Arcanaville

My guess is that the developers are a lot crazier than the publishers.

Even among the developers, we actually see only a tiny percentage of them, and they are all obviously nuts for putting up with us. Perhaps the publishers feel a need to maintain a certain professional distance from the playerbase because they more than the devs determine the mechanics of what we the playerbase ultimately gets and how.

There is a certain freedom the devs must feel to be able to always say "well, that's what I think but ultimately its not my decision." Its a lot different when it actually *is* your decision and you have to confront a large heterogeneous and not always friendly audience. Publishers ultimately control resources and deadlines: I would not envy someone in charge of resources and deadlines that was asked to take questions from the forums.

Personally, I think communication to that side of the house could be a lot better. But I think the fact that we have far more contact with the development side than the publishing side says more about the devs than the publishers. In many games you have direct contact with neither to any significant degree. But here, like I said, the devs are insane.

No one is meant to be literally the tanker on the red side. The red side was explicitly designed to not line up one for one. The devs have said that the "meatshield" role was primarily the mastermind role, because they are the ones with the big bags of health (split up into lots of pieces).

Its important to remember that even blue side tankers aren't meant to be tankers in the way some players think. They are not intended to be able to survive the combined aggro from a spawn generated by a full eight person team. Some tankers can, but they are only designed to handle about half that. More than that, and its good if you can, but not the devs problem if you can't. Players have a much more binary view of the game than the devs do or that they should. The game is not all or nothing: you can tank everything, or you are worthless. In a full team, the devs expect aggro control and damage absorption to be something that is shared between more than one tanker and/or controller. Tanks are not explicitly designed to not need any help except for small teams.

Similarly, on the red side the archetypes were not intended to be all or nothing archetypes. The aggro drawing ability was split between brutes (with explicit and intrinsic taunt) and masterminds (with high threat pets). Neither has the ability to "tank" for the entire team explicitly by design. Furthermore, neither has the complete big bag of health that blue side tankers have. Masterminds have way more health than tankers, but they are vulnerable to AoEs. Brutes aren't vulnerable to AoEs, but unless buffed they have a lot smaller bags of health (including resistances and defense) than tankers do. This is by design. There is no red side tanker. The role of aggro control and damage absorption is split between brutes and masterminds. Masterminds are the primary meat shield. Brutes are supposed to draw enough aggro from the rest of the team to make masterminds effective, and vice versa masterminds are supposed to draw enough damage to prevent the brutes from being vaporized.

Rather than sharing roles when one archetype gets overwhelmed or overloaded, red side archetypes are designed to share roles right from the start.

Its a lot easier to understand what the red side archetypes are supposed to be doing if you realize they were designed to operate together in a way that each archetype has the tools to solo, but has some part to contribute to a collective team effort, rather than each one has one specific role that they take away from everyone else and do all by themselves. That's not the red side. That's not even the blue side, although players assume it is.


Every red side archetype is a mix of pieces of two or more blue side archetypes, plus some extra features, except one. So they can't really directly take the role of any of the blue side archertypes completely. Brutes are basically scrappers with tanker aggro control. Masterminds are meat shield pets with controller support. Stalkers are melee ranged alpha-strike blasters with low health, scrapper protections, and stealth. Dominators are lower damage blasters with control. Only corruptors have a sort-of one to one mapping: they are inverted defenders. So tankers were split between brutes and masterminds. Scrappers were split between brutes and stalkers. Blasters were split between stalkers and dominators. Controllers were split between masterminds and dominators. Defenders were flipped to become Corruptors.

I've suggested something like it since the very first name-purge/non-unique name thread appeared on the forums to my knowledge. Less so as a direct suggestion and more as a thought experiment. For people who want a name that is already taken and are willing to have unique IDs of some other kind, what's the problem with putting in a unique ID in the actual character name field of your character and putting your character's "real name" in the BIO. Its ultimately the same thing, except people don't directly see that you're "SuperDude@123456789" you're just "123456789" and anyone that wants to know your real name has to look at your bio. If its mostly for *you* and not for anyone else, what does it matter?

If, on the other hand, it *does* matter what you look like to other people then this is no longer a simple discussion about everyone getting to have whatever name they want because it doesn't affect anyone else, because it does in fact affect everyone else by virtue of affecting the global namespace.


I wonder if this would satisfy people. Suppose everyone had an "AKA" field in their character ID. Character "Name" would become character ID. IDs would still have to be unique. AKAs would not, and would be optional.

So if I'm the only Suzie Snapshot on my server, I get to be "Suzie Snapshot" and that's all. If someone else wants to be Suzie Snapshot they can't be because that name is already taken. But if they want to be, they can choose to be "Paragon Hero 894374" and immediately below that it would say "aka Suzie Snapshot."

Its no less ugly, but its only ugly for people wanting to take an already taken unique ID and willing to tolerate an ugly ID. People willing to choose a unique name can avoid having the ugly ID. People willing to have ugly IDs can have whatever aka name they want.

I'd be "Suzie Snapshot." They would be "894374:Suzie Snapshot" or whatever. It seems like everyone gets what they ask for.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest. You have to admit though that its a little weird thinking there are actually a hundred thousand truck drivers named Bob that play this game. Talk about niche marketing. If only we could get the cab drivers named Steve we could double our playerbase.

Here's an idea that I think would work in the context of an MMO, albeit with an additional tech requirement, that parallels the "loyalty programs" that casinos have to some degree. Suppose that players had a "pain meter" that incremented by one point for every point of debt you earn, to some maximum level on the meter. And suppose you could "spend" those pain points on things like, say, large inspirations that were bind on equip so you couldn't trade them (the tech requirement we currently don't have here). Basically, the pain rewards would be something to take the edge off of "losing" but their benefit would be less than the cost of going into debt in the first place, so they would not be things players would deliberately die for (unless they didn't care about leveling speed at all and were willing to go slower for those rewards, which is not a problem). If the pain costs scaled with debt amounts per level, I think it would be a way to, in a sense "reward failure" but in a completely reasonable way. In fact, it would address an issue with the reward/debt system.

Right now, debt is a form of penalty that scales upward more or less linearly with lower player skill to a relatively small maximum, then peaks and levels off. If you die you have to burn that debt off. Dying more often means having to burn off more debt, so the penalty actually accelerates with lower skill up to some point. Then debt peaks and the penalty increases linearly based on the percentage of time you spend in debt. Then you hit the debt limit: you're perma-debt and can't possibly get any worse.

The CO penalty is actually somewhat harsher in terms of mechanics. You get weaker when you die, which increases the probability that you will die again. This is an accelerating penalty until you hit the penalty cap that accelerates faster and harsher than the accelerating penalty due to increasing debt.

But in both cases, the reward system disproportionately penalizes lower than average skill. Someone that is twice as far away lower than average skill is actually penalized more than twice as much, at least till both systems saturate. It really shouldn't do that. In our case, the penalty is so low that the reward system tends to swamp it out in most cases so this effect isn't as easy to notice, but its there. Its a bit easier to witness in CO.

The game should strive for an equilibrium point in the reward system where the better you are, the harder it is to get even better and earn even more rewards. It should not "reward" skill in the sense of allowing speed to buy even more speed in accelerating fashion. And similarly it should do the same thing in reverse: it should not amplify lower skill into even worse earning.

By allowing debt to buy performance, we soften the downside without eliminating it. Someone who has less skill will always earn rewards slower, just not in an accelerating downward fashion. I think that makes MMO reward systems easier, not harder to balance.

Well, back when mission rewards were basically nil (and a lot of missions were bugged), some people used to pretty much street-sweep their way to 40/50 by choice. Remember things like Brickstown racetracks, Terra Volta hopping, and PI dock-orbiting? That used to be the leveling norm. I remember someone once committing to leveling from 40 to 50 entirely in the Rikti Crash Site exclusively.

Its no longer ideal today, but I don't think anything has changed about the game to make it a non-viable strategy. I just haven't really heard about anyone trying to do it in years. If anything, there are additional opportunities for target-rich environments, things like Sirens hotspots for example.

Interesting; that's what I've been saying since my join date.

I'll amplify by saying the other thing I've been saying for nearly as long, and its the logical consequence: reward isn't a thing in an MMO, its a rate of earning. Your reward for doing A is to achieve X rewards per minute. Your reward for doing B is to achieve Y rewards per minute.

This is not a trivial distinction. During CoV beta it was said that if stalkers could stealth a mission and click the blinkie at the end without fighting anyone they could achieve "free" rewards without "risk." But that's not the right way to look at that situation. The way to look at it is to ask what the reward per minute is for stealthing a mission and clicking the blinkie, given that critters give rewards too. If that *rate* was lower than the rate of earning for someone who plowed through, then stealthing wasn't a "free" reward, it was actually a reward penalty. The penalty for not fighting, basically.

Once you start thinking about rewards in terms of time, the logical next step is to think about them in terms of rates. I don't mean that the rate is important, I mean the rate is the reward itself. A purple drop is not a reward unto itself. A purple drop an hour is a fantastic reward. A purple drop a century is not. And when you think about rewards as rates and not things, you should draw the *next* logical inference, and that is that rather than think about "higher than normal" and "lower than normal" rates of reward earning, there are "rewards" (which are higher rates of return than the statistical average) and "penalties" (which are lower rates of return than the statistical average). And its ok to have things that have "reward penalties" that nevertheless have an actual reward.

This creates the opportunity to create non-conventional gameplay diversity. Only combat has "risk" in even remote terms. Only combat can incur debt, and therefore only combat has a penalty. But in this reward-rate view, activities that generate rewards can have a design-penalty associated with them that makes them viable as alternate gameplay, but not actually "rewarded" activity in that sense. For example: allowing players to actually use stealth to accomplish a mission. For a mission reward designer, the question isn't "should it be possible to earn a 'reward' for doing that?" It should be "what should the penalty for doing it that way be, and does the reward(rate) reflect that penalty?"


I think its a small distinction that disguises a major difference in perspective.

On 32-bit OSs like WIndows XP/32 the 4 gig addressing limit has to include all memory mapped IO including frame buffers. But I don't think a 2gig RAM video card would literally use a 2gig frame buffer. Most of that memory is for things like textures not for the display, unless you have a 50000 x 40000 display monitor.

This is a cardinal rule of performance in general. Not having enough X will generally hurt, but having more than what the thing needs generally doesn't help. Above the critical level, having faster is better than having more. Below the critical level, having more is better than having faster. Basically, computer resources obey ED.

Conditioning gives you 20% of the value of stamina plus 50% of the benefit of Health, unslotted. That's not bad.

If you enhance recovery with Stamina, the net effect of having the higher recovery value is something close to having one extra SO slotted into it, ignoring the ED soft cap. VEAT recovery with unslotted stamina is about 1.31; that's equivalent to someone with stamina slotted with a +25% recovery enhancement. VEAT recovery with +95% slotted stamina is about 1.562 which is comparable to someone with stamina slotted to +125% (if that was possible with ED), about 30 percentage points higher.

Someone with slotted stamina *and* Numinas regen/recovery IO gets to a recovery of about 1.5875. That's about what a VEAT gets with just slotted stamina (1.562). So in a sense Conditioning's recovery buff is about what Numina's proc would give to a slotted Stamina (non-VEAT) character, plus a better regeneration net buff. Given what people pay for that IO, and given that Conditioning doesn't burn a slot, I think it has to be considered a decent buff overall.


Suppose VEAT recovery was 1.10 instead of 1.05. Then a VEAT with unslotted stamina would already have a recovery of 1.375, and would match the recovery of fully slotted Stamina plus Numinas with about +77% slotting - about two ++ SOs worth. At fully slotted stamina VEAT recovery would be 1.636. That's actually almost as high as someone with fully slotted quick recovery *and* Numinas: 1.685.

The numbers seem small, but when 1.10 recovery turns Stamina into the equal of Quick Recovery and the Numina's proc combined, 1.15 - which seems like a numerically small buff - would have to be considered out of the ballpark and into orbit, and 1.05 is probably best described as a smaller but still significant buff.

I did bounce that basic wording off of him, actually before the Architect issues arose, and I've been quoting it since before I14.

Even the devs will state ambiguous things while in the act of explaining their position, so I tried to derive a very precise version of different things they had said in the past. The reason why my version says "primary or sole intent" is because saying "only intent" creates the obvious trivial loophole you partially reference in your statement on "fun" - that anyone who enjoys earning massive rewards has the ability to assert two intents by implication.

While Castle's definition isn't the official corporate one, the one I state above is also consistent with everything Positron said, and everything Paragon Studios did, in regards to the architect rewards issues. I doubt the players will get as precise of a definition directly from PS, because it opens the door to semantic games. The one I offered above is, in my judgment, as precisely consistent with the devs consensus opinion** on deleterious farming as I think is possible short of a pronouncement approved by the collective reward team.


** The devs are not a hive mind. Lots of people are involved in the process of designing, implementing, and balancing rewards and reward-related systems, and they don't all see things in the exact same way. Positron as a point of view. War Witch probably has her own distinct point of view. Synapse has his point of view. Castle has his point of view. Developers and Producers you've probably never heard of have their point of view. MMO development is a delegated and consensus driven enterprise - at least in my experience it seems to be, here.

Hmm, it might be a bug in the Real Numbers display. Although the base recovery is showing as 1.84%/sec, the stamina contribution is showing 0.44%/sec which is what you'd expect for unslotted stamina and VEAT recovery (100/60 * 1.05 * 0.25 = 0.4375) and outside the margin for error on the quoted base number (1.84%/sec * 0.25 = 0.46%/sec).

Plus, the total only makes sense if the 1.84 number is an erroneous display, because 1.84 + 0.44 = 2.28, while 1.75 + 0.44 = 2.19.

True for virtually all inherent "powers," whose primary job really is to put an icon into players' buff bars with help text to explain archetype advantages. True (as macskull partially mentions) for Criticals, Containment, Gauntlet, and now Defiance - four of the original five hero-side archetypes. Also true for Assassination and Scourge.

"Farming" is a term, and since everyone defines it differently, and because so many people make the presumption that in any discussion everyone must honor their own personal definition of the term, discussions of farming end up being just semantic games.

The devs have stated their definition of farming multiple times, at least where it is specifically used in this context: farming is problematic to the game. And that definition is this:

Farming is the act of performing the same task repeatedly, specifically with the sole or primarily intent of generating the maximum amount of or significantly higher than normal levels of in-game rewards.

In this case "task" refers to something specifically designed within the game to generate a specific reward. It could refer to the act of killing the same minion over and over again for its specific rewards, or it could refer to the act of completing the same mission over and over again for its specific rewards. It cannot refer to the act of executing an attack over and over again in different situations, because the act of executing an attack is not a "task" designed by the devs to generate a reward.

The definition is very specific and not easily paraphrasable, because every element of the definition points to why the devs are specifically concerned with that specific type of activity. In particular, the definition focuses on the act of generating rewards for the sake of generating rewards by repeatedly banging on the same reward-generator. That creates two problems for the devs: there is the design issue of whether or not the rewards for that task are being demonstrated to be too high which suggests a failure of reward implementation, and it makes them uncomfortable that there exist activities that are only performed for their reward generation ability which suggests a failure of game design.


If your definition of farming doesn't match this one, then your definition of farming might be something that other players don't approve of, but its not something the devs have stated they disapprove of.

And in any case, farming without exploits is something the devs don't consider a punishable offense. It usually suggests to them a fault on their part of some kind. Farming with exploits is something the devs have said repeatedly that no one should be surprised to see both revocative and punitive action taken against.

You seem to be looking for dividing lines in continuums. Terms like "power leveling" and "farming" have clearly defined extremes, but not clearly defined boundaries. Looking for the precise point where "playing normally" "becomes" "powerlevelling" is like looking for the precise point where red becomes orange on a color chart.

I can't even keep track of when he's in the quit-state and when he's in the back-state anymore. I just assume he's in a superposition of quitting and returning, and is always playing and not playing. He's basically Schrodinger's Villain.

I don't think that's true. But you have to keep in mind that custom critters are in effect a different "archetype." Scrappers hit harder than Tankers but when you give scrapper and tanker powersets to critters they all hit equally hard relative to the design of the powers. A 1.0 scale "scrapper" attack hits just as hard as a 1.0 scale "tanker" attack when custom critters possess them. You can give a custom critter a bunch of controller sets, but they will hit still hit like blasters on crack when they use them.

I wouldn't go quite that far. For many players the game isn't a complete cakewalk: we aren't all expert MMO drivers.

I would say that there's only two possibilities:

1. You're strong enough yourself that compensating for a weak but not disruptive player should be trivial, and there's nothing to complain about.

2. You're not strong enough yourself to compensate for a weak but not disruptive player, and thus you'd be the weak link on any team with actual experienced players, and you should therefore keep quiet.

I'm not talking about some special run to complete a Master of arc or anything. But even the LRSF can tolerate one weak build if the rest of the players are strong enough that they are in a position to be complaining about weak builds in general.

I don't even turn on my toggles for that.


When you can find me a situation like that where an all resistance character with no other damage mitigation can survive long enough to do anything productive, I'll retract my comment. Otherwise, all you're saying is that soft-capping alone isn't as good as the maximum possible all-around build you can make, which is not the same thing as saying soft-capping alone is worse than capped resistances alone, which is the only thing I'm disagreeing with.

But for me, greens and etheral shift are "other mitigators."

The trade off, and its a matter of preference, is that an all resistance set (if there ever is one made: there isn't one yet) would often be trading "probably dead quickly" with "definitely dead eventually." They do tend to be more predictable in behavior, but that predictability isn't free. Its just a question of which costs you want to pay.

We're also dealing strictly with damage mitigation, and setting aside the elephant in the room when it comes to defense vs resistance comparisons: debuffing.


That whole "I'm at full health, no wait I'm dead" thing does happen, but its not common at all. I've played every combination of defense vs everything else, and its not something I especially worry about much. It happens, but if you keep throwing yourself at higher and higher threat levels, you'll die eventually of something. It'll be bad luck with a defense set, but it'll be something else with something else (or not: Regen sometimes dies from bad luck bursts too).

If you don't keep throwing yourself at such situations, then you might not die ever. But in that case, its not so much Defense or Resistance (or Regeneration or +Health) that you need, so much as it is you just need enough to deal with the maximum threat you're ever going to allow yourself to experience. For every combination of mitigators, there's generally an "enough" unless you are at the point where you mandatorily need multiple overlapping mitigators.

My spreadsheets are at home, but a quick glance at City of Data's info for Battle Axe shows DPA values of:

Beheader: 0.75 DS/sec
Chop: 1.23 DS/sec
Gash: 1.31 DS/sec
Swoop: 1.25 DS/sec
Cleave: 1.18 DS/sec
(intrinsic cast time, not ArcanaTime)

And for the most part, Battle Axe's cast times (for single target) are fairly close together: the longest (2.33s) is only 75% longer than the quickest (1.33). That's not typical. Dual Blades highest (OTC: 3.3s) is 3.2x higher than its fastest (NS: 1.03s). Fire Melee's highest is 2.33x higher than its fastest. Martial Arts highest is 3.0x higher than its fastest.

I think of all the attack sets, significantly less than half of them have a cast time spread of less than 2x between their fastest and slowest single target attacks. And I think no set has a spread significantly lower than Battle Axe. When cast time increases by only 75%, there's room to increase damage to compensate and overtake. But its much harder when the spread is 2x or 3x.

Separate from that, as mentioned previously there is the other side of the equation. Do the early Battle Axe powers allow for reasonable levels of activity for players as the set progresses? Well, the total efficiency of the first couple of powers (without recharge) is:

Beheader: 25%
Chop: 14%
Gash: 13%.

Beheader is rather unusual as low tier powers go: very few have 25% animation to cycle time ratios. Anyway, the total of the first three powers is 52%. With those three powers, the best you can do is be active about 52% of the time, and your average time between actions is about 2.6 seconds. On average, you'll be using an attack once every 2.6 seconds.

And this is actually one of the best attack sets in terms of these metrics. Nearly all attack sets are worse.


The problem is that the gaps are so high that while this might have been easy at the beginning of time, we now have players used to powersets designed differently. There's no way to bridge this gap for a set like Martial Arts, which has a gap of 3.05. Slowing down TK and SK wrecks the set, and speeding up EC breaks the animation most MA scrappers love. It would be extremely difficult to retrofit this philosophy into existing powersets in many cases, although it would be easier to make new powersets that fit the philosophy. It would require cooperation from the powers designers and the animation designers, though: they would have to both agree this is reasonable.