Arcanaville

Thank you, Jean-Baptiste Frosticus Zorg.

Don't do it unless you bring a big enough bat?

Oh wait, that was pohsyb. BaB said don't knock the competition when you can steal from it instead. No, that was Positron. BaB said don't screw up the competition until he makes it to the level cap first. Yeah, that was BaB.

Its always possible its an occasional server-side lagging moment that throws everything off. During my original arcanatime-testing I did observe occasional moments when it seemed that chains of attacks were suddenly thrown off by a half second or so, as if the game skipped a cycle or two. I assumed that sometimes something happens on the server that makes it impossible to complete everything it needs to do in a combat tick, even if the zone is not overloaded.

But that is only a conjecture. I will say that its probably a good idea to have a little more recharge than necessary to factor in the occasional slow, but recharge usually cannot help mitigate server lag in the general case. So even ultrahigh recharge players might still see the occasional hiccough.

That would be comparable to saying that while choreography *might* be an artform, someday perhaps, running and jumping certainly is not, so dance is not really an artform. It contains some nice stuff that could be art, but its not an artform itself.

Your definition of art seems to exclude an awful lot of art, not just videogames. If the Mona Lisa has a message, I've never heard what it was supposed to be. I don't know what the moral to Piano Concerto Number 24 is supposed to be (clarinets always win in the end?)

Most art doesn't actually have a message as you are defining "message." Most art is designed to evoke. Many games are unquestionably evocative of an experience. A painting of the grand canyon is art even if the sole goal of the painter was to give you a sense of what it was like for the artist to be there. City of Heroes, by that definition, unambiguously is designed to evoke a sense of being in the fictional environment its based around. While that is not sufficient to be good art it satisfies the minimum requirements for being art, which by extension proves game design are an artform. It doesn't matter if there exists other games that are not an artform by definition. It only matters if *a* game exists that is an artistic creation for game design itself to be an art form.

I don't consider the question of whether something is an artform or not to be a question of consensus or subjective opinion. I believe the necessary and sufficient requirements for something to be an artform are:

1. It has a definable element of craftsmanship (Art must have an element of deliberateness in its construction).
2. It has avenues for expression by the artist (whether they are used or not).

Anything that satisfies those two requirements is an artform by defintion, in the sense that anything that satisfies those two requirements can be used by artists to create works of art. And that is ultimately what an "artform" is: a form of art.

Can you use game design to make art? If so, its an artform. Are all games instances of art? Not necessarily, but that specific question comes down to intent, and the benefit of the doubt rests with the creators. If the dev team of CoX say they are artists, then CoX is a work of art. If the dev team of CoX says they are not artists, then CoX isn't a work of art.


One last thing: games and game design cannot "approach" becoming an artform. There's no such thing as "nearly an artform." Being an artform is a binary property. Something is an artform if its a form of art, otherwise its not. Its possible for something to approach general acknowledgement of being an artform, but that's a completely different thing.

You're saying its questionable whether what BaB - an animation artist - does qualifies as an "artform" and you're not sure in what specific manner he is disagreeing with you?

The precedent for that would be something along the lines of a SEAL team or platoon commander, either an Lt or a Captain, being accepted into the naval special warface development group (what used to be called SEAL team six) and working on new tactics and training, and being promoted in that unit to a higher rank. Up to that point, you have a reasonable analog with real life. Then the fictional jump happens when that person is recruited from there into the more superhuman aspects of the character backstory. "Super Soldiers" don't really exist as such in real life, but they are not inconsistent with the fictional world of City of Heroes.

Also, there's the rank given to enlisted men when they need to enter officer's clubs: corporal-captain.

One fictional example for command in this context that might be a reasonably accurate reflection of reality (at least under wartime) is Band of Brothers. There is a scene in one of the episodes in which Winters, promoted to Captain, sees his former company under heavy fire and apparently being poorly commanded. He begins to make a move to join them in the field when he is rebuffed by his commander, Colonel Sink, who in effect tells him that as XO of the battalion it would be inappropriate to run into combat. Winters then calls up Lt Speirs and orders *him* to take command of Easy Company and continue the attack.

In the episode, its Speirs that is portrayed as the "badass." Although it seems that his actions in that episode are more or less historically accurate, specifically that he ran through the enemy-occupied town of Foy just to relay a message to the rest of the company to countermand their original orders and coordinate the attack (they had no radio), and then ran *back* through the enemy-held town to return to the main force and take command of them.

This does simultaneously illustrate the fact that ranks higher than Lt are less likely to be literally in combat (usually due to their higher responsibilities: its hard to see the bigger picture when you are also ducking from rifle shots), but it also shows their proximity to combat, at least under some conditions.


One thing I should point out: if you want to make a character that has high rank, but also has a combat-rich backstory, the escape hatch is to write their backstory as a Lt commanding combat troops, and have them be promoted to a higher rank just before they start their career in the game. Major Jones can have a rich front-line combat history if they were Lt Jones prior to becoming your character.

There are additional factors: O'Neill was a colonel in the air force, where ranks are less connected to commanding large numbers of troops, and SG teams were special forces units that included high-ranking specialists like Carter, who was a Captain when the show first started. SG-1 may have started off with a colonel commanding it simply out of necessity, to ensure the commander had sufficient rank to actually command the people in it.

This refers to the show and not the movie. The movie adds an extra twist to the issue of having a colonel commanding the stargate team: in the movie O'Neill was given the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons. That might have elevated the rank desired for the team commander.

Actually, people are extremely good at noticing minute differences in faces of all kinds. We're hardwired to do so. We don't all have a consistent *memory* for faces, and we tend to remember faces more similar to the kinds we see every day. But take a face from an ethnicity unfamiliar to us, photoshop a minor difference, and the average person can general detect that difference down to very low levels of change in a side-by-side comparison.


Only sometimes. Some chest details are very distinct. Some are not. A significant percentage have details impossible to resolve except at distances and timescales where you could also distinguish faces.

Many of the faces in CoH are similar enough to confuse, true. But Champions Online has facial sliders, and it *is* possible to detect when someone has done something goofy with those. Maybe not all the time, and maybe not in an immediately obvious way, but I've seen cases where a player character I only saw in snapshots for brief moments in time seemed "odd" and it turned out after more time elapsed that I noticed they screwed with their face in ways that seemed odd to me.


That's true, but I don't see how its relevant. Just because big details are easier to detect, doesn't mean the little ones are unnoticable.


Most of the time I can't see what my own powers are doing visually either: I see *other* players powers and the NPC powers more than I see my own, unless I deliberately stop to pay attention. The thing is it takes no more effort to make good looking powers for the times I am paying attention than it takes to make them look good all the time. However often I am in a position to see my own or someone else's face, it takes no more effort to make everyone's face animated all the time than to focus exclusively on the subset of cases where its most likely to be noticed.

The truth is the main reason I want facial animation is less for *literal* animation, and more for dynamic expressions. A significant percentage of the "faces" in the costume editor have "frozen expressions" on them designed to make that sort of expression available to players: grins, scowls, crazed wide-eyed looks. But short of changing costumes entirely, there's no way to make that selectable.

And there are combat-opportunties to make those expressions. During the animation for Nova. During the kicking animation for Eagle's Claw. Windup for Assassin's strikes. The "tarzan" emote for MoG goes to the trouble of actually generating an audible howl, but the face makes no expression consistent with it and it *would* be noticable: on NPCs if not yourself. Just because it might not be a noticable effect during Snapshot doesn't mean there aren't lots of cases where it would be noticable.


As I said: I'd lobby for things like animated flowing hair and dynamic cloth for capes and skirts first, but I would place user-selectable expressions on the same par with, say, flight poses. Fully animated faces is something I would consider at an even lower priority, except for cut-scenes.

Everyone has a personal preference here, but you seem to be attempting to justify that personal preference by implying that yours involves improvements that are either more durable or more likely to appeal to more committed players: i.e. by characterizing the preference for more visually appealing graphics as being either inconsequential to gameplay or by suggesting that most players that express that preference aren't likely to notice it themselves after a while anyway.

You don't seem to be acknowledging that the *reason* why its a "smart marketing decision" to expend resources on a graphical upgrade is because that improvement is better aligned with the personal preferences of the majority of existing and potential customers.

I expect a good MMO team to expend a balance of resources on the visual, game mechanical, story, and content design of the game. I think whenever you decide that one of those is the important one, and the others are non-essential, you set yourself up for eventual failure. The notion that a good story is more important than good graphics is missing the point, in my opinion.

When I visited the Seattle Museum of Glass a few years ago, there was a phrase painted on one of the walls of an exhibit room which I don't remember the precise wording of, but I believe went something like:

Without artistry there is no craft, and without craftsmanship there is no art.

I quoted it once before on these forums to express my opinion on whether the numbers or the gameplay of an MMO were more important. I think its equally applicable here. MMOs are not just a game, they are a gameplay experience. The graphics of the game are just as important to the overall experience as the story text and the combat mechanics. That is a truism separate from individual people's personal preferences and priorities. Individuals can decide that the graphics are unimportant, or all-important. But an MMO dev team must believe they are all (roughly) equally important, unless you're making an MMO that completely dispenses with one of those elements entirely or you are explicitly catering to a narrow target audience with identical preferences.

If you see a case of any Elusivity attribute being enhanced by something, I believe that would be a bug you should report to the devs. The last word I had from pohsyb was that Elusivity attributes didn't even obey strength modifiers and no enhancement had Elusivity strength boosts anyway.

Elusivity does *stack* but there aren't many opportunities to actually do so (off the top of my head Overload does stack its Elusivity bonuses on top of the other Elusivity bonuses in other Energy Aura defenses).

That's interesting. How would chest logos fit into your theory of character appearance priority?

I'll agree to the point that there are things I would rather have first, like flowing hair or better simulated cloth for capes, coats, and skirts/dresses. But I'm not sure I buy the premise that most people don't actually see the fronts of their own or anyone else's characters enough for them to matter. It seems they do matter for a lot of people, whether they see them on a regular basis or not. Facial expressions might be less something that players see, and more something players would feel better knowing their character do, whether they see it for themselves or not.

I don't think that is true for the average player. Its questionable *how much* graphical fidelity is necessary for the average player, but there is no question that for probably the majority of them the visual elements of the game "sell" the game mechanics. You don't really need, in the abstract sense, for Martial Arts to play *any* animation: you could just click the power, and then floating numbers appear over the target's head. But the animations are what sell the overall gaming experience. Same thing for the fiery effects on targets of fire attacks, the explosive effect nova generates, the arrows that archery fires.


Actually, I notice and appreciate the graphics (I'm impressed with the visual improvements made in Ultra-mode: nice work there Type-Rs) and I wouldn't characterize myself as a "flightly player." I consider it as much a part of the story-telling and game-mechanical toolbox as the writing and the algorithmic mechanics of the game engine.

So much of gameplay is "cosmetic" when you get right down to it. Damage types, for example, are 95% cosmetic in CoH. It only matters that we have more than one. It doesn't matter what they are: call Fire damage "Wedgie damage" or "Damage type 2" and it doesn't matter to the game. The word "fire" in the combat spam is a purely cosmetic tag. Replace the word with something else and the game hums along quite well without noticing. Its sole purpose is evocative: Fire damage (as a game design type) obeys no different rules than Ice or Psionic damage does.

If I were designing a game from scratch today, I would probably focus *more* on the visual appearance elements of the game design than CoH did. Specifically, in the area of how visual appearance can often "sell" game mechanics better than fine numerical tweaking can, and can act as a very high-value multiplier for game design diversity.

(Coincidentally, I've been thinking very recently about how *reducing* the number of types of things in CoH could counter-intuitively allow for a higher diversity of power effects, by combining a few "core" effects in a lot of permutations with distinguishing visual effects.)

The intent was never to pick "a value" for Elusivity. Elusivity was always intended to be a separate orthogonal form of avoidance that didn't stack with Defense and was essentially resistant to the net effects of tohit buffs (you can't have true tohit buff resistance for targets because tohit buffs don't affect them directly, they buff the attacker, so targets can't "resist" them).

The intent was to use Elusivity as a tool to take Defense-oriented sets like SR and FF and split up their protection between the resistant but not very stackable Elusivity and the stackable but vulnerable Defense. For those that have never seen it before, the original suggestion thread (actually, a repost of it: the original was eaten by forum grues and dates back to 2006) is here.

One thing that repost discussion thread doesn't cover as much, but the original thread did, was the question of whether or not *all* defense had to be converted into Elusivity. I argued it didn't, and perhaps shouldn't. I considered the case where rather than converting SR entirely to Elusivity, I only converted, say, the passives to Elusivity. This exercise was a significant aspect of the suggestion, because it points to a problem in how it was ultimately implemented.

Suppose we want to convert SR passives to Elusivity, but leave toggles as +Def. What we want is to convert the passives in such a way that fully slotted passives + fully slotted toggles generates the same level of protection. We can do that: we first assume that we are balancing around base tohit of 50%, which is the standard normalization point for Defense (defense has different strengths at different values of tohit: that's the whole problem in the first place). Then we just do the math: Given a slotted toggle of 21.65%, what value of Elusivity would give a net overall damage mitigation value of about 60.8%, which is what SR gets with slotted toggles and passives (30.4% defense). Answer: about 0.31 Elusivity (slotted). For reference:

Elusive passive: (1-0.31) * (0.50 - 0.2165) = 0.69 * 0.2835 = 0.1956
Standard: (0.50 - 0.304) = 0.196

This plus the example in the suggestion was intended to point out that the way Elusivity was supposed to be used was as a different kind of Defensive protection: it was intended to *replace* (some) defense, not be added on top like Defense Debuff Resistance, say. By adding 0.30 Elusivity on top of all Defense sets, those sets were effectively buffed, and by a lot. Conversely, at 0.10 they aren't being buffed by a lot, but also aren't being helped by a lot either.

You're absoutely correct that if you don't give a lot of Elusivity, it doesn't do its job, but if you give a lot Defense gets overpowered. The correct solution to that quandry was to give a lot of Elusivity, and then take a lot of Defense away in exchange. That way the defense sets didn't get stronger, but did get resistant to tohit buffs. And on top of that, it would have been harder to soft-cap defense in PvP (because you are taking points of defense away and replacing them with elusivity), which was also intentional.

I think the devs were hoping there was a "sweet spot" that they could set Elusivity to that would work for everyone. However, the history of CoH is littered with sweet spot attempts to balance defense, and in my opinion its just never going to work. The mechanics are such that you need a very targeted solution.

(Its not that I didn't look for one: the closest thing to a "sweet spot" I could find was a PvP Elusivity buff of 0.35 and a Defense self-debuff of -7.5%. That tends to have the smallest error for the most defensive sets overall. But its not really a great solution: just the best one if you have an explicit need to set it universally the same everywhere).

One more thing: Elusivity and DR (as applied to defense and tohit) are somewhat at odds. What DR tries to do is moderate +DEF and +tohit, but the DR curve is so sharp it basically drives most defense and tohit numbers to the same valley: around 30% defense and 15% tohit. The whole point of Elusivity was to make it tunable to everyone's individual defensive mitigation components.


Its also worth noting that Elusivity is currently a PvP-only effect, but it was never intended to be a PvP-specific suggestion. In fact, it was intended to solve the defense stacking problem(s) first, and PvP tohit buff issues second. If the devs had implemented Elusivity as a PvE feature as well as a PvP feature, we could have eliminated the stacking problem with defense bonuses in the invention system, for example (i.e. we could have made bonuses that were more effective for low defense characters but not instantly soft-capping high defense characters).

Actually, I'm significantly more engaged with City of Heroes than Champions Online at the moment. I'm just somewhat more sporatic in following the forums these days than I used to be. Part of that is due to the fact that my replacement computer keeps getting delayed, part of that is that most questions about the game tend to get answered very quickly and accurately by the rest of the forum community, so by the time I see it its often old news.

About the only thing I can add to this thread is a link to my Guide to Recharge for people interested in calculating recharge in tricky circumstances.

That's still my standing suggestion to Castle. I think the last time I mentioned it he called it "interesting." Which coming from Castle can mean anything from "the idea is very interesting" to "I find it interesting that you can come up with an idea that dumb." Usually, though, it means "good idea, but don't hold your breath."

*I* have always believed that MA should be the single-target king, given its rather iffy benefits anywhere else *and* given that it had that crown for a time, back when it had "broken" TK.

However, I should point out that long ago when I discussed this with Castle, he told me (and told me back then that I could repeat) that the original design intent of MA was to be a secondary effects king. Dark Melee wasn't supposed to be a high damage set either: it was intended to be a "utility" set: the swiss army knife of scrapper primaries.

(Precisely how you could have one set with the best "secondary effects" and another set with the best "utility" is left as an exercise for the reader: I doubt even Geko could answer that question today.)


Of course, neither powerset is necessarily bound to those objectives anymore, but those are still the design intents on the books of those two sets. And I doubt anyone on the dev team is blind to the fact that neither set really fulfills its design intent today. But any argument based around design intent other than those two would have to justify that new intent from scratch. I'd still *like* MA to be the single target king, but I can't use the set's original or current design intent to justify that preference (I *can* say that its a good target to try to achieve given that the *official* one is possibly an intractible one at the present time.)

This is a very persistent myth. The devs did not balance SS attacks around Rage, because they had no tools to do so, and because the balancing methodology they did have *explicitly* gave them no latitude to do so.

In fact, with no small irony, the SS set shows signs that the devs intended its powers to deliver *more* damage, not less, probably to compensate for KO Blow (which originally did no damage). Thinking the way the devs did during initial development and at release, the fact that SS has attacks that do less damage per attack actually means they were deliberately attempting to give SS attacks that did more damage per cycle second because they recharged faster. The damage/recharge formula very explicitly (Geko attested to this) attempts to express the notion that frontloading has a certain benefit all its own, so attacks that do more damage per use take disproportionately longer to recharge, while attacks that do less damage per use recharge disproportionately faster. That way, hard-hitting attacks do less damage over time overall, while lighter attacks deliver more damage over time overall.

Right or wrong, that was the thinking at the time, and *if* you take that perspective, the evidence shows that Geko didn't try to make SS weak and then compensate with Rage, he attempted to make SS deliver more damage overall and then stack Rage *on top* of that, balanced against a Rage crash.

Also, keep in mind that the devs consistently thought that any power with a crash would be strongly incentivized to be used sparingly. They thought players would not perma-unstoppable. They thought players would not perma instant healing. I'm sure they thought that because it crashed, players would not (in general) perma Rage. By dev logic at the time, Build Up was just as good of a power as Rage, because Rage was intended to be used sparingly.


To the extent that SS has (in some cases) lower DPA attacks and perma-capable Rage, its a coincidence. And to be frank, if SS is supposed to be balanced around perma-Rage, it isn't anyway.

I'd love to see an emote for shark-surfing.

Hmm, now that I look at the nova attacks, they do use a different damage table. It does seem that Ranged_SSDamage has an effective damage modifier of 1.2 based on the level 50 damage number.

I'm sure I must have seen that before, and just forgot about it completely. I wonder what I did to destroy those brain cells. I hope it was something entertaining. Its also possible that I have an absolute limit on the number of CoX-related tables I can keep in my head, and I ejected that one recently (I'm currently working on a little analysis project that involves a lot of tables).

A search of the powers in existence in I16 beta shows that no other powers use the SSDamage tables except for the Bright and Dark Nova inherent attacks. You'd think that they just copied the HEAT tables when they made the VEATs, but the VEAT tables aren't identical to the HEAT tables (specifically, the Melee_SSDamage table isn't identical). Maybe they were playing around with those during early development of the VEATs before changing their minds.

Hmm, last I remember Peacebringer ranged damage modifer was increased to 0.8 (Nova form does have a +45% damage buff).

Also, as far as I know, there's no way for a power to change an archetype's damage "modifier" (really, the damage table). As far as I know, that table is immutable and irreplaceable for all archetypes, which means the only way to change it is to literally change archetypes. I don't think Nova form changes archetypes.

BaBs never said it was impossible. At one point, he did suggest that the amount of work involved - both in terms of changing the game and the tools the devs use to add content to the game - would have been so high that it would more likely happen in a sequel of the game rather than the current game, but that was before the NCSoft buyout and the radical increase in development resources made available to the CoX team, and (to be honest) before BaB had sufficient information to judge the amount of code work involved (as I said back then and even BaB says then and now: BaB is an animator: his views on animation and visual resources is generally authoritative, his views on general infrastructure and systems are not).

The issue was always the workload issue, though, and not whether the game systems themselves were too primative or it was too difficult to figure out. The bottom line, though, is that essentially anything said by anyone regarding what is and is not feasible for CoX prior to November 2007 should be presumed to be no longer valid.

Its worth noting that as late as September 2007 BaB was saying power customization was too much work to be reasonable; by April 2008 he was already working on power customization. The NCSoft buyout basically changed everything.


I am still wondering, though:

who would have told you that the CoX engine is "harder to work with" within the context of power customization. It doesn't sound like something a red name would say, especially since as I mentioned the current power customization features didn't require any significant changes to the graphics engine (as far as I'm aware of, they didn't really require *any* changes beyond support for a set of tinting parameters). If a dev said that in a context I didn't catch (at a con, say) I'd be interested to know who it was, and what specifically they were referring to.

Also, I don't think anyone thinks things like flowing hair are easy.

In general, maybe. But City of Heroes already makes the concession that Super Reflexes, and dodging in general, has no consistent animated effects associated with the damage evasion mechanic.

Ironically, the one situation where reverse bodyguard has the best opportunity for visual effect is for the one kind of tanker we don't have: the force field tanker. And I have to believe that the reason we don't have FF tankers is because it would be extremely difficult to make FF tankers that wouldn't stomp all over FF defenders.


Its worth noting that my original suggestion for "reverse-bodyguard" had an extra catch: it would have a relatively low radius. The idea was that right now with the current aggro rules, its counter-intuitively dangerous to stand anywhere near the tanker, because they are drawing all the fire (including AoE fire). I wanted reverse-bodyguard to reverse that, and make the *safest* place to stand be next to the tanker, where reverse bodyguard's effects were strongest. And if players are standing relatively near the tanker, one way to animate RB's effects is to tell the animation system to send visual attacks intended for players under RB to the tanker, so that they "hit" the tanker instead of the player, and then either deflect off or are absorbed by the tanker (as an aside, I wish there was better deflection and absorption animations as well).