Arcanaville

Nope, actually I intended it to be read as written. There are almost certainly far more players with level 35s than level 50s, and they deserve more content just like the people who've hit the level cap deserve more content. Level 50 is only *slightly* more special than level 35 because it *is* the cap, but otherwise CoX doesn't accord a special significance to level 50.

My best understanding of the situation (which is somewhat of an educated guess) is that while Paragon Studios can hire you (with NCSoft HR approval), only NCSoft HR can create the position you could be hired into in the first place. So yeah, their ability to hire anyone other than someone that could be slotted into one of the positions currently being advertised for Mountain View (tools, software, qa, server engineer, animator) is severely limited.

I have to concur. Its the little things that turn a decent effort into a great one. One of my favorite fan videos to this day is the I Need a City of Heroes from like June '04. (Actually, given that it was shot with video recording and not with current demo editing, the timing is all the more impressive: the double-shot at 1:35 was a ridiculous stroke of luck according to the author if I remember correctly).

I like DR's Avatar video for similar reasons. It takes the story of the soundtrack and tells it visually in time with the music, and it does so simply (in visual terms) but very evocatively.

In general, I like DR's videos because they tend to have a point, a story to tell, and they get there right away. And they show strong editing: they are as good for what's not in them as they are for what actually is in them. They are no longer than they need to be to tell the story they are intended to tell. They aren't there to show off the techniques of the author. Everything in it is there to serve the story. That tends to make them very clean and interesting to watch.

The point, though, is that this game is not designed or intended to be a game where you race to 50 and then most of the interesting things occur at 50. Its a game in which you're supposed to play through, and there's no special bonanza of content at level 50 that suddenly unlocks. In this game, level 50 content is afforded only slightly more importance than level 35 content, because the players currently at level 35 have the same right to increased content, and there are more of them.

Although there's always room for improvement, level 50 content will only exist in this game as part of a continuum of content, not as an ultra-special reward for grinding to 50 as fast as possible. So if you are one of those players who believe level 50 is supposed to be the land of plenty, this really isn't likely to be the game for you. The devs should add more content at all levels, including level 50, but not at the expense of neglecting all the other levels.

I think the main area of improvement the devs can reach for is to specifically engineer level 50 content *for* level 50s, rather than content that is no different than level 49 content. But even with the significantly expanded level of resources available to Paragon Studios, I don't think we'll ever be innundated with level 50 content. If replay doesn't interest you, the devs are simply unable to generate level 50 content faster than the level 50 players can play it into the ground.

"Its not the destination its the journey" is not an argument. Its the design premise of the game. "Its not elves and orcs, its superheroes" is a similar matter-of-fact statement, and if it costs the game players that are more interested in elves and orcs, that's unfortunate but unavoidable.

If I did, no one told me (I didn't get to HeroCon).



Although, I keep wondering if I'm the only player with a thousand point damage aura surrounding them all the time. I just assumed that was the latest veteran reward. Its not?

Within the fiction of City of Heroes, power dampeners typically don't remove powers, they simply prevent their effects from occuring. That narrative assertion overrides your own narrative as it pertains to your character. All shared environments, even the original PnP ones, were collaborations between the game masters and the players, but the word of the GM overrides all. That is as it should be in a shared consensus environment. You can say your narrative makes it impossible for their powers to be suppressed, but if the game writers say differently, they win.

You might think depowering is cheap, and in some circumstances it is, but the fundamental issue of the game's narrative overriding yours is something that is always going to be true when the game's narrative has the force of the game mechanics. Its no different than saying your character's powers come from being an air elemental and therefore you should be able to fly at level one with no endurance cost and at mach 1. You can say it, but the game won't let you do it, so you're supposed to bend your narrative to fit the "laws of physics" of the game. Similarly, you can say your powers can't be suppressed, but since the "laws of physics" of CoH say that all powers can be suppressed, if you stick to your guns then your character basically cannot exist in the world of City of Heroes.


Just to toss one specific out there:

You may have control over that energy, but you don't have control over the surrounding room, or the air within it, or the space that fills it. Power suppression could simply act to prevent your control of that energy from affecting anything in your surroundings. You can try to fire an energy blast, but the blast can't leave your fingertips. Power suppression doesn't have to suppress the literal powers, it can, within the fiction of CoX, simply suppress the ability for those powers to affect any part of the material world within the suppression field. In fact, maybe its partially magic (as it exists within CoX), in which case it doesn't even have to be logically consistent.

But as I said, your right to control your own narrative ends at directly contradicting the game mechanics. Saying your narrative prevents power suppression is no different than my saying my narrative is I'm a master of Shinanju and cannot ever get hit by an attack or that I'm captain of the Enterprise and capable of vaporizing Lord Recluse with a phaser strike from orbit. Some things you're just not allowed to claim.


Or, I suppose you could roleplay this to its logical conclusion by deleting the character the moment you walk into a power suppression area. That is a theoretical option available to obey the rules of that character's narrative, although its a bit of a severe one. There are people who play perma-death also, specifically to enforce a narrative that the game doesn't support on its own.

As weird of an admission as this may seem coming from me, when I first played all five archetypes - in CoV beta - I had no idea what their damage modifiers were. In general, I don't choose what to play based on things like damage modifiers alone, because I know they do not tell the entire story. If I wanted to deal damage, initially I could play anything except possibly dominators. Out of the gate everything dealt more than enough damage to solo pretty quickly. Brutes especially, but also Masterminds.


You keep saying that the inherents are "gimmicky" and I'll have to take your word for it that it seems that way to you, but it seems to be enough of a matter of opinion that I don't see how this eventually comes around to pointing out a way to make a better game. If we remove everything that seems gimmicky to you, it sounds like it will remove a lot of features that many people find actually fun.

What ends up being a "gimmick" and what doesn't is something none of us can really predict: it usually ends up being something the playerbase as a whole in effect votes on. The SR scaling resistances were called gimmicky when they were first added (including by me) but they've persisted because the playerbase overall accepts them without much second thought. Fury isn't considered gimmicky by probably the vast overwhelming percentage of the playerbase. On the other hand, Defiance 1.0 was ultimately considered gimmicky simply because our playerbase cannot, on average, leverage it properly. I was doing perfectly fine with it, but datamining showed that people were getting too hung up on trying to maximize its effects and getting killed in the process.


Honestly, that's because the devs tended to take the easier way out. The easiest thing to do when something is perceived to need a buff is to buff its damage modifiers, and that's what the devs have tended to do. But I don't think you can say they put too much "faith" in inherents, because the devs never had any faith to begin with that the mere possession of an inherent meant the archetype would be perfectly fine.

Consider Stalkers. Your thesis seems to be that the devs first "relied" on assassin's strikes, criticals, placate, and hide to "fix" the archetype, and when that "failed" they were forced to increase the damage modifier of stalkers. But that's not what happened. The devs went out of their way to:

1. Make hide cost zero endurance to eliminate its cost to run
2. Improve the benefits of assassin's strikes
3. Scale criticals with team size
4. Increase the stalker damage modifier

The damage modifier increase which you are emphasizing is just one of a laundry list of modifications *most* of which are specifically directed at improving the basket of abilities most would consider part of Stalker's "inherent." And in fact, many players now believe that it is the gimmicky team-scaling criticals that make Stalkers more effective on teams, not the relatively small increase to their damage modifier.

Dominators are the only clear example where the devs backed away from the inherent, but there was a specific reason for that which you specifically referenced: the devs perceived that too many players felt the performance swing between inside and outside of domination was too high. In other words, its not that it was gimmicky that was the problem, it was that the gimmick didn't work properly.

Among the other "gimmicks" this sort of thing is true for are powers like Energy Transfer (which is dangerous to use on a consistent basis if you don't have a self-heal), the Phantom Army (which doesn't synergize well with secondaries focused primarily on buffing rather than debuffing), Invincibility and Rise to the Challenge (which scales their buffs upward to higher numbers, but degrades when facing very few). There are a lot of powers and effects that could easily be classified as "gimmicky" and quite a few of them are gimmicks the players actually want.

Also, I'm not sure I can accept the assertion that you can't build fury fighting a single elite boss. You might not saturate fury, but you don't need to saturate fury to achieve near or higher than scrapper levels of damage.



That's an interesting statement to make, as the canonical inherent is Gauntlet. Its really the reason the term "inherent" was invented for in the first place, and was intended specifically to address concerns by the players that the archetype was not designed properly to satisfy its team role. Its *intended* to be archetype-defining by both the devs *and* the players (at least the players of the time).


I can understand that preference, but we started at a point where you were suggesting that such a design goal was either better or an advancement over current designs. My own design philosophy is that I believe in trade-offs; I believe in presenting the players with choices that have consequences; I believe in having (at least some) reward for applied skill. Within the context of this discussion, I believe in gimmicks, and I believe that the future should have better gimmicks, not less gimmicks. I don't believe my own preference here is a step backward.

Actually, no one relies on heals so much that cutting them in half would make this mission suddenly difficult if it wasn't already. People deal with Hamidon's debuffs just fine.

Turning off inherents is a bit trickier, mainly because there is no "turn off inherents" switch. There isn't even a clear definition on what is an "inherent" because its mostly a made-up term. Are the intrinsicly higher base recovery and regeneration attributes of VEATs inherent abilities, or not? Somewhat arbitrary, and there's no way to turn them "off."


Interesting challenge, up to a point. The perma-fail would probably just be frustrating, and ensure that no one goes through this map without massive overkill in temps, inspirations, or other trickery.


This is borderline ludicrous. Its not that it favors certain sets, it all but nullifies certain sets making them totally unplayable. Dark Armor comes to mind. At this point, the only teams that are going to bother with this task force are teams of mind controllers.


Hurray! Energy Transfer suddenly becomes the best power in the game.


If the team made it through mission 3 where toggles did nothing at all, I don't see how mission 5, where toggles are intermittent, would be any worse.


Score another one for the mind controllers.


Aka Master of Respecification Trial.


Basically, a team full of confuse skates through this. Everyone else shoots themselves in the head for even contemplating running it.


Mission 8: Everyone forced to toggle Rest on permanently. Players debuffed to the defense and resistance floor. Require at least mag 100 immobilize protection just to move. Mission requires eight simultaneous clicks on objectives which spawn Ballistas at ten second intervals.

Mission 9: All powers suppressed except for Self Destruction and rezzes. Objective is to defeat the Crystal Titan.

Mission 10: All players are turned into clockwork gears, and must then defeat themselves scaled to archvillains.


Its not difficult to just plain kill players. The hard part, the part I'm puzzling over, is not judging whether any of these ideas is "hard" but rather do any of these ideas have a point? If its intended to be winnable, how? If its not, why dance around when you can just kill the players with a mission full of giant monsters armed with total focus and radiation infection?

Much easier to say than to do, it turns out. And actually, automatically generating critter powers is not the hard part of this problem.

Zach seems to be talking about content which allows character development significantly beyond what is available to a current level 50. Although AE content is numerically high, its still limited in that aspect: it doesn't provide advancement opportunities beyond level 50.

Content gating options and player-designed rewards would be the necessary next step to make the AE a theoretical post-50 development tool. But I can't see how to do that without serious exploitability issues. I'll let Dr. Aeon think about that one for the next few years.

I expect that from the time you hit the power-on button, ten seconds later your neighbors will be lighting candles.

WoW has about a hundred times the resources we have, and they have a level cap. Anyone smart enough to figure out how to produce endless content in an MMO that none of the players can race through will probably be far too busy curing cancer to be making content for MMOs.


(Which is not to say there aren't alternatives to level caps: its just that they either ultimately implement level caps just in a superficially different way, create the illusion of being capless while effectively capping progress, or simply do away with numerical levels altogether and create a hundred little caps rather than one big singular one. Regardless, completely limitless content is currently outside the realm of possibility for the technology).

The fact that you didn't promptly shoot them in the face with your pistols and kill them should have told them at the very least that you weren't pohsyb.

It might be lower, it might be higher, but since the effective range for this parameter is between 5% and 10% (there are some attacks that crit at a higher percentage, but not many), and since you're unlikely to completely avoid minions, it has to be significantly lower than 10% and probably higher than 5%. I'd say the average pretty much has to be between 5% and 8%, and probably leans towards 6%-8%. There's not much wiggle room to be very wrong there.


I do. The benefits are much higher until you reach either stamina or damage SOs or both. Fury dilutes the benefits of damage slotting, but you get practically full return on endurance (and recharge) slotting.

Right out of the gate, I slot accuracy and recharge. Around when DOs become available I transition to slotting accuracy, endurance, and recharge in that order. The logic is that at very early levels, you don't have enough attacks to run out of endurance, but you do end up waiting around for attacks to recharge (even with brawl). So recharge is more important than endurance (TOs don't help a lot, but 8% is 8%). Just about when DOs start to become available you also start to have enough attacks to close the gaps in your chain (not completely, but significantly) and run out of endurance, and its endurance that is the bottleneck. Once you hit SOs (and get stamina) the options open up for Brutes. But until then, I tend to slot for sustainable activity first, and damage last, because Brutes tend to be running around nearly perma-raged anyway.

I would do two tests (at least). One: pick the server nearest to you. This is likely to be close to the bandwidth your ISP is giving you, from your house out to their backbones. Two: pick the server nearest to the location of the CoH servers you play on. That's likely to be close to the bandwidth you have in theory from your house all the way to the CoH game servers (or, replace the CoH servers with some other target you're trying to guestimate your bandwidth to).

Not really (/netgraph doesn't quite do that). I sort of do it "by hand" with things like traceroute, but something you can use to automate the process a bit is the NCSoft Network Info Tool. Among the things it does is perform traceroutes to the three CoH data centers (Euro, West Coast, East Coast), which you can see in the network data file (it also checks connectivity to the forums, the update servers, and the login/auth servers). The game server farms don't allow pings or traceroute packets specifically, but you can extrapolate your likely latency from the latency to the hop closest to the servers (in the file, it'll be the RTT for the hop just before the traceroute terminates).

You're making the assumption that the way Brutes (just as an example) were designed is that they were given bad numbers and then Fury to compensate, or alternatively they were given good numbers but had them taken away as the "price" for Fury. That's unlikely.

Much more likely is that Fury came first. And more specifically, not just Fury, but the concept of something that starts off with lower damage, and quickly builds in strength with activity. In numerical terms, the damage modifier and Fury started off as a singular package, as an implementation detail of the concept of Brutes. Then the rest of the Brute archetype was "wrapped around" Fury.

Brutes did not give up anything for Fury. Fury itself is the implementation of a concept, and that concept is not "buff damage." Its "start low, end high." You seem to be suggesting that the devs were unwilling to instead implement "start high, keep going higher" because of some intrinsic design cowardice on their part. I cannot speak for them on that score, but what I can say is that if it were me, I would have no problem defending the basics of the Fury implementation (if anything, it probably tops out slightly too high, not bottoms out too low) as being not some compromise, but precisely what I wanted to do.

Fury is actually one of the devs better design decisions all around. Specifically:

1. It benefits lower level characters more than higher level ones, so it starts off visibly strong immediately for new players, without creating overpowered buffs at the end game.

2. It rewards skill.

3. Its benefit is linear, so its proportional benefit diminishes with high damage buffing (it doesn't have accelerated stacking).

4. Its directly integrated into the tools its intended to support (i.e. its mechanism is built into the attacks its intended to buff).


Given that Fury + Brute damage tables are a single package, its rather obvious that Brutes didn't sacrifice *anything* for Fury. If anything, Fury comes a little too cheaply from a balance perspective relative to Scrapper design. The "baseline" comparison you're making is almost entirely hypothetical, like comparing Scrappers to Blasters starting from the "baseline" of both of them not having any range. To amplify on LISAR, lets look at level progression a bit. At level ten, the Brute is doing 15.43 damage with a scale 1.0 attack, while the Scrapper is doing 18.73 and the Tanker is doing 15.87. With minimal damage slotting at that level, the Brute will basically outdamage the Tanker at +2.9% damage, and the Scrapper at about +21.4% damage. That's about 11% fury to beat the Scrapper and 1.5% fury to beat the Tanker. I defy you to *see* 1.5% fury in actual combat. In actual fact, any player with a pulse is going to outpace both Tankers *and* Scrappers at lower levels (crits are going to add some damage, but on average they are only good for about 7% more damage on average).

At level 15, assuming 3 DOs of damage (+50% damage) slotted for the Tankers and Scrappers *and nothing for the Brutes* we end up with Tankers doing 29.03, Scrappers doing 37.35, and the Brute (remember: unslotted) doing 18.50. At that point, the Brute needs +56.9% damage to overtake the Tanker, and +101.9% to overtake the Scrapper. At this point, we're talking about 28.5% Fury to overtake the Tanker and just over 50% fury to overtake the Scrapper. Its still reasonable to assume most Brutes will overtake the Tankers under nearly all playing conditions. We can't assume the average player will consistently overtake the Scrapper anymore, but they will be getting close even if they do not slot any damage, and even if they only solo.

At level 25, assuming the ED softcap slotting of +95% damage for all three archetypes, we now have Tankers doing 53.57, Scrappers doing 75.33, and Brutes doing 50.21. Now, to overtake the Tanker requires +13% damage (6.5% fury), to overtake the Scrapper requires +97.5% damage (48.8% Fury). Even the worst Brute on Earth is going to land between those two numbers on average for solo combat. A better than average Brute is going to exceed that value without difficulty.

At all phases of the game, the Brute is going to exceed Tanker damage numbers. Its just that the numbers will ramp up from just slightly under to significantly over Tanker numbers in each fight. This makes it impossible to seriously argue that Brutes gave up significant damage relative to Tankers. They *did* give up some damage relative to Scrappers (keeping in mind I'm using the phrase "give up" very colloquially here) but you can't call that a direct cost either: they "gave up" starting lower for the opportunity to potentially end up higher. Most Brutes don't consider that a penalty: they consider that a bonus.

Just to put a period at the end of the sentence, at level 50 Brutes have about 12% more health than Scrappers. If we assume just for simplicity that this suggests Brutes should do about 12% less damage (or 11%, depending on how you like to calculate this), and if we also assume criticals increase average Scrapper damage by about 7%, then for Brutes to end up about where they belong relative to Scrappers they would have to average about 40% Fury. I'll leave it to the readers to decide how difficult it is, even for neophyte players, to average 40% Fury.


To summarize, Fury is not a bandaid for low damage. Fury + Brute Mods are a single damage package concept intended to give players the choice to play something that rewards activity, and implements the concept of building in strength. There's no "penalty" for this opportunity anywhere within the numbers for Brutes that I can find that's actually a real penalty on players.

What you are seeing in those pics is the negotiated speed between your computer and your switch or cable router (whatever you plugged your computer into). That's not your internet bandwidth, that's just the speed of the card to the device its plugged into. Its a fifty-lane onramp merging onto a two lane highway.

To find out what your actual internet bandwidth that you're getting from your provider is**, you need to use a speed tester. Two that I use are:

Speakeasy
Speed Test

I also use DSL Reports occasionally. Of the three, I probably use Speed Test the most often. These sites will test your upload (speed you can send data), download (speed you can receive data), and latency (average time it takes for a packet to get from them to you and vice versa).

Broadband connections are generally considered crap unless they can get to at least a megabit per second (about 125kbytes/sec) of download, and you want a low latency connection to play real time games on the internet (< 100ms to the game servers). My own cable modem connection tends to give me download speeds of 400-500 kbytes/sec (about 3-4 megabits per second) and round trip network travel times of about 75-ish milliseconds to the CoH servers (which is not the same thing as the /netgraph latencies).

CoH doesn't require a lot of bandwidth (in fact, we're bandwidth limited at their servers or their network infrastructure). It does want as low a latency as possible.



** There's no such thing really as "internet speed" because just like the highway system, you're bound to the worst link in the chain between you and where you want to go. If you are trying to connect to me "on the internet" then even if you had 100 mbit to the internet, since I don't you won't actually get that speed to me. Most of the time, the critical bottlenecks are from your house to the main backbone(s) of your provider, and any bottleneck on the side of the target you're trying to reach. This is what typically goes awry with some DSL internet providers. They claim to give you 6 megabits per second to "the internet" but actually they give you only 6 megabits to their *office*, and you're then sharing (the industry term here is "oversubscription") something like a 45 meg link with a few hundred other people.

Maybe he captured the pic with vertical sync turned off so he could see the maximum possible, and then shipped the box with vsync turned back on and that's about 60Hz. That's just a wild guess, though.

Vertical sync is a setting that tells the game not to redraw faster than your monitor is painting the screen. If you don't sync and the video card actually changes the display out of sync with and faster than the monitor refreshes, you could see shearing or odd frame tweening (meaning, the display shows one frame, and then before it finishes the graphics card changes the frame so the bottom half of your screen shows a different frame: this creates visible artifacts).

Beyond that, I can't hazard a guess.

The devs definition of "farming" refers to repetitive activity. Setting your difficulty to x8 is just that: setting your difficulty higher. Setting a mission to x8 and soloing it is not considered farming by the devs. Setting a mission to x8 and then running it a hundred times is considered farming by the devs. Such activities are frowned upon, but not considered specifically forbidden.

The devs are well aware that the setting could be used by farmers, but its not intended to encourage farming specifically. Its specifically there to allow players to create that level of challenge for themselves without the need for fillers.

Farming is tolerated, not encouraged. Meaning: the devs aren't likely to expend a lot of effort eliminating it, but they also won't spend a lot of effort protecting it either. And they will balance around it if the activity becomes prevalent in any area.

What do you mean specifically by "severe penalties?"

Ah, agent of chaos. Can do:

Primary
1. Mass Confusion
2. Seeds of Confusion
3. Aura of Confusion
4. Wormhole
5. Repulsion Bomb
6. Lightning Storm
7. Psionic Tornado
8. Lightning Rod
9. Omega Bomb

Secondary
1. Bonfire
2. Hurricane
3. Taunt
4. Dimension Shift
5. Quantum Flight
6. Repel
7. Soul Transfer
8. Rise of the Phoenix
9. Self Destruction

Maybe that's how CR makes his money. The computer costs $19.95. The cables cost extra.