Arcanaville

Who's going to believe that anyone actually plays on Triumph?

"Look, it was hot and I was hungry and fighting clockwork okay?"

When does any sane army defend against an attack by superior numbers on "open ground?" Usually, combatants cross open ground only when they have to, and usually that is when they are the attacker, or they are retreating defenders.

The battle of Thermopylae is not just about blocking a narrow pass. There are suggestions that other tactics were used, such as the tactic of pretending to retreat and then turning back on the attackers in perfect phalanx formation (which disrupts the formation of your attacker as they pursue, while keeping your own). Used more than once by the Greeks. The terrain was also used at least initially to neutralize calvary and prevent being outflanked, which is smart tactics, not just a way to neutralize numerical superiority.

Remove the archers and calvary from the Persians, and I believe the Spartans could have held their own against the Persians on relatively open ground for a very long time against an extremely numerically superior force. When calvary wasn't present, an Athenian army attacked and defeated a comparable Persian army outnumbered by about three to one or more on open ground at Marathon, with minimal losses.


In the Battle of Mogadishu (i.e. the battle portrayed in Black Hawk Down) US forces were probably outnumbered by factors possibly approaching 100 to 1 during the night (although more likely 50-60 to 1). Although the environment allowed some cover to the forces on the ground, the terrain was not a carefully selected one that granted a unilateral advantage to the Rangers and Delta operators. Superior training and tactics were the deciding factor in the outcome of the battle (although the battle is a difficult one to call a victory for either side, most of the US forces escaped being killed by an overwhelmingly numerically superior force of attackers.)

In general I tend to believe that content should not be gated without a very good reason, but its important to remember that this is not an absolute; there is a lot of grey area. There probably exist players that never level an alt to 35 and therefore cannot participate in the RWZ content. Those players have the same right to complain as people who don't want level 50 gated content, or people who don't endgame-gated content past level 50.

However, while they have every right to complain, and even quit over the issue, that cannot be the sole basis for the devs decision making. They have to strike a balance, and not everyone will be happy with that balance. The invention system, in my opinion, strikes an excellent balance in optional character enhancement and material enhancement gains, but not everyone agrees and some players have probably quit over it. While I don't specifically want players to quit, I believe the game is better off without those players and with the Invention system, than it would be with those players and without the Invention system. And that's just based on obvious observation: I was not the biggest supporter of the Invention system when it was first announced.

Similarly, the best possible end game system will almost certainly anger some, and perhaps even cause some players to quit over its implementation. But as cold hearted as this sounds, the success of the end game system won't depend on them, but rather whether the net overall improvement of the game for the remaining players and its increased marketability to future players far outweighs those losses.

I didn't ask for gear, I had serious reservations about gear, but its unambigously obvious to me that the invention system was a huge plus for the game (and I do use the system myself). I'm hoping that most people with serious reservations about a future end game system will be capable of sticking around long enough after it launches to at least make that sort of informed judgment for themselves, and to decide whether to continue subscribing based at least in part on whether they can concede that part of the gameplay doesn't appeal to them but makes the game richer and therefore stronger overall.

The fact that some things are exactly identical and others are totally different is a hallmark of fictional alternate universes, and given the level of divergence we already know there appears to be no default assumption that everything we don't know is likely to be identical. This isn't a universe with a single counterfactual divergence. Its a universe that parallels the Primal one in many ways, but appears unpredictably different in others.

Part of the point to the current system is to act as an influence sink for people with tons of IOs. If the devs were willing to give you the proceeds, they would also have allowed you to sell them.

At best the devs might accept redemption at the intrinsic cost of the enhancements; i.e. something near the value of the recipes for them at the stores. But the point to the suggestion was wondering if a system that added supply to the market that also obeyed the devs current design constraint to not allow people to fully profit from those extra IOs (without significant effort and extra expense) was still agreeable.

The suggestion also creates opportunities to prevent flooding: if Dr.B gets too many of certain kinds of enhancements and the supply reaches a critically high level, Dr.B could be programmed to destroy them to prevent the market from being oversupplied.

I'm just thinking out loud: I don't know if the devs would go for such a system, or if they did if its practical to implement, because I'm not sufficiently familiar with the implementation of the markets. But the notion of market makers for certain items has always struck me as an interesting one to pursue in general. Perhaps ironically, possibly the best way to implement this idea would be with an in-game marketeering bot.

Alright, suppose (I'm actually digging up a weird suggestion I made in I9 beta, but retooling it for a serious purpose) whenever a player respecs, all IOs that would ordinarily be "destroyed" actually get sent to a market-maker: we'll call him Dr. Brainstorm. Dr. Brainstorm would then be programmed to sell those enhancements on the markets at a reasonable rate so as to not suddenly flood the market, and at prices consistent with the current trading activity. He would do so randomly, so the person respecing would have no specific advantage to timing the market for when those enhancements got sold.

This would put those IOs back into supply, but they wouldn't profit the person respecing just as happens now. If this could be done, would this theoretically satisfy the basis for your suggestion?

This almost certainly explains why Positron is trying to spearhead a skunkworks within Paragon Studios to work on things like end game mechanics.

Although I haven't checked them in a while, I believe the DR values have been unchanged for several issues. The latest version of my damage mitigation spreadsheet linked on the first post of this thread has a DR calculator on one of the tabs of the sheet that I believe is still accurate. It takes as inputs the archetype in question, the attribute in question, and the aspect of the attribute, and calculates the DR for that value.

Just a reminder that DR calculations can sometimes be a multistep process. Suppose you have a defense power slotted with enhancements, and you want to find out what that power's strength would be in a PvP zone. First, you would need to figure out how the enhancements decay in PvP. Defense enhancements increase the Strength of the power they are slotted into, and that Strength gets reduced. If its, say, lethal defense we're talking about, you would first figure out how the Lethal Strength was reduced.

Then, you'd multiple the base Lethal defense of the power by the Lethal Strength (basically, the reduced lethal enhancement of the power) and then take *that* number and determine how DR reduces that, by looking at how Lethal Cur is reduced (defense powers increase the *value* of your lethal defense, so they increase lethal Cur, or Current Value).

So you have to know a bit about how powers work to use the calculator. SR affects Strength (usually this is enhancement strength), Cur, and Res (i.e. resistance). It does not affect other things like Abs or Max, which is why it doesn't reduce the damage of powers (which are normally Abs effects) or the effects of powers like Dull Pain (at least the part that increases maximum health, which is a Max effect).

If you don't trust me, you could just pop a sturdy and check the Real Numbers system for yourself to confirm.


Well, there's not much I can do about that. Except possibly make it worse.

That worked out so well the last time.

This sidesteps the point. No one is saying the *only* thing important about the game is the costume editor. They are stating that it was and is critically important to the success of the game.

Nor is anyone saying that *everyone* likes and heavily leverages the costume editor either. But it is undeniable that enough players do so to make it a critical element to the game's overall success.

There are elements of the game that I don't like, that I think lots of other players like. If I didn't like or use the costume customization features of the game very much, I would still have to acknowledge that they were critically important to the success of the game.

Wow. That's a long way to go just to slip City of Spies past Castle.

It all makes sense now. Positron creates an entire boxed set of content which looks like an upgrade to the Praetorian dimension, when all along he's just trying to trick Castle into working on City of Spies. And then on the eve of everyone discovering his master plan, he hands War Witch the keys and hides in his secret lair while he prepares to launch his next master plan: a massive update of the Shadow Shard based around aerial combat with the Rularuu that tricks BaB into working on the animations necessary for an underwater zone.


Genius.

If the people who are (incorrectly in my judgment) accusing the devs of being rude, immature, and unprofessional cause them to reduce or eliminate their public contact with the playerbase, then those players are doing a level of damage to the game disproportionate to their own net benefit. I was specifically thinking about the cold hard calculus of that equation when I posted what I did.

Personally, I think they need to consider swinging harder. If they are going to be blamed for "arrogant, immature, antagonistic face-slapping" anyway, I say swing for the fences.


I would.

I'm not even sure how many players see intrinsic low level SR performance, because while most endurance problems are either highly overstated or highly understated, its probably true that at low levels SR gets the least benefit for the most endurance cost of any scrapper secondary. That tends to even out at higher levels, but I've never actually played a low level SR that *runs* both toggles for more than a couple of seconds at a time. FF and FS combine to burn more than 30% of your endurance.

What I've found personally is low level Regen tends to have better sustainable performance than SR does: you start every fight at full health, with full endurance, and basically maximum ability. You might survive a single fight better with SR, but if you do take on that strong single fight you'll be left with low health and endurance, and either require Rest (the power) or taking a chance on the next fight with less than 100% health and endurance. And it is *that* fight that does you in. Regen doesn't have a "next fight." They tend to all be the first fight.

Of course, if you always make sure to wait until you recover back to full before starting the next fight, SR will tend to outperform Regen at the low levels, for some definition of "perform" which includes waiting around a lot. But I doubt very many Scrappers have that sort of patience.


And yeah: skipping dull pain is not recommended. While its up, even unslotted at low levels its like having 28.6% resistance to all. That's getting close to the damage mitigation levels that low level Invuln's have to smash/lethal (without Dull Pain).

Capes, wings, and trenchcoats create two sources of slowdown. First, there is the amount of time necessary to transmit the fact that the player actually has such a costume element. This is trivial. Second, there is the amount of processing power on the client-side that it takes to render those items. This can only affect individual players based on the speed of their system and can almost always be remedied on their end by reducing their client detail sliders in theory. It is not the primary source of overal raid-lag.

The primary source of raid-lag - the lag that actually seems to be causing time to slow down in the zone and everyone's clients to get extremely jumpy regardless of computer horsepower - is the fact that so many things are so close together that the game servers start spending a lot of time with bounds and collision checking. Every PBAoE has to be checked against every target in the area. The players have to be checked against Hamidon's aura. If players accidentally left PBAoEs on like invincibility those have to be checked against every target in range, including all the players (invincibility isn't affected by other players, but the game doesn't know that until it checks them one at a time). Its basically the density of entities and all the checks that have to happen from every power to every entity that ends up slowing the game engine down.

When you reach a critical point where it takes more than one server tick to calculate what's supposed to happen within the time alloted to one server tick, time effectively slows down. Powers take longer to recharge, because the game is ticking them slower. Powers take longer to activate, because the game is checking for power activation less frequently. This is difficult to address without making the entire core combat engine more efficient in how it processes just about everything.

Or: theoretically you could dedicate special hardware just to run the raid, and try to devote enough to allow more players. I'm not sure how technically feasible that might be, though.

Most citizens of Peoria would probably think that.

Almost certainly wrong. I can't use a time machine to replay the counterfactual situation, but I can say that in the early days of the game, a lot of players commented on the character customization features as being a major selling point of the game, it garnered more press attention specifically because of its character customization and it did for being a superhero MMO, Icon was such a blazing success when it launched that it caused more lag than a Hamidon raid, the momentum of character customization drove the devs to expand on costume pieces which enhanced character customization, and a significant component to replay value was due to the costume editor.

In addition, the design decisions relating to costume customization led to other collateral decisions that are considered highlights of the game design. For example, costumes aren't dictated by function, which means you don't and can't display character advancement visually. Counterintuitively, in CoX this caused costumes to be more valuable to the average player, simply because the costume appearance was considered personalized to the character and not a variable aspect of the character as they leveled and enhanced the character.

While not everyone leverages the costume editor to the same degree, there's absolutely no question whatsoever that it was a critical element to CoH's initial success, and is a dominant factor in its current design aesthetic. In fact, and coincidentally, it meshes well with the casual-player focus that the game moved towards not long after launch.


Its an MMORPG. Not an MMOG. The character costume editor is *the* quintessential component to the "RP" part of MMORPG. In CoX, the combat is a component of the role-playing game, it is not the totality of the game. Without the RP parts of the game, its multiplayer duck hunt. For many players, particularly the ones that do not hard-core role play, the costume editor is the beginning and the end of the role-play portion of the game, and the part that generates the most attachment to the characters being played.

Reluctant?

Sorry, I can't be bothered with ruling you all, because I have to go fight the monsters right now.


Fine: I'll rule you all, but I'm going to dump a lot of the grunt work off to lackeys.


Ok, I've got some free time now. I'm ready to rule you all. Kneel before Cole.

Cryptic bought (not licensed: bought) the Champions backstory IP (and then licensed it back to them for use in the PnP game) but not the Champions/HERO combat/powers system. Not only is CO not based on the same combat system as the PnP game, Cryptic has no rights to use it in any form at all.

Its the first thing I thought of when I read the bio. However, I hope that the writers did not go there, because its so much more interesting that Tyrant actually did take over the world because he thinks its for the world's own good, rather than being a straight-up mustache-twirling evil-doer.

Its really a very short, but very interesting stroll between being Superman and being Magneto (at least, the appropriately sane versions of those characters).

That its not optional that Praetorians must leave Praetoria by storyline directive is an unambiguous statement by Positron. It did not appear that he was equivocating or even thinking about that question much, which suggests it really is as simple as: Praetorians cannot stay neutral forever, and when they are forced to declare side they will be forced to spend most of their time on the appropriate side.

That doesn't preclude additional content in Praetoria for other levels. It does very strongly suggest that you won't be able to actually level there exclusively, like you theoretically can within the Architect. There's no real point to saying you will have to leave if you can literally return unfettered ten seconds later. Its very likely that at least initially beyond a certain level you will only be able to enter Praetoria for side-switching story arcs and other special activities (i.e. task forces or possible end game content).

Of course, this does not preclude Praetoria from showing up within instanced missons added to both sides, like the blue side zones show up in the mayhem missions for villains. I would bet that if there is level 50 end game content within Praetoria, there will be mission arcs which lead up to it that exist at lower levels. Heck: technically speaking we *already* have missions in Praetoria (i.e. Tyrant) that I would bet are getting a revamp for Going Rogue.

Actually, my recollection of the Herocon video was that Positron stated that Praetorian (players) must leave Praetoria eventually.

Reviewing the video, this is the relevant statement from Positron:

Positron: ...all of the Praetorians will eventually leave Praetoria ... its part of the storyline, yes they do, and yes, they all leave and when they leave they make one final choice of hero or villain.

This was in response to a question about whether Praetorians *can* leave Praetoria. Positron emphasized they *must* leave Praetoria. He did not specify precisely when, so technically its speculation that this occurs at level 20, but its reasonable speculation given other statements about the level range of content for Going Rogue.