Arcanaville

During the brief period when the "-1 bug" was in force, mitos could be spawned with no powers. Without powers, they were no longer immobilized and you could push them around. Strangely, you could only do this a limited number of times and then they would usually "stick" to the ground for some reason I couldn't determine (it might have been a geometrical oddity where the mitos were getting /stuck into the ground, being round and all).

I kick myself for not frapsing it, but I had a test mission where I could punt mitos around like Big Yellow Balls. By the time I thought to record it, the bug was patched out. In fact, I think it was patched out the next morning after I posted about it.

Gonna be hard to level that alt, seeing as your Hamidon EAT would need to constantly eat trays of breakfrees just to move anywhere.

(I wonder if I'm the only person to have ever seen a mito move around outside the dev team).

You could always give the critters in task forces the Soul Storm bug: that's bound to make task forces a bit harder.

But BaB said it would be impossible to add walking and would require completely changing the game engine and Paragon Studios would have to hire a team of a hundred and fifty Tirolian ski troopers to make it happen.

I had actually been working on "arcanatime" since I11 beta, off and on, and was in the middle of the final leg of my testing when coincidentally someone (it might have been Shred Monkey) sent me a PM that said "look at this thread, tell me what you think" referring to the pylon testing people were doing. I basically told them "what a coincidence: I'm working on that now."

So it looked like I looked at what the pylon testing people were doing and took a look at it right away, but actually it took far longer than that for me to figure out anything. I just happened to get an answer around the same time other people were starting to ask the question.

Its a funny story actually, and one I probably can't repeat all the details on. But you have pohsyb to thank for arcanatime. Back in I11 I discovered that my timing measurements for Dual Blades wasn't matching the reported cast times. That led me to do a whole analysis of cast time, root time, and in the process work with BaB to figure out how the animation system worked.

*That* caused pohsyb to ask me this question: "how long does it take for a critter to eat a donut?"** The reason: oh, this little project he couldn't talk about that involved letting players write their own missions. Which promptly sent me on a rather epic analysis of how animations work in general, and that led me back to reexamining my cast time measurements done back in I11 beta. Which led me to discrepancies which caused me to suspect I was seeing evidence of large server-side clock ticks (greater than 1/30th of a second). That led to my arcanatime article.

By the way: I presented my findings to pohsyb, and he said "oh yeah, the combat clock is 0.125 seconds and it aligns to the 1/30th second clock, so you should be seeing about 0.132s server clock ticks." I also presented to BaB, who said "yeah, and?" Then he gave me a no-prize.

It was something of an anticlimactic moment, like the American Indians watching Columbus discover America.***

Oh yeah, and it takes about eleven seconds to eat a donut, although that time is variable because the act of eating a donut has a branching randomness to it.


My recollection was that you were the first poster that plugged arcanatime numbers into an attack chain that was then used to compute an estimated time-to-defeat for a pylon, whereupon it matched your previously observed time. There might have been others that posted partial confirmations prior to that, but yours is the one I remember most clearly.

I think you're the first person to call it "arcana-time" too (it never occured to me to give it a name, which is actually unusual for me).



** Because when pohsyb asked his fellow NCSoft employees "can you help me figure out how long it takes to eat a donut" they invariably said "get the *$#^ out of my office, CW."

*** Columbus didn't originally land on the North American continent, but I'm not changing the metaphor.

I don't consider Stamina to be "required" but I would say that for a Mastermind taking Stamina is a lower priority than all those other powers you list as burning up a lot of endurance. I tend to rather have those powers as a Mastermind and pace myself than to have three less mastermind powers but a lot more endurance to power them.

That's the opposite of my priorities as say a blaster or scrapper. As a blaster I would rather have enough endurance to power my priority powers (i.e. attacks) than have more powers and not enough endurance to power them all consistently, because blaster survival tends to be predicated on activity. And as a scrapper I find that the best overall strategy is to balance offense and defensive toggles in a way that happens to favor taking stamina earlier than later.

So I do think there is a fundamental difference between mastermind endurance requirements and many of the other archetypes that's worth mentioning, especially to people not familiar with masterminds in general. Masterminds do benefit from Stamina, but the cost-benefit ratio, especially compared to opportunity costs, is in my opinion very different for masterminds than most other archetypes.

That too is very oversimplified. If a painter paints a work of art, and another artist creates an artistic picture frame, the combination of the two might not "transcend" the basic juxtaposition of painting and frame, but that doesn't mean the combination is disqualified from being an overall work of art.

I think this is an example of defining something in terms of its highest exemplars, rather than its fundamentals.

I think the real issue in this context is "can an 'artist' be a group of people?" If artists aren't required to be individuals, then its much more obvious that CoH isn't a "collection" of art, its a singular piece of art created by the artist "Paragon Studios" with different parts worked on by different people. If a sculpture was created by ten different people, with some working on the feet, some working on the face, some working on the hair, would it be more debatable as to whether the final sculpture was a work of art than if one person did it alone? In my opinion, not really.

Says the guy giving ATI "one more chance."

If my recollection is correct, Werner was one of the first people (if not the first) to put "ArcanaTime" through rigorous testing to confirm or deny its predictions (on time to defeat a pylon). And he's still not convinced my best guess on recharge is correct (granted: I'm still not convinced my best guess on recharge is correct either).

(Nihilii, in this thread, is probably also unlikely to be counted among my zombie minions, although to be honest I've reconsidered some of his objections to the scrapper challenge mission, and factored them into the requirements for the next version).

I'd say that you'd be hard-pressed to find someone that undergoes a higher level of peer review on numerical postings than I do. There's just too many other players with sufficient knowledge of the game to slip things past the radar, not to mention that Stargazer forum-bot that monitors my posts for database errors and posts accurate corrections within 24 hours.

I disagree with Venture in this case, but as in many cases I don't think most people are disagreeing with Venture head-on, but only tangentially.

My read is that Venture isn't saying its impossible to use the extra space to make better arcs. He's saying its more likely to promote lesser arcs than better ones. And he's saying that because of that, the system would be better off if it restricted size, because those authors that could have made good use of the extra space could also make good arcs with the restricted space. Suggesting counter-examples isn't contradicting Venture, because he's saying a) if you're good enough to pull off what you're saying, you're also good enough to pull off equally good arcs with less space, and b) if you're not good enough to pull off what you're saying, the mission architect is better off not allowing you to try.

I think that presumes that the purpose of the MA is to be, essentially, a teaching tool and *that* is the part I disagree with. I believe "bad" (ignoring the fact that equality is highly subjective to begin with) arcs are a necessary evil of the MA, because I believe its primary purpose is to allow players to express themselves as authors. If I can tell good stories with it, but I can't tell *my* stories, it fails as a tool for me. I'm not a professional architect author; my goal is not to tell the most commerically viable or most efficient stories, but *my* stories, period.

My point of disagreement with Venture here is not that anything he says about the net consequence of increasing file size is necessarily wrong (although I don't think its entirely correct either), but rather that its besides the point of the purpose of the MA. I think the distinction is best put this way: if there is an architect mission I want to make that requires 200k, Venture says its better to sacrifice that mission for the greater good of forcing authors to be more directed towards better mission design. I say its better to allow that mission for the greater good of making a system that is as inclusive of expression as possible, even if it means it might include lower quality missions.

However, I should point out that neither choice is free of problematic situations.

A better way technically would be to expand the requires clauses for powers to include the ability to suppress a power based on player team calculations.

So you could make a massive -DEF debuff "Require PlayerTeamCount > 3" or "Require PlayerTeamDefenderCount > 1" or something like that. If the critter doesn't face a team with the right requirements, they lose that power. This way the spawn system doesn't have to deal with lots of complex decisions and the powers designers don't have to make many versions of the same critter. They can just add an arsenal of powers to the critter, and turn on the ones appropriate for to the opposing team.

However, this would need some way to prevent exploitation via the standard mission entry spawn-manipulation strategies (this is also why you don't want to spawn critters based on team composition either: its exploitable). The best way to do that might be to push these requires calculations into the AI of the critter and evaluate them in (near) real time, so they cannot be gamed. That way even if you spawn the entire mission with a solo player and then add in the rest of the team, the act of doing so would immediately "enable" the suppressed powers.

That's a tricky question. Let me ask a counter-question: we assume that players get stronger when in teams due to team buffs and other synergies. Would it be fair if the critters got stronger in teams as well?

The problem is often that its difficult to get the AI to produce good team work for critters. So critter teams often find themselves saturated out by player teams. To counter-balance that, the devs often give critters that are supposed to be "dangerous" foe debuffs and other foe affecting powers that are extremely powerful to counteract player synergistic buffs.

The -40% defense debuff that PPs have isn't likely meant to be similar to a -80% resistance debuff that other critters might have. Its more likely meant to be comparable to the counter for one FF defender's team buffs. Its scaled relative to what players can counter-produce, not relative to other critter debuffs.

This is what makes it so tricky to balance a game that doesn't have proportional or other scale-invariant mathematics. Powers can mean different things in different contexts and the balance requirements can be very difficult (or impossible) to meet simultaneously. Its very difficult to make critters that are a challenge for a team that aren't extremely difficult for (most) solo players. The game has a lot of instances where its clear the devs made judgement-call compromises to satisfy these requirements.

That's an intriguing possibility. However, its also possible this was just part of the plan: I was told way back in beta that the arc sizes were set to a conservative value and if it was determined downstream that the game systems could support larger arc sizes they would consider giving the players more headroom (the devs may have said that publicly on the beta forums as well).

Personally, I like the branching arc theory better.

Are you suggesting that if the devs don't hire everyone with a dev choice award, that implies favoritism to the one player they did hire? Because that would be an incredibly odd statement to make.

Well, at least now we know what reward comes after "Dev Choice slot."

Personally, I think its great that fearghas is in an advocate position for the Architect. It suggests that Paragon Studios is interested in continuing to develop the AE system moving into the future, which was one of the open questions often asked about the AE prior to its release: was it going to be released and then abandoned. Clearly not. And fearghas aka Dr. Aeon clearly believes in the AE system. And it means we all don't have to compete with his damn arcs any more.


I wonder if this means Dr. Aeon now works for Hero-1 on AE development, or if Dr. Aeon has taken over the responsibility of AE development from Hero-1. This is important as its critical to know who to armtwist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H abuse^H^H^H^H^H discuss AE changes with.

Common IOs being purchasable was I believe due to player suggestions during I9 beta. The difficulty settings for custom AE critters was definitely affected by player suggestions during beta (originally all critters were locked essentially at "extreme"). Willpower's power order was changed in beta due to player suggestions (QR used to be tier 7 instead of tier 6, which meant it became available long after stamina, rather than at the same time as stamina).

There's also an uncountable number of little things that are likely to have been influenced by player suggestions or comments as well. Just because someone mentions it before the devs do it, doesn't necessarily mean the devs did it because of that suggestion, but there are a very large number of changes which are almost certainly the result of direct player feedback or have been acknowledged to be such by the devs.

Because they were the issues with the most visible improvements or gameplay extensions. If your theory was correct, they would *also* tend to be the issues with the largest nerfs, because your theory is that when the devs want to nerf, they wait until they can bundle it in an issue with enough positive changes to balance out. PvP was certainly a highly requested feature back then, as was power customization. Neither came with large nerfs, relative to the average issue. XP smoothing and the Architect were heavily marketed and (at least initially) well received announcements, so they should have also been significant targets for bundling nerfs, but neither of those did either (at least, not planned ones).

On the negative side, there's no question that the PvP changes were performance reductions, and the devs had a pretty good idea they would be very controversial. That means, according to your theory, they should have saved them for an issue they could have offset them with a major positive change. But they didn't do that either.


So your theory is that the devs always bury large performance decreases of the order of ED in content issues, and your evidence is the *one* time there was a performance decrease on the order of ED, and every single other large-scale performance reduction is an exception to your theory?

Is that your final answer, or would you like to phone a friend.


Your theory is already wrong no matter what happens. If your theory is that the sun will rise tomorrow because the sun likes pizza, that theory would be wrong as well regardless of what happens tomorrow. If you're simply guessing wildly that GR will have DR, you're either right or wrong. If you assert that you have a theory that suggests you're right, that theory can be right or wrong regardless of whether GR has DR or not. In this case, there's no evidence for your theory.


Good question. When ED was announced both Pilcrow and I did analyses showing that for damage-dealers ED was unlikely to reduce overall damage output for the average player by a significant amount provided the blasters changed slotting to an ED-conformant slotting. Only characters loaded with HOs would see a strong difference. So for blasters in particular (who tend to have limited defenses) ED was unlikely to affect the performance of the average player, but its also true that total damage output in general was unlikely to drop by much, and as a result the average performance (xp progression in particular) of the playerbase was unlikely to go down by much. In fact, when you combine the damage calculations with the notoriety sweet-spot calculations that were done at the same time, the conclusion I reached was that ED was likely to steer players towards higher XP reward levels (i.e. around +2/+3) which would counterbalance by a significant percentage any reduction in overall kill speed due to ED. ED was more likely to moderate extremes than reduce performance across the board ("performance" in this case being xp progression and reward earning rates). The largest impact to average player performance was going to come from the reduction in available endurance, which was mostly mitigated by the endurance normalization changes.

The difference between ED and DR is that ED has an extremely sharp cutoff, while DR has a much shallower diminishing curve. This means ED tends to act as a "soft-cap" while DR acts as an actual across-the-board performance reducer. DR would have a much higher numerical effect on *everyone's* performance than ED would.

Put it another way: you can't even *notice* ED until you get to the point where you can slot SOs *and* are slotting more than three of them into a single power. You'd notice DR in the teens.

On the subject of average players noticing a 20% difference in damage. I'm pretty sure they can notice that. That's only about half the archetypal difference between blasters and defenders (42%).


Now, since the GDN was released in I5, long before CoV, the GDN is an exception to your theory, not a supporting fact. Unless your theory is that the devs want to release strong performance reductions in sync with other positive changes or several months before positive changes in which case your theory falls into the category of "can't be disproved, because says nothing."


Just as an aside, I don't think that word means what you think it means.

I'm referring explicitly to the fact that Defiance 2.0 was designed to improve blaster performance in a significant way, because blasters as an archetype were lagging average performance by a wide margin (wide margin in this case being > 25%). As Defiance 2.0 includes a significant damage boost, your assertion that PvE DR would not affect PvE performance is without foundation. It doesn't matter if mezzed-shooting is "more significant" than the damage buff, it only matters if the damage buff is material. For your assertion to be true that PvE DR would have no effect on PvE balance, you have to demonstrate that the damage buff in Defiance 2.0 is immaterial. That if it was removed entirely, blaster PvE performance would not be materially affected.

Good luck.


I am not arguing it both ways. You're saying the devs have "invested" a lot of time in DR that they have every intention of leveraging by applying DR to PvE. I'm saying that *if* they apply DR with the PvP numbers that will cause all sorts of problems including ones you dismiss - namely that it would alter the performance of at least some archetypes enough to be a problem. My numbers are only there to prove that is true: that applying DR with the PvP numbers - the only way to "leverage" that time investment - creates problems.

The only way to dodge those problems is to redo DR with different A/B values. And that means virtually all of the time investment the devs made into DR for PvP is not transferable to PvE. Which means your assertion that the *reason* the devs are likely to apply DR to PvE is due to the time investment is false: no such investment helps. The *only* time that can be leveraged is the time spent adding the tech, which was low relative to the time spent attempting to balance the PvP DR parameters.


Actually, if they always intended to apply DR to PvP and PvE, then applying it to PvP alone first required significantly more work by Castle: he had to add all of the PvP requires clauses into all the player powers, and work to get maps tagged with PvP flags.


Yeah: as I said before, my issue is not with your DR guess, but with the fact that your theory itself is foundationless. That means right or wrong, its basically doom-crying. I actually have no strong guess as to whether GR will include PvE DR or not. In fact, all other things being equal, I'll assert that it would be more likely that GR would have some form of DR (but not the PvP one) if I was in charge than the chances of the devs deciding to implement it. But that only means I think the probability is low, not exactly zero.


Only one of us is far more certain than they have any right to be.

By my reckoning, the issues with the largest or most visible extensions to the game or gameplay are:

Issue 4: PvP
Issue 6: Bases and CoV-related
Issue 9: Invention System
Issue 11: Real Numbers, Weapon Customization, XP smoothing
Issue 14: Architect
Issue 16: Power Customization
(honorable mention: Issue 3: epic archs, EPPs, global chat, notoriety)

The Issues that introduced the largest performance reduction changes (at least in scope) were:

Issue 5: Global Defense Reductions
Issue 6: Enhancement Diversification
Issue 13: PvP diminishing returns

I don't see the pattern myself. If someone has a version of the release data that supports the theory that the devs make a conscious effort to release performance reducing changes with high profile releases to reduce their psychological impact, I'd like to see that.

Clearly not; you said:

The numbers support no other conclusion other than implementing DR with its current values would seriously impact PvE performance for xp progression, and moreover there is no other reasonable conclusion than that it would also affect cross-archetype balance.

That makes your logical inference false:

As "the time and effort" put into DR is inapplicable to PvE, its premise is provably false. Just because none of us knows for certain if DR is coming at some future date, doesn't make any wild conjecture you come up with equally valid.

Does anyone know of an MMO *anywhere* where rigorous regression testing is performed? I've helped with the design and implementation of regression testing and so far I haven't seen or played a single MMO that shows clear evidence of rigorous regression testing of patches.

I sometimes wonder if one reason for that is that most MMO dev teams are opposed to bots in their MMOs, and there is thus a subtle bias against trying to write automation tools necessary to do hardcore regression testing.

Well there's your problem right there.

That's a bit of cherry-picking of Castle's comments. Castle has said that if it had been up to him, he would have considered a "diminishing returns"-like system for CoH in many areas**, but he's also said that changes like that would probably be inappropriate for a game of this maturity.

As to the "time and effort" part: the effort to put the tech in itself was probably relatively low. I don't know which programmer did it, but my guess is that whoever did it it was a couple days work at most (that's an educated guess based on how long other things have taken to be actually written, of which I have some limited information). Most of the time was spent actually tweaking the values and testing them within PvP contexts, which could have been weeks or months of man-hours of work within the powers team. That effort would only be applicable to PvP, and would not transfer to PvE: the DR alpha/beta parameters would have to be rebalanced for PvE (see below).


Not true. Consider that we know blasters were, by the devs' definition, underperforming prior to I11. The attempted remedy was to modify Defiance, and one component of that change was to attempt to give a greater percentage of players better damage (D1.0 was also a damage boost, but the thought was that directly attempting to leverage D1.0 was getting all but expert players killed). If DR lowers blaster damage***, it would almost certainly hurt blaster balance - meaning blaster xp progression and reward earning capability - by logical inference. It would probably have other balancing effects as well.

The only way I could see DR being implemented in PvE would be if the entire system was rebalanced for DR. That seems unlikely. Otherwise you'll have situations like "normal" SR scrappers will be walking around with maybe 23% defense and currently soft-capped SRs will have maybe 33% defense. Scrappers are going to pop unstoppable or MoG and discover they only have 55% resistance. This is far too drastic a set of changes. I believe Castle is unlikely to sign off on such drastic changes to the PvE experience, and even if he did I would bet he would never get that past either Positron or Brian (Clayton, the producer).


The status quo is never preserved indefinitely. That doesn't mean its really fair or useful to predict "changes" in the general case. When the Invention System was introduced, a lot of people predicted significant nerfs to counterbalance in PvE. Its been six issues, and four since the dev team has had the enhanced resources made available by the NCSoft buyout, without such changes. Even if such changes are eventually made, say, two years from now, all those people will still have been wrong, not "eventually right."



** A proper read of Castle's prior public comments suggests that Castle would have originally been in favor of linear returns for survivability-related effects like defense and resistance (not too dissimilar from the type of diminshing returns on resistance in Champions Online) and harsher, more genuinely diminishing returns for things like buffs and debuffs, or alternatively a significant stacking limit on such effects.

*** At current values, DR would reduce 0.95 ED soft-capped slotting to about 0.80, and assuming blasters have an average of +35% damage from Defiance their 1.30 damage strength would drop to about 1.03. That's a net reduction comparable to removing the damage buff from Defiance altogether.

Commissioned officers are often "upwardly mobile" - they are looking to get promoted and advance their careers in the military. Nothing wrong with that, but almost by definition that means they don't tend to stay in one place with the same job very much. Conversely, enlisted men generally have terms of enlistment, and often leave military service after some number of years.

Non-commissioned officers, at least on average, tend to be both committed to a career in the military and yet also less likely to move up, down, or sideways very far: they tend to last longer doing the same or similar related jobs. That's what tends to make them the "backbone" of many modern armed forces: they are the most stable, and thus experienced, part of them.

That only means as an artform it has not yet achieved its full potential yet, or alternatively its not the artform you want it to be. That does not mitigate the fact that it is somewhat insulting to claim it isn't an artform at all.

Saying something is not an artform is making a very strong judgement. Its saying no game is a work of art and no game could be a work of art. Saying the reverse, that games are an artform, *doesn't* require I believe that all games are works of art. It only states that they can be.

In fact, saying games are not an artform is a stronger insult than saying CoX is not a work of art. If I tell BaB "CoX is not a work of art because ..." I'm saying the game itself has no artistic merit. He will probably disagree, but its a debatable judgement. If I tell BaB "games are not an artform" I'm telling him that nothing he does, for this or any game, can ever be called a contribution to a work of art, regardless of circumstance, and by extension his profession as "MMO animation designer" is not an artistic profession, period.

The claim that games might be assemblages of art but not art itself is a hair I'm disinclined to split in this context.