure at being a failure.

I doubt it. World of Warcraft makes gigatons of money as it is. This sounds to me like someone wanting to prove to the world they can make *more* money, which is not actually a money decision: its an ego decision. It happens all the time. The attitude is that neither success nor failure is as bad as being seen as irrelevant.

If the Activision-based rumors are true, this is comparable to shoving a camera up the oviduct of the goose that lays the golden eggs just to sell the video rights on the internet.


And the statements about Blizzard rank and file being generally just as upset about the decision has the ring of truth to me. In every dev studio I'm at least generally aware of, including Paragon Studios, there is a keen awareness of the fact that every developer has their own personal threshold for public participation, and that personal threshold is basically always acknowledged and accepted. Its why not all Paragon Studios and NCSoft employees that work on CoX have red names, for example, and why some are almost completely invisible. Even Blizzard employees perfectly comfortable with being completely transparent about their real names and identities are going to know and sympathize with other employees that are not, and most of them are likely to be a part of the MMO player community in general and have similar sensibilities as the majority apparently do.

Actually, I'm making the stronger statement that I don't think it needs to be proven necessary. We don't sit around trying to logically prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that free speech is necessary. Contrawise, even if you could prove free speech had a statistically negative impact on the death rate in America, that wouldn't be enough to revoke it. Some things we accept as the price for living in a free society.

I dare say that even if you were to discover a totalitarian society on earth where violence against women was five percent what it was in America, you wouldn't be tempted to emulate it. Well, I'm assuming anyway.

The "grotesqueness" of Venture's world to me isn't that he considers the loss of anonymity to have statistically insignificant consequences, but rather that Venture seems to be suggesting that I should base my disclosure decisions on what I can statistically prove. That would be like asking me to base my preference for not being mugged on the street on the ability to prove society isn't better off allowing muggers to attack me rather than potentially be forced to commit other crimes. If I were a Blizzard customer affected by this decision (at the moment, I'm not) and if my personal information was disclosed without my permission (which I cannot say with certainty it would be under this policy) whether I feel violated by that decision has nothing to do with the statistical likelihood of someone misusing that information. That that probability is non-zero is a separate, general fact worthy of social discourse. But it doesn't inform my personal feelings on the matter.

It should really be enough that I decide to keep something private, and someone else decides to violate that decision. In fact, you could argue that in a world where privacy is increasingly becoming a technological impossibility, its really values that have to pick up the slack. Increasingly, our privacy is based less on what we can personally enforce, and more on what others elect to grant to us. From that perspective, someone that decides that privacy is meaningless and those who desire it deluded simply because it can be technologically revoked is actually something of a sociopath.

You'll discover quickly enough that was the wise choice.

I don't think I'm "more awesome" than any other player. I can discuss certain things up to a certain point, and then no further. Since you will not accept that situation at face value without further explanation, I can't pursue this line of thought beyond this point. Although I will continue to read the thread if any interesting ideas pop up, this will be my last post in it.

Then since I am not, in fact, operating under the same restrictions that you are, I'm going to have to end my participation in this discussion.

Knockback is actually two separate effects. Knockback is a *mez* and its a *physics effect*.

Knockback the mez has only magnitude. Negative magnitude is protection from knock. Positive magnitude is knock. Its actually directionless: its not a vector.

*If* you are knocked, that information is passed to the physics engine of the game, which looks at where you are, where the source of the knock is, the magnitude of the knock, and does its thing. The game "engine" itself has no real control over this. It cannot say "knock this way please." The physics engine, as far as I've been told, does this all by itself.

So there is no way for the powers system to tell the physics engine "knock, but the other way." That type of directional information isn't passed from powers engine to physics engine. So it would require rewriting that entire interface between the two. Its been suggested to me that gouging ones eyes out with a number two pencil is a more attractive option to untangling the code for that feature.

Its hard to be specific at the moment without getting into trouble. Let me toss out some non-specific ideas that I've been kicking around for several months now, but haven't completely nailed down into numbers and such yet.

MA is a single-target focused set. I don't want to change that. I'm not a believer in the "AoE is everything, anything without AoE is gimp" theory of powerset balance. But I do think that given the power of AoE, single target sets have to be particularly good at it. There are a number of ways to be a really effective single-target focused powerset. DM has one way: stacking tohit debuff is *really* effective when you are focused on just a few targets. Another possibility are the stacking -RES in sonic blast. Sonic attack does have multiple AoEs so its not AoE deficient, but it does excel in focusing damage on single targets because of its escalating resistance debuff.

These effects already exist. I'm interested in looking at new effects that don't exist and could be made special to MA, like combos are for Dual Blades. One possibility, I thought, was to have MA attacks "tag" their targets with a very brief duration tag. They would also check for the presence of the tag and based on the presence of the tag increase the critical chance of the attack. So repeated attacks against the same target would give MA an increased critical hit chance. This increases MA damage against single targets (dragon's tail wouldn't deliver the tag or check the tag) without actually buffing the base damage of any of its powers. This would be "situational" damage, and that means its under the discretion of the designer, not the formula.


I've always suspected that Focus Chi was going to be something other than Build Up at the beginning of time, and then the devs ran out of time and copied Build Up. When you look at the original scrapper secondaries, it looks like the devs *started* to try to come up with original boost powers. Broadsword (and its pseudo-cousin Katana) and Spines had Build Up. Claws has Follow Up. Dark Melee has Soul Drain. Martial Arts has Focus Chi, but its a Build Up clone. Its I believe the only Build Up clone not actually called Build Up in the original released powersets. They named it, then didn't design it.

Unfortunately, people like Build Up so the cottage rule prevents making an exotic Build Up. I suggested many times in the past replacing BU with PBU (actually, that suggestion predates PBU) but with rebalanced numbers, just because it preserves the functionality of BU. But that's kinda boring to me now.

Here's a *really* exotic idea for BU in terms of mechanics that I think, of all the ideas I have on paper, has the *least* chance of getting added to the game, but I still think is a cool idea. Its one I've been thinking about for a while in terms of whether its possible to do within the confines of the current game engine, regardless of crazy twisted implementation, or really requires new tech. I think the latter, but I'm still not sure. Suppose BU's recharge was cut in *half*, from 90s to 45s. And suppose further that after you activate BU, when BU expires a self-suppression power kicks in that cuts the buff of BU in half, which lasts for 90s.

In other words, when you use BU, you get a full strength BU. It recharges in 45s. But if you use it again between 45s and 90s after use, you only get a half strength BU. So you have a choice: get half the strength twice as often, or full strength half as often. Now *that*'s an exotic mechanic, but it doesn't actually change what you can do with the power, except for having to explain to players that if they use it immediately it won't be at full strength. That right there might be the critical stumbling block to the whole idea: players won't expect such a radical change in gameplay controls.

The other problem is that when you slot BU, somehow the suppression power has to reduce in duration to match the recharge of BU, and I don't know how to do that yet without asking for code. But I think that would be a way to give MA a really unique Build Up that nevertheless can be used exactly like the current BU now.

(One possible way to mimic this behavior would be to give the player two powers when they select Focus Chi, one with half strength and 45s recharge and the other identical to the current BU, each of which suppresses the other when used. But while the precedent for that option was set with Dual Pistols, I don't think its one the devs are eager to repeat. And slotting gets *real* ugly).


CAK is the power that singularly sits there mocking me in my tray. Its secondary effects are, without rehashing that debate, pitiful. But if I overload the power with a rainbow of effects designed to stack with other powers, I run the risk of buffing Martial Arts by buffing the power least often taken, which is not something I want to do. I already chewed the devs out for increasing the cross-synergy in SR to the point where losing *any* of the six defensive powers radically reduces survivability, a feature no other defensive set can claim. But I also don't want a weak CAK. That makes it ground zero for resolving the secondary effect problem: how to grant more secondary effects in a way that won't require the entire set to leverage, but in a way where each power's secondary effects are distinctly valuable *and* all reasonable combinations of powers have a combined secondary effect total that is reasonable.

There's a couple ways I'm thinking about I can't really mention yet, but one off the wall idea I actually had long ago, that was originally shot down for technical reasons I now think I can overcome, is to create a new pseudo-effect called "stagger." Stagger would actually be a grantpower: it would grant the target a special passive that had a percentage chance to induce a knockdown to self. So basically, while under the influence of this power, targets would occasionally fall down. That works quite well as a complement to immobilize/slow, the concept of the power, and as damage mitigation. It would have to be very carefully moderated in PvP of course, and there would need to be some thought put into how to deal with higher ranked targets. If I make the effect resistable, anything that buffs knockback resistance will nullify the effect. Conversely, if its unresistable it will be knocking down AVs and Giant Monsters. I think this needs to be "target=" specific. Maybe unresistable to minions and the like, resistable to EBs and higher. I've honestly not spent enough time on this idea to fully flesh out the numbers on it, because I have other alternatives I'm also working on, but this was actually near the top of my list for CAK before I began pursuing other slightly more set-synergistic ideas.

Why CAK is a good place to start here is that its the standard for secondary effects across the set. Once you decide what to do with CAK, you can decide how strong the secondary effects should be for the rest of the powerset. If "stagger" ends up being an appropriate effect in terms of power, you can use that to guide whether the stun in TK is appropriate, or the knockdown percentage in Dragon's Tail, or whether EC should have knockdown also. But if you go the other way around, buffing EC and TK first, you'll probably paint yourself into a corner and have nowhere to go with CAK. CAK is the place to try out exotic ideas, because its so obviously underpowered. It therefore gives a lot of latitude in what will work and not work. And if you get the right exotic idea into CAK, you can let that spill over into other powers in a way that keeps the set on a relatively even keel.


That's sort of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about more mechanically unusual effects. They aren't necessarily stellar in net effect, they are still intended to fit into the balance requirements of the set. But they try to do so while honoring the cottage rule and also inventing very particularly interesting effects unique to MA. This might give a better idea of at least the general direction I'm heading in.

About MA? Not really. I'm in no real position to hide anything about MA specifically. All I said was that as soon as Going Rogue releases, I'm going to make it a priority to get the devs to reopen the design of MA. And I don't do that by telling Castle "go look at MA." That's not really my way. I'll present an actual reference design for MA and discuss it with him (or someone else on the powers team): that's more my style.

My ability to make progress on such an endeavor is what it is, and that's all I'm saying about that. If you think I'm "the supreme armchair quarterback around here" then that ability is strictly limited. For anyone else that thinks otherwise, this is just an opportunity to think aloud, before I settle in on what that reference point design will look like.


While I'm on the subject, Umbral mentioned that I haven't commented too much on the details of most of his suggestions. The reason for that is that while I normally recommend, and normally follow, the rule that small tweaks are better than dramatic changes, beacuse they are much more likely to be acceptable to the devs, this is the one case where I'm going to break that rule myself and seek out dramatic (mechanically) changes. Things like changing TK to mag 1 + 10% mag 1 are actually old suggestions: going all the way back to when Tk's stun was first changed. A year ago, I would have agreed with the suggestion as being both fair and reasonable. Today, for a variety of reasons I think its insufficiently dramatic of a change, at least on its own. As I said, I'm breaking the very rule I recommend to other players when making powerset suggestions in attempting to propose a more complex set of changes. As a result, I'm taking the calculated gamble that in swinging for the fences I'll strike out completely. But I've been playing this game with MA for a long time, and I think now's the time to do so. That's just me.

At the moment, not really possible.

I'm only implying that you have no idea what you're talking about. And the devs would never hand any component of the game over to "a player" for any purpose much less rebalancing.

On the other hand, I don't see how it could be interpreted as anything but an attempt at a personal insult to imply the powers team would have to be severely impaired to trust anything I have to say about powerset balance. Whether that's more of an insult towards me, or them, is debatable. We are in agreement, though, that its funny.

I've watched the animation frame by frame just to see how BaB changed it. The pause is not there any more. The animation transitions from the kicking motion into the target in one frame directly into the push off for the back flip.


The players, on the other hand, do care. Some powers less so, some powers more so. Eagle's Claw is one of those powers that is so obviously designed for visual impact that messing with it is just unlikely to happen in any dramatic fashion, because its bound to have far too many players attached to the basic animation.

Unless you can prove that powerset balance mandates a faster animation - a very high standard - I doubt you'll see a dramatically faster animation. And in this game where appearance is as important as performance, I also doubt you'll see anything other than a collaboration between the animators and the power designers when it comes to power animations and cast times.

I don't see where the 15 frames of animation will come from. BaB squeezed out the pause in the backflip already just to get it down to 2.53s.

Will do.


The devs are not out of ideas yet, so I'm going to have to go with (a), final answer.


If only you knew the level of restraint I'm required to apply here. Its actually a luxury I hope you fully appreciate, being a smart-***. Trust me when I say you'd miss it if it was gone.