Arcanaville

It might be more productive to suggest to them that they market City of Heroes more first along with specific marketing option suggestions. There will be plenty of opportunities to tell them they suck if they don't respond favorably to that suggestion.

Marketing and Publishing, NC Interactive
6801 N Capital of Texas Hwy. Building 1
Suite #102
Austin, TX 78731-1780

1 (512) 498-4000

marketing_na@ncsoft.com

Just a note: no point complaining about Paragon Studios marketing of CoX: I don't think PS has a marketing department specifically. I believe all marketing for CoX comes from NCSoft's North American office. Good luck.

I think many of them consider it more of a gameplay eventuality than a gameplay option.

Heck, my first character was a blaster, and like all blasters the hospital was my first travel power.

Without physical access to the fobs and the encrypted seed records, that would be a neat trick.

I'm referring to a lot of things. For example, I like the blocking mechanic: it fits with the unrooted combat and allows for a better way to add complexity to the damage/defense equations of combat. I like the shift to activity-based endurance (although I'm not as crazy about the concept of specific endurance-builders specifically). Combine those two with a zero-recharge power system (with minimal cool down) though, and you can end up with a system where the sweet spot for combat has just enough blocking in it that you get virtually unlimited endurance "for free" as part of your general defensive strategy, and can therefore cycle your most powerful attack(s) almost indefinitely. This then can eliminate endurance as a balancing factor, and by extention eliminate the cost/benefit balancing factors in attacks in general. Then you have people simply gigabolting their way through the game.

And bear in mind these are features I *like* combining in potentially design-breaking ways in the launched game. There are also features which have materially affected the evolution of the game in constraining and deleterious ways. One side effect of the "open" powers system is the fact that initially, you could take any *or all* of the defensive powers. I actually sent a PM to Weirdbeard with basically one sentence: this is broken. I think they thought they could get away with that because Champions "gets away with that" but that's mainly because Champions GMs don't let that get out of hand. This prompted the need to create the "passive slot" and with it the passive system, and with that the offensive passive problem (namely: they suck). It also severely constrains defensive diversity: all characters with strong defense basically have the passive-block-heal tuple. They tried to compensate by packing mechanical diversity into the passive defensive mechanisms, but that then created the problem that novel mechanics are not trivial to balance, and I'm still not sure they have or can.

Another casualty of the "open" powers system was the melee archetype. In CoH the melee archetype is justified by granting the melee archetype higher defenses. This not only compensates for "being in more danger" but it also provides a tradeoff justification for surrendering range as a gameplay option. People play scrappers even though they are giving up range, because scrappers offer a completely different gameplay experience. In CO, there is no unique gameplay option that melee focused characters provide, unless you count dying as a gameplay option. Melee offense in CO gives up a lot intrinsicly just by not being ranged. But that option comes with no counterbalancing options unavailable to non-melee characters. So they've essentially created a game which penalizes the conceptual choice of not using range - which is what melee is in CO: its the voluntary choice to not use range.

The rule here is: if choices have no downsides, all the upsides must be identical.


Some of these things I publicly predicted on the closed forums, but some I didn't anticipate at all which makes them interesting learning opportunities.

Actually, by your own definition, it does imply there is no automation. Automation presumes an actual process being automated. If all I'm doing is standing still, there's no automation of a process. There's no operation or control.


I didn't say anything about requiring the attention of the player. I said:

If you've automated a task in the game so you can pay more attention to other things in the game while playing, you've macroed.


But it also provides the loophole that an exploit which allows the creation of an automation tool within the client isn't a bot by definition. My definition cuts to the heart of the gameplay issue: automation of any kind intended to assist the player perform tasks isn't a bot (it might be undesirable for other reasons), while automation intended to make the player redundant is a bot. Its a definition with a grey area, but that grey area is congruent to the grey area corresponding to developer tolerance of gameplay bypassing strategies.

It also places the tag of botting on any external automation, even if that external automation doesn't perform tasks traditionally associated with botting. For example, a programmable keyboard that had a hotkey which turned on all my toggles in rapid sequence would be a bot by your definition.

There are no "friends and family alpha testers." In the CoX development process, the "alpha builds" are internal test builds that only the developers and QA can see and test. The moment they push the build out to external testers of any kind, its beta test.

I'll point out that you quoted my definition, then gave three examples that don't meet that definition (in the first case there's no automation, and in the other two cases the automation - if you can call it that - typically meet the requirement that they are automating tasks for a player paying attention to other parts of the game during actual gameplay).

While I think there's lots of potential room for improvement in combat mechanics in general, since I tend to like, on average, only about 2% of all the suggestions made to improve combat mechanics in the game, and since I believe more than 75% of them would actually damage the game**, given a choice between sticking with the mechanics we have and implementing *any* suggestions to improve them, risk analysis tells me to stick with the current ones.



** Champions Online is proving to be an excellent point of reference for me for all future game design discussions with actual game developers in this regard: even the game mechanical changes I *like* seem to have very interesting deleterious side effects that don't have trivial workarounds.

If you've automated a task in the game so you can pay more attention to other things in the game while playing, you've macroed. If you've automated a task in the game so you no longer have to pay attention to the game at all, you've botted.

All KB effects in things like attack powers are Magnitude effects. That means resistance uses the magnitude resistance formula, which is the same one damage uses. 100% KB resistance means KB is reduced to zero magnitude.

There is no special formula for "damage resistance" and "mez resistance." The game engine supports only two resistance types: magnitude resistance and duration resistance. Which one is used is based on the type encoded on the *effect*. Since KB on attacks is tagged as magnitude-based, all combat effects affect the magnitude of the power: the purple patch reduces the mag of the effect, slotting (if its a player) increases the mag of the effect, and resistances reduce the magnitude of the effect.

If the effect is a magnitude effect, resistance works this way:

Net = Base * (1 - Resistance)

If the effect is a duration effect, resistance works this way:

Net = Base / (1 + Resistance)

Damage is a magnitude effect, so it obeys the first formula. Most mez is coded as a duration effect, so mez tends to obey the second formula. KB is generally coded as a magnitude effect. That's also why slotting KB increases the magnitude of the KB, but slotting Hold tends to increase the duration of the hold: same reason: KB is a magnitude effect and thus slotting increases its magnitude; hold is generally a duration effect and thus slotting increases its duration.

In this case, its not the first time there has been speculation about "secret betas" related to Going Rogue, and my name was mentioned in the thread, and I suspect there are forum lurkers with less experience with closed betas that might be reading and thinking there might be something to the notion.

For the record, the devs have never had a closed beta test that started in secret, and I don't think its likely they will conduct such a thing for Going Rogue. There's no specific upside to deliberately doing such a thing. Closed beta rules prohibit any participant from mentioning that they are in the closed beta until the closed beta is over** but beyond that the devs have never made any serious attempt to hide the fact that testing had begun on an issue. I'm not even certain they have the capability to do so if they wanted to.

As to the notion that PP is phishing for information from the devs, well my denial of a current closed beta is the closest that she'll get to that: the devs are not likely to jeopardize their jobs to satisfy PP's curiosity.




** Although in my case its fair to say I doubt anyone even bothers with the pretense anymore.

To the best of my knowledge, no testing of Going Rogue outside of the dev team is happening anywhere. In this particular case I believe its highly unlikely that they could start such a beta without me at least hearing about it.

For whatever its worth, I think its unlikely (possible, but very unlikely) you'll see a closed beta start before mid-February at the earliest. There's no point in conducting witch-hunts among the playerbase before then.

Mission Maker powers (the ones used by custom critters) have the same damage/endurance ratio that standard critters have in the general case: 7.0 endurance per damage scale. Players have a 5.2 endurance per damage scale ratio for most attacks.

Meaning: Thunder Kick used by a Scrapper burns 4.368 endurance (0.84 * 5.2). The custom critter version burns 5.88 endurance (0.84 * 7.0).

The reason why custom critters sometimes seem to burn more endurance is that players tend to give them more powers than the average standard critter.

That's not setting the bar high; that's setting the bar sideways and complaining that the devs won't give you a pole dance.

I said high, not absolute. Virtually all KB protection in defensive primaries and secondaries (when it exists) is essentially absolute. I think that was mistake #1. It primed players to think that absolute KB protection was remotely reasonable, and that then by extension anyone that didn't have it had an obvious "hole" in their protection.

10 * 1.05 = 10.5.

Small studies actually buff 10.5% with the veteran reward, not 11%, so the devs did not round off either.

During the HeroCon demo, they made it a point to highlight the fact that Praetoria doesn't have WarWalls. I assumed this implied Praetoria actually had different sections intended for different level ranges, and that therefore Praetoria will either have content from 1-50, or will at least have the potential to contain level 1-50 content eventually (its theoretically possible the content will be focused on 1-20 and level 50 end game, with later issues expanding on the content in other areas).

If Praetoria was really intended for just level 1-20 content, pointing out Praetoria has no WarWalls would make about as much sense as pointing out that Mercy Island has no WarWalls.

Their minds should be completely broken by now, if that's what you mean.

I have no idea if the animation system in CoH bears any resemblance to any other MMO (or video game, or human technological construction) but I remember at one point after discussing a particularly complex issue involving state bits that I asked BaB how he kept track of the particular behaviors of the different types of bits and he said he mostly kept track in his own head.

Not true. Critters use endurance just as we do (in fact they use more endurance for the same attack: 5.2 end per scale damage for players, 7.0 end per scale damage for players). What is true is that many critters are "underpowered" in terms of attacks, meaning they have very few attacks and therefore burn very little endurance overall. Critters with lots of attacks - especially bosses - burn endurance much faster and can be drained to the point where they are unable to attack, or are only able to attack at a very reduced rate (waiting for recovery ticks to provide enough endurance to fire off an attack).

I got this one BaB:


(Click to view the Dev-o-meter response)

The thought had crossed my mind. The issue is damage vs critter health. At level one minions have about twice the health that a scale one blaster attack does, and bosses have about ten times the health that a scale one blaster attack does. By level 49, that ratio has increased to about 6.9 to one for minions and 40.6 to one. Essentially everything gets about four times harder to kill in terms of damage points.

Player relative damage also goes up, but not as much: basically slotting takes players to about twice the damage, which still means things are about twice as hard to kill at 49 as level 1. When you factor endurance utilization, though, potentially this can even out: you gain (potentially) stamina and endurance slotting. Someone with slotted stamina and averaging 1 endurance SO per attack, plus about twice the damage in damage slotting, has an overall damage/end limit of about 3.86, which comes pretty close to neutralizing the damage/health increase as you level.

In your case, I think the reason for the curve-breaking performance is due to playing a brute. I mention originally that some ATs aren't as tightly bound to the endurance constraint and brutes are one of them due to fury. What I didn't fully consider that I think your experiment leverages is that by staying exemped, you're able to maximize the proportional effects of fury undiluted by slotting. That's actually worth more than Stamina is at lower levels. Its not at higher levels, which is why I assumed it would not have a strong enough effect to break the curve.

I'll need to review the calculations carefully to see what your leveling experiment tells me overall. Thanks especially for the endurance utilization numbers: those are helpful.

Its not the first time BaB hit his limit on PMs and disabled them. He probably just needs a break from our BS for a year or three.



Maybe he has a problem, and no one else can help, and he's off to find...

(Its not Picard, but its still Youtube, BaB)