Arcanaville

Not exactly. What I'm saying is that the current game doesn't seem to generate enough "pain" on even two i7 cores to make spreading that load to four or eight i7 cores worth it. If you have a single processor machine, the many threads of the game all have to run on that one core, going to two cores would help. Except, if you had some special massively overclocked super processor that was 50x faster than a P4 per core, then you'd have so much processing power that whether the game used one core or two wouldn't make a difference to your game. Similarly, Nehelem cores seem to be fast enough that two deliver more power than the game ever seems to ask for. Threading makes sense when you have more load than one processor core can comfortably do, but you have more than one core.


I'm not an expert on the renderthread flag, but I believe that specifically signalled the game to separate two different rendering tasks into two different threads that ordinarily run in only one. The unit of processing that is scheduled by the operating system is the thread. If you have only one thread then Windows (and most other operating systems) can only use one core. Individual threads can be put on different cores to balance the load. Older versions of Windows used to have incredibly dumb schedulers: the classic problem was the case of having a single high CPU utilization thread "bouncing" back and forth between two cores in a dual proc system. Windows saw the load on CPU A to be very high and CPU B very low, so it scheduled the highest load thread onto B. Which made A low and B high. Which caused Windows to schedule that thread onto A. Rinse, repeat. This actually made execution *slower* than if it just left it alone, because switching cores has a certain amount of overhead (and why we have an "affinity" switch).

CoX seems to have a couple of high load threads, plus one for opengl, plus one for 3d sound, that burn at least measurable amounts of CPU. Everything else burns almost nothing - at least relative to the power of a Nehelem core (except demorecords seem to burn a percent or two on a Nehelem core which is at least measurable).


Windows is doing the right thing. Its taking the two most computationally intensive threads and putting them onto two different physical processors. Its then taking the rest of the threads and sprinkling them onto the other two physical processors. And its noting that when it does, none of those processors are anywhere near being full, so it specifically only uses one core per processor, because it doesn't need to use the virtual core on any of those four. If it attempted to use any of the virtual cores, it would do so at the expense of slowing down one of the four physical cores.

Think of the four i7 processors as four pick up trucks, each of which can pull a trailer. You have four of them driving from LA to San Francisco and you need to haul a certain amount of cargo. The first thing you're going to do is try to fill the beds of the four trucks before resorting to trailers. If you can, there's no need for the trailers. You could attach the trailers to all four trucks and take some stuff out of the beds and add it to the trailers, but you're now hauling around the trailers for no reason: you aren't doing any more work.

However, if you have more stuff than the four truck beds can hold, its obviously a lot better to start using the trailers, even if it adds weight and slows the trucks down, than to leave some stuff behind and have to make two trips.

Now, if you have just one really big crate to take, even if you have four trucks you can only put that object in one truck. You have three empty trucks and one overloaded truck that has to drive very slowly. Recognizing this, if you can split that shipment into two crates half the size, you end up with two trucks with a comfortable load (and two empty trucks) that can both drive at comfortable highway speed.

In this case, you have four pickup trucks that can each haul four trailers, and you're being asked to haul a case of beer. Your question boils down to whether or not it makes sense to take the cans out of the plastic rings and place two cans in each truck, add the trailers, and add one can in each trailer. Its possible, but not really beneficial.

I hope the cap is on emails with attachments, rather than emails period. I can understand the limit on attachments (they can be used as a form of global self-storage) but there's no reason to bounce emails without attachments if you have 20 emails with attachments.

Well, to be honest if they put me in charge of the doppleganger system, I wouldn't make you fight your exact equal, I would make you fight your exact opposite. So the super-defense tanker would go up against the ultra-ultra-firepower blaster.

Or a toggle-cracking gravity controller. There ain't gonna be no draws in my doppleganger system. If you want to hokey-pokey with superpowers, we have pylons for that.

Hey, Techbot is stealing my immature shtick!

Assuming the AI was even reasonably smart, the AV would have your powers, your abilities, about ten times your health and double your damage. You'd have ... an insp tray. Oddly, you might have an easier time defeating your AV doppleganger if you were an SOed low level Blaster than if you were an IOed level 50 Scrapper.

I wish we could do that, I really really do. But I don't think we're quite at that level of supporting that sort of thing yet. If I had my way, we'd get there eventually (if I had my way we'd get there at gun-point).

They aren't really virtual cores in the same sense as the P4, but nevertheless Win7 is going to try very hard to *not* schedule threads on those cores unless you use up the other cores first, since that will generate better performance. For CoX to "utilize" all eight cores it would have to basically generate so much CPU load that it forced Windows to schedule all 8 cores, and performance would probably suffer.

CoX is actually significantly threaded; things like 3D sound and even demorecords seem to use different threads from the main compute threads. The real question is whether any version of CoX will use up more than two i7 cores' worth of computing power, even with Ultra Mode processing. If it doesn't, it really doesn't matter how many cores are in use. Two full cores of i7 power is quite a lot relative to the stated minimum system requirement. What would you use that for in terms of optional enhanced capability? Artificially intelligent veteran pets?

Stone Spears

Also, my experience is that knockup doesn't literally throw the target straight up into the air. The target seems to go up at a random slight angle. I've knocked up targets to my right and had them land to my left, so I know they are not going perfectly up and down. They usually land very close to where they started off, but not in precisely the same spot.

I have always thought that explosive blast (energy blast) should do high order knockup.

I believe so. As far as I know, there is no "minimum threshold" for knockback; anything above zero will at least knock you down. So if you hit the target, there are only two possibilities: you induced KB and the target is knocked, or you didn't and the target isn't. There's no way to "build up" knockback until the target falls over in that respect. So the window during which knockback can build up on a target has to be comparable to the maximum delay between hitting a target and visually seeing a knock effect, which is very short: about half a second. However, it probably can't be too much less than 0.125 seconds, because as far as I know there's only two server clocks running less than every 0.5 seconds, and that's the 0.125 combat clock and the 0.033 animation clock. I don't think knock accumulates in only 1/30th of a second, so I'm guessing knockback accumulates as some small multiple of the combat clock, either 0.125s or a small multiple of 0.125s.

That's mostly informed speculation: I don't actually have direct knowledge of the knock interval and no one has ever told me what it is. And its non-trivial to engineer a test for (although this is probably where Stargazer says she tested this back in 2007).

The devs have never, to the best of my knowledge, accidentally made a knockback with a duration, so we don't know for certain what would happen if you made one. But we can guess: the devs *did* accidentally make a heal (of sorts) with a duration, and when they did the power began rapidly pulse-healing the player about every 0.125 seconds (actually, and difficult to explain fully, it was closer to 0.115 seconds with very high precision)**. So most mechanics-knowledgeable players are likely guessing that if the devs ever made a KB with duration, it would pulse-KB the target during the duration as fast as the knockback system can do so. An interesting complication is that the KB system, to the best of my knowledge, "accumulates" knockback within a certain very small window (its somewhere between 0.125 and 0.5 seconds, I believe). That's what sometimes causes two knockdowns to combine into one knockback if they land nearly simultaneously. So a KB with a duration will not land lots of KBs in a short time: it will land a set of KB effects that combine to one KB, then another burst that combine, etc.



** This was the bugged Indominable Will in Issue 12, which instead of granting psionic resistance was granting essentially a psionicly-typed heal. The net result was that Iwill began rapidly healing the player with 10% heals about 9 times a second - about seven times faster than the strongest toggle-IH regen scrapper that ever lived.

Different but same. Resistance affects the strength of an effect, and most knockback powers define the strength of their KB effect to be its magnitude, thus resistance reduces magnitude. Most conventional mez powers define their mezzing effects strength to be their duration, and thus resistance reduces duration.

As strange as it may seem, this is how powers are defined. Each effect of a power has three quantities: Scale, Magnitude, and Duration. It also has a type: Magnitude or Duration (a simplification for our purposes). If the effect is type: Magnitude then the magnitude of the effect is its scale and the magnitude field is ignored. If the effect is type: Duration then the duration of the effect is its scale and the duration field is ignored. Basically, there are two kinds of effects:

Scale (magnitude) and Duration

and

Scale (duration) and Magnitude

Resistance always affects Scale. For that matter, Strength buffs also always affect Scale. So if you know which quantity is increased by buffs or slotting, then you also know which quantity (mag or dur) is reduced by resistance. They are always the same. Slotting knockback increases magnitude, so KB resistance reduces magnitude. Slotting hold increases duration (for all player powers so far) so hold resistance reduces duration.

And yes, I believe the final magnitude after protection and resistance affects the distance thrown (as anyone who has power pushed a clockwork gear into the stratosphere will attest to).

Paragonwiki is your best bet there. For example, they have a page on Knoockback. Its not complete, but it has all of the basics.

I try to be as polite as possible in the Player Questions forum specifically, regardless of the question or questioner because new players that come to this forum specifically will likely not know any of the side issues related to a post. Its the one place where I think there is an excuse to be ignorant of the complexities of the game and the forums. Even if I think someone deserves a thwacking, the newbees and lurkers of this forum do not and I don't want to discourage anyone from asking questions.

The problem is that the knockback system is intertwined with the physics engine of the game. Knockback isn't really a "mez" in the normal sense of the word. It has a magnitude, and the game treats all Knockback of 0.75 or lower as a knockdown, and all knockback of 0.76 and higher as a knockback, and that magnitude is passed to the physics engine which throws things around. The magnitude of the KB is used as both the trigger of the process and the strength of the process. At the moment, there's no way to specify both a "triggering magnitude" and a "strength magnitude" for knockback, because such attributes don't exist within the powers system. To add it just for knockback would probably require making changes to the core parts of the game engine, or ripping KB out completely and reengineering KB as a brand new special case system.

Basically, what you want can't be done by the powers designers with the current game system (not without a lot of complex twists and tangles) and the developers are unlikely to get permission to go poking around in the KB system just to modify knockback in this way.

Or to put it another way, its possible in the sense that everything is theoretically possible, but its not possible in any other sense of the word.

Backwards. The ability to use merits and tickets to obtain things ordinarily only achievable through drops is the compromise, not the norm. Those mechanisms were put in by the devs to create opportunities to earn some, but not all of the otherwise uncommon or rare items. If you believe there is a slippery slope that warrants extending that system to all drops or none, then it would have been none, not all.

It could also suggest that there's simply too much influence in the system to properly balance influence-priced transactions. Inflation is always the result of too much money chasing too few items, not just a one-sided lack of supply, and influence is all too easy to earn in the game at the present time.

The standing question though is what the correct response to this fact should be.

Since its almost certainly true that most players' first encounter with the markets is as a seller not a buyer, and definitely true that lower levels sell more than they buy, how much influence are you prepared to take away from those players in order to correct this perceived problem?


And again: you can say this about anything. Some players confronting the new MoG for the first time are going to be dismayed, and this reaction should be expected and ought not to surprise anybody.

So what do you suggest we do about MoG? The statement above is a truism, and can't be prevented. We are supposed to care about those players, but only in the sense of caring about someone who has a cold. We care they are sick, but we can't do anything about it and they will have to get over it themselves. For the above situation to be important enough to do something about, at least one of two things must be true:

1. The "Some" is so high of a percentage of the players that it forces a response.

2. The cost to address the problem is so low its unreasonable not to eliminate it at its source. This includes the social cost of altering the game in ways that eliminate the problem but create other objections.

However, neither of those two things has been demonstrated to be even likely, much less true. If someone could make a case for at least one of those two things being true, I would be prepared to reevaluate my position. Until then, I'm going to have to presume, as I always do, that "the players" are really just "some small unspecified number of" the players. Although their concerns are no less important than the other players, they are no more important either.

Don't listen to TopDoc. He's just going to start being evil and marketeering on alternate days.

For better or worse, they already have. And my evaluation is that the consensus average viewpoint is that the market is an optional, mostly innocuous element of the game. The people who dislike either the market or the behavior of its participants more than any other minor game element is currently the extreme minority. Some people could grudgingly participate in the market but overall participation is far too high to be explained by gruding participants. Most people seem willing to accept that the same forces that work to their disadvantage at times also work to their advantage at times, such as high prices which actually tend to benefit the casual player more than hurts them, because they tend to be overall sellers rather than buyers.

I see no evidence that there is a silent majority of people that want significant change to the way the market works. Theoretically speaking, if you ask the average person if they want lower prices, I'm sure they would say yes, but only with the same strength they would also say yes to having slightly higher leveling rate. The number that think its problematic appears far lower.

I observed the market - which is to say the market community - evolve very carefully and very critically from its inception and for over a year afterwards, because I was one of its harshest critics when it was first announced. However, the community at large very quickly converged to using the markets and the invention system mostly as the devs envisioned both: as optional metagames. Honestly, I wasn't sure we had it in us. There are corner cases and individual negative anecdotes to be sure, but no more than there are with any other activity of similar scope.


Communities change. I remember when the most common announcement in PI was for help with Maria missions. But as of right now, the markets have been functioning for nearly three years with no significant sign of a trend towards people turning away from participating in it that I can see, and I see zero evidence that the CoX markets are an overall negative to player subscriptions. I don't see evidence this hypothetical is being actualized, and I see no evidence that the default assumption should be that it is.

The trivial answer to all such questions is "yes." For everything the game does, for everything the game doesn't do, and for everything people think the game does but doesn't do, there will be people who quit over it.

The more relevant question is whether enough of them do to be significant. We miss out on a lot of players because we are not a classical fantasy game. We lose players after the fact for the same reason. But we are a superhero (or superpowered, anyway) genre game, and we accept the costs of not being a space opera, or a swords and sorcery game, or whatever.

The question for any feature is always two-fold: is the feature enough of a positive to be worth it and are the negatives low enough to be worth it, and is that feature part of the game the devs want to make even if it means the target audience might not conform exactly to the current playerbase (meaning: they are targeting people that might not be you personally, for the general definition of "you").

The introduction of inventions themselves, separate from the markets, were an instance of this type of decision-making. If you were a player that absolutely did not want gear or crafting of any kind in your game, then CoH came close to that ideal until I9. I9 changed the game, and for some players probably in an unacceptable way. But the devs have to weigh that against the potential benefit of having gear, and I think they did a reasonably good job of preserving most of the "good" aspects of gear without most of the "bad" aspects of gear, at least in terms of the average playerbase expectations at the time. But not everyone agreed, and not all of those who disagreed were willing or able to stick around in spite of that disagreement.

I don't want to overdramatize the issue. The issue isn't related to the fact that CoH itself is not a necessity. Its more the case that there is a social consensus to build around in the real world when it comes to things like the cost and availability of food, clothing, education, etc. We can at least *frame* the discussion, even if the participants don't all agree on the rationale.

However, that consensus doesn't exist for most of the commodities in CoH within the context of playing the game because there's nothing remotely close to a consensus on the social cost of not being purpled out. And if no one can agree even in ballpark terms on what the penalty is for lacking such items, there's no way to come to an agreement on what the availability, and therefore the ethical price for such items should be.


I think if it were possible to "corner" the market on DOs and SOs, you could argue that was an anti-social behavior because those things are presumed by the designers of the game to be the baseline requirements for playing the game at a reasonable power level. That's true even if the game is not as important as life and limb. But that's not possible because there are stores with infinite supplies and static costs for those. Its a much harder case to make that one player's pleasure in acquiring an invention is worth more than another player's pleasure in selling it at a high return on investment, because those are considered optional "luxury" items according to the design of the game, and there is no social consensus which overrides that game design statement.

The problem with this perspective is that influence is not a normalized currency. It barely functions as currency at all in CoX. Its really a proxy for time and when your currency has as its sole foundation of value the amount of time it takes to earn, its virtually impossible to support a marginal utility valuation philosophy.

You can say that an enhancement that offers 5% better performance shouldn't cost more than about 5% more in a "moral" economy, but with so much influence chasing so few commodities and with influence so easy to earn that's not just impractical, its impossible.

Part of the problem is exactly what you mention, but not in the way you think. So many things cost so little their cost is virtually zero. Inspirations, for example, cost basically nothing, especially to high level characters who can earn one inspiration worth of influence in about one second. Because so many things cost nothing, there is no incentive to preserve influence to buy anything *except* high value items.

Basically, the CoX economy isn't functioning like any normal economy - which is true for many if not most virtual economies. There is stuff that you can buy with pocket change, and the stuff that requires a wheelbarrow of money. And that changes *everyone's* perspectives, not just market manipulators.

Real economies sometimes show hints of similar psychology. Its often weirdly in the areas with the highest home ownership costs that you see people who *don't* own their own homes but *do* own incredibly expensive cars. Logic suggests that if homes cost a lot of money most people would save to buy them, and buy cheaper cars. But buyers psychology twists that: instead people will often assume that home ownership is simply impossible - and because that expense no longer exists, ironically they have a higher budget for car purchases. Similarly, for probably *most* players there is a threshold beyond which the player presumes they will never have enough influence to buy those items. And that causes them to choose to spend a lot more on everything else.

Almost no one really operates under "moral economy" values. Even most of the most casual and most altruistic players are operating under a time valuation psychology, and that makes it impossible to convince even the people who would benefit from it to operate within a utilitarian valuation model. And most "moral" economies rely on such models to function.


All of this is completely separate from the fact that pursuit items and rewards in MMOs are incompatible with "moral economies" almost by definition. They must, to function correctly within the balance limits of the game, have exponentially higher costs to acquire and diminishingly lower incremental value. Valued based on utility there would be no incentive to sell the best of them, because their dictated price would be orders of magnitude lower than the effort required to attain them. They'd be hoarded or given to friends rather than sold as the rational thing to do. In other words, they would be like Hamidon enhancements prior to the introduction of the markets in I9.


One last thing: most discussions of "moral economies" presume that what is being discussed are relatively pedestrian, utilitarian, and fundamentally necessary goods and services. Almost no one talks about moral imperatives when it comes to pricing completely optional, arbitrary value items such as non-utilitarian jewelry. Although market items have utility, they are currently optional items relative to playing the game. If people cannot buy certain items, there almost no social cost to that fact; those players are not exempted from any activity. To say that the Numina's proc has a morally acceptable price is like saying a Ferrari has a morally acceptable price that is some small multiple of a Honda Civic.

Matter of preference I guess. Although I'm not complaining about the 8-10 second load time my new system has. However, no rig however insane is likely to break about 6 seconds or so because at that point you're bound by the limit at which the game servers will send you the initial zone data.

Nothing that I can see, provided the rest of the system has the power and cooling to drive it all, including the 5870.

For gaming I'm still not sure if the i7-920 has any advantage over the i5-860 I have, and I don't think I'm suffering the lack of the memory channel. The main advantage is the presumptive headroom that LGA 1366 has, but I've learned to be cautious about anything Intel says regarding futureproofing.

The only thing about Windows 7 is that I'm finding a slightly higher crash rate than I did under XP, but its not excessive and I don't know if its Win7 or the drivers I have under Win7 or what. So far, weirdly enough the crashes only seem to affect me when I'm not doing anything important. I did a couple of Winter events back to back, zoning in and out of Atlas, and then when I was moving to park an alt for a day job I crashed zoning into the tram.