Arcanaville

People have suggested increased criticals across the board for MA for a long time, and that probably inspired Castle to add increased critical chance to Storm Kick. But my guess is that Castle does not have data that demonstrates MA lags significantly in damage output, which makes him reluctant to add increased criticals across the board.

I'm not sure I want to just boost damage across the board, or increase critical damage across the board. I'd like to actually have the set fulfill its design goal of being a secondary-effect-y set. Perhaps attacks could be given "critical effects" which have a percentage chance to take effect. Storm Kick could have a 10% chance for -DMG debuff and a 15% chance for movement debuff. Thunder Kick could have a 10% chance for stun and a 10% chance for knockdown. Stuff like that. I'm not sure of the precise way I would want to do this: it would partially depend on what I could get away with. But I don't think pure damage increases across the board are what MA really needs, and increased criticals essentially does that.

Without stun slotting, EC should be wearing off somewhere between CAK and DT. And to repeat that chain, factoring in "ArcanaTime" you'd need EC's recharge to come in under 1.848 + 1.056 + 1.848 + 1.848 + 1.716 = 8.316s and CS's recharge to come under 1.056 + 1.848 + 1.848 + 1.716 + 2.772 = 9.24s. The first is not difficult, requiring +44.3% recharge. The second is harder, requiring +116.5% recharge. If CS is 3-slotted with disorient, its stun duration on an even boss would be 23.2s, and the cycle time of that chain is about 11.1 seconds. CS would be capable of perma-stunning the boss by itself without EC under those conditions, which no one argues CS is incapable of doing with very high recharge and stun slotting.

*However*, the boss would only be stunned about half-way through the chain in the first cycle, and wouldn't be perma-stunned until the second time through.

EC is acting as a margin for error buffer in the event you attack something of significantly higher level and CS cannot quite overlap in that chain. But that perma-stun is coming 90% from CS, and only 10% from EC.

A Dark Melee trying to perma-fear a boss would, with similar levels of recharge on ToF, apply ToF once, and then 3.7 seconds later apply ToF a second time, and in a total of 1.32 + 3.7 = 5.03 seconds the Boss would be perma-feared. What's more, there is so much overlap due to the low recharge and high duration of the effect (base fear duration at level 50: 22s) that the Dark Melee scrapper can focus on attacking and not even have to reapply the fear for nearly 17 seconds at even con. And this is with *no* fear slotting. With fear slotting comparable to the implied stun slotting above, a DM can hit a boss with ToF twice in about eight total seconds, and then wail on him for over thirty five seconds without reapplying (alternatively, the DM can just keep applying ToF as fast as possible, stacking an additional -11% tohit debuff on each application which lasts 20 seconds per application).

Prior to adding Fire, DB, and Electric to scrappers I asserted that MA was about in the middle of the pack in terms of single target damage and inferior in AoE, and could not make the unambiguous case that it had the best secondary effects. Its *still* about in the middle in terms of single target damage, and every single set that is lower than MA on Billz table has unambiguously better AoE with the possible exception of Electric (and only because Electric is a more complex set to analyze, not because it ultimately loses there).

Moreover, of the three sets with *higher* single target potential, two *also* have higher AoE potential, and one has vastly superior secondary effects (anyone that wants to argue that one immobilize, two and a half stuns, a PBAoE knockdown, and a knockback power beats an immobilize, a self heal, a stackable fear that has four times the uptime of CS, an endurance recovery power, and a stackable tohit debuff, be my guest).

MA is not a bad set, because there are no bad scrapper primaries. But its arguably the lowest in overall capability, and unarguably the one original scrapper primary that was given no area to excel in specifically that was achievable**. What's more, the devs know this: its just an incredibly low priority to make the lowest of the good, slightly better.


** Castle has, as I've mentioned previously, told me point-blank that MA was originally intended to be the "jack of all trades" set which specialized in "secondary effects" as those were defined back in the design-days. Unfortunately for MA, what apparently didn't count as a "secondary effect" included nearly every good effect that every other set got: self defense buff (Parry), self heal (Siphon Life), endurance recovery (Dark Consumption), foe tohit debuff (all of Dark Melee), fear (Touch of Fear), defense debuff (both single sword sets), DoT (originally no scrapper set but in Fiery Melee). Apparently none of these was a "secondary effect" as the devs conceived the MA set.

MA was left with stun, knockback, immobilize, and movement debuff. And some genius at the beginning of time put the immobilize and movement debuff in the same power which meant CAK was often debuffing the run speed of things it immobilized.

Then the devs realized that pervasive knockback/down and stackable stuns were too dangerous to allow a single set to have. So MA got the leftover effects, and was specifically barred from having too much of them. That's a recipe for mediocrity. Even the +5% accuracy is honestly weak sauce, because its lower in magnitude than the defense debuff that the swords get, lower in magnitude than the tohit debuff that dark melee gets, and its not stackable. And the single swords get it also. Archery gets +15.5% accuracy: +5% for being a weapon, +10% for being archery, and those were baked into the archery powers multiplicatively. Which is not to say that MA has more issues than Archery overall, its just to demonstrate that +5% is extremely low.

You can perma-stun a boss with Cobra Strike if you slot the hell out of it. But TK and EC aren't going to help you very much, even in the current incarnation of EC. EC's stun at level 50 is only about 4.8 seconds, and including server ticks it has a 2.8 second running time. That means more than half of EC's stun occurs while you are animating the power. Using EC without stun slotting against a +2, the stun is wearing off just a fraction of a second after you land on the ground. I have no problem with saying that's ludicrous on its face.

CS with both disorient slotting and heavy recharge can stack with itself and perma-stun a boss in theory. CS+EC is a stunned boss for a couple seconds. Since CS has base recharge of 20 seconds and EC has base recharge of 12 seconds, the combination itself can perma-stun a boss if you maybe 2-slot EC with disorient and 3-slot it with recharge, or get the equivalent in global recharge buffs and hasten.

I can help a bit there. Dimension Shift used to have five effects:

Intangible
Untouchable
OnlyAffectsSelf
ThreatLevel reduction
Immobilize

It now has four:

Intangible
ThreatLevel reduction
Immobilize
Phased (the new state where shifted targets can attack each other)

In any case, separate from the threat level reduction (-1) in all cases the power applied a +3 mag effect (i.e. +3 mag intangible, +3 mag immobilize).

As I mentioned before and just now checked, all of the effects are tagged to be magnitude effects. What this means is that all strength modifiers and combat modifiers (i.e. purple patch/level scaling) will affect the magnitude of the effect and not the duration.

Side-track to explain. Every power has a set of effects, which are referred to as "attribmods" internally. When a power like Blind does damage and hold, the power has a damage attribmod and a hold attribmod. Dimension Shift used to have five attribmods and now it has four (technically, it used to be ten and now is eight because there is one set of attribmods for PvE and one set for PvP). Each effect has a value called its Scale Value. Basically, the strength of the effect. However, what that scale value means depends on another setting which says whether that scale value is a magnitude or a duration. In the case of most holds, that is set to "Duration" and the scale value is the duration of the effect. There is a separate place where the actual magnitude of the mez is set.

So: a mag three 10 second hold is implemented as a "Scale 10 Mag 3 Type Duration power" (more or less).

Now, if an effect is set to magnitude, then *all* changes to that effect will affect magnitude, period. If an effect is set to duration, then *all* changes to that effect will affect duration, period. This is an Absolute rule of the game engine that cannot be overridden. Note: its currently impossible to make an effect that has both magnitude and duration that can be *both* changed. One is always possible to change, the other is absolutely constant.

Hold enhancements say they increase the duration of a hold, but that's just a simplification and a generalization. Hold enhancements increase the Strength of a hold, and that usually means it increases its duration. In the case of Dimension Shift, because all attribmods are tagged "Magnitude" all enhancements and all combatmods will increase (or decrease) the magnitude of those effects, not their duration (which is constant and *cannot* be changed by any effect in the game, period).

Interestingly, mez *protection* powers are also tagged magnitude and not duration (technically, their mez protection *effects* are, but I sometimes shorten for simplicity). This means anything which can affect their strength will affect their mag protection, not the duration of the effect. Powers like benumb do just that: the benumb debuff will *shorten* the duration of your holds, but lower the magnitude of any protections you have, in both cases obeying the Magnitude/Duration setting of those effects.

If you could somehow slot mez enhancements into mez protection powers, those powers' magnitude protection would increase.


Getting back to Dimension Shift. Because the effects are tagged Magnitude, you should see the effects you tested in terms of magnitude. Slotting will increase magnitude. Fighting lower levels will increase magnitude. Nothing should change duration. The one thing I cannot explain is why mag 3 immobilize doesn't affect a boss but mag 3 untouchable does. Mag 3 should affect both because in both cases the boss has mag -3 protection. The only thing that makes sense is that its as simple as traditional mez was implemented such that Cur > 0 equals mezzed, while the status flags like Untouchable were coded such that Cur >= 0 equals affected.

I have often wondered if one way to encourage more raiding and also bring some of the server-wide community aspect back into Hamidon raiding would be to add server-wide rewards to the encounter. Suppose that every time Hamidon is defeated on a server, that server gets a server-wide -5% debt reduction, or something like that, for 48 hours. Something similar to the zone-wide buffs in the PvP zones, but across the entire server.

Perhaps the bragging rights of being able to say that you helped reduce debt across your entire server for a couple days would add sweetener to the encounter. Maybe the buff could be randomized and include interesting but not game-breaking buffs. Things like 10% movement buff, 1% recovery, 2% accuracy, 0.5% damage, stuff like that. Just thinking out loud.

Is dimension shift slottable for duration? I may be misremembering, but I thought all attribmods (effects) of dimension shift were Magnitude effects (meaning: slotting would increase magnitude, not duration).


On the subject of whether or not even the concept of foe shifting powers are salvagable, I don't presume every power must generate optimal results compared to all other powers. My goal in changing foe intangibles would be to eliminate the unintended downsides of such powers. It would not be to decide for the entire playerbase that such an effect is fundamentally suboptimal, and therefore undeserving of being in the game.

If its determined that the foe intangibles are sufficiently deleterious for powerset performance, I'd improve the other powers to ensure that the overall set presented a materially similar set of tools to other control sets rather than remove the foe intangibles. The only reason I would change my mind on that is if the devs were to datamine dimension shift and discover that a vanishingly small percentage of players either took it or used it ("vanishingly small" in this case would have to be on the order of less than one percent of all gravity controllers or less than a few dozen actual players; once you get into the hundreds of players I'd consider that too high to eliminate). That's why I suggested that beyond addressing what I believe to be unintended consequences of dimension shift, I'd possibly make numerical changes to the rest of the set if they were warranted. But for myself personally, I don't think the essential character of the set is flawed. I just think its tools might not be strong enough overall given CoX's design rules regarding soloability and archetype functionality.

Also: BaB jumped under that bus himself during Issue 9 beta by admitting the design was significantly his idea, which is also why he was monitoring the beta test attempts. This is public, if not common, knowledge.

Hmm, I've never done any of that, because I'm actually unwilling to do any of that. I don't "sit" on character concepts for extended periods of time just because a name isn't available. I assume if a name is unavailable, its permanently unavailable. I never use prefixes or suffixes unrelated to the name. I decide which server I want a character on before I begin making it, and I never change that decision due to name availability. I have never, and will never ask someone to give up a name: I would consider that rude and I can't think of any way to phrase the request that would make it less than presumptuous.

I just make characters and pick names. And to be honest, I've almost never had to take more than a couple of tries to get a name. Half my names I've scored on the first try.

Not that long ago (early this year, if I remember correctly) I decided to make a set of new characters just to test solo leveling speed. But rather than make throwaway characters on test I decided to make permanent characters on live, so I put actual thought into them. The five characters I ended up making (all on Triumph) were:

Libra Moon: DB/Will scrapper
Ms Fortune: Arachnos Widow
Amber Vendetta: Claws/Elec stalker
Plasmina Dynamo: Fire/Kin controller
Electrocutioness: Elec/Elec Brute

Ms Fortune took two tries (Miss Fortune was taken). Libra Moon took three tries (three totally different names). Everything else took one try. Five distinct names in eight total tries. I had no special advantage over any brand new player in picking those names just for being a long-term player. They were not camped, they were generated this year, they use no special strategies to avoid name collisions (unless you count trying both "Ms" and "Miss"), they did not require jumping servers, and I did not have to ask someone to vacate the names. And every name is closely tied with my mental concept for the characters: none of them is a "random" name.

I only ever do what I expect everyone else to do. Think up a character, and then pick a unique name for the character. That's all. No tricks, no special advantages.

The spirit of the "cottage rule" is that players using a power for a particular purpose should be allowed to continue using the power for that purpose. But the specific details can be modified when appropriate, and additional effects added: cf: Energize.

The answer to the question of how I would modify Gravity Control is to specifically target dimension shift. Back in I14 beta I suggested a set of changes to foe intangible powers in general, dimension shift and detention field in particular.

Dimension shift is a 30s foe intangible with 90s recharge. First, I would reduce the duration to 10s and the recharge to 30s. That retains the same amount of uptime, but speeds up cycling the effect. It prevents a single target from being shifted for an excessively long time.

Second: dimension shift unintentionally benefits the targets because it not only makes them unable to attack the player but it also makes them immune to attack. In combat terms, it allows the target to recover unmolested. I would give dimension shift a massive -regen/-recovery effect so that during the duration of the shift, the target can't recover. In other words, they would emerge from the shift no stronger than when they went in, which prevents the shift from being a net benefit to the target.

Third: since the power actually prevents the caster and the caster's allies from attacking the target, its acting as a form of damage debuff on the caster (and team). In my opinion, that doesn't quite compensate for its form of control. Conceptually the power is intended to cause the caster to shift the target out of our dimension, which creates the phase shift-effect (neither can affect the other). There's nothing in the power's description that says the target has to be shifted to a completely safe dimension. I would add a small random DoT to the power that took effect prior to the phase (so it would affect the target within the intangible). The random DoT would represent being shifted to hostile dimensions, and could be random fire DoTs, toxic DoTs, cold DoTs, etc. For flair, I might consider having the foe intangible "detonate" on expiration for (very) minor damage and/or knockdown, particularly to compensate for the fact that the power cannot induce containment.

It would still be an imperfect power to people expecting a more offensive and less control-like ability, but it does (in my opinion) satisfy the core cottage-rule limitation that the power could still be used by players to accomplish the same basic task - to phase shift a target and make it impossible to be attacked or attack back - while adding features consistent with its conceptual definition that would aid the set overall.


I'm not sure what else I'd do to Gravity Control. Mostly minor tweaks to numbers in all likelihood.

Before the MA adjustments:

TK: 1.07s
SK: 1.0s
CS: 1.93s
CK: 2.0s
CAK: 2.17s
DT: 1.67s
EC: 3.0s

After the circa I13 adjustments:

TK: 0.83s
SK: 0.83s
CS: 1.67s
CK: 1.67s
CAK: 1.6s
DT: 1.5s
EC: 2.53s

Some may recall that at one time I used to complain that MA was the only scrapper set that had *three* single target attacks with cast times of 2.0s or more, making it actually a slower set in some ways than Broadsword.

I had asked BaB to look at shaving frames from MA's animations, but I believe that the reason BaB ultimately looked at MA was that he got the green light to eliminate the weapon draw padding from weapon sets, and he looked at MA so it wouldn't get left out (and so I wouldn't get medieval on his ***).


On the subject of Cobra Strike. On many occasions I've advocated reducing Cobra Strike's recharge so that it is consistent with ToF. I think the problem is that CS can stack with the other MA stuns, and that fences Castle into not allowing CS to generate too much stun magnitude per minute. However, I don't think that is a legitimate barrier to reducing CS's recharge. It can't stack with EC until at least level 32, which means for half the game CS doesn't have a legitimate stacking partner (TK is not a legitimate stacking partner in terms of balance: its chance for effect is too low). That isn't true for ToF: ToF's stacking partner is ToF itself. And I don't buy the issue that stun is so much of a better effect than fear that it must be moderated much more strongly. In the case of a single target melee power, the difference is minimal. Contrary to common belief, fear doesn't break on *every* instance of damage. In fact, a DM spamming ToF on a Boss to keep him perma-feared will likely only get attacked about every ten to fifteen seconds, if that (and that doesn't factor in the fact that a Boss would be tohit debuffed to the point of missing most of those attacks anyway).

In terms of overall capability, CS is a bit too low for what it does, especially compared to its two closest peers: Parry (DA) and ToF. Since its defined to be a control power with minor damage, adding damage is not consistent with its definition. Since its not in a control set, increasing mag to 4 is also unpalatable. But reducing its recharge is not out of the question.

The MA secondary effects are such a mess, if I had my way I'd wipe them out completely and start over (or rather, I'd grandfather the current MA set and make a new one with the same powers - which is also something that goes a bit contrary to the devs' design ethic). But given what we have now, I think CS can use a bit of a buff. Unfortunately, the only buff I can think of that I think has any chance at all is a recharge reduction. I think all my other suggestions for CS have an even lower chance of getting done.

Unfortunately, Castle hasn't quite come to that realization yet, or MA would have had a PBU-variant a couple of years ago. Quite a stubborn fellow, Castle.

I think I now recall that. Was this the super-secret "use 24 rad defenders with 6-slotted snipe" strategy? That wasn't really all that secret.

In fact, it was the fact that Hamidon seemed to be vulnerable to such hyper-optimized strategies that caused me to step down from leading the raids on Triumph. Back then, I only told two people why: that's why. I was a strong proponent of open raiding, and I did not want to be a part of any strategy that excluded people from the raid. But those were the only kinds of strategies I could think of, which made me an impediment to my own strategic thinking. When I couldn't resolve that conflict, I stepped down.

I'm happy that when Hami finally went down on Triumph, it was in a 100% open raid. In fact, we might have been just the second or third successful open-to-all raid.

Damage is better than endurance reduction for DPS and equal to endurance for DPE. It has nothing to do with whether you "hit or not." If you don't hit, your damage for that attack is zero and your DPE is zero both ways. Endurance is better for EPS, but that's not improving your efficiency if it also takes longer to kill the target and you have to burn just as much endurance, just over a longer period of time.

However, one thing most players aren't educated on, and most guides and discussions overlook, is that the proportional effect of enhancements is not constant. This means mixtures of enhancements are better overall than more of the same.

Take an attack that has a 75% chance to hit, does 100 damage, and burns 10 end. If you slot a +10% accuracy enhancement that will have the same effect on DPS and DPE as a +10% damage enhancement (I know real TOs and DOs don't buff by that much, this is just to simply the math). In the first case, accuracy goes up to 75 * 1.1 = 82.5%, and your average damage per attack is 0.825 * 100 = 82.5. In the second case your average damage per attack is 0.75 * 110 = 82.5. So in both cases, average DPS is the same, and obviously average DPE is the same.

But what's better: two accuracy, two damage, or one of each? Well, we have:

Accx2: 0.75 * 1.2 * 100 = 90
Dmgx2: 0.75 * 100 * 1.2 = 90
Acc+Dmg: 0.75 * 1.1 * 100 * 1.1 = 90.75

In this case, one accuracy and one damage does more damage per attack than two of either. The difference is small, but its there. And if you're concerned about DPE, the best situation will be Acc+Dmg+End.

In other words, the act of slotting an enhancement changes the situation in terms of what the best thing to slot into the power is. The same logic is why people recommend endurance reduction over damage slotting for brutes: brutes get a lot of "free damage slotting" with fury, and that makes endurance slotting proportionately more valuable.


Perceptually slotting a lot of endurance only at the early levels gives the appearance of better DPE, when its actually only improving EPS. You burn less endurance per second. But you're taking longer to kill each thing, and the net result is that its taking more endurance per kill. The only reason for slotting a lot of endurance over other enhancements as a tanker is if kill speed is completely irrelevant to you, and the reason you're attacking at all is primarily for gauntlet. In that case, the only thing that matters is that you can maintain a high level of activity, and you don't care what that activity does. In that case, you want to slot accuracy and endurance reduction specifically over damage, because neither DPS nor DPE matter to you anymore, and the only thing that matters is EPS which will limit your activity level.

Regens were preferred because they could tank the nucleus solo, as long as a nearby mito didn't take a crack at them, *if* they build to maximum effectiveness. Maximum effectiveness being: fully slotting FH+INT+IH, plus slotted recon, plus slotted Dull Pain, plus hasten. If you didn't have the full boat (or weren't loaded with HOs) you probably wouldn't be able to keep up indefinitely. The number of regens with every single regen recovery power and taunt were, of course, low. The way this worked was that the attack team cleared out a 90 degree arc around Hamidon, which cleared space for the regen to tank the nucleus. That in combination with PA drops would keep the nucleus firing on the Regen and the mitos firing on the PA or everyone else.

(The yellow mitos actually hit harder overall but the nucleus was an AoE and was thus much more dangerous to the attack team in general. That's why it was more important to tank away nucleus aggro than worry about what any of the mitos did.)

Otherwise, any tanker with empath support could do it, but they were basically acting as large bags of health with taunt.


Granite was worthless against Hamidon because Hamidon shots were untyped: typed resistance was worthless and typed defense was worthless (for a brief time in there, PFF and Elude had base defense and offered protection against Hamidon: Granite never did). Granite was more than worthless because its recharge debuffs would slow down taunt and EE for no benefit. But Stone tankers themselves were a little better than the average tanker due to Rooted. But even with Rooted and EE, I'm pretty sure Stone tankers needed heal support to tank Hamidon. A maxed out Regen didn't.

Just FYI: Accuracy bonuses affect players with and without defense equally, until you run into the tohit ceiling. Meaning for all intents and purposes, accuracy bonuses up to about +90% are "fair" to defensive sets.** Past that point, they start to become marginally "unfair." Inventions do allow accuracy bonuses to reach and exceed that value, so there is a certain amount of unfairness. But its not as much as sometimes portrayed. In addition, accuracy is affected by diminishing returns in PvP, which further reduces the likelihood of seeing accuracy strengths far above +90%.


On the subject of the cottage rule. The cottage rule is a compromise based on two assumptions:

1. No matter what it is or what it does, there are a lot of players that like it that way. A power that does 2 points of damage and has a 50% chance of killing the caster is going to be loved by a double-digit percentage of the player population for some reason or other.

2. The devs have to change things.

Given that, the devs try hard to avoid making changes to purpose, mechanics, or general effects whenever possible, because they have no way to know how many players like the current version, but its presumed to be a lot of them. They cannot make that promise with numerical strength, so they don't.


Now, as a thought experiment, if the cottage rule could be avoided, what would I change? That's a good question. Honestly, given that one-time get out of jail free card, I would probably blank out the Kheldians altogether and redesign them from scratch (it does scare me that I'm repeating a thought EvilRyu had). I would make the forms have subsets of the human form powers, not different ones, and then give the forms special bonuses on certain powers (for example, I would give the human form a number of ranged attacks, but those attacks would be boosted in Nova form, while some others were suppressed that required human form). This would eliminate the slotting problem with multi-form Kheldians. I'd better distinguish and balance Peacebringers and Warshades. And I'd probably give them two completely different inherents. I'd give the Warshades buffs for being on teams, and I'd give Peacebringers buffs that were applied to team mates. And to ensure that Kheldians weren't seen as having no "solo-useful inherent" I would give each form a special bonus: Nova form would get a damage buffing "inherent," Dwarf form would get a resistance to debuffs inherent, and human form would get a small regen/recovery buff.

If the devs ever hire me to be the epic archetype designer and suspend the cottage rule, that's a preview of what EATs become. Otherwise, not likely.


** Accuracy buffs proportionately "hurt" everyone with or without defense the same way. If you have no defense and get hit 50% of the time, a 1.33 accuracy attack will hit you 33% more often, 50% * 1.33 = 66.5%. If you do have defense, say 30% defense, your base chance to be hit drops to 20%, and a 1.33 accuracy power hits you also 33% more often, 20% * 1.33 = 26.6%.

This first-order rule of thumb works until you get to +90% accuracy, where someone with zero defense gets hit 50% * 1.9 = 95% of the time. At that point, more accuracy has no effect on that target. But it can still continue to affect the target with defense. But this is usually a relatively minor difference.

There are second-order effects related to things like burst damage or the streakbreaker, but those are usually considered the price of having defense, and not a specific bias related to accuracy buffs per se.

Yeah, I neglected to mention that (I was worried about getting bogged down in exceptions). And Castle did tell me once that Kismet is intentionally +Tohit, even though its description incorrectly describes it as +Accuracy.

What I probably should have said was "no enhancement increases an individual power's tohit" which would have been both accurate and still simple enough for people unfamiliar with the complexities.

According to the devs, the EvP game is balanced around you taking on six to eight standard players with SO slotting. The Master of Nihilii challenge was designed to be very difficult to complete. Some AV builds may be more effective at this challenge, and not all AV teams will be equally successful. This is working as intended.

I never checked it personally, but I remember reading it in the Issue 14 release notes (they are long, so I would recommend searching for "60").

It has negative value to you. It has positive value to NCSoft, because at least some players value it. Therefore, NCSoft has to consider removing that feature as having a negative value (a cost) associated with it which counterbalances the benefit of adding a non-unique character naming feature. That should factor into not just the decision on whether to implement such a feature, but whether its even worth the cost of attempting to determine if such a feature is cost-effective. The question is how likely is it to be a net-positive.

I see no reason to believe that likelihood is high. I see no reason to believe that likelihood is low either, but in such a circumstance NCSoft would be better served pursuing game improvement opportunities that are much more likely to be bear fruit. In other words, not only is it likely to be low on the list to implement, its likely to be low on the list to study.


There's only one thing I can think of that would significantly change that situation: cross-server content. If the devs are considering cross-server PvP, or even something more dramatic like cross-server teaming, then the whole question of unique naming becomes in-play, because relative to the issue of cross-server identity, no character name is guaranteed unique already, and the issue of resolving character name collisions is forced.

Also, back when Hami buds spawned it was also one per target affected, so controllers would start spawning pets like crazy, often just *before* Hamidon was defeated to try to get the maximum number out (until that point, most raid leaders restricted pet usage to Sings, because Sings had lots of holds and they could be used as targeting proxies).

For those that did bot attend the early level 50 raids and aren't familiar with the "buds" being refrenced in this thread, when Hamidon was defeated it would spawn one "bud" per target, much like a yellow dawn, that was a boss-class critter and would drop a Hamidon enhancement when defeated (it was a small two foot radius object that looked like a miniature Hamidon nucleus: it was intended to be a Hamidon fragment I believe). This created a couple problems, most noteworthy of which was that since the reward logic in CoH only requires a player do some minimum amount of damage to a target to have a *chance* at its drops, anyone with AoEs would just go berserk hitting everything in sight, because a chance to get drops from thirty buds was a lot better than a guaranteed chance at getting one from a target to kill in a dedicated matter (it wasn't uncommon to have players trip mine the entire area specifically for this reason, as mentioned previously).

Since the encounter spawned one bud per player (plus or minus some pets), anyone who got two meant someone else got none. If you were melee or single-target only, you had a really good chance of being out of luck (due to the lag induced on the server at that moment, your chances of being able to effectively move to any target to hit it with a melee attack were nearly zero). Being on teams mitigated this somewhat, but you definitely did not want to be on a team with seven scrappers and a mind controller. The team with six fire blasters and two dev blasters would simply take all your drops.

As long as you start from the premise that the right to a unique character name on a server has zero value, its easy to create systems that eliminate that right that have no cost.

And we just got rid of using idle time to remove items from character's auction slots. I find it difficult to believe that wasn't done because the idea of removing anything, even a right like right to unique name, from an otherwise active paid account was considered to cause more harm than good.

The original player does lose something. The question is always is it worth it to take it away from them, knowing it might harm your relationship with that customer. Sometimes, that's true. In this case, I think that's highly questionable.


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Chat windows
Team Windows
Supergroup listings
Above characters in the UI
Arena interfaces
Trade windows
City Terminals
Player Notes


In all of these cases there is a need for identifiers to be unambiguous, and in many of them there is an additional need for the user interface to reserve sufficient space to display the worst case scenario length identifier. Some of them are easier to alter than others, but all of them would require some developer work. I still don't see the "elegant" solution that is continuously presumed to exist.

That's only a side benefit, comparable to, say, snaring the illiterate and belittling them.


Because correctness has nothing whatsoever to do with good and bad at all. Correctness is purely an objective measure of whether the site implements the business logic the company intends to support, whether that business logic is "good" or "bad." If the intent of the business is to screw their customers, then the site is operating correctly. That's neither opinion nor semantics. That's a professional assessment on the nature of correctness for a software system.

Whether the business practices being discussed are good or bad is a subjective opinion. Whether the site is operating correctly or not is an objective judgement that can be inferred from Mod08's statement. Its therefore irrelevant whether the business practice of allowing customers to do what the site allows them to do is a good one or a bad one. If its a bad one, the site is incorrect. If its a good one, the site is still incorrect. Either way, the site is essentially bugged. That's the definition of "irrelevant."

And that's on top of the fact that, as I mentioned just a few posts up, that the site would be considered improperly designed and implemented by any professional programmer worth anything. There may be mitigating circumstances, but if the site programmers said it wasn't a high priority to fix, that would be one thing. If the site programmers said it wasn't actually an error, I could probably make the professional case they were not competent as software designers.

In either case, I believe saying the site is bugged is a stronger statement than saying its annoying.

Conflating working as intended with working as desired is very common when judging software, as evidenced by most discussions surrounding changes to the game itself. But its not an error I ever excuse colloquialisms from perpetrating in most contexts.

Also, my new Dell USB keyboard doesn't have that satisfying click to the keys, mores the pity.

And the Guardians, who also self-appointed themselves as arbiters of life and death? What are they known as?

This was mentioned early and often during the beta as a reasonable compromise to spawn point control issues. The assumption was that editing spawn points would probably have to wait for a map editor system, but simply selecting spawn points would require much less work.

What you could do for maximum flexibility with limited alterations to code is allow players to create a "spawn point group" just like they create critter groups that can list a set of spawn point entries for a given map. Then allow objectives and enemies to spawn at "Spawn Group 3" instead of "front." Then issue a directive that states if maps are ever edited and spawn points added or removed, the absolute ID of every existing spawn point not removed is left unchanged. That wouldn't take much programming and the art department won't have to extend the UI much.


Maybe I should send a memo to Dr. Aeon.