Arcanaville

Put simply, if you want to level fast, and you want to slot fast, you have to learn to market fast. Like many parts of the game, the Invention system is designed to have something for everyone. But in doing so, it will offer everything for no one. There are things that are trivially easy to get, things that take moderate effort, and things that take a lot of effort.

And if "normal" recipes really are selling for fifty million, then you should be able to sell some of the normal recipes you get as drops to buy the other normal recipes you need. There is a notion that high prices hurts "casual" players but that's not unilaterally true. It does hurt their ability to obtain the most expensive things in existence, but that's basically by design. But it also gives them an opportunity to earn massive amounts of influence with trivial effort, by simply selling what they get as drops.

There was a time when it was hard to outfit with *SOs* without twinking with a rich alt. Those days are gone: if you are a "casual player" at some point you're going to get a lucky drop - drop, singular - and your influence problems will be over: you'll be able to SO and possibly common IO yourself right to 50. Even without that one lucky drop its almost impossible to be unable to slot yourself very well past the teen levels if you simply sell your drops with about the same dedication we used to sell our DOs and SOs at stores.

The high prices do make it hard to get the best of the best stuff, true. The best of the best stuff is supposed to be hard to get, and without the markets you'd probably be lucky to see one much less slot one. But those same high prices make the issue of outfitting with reasonable enhancements vastly easier than it used to be pre-I9. In fact, the crap recipes you seem to be dismissing are offering casual players slotting opportunities previously reserved for the incredibly Hamied out.

The fact is that even for (perhaps especially for) the casual player the combined system of the Invention system and the Markets has dramatically improved the ability to purchase and slot standard enhancements, dramatically improved the ability to slot at power levels higher than standard enhancements allow, and dramatically increased the maximum slotting options available. The fact that it *also* adds even higher slotting options for players that want to apply more effort doesn't change the fact that without "making it a second job" you can do far more now with the current system than before it.

If your satisfaction is based on your ability to dictate the level of effort that the rarest and most powerful items in the game should take to acquire, your satisfaction will be elusive. If on the other hand all you require is proportionality and fairness; the game offers options commensurate with the level of effort you wish to put into it (proportionality), and the gap between the lowest and the highest options are not excessively high (fairness), then the game does a much better job of that.

Good luck with that. The best I can do for you is that both during I9 beta and after release I discussed the question of the purpose of the market with the devs, and posted their basic answers repeatedly back in the day (back when I was more active on the market forums). The market is intended to be a mini-game within the game, and as such it is a form of PvP in at least some respects. It isn't explicitly designed to exclude "casual" players, but that's a matter of definition. Players seeking to participate in the market must assume that they are buying and selling with and against other players, and the devs will no more police that activity than they will police who teams with who.

Its designed to make it relatively easy to participate, and relatively difficult to manipulate in many respects (although all markets have some ability to be manipulated regardless). Like almost all aspects of the game, such as inventions, casual players can participate, but they cannot automatically expect optimal returns relative to players that spend more time learning the system.


As to the question of whether flippers cause inflation, essentially they cannot do that. In order to be a flipper, you must buy things - which makes you the highest bidder for that item - and sell things - which makes you the lowest seller for that item. Flipping only closes the gap between the highest bidder and the lowest seller**. Whatever the highest bidder and lowest seller were before the flipper every arrives, he can only drive the price to some value between those two.

And in fact, flipping is a self-annihilating process. In theory, someone could outflip the flipper by simply bidding a little more, and selling for a little less. Essentially you are going inside the flipper: placing your orders within the gap of the flipper***. Eventually, this process reduces the gap to the point where the flipper cannot make a profit on the activity (or any reasonably high enough one to be practical). However, that is what flipping does: it *reduces* profit margins on sales and *increases* the likelihood of executions.

The only way a "flipper" can cause inflation is to somehow cause people to bid more than before. The flipper cannot just arbitrarily keep up with the higher bids because they are capped above by the sellers. At some point bidding higher kills the profit on the exchange. The only way a marketeer can drive prices upward is to stop flipping and attempt a corner. This is where the marketeer buys up as much of the supply as possible, making it difficult or impossible to obtain the item****. Eventually, people will get impatient and start bidding higher to obtain the item faster. If the item is such that the players can be goaded into escalating the bids rapidly, the marketeer them starts selling slowly into the rising bids - slow enough to prevent a price collapse. Eventually, the marketeer can "reset" the buyer expectations for the item and cause them to bid higher of their own accord for at least a substantial amount of time. If they can sell enough of their stock at the higher price without excessive buying, they can profit on the corner. If they guess wrong about supply (if they try to corner an item that can flood into the market) or psychology (if the try to corner people will just not buy the item or wait them out) then they can lose a lot of influence in the attempt.


These days, I am neither a farmer nor a serious marketeer, but I have no problems selling items into the market to make influence, or buying most of the inventions I want at reasonable prices. The battleground in the markets is only for the top 1% most expensive and desirable enhancements, and I'm usually willing to wait for a good opportunity to acquire those. If you don't farm, don't want to learn the market, don't want to marketeer, do want the most expensive items and are an impulse shopper you will probably have difficulty. But that's by design: if its not difficult under those extreme circumstances, its going to be ludicrously trivial everywhere else.




** I've done it myself between I9 and I11, but I got bored of it to be honest

*** Yeah, I've done that too, just to see what flippers would do when they were being outstraddled. Some repeat the process, some go away. One or two actually posted rather angry forum posts about it without knowing who did it.

**** I haven't specifically done that before, but I have in the past executed strategies designed to break a corner. Ironically, with flipping. Probably one of the most interesting things a marketeer can attempt is to break a cornering attempt without simply swamping the person attempting the corner.

Only you can really answer that. But the correct way to look at it is that most things you will attack have base 50% chance to hit. So 44.6% defense means they will only have 5.4% chance to hit you. The best you can do is go down to 5.0. So you're being hit 5.4/5.0 = 1.08 times more often than the best possible defense you can get - i.e. 8% more. You should always evaluate defense by looking at the amount of damage incoming, not the amount of damage being avoided, because that's the damage that will kill you.

Also keep in mind that some things debuff defense. Even people who soft cap will often try for some extra buffer to deal with debuffing. Things with moderate resistance to defense debuffing will often try for as much as possible above the soft cap if they can get it, because under debuffing they are likely to lose several points of defense. If you happen to be SR, then you're likely to have massive defense debuffing and only need a couple of points of defense to hedge against all but the highest levels of debuffing.

Maybe he normally plays in a 200x150 pixel window.

I believe when the Peacebringer respec bug was used to two-shot Hami, the game engine had a 32767 damage limit, and Hami was up around 50,000 points of health.

Although since Hami had I believe 99% damage resistance back then, hitting for 32,000 implies attacking with a 3.2 million point damage attack. That must have been a lot of respecs executed to get that many slots. Hmm, I never really thought about it till now. That's a heck of a lot of effort put into a proof of concept if that is what happened.

Well, one of the participants was kind enough to give me a demorecord.

This is actually what a building looks like the instant it detonates (click to see slightly bigger version):



Actually, I've never seen this frame of video before myself: I analyzed the demorecord's damage numbers, and I watched the demorecord play in real time, but this is the first time I actually watched it frame by frame. I've never noticed that explosion effect before. You can clearly see Kronos thinking "holy &*(^$!"


And this is the building laying down the smack-juice on Protector's finest (click to see slightly bigger version):



Three ticks of 225,788 damage is apparently more health than the demorecorder had that day.


And if you want to see the earth-shattering kaboom, I uploaded the last minute or so to youtube (detonation occurs at 36 seconds in).

My second favorite quote is Kold Knight saying "well I guess that does work." My favorite quotes occur just after I stopped fraps when a bunch of people in rapid succession say "I got merits!"


And this is the dimension that Emperor Cole wants to try to take over? I don't think so.

For those not familiar, an oddity to the game's design is that the labels on enhancements are unreliable, because enhancements *cannot* be programmed to increase either magnitude or duration of an effect. Enhancements generally increase Strength and its the Power that gets to decide whether strength increases affect the magnitude or the duration of an effect, and this is set per effect.

So when Blind does damage and Holds the target, it has a damage effect and a hold effect. The damage effect is tagged to be a Mag effect, and the hold is tagged to be a Dur effect in the power itself. When you slot damage enhancers into the power, that increase damage strength (technically, it increases the strength of all damage types). The damage effect is tagged Mag so the enhancement increases damage magnitude, which increases the actual damage of the effect. The Hold is tagged Dur, so hold enhancements increase the duration of the effect. Important to note that if Blind was changed so that the hold effect was tagged Mag, then hold enhancements would increase the magnitude of the hold, not the duration. Its the power that has the first, last, and only say in this. The enhancement gets no say.

So the labels are technically colloquialisms, intended to tell the player what is most likely to happen given the way the powers typically work. But they are really educated guesses only. No enhancement can be designed to increase the magnitude or the duration of an effect, no matter what. That is literally impossible to do with the current game engine.

So you're bound to see oddities occasionally where an enhancement does something other than what it says or expects. This is unfortunate, but its not a bug. Its how the game was intended to operate. But if the enhancements just said "increases strength" all the time, the descriptions would be more accurate and less helpful. At the beginning of time someone decided it would be better to be simple and right 99% of the time than be confusing and right 100% of the time.

I'm not a member of "that profession."

I always assumed it was because the devs hated you and wanted to annoy you. Or it could be because the build number for Going Rogue isn't super-secret information.

The fact that "Pistols" is capitalized, on the other hand, is something you're only going to get from me and my special sources of information. I don't think they released that information at HeroCon, they only formally announced that "Ultra Mode" was not going to have a hyphen.


Castle is more popular than I am and he gets even more privileged information than I do. Go hate on him. I know less than 96% of what he does.

The existence of build 1800 does not prove the existence of build 1700.

At some point well over a year ago someone would have had to start reserving a build number for Going Rogue. Way back then they couldn't be sure if there was going to be a major release of features between Issue 16 and Going Rogue, so they preassigned 1800 to GR and reserved 1700 for any major feature release that might come before Going Rogue. If there was no release, the number would just be discarded. Happens all the time in software development when it comes time to fork a new build series.

I have no idea if there is going to be a release 1700 or not. I only know that Going Rogue is going to be 1800. Technically, I guess that qualifies as a Going Rogue leak. Fortunately, I don't think I was non-disclosed on that one.

I can also confirm that both Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning have nine powers. Take that, Marketing! Information wants to be free! "Pistols" is officially capitalized!

(Really, though, I still don't know much about Going Rogue - still haven't asked.)

Going Rogue's base build number is 1800. Just saying.

That's because Insult is an Assault set.

Pacing seems to be in the middle of the pack, and that might be because while people don't slot slow very much, they do take a lot of powers that can be slotted for slow. Perhaps sets tend to be weighted based largely on how many powers that the players take that could take slow enhancement, rather than the actual number of slow enhancers that are actually slotted.

But again, its just a guess. I'm pretty sure they didn't just pick randomly, and I'm also pretty sure there were limits to the amount of mathematical number crunching they would do. Something like looking at the number of powers that were enhanceable for slow seems to be a middle ground datamining step. But its also possible many factors went into the weighting, and there isn't a unified theory for the weight assignments.

Love was not mentioned in the brochure.

I have a conjecture. The conjecture is that to a first order, and with ad hoc exceptions, the weights of the recipes are related to how common either the enhancement bonuses or the powers that take the invention are.

Recharge is a very common slotting option. Notice the invention system practically drips recharge, and it that was made even more extreme with the purple sets. The devs know the players slot a lot of recharge, its a popular buff, and there wasn't a specific balance reason for denying high recharge, so we got a lot of recharge (that part is not conjecture: Castle basically admitted to me that is why the purples have a lot of recharge in them, and probably accuracy as well).

So if players take a lot of powers that can take the invention set, then all things being equal all members of that set will be weighted more. If the buff that the specific invention delivers is commonly slotted, that invention will be weighted more than its peers on average.

However, I think there is enough judgment calls that the devs have to make that this conjecture isn't very useful to predict what the weight of a recipe is likely to be. I haven't tried to actually see if the recipe weights match this theory (partially because I've never had access to the weights) but my suspicion is that this conjecture will work better for explaining the weights after they are determined than predicting the weights before they are determined. I see hints of a general trend in this direction, but not a strong enough one to eliminate random chance correlation.

If they started posting at launch, they would have been posting for about 69 months now, and to reach 15,000 posts would require about 217 posts a month, or a little over seven posts a day. 20,000 would require averaging close to 9.5 posts a day.

You'd be surprised how many posts you can rack up just revising or correcting calculations.

In City of Heroes, the villains are there to give the heroes something to react to. They are the "proactive" ones attacking people on the street, say. In City of Villains, by in large *because* the gameplay is intended to be similar, the players need something to react to, and once again, the role of the proactive element is played (very often) by the villains.

That's what I mean when I say that CoV is a reskinned CoH. Its not just the literal game *engine* but also the gameplay design. Because the gameplay template for both games is very similar, some things cannot be made into dual reflections.

In CoH, the bulk of the core directed gameplay revolves around two things:

1. Following the moral compass of a contact
2. Attempting to stop the actions of an antagonist

To put it simply, we are either working with someone, or against someone. That's simple enough, but the problem comes when to try to translate that across alignments. Its obvious that most of the time, if you are working *with* someone they have to have the same alignment (there are exceptions, but they are uncommon). So heroes have to follow hero contacts and villains have to follow villain contacts, usually. Good so far. But when it comes to opposing antagonists, it gets trickier. You'd think that its obvious that villains should always be opposing heroes, but at least given the stylistic model CoH and CoV follow, its hard to have the heroes doing things proactively that the villains can try to stop. Phipps probably comes the closest to this model, but its a lot easier to write stories where a proactive villain does X, and the player decides to react to that by doing Y, because the villains tend to be more proactive.

I'm not saying its impossible to make the heroes more proactive and give the villains something to react to. I'm simply saying its a lot harder, and contributed to the path of least resistance pointing to having villains primarily react against villains rather than other heroes.

Also, its slightly absurd that heroes are stopping purse snatchers in Paragon City. It would be an order of magnitude more absurd if the villains were stopping heroes from helping people cross the street in Rogue Isles. It really is harder to write good content for the villains, because we seem to excuse a lot more absurdity surrounding heroes. Saving a cat from a tree is a little silly. Kicking a cat into a tree seems far more of an over-caricaturization.

Debuffing is mechanically always, and conceptually usually, a form of depowering in this game**. Where people draw the line is generally arbitrary. Very few people think its cheap that we can debuff critters' damage, but that is only a degree separated from debuffing recharge (which reduces the frequency powers can be used) and debuffing endurance (which reduced the ability to use powers above a certain cost) and power suppression (which removes the ability to use certain types of powers). Its a continuum of effects without intrinsic borders.

Mostly, I'm responding to the notion that the concept of depowering, especially when translated into an MMO, represents a lack of creativity. To the contrary, I consider the lack of it to represent a lack of creativity in utilizing it effectively.


** Some debuffs can be argued to be conceptually not a reduction in the target's abilities, but rather a defensive measure against those abilities. For example, some -perception powers that affect tohit can be argued to be not intrinsicly reducing the target's aim, but forcing the target to use that aim in a disadvantageous situation. Debuffing damage, on the other hand, has almost no conceptual options in this game to actually weakening the target. Its *possible* to make an effect that debuffs the target's damage but isn't conceptually weakening it - make him shoot through a force field you've encased him in - but such conceptualizations are extremely rare in CoX

Well, that's not exactly what I had in mind...

You want TV and VR to battle on the Internet? Who's refereeing this, Max Headroom?

Technically true, but by the time you have enough rolls to have reasonable counts for the lowest bins, the highest bins had better be clustering enough for that to be a non-issue. It the spread between the "luckiest" and "unluckiest" x5 bin has a wide spread, either the assumption that the bins are whole numbers is wrong, or the confidence level in the number of rolls is out the window. And if it turns out that the issue is the weights are not whole numbers, you won't even be able to trivially find the "centers" of the bins from distribution, because you will have to run a reverse analysis to determine the most likely set of bin values that would generate the distribution you are seeing which is derivable from the distribution you are seeing.

You're looking at the problem from the perspective of whether the data confirms a given bin hypothesis. I'm going the other way around, and attempting to derive a guestimate for the bins without starting with an initial guess for the bins. With enough data, both approaches should converge on the same values.