Arcanaville

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I'm curious as to what you mean by "on paper", especially considering that I'm reasonably certain that most players (re: the ones that don't crunch the numbers) choose to create characters based on assumed performance based on the interpreted effectiveness and play style of the character/AT based on the name rather than planned effectiveness.

You touched on this with the reason why Blasters and Scrappers seem to have such a comparatively high attrition rate. Could it simply be that the general assumption with Stalkers is that they'll play significantly differently than how players assume they will thanks to the name rather than simply a less effective (from a balance perspective) design?

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That's basically what I mean, more or less. Without being any more specific, what I was saying is that what players expect from stalkers from all information prior to actually making one (manual, in-game information, forum articles, whatever) appears to be different from what they actually get from them. It might be that stalkers perform lower than expected, or it might be that their intrinsic playstyle is different than expected, or some combination of both (it could also be that unique to stalkers, players misjudge what they think they want far more often than any other archetype). But something made players want to make them, then not want to play them, relative to other archetypes.

By "on paper" I didn't literally mean paper calculations: I meant the judgement that players made about the archetype based upon its description rather than based upon playing experience.

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1. Rather than separate single target vs AoE performance, the metric attempts to generate a combined offensive score that measures the net damage output against a range of target numbers. In other words, given the full suite of single target and AoE attacks, what's the offensive potential of the powerset when facing one target, three targets, five targets, ten targets, etc.

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How do you plan on dealing with the AoE size/cone issue in that? A 30' range 30* cone is going to have fewer targets in almost all situations than a 50' range 360* targeted AoE simply because enemies don't tend to form up in nice thin lines for longer than a few seconds (not to mention player error because it's hard to gauge what exactly 30* is, much less how far out it extends thanks to issues with perspective).

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At the time, I didn't deal with it. Fundamentally, this is not singularly a problem of geometry. Its really a problem of factoring in skill. There's no real benefit (at least there wasn't at that stage of the game) in attempting to factor skill into numerical balance equations and metrics, because they are sources for debate without resolution. The metric only calculated the damage potential of a powerset when actually successfully engaging X number of targets. It didn't factor in the difficulty of actually consistently engaging that many targets continuously.

That's why, in exactly the same way the defensive analysis posts did, the metric dealt with damage potential. It did not and does not attempt to predict the damage output of any particular person.

Next time, I do intend to handle this by some methodology. I don't know if it will be acceptable methodology, but I think we've moved far enough along in numerical analysis that its a reasonable next step for me to tackle.

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So, yes, it's a simulation; but at the same time, characters are transformed by the experience.

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I consider the AE to be by default not real in the sense that the activity does not take place within the same consensus reality of the prime game world, but real in the sense that the events actually happen. Essentially, its a cross between the holodeck and the matrix. However, this question is slightly slippery: for example, instanced missions are an example of the curious case of the game asserting that something is real but *not* part of consensus reality. You're not supposed to think about that too closely, and I suspect the mechanics of the AE fall into similar territory.

I say by default because I consider it perfectly valid and give full latitude for AE authors to override this assumption in (at least) one of three ways:

1. Write the arc as if it were actually real, ignoring the AE mechanics backstory entirely, with the same basic handwave that the actual game uses to assert that all instances of all instanced missions are real and canon, even if they are cross-contradictory.

2. Write the arc acknowledging the AE backstory, but claiming its somehow false or misinformation.

3. Write the arc extending the AE backstory to suggest that the underlying mechanics of its operation are functionally equivalent to creating an alternate reality/dimension/universe.

I also don't need to be explicitly told which of these the author is assuming, so long as its reasonably obvious that one of them is most applicable to the arc.

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Now, the animation customization may not be all that much, but look at the kind of potential it brings. Not only does that mean that, with time, more powersets and more powers could have alternate animations made for them, but these alternate animations could work their way to picking WHERE you shoot powers from. I mean all it takes is an alternate animation that, instead of pointing your hands to shoot a fire blast, causes you to peer forward and shoot it out of your eyes. So animation customization, and possibly even a power emanation point customization. To me, this is one step removed from letting us shoot our powers out of devices of our choice, provided BABs wants to give every dang powerset a weapon choice

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Theoretically, this is already possible. If BaB is really clever, he could try to design the animations so that the weapon barrel ends right about the same point in space that the player's hands end up at the moment the blast fires, which would make the two animations interchangable (for the purpose of projectiles). Then its just a matter of doing some text-file jockeying to make the appropriate PFXs that call all the combinations**, and you have fire blast with hands, fire blast with rifle, energy blast with hands, energy blast with rifle, with the minimum amount of work.

There is a point where this becomes too cumbersome, but in the interim it opens lots of possibilities in theory.


** Read BaB's power customization FAQ, then add these words: powers can now have selectable arrays of PFXs. The end.

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With all due respect Zombie (lots and lots), those sets won't work as the appropriate sets. They just won't.

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Obviously I disagree with you about them working.

But I'm curious to know why they 'just won't' work.

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I think its highly unlikely the devs would give blasters a set with Tar Patch, Darkest Night, and Siphon Life.

Dark Control seems potentially tricky for the devs to balance. On the one hand, it only has one single target immobilize and a PBAoE disorient, which makes containment problematic for controllers. Conversely, the combined dark control/dark assault sets have so much -tohit and stacking fear it might be problematic for dominators as well. And it basically has two extraction powers. I think its unlikely the devs would do that.

The Assault set is probably the least problematic, although I think Blackstar would be considered unprecedented.

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Dude, for this feature, I want to have your baby.

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I told you BaB: give them an inch, and they'll be after your children next.

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Ok then fine, whats the hold on illusion control for doms? This is the most wanted powerset for this AT and it gets denied again and again. Dont give me that crap that most of the power wouldnt work with domination, because with the recent changes to the AT its really a non-issue now. Give us dark illusion and dark assault.

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And here I thought it was the most wanted powerset for masterminds.

To say it "gets denied" implies its ever even been visited: its possible its simply never come up as a proliferation target yet for someone to say "no" to. Picking other sets first as higher priorities for proliferation is not the same thing as saying no to Illusion.

Also, I'm not sure there actually are major problems with proliferating Illusion to dominators (at least, not balance-related ones) but if there were, Domination would not be at the top of my list. Giving Superior Invisibility and indestructible tanks to something with assault sets would be higher.

And finally, "if you weren't full of crap you'd give me what I demand" is only sweet talk in the original Klingon.

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BaB while you're looking in on this topic.

Curiously just wondering how much extra work it would take to be able to select the projectile type as well as the colour of a power?

Would love to be able to select Proton Volley style (the three round balls of energy) projectiles for an energy blaster, colour them pink and go all Danmaku on the enemies.

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Given that alternate animations for Martial Arts and Superstrength are included in Issue 16 something of the sort is possible. But before that, he'd have to tweak the animation so that it had the same animation time as the animation it's replacing. So it would be more complicated and have to be done on a more one-power-at-a-time basis.

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This wouldn't be changing the animation, that would still remain the same, I'm talking about merely replacing the type of projectile used, sniper blast would still use sniper blast's animation BUT instead of it firing a beam of concentrated energy, it would fire the same projectiles as Proton volley.

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But the blast itself is part of the animation I think ? Or AN animation.

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Projectiles are separate from character animations, but my understanding is that at the moment the system "customizes" the entire package of animation, FX, and projectiles. So (and of course this could change at any time) if I understand correctly for BaB to give us animation A and B, and projectile C and D, he would basically have to give us option 1 (A&C), option 2 (A&D), option 3 (B&C), and option 4 (B&D). I suspect that if they wanted to give the players significant independent options in this area, they would probably strongly consider changing the tech to make the two choices independent (which I think is doable, but more work than the change that I16 incorporates).

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^ You can get Self Destruction via Super Booster.

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You have to be alive to use that.

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I still don't understand why I can't use my real money to buy the 63 month veteran reward if I want to.

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Fundamentally, its because some things aren't for sale. The devs don't sell XP, for example.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the veteran rewards eventually turned into perk packs down the road though. I don't believe the players were ever promised that the veteran rewards would be exclusive to the veteran system; the only inappropriate thing is players attempting to cheat the veteran reward requirements in the first place. There's no intrinsic problem I can see in suggesting that some of the bonuses included in the veteran system show up in other reward systems (certain things, like the actual veteran badges, though, would be inappropriate to sell in perk packs for obvious reasons) although it would depend on the details of how it was done.

I just think that is unlikely in the near term.

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Seriously Witch Engine, just apologize for your arc kicking Venture's dog, and the healing can begin.

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That won't solve anything, since it's reached the point where the entire MA Forum has started arguing with Venture. Actually if anything, this is getting Witch Engine tons of exposure.

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While the rating of the arc drops. Law of Averages has already taken hold.

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It's funny actually, because near the start of this thread, the arc had over 90% 5-star votes, and nearly a hundred votes. Once the 'forum cartel' folk latched on, it all of a sudden got hit with a bunch of 1 and 2 star votes that have been coming in in bursts. But not before, and the arc had literally been around months, and hadn't been advertised at all. My supergroup has 4 active players, and my coalition has another 6-8, so I know those prior masses of 5-star votes weren't from them. We're a small crew.

The lesson here is, don't dare upset the Forum Cartel because apparently they've got connections. :P

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Actually, my suspicions are that forum readers in general give statistically lower ratings than non-forum readers. At least one reason for this may be as simple as the fact that the players that subscribe to the forums in the first place are self-selected to be more critical in general. Players less likely to want to participate on the forums are also less likely to want to pass criticism onto other players, and more likely to rate slightly higher on average as a result.

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As Lazarus points out 12 Monkeys plays games with the main character's head but plays fair with the audience. Good luck with that in a MA project.


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Since the audience is the main character, there is the paradox of this logic. You cannot both "play games with" and "play fair" at the same time. If we accept this a fundamental feature of this media, then we can entertain stories that do either one or the other. This arc is one that 'plays games', most of the other arcs out there are ones that 'play fair'. I think there is room for both in the MA and I enjoy both.

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I think its possible albeit difficult to pull off well.

The Sixth Sense borders on this territory. The movie is deliberately crafted to slip the audience into a pseudo-first person perspective, and then plays games with that perspective. But it plays fair: it doesn't hide anything from the player that isn't hidden from the main character himself. Furthermore it isn't a conventional gotcha in that its written to make the audience *want* to pursue the perspective of the main character, which is to help the boy.

In my opinion, the genius of the movie is that it doesn't cheat: the big reveal doesn't, as so many others do, *add* new information that changes the meaning of the story in ways the audience couldn't have predicted, it actually *subtracts* the rest of the movie from the clues, and without the distraction of the rest of the movie the dots become suddenly easy to connect.

Partly illustrating what makes that so difficult is that, having done it once, even Shyamalan can't figure out how to do it a second time.

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Moreover, I don't, and I don't think most people do, treat my friends of five years drastically different from my friends of ten.

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No you most likely wouldn't because there's been sufficient time to establish relationships with the 5 year friend and the 10 year friend. In terms of the game; however, they based the rewards on time and patronage because it's not possible for them to get to know the players individually.

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Also, you don't owe your existence to having friends willing to pay for the privilege of being your friend.

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. . .A curious twist to the cape mission is that when it first came out, a lot of people *thought* it was hard, and so tended to invite more and more people to "help" with it. Ironically, the more people you added, the harder it got to save the time capsule before it was destroyed, which caused people to add even more people to try to make it easier. I didn't know it was supposed to be hard and soloed it with all of my alts at the time without any difficulty..

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I would say you must have started this AFTER the bug was fixed.

You see, the initial bug was that the trigger to start destroying the capsule began as soon as you stepped into the mission.

If you had a friend or team with you, and waited for someone to zone in to the mission, you lost.. The capsule was destroyed while you waited at the door.

If you stopped to fight ANY enemies instead of racing immediately to the capsule, you lost. Capsule destroyed.

Even if you did immediately race to it, it was still iffy on saving it.


It didn't stay that way long. But I wanted MY cape right away, and went through several attempts (and finally won) while the bug was in place.
The biggest problem was just figuring out that the timer sprang right away, and you had to race to the end.

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Actually, I played it on the very first day. Very few people saw that version and I don't think it was responsible for the reputation the mission garnered, because most player unfamiliar with the mechanics of the mission when it first came out thought it was bugged, not hard (because it just suddenly ended without warning, like many bugged timer missions do). The difficulty reputation was earned due to the very common practice back then that when you are encountering the unknown, its best to bring friends.

Respec had a similar reputation, only in the case of respec it actually was quite difficult in its original incarnation. Respec also had an amazing set of urban legends surrounding its mechanics that would fill an entire episode of Mythbusters.

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lower controller damage cap to 300%. It is currently too high in conjunction with containment.

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Or, give Defenders a Critical that can break their damage cap.

Or, change Containment to a damage boost so it won't break the damage cap.

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In general, I don't like intertwining base damage with the damage cap. Fundamentally speaking, the base damage elements of an archetype are supposed to express their intrinsic damage potential, and the damage cap is supposed to express their intrinsic ability to be buffed. Saying "lower the cap because they have containment/criticals" is tantamount to saying "they're designed to do a lot of damage, so make them unable to benefit from teams assistence." That may not be the direct intent, but its what the game change ultimately says in terms of the design.

If containment was delivering too much damage, it makes more sense to simply lower containment damage. There's no law that says containment must do the same amount of damage that the primary damage components of the attack do. Reducing containment to, say, 50% of primary damage would mean a fully buffed controller ends up dealing the same amount of damage that a controller with full containment and 300% damage cap would do. But it would also lower the damage of controllers below the cap.

Alternatively, if you wanted to play deeper games with containment, my original counterproposal to containment when it first came out was to make containment ~150% of primary damage but be unbuffable (i.e. Ignores Strengths and Enhancements). The original stated intent of containment was to boost lower level damage of controllers and improve soloability. A high-order containment that wasn't buffable would proportionately benefit lower level controllers more than high level ones, which I thought was the original point of containment.

At this point though, I'm not sure if such a dramatic change is justifiable. I'm not even sure if that original intent is still operative.


In any event, the real reason you don't want to travel down this road is that if controllers are knocked down to 300% because their *maximally buffed* damage intrudes on defender territory, it opens the door to blasters asking for defender damage caps to be lowered equally severely, because teams of buffed defenders intrude on their offensive territory. While I'm sure someone can nitpick the differences in situations**, that would ignore how game design precident actually works.



** And its not an argument they are guaranteed to win either: while blasters have no intrinsic archetypal design right to buff each other - the weakness most likely to be nitpicked - they are intended to be the best damage dealers in teams. To simultaneously satisfy the defender right to be the best buffers and blaster rights to be the best buffed damage dealers, the "optimal" offensive damage team should be four defenders and four blasters: eight defenders should *not* outperform that combination or else the defender archetypal requirements would be superceding the blaster ones. And that requirement places very severe limits on the relationship between the defender damage cap and the blaster one. In effect, four defenders should saturate a defender but not a blaster in the vast majority of powerset combinations with offensive buffs. On paper, to satisfy this requirement defenders should have had about a 250%-300% damage cap relative to a blaster cap of 400%-500%.

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At least someone finally admitted that they do, in fact, view veterans as more valuable than new players.

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I never said that. What I said was that the veteran reward system rewards subcription time because being a subscriber at a particular moment is specifically valuable to the game at that moment in a way that retroactively paying the same amount of money cannot replace. However, someone that subscribes for a year from April 2004 to March 2005 gets exactly the same credit for that twelve months of subscription as someone who subscribes for a year from April 2008 to March 2009. The system doesn't value any particular month of subscription any higher or lower than any other month. But it does consider them *distinct*. Only 2004 subscribers can get credit for being 2004 subscribers, just like only 2009 subscribers can get credit for being 2009 subscribers.

Put it another way: lets take "veteran status" out of the equation. Suppose a player has subscribed since head start, subscribed for a year, then suspended their subscription. Then last month decided to resubscribe. They have thirteen months of subscription. Their thirteen months counts no more and no less than the player that started thirteen months ago. The system does not preferentially offer the "veteran" anything more than the (relatively) new player. All that matters is total months of subscription, regardless of when you started playing the game.

The system doesn't consider veterans as more valuable players. It rewards months of subscription. It doesn't care *which* months. It *does* value someone who subscribed for fifteen months higher than someone who subscribed for only twelve months. But again, it doesn't matter which months, and it doesn't matter which first player started subscribing to the game earlier.

Its just that while the system values all months of subscription equally, it doesn't value them in dollars which is why you can't buy credit for being a subscriber during months you weren't actually a subscriber. You're being rewarded for actually *being* a subscriber on July 23, 2009, not for paying the same amount of money that players did on July 23, 2009. Once July 23, 2009 is gone, you can never get credit for it again.

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If I may deconstruct this a little, you seem to be ignoring a lot of things here.

Pet peeve: this is reductionism, not deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is taking a text (which doesn't have to be an actual text) and re-interpreting it so that it says the opposite of what it was intended to say (or, really, anything the interpreter wants it to say).


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How many pet peeves can one person have?

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Quoting Arcanaville from my first review thread:

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By the way, this is what makes contact betrayal so dangerous. The one thing the player - the human behind the screen - and the game make a silent pact to honor is that the player will play the game, and the game will encourage the player to play the game. When the player *must* do mission five of an arc, but the contact does something that makes it absolutely bat-[censored] stupid to do mission five of the arc, the game violates that pact with the player, and that's what makes that so generally annoying. The game is never supposed to tell the player that the only winning move is not to play.

The player is supposed to agree to play your work, and your work is supposed to always give the player objectives they want to complete. Tampering with this contract is something that requires massive skill to pull off successfully across the vast range of possible players. Exploiting this contract is what makes it possible to hide the railroad tracks.

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I generally respect Arcanaville, I will assume that this quote is somewhat out of context... more along the lines of perspective from the fact that I didn't feel betrayed by this arc at all (and again, the indicated quote has nothing to do with anagrams).

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The context of the quote was actually talking about the degree to which the players can "affect" the plot of a mission arc. Obviously, they cannot affect it at all in the literal sense: the entire arc was scripted before the player ever entered it, and nothing they do can change the story of it (at least in the current incarnation of the architect). However, even though the player is on railroad tracks, a good author will try to disguise this fact in many ways. Key to this deception is to strictly minimize the number of times the player questions the direction they are travelling in, because their steering wheel doesn't actually do anything.

This leads to my quote above: if you intend to write an arc where a mission contact will betray you in some way, you have to somehow get the player back on the tracks immediately, because if you put the player into a situation where the obvious smart choice is to abandon the contact but that choice isn't actually available, the tracks suddenly become very visible. Basically, you shouldn't say "gotcha" to the player when the player was dragged kicking and screaming to the gotcha.


I haven't played the arc in question yet, so I don't know if in my opinion the arc suffers from this problem. But I'm intrigued enough to play it for myself and see, at my next available opportunity. As to Venture's criticisms in general, I tend to agree with Venture that the problems he describes are in fact problems worth resolving whenever possible, but I don't always (or usually, actually) agree that those problems exist to the same serious degree he perceives them to in actual arcs. That's a highly subjective aspect of good storytelling and Venture happens to exist on one (relatively) extreme end of the scale. But I'm quite certain that there is an unbroken continuum of players that connect Venture through the average and out to the far extreme of happy-land.

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When did Day Jobs go live? It may have been after BaB gathered those figures...but I'd think that any determination of "ATs logged in during time period X" would be muddied by Day Jobs, as I now log in all my untouched alts regularly to shift them to new Day Job locations.

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Day jobs were introduced in Issue 13 which started beta testing in October '08 and went live in December '08. All of BaBs numbers date from August 2008 (the dates are listed with the numbers).

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Ahh. I knew I left something out. The Bright color grid doesn't have black as a color choice; the Dark color grid does. Bruce Harlick said that black didn't work well as an additive color choice. The way the grids are laid out, the Bright color set takes each color from full-saturated color through a very pale tint of that color plus the two colors on the extreme right of the costume color grid, while the Dark colors have the shades that are down on the left edge of the color grid. So for Red in the Bright palette, you can go from white to a saturated red, while in the Dark palette, you can go from a dark red to an almost-black red shade.

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It sounds like the bright colors might be designed to range from maximum color intensity to zero intensity with transparent alpha, and the dark colors might be designed to range from maximum color intensity to opaque black. It'll certainly be interesting to play with once it goes live (or goes test as the case may be).

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This?

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....16#Post13710016

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LoL actually put her wonderful data into Mids to see this uber AV killer and all I can do is LuLz.

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Not specifically commenting on any builds or capabilities, but my main problem with those recommendations is:

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Darkest Night - to stop him from hitting back

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So far as I know Darkest Night is resistable in PvE (as are nearly all player debuffs) and most Archvillains generally strongly resist tohit debuffing to the tune of about 85% or so at level 50 (in fact, the *minimum* Archvillain tohit resistance is 30% - that's not the lowest that currently exists, but the actual floor that the game is programmed to obey for AVs). The net result is that you aren't going to budge the typical AV's net tohit much (you can buff your own defense to make them miss, you just can't really budge their tohit much without extremely massive amounts of debuffing).

Darkest Night will debuff AV damage some so its not useless, but it won't really make them miss noticably unless you have significantly outlevelled them and have a huge combat modifier advantage. This would seem to be dangerous advice to give to players (that a single application of DN can debuff an AV enough for it to miss you often enough to matter).

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The blaster forums were stunned when Castle brought up the potential to change Defiance. The blaster community had pretty much accepted their state of affairs. Naturally, Castle's post re-invigorated conversation, but before his request for input, blasters had been pretty quiet (about AT wide changes) since after ED and I6. Some of us (rather foolishly or ignorantly, in hindsight), didn't even realize there was a problem, thinking the extra fast kill speed made up for the (probably more often than we realized) occasional extra defeat.

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What's more, I think if there was any consensus at all, we all agreed that what should happen to blasters next was a review of blaster secondary sets. Ironically, secondary powersets were probably the least affected by the I11 blaster changes. Personally, I had stopped thinking about blaster improvements because I had come to believe that stalkers and dominators (and maybe peacebringers) deserved more attention, and I figured the devs felt the same.

To be honest, I was not surprised to learn that blasters on the whole were performing much worse than most people believed. But even I was completely surprised to learn that even powerset combinations like Ice/Energy - how do you die playing Ice/Energy? - were underperforming, probably because of debt. I was sufficiently stunned that I had to ask the question three times worded in three different ways to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding the answer.

(Also, there are still things the devs are not allowed to tell me about the datamining process, so I couldn't get 100% straight answers to all my questions).

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I've never seen an AoE breakdown of blasters that was more useful than an interesting conversation piece. If you know of a good one out there, do share.

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I could repost my PeakDR analysis, but it would be mostly worthless because so much of the information has been rendered moot by changes to the blaster sets. I'm kicking around an update to it, but it might be some time before I'm in a position to post it.

In brief, though, PeakDR encompassed two main ideas:

1. Rather than separate single target vs AoE performance, the metric attempts to generate a combined offensive score that measures the net damage output against a range of target numbers. In other words, given the full suite of single target and AoE attacks, what's the offensive potential of the powerset when facing one target, three targets, five targets, ten targets, etc.

2. Rather attempt to calculate optimal attack chains which may only be applicable in some cases, have edge issues (start up, cool down, etc) PeakDR attempted to measure the efficiency of a powerset by using a calculation that attempted to determine, for varying levels of recharge, which attacks were really most relevant to the best possible damage output under a variety of conditions. It did that by taking all the attacks, sorting them by DPA, calculating the "efficiency" (really the ratio of activation time to total cycle time, given X recharge), and figuring out what the average DPA was for the top N attacks for which the sum of their efficiency ratings was approximately 100% (a little more complex than that, but that's the basic idea).

To oversimplify what this thing was trying to do, imagine a powerset with two powers, each with one second cast and one second recharge with DPA of 2, and a third power with one second cast and three second recharge and DPA 1.5. Obvioiusly, since you can just cycle the first two powers indefinitely, there's no reason to ever use the third power. In effect, a powerset with only the first two powers and a powerset with all three have basically the same offensive potential.

PeakDR would basically say this: if you use the best DPA power as often as possible, you'll be attacking 50% of the time. If you use the second best DPA power as often as possible on top of that, you'll be attacking 50% + 50% = 100% of the time. You can't attack more than 100% of the time, so those two powers are probably most relevant to net offensive output.

Expand that to many powers, varying recharge, a proration algorithm when the percentages don't add up perfectly at the end, and a discussion of how attack collisions affect the metric, and you basically have PeakDR.


On revisit, I'm planning on using computer calculations to average huge numbers of random situations and calculate a "discrete PeakDR" which includes things like overkill (i.e. powersets full of hard hitting attacks can be less efficient than powersets full of light ones, if DPA is identical). Actually, its probably going to be not to dissimilar from the scourge calculations that Starsman used to quantify scourge: I thought about revisiting this project after Starsman first discussed his idea for scourge analysis with me.

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All ATs do as well on teams as Defenders, though it's arguable Defenders bring more to teams. The thing is that no other AT suffers as severely for their contribution to teams.

Tankers bring aggro control, and have the benefit of high health as a result of their role.
Blasters bring pure damage, which benefits them as much when they're solo as when they're teamed.
Scrappers bring boss-killing criticals, which benefits them as much solo as when teamed.
Controllers have controls, which equates to defense for themselves and the team.

Defenders that debuff benefit the team with their debuffs, which also help the Defender solo;
Defenders with Buffs can buff the team, but largely cannot buff themselves, which hampers them solo.

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Does this theory account for the fact that the last time we received any knowledge about archetype performance, it was blasters and not defenders that were levelling the slowest overall? Its possibly the case that the I11 changes addressed that fact, and its now Defenders that level the slowest, but that's not certain and even if that's true no theory I've ever read has ever been able to explain the contradiction between the "logic" behind defender performance lag and the reality that they don't actually do so when played by real players, or at least never have in the past.

The only assumption that I believe gets implied a lot is that the vast majority of players suck, and as such their experiences don't count. Unfortunately, this game is primarily made for them, not us.

Its a fact, though, that as of I11 one thing we do know is that while Defenders accepted slower soloing for team buffing, Blasters paid for higher offense by being dead a lot. Its difficult to argue that Defenders suffered the most for their archetypal design decisions within that context.


(My own theory is that on average blasters die far more often than forum readers are willing to acknowledge, and defenders team more often and are better protected and take less risk in those teams when they do. It suggests that while the performance bottleneck is offensive for higher skilled players, its defensive for lower skilled players and that makes evaluating which archetypes gets the better tools a tricky to assess without knowing the skill level of the average player. Even more tricky is the fact that this ratio changes as the players progress in level range, which probably explains why blasters have often been observed to level faster initially, then slow down markedly in the mid-levels.)

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Second of all, having the veteran's rewards cap out after an arbitrary length of time is about as 'fair' as suggesting that companies stop paying salaries to their workers after five years

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City of Heroes is not a job, and Veteran's Rewards are not a salary.

This is a service we all pay for. I pay just as much as you do. You don't pay more because you're a veteran, and you haven't contributed more, because you're not contributing. You're playing.

If the only reason you keep subscribing is for your 60+X month veteran reward, I have to wonder what value you are to the community aside from income, and if your value is income, why aren't the same benefits for sale?

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The veteran reward is not specifically a reward for subscription dollars per se but for actually being a subscriber. No amount of dollars paid today buys the existence of the game then. The only reason we have a game in 2009 is because of the subscribers in 2008. And the only reason those subscribers had a game is because of the subscribers in 2007. Without the subscribers of 2004, there would be no game today. Veteran reward programs reward long-term loyalty because long-term loyal customers have given the game a benefit that cannot be replicated by any amount of money today. Money today can only go towards supporting the game today. In this one sense, 2004 subscription dollars and 2009 subscription dollars are not fungible.

That's why veteran status is (in this case) not for sale. You can't buy it without a functioning time machine.

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My vote is still Reverse Ice Slick. It fits the Gravity theme perfectly.

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If you're talking theme, the power is called "Dimension Shift." I see no reason we should be shifting them to an especially peaceful dimension.

Have the power cause all affected targets to disappear completely for five seconds. When they reappear, have the targets all be randomly either:

1. On fire and afraid
2. Frozen and immobilized
3. Choking on fumes
4. Confused
5. Impaled
6. Affected by mag 100 knockup

I think that's theoretically doable by the game engine, although it might take some creative attribmodding by the powers team.

Heck, I don't even care if that fits the gravity theme or not. I just like the idea.