Arcanaville

The same thing is true for PMs. For that matter, the same thing is mostly true for public threads as well. The odds of a mod stumbling across a forum violation without it being reported are not high.

Whether you think the rep system is a good idea or not, its a bit over the top to try to claim that the system literally violates the forum rules. Nowhere in the forum rules does it say you can't send anonymous messages to other posters, and they are only anonymous to you, not to the forum mods if you report them. They are just as accountable for what they say in reputation flags as they are in PMs or public posts.

There is no actual double standard. And exaggerations are only interesting for humorous ends, they never really help a situation even in terms of getting attention to them, because it tends to be the wrong attention.

I think players need to be more careful when responding to requests like this because their responses often are much stronger than the reality of the situation suggests. But conversely, this is also equally mischaracterized by the people making the requests as well.

For example, no dev ever said power customization was impossible. The *closest* any dev came to this was BaB, who said that the amount of work involved was so high, it would probably be better to implement it in a future game engine rather than attempt to retrofit it into this one.

A few *players* then starting saying "the devs" said it was impossible, and I personally tried to post in as many of those threads as I stumbled across that no, the devs didn't say that.

Conversely, no one said power proliferation was impossible either. The closest was Castle who said, a long time ago, that given a choice he wouldn't arbitrarily proliferate powersets between archetypes in general. But of course, it wasn't entirely his choice. However, there was no mass numbers of players jumping in to say powerset proliferation was impossible or even unlikely. Most were simply asking for it. Some (including me) were advocating against it, or at least against some aspects of it. But that sort of opposition to an idea is entirely fair. I like it, you don't, so you say so. A lot of people now seem to characterize powerset proliferation as an example of "The Man" trying to keep them down, when that's not an accurate portrayal of reality at that time.


Here's my own view. Whether the devs have said X is impossible, difficult, or unlikely, there's no harm at all in a new player saying "I wish we had X." At worst, they should be gently pointed to prior discussions about X to familiarize themselves with the history of X on the forums.

However, new or not, when a player starts expousing how they know how easy X would be to implement, or demanding to know why the devs can't figure out how to implement X in a reasonable amount of time, they voluntarily surrrender the right to be treated with kid gloves. And this is the sort of common sense everyone is supposed to have when jumping onto the internet.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: every guess about how the game works or how development of the game works has been wrong. Every single time, from 2004 to now. Every single post that has started off with a resume, proceeded with some guesswork about how to add something to the game, and ended with an analysis of how difficult that would be, has been not just wrong, but wildly wrong, unless it has been based entirely on publicly released information about the game system.

So: ask for whatever you want to ask for. People may jump on you for that, but they shouldn't. If you really think you're being pounded on by know-it-alls just for expressing a preference, PM me a link to the thread and I'll jump right in if I can. But if I find out the reason why they are jumping on you is not because you're just expressing a preference or a suggestion but because you're arguing about technical details and you're wrong, I'll probably jump in on *their* side.

They shouldn't be. Charged Bolts, Lightning Bolt, Power Bolt, and Power Blast should all be worth 100 points.

Fire Blast's first attacks are worth more: lots more. Flares is worth 145 and Fire Blast is worth 150. The reason is that while DoT is given to players "for free" the system counts DoT as if it were part of the base damage of the power. And the logic behind that is that when a player lands an attack on a critter, damage that happens right now is worth more to the player than damage that lands much later, because if you're attacking continuously the presumption is that you'll eventually win and defeat the critter, and that DoT could have reduced the number of attacks you needed to defeat the critter had it happened sooner rather than later. Of course, players can play games with that, but that's usually the case.

But when a critter attacks a player, whether their power does all of its damage now or some now and some later is less important: assuming the player survives at all the player will need to mitigate all of that damage regardless. So from an overall danger perspective, whether a critter hits you for 100 now and 50 later or 150 now you still ultimately have to mitigate 150 damage. So Fire DoT for critters makes those attacks a lot more lethal to players overall. And testing seems to suggest that is true: fill a mission with fire minions with flares and fire blast you have to plow through, and you will notice your health dropping much faster than if they had power bolt and power blast.

I would assume that you'd know if the critter was more or less difficult by the powers you give it, not the score you give it. The score doesn't explicitly judge the difficulty of the critter, but only if the critter meets the requirements for full XP. In other words, there is no guarantee that a 160% critter is actually harder than a 120% critter. In fact, there are times when the reverse is true. That's one of the reasons why numbers above 100% aren't shown: numbers above 100% are less meaningful.

It would be difficult to explain in detail, but the system is designed to try to implement a threshold, not a precise difficulty value.


Here's how the values basically work.

There are two kinds of powers: powers with Alpha scores and powers with Alpha and Beta scores. The Alpha powers are pretty straight forward: you just add them up. However, due to the rule of five you actually take the five highest and add them up. The rest don't count.

The Alpha/Beta powers are a little bit different. They have a value and a count. You take the count and find the top X alpha powers, add them up, and then multiply by the value. That's the net score of that power, and you add that to the total.

This may seem weird, so let me describe what its original intent was for. Suppose we have a power like Build Up that doesn't do any damage on its own, but double's the damage of your other attacks while its up. If we have one attack worth 100 and another attack worth 110, the total score is 210. But if the critter has build up and uses it, those two powers could hit for twice as much damage, and be worth (about) twice as much points. So *if* the critter has build up, we want Build Up not to be worth a fixed amount of points, but rather a multiplier against the other actual attacks you have.

So if Build Up was worth, say, an extra 0.8x your attacks (80%), then your total score would be (100 + 110) + (100 + 110) * 0.8 = 210 + 168 = 378.

But Build Up isn't up all the time. It could buff one attack, maybe two. Three is iffy. Not four or five. So we place a limit on the number of attacks BU can multiply. If BU is 2/0.8, then it multiplies up to two powers. So if you have attacks worth 100, 110, and 120, then the score without BU would be 330. With a 2/0.8 power, it would be (100 + 110 + 120) + (120 + 110) * 0.8 = 330 + 184 = 514. Only the top two powers are being buffed extra.

That should be fairly straight forward, but what about other powers that don't do damage but aren't damage buffs either? Well, the system uses a trick. Suppose I want Focused Fighting to be worth 20 points, but *only* if the critter has at least three attacks. If it has zero attacks I want it to be worth nothing (a critter with defenses and no offense is worth nothing). If its something between one and three I want Focused Fighting to scale up to its full strength. What I could do is take the score I want, divide by 300, and turn it into a 3/0.067 power where its a multiplier just like damage buffs are. By dividing by 300, the power only gets its score back if the critter has at least three attacks with a score of about 100, which is a standard attack. If the critter has less attacks or the attacks are worth less, Focused Fighting will be worth less. Otherwise, it will be worth a little more. So basically, defenses are worth more if the critter itself has more damage. Its one way to try to "adjust" defenses to be worth more on more dangerous critters. In effect, both damage buff powers and defensive powers (or attacks that do no damage) have the same requirement: we want them to be worth something if the critter has attacks, and be worth nothing if the critter has no attacks. This scheme lets us do that.

So we add up the top five alphas, then for each alpha/beta we do the multiplier and come up with a score for each and then add on top. That's the total score. We divide by the threshold of the critter to get the final XP ratio.

The thresholds are based on rank: for minions/Lts/Bosses/AVs they are 250/340/430/450. The thresholds are also based on level: they have that value at level 20, drop to half that value at "level zero" and increase to 1.2 times that value at level 50, in nice straight lines (the "level zero" just means at level 10 it drops to 75%, and if you drew a straight line it would drop to 50% at level zero, but of course there is no level zero: its just a quirk of the math).

Last two things: if the critter has a score higher than 100% its capped to 100%. And if the critter has no ranged attacks at all, its capped to 40%.


Some rules of thumb for quickie calculations.

Defensive secondaries tend to be worth between 60 and 120 points total, assuming you have enough attacks (as in, the entire secondary, not one power in it). And adding a 100 point attack to a critter can only change its value by somewhere in the range of 40% for a minion, 30% for an LT, and 20% for a Boss or AV. There's no way to change just one power on a boss and have it jump from 90% to 160% or anything like that *except* powers like Build Up.

When you are staring at those weird decimal numbers, any power that is 3/X is going to be worth *about* this much:

0.033 -> 10
0.067 -> 20
0.083 -> 25
0.100 -> 30
0.167 -> 50

That's if you're sticking them on a ranged attacker with at least three attacks. On a melee attacker with at least one ranged attack, it'll be about 3/4s those values: 7/14/18/21/35. If you want to just assume all of those defensive and non-damaging offensive powers are worth 20 or 25, you'd be in the general ballpark for quickie estimates, especially in terms of how dramatically one power can change the score.


At the moment, there is no documentation that I didn't make up myself, although another player did analyze and document the basic properties of the system during I17 beta. The open beta threads still seem to be around and the second post in this thread has Coulomb2's write up, which is basically accurate.

Tights options.


Candidate for most jarring typo of 2010.

Not in the current system, unfortunately.


Out of curiosity, why? The system shouldn't encourage people to deliberately try to game it. It's supposed to tell you what value the critter you made is, and allow you to make adjustments if desired.

However, if you really need to know, it's not hard to calculate the score based on the numbers provided in the real numbers displays for the powers.

Of course that goes without saying: if you started opening random threads comparing your chest to comic book heroines and posting spandex pictures, your rep would overflow the forum counters.

Drinking, eating, using it to clean the sink; all not happening with anything called Sprunk.

Actually, I've gotten the slam-dunk inexplicable one a couple of times (that I know of).

The amount of reputation points you can deliver in positive or negative rep is partially based on the amount of rep you have, I believe. Furthermore, although I'm not actually sure myself, I think if you turn off your own rep your reputation flags carry no score. So when you are flagged for rep, the flag is red if its a negative rep, green if it is a positive rep, and grey if the person flagging you has their own rep turned off.

Sometimes people leave very elaborate messages. Sometimes they just leave short ones. "Nice!" or "you suck" or one probably unique to me "not a dev." Sometimes they don't leave any comment and I just get a positive or negative rep with no message, just N/A.

The truly Zen rep that I've gotten two or three times is when they leave no message, and they have rep turned off. So what I get is a reputation flag with N/A and no value. Its not positive or negative, and it has no message.

I always wonder if the person intended to flag me positive or negative and they just didn't know their reputation flags have no value, or if they knew that and flagged me anyway as either positive or negative with no message *knowing* that I would have no way of knowing if it was a positive or negative flag. That's deep.

Well, yeah. Well that and you think the chest slider pushes breasts too far apart. Also, those pictures of spandex-clad heroines. And also that you can't use small breasts on your characters because then they wouldn't match your own real life chest.

Hmm, now that I think about it, it actually makes no sense that your rep would be as low as mine is.

Shoot, I forgot to put a smiley in my post again. Here we go:

Yeah, I noticed that mental malfunction. My mistake.

Although there's a lot about Recluse that seems incompetent, to believe that this makes it totally unrealistic that he could possibly be the leader of anything contradicts history. Hitler managed to rule half of Europe by first being nothing more than a charismatic speaker, parlaying that into being the focal point of a layered group of people from inner circle to outer that took control of an entire country, and eventually forcing obedience through a mixture of suspicion and fear.

In WWII, historians tend to agree Hitler did almost everything right for three years, then practically everything wrong after that point. If you look at his military decisions in the last few years of the war, you could be excused for wondering how he could lead a cub scout troop much less an entire European armed forces and why people ten times smarter were still taking orders from him until almost the very end.

I think you need to look at Recluse in terms of the fact that few people actually work for *him*. They work for a Fortunata boss, or an Arachnos soldier, and *those* people can and will kill you. They don't work for Recluse either, they work for other leaders, who work for other leaders. And why do Recluse's Lts work for him? Well, why not: working for him allows them significant political power, and there's no specific benefit to trying to take him out or replace him unless they are absolutely certain of success.

This is probably an irrelevant technical side track, but those statements are not necessarily true, or rather they are not always consistent with all fictional variations on parallel dimensions.

If we're talking about parallel dimensions which are basically alternate timelines of our world, then if I place a radioactive atom in a container, there are infinitely many variations on what happens next based on the exact time and orientation that atom decays. In one parallel dimension the atom decays two seconds later and parts go flying in different directions, and in another it decays four seconds later.

But that doesn't mean *all* describable futures actually exist. The alternate future in which the container has all of the parts of that decay embedded in the right side of the container *doesn't* exist because that one violates the laws of physics: some stuff has to go one way, and conservation of momentum requires the rest go the other way. Of all the alternate futures, that one can't exist if the alternate futures are split from mine.

There is a mathematical construct called the Game of Life that is based on cellular automata. Basically, its a system based on a square grid in which cells turn black or white based on a set of rules, and those rules are executed in turns or clock ticks. It turns out there are patterns of squares called Gardenof Eden patterns which are called that because they cannot occur as the next step in the system from *any* possible starting pattern. In other words, they can only occur if they are the starting pattern placed there at creation, thus "Garden of Eden." Another way of describing these patterns is that they have no past. No past pattern eventually becomes that pattern.

The universe is a lot more complex, but there's no reason to believe that such patterns don't exist for the universe as a whole: patterns that cannot possibly be the end result of the universe, either literally from the big bang or from some known starting point. There isn't a universe that looks exactly like ours does throughout all of history except five minutes from now the earth and the sun have changed places, say.

So are there universes in which Recluse doesn't exist? Almost certainly. But are there an unlimited number of possibilities for what Recluse's fate might be? Maybe not. This might be one of those unknowable to humans questions: if you could know what all of the myriad quantum states were that were involved in Recluse eventually becoming leader of Arachnos, you could theoretically know what all the possibilities were. But in practice, probably not.

What is true is that there are probably either an unlimited number of alternate futures in which Recluse ultimately wins, or there are zero such alternate dimensions. Whatever the number is, its either zero or infinity.

One of the things I had forgotten about it until I went looking for it again was the fact that the KCC had an emote interface. You could see your character playing various emotes on command. This was years before we had the ability to play power animations in the character creator which only came along due to the need for that interface for power customization in I16 (although the emote interface made its first return earlier in Issue 14 in the critter creator of the Architect).

I couldn't get Television to add a coolness factor into the critter AI. He said it caused MA critters to just cycle Eagle's Claw over and over again and everything else to commit suicide out of jealousy.

I don't see it as "ripping off" Arachnos. I see it as the writers trying to avoid making Praetoria a literal "mirror" of Primal Earth, and instead taking the elements of Primal Earth and mix-and-matching them in Praetoria. In the same way that villain archetypes are not just inverse or opposite versions of the hero archetypes, but are instead usually jumbled up versions of them (the notable exception being Corruptors as inverse Defenders).

So there's no Lord Recluse in Praetoria, so there's no Arachnos so there's no Fortunatas. Without an Arachnos, its Mayhem that fills that gap in Praetoria, turning the seers from an army of Arachnos to a police force of Praetoria. To be honest, if Mayhem wasn't the leader of the seers, it would beg the question to me as to how did Tyrant deal with the psychics on Praetoria. The seers would be a very big threat to him uncontrolled.

I think the fact that he says "obviously, this was before my time" implies he is aware of the KCC (and he should know about it because I asked someone to forward an email to him regarding the KCC). I interpret his comment as implying that he thinks there must be some sort of hurdle towards making one now (not necessarily technical) or someone would have eventually made a US version.

I don't think it was ever really confirmed that the reason why there was no US version had anything to do with the Marvel suit. Even if the community team said it (and I don't recall that they did) its illogical because its not like Korea has no copyright laws. The app would have been just as much of an infringement there as here. If it was an actual legal threat, they should have *immediately* pulled the thing completely. But they didn't.

I have often wondered if the real problem was that the internationalization or localization team or whatever for the Korean version simply didn't have *authority* to make that thing, and that made it a sticky wicket.

In any case, while the KCC is a proof of concept, it can't be just patched to the latest set of costume parts. It just can't. But as I mention above, it doesn't have to be.

You could also cut the recharge of the ranged attack in half (roughly) and double its score (roughly) to reflect the fact that the attack can be used to deliver twice as much damage by firing twice as fast. But the problem with that is you can't turn that *off* if you really don't want that level of ranged output.

Adding two powers that are "the same" is not literally possible, but as you suggest you can always add two identical powers that have different names. In that case, the critter will use them both no different than if it just had two ranged attacks. The critters don't actually really "know" what their attacks are called so whether the critter has two power blasts or one power blast and one power bolt really means nothing to them.

There's a couple problems with this idea. I actually proposed this (or rather something close to this) in I14 beta but as it turns out the custom critter powers were specifically intended, I was told, to parallel player powersets and not just wide-open randomly customizable critters. There were conceptual and design reasons which were not fully explained to me at the time, but which I know now but can't articulate.

Separately, its important to recognize what can be changed quickly and what takes longer. I think people know that its far easier for Castle to change the damage of a power than it is for BaB to shorten the animation of a power when it comes to power adjustments. Here, it would be not too difficult at all to add a third power set in theory, but it would take user interface programmer time to make it visible to the players and that's harder to acquire and takes longer to do. Such changes are also subject to more checks and balances having to do with art direction, look and feel, etc. Its also a part of the game development that I've had much less success bending to my will. I mean, successfully registering suggestions for.

So if you want it in this lifetime, frankly the change should be something that only impacts the data of the game, has minimal or no changes required to the user interface, and doesn't radically change functionality in a way that would require a committee to discuss. So I'm thinking about a change that would get part of the way there without tripping over those resource limits, so there's a better chance it can be doable relatively quickly ("relatively quickly" might be weeks or months, though, as opposed to a year or more, given the resources being devoted to I18/GR and beyond).


On the subject of fully customizable critters, I have this idea for a wide-open customizable critter system (at least in terms of powers) that would leverage and extend the existing XP weight system into something that would allow for very fine control over the difficulty and value of the critters. Something where you design the critter cafeteria style and the game computes a score and gives it a reward value. Basically the Champions system in reverse. Or rather, the HERO system in reverse: the CO system basically tossed that out entirely. I personally think it would be cool, and an interesting design challenge**. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that one.



** And, I have to admit, it would be amusing as all hell if CoX eventually had a points-purchase power system, albeit for NPCs, that is closer in spirit to Champions than Champions Online itself is. I have no animosity towards Cryptic per se, but I'm evil and can't help it.

The safest thing I can say here is that anyone like me who sometimes spends hours in the character creator has probably had at least one instance where after spending all that time creating the perfect new character finds they can't log it in because something happened like an hour ago they shut the servers down for maintenance and they aren't connected to anything anymore.



An' that's all I got to say 'bout that.

I'm convinced: I'm going to see if I can do something to improve this situation. My best guess is that melee attacks need to increase *slightly* in score (somewhere in the vicinity of 10%) and damage auras should bypass the rule of five.

I thought of just changing the rule of five to the rule of six, but that's not especially helpful because to take advantage of that generally requires using some of the most extreme attacks in the melee sets which are nevertheless not extremely high in value.

The two changes above still won't *guarantee* that a melee/defense boss (or higher) will get to 100% consistently, but it will make it more likely they will get close, which is I think a reasonable compromise that doesn't hurt mission XP too much (bosses and higher ranked critters are not efficient sources of XP regardless, unless you're defeating them under exploit conditions, so players shouldn't shun a mission arc because the AV at the end might be worth 5% less than a normal AV).

By the way, one of the things the system does is weight AoEs generally low, because the system assumes AoEs hit only one target. So melee sets with a lot of AoEs will tend to lag sets more focused on single target damage. Keep that in mind when selecting attack powers: its one of the things that reduces the score you can achieve with Katana.


I have another wild hair idea that might fly, but I need to discuss it with the devs first.

I would think you would explicitly want to make your red name something different from your regular game account name, because there are limitations as to what you can do in-game with your actual red name game account. I would keep my existing game account separate, and make up a totally new red name account specifically for Paragon Studios purposes, which is more or less what the other red name devs have done.

The rules surrounding this that are relevant to this intellectual exercise are:

1. Paragon Studios employees cannot stealth post anonymously: they must post on these forums with their red name account only. The only exceptions that I've seen have involved forum glitches where devs posted with temporary non-red name accounts and in those cases they explicitly identified themselves as such.

2. Conversely, you can't just play around with your red name game account. There are limits to what you are allowed to do with your signature characters, and the rules governing what you can do with any character in your red name account seem to lean in the direction of conservatively not creating the appearance of impropriety (although I don't think those are set in stone). So if you simply convert your current name into a red name, there might be issues that require you to occasionally use another anonymous account in-game. Which you'd have to start from scratch. That might not be ideal.


As for me, well if I ever became a red name there's no hope at all for "Arcanaville" to be an anonymous name, so I might consider just using it anyway. But if I was asked to pick an in-game avatar as my red name, it would depend on what I was doing for Paragon Studios: I would want the name to be appropriate. So if I was working on powers under Synapse, say, I would want to be Siege. If I was working on special projects with Positron, I might want to be Nightstar. If I was working on datamining or the reward system, I'd be Pither.


Although the notion of assuming the role of Dr. Brainstorm and mixing it up with Dr. Aeon and Television in the technology run amok crazy-person triumvirate arena has a certain appeal regardless.

Can't wait to see what happens if they post a Going Rogue update of Dominatrix.