Arcanaville

Las Vegas seems to be full of them. Although technically speaking many of them are very expensive puzzles.

I don't think its possible to make a raid where tactics are important, but at least some players don't feel like they are trapped or controlled by those tactical dictates. The original level 50 Hamidon was a degenerate case where there was a functional strategy that had very few tactical components that couldn't be heavily automated. For all its social side-benefits, I don't think that is a good target to aim for in general.

The collective story of how it got to this state in the first place is probably a lot more interesting than the actual raids themselves. As I was one of the people involved in the early days of the level 50 Hamidon, I'm privy to some but not all the details. I know, for example, that the tactic of dropping Phantom Army was first invented on Triumph during a raid I was leading by an in-game friend of mine. Prior to that, the absolute rule was no pets because the thought was that pets would draw unnecessary aggro. It didn't occur to anyone until that moment that they could be dropped from outside mito range by a controller far away from the rest of the players to draw aggro away from the attacking group.

(At least, that is my understanding to the best of my knowledge, and when tactics were discussed at the time no one contradicted my statement that PA dropping was unique at the time Triumph first started doing it).

I don't know who first invented Regen tanking. I do recall that the hold strategy was formulated after a test server raid (which was coordinated between people on different servers to try out strategies in an environment where it would be easier to experiment and also try to get a larger number of sustained raiders) where a player (I forget which one, but I probably have the name written down somewhere) happened to notice that Hamidon was getting held momentarily in his chat logs.

And I know that the players (Freedom in particular) actually "invented" the proscribed "proper" strategy for taking down Hamidon that was designed into the encounter (the triangle attack pattern) but I don't think (not certain) it was ever used to success, because the hold strategy preempted it before it could be perfected. And most of us thought it couldn't be the "correct" strategy because it was too silly.

Plus the level 50 Hamidon is a veritable mosh-pit of weird tactics. Phase shift targeters? Check. Fulcrum-shifting swarms? Check. Intergalactic-ranged snipers? Check. Enervating field as an attack? Check. My guess is that if everyone that was involved from about November 2004 to May 2005 collaborated, you could fill a book on just the level 50 Hami raid activities.


On a personal note, I believe the very first time I ever PMed BaB was to discuss the I9 Hamidon update. Specifically to chide him for making defense worthless in it. Come to think of it, the I9 beta test of the revamped Hamidon has its own set of memes associated with it. RUN FASTER, for example. It seems Hamidon has always contributed more to the lore of the game than to the actual gameplay of the game, Oil Slick Arrow and Howling Twilight notwithstanding.

This definition of "gear" seems to be: gear is something that must be collected or acquired that alters the capabilities of the player/character in ways that differentiate the capabilities of individual players.

Given that definition, it does not follow logically that "a game without gear is a game that can't create obstacles." The missing element from this argument is the question of strategy. Its possible at least in theory to construct a game with no gear, in which the defining characteristic of the obstacles is non-trivial strategic uses of otherwise universal items. In other words, there is no logical argument that states its impossible to make a game in which the goal of the game is to find innovative uses for the resources that everyone possesses in roughly equal measure.


I don't think I can accept your first principle of games either. I think in the abstract, games have a requirement for some form of "social interaction" by a very loose definition of social interaction, but the key word "copy" creates a problem. It suggests that its impossible for there to exist social interactions that can only exist within the context of games. If games are only copies of social interactions, no social interaction can ever be invented by or inspired by a game. And this places a limitation not just on games, but on human beings themselves.

I'd recommend external USB hard drive over burning to CDs. You can get drives with three times the capacity of the OPs entire computer for about $70 or less, all the files will still be available to use, and when you buy a new computer you can use it to transfer all your files to the new system, and still keep the drive for external storage or to move things to different locations.

Lower, not higher. Launching at an angle should cause your upward velocity to be lower than if you launched straight up at that same velocity, which should lower your maximum altitude.


Only if the calculations do something funky, like attempt to honor certain limits or do vector sums incorrectly, because lateral speed alone shouldn't affect final altitude if the velocity calculations are done correctly, even if velocity obeys a cap throughout the jump. Your velocity entering the parabolic arc would be higher, but only because it would be (or should be) the vector sum of your ascent speed and your forward motion.

Its on my list of things to investigate one rainy day, although I will say its been on that list for a couple years now, mainly because it seems to be such a small and usually immaterial effect. But now that I've posted about it, it might start to gnaw on me to figure it out.

1. There really isn't any such thing as a "purple triangle power" - its just the catch-all term for the collective protections AVs tend to have. But since they are actually created separately for each AV, its theoretically possible for the "purple triangles" to be different for different AVs. Normally, they are all very similar, but there are tiny occasional difference between them.

2. I'm unaware of a "purple triangle" that offers mez resistance, except for knockback resistance. There could be one I just don't know off the top of my head, but most I can think of do not.

3. I am aware of at least one AV that does have 100% mez resistance: Hamidon.

4. 100% mez resistance isn't a lot of protection anyway: mez is usually a duration effect, and 100% resistance for duration effects only cuts the duration in half, it doesn't offer immunity like 100% resistance to a magnitude effect does.

5. As far as I recall, the mez resistance cap for AVs is still 100%.

Derailment? I thought we were supposed to be Kung Fu Fighting?

Even that's not relevant to the question of whether the ordering site is operating correctly, because Mod8 seems to be suggesting that people who order duplicates or improperly apply duplicate codes can probably ask customer service for refunds. So actually the online store allows for errors that NCSoft's business practice appears to allow people to back out of. Which makes them unnecessary errors.

My guess is that the only reason this hasn't been fixed yet is because very few people have complained about it, which suggests to them that the probability of someone stumbling into the error is extremely small, and that prioritizes fixing it very low.

That's *also* not the question. And in fact, elsewhere in the thread its already been stated by me and others that the question of "which origin should I pick" is generally only restricted by personal narratives as well.

Somehow, you've stumbled into people discussing who's older, Luke Skywalker or Yoda, and attempted to turn it into a discussion about whether teenagers can be Jedi Masters.

Your alternate viewpoint of origin is interesting, and would be an interesting point of discussion if we were discussing "what role should origin play in City of Heroes version 2.0?" But we were not talking about the limits of origin, just the simple academic exercise of fitting Superman's origin to the definitions of Origin currently in the game.

This is irrelevant to the discussion. The Origins themselves have an actual stated set of definitions. Its legitimate to ask what Superman's best-fit origin is given those definitions.

If you want to get into a discussion of the role that enhancements play from a game design perspective, just say so. However, its obvious that while the original game design intent was to have origin have an actual developmental meaning, the eventual decision was to make enhancements redundant. In other words, Origin doesn't determine what kind of enhancements you can get so much as it determines the labels they have. The only real difference is who sells them (at times) which is hardly any difference at all. They are distinctions without a difference (which is normally a sign of a game design error or compromise, actually).


Also totally irrelevant, because the question was never "is it possible to define origin in such a way to make Superman be <fill in the blank> origin?" The fact that CoX has extremely loose narrative connections to its underlying mechanics has always meant people could justify almost any cosmetic decision (and many non-cosmetic ones besides). But that's completely irrelevant to the discussion of which origin's definition best matches Superman. Interpreting that question as a narrative challenge is substituting the question for a completely different one.

It would be no different than if someone asked "what origin are Kheldians" and I said "Natural" and you said "wrong, they are magic, because" and then proceeded to give a twelve page personalized backstory that you use to justify a divergence from the canon description. Interpreting the question as "what origin are Kheldians [i]in whatever personal narrative you've invented for yourself" is willful side-tracking.

Now, if you do want to side track into a discussion of whether the game design would be better served with evocative game mechanical devices or simulative ones, that's cool also. Its a topic I don't find many opportunities to discuss in the thirty odd years I've been thinking about that particular topic.


You're right: it does nothing. Because I never challenged the assertion that personal narratives are limited only really by creativity. In fact, I've asserted that for essentially as long as I've been on the forums to assert anything. It is, as I said, irrelevant to what origin's definition Superman best matches. If you want to personally justify his origin as magic leprechauns, be my guest. I'm not denying you the right or questioning your ability to do just that. It just has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about.

I see two "Black Jackals" standing next to me. I want to send one of them a chat. Before I can click on one of them, which would be theoretically unambiguous selection, they both run off. How do I type a chat line directed at the correct one?

I see two "Black Jackals" standing next to me. One of *them* wants to send me a tell and does so. If the "II" doesn't show up in chat, how do I know which one it was? If two of them are simultaneously sending tells, how do I know which one is sending which message?

Suppose I only see one "Black Jackal" standing next to me and I get a tell from "Black Jackal." How can I be sure its the one actually standing next to me? How likely is it that someone else might make an error and assume it is, and be wrong?

Ultimately, its impossible to hide extra distinguishing prefixes and suffixes, because in every setting where character names appear, that may be at that moment the only way to identify the desired character. That means whatever is visible must be unique. That's why you can have duplicate character names across servers: its impossible for someone on one server to "see" someone's name that's on a different server. The exception is the global chat system, where people are known by global handle because again, the visible identifier must be unique. If the visible identifier is not unique, its not an identifier. In a system like an MMO, the identifier cannot be "almost always correct." That's bad game design of the first order.

I would have thought this was not necessary to state, but it seems to be. Every character must have a unique identifier in every setting in the game, and that unique identifier must be visible to all other players that can interact with them in that setting. Any attempt to play games with identifiers that breaks this rule is guaranteed to create a problem somewhere as a logical consequence, because this requirement cannot be nullified. Doing so creates circumstances where players cannot uniquely identify each other in a given setting. I would say that as a rule, that is always bad design.


This has nothing to do with player errors: that's irrelevant to whether the design decision is a good one. Saying "players sometimes make mistakes, so its ok for the system to do so as well" would be like saying sometimes players buy the wrong enhancements, so its ok for the game systems to occasionally give them the wrong enhancements.

What are your plans for the Architect for the build after the release of Going Rogue?

There are Accuracy enhancements which increase the accuracy of the power they are slotted into. There are also powers which increase ToHit chance such as tactics. Yellow inspirations (insights) also increase tohit.

There are no enhancements that increase your tohit directly. There are enhancements that make *powers* that increase your tohit stronger.

Short answer: slot accuracy to make a power hit more often. Use yellow inspirations to temporarily make it easier to hit things. Pick powers that increase tohit if you want to have powers that make you hit more often.


The difference between tohit and accuracy can get a bit bogged down by math, so here's the simplified version. You as the player have a base chance to hit things that is 75% by default. Attacking things that are higher level than you will reduce that chance, as will attacking things with Defensive powers. At very low levels, you'll have a bonus that starts off strong and gets weaker as you get higher in level, specifically to make things easier on lower level characters that have limited ability.

Accuracy increases your chance to hit the target by a proportional amount. If you have +33% accuracy, that means you hit 33% more often. So if your chance to hit was 50 percent, a +33% accuracy power will hit 33 percent more often, or 50 * 1.33 = 66.5%.

On the other hand, boosting your tohit increases your chance to hit by a flat amount. If your chance to hit was 50% and you increased tohit by 33 percentage points, your net chance to hit would increase to 83% (50 + 33).

All other things being equal, more tohit is better than more accuracy. But all things aren't equal, because its relatively easy to get more accuracy, and usually harder to get consistently higher tohit.

If you have some of both, life gets a bit more complicated. See: Attack Mechanics.

I was very deliberate in picking a specific instance of the Batman, to dodge these sorts of hypotheticals. As I said: "I would say the only time a downstream act can redefine origin is when its dramatic enough to redefine the character itself." You're suggesting that under certain circumstances, Batman could have been very different. And that would satisfy my own caveat that if the act is dramatic enough in terms of altering the character, it could qualify as a different origin.

"Is it the tools or the man who uses them that makes the hero. Take away Batman's batarangs and he'll still be able to outsmart his foes even with more spartan methods. Take away Iron Man's armour, and he's helpless." Its not quite so simple. Some beings aren't helpless when they have their defining superabilities removed, sometimes because prior to that they had *other* defining superabilities. See: Frankie Raye. And sometimes the tools are necessary but not the source of the ability: see (albeit not a hero) Bullseye.

I think you need to look at what abilities are core to the character concept and which are ancillary (which is sometimes subjective), and then look for the root cause of those abilities in terms of the origins CoX includes, until you find the best possible match consistent with the definitions in the game. I don't think its possible to simplify the process more than that without creating an overabundance of special cases.

I meant in terms of the origin of the Superman character or his powers. I will concede that Superman Red and Superman Blue might both be considered science-origin entities at least in part.


That's an interesting perspective. You're suggesting that we ignore the actual definition for Origin that the game presents to the players, because that textual definition has no game mechanical consequence, but you're willing to look at the textual descriptions of the enhancements and consider them definitive, even though they too have no game mechanical consequences.

In other words: Natural Origin says your powers are intrinsic to yourself, we can ignore. Natural Origin Enhancement says monk trained you on a mountain top to increase hold duration, that we cannot ignore? On its face, I cannot consider this argument valid because its inconsistent in how it treats the in-game information. It cherry picks.

Also, it doesn't cherry pick very well: Natural Origin SOs don't say how you were trained. You could have simply trained yourself, which certainly Superman has done. In terms of his core abilities, the classic iteration of Superman best matches someone with innate abilities not the result of any external magic, scientific experiment, mutation, or technological enhancement, and were simply improved by learning and practice.

This perspective is also unusual in that it redefines "origin" to be "anything which can change your powers *long after* your character is created. In other words, this line of thought states that anyone that goes through the respec trial and executes a respec is automatically either Science or Mutation origins, the only two consistent with being exposed to radiation and having your powers significantly altered.

There has to be significant weight placed on the *origin* of your powers to determine what origin you are. My natural MA/SR doesn't become technology origin because she gains a nemesis staff: that's ancillary to her primary super abilities, and also ancillary to her actual origin as a superhero.

I would say the only time a downstream act can redefine origin is when its dramatic enough to redefine the character itself. If the character simply isn't the same character anymore because of that change, you could argue that that event was the "origin" of the new character, and the metaphorical "death" of the old one. Jean Grey might have been a mutant with telepathic powers, but arguably once she became the Phoenix she was effectively a completely different superhero with a completely different origin (before all the retcons). Short of that, though, I don't think its reasonable to suggest that acts you take downstream can affect your origin. To do so suggests that origin is fluid, and that contradicts the intended meaning of "origin."

Lets apply this to an example. Daredevil gets hit by chemicals, gains supersenses. Acknowledging that this event has been interpreted in different ways, lets just assume for now that this is a Science origin. The important fact is that he gained these senses by one method. He then decides much later to fight crime with these senses, and he makes his billy club, clearly a technological invention. The question is: is that billy club a part of his origin, or a *consequence* of his origin. In this case, I would say the origin of his "powers" was the event that gave him his senses. The billy club is only a tool he made to augment those senses. While you could make the case that Daredevil is Science/Tech dual origin, I don't think that argument has much substance to it. Daredevil is still Daredevil even without that tool. Murdock decided to become Daredevil (at least in concept) before making that tool. Ergo, its not a part of his *origin*. It could be considered part of his *development* but that's a different thing.

Nolan's Batman is also a case where there is very heavy use of "natural" origin abilities and technology. In this case I think a case could be made both ways, although I think the fact that Wayne had already decided to become a "superhero" when he returned to Gotham, and would have done so with or without the technological trappings available to him, suggests that the origin of the Batman was natural, and the technology only a set of tools layered on top.

Although there is some grey area here, I think its obvious that the intent of "origin" in City of Heroes was not to be a game mechanical contrivance, but to represent the event that grants super abilities to the character. Everything past that point has to bent to the requirements of MMOs and *is* colored by being at least in part a game mechanical contrivance, and the technical mechanics of those requirements may not perfectly parallel the fictional directives of the genre.

You don't fight in 6 inch heels. You jump out of aircraft in 6 inch heels. You switch out of them to fight of course.

Also, there seems to be nothing wrong with using Walk while in combat.

You keep saying that, but haven't suggested one yet. What do you do about players on the same team. Do you list them by character name and guess, or do you list them by global name and also guess (since their characters are going to be displayed by character name, or are you suggesting removing that as well).

The whole *point* of having character names is to be identified by them. If you're allowing for people to not care what they show up visibly to the rest of the game as, then for people who want non-unique names and are willing to have that name not be the actual identifier for their character, *I* have a suggestion: put random numbers in the character ID field and put your character's "real name" in your bio. Now your character has whatever name you want, and your character ID field is just a placeholder to uniquely identify your character. Problem solved.


Why do people keep thinking I'm guessing on matters such as these?

Ok, suppose you're BaB and you think this is the greatest idea ever. You can always present that to the rest of the dev team and see if you can advocate getting it implemented. However, there's probably an intermediate producer responsible for systems related to chat or related systems: he would have veto power on the idea. Positron as the lead designer would have veto power. Brian would probably have veto power. Separate from all of them, on a matter as wide-ranging as this there would probably be an internal discussion of the idea, and if a large majority of the devs expressed serious reservations, that would probably also kill the idea, if not delay it substantially. Then you'd have to discuss it with the programming team. While they do not have explicit veto power over the idea, they have a way to express their overall preferences by presenting the opportunity cost of implementation: given their estimates of how long it would take, what else won't get done. And if you think this is always an objective process, you're operating outside the boundaries of reality. If they think the idea sucks badly enough, it'll get implemented next thursday 2021 right after nostril-hair sliders, unless it was made a high priority task which is extraordinarily unlikely.

The dev team is not normally a dictatorship: its a collaboration. There are design decisions made at the top, sure, but most of the time ideas are vetted across the dev team, and usually everyone gets some input into whether something is implemented, and when its implemented how its implemented (if it affects an area of the game they are involved in). Something like changing the way characters are identified is something that I'm pretty sure will pass through lots of hands and is unlikely to be a decision made dictatorially. And that's why I'm pretty sure it would get killed in the crib: its a high risk low payoff move that I doubt anyone would go to the mat to get done, but at least one person involved would expend sufficient energy to kill.

The only way this gets done is if Positron or Brian fall in love with the idea. I don't know either well enough to know if they would fall in love with the idea, but I think they probably have more interesting things on their plate right now.


Oh, and by the way, taunt wasn't implemented "contrary to design" it was the documentation that was out of sync with the implementation (that occurs a lot: player accuracy buffs were another example of implementation being out of sync with either documentation or general knowledge). And the random number generator error in the reward system wasn't the result of a programmer implementing their own priorities, but bad programming period.

Superman does not in general perform scientific experiments upon himself to enhance his existing powers or gain new ones. You can't drop the "scientific experiments" part from "exposure to weird radiations and substances" or its not science anymore. It might not have been a deliberate scientific experiment on you personally, and it might not have been a scientific experiment conducted by you personally, but the presumption is always that the effect was a product of scientific research. The Sun is not the product of scientific research.

Furthermore you're attempting to make the case that what affects Superman's capabilities the most is exposure to the sun, not his intrinsic Kryptonian biology. In effect, you're saying that a human being standing in the sun is intrinsically closer to having superpowers than a Kryptonian on Krypton, because the Kryptonian must still get to a yellow sun, which is more than what the human being has to do, which is only become Kryptonian.

I don't think that is likely to match most people's definition of "affects the most." Its his Kryptonian physiology that is most responsible for his capabilities: yellow sunlight only unlocks that ability without actually changing his physiology in any way (that has ever been stated as far as I know).

Super Reflexes Stalker. His horse was shot out from under him and he took four bullets through his coat without getting hit once in the French-Indian War. His two most memorable tactical actions during the Revolutionary War were a sneak attack on Trenton and a stealthy escape from Long Island.

Way out at the edge of performance you can still save a lot of money by building instead of buying complete systems, and that config is way out there. Although to be honest, I couldn't build that system for $1100 US without stealing half the parts off the back of a truck. I might be able to do it for $2k, but that was outside my price range.

At least you're ready for Ultra Mode. Just out of curiosity, what sort of screensize/framerate does CoX give you at maximum detail settings?

That's no different than saying everyone should be able to experience all of the core mission content "eventually." If the servers close too soon after someone joins, that will also be impossible. However, its not relevant to whether the opportunity exists as a design issue.

As I've mentioned previously, this objection is also theoretically defuseable in a trivial way by simply stating that if the servers were to ever close, everyone would get every veteran badge at least one hour before server shutdown as a parting gift.

Short version: don't just make it up as you go along.