Arcanaville

I find it interesting that people think new players are more likely to prioritize being able to have any name they want for their characters as higher than protecting the uniqueness of that name once they generate it. Making names non-unique only attracts more newer players if you believe they wouldn't want the same uniqueness protection we currently have now.

I don't think there's any evidence that such a system would be preferred over unique names by a majority of the prospective customers of the game in the long run. If it was the case that this was something only the long-time players liked, and newer players did not like, then by now the vast majority of players - most of which joined the game significantly after launch - would want this reversed. But I haven't seen such a trend. This suggests to me that the current naming system is unlikely to be a significant deterrent to people subscribing to the game (even if the game self-selects people that won't quit over the feature, its statistically unlikely that it would do so in a way that wouldn't at least admit more people that were opposed to the feature but were willing to tolerate it to play the game).

Personally, I think the global@character naming system to be ugly beyond belief myself, and I can think of no palatable alternatives that accomplish the same thing.

The "no temp powers" setting is a slight misnomer. Powers are individually classified as to which modes of the game they are compatible with. Ninja Run is classified to be disabled in any situation where all powers are disabled (no, seriously**), travel powers are disabled, or temp powers are disabled. That's baked into the power and has nothing to do with its name or where it shows up in your powers listing.


** There are powers that are not disabled even when "all powers" are disabled: Vahz disease, for example, isn't set to be disabled when "all powers" are disabled with the standard disable-all setting.

Correction: it only took BaB three years to make Walk. He hasn't been here for five, and the two years his predecessor spent on it didn't have enough butt-wiggle on the female emote so he had to start from scratch.

Personally, I think the three years BaB spent animating female hips (he only spent six minutes on the male and huge animations) was better spent than the four years Castle spent setting the Walk speed cap. I mean come on: if it takes more than eight months, you're doing it wrong.

You posted it on the internet.

I see examples all over the place, although I don't always think they learned the right lessons.

Some things they did seem to learn, though:

1. Diminishing returns
2. Designing for the maximum achievable stats
3. Implementing PvP from the start so it has to be balanced simultaneously with PvE powers evolution (whether they are balancing well is a separate issue)
4. Reduced AoE effects
5. Reduced stackable buffs
6. More involved tutorial
7. Ability to test powers before making build additions

Some would also say they learned players prefer unrooted combat and earlier travel, but those are mostly optional design decisions, not lessons.

I also think a core lesson they learned that isn't obvious to the average player is to design and implement their game systems in a more modular way to allow for easier changes. The rapid development incurred in the months before open beta seemed to me to occur much faster than Cryptic has ever suggested they were capable of doing for CoH at any time from closed beta to post-launch.

One lesson they seemed to have learned, but I don't think they executed well on, was implementing numerical balance methodologies for powers from the start. They clearly did so rather than mostly just guessing, but I don't think those methodologies worked as well as they should have (they didn't work at all correctly for defensive passives).

The lessons they didn't learn still have me shaking my head, but its clear to me they did a much better job the second time around.

I would in fact make KB work radially from the generation point (which would be point of impact for AoEs and attacker for cones and PBAoEs) but as far as I can tell there's no other requirement for KB physics from a balance perspective other than making it work in a directionally valid way. There's no specific balance directive that I can see that places requirements on the surrounding environment in the general case.

Unfortunately, its not trivial to give a script the ability to tell when the animation system generates the "wrong" output. For any set of inputs, it always generates *some* output. Furthermore, because animations are reused often, its impossible to tell simply by name that a particular power or other action is calling the wrong animation simply because of a name mismatch.

It *is* possible, now that I think about it, to determine what every possible combination of inputs will generate in terms of sequencers, and then compare that to what a future build of the game generates to see if there are discrepancies in the way the sequencers are called. The complexity of the problem would be high, though, because you'd want to make sure you dealt with every possible mode and bit combination, plus all interruptible situations.

Hmm.

For a long, long, long time I noticed that critters that were simultaneously feared and stunned would very often play the walk animation rather than either terrorize or stunned. I'm not sure if the patch note above is referencing the same problem as the one I'm thinking of, but I used to say (jokingly) that Fear + Stun equaled a different mez state I called "Oblivious." The critters would simply walk away from you.

Dark Armor players that used both Opressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear simultaneously would see this quite often under the right conditions.

Plus, smaller boobs wouldn't work properly with BaB's next free-time project: boob emotes.

I think the short term Champions Online effect is nothing more complex than if you're a casual gamer looking at the MMO marketspace, and superheroes catch your eye, knowing nothing else Champions Online is the obvious purchase because its newer: there's a presumption that the game has newer and better technology, and there is the perception that a newer less-established community will be easier to join. If Champions Online boxed sales didn't significantly cut into CoH boxed sales, I would interpret that as a significant failure on the part of Champions Online.

However, that situation should stabilize once CO itself establishes itself and gains most of its subscribers by word of mouth rather than being the interesting unknown. So I agree the long-term effect of CO might take a long time to see.

If at all: I'm guessing that at least one marketing strategy of Going Rogue will be to make the case that City of Heroes isn't ceding the technological high ground to Champions (or any other MMO). I wouldn't be surprised if the point to "Ultra Mode" was explicitly to be able to claim that City of Heroes: Going Rogue was powered by "all new" technology. That may, if its successful, flip the shiny spotlight onto CoX for a brief time and reverse the effect, making it even more difficult to be sure what Champions Online's net effect on subscriptions and sales of CoH was.

And by the way, that's the way the marketing game is played and I have no problem with either Atari or NC playing that game to attract eyeballs per se.

You seem to be suggesting that the rights of the team leader to control their team members supercedes the rights of the players not to be controlled, and the player's sole right is to leave the team.

Are you actually suggesting that as a general principle, leaving a discriminatory situation is a legitimate option to consider when deciding if the discriminatory situation is allowable?

I think BaB read "recovery" instead of "discount" as another suggestion floating around has been to give walk a small health/endurance recovery bonus, sort of like a "walking rest."

I meant here, not on the Champions Online forums.


By the way, you post a lot for someone suffering from repetitive intra-cranial detonation. Doesn't that gum up your keyboard?

Those effects affect every player on the team in a very indiscriminate way. While you can argue that a no-KB flag affects everyone in the same way, I don't buy it. I could argue under the same logic that a flag that removed the damage from defender secondary attacks also affects everyone, its just that not everyone actually possesses those attacks. And if the motivation turned out to be that I thought defenders should buff/debuff more, defenders using ranged attacks annoyed me, that would turn the flag from highly suspect to highly offensive.

The issue is not a question of "wanting a certain experience in the game." Its a question of whether the game should give you the ability to achieve that at the expense of *removing* capabilities from other players. The boundary is not arbitrary. The principle is a non-subjective principle that each player controls their own characters, and that right is absolute until it directly affects someone else's control over their characters. My scattering targets does not affect your control over your character. Therefore your only recourse is to ask me to change my behavior voluntarily. You have no right - and as a developer I would give you no capability - to override my absolute final authority over the control over my character. The teleport flag is an example where someone's control over their character intersects with someone else's control over their character.

If you want to play socratic games with this, then the most interesting playground would be this: rather than making a KB team switch, suppose Castle were to make an ally debuffing power that reduced KB strength to zero (-100%). Would you consider such a power a griefing power if it was used without permission, or a player's prerogative to "buff" any ally in any way they wanted to, barring being kicked from the team? The game currently does not consider drive-by speed boost buffing to be "griefing" even if the player didn't ask for the buff, so technically speaking there can't be a prohibition on "buffing" a player's KB strength to zero.

But if that's the case, what's to stop Castle from making a "buff" heal strength to zero power, a buff movement speed to zero power, or a buff recovery to zero power? Where precisely do you draw the line on which of these powers is obviously a griefing power when used without permission, and which are not? And by "griefing" in this context I mean sufficiently abhorrent so as to make the power itself something to specifically remove from the game.

I believe someone that thinks its perfectly acceptable to allow one player to disable someone else's KB should have an answer to this question. My own answer to this thought experiment is that, although its not perfectly ideal, the only rule that doesn't leave such matters to mob rule is to presume objectively that powers which increase strength are presumed to be allowed, while those that decrease strength generally are not, except when that decrease is a compensating control for another buff (i.e. increase density). Under this rule, the mob doesn't get to decide by majority rule that the numerical sense for KB "buffing" should be reversed, because the game design itself is predicated on the assumption that buffs increase KB strength.

I'm not sure about the specifics of the mechanics of the situations you list, but I do know that the Rikti UXB bombs induce very high order knockback that nevertheless doesn't seem to knock you over. I believe this is due to the explosion initiating some form of FX on the target (you) that plays an uninterruptible animation which the knockback effect itself cannot override. So instead of playing the knockdown/over animation, you simply get pushed back.

However, that animation is rooted, which means not that you can't move, but that you cannot act: you can't activate powers or use movement controls (you can still slide, fall, glide, or decelerate). I would separate being knocked back from being rooted, so those two separate effects would have to be specified directly. That way you could be knocked back but still be able to act in some cases (but perhaps not all).

I assumed "updated textures" implied a face-lift, not a complete revamp.


I would assume the map editor would be no different than the custom critter editor: optional, not necessary. I can't imagine the devs would ever remove the ability to use the existing maps.

I don't consider it the same argument, because there's a huge difference between tolerating another player's behavior, and controlling it. If someone were to advocate adding a "set EvilGeko's health to zero" power to the game, and someone else were to advocate not adding such a power, those two positions are not equal and neutral. And the claim that anyone that doesn't like the effects of that power can simply choose not to play with anyone who uses it so there's no possible harm involved is also equally unlikely to be a valid game design point.

The question is one of whether the designers want to promote tolerance for gameplay options or not. Adding features that allow some players to control the gameplay of others may be a "less drastic" option than kicking them, but it also lowers the barrier to exercising control, and implicitly acknowledges it as acceptable. Obviously the devs believe its perfectly fine for me to decide how other players behave on my team, beacuse they are giving me tools to do so.

If I were a game designer, that's a line I would not ordinarily cross. It would not be the kind of game I would want to make, unless the surrounding social elements of the game were consistent with that sort of decision (I could conceive of a game designed around organized warfare where a core gameplay element was organizing around pseudo-military command structures similar to but more rigorous than the corporations of Eve. Under those circumstances, providing players with tools to control subordinates might be consistent with the intended social feel of the game).

It would probably work in the sense of converting that power into having the same effect that powers we normally call "KD" powers have. Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as "KD" - KD is really just low magnitude KB - so anything with knockback protection can convert "KD" into having no effect. That would have to be explained carefully to players who are presented with the choice to slot such an enhancement.

(Its rare, but there are critters with KB protection but not KB immunity. "KD" simply doesn't work on them. My guess is that such critters are going to become more common over time, not less).

I'm also not willing to state with certainty that it will work, because I believe this is relatively untested ground: the game engine has sometimes surprised us by doing something other than what it should do based on the rules as we understand them (Oil Slick Arrow is the canonical example here). This was actually one of two possibilities I was thinking of when I wrote "no way I know of that doesn't involve sufficiently weird circumstances that it wouldn't require very careful testing."


The other one was you might be able to make an IO that applied -0.98 KB strength to the power, and not have to split up the effects. That would reduce any KB power less than mag 37.5 down below 0.75, converting it to KD. But that has a different issue worth testing carefully: I'm not sure what happens if you apply a really tiny KB to something; would the game even *notice* a 0.03 mag KB, for example.


Regardless of how you do it, I think you'd be in uncharted territory that required a lot of testing to confirm the correct behavior, which makes this not a simple addition to the game, even if it was desirable.

Hmm, I'm not too crazy about most of the things on that list, but at least two appear to be things that not only I'd like to see, I believe the devs have all but said we will likely get eventually (although "eventually" might be a long ways out): updating the existing zones to ultra mode quality, and a map editor for the architect sound like items four and six on that list.

Next time, I'm making book before sending any emails.

If you mean the one about adding damage to kb, I think most people think that's a good idea in principle, although it might be difficult to do in terms of the details (i.e. should a KB power do extra damage to a target that is immune from knockback).

If you mean the one about changing all KB to KD and requiring people to slot KB enhancers to regain the KB effect, but add extra damage to the KB slotting, I think it could be made workable for single target attacks, but not in general for AoEs (while I think KB would be a good compensating control for AoEs, allowing KB to increase AoE damage would in general be dangerous for game balance).

In two weeks, Frosticus will be saying that it was me that was wrong, because I said DR in GR was impossible and he was only saying it was possible, not certain.

In two months, Frosticus will be saying that I was so wrong about DR being a possibility in the end game, Castle had to post a correction to my misinformation.

In two years the devs will add a buff soft-cap mechanism and Frosticus will say "I told you so."

Next up: chewing bubblegum.

I think the whole "search a maze-like area for things to kill" is an unnecessary carry-over from dungeon-crawl-based games. That metaphor is much less applicable to the genre. It can still represent a minority of mission content, but I think in the future mission content should focus on the other 90% of encounters within the genre. Many other kinds of encounters favor having more crowd control and less concentrated damage, like ambush-style encounters, or just meeting-engagement encounters. I find it interesting that one of the more useful powers in the respec trial is Repel.

In fact I have always considered it to be a small genre flaw that the superheroes almost always have the initiative on every single fight in CoH. Superheroes usually tend to be reactive, not proactive (there are exceptions of course). I actually think that genre error on City of Heroes gave nowhere for City of Villains to go.