Arcanaville

Its specifically the buff-only situation that made the confused code only a partial solution at best. And there were other, AI-related issues with it.

Their arcs have to pass balance metrics, reward reviews, content vetting, Q&A testing, and are subject to change due to datamined imbalances at any time over the objections of the content writer.

The players just have to make sure the little orange box goes away and they can upload the arc.

Actually, essentially this feature was supposed to be in the AE from I14 beta. For some reason it never went in correctly. But this specific situations (creating allies specifically designed to assist a player in combat in the AE) is something that I personally a) warned the devs about *before* I14 went into beta, b) specifically warned the devs about *during* I14 beta, c) created several missions specifically to demonstrate the exploitability issue in I14 beta, and d) got assurances two fixes were being considered. One of them was setting the allies so that only one would assist the player at any one time, no matter how many of them there were (which I think ended up being problematic) and the other was setting the reward system to consider combat-capable allies "team members" which meant in essence you'd be splitting your rewards with them no differently than if another player was helping you.

Because of all the chaos surrounding the AE reward system after launch, I never bothered to go back and check to see if this issue was ultimately resolved until not that long ago. But I can say with absolute certainty that while something going on now might have reminded them to look at this, nothing that is happening now is especially new in terms of this problem.

Because a netbook is just a crappy version of my laptop, which literally does everything a netbook does only better. What the iPad does, it does fairly well and better than my laptop or a netbook. Like be light and start instantly for one.

Its certainly not perfect, but given that I already own an iPhone, I can afford to be an early adopter for the iPad.

The HP Slate looks interesting, but a) I can't buy one yet and b) running Windows 7 is likely to hamper the product by trying to shoehorn a general purpose OS onto a clearly special purpose platform.

I don't think you can "squat" on a trademark. You have to actually use it and defend it in some form, and you'd lose it immediately if someone else demonstrated it was too derivative of their own trademark.

I'm going to go out on a legal limb and say "City of Heroes 2" will likely be considered too derivative of the trademark "City of Heroes."


Any development work involving the current game engine or extensions to the existing game engine would almost certainly be released as an expansion to City of Heroes. If NCSoft was working on something called "City of Heroes 2" its logical to assume it *wasn't* using the existing game engine. Game engines take a while to design and write. It would likely be years before we see City of Heroes 2 or any other MMO that Paragon Studios might have in concurrent development, except maybe for things like concept art. Consider that Cryptic managed to release STO in only two years and outside observers consider that a very speedy development cycle, and they started with the CO engine as its base.

Unlikely. Linux isn't going to disappear or go closed source in twenty years. Some things like java pretty much *can't* go closed in only twenty years due to their nature and the way they are licensed and managed.

Oh, and in keeping with the theme, posted from iPad.

If you really wanted to do it and approached the problem from gameplay fundamentals, it would be no harder than the alternative, which is to come up with lots of interesting content that *doesn't* do all of those things. Also, some of those difficult to do things already exist**.



** Star Trek Online has a reward system in which most of the rewards are backloaded into mission completions and not combat kills, and at least that part of the system seems to work fine in an MMO (in fact, the kill to completion reward ratio is almost exactly what I would set it to, which is probably dumb luck on their part).

Actually, this thread has been mostly polite, and for the most part agreeing or at least sympathizing with at least part of your thesis. The problem is that you seem to have a combination of a very confrontational posting style combined with a very thin skin. For example:

I'm one of the people that claims not to have that problem (although I acknowledge it happens at some frequency) and I'm certainly not an FOTM player. And on the subject of Mids, long-time posters know that for a long time I advocated non-planner play: I myself never plan out builds as a level them up and until Mids came along I never recommended a planner even when asked as a matter of principle. But I was an early advocate for Mids simply because it was a full-featured and simple planner, and supported inventions which are a complex thing for the average person to otherwise contemplate. I *still* don't use Mids or any other planner to plan builds of characters I level, and I have a policy of not respecing a character before the late 40s - usually not before 50, no matter what goofy power choice mistakes I might have made.

So I recommend Mids to players looking for planners, but don't use it myself to plan leveling builds (I do use it to plan invention slotting for high level characters, when I do full-fledged invention builds - which is not all the time). I don't have problems being kicked myself, and I play all sorts of archetypes and power set combinations. I'm exactly the person that might sympathize with your position, if your position didn't include overzealously denigrating large segments of the player population just to try to make a point, *then* acting injured when other players call you on it.

You need to learn to take as much as you dish out. Learn to dish out less, or learn to take more. I would recommend the former over the latter, because here the sheep are packing heat.

I've never actually been kicked for build (as far as I know: I've almost never been kicked at all) but I know it happens. But if the playerbase is now kicking Fire/Fire Tankers or Sonic/Sonic Defenders or anything that possesses force fields, I'm becoming concerned that the biggest threat to long-term subscription numbers is a significant percentage of the playerbase becoming too stupid to feed themselves unassisted and dying of starvation.

Its a bit of a side effect of a larger design error**, but basically this is the one error that was easily avoidable (knowing nothing but what the devs knew back in either alpha or beta, it should have been obvious not to do this), easily correctable right up to launch (the reward system was not tightly coupled to the rest of the game design and could have been changed without disrupting the rest of the game), and has had the largest negative impact on the game that persists to this day.


** Which was not deciding what the game was actually about - for example from the very beginning the devs seem to believe that running instanced mission content was the "core" part of gameplay, yet the game launched with practically zero rewards for doing so, and relatively massive rewards for avoiding it entirely. They also seemed to realize that players wanted large-scale combat but giving that experience to them would unbalance the reward system they created for combat (there was also technical issues, but that's not relevant here: in fact those technical limitations impose a soft-cap on such behavior anyway). Which has an ironically obvious solution to anyone *except* a circa 2004 MMO designer. This is actually the moment when the "three minions" design rule caused its real damage: the balancing done around that rule after launch was and is a minor point by comparison.

So Super Reflexes is finally going to work correctly without power pools or inventions? Sweet.

I can't wait for the expansion Going Lackey when through a series of missions you can perform increasingly silly and useless things until you "cross over" into being a sidekick.

Its a little more complicated than that. For example, the ultra mode demo included a feature referred to as ambient occlusion. Its a way of rendering a scene with a technique that simulates the effects of geometry on lighting. See 17:45 of the Ultra Mode demo. Ambient Occlusion is a technique (or rather a set of techniques) to estimate how much of the ambient light in a scene is being obscured in different parts of the scene, and therefore causing implicit shadowing. Its potentially a computationally expensive technique. Depending on how they implemented it precisely, it could add computational load to your CPU, or your GPU, or both (my guess, and its purely a wild guess, is that they did some hardware-accelerated OpenGL geometry mojo).

Ultra Mode encompasses a significant number of different enhanced rendering techniques, and to run it "at maximum" requires a CPU and GPU capable of running all of those settings at their limits. But that doesn't mean running Ultra Mode at less than the absolute maximums is necessarily going to be worthless. You're probably going to have to see it for yourself to know if running at less than the absolute limits is really noticable to you.
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There is one other issue, and that is all other things being equal, running a power supply significantly under its rated maximum will likely cause it to run cooler than its design limits, and as a result run its fans much slower which reduces noise levels.

When I stuck the 5850 in my Dell, I also ripped out the power supply and put in a Corsair 750 (actually, I'm pretty sure its exactly the one you link to in your first pic). It has a fan the size of a small jet engine at the botton of the power supply, but I notice it hardly runs: I don't hear it really running at all. Probably because of this:



Its basically designed to run practically fanless until you get to about 400 watts or so. It probably doesn't even notice the piddly 350 or 400 watts I draw under my system's high load levels. A 500 watt power supply would have probably been plenty, but it would probably be running its fans constantly when the video card was drawing its max current.


One other thing I should mention is that the closer you approach the limits of your power supply, the less likely it will be to hold rock-solid stable voltages or control shifting loads on its rails. So whatever you calculate your system to need, you always want a power supply that can deliver significantly more than that for a variety of reasons.

I can think of all sorts of exotic things that just won't happen. One thing that could happen is Practiced Brawler could get a small slottable +health(small as in something like +10% health). That would add only a small amount of increased protection without increasing +DEF and add the ability to slot Heal sets in PB.

Technically, this is exactly the sort of thing that Markov analysis is best suited for, because the statistical one blurs the situational dependencies from one round to the next.

Now that would be interesting. But I'm not volunteering to do that at the moment.

Not so much overlooking as looking at a specific example with the model. It may even have more detail than is necessary to prove the point.

Let's start very simple and look at the claim: any defense without debuff resistance is useless.

Well, that's pretty obviously not true: I'm sure there's at least one or two perma-elude veterans that would dispute that. I know cascade defense failure is a real possibility (since I coined the term and all) but for your defense to cascade fail you actually have to get hit first, and the higher your defense is the less often that will be true.


The real question ultimately is how many hits on average does it take to induce cascade failure near the soft cap. Its generally a number greater than one for most critter groups unless you are facing large numbers of foes. The higher that number is, the longer the soft cap will hold up against debuffing. For the strongest debuffers like vanguard and cimerorans, it might be close to one at times and then even the soft cap without defense debuff resistance can fall apart quickly. But even so, is the soft cap "worthless?" Only if your perceived value of the soft cap is to be a magic bullet that makes most attacks go away all the time.


In any case, this is also mostly irrelevant. The notion that something that is extraordinarily powerful in one situation is perfectly fine if there exists another one where its not is simply wrong on its face, and any assertion resting on that foundation is simply automatically dismissable.

Really, long before a 5850 runs out of gas my guess is that the servers will and you'll be server-lagged with a spectacular-looking slideshow. Its always been server-lag that has caused most of the visible jerkiness in things like Hami raids and Zombie invasions for people with high-performance systems, not graphical client-side lag (although that is also a factor in low-performance systems).

Although, UltraMode does create the potential for some interesting graphical gnashing with things like reflective costume pieces. Fifty players with shiny costumes standing around like a super-powered hall of mirrors shooting powers off left and right might make for some interesting graphical card load in theory.

Here's the inside story:

BaB: Hey Castle, I got the new guy working on some ultra cool new melee animations for MA. I think Arcana is really going to like these.

Castle: Yeah, I finally worked out a new set of secondary effects for MA too. Its got everything: end management, heals, buffs, debuffs. Arcana is going to flip out when these go in.

BaB: ...

Castle: ...

Bab: You're not going to give these to MA, are you?

Castle: <smiles> Got the new guy working on a Kinetic set already.

BaB: Arcana is going to rip off your head and &!#* down your neck.

Castle: Yeah. God I love this job. Wait'll the intern finishes up that Elusivity-based bullet-time secondary.

That's why I said "on average." Its impossible to predict what a specific duo will experience, and trivially easy for a specific duo to engineer *any* kill speed difference they want, if they want. If they want the duo to be a hundred times faster, or 40% slower, they can always specifically *play* in a way that generates any result they want.

Something has to fill the void left when Positron's massively multi-sponge car wash project failed to meet revenue expectations.

As long as this is on your island:



we'll call it even.

In general, they won't be the same spawns because the game will scale up the spawns to be bigger. Even if you have the case where the tanker sets themselves to be +0/x8 a tanker/blaster duo is going to have more targets.


But as I mentioned previously, why I feel safe in making this statement is that if anyone else could prove me wrong, and demonstrate conclusively that on average (because again, individual anecdotes are just that) a blaster/tanker duo was slower than two tankers or alternatively less than twice as fast as a single tanker, that would be unambiguous proof that either tankers were overperforming solo or blasters were underperforming period. It would point to a broken situation that mandated a solution be formulated, no differently than the blaster datamined underperformance essentially forced the devs to take action back around I11. This theoretical possibility is really that bad of an occurance from a game-balance perspective.

So if this were true, and I think its extremely unlikely, then I'm all but challenging someone to prove it, because that proof would force the devs to take corrective action.

I'm hoping you just misread my post that the numbers are quoted from. I said the tanker-blaster combo would likely be 3 to 5 times faster than a single tanker alone. If you just add another *tanker* you should get 2 times faster kill speed if they just headed in opposite directions. If you believe that a tanker plus a blaster is actually not any faster than two tankers on average or requires a particularly bad tanker to make true, then you believe blasters deserve a *huge* damage buff, or tankers do way too much damage. On average, a blaster can expect to do at least 40% more damage than a tanker under equivalent endurance and damage slotting conditions simply due to the archetype modifier difference, so long as they can use their offense without worrying about aggro, and in a tanker-blaster duo it should be presumed that aggro is under control most of the time.

Basically, the number has to be higher than 2, because that's the case where the blaster does exactly the same amount of damage as the tanker, 1 to 1. But it gets difficult to make it go very much higher than 5, because that would be the case where the blaster was individually outdamaging the tanker 4 to 1.

As I said, by this definition *nothing* is original. And any perspective that concludes nothing is original has accomplished nothing but eliminating the usefulness of the word "original."

Even letters aren't original: its not like any of them are constructed from any visual elements that don't pre-exist written language.

Whenever someone uses the absolutist reductionist argument to conclude that nothing is original, I'm reminded of the same line of thought which concludes that nothing is real. Outside of a philosophy class, both lines of thought have no practical outcome. In a practical sense, what matters almost all of the time is real enough, and when judging creative endeavors what matters is original enough.

I don't mind that nothing I've ever created is absolutely original because absolute originality is a semantic construct devoid of any meaning other than a definition which precludes exemplars.

But for people that have a definition of originality that actually allows for the *existence* of originality, I think there are lots of examples of both creative and original naming as well as derivative naming.

In my opinion, its a little less ugly and has a slightly better structure. Instead of *appearing* in-game as Fireman678 you'll actually appear as:

Hero 678
aka Fireman

In other words, you get a "unique name" and a "common name" and both appear as separate "titles" on your character. Its easier to claim you are "Fireman" because you actually are "Fireman" - just colloquially. But the structure of the game is now signaling that this is a legitimate way to name characters, so there's no stigma associated with it, unlike *** Fireman678 ***!!!

What's more, by forcing the first part to be unique *and* displayed, it can be used as a universal character identifier. There will never be a question of who or what "Hero 678" is because its *not* a global handle: its unique to that specific character.


There are lots of reasons why I don't like Character@Global. The biggest objection I lodged when the system was first proposed, and later when the chat system was modified to remove even the illusion of disconnect between character and global, is that its impossible to play a character anonymously, short of having a completely different account.

Maybe for the vast majority of players this is a minor annoyance, but for me its not a small distinction. Cryptic takes this to a whole new level: I haven't investigated whether this is alterable or not (it probably is and I just haven't stumbled across it yet) but your global handle is at least initially your global handle for *both* Cryptic games, which means I'm Character@Global across both Champions Online *and* Star Trek Online. As much as some people like that, I'm not one of them.

Mostly, though, I dislike Character@Global because it perpetuates the perspective that my character is just a thing in my account, no different than a damage enhancement is just a thing in my character. It isn't an entity unto itself.


Tenzhi:
That's a pretty wide brush to paint with. I think its only true if you believe nothing is original, starting from the creation of the universe. Personally, I tend to put a lot of thought into my character names, and since way more than half the time the name I choose is immediately available I assume my names are, if not provably creative, at least relatively original.

Although there are times when I'm genuinely surprised to get a name, because *I* assume its not original but I'm trying anyway. The last time that happened was when I rolled my Elec/Elec and named her (The)Electrocutioness.

My brother, now he had an interesting naming anomaly. He started in head-start, and was not in beta so his first day in head-start was his first day ever seeing any part of the game. And yet he had a weird habit of naming his characters things that eventually ended up in the game. "Patient Zero" for example. The first time I got a mission to track down "Patient Zero" I actually thought for a second that the game was telling me to track down my brother in-game and thought that was an awesome mission-generation feature.