Arcanaville

It was tempting.

There's a third possibility: the downsize was the correct decision for Cryptic, so it could focus its limited resources on the next game in the pipeline, but not the correct decision for NCSoft, which felt focusing on reinvestment in the existing IP would be more profitable.

If that's the case, then divestment for Cryptic and acquisition for NCSoft may have been simultaneously in the best interests of each. There doesn't need to be a "bad guy" in this situation, when practical realities may have simply forced each party's hand in sequence. Of course, if there was an actual bad guy in this instance, no one seems to be talking about it.

My guess is that its less a question of who was the "bad guy" and more a question of which choice was more stable. Each CoX developer had to choose between continuing to develop a profitable game that had lasted over 3 years, or take a crap-shoot that whatever Cryptic launched next would be successful enough to provide job security. At least, that is the financial element of the decision: there would also be quality of life factors as well.

On top of that, there's the question of what choice they actually had. Even before the buy out Cryptic probably had a solid dev team for MUO/CO, so its unclear what precise jobs the CoH 15 would have gotten with Cryptic had they stayed with Cryptic. Something, certainly, but what precisely is uncertain.

My take is that the split seems to have occured on relatively amicable terms, at least at the corporate level, and the only thing we can be sure about is that the devs who stayed with us were reasonably sure that NCSoft wasn't going to torpedo the title in short order. Two years later, that guess seems to have been reasonably accurate.

The key decision maker might have been Positron. He was probably in the best position to know what was going on at the high level between Cryptic corporate and NCSoft corporate, and would have been in the best position to know whether to bail out or not. The fact that he stayed on may have signaled to everyone else that the choice to stay was a reasonable one.

Betting fake money at any odds wouldn't really mean anything to me. So I elected to take a different approach entirely.

By the way, when you misquote me, is it because you don't remember what I said or because you somehow think I don't remember what I said? I'm just curious.

I meant its not a strong enough precident to offer any guidence, which I'm assuming you were implying it was.


Perhaps, but I'm well aware of that. In this case, if such rules were put in at the beginning of time, there would be nothing to compare to for the great many people to complain about. The notion that players have a right to demand clustered critters they can incinerate simultaneously with area of effect powers because its fun appears to be something fairly unique to CoH. To a large degree Cryptic seems to have learned their lesson in Champions Online, as AoEs tend to often have much stronger limits than in CoX. My guess is that if Castle could go back in time and change the AoE rules for City of Heroes, he would not allow high-order AoE without some compensating control. Knock is (in my opinion; I don't know Castle's opinion on this specific matter) a reasonable compensating control.


My argument has been the same one for five years now. And that is the people advocating removal or control of KB are the first movers here. I'm under no obligation to justify anything. Its the people that want to suppress KB that have the obligation to attempt to show that their gameplay desires supercede all other players. And they don't. If the game was constructed without KB, I would not argue that I had the right to impose KB on the entire playerbase just because I think it would be fun. But so long as it exists I will treat all requests to neutralize it as a form of playstyle policing, no different than players that demand all defenders take heals.


Unfortunately in the current game there's no way to do that.** And if we were making CoH back in 2003 from scratch there would be no need for that if KB was designed correctly in the first place. Or rather if the AI was designed correctly in the first place, because the reason KB is useful to most comic book heroes is because its involuntary movement: you're moving your foe in a way and to a location other than where they generally want to go. But in CoH, critters don't make intelligent movement decisions and thus there is often little or no advantage to moving them from the spot they are already on. If critters took cover, separated in the face of AoEs, and tried to flank players then knockback would make more sense.

Also, high-order AoE mez can override the benefits of knockback. But high-order AoE mez is just as unbalancing in CoH as high-order AoE damage. Ironically, its AoE effects that make it too dangerous to allow players to fight many things at once: if AoE effects were moderated or neutralized, it would have been much less necessary to impose aggro limits, and players that wanted to "feel super" by engaging many targets at once would have greater options than they do now.

Its all about making the right tradeoffs, and every game decision implements a tradeoff somewhere. These are all interconnected design decisions, and I don't agree that my version of them would make a "less fun" game overall, just because they pay closer attention up-front to what those interconnected tradeoffs actually are.


** At least, no way I know of that doesn't involve sufficiently weird circumstances that it wouldn't require very careful testing to ensure the game engine did what we think it should do under those conditions.

I would never remove KB protection from the game. I would, however, modify the KB mechanics to make a distinction between "knocked back" and "knocked over." Right now, its impossible to knock a melee (or any other) character back without also knocking over, so to prevent knock over (which is a form of incapacity) you have to be absolutely immune from KB.

This would allow the game designers to make, say, an AV that is capable of knocking the tank back five feet without the tank being incapacitated for the 3 seconds it takes to get back up. It also would allow certain powers (like say, hover) to provide knock over protection separate from knock back protection, which would give squishies a way to buy some protection from knock effects without having to sell immunity from knock effects.

You amortize for tax purposes, perhaps, but not for business decision purposes. See: sunk cost.


I'm not really assuming any of those things. I'm assuming the Microsoft payments were landmarked and thus Cryptic had to fund the lag, that they are unlikely to have taken out materially large loans or obligations or Atari would have announced they were assuming Cryptic's debt as part of their buyout, and that however you want to characterize it, Cryptic was making significantly more money off of their ownership and development of CoX than they were spending on it.

Actually, I spend less on our employees than our clients pay for their cumulative services. We like to call it "covering overhead" and "making a profit" not "fleecing our customers" but technically its the same thing.


I'm not the one presuming that expansion is necessary, so I'm making no statement about how easy or hard it is to expand the game. Nor am I assuming there is a "standard" model of business that CoX *must* conform to, so I am making no statement about CoX being or not being the standard. I'm assuming that CoX is a special case, because its a special case: NCSoft has been the publisher of CoX for a long time, and has yet in five years to submit the ultimatum being suggested in this thread as NCSoft's "business model" which is "hit our ultrahigh metrics or we'll abandon you." They could have done so at any time.

Granted: its only now that NCSoft *owns* the entire property, but they were always in a position to demand development direction as the publisher. And even if they did not, the very acknowledgement that NCSoft was not the owner originally makes CoX a general exception: NCSoft knew what they were buying when they bought it, because CoX already had a stable body of users and a stable development direction. That makes the decision to buy them at all a completely different circumstance than, say, Auto Assault or especially Tabula Rosa. TR hadn't yet demonstrated that they were guaranteed to stabilize at profitable levels, and there was additional corporate politics involved. There are no comparable corporate politics in the case of CoX, and CoX has already demonstrated long-term profitable stability.


That's not the best case.


I'm not stating my opinion on the circumstances under which NCSoft would substantively abandon the game. That's not an opinion I can state. I'm merely stating that the theory that the purpose of GR is purely to provide an immediate return on the investment of development resources is unlikely to be true. Its almost certainly part of a longer-term strategic commitment to the game, which is still one of its flagship titles.


Unfortunately, I've now reached the end of my speculation rope.

Lemur Lad is pointing out that when NCSoft and Cryptic shared ownership of the property, Cryptic was almost certainly getting more revenue from that ownership than the 15 devs cost - otherwise Cryptic would have had no money to fund MUO.

In fact, what Cryptic was getting from CoH was enough to fund the CoH 15, plus a couple of years of MUO development, *plus* there was enough money left over to development on CO without revenue from CoX until the Atari deal.

This suggests that, separate from the cash NCSoft had to pay to buy Cryptic out, the revenue that NCSoft no longer has to pay Cryptic is probably enough to pay for a lot of the additional developers. Perhaps not all 45, but a substantial number of them, possibly most of them.

Its not a strong precedent: that option is there because recall can be used as a griefing tactic. Its telling that the devs have still refused to put a "prompt for buff" switch comparable to the prompt for teleport switch.

On the subject of the OP, at some point, you have to tolerate the actions of other players in an MMO. If I want to KB targets into trees, that's my prerogative. Your prerogative is to not play with me. But the other players in the game are not your pets and giving players the ability to control the execution of the powers of other players is a line I believe the dev team should never cross.

On the general subject of knockback: KB is an easy target. I've seen lots of people claim to have seen a team wipe "because" of knockback. But teams wipe for all sorts of other reasons. Maybe in those situations those teams would not have wiped if, say, the players in it built differently. In my opinion, saying KB wiped a team is no different than saying that the team composition or the team member builds wiped the team. Or team skill in dealing with knockback. I am a consistent enemy of the playstyle and build police, but I have no problem using their tactics against them. If someone tells me my KB is hurting their play, I'll tell them their incompetence in dealing with KB is hurting my play.


Frankly, if it was up to me, I would sooner eliminate all *non-KB* options than all the KB powers. In fact, knowing what I know now, in retrospect I would make all AoE damage deal knockback, and all powers above a certain DPA threshold deal mandatory knockback. That would be a deliberate shot across the bow of the efficiency police, and it would simultaneously resolve the problem with AoE balance in this game.

My guess is that if subscription numbers are exactly what they are now six months after Going Rogue releases, that will be disappointing but will not affect staffing levels at Paragon Studios in any way.

Contrawise, if they are even a little higher at that point, but not dramatically so, Paragon and NCSoft will probably be a lot happier than you will think they have any right to be.

Picture a checkerboard. Write all the primaries across the top, and all the secondaries down the side. Every square on the board represents a combination of one primary and one secondary. Total number of squares: number of primaries x number of secondaries.

I asked BaB to spend time on Indian Music Video dance moves but he told me he was too busy. Now I find out he was wasting time making walk cycles. I'm so insulted.

It wasn't even moon-walking or anything. The man has no sense of priorities whatsoever. I don't even think BaB wanted a walking power, but he was caught staring at women's butts at the mall and had to make up a quick excuse. "No honey, its research I swear" indeed. If the Man Show was still on the air Going Rogue would probably be full of trampoline emotes.

You know, I still haven't even gotten that I9BetaSecretHandshake emote yet.

Just out of curiosity, would knowing Paragon Studios had actual plans for post Going-Rogue development give you any confidence that NCSoft would not scale back Paragon Studios if Going Rogue isn't a "huge hit."

I think BaB is implying that if NCSoft was going to shut Paragon Studios down, BaB and Castle would be the last ones to know. *I* might find out before they do. Companies don't often give all of their employees advance notice they might all be fired.

Well, I was only suggesting the best way to reproduce the most exaggerated form of the walk for a man. I should point out that you'd probably be off-balance even attempting to reproduce a normal female gait. You'd probably snap your own legs off attempting to reproduce an exaggerated female gait (performed by a woman).

You can try to attempt to replicate the walk by leaning slightly forward and taking short strides with one foot landing directly in line with the other, or even better with the left foot landing just slightly to the right of the right foot.

However, if you are male there are usually certain biomechanical impediments to attempting to reproduce the walk that walking stride aren't likely to overcome, but may increase the amusement factor.

Actually, BaB already took several passes through the game reducing animation durations for things that were rooting longer than the cast time implied (or in some cases worked with Castle to increase the cast time to be consistent with the animation time so its not misleading). There's still a few more of those, but not as many as there were a couple years ago.

I'm sure taking a closer look at powers with the opposite discrepancy - cast time much longer than animation/root time - is on his list of things to do. Or will be very shortly.

"Need?" Who cares about "need?" Ultra Mode demands this!



Ok, its ATI. Still, I think even BillZBubba would give ATI another go if he got his hands on this setup.

As players we often assume that because we're told anything we're probably being told everything.

We're not.

Well, first of all its not just a question of whether all the protection comes from defense, but more a question of how critical to the overall functionality of the secondary is that defensive protection. That's why cloaking device doesn't have defense debuff resistance.

*Buffs* never grant defense debuff resistance, because its not considered a malfunction if player A buffs player B and then enemy C debuffs player B and counters those buffs. That's the purpose of debuffs in the first place: to counter buffs. So the +DEF that a Widow might grant as a team buff is unlikely to count as something that should have defense debuff resistance protection. Granted those buffs also affect the caster, but when it comes to team buffs its likely that such buffs are considered team buffs that happen to buff the caster, not buffs that primarily protect the caster and also protect the team besides.

Second, Widow protection is not exclusively +DEF. Widow secondaries also offer scaling resistances in two powers in Teamwork that are individually stronger than SR gets, and they also provide significant psionic resistance besides. And the secondary includes placate. On top of that they also get significant offensive capability. You could argue that the +DEF available to Widows in secondary sets is only a fraction of the total capability of those sets, a much lower fraction than say SR.

Third, I believe Widow secondaries do offer some level of defense debuff resistance, comparable to powersets with a similar nature of having significant but not critical majority of its functionality in delivering +DEF, like Ninjitsu.


In any case, this isn't an argument for *proving* what level of debuff protection Widows should have, its only a line of thinking that is consistent with the level of protection they actually got. You could probably make a legitimate case for why they might need more than what they have that isn't inconsistent with the apparent design intent of the archetype.

Replying to both you and Umbral, this is a Yes and No situation.

Yes: Resistance is its own debuff resistance and that makes resistable -RES have a generally proportional effect on players. -DEF doesn't have that same resistance and thus its effects are not proportional.

However, its not that defense has no protection: it does. It avoids debuffs. The problem is *not* that resistance resists debuffs and defense doesn't. Rather, its that resistance always resists debuffs *at full strength* while defense avoids debuffs only *at current strength*. This is actually the issue with "cascade failure." Its not exactly that defense spirals downward that's the problem: that's just a symptom of the core problem, which is that protection against debuffs spirals downward and that's what causes damage protection to follow it down the spiral.

Put it another way: suppose we have one player with 50% resistance and one with 25% defense and 50% resistance to defense debuffs, and then we fire *autohitting* resistance and defense debuffs at them. The first player will still resist half the strength of the resistance debuffs, and the second player will resist half the strength of the defense debuffs. Their relative performance will be, more or less, equal on average. But notice that if we now require the debuffs to roll tohit rolls, the latter player will avoid more debuffs than the former. His strength will be higher because he will be both avoiding *and* resisting his incoming debuffs.

This is what makes it difficult to simply "hand out" defense debuff resistance to everyone, or alternatively to package all defense buffs with defense debuff resistance. There's no "correct" level of debuff resistance to package with defense that doesn't require picking an arbitrary level of incoming debuffs and then working out the numbers to happen to balance for that one particular situation. The "2 to 1" rule guestimate for defense debuff resistance would make +DEF always stronger against debuffs than +RES, sometimes by very wide margins. Defense and Resistance are just different, and can't be made congruent in this way any more than Resistance and Regeneration can be made congruent.

In my opinion, the best you can do is to make powersets fairly equitable across the game. Its never going to work to try to make the raw mechanics equal in nature, and I'm not sure I would want to even if it was possible (because what's the point in having two different game mechanics always work the same). That's in my opinion why defense debuff resistance is specifically targeted at powersets that rely on defense for the majority of their protection. For everyone else, the harsh nature of high order defense debuffs is intentional (the intent itself might not be properly balanced and need tweaking, but its deliberate). For those sets specifically, the ultrahigh debilitating nature of those debuffs was *not* intentional, and that's why they have defense debuff protection. Its not to make Defense work like Resistance.

Well, why didn't those players use the time to improve bases then?

Focusing just on the -DEF, its not quite that simple. -DEF is only effective until the attacker saturates tohit, meaning reaches the 95% tohit ceiling. If you don't have +DEF, the best that a critter can do is debuff your defense to about -45% DEF, assuming the attacker has no accuracy and is even con to you. After that, -DEF becomes worthless. For an even con zero accuracy attacker facing a target with no defense, the best that unlimited -DEF can do is to increase net damage by about 90%, just short of doubling. On the other hand, -RES can stack in a similar situation to the resistance floor, increasing net damage by up to 300%, or quadrupling incoming damage.

The bottom line there is that a -40% stackable defense debuff is a higher threat to players with significant defense (and low or no defense debuff resistance) than a -80% resistance debuff is likely to be, but a -80% stackable resistance debuff is a higher threat to players without defense than a -40% defense debuff would be. We cannot just say one is equal to or comparable to the other. And the reason is that in this case, among other factors**, the -DEF debuff has a lower "cap" on its effect than the -RES debuff does in the zero defense case, but not in the high defense case.

Colloquially we tend to talk about defense and resistance as if they were essentially identical attributes except for the 2:1 ratio, but they are not. Its one of the reasons I have never liked the 2:1 rule in the first place. It implies a higher degree of similarity between defense and resistance than actually exists. For small numbers, moderate conditions, and absolute (not relative) calculations, the 2:1 rule usually works. But in situations like this, it can be misleading.


I'm not saying the -40% defense debuff is necessarily appropriate. But its not a good idea to use the 2:1 rule and attempt to use it to analogize to the resistance case, because that's not a good foundation to make a case upon. In general, the 2:1 rule tends to ultimately skewer balance arguments, not support them.


** Among those "other factors" is the amount of buff to neutralize the effects of the debuff. Its obvious that it takes +40% defense buff to neutralize a -40% defense debuff (assuming the target doesn't have defense debuff resistance). But it doesn't take +80% resistance to neutralize a -80% resistance debuff, it takes only +44%. Yet another area where the 2 to 1 rule falls apart.

Hero-1 told me they needed to remove all the giant-sized critters because they could get stuck in the geometry. When I pointed out that was unlikely to be a problem with Hamidon, he said those picky art department people had "issues" with Hamidon.

What possible problem they could have had with a giant red ball of goo cutting across hallways and shooting at players through the ceiling I have no idea.

If you add a task force difficulty selector mouse button, you can animate two birds with one stone.