Arcanaville

Outside of tohit buffs, anything that can take out a softcapped player, especially one with scrapper health or better, is going to make a mess out of a resistance-capped player as well if they have the same limitation of having no other means of damage mitigation or health recovery. Even if the softcapped defense player is very unlucky, the resistance-capped player is quite inevitably following right behind in a few short seconds.

Much like the Cuban Missile Crisis or any Uwe Boll movie, some things just don't slip one's mind very easily.


Engineering, wasn't it? Yeah I remember my first year of engineering. Mostly because I was still showing up for classes. I highly recommend actually showing up: it makes knowing when the final exam's going to be much easier.

Good question. But lets take a step back a bit and look at this from the perspective of whole attack sets, and power progression.

We start off with only one attack. Which one do you want:

a: 0.8 DS, 1.6s cast, 2s rech
b: 2.0 DS, 1.0s cast, 12s rech

The second one has higher damage (2.5x) and higher DPA (4x).

Except: the first one does 0.8 DS every 3.6 seconds, for a total of 0.22 DS/sec. The second one does 2.0 DS every 13 seconds, for a total of 0.15 DS/sec. If you only have one of them, the first one is actually better: it deals more damage over time (almost 50% more). You'll kill a lot faster with the first one than the second one. And the first one will be animating an attack 44% of the time, and allowing the player to act ever 3.6s. The second one will be doing nothing 92% of the time and only allowing the player to act every 13s.

As a *first* attack, (a) is actually better than (b), unless (b) is so high its a one-shot kill.

But take a look at this set:

1: 0.8 DS, 1.6s cast, 2s rech
2: 0.8 DS, 1.6s cast, 2s rech
3: 2.0 DS, 1.0s cast, 12s rech

Once you have the first two powers, you can practically alternate them. You have a nearly full attack chain without recharge slotting, and dealing about 0.44 DS/sec. When power #3 comes along, its DPA is always better than any other alternative, so you'll probably use it as often as possible. But you'll still be using the bread and butter attacks because #3 simply doesn't recharge fast enough to be a mainstay. It essentially provides an occasional damage boost, and it improves the set. So even though it was a bad Power 1, its a really good Power 3. By giving it higher DPA, we make it valuable, and something to look forward to. It will always be a good power to use when it comes up, and yet it doesn't totally replace the first two, because its not up continuously.

Until you have a full attack chain, higher DPS powers are better than lower DPS powers, regardless of DPA. But once you do have a full attack chain, higher DPA powers are better to add than lower DPA powers, regardless of DPS. That's a bit simplistic, but close to the truth. So powersets should be designed with high DPS/low DPA powers at the top, and low DPS/high DPA powers at the bottom. That way the lower tier attacks are valuable when we get them, and the higher tier attacks are more valuable than the lower tier attacks when we get them. Nothing seems wasted or pointless.

I found that tough (at least for smash/lethal) had a disproportionately higher benefit to regeneration than weave did, because without stacking additional defense it would only forestall damage bursts that regeneration couldn't overcome in a small proportional fashion. Tough reduced their magnitude across the board, which created a skew that created near-exponential benefit by setting the critical threshold for bursts higher, and therefore their statistical likelihood far lower. That result (among others) is in my scrapper comparisons analysis linked in my sig, somewhere near the bottom of post three.


Of course, no one relies on the regeneration mechanic alone. Regeneration scrappers have dull pain, which is essentially a form of (surprisingly high) resistance. The uptime/downtime essentially creates a case where regeneration is extremely strong at times, and has windows of vulnerability at times based on DP's uptime. That's a much easier situation to balance empirically.


You know, this is an oft-suggested idea, but I actually looked at it in my discrete simulator. It wouldn't have helped during the I2 salad days, because the levels of damage were so high the healback would need to be too quick to be effective: it would essentially be instantaneous with no delay. Now, it would work to a point, but I think people would quickly realize that its Achilles heel is higher damage attacks from things like bosses. The technical aspects are a challenge, but I think the feature would create a swirling controversy that would be difficult to resolve without resorting to technical math above and beyond what can ordinarily be managed in an open discussion.

I made an alternate suggestion back in the day: give regen scrappers two health bars, one of which was allowed to regenerate much faster than the other one. The "outer" fast regenerating one was a form of healing protection, but anything that blew through that would hit their "core" health bar which would heal much more slowly. So they could be fast, insanely regenerating monsters in combat, but they would slowly take nicks and scrapes their monster regen couldn't heal instantly, and that would build up over time to eventually force them to stop and recover that damage more conventionally.

The core of that idea is actually mathematically congruent for the most part with the force fields seen in Champions Online and Star Trek Online, actually, although some aspects are different (such as the construction and maintenance of the secondary health bar, and the relationship between healing and regeneration as it pertains to the two health bars).

Because its not just about DPA. Its also about EPS and the perception of activity level. You want the early attacks to have fast recharge so they can be used often, because in the early going that's all you'll have. But if you jettison recharge time as the primary limiter on total DPS, you have to be a lot more careful about DPA: it has to start low and get higher, or there's nowhere for the higher tier attacks to go. If DPA has to get higher for the higher tier attacks *and* they also get longer in cast time, you have a ridiculous balancing situation.

But DPA is critical as well. I had a conversation with Castle where I proposed that 1 DS/sec be the baseline DPA for a "standard" attack. Powers intended to be weaker would be lower than that (powers that aren't primarily damage, for example) and special attacks would be higher than that, to a point. Castle seemed to think that was a reasonable idea and I think based partially on that conversation the blaster tier 1/2 attacks were rebalanced around ensuring that no one had much less (Flares) or much more (Ice Blast). Following this logic, you'd expect attacks intended to be stronger, like Blaze, to have higher DPA and they do. Not counting the DoT, Blaze has a DPA of 2.12 which is probably near the top of what you want to be giving out most of the time.

So where does that leave Power Burst? Its cast time is 2.0s. Do you want to give it twice the damage of Blaze? Heck, just to get to the same DPA as the tier 1/2 attacks it has to have the same damage as Blaze, and in fact that's what it is: it has a DPA of 1.06, just barely above the tier1/2 standard 1.0 DS/sec.

If as you go up the tiers you want to increase DPA *and* cast time, eventually the damage of the attacks gets absurd.

Completely separate from this line of thought, if your first two attacks were, say, about 1.5s - 1.67s in cast time, and had recharges in the 2-6s range, you'd be spending a greater fraction of your time actually shooting at things than if you have 1s cast time 8s recharge time powers. The early level activity would be higher, and that's a psychological gameplay win as well.



Its more correct to say that whenever melee attacks are designed within some "special purpose" they tend not to sacrifice damage in the process, so they are always attacks first, and anything else second. Even powers that used to be secondary effect first and damage second were revised: Parry, KO Blow, and Crippling Axe Kick are examples.

It is odd that the damage-focused archetype doesn't get that advantage.


I would never recommend that.

Like Niviene, for example.

As to what happens in closed beta, I couldn't comment on the I17 one if I was in it, but I am free to comment on past closed betas. In the past, the earlier you got in, the greater the probability that the primary thing you'd be testing was whether the server would be up at the same time you tried to test it. Also, very early closed betas tended in the past to be directed betas, meaning the devs *told* you what to test, and what not to test, because a lot of things simply aren't working correctly or stably in the early parts of the beta. It is not uncommon for the servers to be brought down on a moment's notice, for whole zones to stop working, for clients to randomly crash, and for odd things to happen to characters and other test server entities.

Early beta testing is not about providing the devs with your highly valuable insight. Its about trying to make everything work correctly and at all. Highly valuable insight typically becomes more interesting a couple weeks into the beta, once the system is stable (both in terms of execution and in terms of the devs not changing things daily) enough to make that insight meaningful.

During the I14 closed beta for the Architect the devs were at one point changing things so fast that often missions you created to test something would not run the next day to allow you to test what you were trying to test. Missions you spent three days working on would suddenly corrupt in ways that basically destroyed them and forced you to start from scratch. It was very painful at times but that is the purpose to the early betas - to shake those things out.

If you just want a sneak peek at the content, closed beta is not for you. There are fun aspects of it, but a lot of the fun is the kind of fun people create for themselves while being otherwise tortured. And the rules in closed beta are a lot different than they are in the relatively free-wheeling forums out here. Its a much more focused environment in general.

Honestly, I think they *should* have designed the attack sets that way. The problem is they designed the initial attacks to be recharge-bound so until you get a bunch of attacks you're waiting for powers to recharge a lot. That waiting means the "neat quirky" attacks get immediately put to work in your attack chain as soon as you get them, which puts people into the mindset that every power should be usable as often as possible, which then causes a lot of friction when it comes to endurance balancing. If power X costs more endurance than power Y because it power X does more, players often won't see it that way. Instead, they'll see it as "I need to click power X as fast as possible because its often the only thing available."

They should have instituted short global cool downs and rapidly recharging "bread and butter" attacks so that players would be trained to understand that the "bread and butter" attacks are intended to be cycled quickly, but if you use these other special powers you will have to manage their endurance costs.

Because of the way recharge was used in the design of powers, powersets don't have "bread and butter" attacks. They just have attacks, and often not enough of them.

Ironically, the early attacks tend to be fast and the later attacks tend to be slower - they have longer cast times and animations. But that's kind of backwards. The early attacks should have had longer animations and the later attacks should have had faster ones, and then a few special powers could have longer cast times separate from that. Because while the animation times make sense when you look at individual powers, they don't make sense when you look at whole sets. You want a powerset to progress from the powers that are weaker but you can use all the time, to the powers that are stronger and you can use only some of the time. Longer cast times means DPA and DPE are lower for those early attacks, and the percentage of the time you're using them is higher. Think original Flares. You can quickly make full attack chains when you have the higher cast time powers up front. Then, as you level you get access to the faster, higher DPA higher DPE powers that are fast enough you can insert them into your normal attack chain with very little cost but with a lot of gain. Think Blaze. The progression makes a lot more sense this way. Then you can still have "finishers" that have longer animation times but are powerful enough that even with longish cast times they are still powerful enough to use, and look impressive also: think Nova and Total Focus.

We aren't in an open system where people can take whatever powers they want from any random powerset, but the powers are still designed like we can. Recharge is based on what the power "wants" not based on what the powerset that power is in "needs."

Trick question: why does Power Blast have to have a longer recharge than Power Bolt? Hint: there's actually no *holistic* game balance reason why it must. There are, of course, design rules that mandate it. But the question is what purpose are those design rules serving? That's not so simple of a question to answer in this specific case.

If there's one thing I wish I could wave a magic wand and grant to the devs, its a better set of design tools. Its hard to blame Geko then and the current devs now for some of the oddities I see in the powers system, when my spreadsheets are better than theirs much of the time. Heck: it took a player (Stupid_Fanboy) to realize that the discounts Geko said were in Claws were not in Claws, and with the sort of spreadsheet analysis just about every Scrapper min/maxer does regularly such an error is easily detectable today. Today, if the devs say a powerset obeys a certain set of rules and it doesn't, ten players will be there to point that fact out the same day.

Knowing how Castle and the powers team design powers, its a wonder Explosive Blast doesn't occasionally play fart animations** and cause it to rain Total Focus-sized DoT.



** Strictly speaking, that would be a BaB error

I think they originally possessed a delusion I saw on a mass scale during the pre-beta CO boards. The Champions/HERO powers system is *incredibly* broken in terms of strict mathematical balance. Anyone who thinks otherwise is numerically illiterate. However, a lot of people *think* its balanced because it seems so during gameplay. They fail to realize that most of the "balance" within the game comes not from the intrinsic balance of the system but rather from the options the system gives to GMs to counter most player attempts to break the system. In fact, it was one of the first PnP gaming systems I ever saw that actually *specified* repeatedly just where the dangerous areas of the system were.

Of course, all PnP systems (with any sense at all) have such warnings to GMs, but the Champions system seemed very specifically conscious of the numerical problems in their system. In D&D, you have warnings to GMs about teleportation and wishes, in Champions you have warnings about stacking resistance and defense. I say again: stacking resistance and defense.

Fortunately, for almost everything a player can do, there is a way for the GM to throw situations at the player that prevent them from making a mess of the combat in the game. And a smart GM will make sure combat is not the singular focus of every session, so even if you can obliterate everything in the game that won't necessarily solve the problem at hand. Put simply, Champions isn't balanced its rich and its richness arms players and GMs alike with ways to keep each other in check.

And players *want* to keep each other in check, most of the time. GMs and players - at least to some degree most of the time - are trying to cooperate to make gaming sessions fun and lasting. There is a social dynamic to human beings having to face each other that tends to suppress the worst abuses. Having the strongest killing attacks is usually not worth losing friends over.

In a computer MMO, neither of those dynamics exist. And without it, nearly all PnP game systems shatter. City of Heroes was created with a PnP mentality that balanced gaming systems aren't hard, because practically every PnP game system is at least workable. But when you turn it over to a computer, all bets are off. A gaming system gets *better* when you hand it to a good human GM to use. It gets *worse* when you hand it to a computer to operate. So unless you start from near perfection, you'll end up with hash.


Now, to an extent their really horrible numerical design had unexpectedly good side effects (depending on your point of view) including accidentally backing into a game that practically anyone can solo with anything. But we must never forget that that was a side effect. There were and are still serious negative consequences to those bad decisions that we still live with today. It is very difficult to design things that are hard but not ridiculously so; things that are not easily for some and impossible for others; things that don't just throw huge numbers at the players and dare them to overcome them with purely huge numbers in return. The game mechanics are simply *impossible* to balance in a straight forward manner without resorting to incredibly complex trickery, and even then its often too difficult to be practical.

With only a few mostly reasonably exceptions, there isn't any linear math anywhere within the Champions Online systems: its all proportional math. Someone learned their lesson at least in that sense. Here, its almost entirely linear math and that linear math is the singular most powerful bane of the entire powers design team. And because players are so accustomed to it, its virtually impossible to rip out and replace. And that will forever limit the places our game can go.

That "gameplay may change" warning on the box? In the grand scheme of things, its mostly worthless. Some things, even in an always evolving MMO, you only get one chance to get right. After that, if you're lucky you only get second chances to make it less wrong.


Now, there is one thing that I can pin on Jack. He actually believed that even if the game's numbers and mechanical systems were "less than optimal" it wouldn't matter because the players he believed he was targeting wouldn't care. *Some* would try to munchkin the system, but most wouldn't. He believed that players would want to *explore* the game rather than attempt to *exploit* the game. Again, just like humans do in better PnP sessions.

The problem is that he knew, or should have known, that he would never have the resources to make the massive blizzard of content you'd need to satisfy the "explorer" personality. The game would always come down, even for casual players, to figuring out ways to improve their characters and develop them, and that meant often finding new ways to improve performance. Even casual players would do this on some small level, nowhere near the min/maxers, but still.

You might get away with that sort of thing in a game like Star Trek Online, if they devote enough content resources to development. But that was simply never going to happen here. This game needed, or rather could have greatly benefited, from a properly designed and balanced playing field within which to design focused and targeted content. I don't think Jack ever, and perhaps to this day, fully appreciates that fact. I believe he thinks that the script is more important than the camera work. Which it might be, but that doesn't excuse leaving the lens cap on.

But it also proves that Jack wasn't unbudging on his "vision" for the game, since the change was in fact rolled back. And I think that change might *not* have been rolled back, had the ability to neutralize bosses in missions with difficulty sliders existed. In fact, the straw that broke the camel's back wasn't that the bosses were hard, it was that you could be surprised by them in ways that no amount of skill (except the skill of memorizing spawn points) could save the player, such as a mezzing boss right around the corner or worse front-loaded bosses at the start of the mission that killed you as you zoned. You can't "Nintendo" your way out of mezzing boss designed to two-shot blasters.

But his vision of a boss that was stronger than the current bosses, that players can be tested against, lives on in this new-fangled construct we call "Elite Bosses." And you can't always completely downscale them out of a mission. But they are mostly considered acceptable because of their frequency and context. Jack simply went too far with the boss buff, but clearly he also realized he went too far - eventually.

If its one thing both Venture and Jack have in common, its not sweet talking. I'd say they are both right often enough to pay attention to, wrong often enough to pay close attention to, and annoying enough that everyone paying attention is bound to be pissed off most of the time.


Game development, especially MMO development, isn't usually a clear cut case of "right" and "wrong." A lot of people don't like to play WoW. Does that mean the developers are "wrong?" Well, when five billion, nine hundred ninety million people on Earth don't play your game, and ten million do, we call that "raging lunatic success." Could they do better? Sure, except no one on Earth has actually proven its possible yet.

Everything the devs do will be attractive to some people, and not attractive to others. If they gave away free ponies to every player, some would complain about the smell. That doesn't mean everything they do is right, or there's literally *no* reference for objective criticism, its just that there's two orthogonal independent scales on which to judge the devs, and people usually are only using one. There is the scale where we judge give what they were aiming for how close did they get, and there's the scale where we judge given the target audience of the change how statistically attractive is the change.

The devs are usually only unambiguously wrong when they a) aim for X, and hit its opposite Y and b) they say its for a target group A and nobody in A is likely to want it. That's "really, really wrong." But its trickier to judge most things because they are more fuzzy. A lot of people didn't want loot or markets. A lot of people *still* wish the game didn't have loot or markets. That doesn't mean the devs were wrong to add them. They stated a bunch of goals for the invention system and the markets, and for the most part they hit them. And they intended to broaden the appeal of the game for both the existing player population and future newer players. They seem to have done that as well. *Some* players didn't like it, but the target was never "make sure every single existing player likes it." The target was "more people like it now than before, including hopefully a majority of the existing players" and that is probably true. The players who didn't like it, and perhaps don't like it? Unfortunately, to put it bluntly, they were and are acceptable losses when you design an MMO long-term. All those people *know* the devs were wrong, but the devs were not wrong, they just weren't targeting them.

Some people think the reason why the devs were not "wrong" to add the invention system was because more people wanted it than didn't. But that's a very oversimplified viewpoint: sometimes the devs are right even when most of the players are in opposition. Sometimes they know there will be strong opposition, but they believe its in the best long term interests of the game. ED is an example, and I think at least in broad terms the devs were proven right (which is not to say there weren't better technical ways to achieve the same goal).


Sometimes Jack was just plain wrong. Certainly, when it came to what his own game was doing, he wasn't often right. But when it came to big design decisions, its a lot fuzzier to criticize him. Was he wrong to target the difficulty levels and teaming situations he did? In retrospect its easy to say so, but its more correct to say that Jack made an easy to make mistake: he assumed that the casual players that wanted it differently would be gone in a year, and the more dedicated ones that had any chance at all of sticking around wanted and needed a different kind of game. And its easy to second guess that decision now, but back then it was a complete roll of the dice.

If Jack had completely gotten his way, its possible you and I wouldn't be here anymore. But someone else probably would be. We will never know if that group of people - who deserved a superhero game to play just as much as we do - would have been bigger. I doubt it, but I can't prove it.

After six years, its fair to say any competent dev team will be weighting the needs of their long-term players somewhat higher than the needs of newer players, because they have a very strongly established community. But after six months, or even a year? We were nobody special yet and the devs had an obligation to continue to target the widest possible group of potential future players they thought would eventually be playing this game. Many of the Champions Online and Star Trek Online players (and every other playerbase that follows a game from beta to launch) just don't get that. They feel that because they followed a game into launch they have a most-favored nation status among all people in the world: they are more important than the people not subscribing. But the reality of MMOs seems to be that no matter what the dev team does, most of those people won't be around in a year or two. If you focus solely on the vocal elements of your launch base, you'll become very quickly insular. That is not conducive to long-term subscriber health.


I think Jack was too transparent in reacting negatively to players who presented themselves as knowing how to make a game better than he did. He did, keep in mind, get this game launched from a point where CoH could have been one of those stories we tell about how a game development imploded from a pile of unrealized good ideas and never saw the light of day. Its *possible*. I have clients that pay a lot more than $15 that I don't let tell me how I'm doing my job all wrong.

But really, its more that Jack didn't have that thing public speakers are supposed to have, where they play what they are saying in their own heads, and make sure they aren't saying something confusing, ambiguous, or dumb. Public speakers know what I'm talking about: you can be unscripted yet precise, unedited for content but edited for presentation. Honestly and eloquence are not mutually exclusive. Jack never seemed to know what he sounded like to average listener. We can debate the design skills of the man, but there's no debating his public communication skills. He doesn't have any. One on one, I think he's fine. At least, I never had a problem understanding him.

Either you didn't understand what I wrote, or you are having one of your mental malfunctions. There's absolutely no question whatsoever that of the twelve million playes in WoW, the vast overwhelming majority are not high level raiders or hard core PvPers. Most are relatively casual players, and most play the game not because of any esoteric game design or mechanical reasons, but because their friends play it. WoW has virtues and vices, but its biggest virtue was that that it took the natural momentum it had by having a very large development budget and the Blizzard name and reputation, and targeted the game at pretty much everyone capable of using a keyboard. The result is millions of players of all types, most of which do not conform to the typical MMO profile. If WoW actually targeted the hard core MMO player, all the money in the universe wouldn't net them a tenth of the playerbase they currently have.

WoW has a large PvP population and a large raiding population because they have so many players, they also have a large sock-puppet collecting population, and a large left-handed purple keyboard Bahai population. But to say that "all" the activity is in raiding and PvP is an incredibly skewed perspective. I'd bet hard currency that the majority of the player population has never done either even *once*.

I'm not a WoW authority per se, but I can speak authoritatively on this game. This game was not, is not, and has never been anything but ultimately attractive to a more casual player, and for both deliberate reasons *and* especially dumb-luck accidental ones it has targeted them over what the original typical MMO player profile was. It never forced teaming for most things. It used more instancing to prevent resource contention. It pumped resources into the more superficial parts of the game (i.e. the costume creator) and was lauded for it. And the game didn't wither and die on the vine like the classic MMO theory predicted it would do so. You can insinuate all sorts of "the game is dying" assertions all you want, but the simple fact is that even if it was dying, classic MMO theory suggested back then that an MMO that does everything this one did should be *dead*. It rings extremely hollow to say that, hah, see I told you so, because Jack didn't get to implement his vision the game only has ten years, max.


I talk to the developers often. I don't get the sense of desperation typically ascribed to them. And while I often defend Jack's motives - he always played straight with me if sometimes in his own way - even by the standards of classic, by the book MMO design he made a lot of critical judgment errors.

Portraying this as a question of Jack giving the players what they need and the current dev team surrendering control to the players is quite frankly naive.

"The players" also argued strongly against having loot in the game, aka the invention system. Many argued against even *having* a "City of Villains." Power proliferation was controversial at one time. Its easy to remember all the times the players asked for something that in retrospect most people now agree is a good thing, and forget all the times the players either asked for something that we'd now consider ridiculous, or asked the devs to prevent something we now all take for granted.


I wouldn't say that exactly. I think they have a wider sense of what's reasonable than Jack did, but they have their own internal compasses too. I think the reason theirs is more aligned with ours at least in broad terms is the simple fact that they've had *years* to get to know us, whereas Jack did not. And Jack was trying to build a game whereas the current developers are trying to support and enhance an existing game. I think the trickiest part of MMO game development is that in the beginning, you really need someone like Jack that can listen to external feedback, but isn't dominated by it, and has a singular game design vision. You have to, or you get, well, Champions Online. But after it launches and it builds a strong core playerbase, you have to switch gears and slowly shift from targeting what you want and hoping to attract players to that vision, and recognizing that you now have that core audience and now you need to incrementally build on it.

For all the crap that Jack gets from the CoX playerbase then and now, it has to be said that CoX is almost certainly better for having him in the early days, even if it is better off without him now. Every game seems to need someone like Jack just to get it out the door, and it seems every game eventually needs to kill someone like Jack to allow it to grow beyond that point. And that's why I think Jack is happier launching games than supporting them.

Jack's opinion that we shouldn't be just mowing over minions, that combat should have some chance of losing, and that players should be encouraged to team, all seem dumb in hindsight, but were all reasonable beliefs surrounding MMOs prior to CoH coming along. It was a legitimate fear that if content was too easy and everything could be soloed, people would become bored and fail to build the social networks necessary to keep the playerbase strong. CoH broke that assumption, and then WoW came along afterwards and shattered it, stomped on the pieces, and set the pile on fire.

Notice that when Cryptic makes a game in which it appears to be an actual design *feature* that combat be easy, almost impossible to lose, and have no penalty for dying (STO) people actually *beg* for it to be harder. You really can't win the philosophical high-ground against your most vocal players in this area.

Honestly, *I* think we mow down minions too easily. Its not that I think everything should be hard, its that I've always thought that the model for a casual game should be a little more like STO is now: very little reward for defeating individual critters, more reward for completing missions. If the reward for defeats is low, it doesn't matter how easy or hard they are from a progression-balance perspective. So you have a lot more freedom to make combat very flexible.

Its also a question of simple terminology, something I think they tried to address in CO. I think we should be balanced against "three minions" but its ok to call them "bosses." Then spawn some things lower and some things higher. There's no harm, in a superhero game, in allowing us to mow down lots of "underlings" that are no serious threat to life and limb but can slow us down when the real objective is always to finish the mission. The key is to make sure its clear when the combat is really just environmental, and when its significant.

After all, what is mowing down a room full of meaningless minions if not the destructible environment everyone asked for and we got in mayhem missions. Its just a specific kind of destructible environment that shoots back a little and moves around. Its all part of improving the immersion. Sometimes you want to take down one thing at a time, sometimes you want to take out an army. The game could have done both if it had just decoupled rewards from combat. But I suspect this is yet another area where the devs (not necessarily only Jack) wanted two incompatible things.

ED was "sprung" on the CoV beta testers, but it wasn't stealthed into the game: we didn't need to notice it because as far as I recall it was actually announced in the beta. There was a giant commotion about it and then some of the beta testers leaked information about it to the general forums while we were still in closed beta. The devs had no time to release information about it ahead of time because it was improperly leaked, literally a day or so after we first saw it in CoV beta. That forced the devs to scramble to create an announcement on ED on the open forums a few days later.

ED might have been a surprise to players that don't frequent the forums, but that's true for all game changes. It was not a surprise to the players that were participating on the forums. And the people who leaked that information did this game and the playerbase in general no favors by doing so. The devs never had a chance to make a formal announcement and start discussion about ED prior to it going live, because they were preempted from doing so. So we'll never know what would have happened.

We will also never know if it would have been possible to steer the implementation of ED into slightly better implementations, because all the oxygen was sucked out of the room due to the controversy surrounding the feature.


Also, as far as I know there was no significant tweaking upward of defense sets after I6. I can tell you for a fact that SR was not tweaked upward, and it was hit probably the hardest by ED of every powerset. In fact, SR was the recipient of the statement (by Positron, I believe, not Statesman) that it was an advantage that SR could not diversify enhancements (because most of its powers only took defense, or defense and endurance enhancements) which meant SR scrappers could devote more slots to offense.

To which I sarcastically replied that maybe they should just double all the SR powers and make the unslottable, and *really* give us an offensive slotting advantage.

We know you can't make more beast heads. So instead, I would like to see Beast Head bullets for dual pistols. And a set of animated beast heads as the summons for Demon Summoning. And power customization on all immobilizes that has two beast heads biting the target's ankles. We could easily double the number of beast head-related effects. Triple, even.

I thought zoning removed certain buffs including the ones that could stack this way. But its been so long since I've really payed attention or tried it, my recollection could be wrong. If you see two buff icons, you almost certainly have two copies of the buff, and they would be stacking with each other.

Hard to say.


We'll see how much the playerbase starts beating up on War Witch next.


The design team clearly was thinking "pen and paper" in terms of their game design experience, and not leveraging what you could do with computers to high degree. That influence is extremely obvious in some respects, such as the 95%/5% tohit boundaries ("1 always misses, 20 always hits") and the "defense subtracts from tohit" aspect of the tohit system: defense is basically armor class. Very ironically, in Champions Online you can see they threw that P&P mental model out completely. Ironically, because so many people thought that even though Cryptic very specifically stated that they didn't license the Champions/HERO system, that CO would be at least significantly inspired by that mechanical system.

I did say on the pre-beta boards that I would bet anything that CO would either steer very far away from HERO, or if they patterned after it the game mechanics would be extremely and irrevocably broken with no recourse to fixing it. You can imagine how popular that statement was back then.

Jack wasn't opposed to respec per se. He believed in limited, infrequent respec because he believed respecification had the potential to dilute the value of the character into being just a container of powers that could be shuffled around. He wasn't wrong on that account. However, with the strength of the costume editor, character identification became much more strongly associated with character appearance than with character ability, something that was difficult to foresee in City of Heroes playerbase evolution.

The problem I think is that we have a range of powers options, starting with archetype selection, ranging through powerset selection, power selection, and then slot allocation, and then enhancement slotting. Making the invariant threshold slot allocation was too far down the tree: it left only enhancement slotting as the method for "playing around" with a build.

Ironically, the original concept for City of Heroes was that what we call the powerset was supposed to be our *powers* and what we call powers was supposed to be variations of that single power. So my power would be "Fire Blast" and things like Fireball and Flares would just be different "skills" I would learn in terms of how to use Fire Blast. Under that conceptualization, powers should really have been more easy to swap around at the beginning of time, because they are really just "tricks" to using the one true power: Fire Blast.

In this sort of game, you have to decide which decisions are more or less permanent and which are optional and reversible, because some decisions should have permanent consequences, and some should have temporary consequences that the player should be able to react to by changing things. That balances those two game play avenues. In retrospect, Jack had the right idea in general but went too extreme with it.

And once again, even this decision had a possible way out: if enhancements were stronger and more diverse, so that their decision weight could counter-balance archetype, powerset, power, and slot allocation decisions, then this could still have been reasonable. But that would require an even stronger invention system than we have now, and the game launched without crafting.

The rule of thumb is generally that powers that apply debuffs as their primary effect don't stack when they come from the same power and the same caster. Powers with debuffs as a secondary effect to something else, like damage or mez, tend to stack. However, this is a convention that is usually obeyed by the powers designers, its not a game engine enforced rule. The only way to be sure is to see if the effect itself is tagged "does not stack" in which case it won't stack from the same power and the same caster. In general, if the effect comes from a different power or a different caster the effects always stack: the only question is stacking from repeated uses of the exact same power from the exact same caster**. I think Real Numbers might say so (I don't remember) and City of Data generally says so as well (the phrase "effect does not stack from same caster" is what you are looking for).



** There used to be a bug where you could stack an effect tagged as not stackable if you passed through mission doors, because as far as the game is concerned when you zone you are "destroyed" and "recreated" in the new zone, so technically speaking you aren't the same "caster" when you zone. This caused people to do things like double-shield people by shielding them outside the mission door, then zoning, then shielding everyone again, and the shields would stack. The new zoning mechanics eliminate that opportunity for the most part, and of course it would generally only work for buffs because you never chase foes across zones.

It worked fine for expert blasters, but it wasn't the expert blasters that needed the help. If you were dying before Defiance, giving you a power that would get stronger as you got closer to death sounds good on paper, but it was only encouraging those who shouldn't be at low health to stay at low health. Telling blasters that they should ask defenders not to heal them so they can stay at high damage was one of those rare moments when even by my very forgiving standards Jack exhibited major brain damage.

Probably the most tragic failing Jack had, at least in my opinion, was that almost everything he wanted wasn't bad in theory, it was that what he wanted required the game to change in other ways he didn't want. In other words, Jack was incompatible with Jack.

Canonical example: Real Numbers. Jack didn't want numbers in the game because he didn't want to encourage people to dwell over the numbers. Fair enough. But then he didn't make the executive decision to change the game mechanics so that it didn't *require* knowing the numbers to understand what was going on.

Consider that in an oversimplified example, if Accuracy buffs existed but Tohit buffs did not exist at all, Accuracy would be much easier to explain without having to resort to any significant discussion about either numbers or mechanics. This makes you hit twice as often, this makes you hit a quarter less often, and so forth. Accuracy would be intuitive in the absence of tohit (and defense). But accuracy, defense, and tohit interact in ways that its just *impossible* to either know or explain to anyone what is going one without resorting to very precise mathematical explanations. There is no "rule of thumb" for accuracy, so there's no causal understanding possible for accuracy. You know the formulas and the numbers, or you don't.

Jack *simultaneously* thought that the game mechanics didn't ultimately matter *and* the players shouldn't have to think about them carefully if they didn't want to. You can't have both: if you want the game to allow players to ignore the numbers, as developers you have to make sure the numbers always work in an intuitive manner, so that casual "guesses" are always at least close, if not precise. Jack was incompatible with Jack.

This happened again and again, with critter balance, with respecification, with enhancements, with practically everything that had a game mechanical connection. Jack needs an editor, and CO suggests to me he hasn't found one yet (the judgment is still out for me on STO: I don't actually "feel" Jack's influence in the mechanics of that game yet).

My guess is that the client interface would be similar to what we have now: in the current client there's a basic detail slider that goes from low to high, but there's also an advanced mode that lets you tweak all of the graphics options separately and independently. Its probably a reasonable assumption that Ultra Mode adds more options which your card may or may not support, and there will be a basic slider that will go from low to high where the client will make reasonable guesses for the settings, and an advanced mode where you will be able to dial in all of the new options manually.

Just like now, if your card doesn't support the feature at all it will probably be disabled, but if it does, just slowly, you could turn it on and see what happens. Turning on a feature you support but not very fast will probably make the client run extremely slowly.

The streakbreaker never induces misses, so it cannot "cause" you to miss. However, its possible to "lose" a hit the streakbreaker would have given you if you use very low accuracy attacks with very high accuracy ones. High accuracy attacks will trigger a streakbreaker hit quicker than low accuracy ones**, but the overriding accuracy is the *lowest* one in your current string of misses. So a low accuracy attack can in effect "poison" a miss streak so that the streakbreaker doesn't give you hits as often as it might have. But it never actually gives you a miss: it only overrides the combat system and forces hits when you miss too many times in a row (relative to your accuracy).


** technically, I should say "high net chance to hit" will trigger the streakbreaker quicker, because its your net overall chance to hit, and not the accuracy of your power per se. You can use the worst accuracy attacks in the world but if your target is massively defense debuffed (say) and your actual net chance to hit the target is still 95%, that is what the streakbreaker will go off of. Conversely, you can have massive tohit buffs, all the accuracy buffs in the world, and if you're swinging against as buffed Lord Recluse and whiffing, that is what the streakbreaker will go off of also.

It almost *never* matches reality.

Without some corroborating data, I generally don't bother investigating broken accuracy claims any more unless there's something uniquely interesting about the problem report. With some sort of data to back the claim up, I'm much more inclined to give it a second look, but that second look usually turns up a logical explanation for the observation that doesn't involve a problem with accuracy.