Arcanaville

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So, I was checking the consignment market this morning and I had a really wierd conversation with the Scrapper next to me. I liked his costume so I took a peek at his build and noticed that he was a Martial Arts/Super Reflexes with the Leaping Pool with Acrobatics... And Practiced Brawler in the build as well. Below is the conversation from my chat log (color coded for clarity and with names removed).

Me: Acro and Practiced Brawler?
Me: Isn't that a little... redundant?
MA/SR Scrapper: no
Me: How so?
MA/SR Scrapper: because all defence powers are expressed in percentages, when one fails another may not.
Me: Never had any KB or Mez isssues with practiced Brawler on any of my /SR Scrappers... Ummm. And that logic is not accurate.
Me: Acrobatics does not provide any Defense or Defense Debuff Protection
Me: Also, attacks check against your total Positional Defense value, not each power sequentially
Me: Acro does provide some resistance to status effects, but as long as Practiced Brawler is overlapping, the PB protection dwarfs the contribution that Acro provides.
MA/SR Scrapper:all defence powers (melee - sorry i didnt meean to include practiced brawler there) dont activate accumaltively - they are all separate activations
Me: Activations, yes. But attacks check against the TOTAL Positional Defense you have
Me: Cumulatively
MA/SR Scrapper: Practiced Brawler u must have against sleeps and disorients and stuns. QED.
MA/SR Scrapper: no they dont
Me: Read Arcanaville's guide to Defense on the forums
MA/SR Scrapper: otherwise u would have over a 1000
MA/SR Scrapper: its wrong
Me: Suit yourself.
MA/SR Scrapper: no let me get back to this please
Me: A-OK.
Me: Good luck, have fun.

Am I missing something here, or perhaps am I misinformed? I was flummoxed by his response, as he had a substantial number of Vet bages on his character...

According to Red Tomax, Acrobatics for a Scrapper gives:
-7 Knockback, Knockup (unenhanceable)
-2 Knockback, Knockup (enhanceable)
-2 Held
RES(Held) +60.55%

What gives?

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Theoretically speaking, you could decide to stack Acro with Practiced Brawler for the small increase in hold protection and the hold resistance (which would reduce the duration of holds assuming you don't actually get held and acro shuts off).

But as to the rest, the player is misinformed. However, my guess is that more than half the players who play this game are misinformed or believe blatantly false information about how the game works. The documentation is unclear, and when you gather a large amount of people and ask them to guess about something complex, a lot of people will guess wrong and some fraction of them will guess wrong with certainty.

So long as the player isn't misinforming others and is having fun, I really don't care if they don't know and don't want to know or refuse to learn: its their dime. The only times I've forcefully corrected another player in-game is when they were attempting to spread dangerously false information to other players. Otherwise, I correct them once and if they think I'm uninformed or incompetent, I leave them be.

I'd actually bet even money that one of the things confusing the player in question is the slotting screen. Neophytes - even "neophytes" that happen to be long-term subscribers - have been known to get confused when it comes to the difference between slotting percentage and base strength percentage. When the real numbers screens first came out, I did have actual players in-game ask me how it could be that they had 300% defense or something like that, because they thought their defense powers were as strong as the slotting strength listed rather than the modified base strength.


Incidentally, the basic mechanics of defense and tohit are so well known at this point that even if you were to subtract everything I've ever said, done, tested, or confirmed about defense and tohit mechanics, what's left is still enough to confirm the basics a dozen times over. In terms of the basics, they are known with absolute certainty.

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So in your opinion, do you think MA is a bit under-performing right now even after the changes? I know MA is not unplayable.

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It is by no means unplayable, and in terms of pure levelling performance I don't think any player, neophyte or expert, is going to have difficulties playing the set and getting at least decent results.

What I think it lacks is that it doesn't especially excel at anything, except perhaps executing pretty (and often long) animations (CAK is still questionable, though). I say that within the context of asserting that the vast majority of powersets *do* excel in something, or alternatively have a unique combination of strengths, relative to their peers. This is not just true for scrapper powersets, or melee attack sets, but nearly all sets everywhere: so much so that I think that failing to satisfy that criteria is itself grounds for re-examination in my opinion (my opinion is that all powersets should have at least one good conceptual reason for existing, and at least one mechanical reason for existing, or its design is flawed).

I have lots-o-ideas there, but I think its also true that scrappers in general, and even martial arts scrappers in particular, are not a high priority issue at the moment.

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babs was pretty clear on this a while ago, but we will go through it again, he NEVER SAID that power customization was something we were not going to get

[/ QUOTE ]In the past a least one dev has posted that it's unlikely that we'd get power customization because of the massive amount of work that would be necessary.

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That was BaB, and in his defense the last time he said it was at a time when it would have been virtually impossible to implement given the resources at the dev team's disposal at the time. While there are still bottlenecks in the system, Paragon Studios probably has quadruple the development resources now than the CoH dev team had at the time BaB suggested the workload would make it very unlikely to happen.

Of course, since I said at the time that in fact it was more likely we'd get power customization retrofitted to the existing game rather than have it occur in a succeeding game, you all should have ignored BaB anyway.


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The point that I was trying to make is that there are characters in game right now that have ankle-length robes/dresses and that they do the same martial arts moves that the players do. My point is that if the NPCs can do it then the devs can figure out a way to allow the players to do it. They could if they wanted to put the effort into it.

Whether or not it would be worth the effort necessary to make it happen is a completely different topic altogether.

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Its a truism that given sufficient effort almost nothing is impossible. The practical question is always whether its possible given the parameters the individual devs have to operate under. For example, I could say its "impossible" for Castle to make a defensive power that reflects attack damage back at the attacker, but its not impossible for pohsyb to modify the game engine to allow such a power to be made, and I think people would get the point being made. If I said "with enough effort making such a power is possible" my statement would be technically correct, but be providing zero information.

Also, as we've seen, while there are entities in-game that have long robes and do martial arts-like moves, they don't do them especially well, and they were created at a time when it was probably more important to do it at all than to do it well. The quality criteria for animations today is probably much higher than "if the original designers didn't do it very well we don't have to either."

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this isnt quite on topic of making a ranged eagles claw, but...

I suggested once or twice instead of major overhauls, the MA set gets some activation time rework instead.

Think of this, when you use storm kick, your character does the spin kick, and then ends in the "i am a baddass" pose. The character will keep that pose, as it is part of the animation.

However, it is not in the activation time. If you say, use thunder kick, then storm kick, then crane kick, your character will skip the pose part of the animation, because the activation time is shorter then the animation is.

So, lets apply this to crane kick, and eagles claw. if you want to watch the full animation of eighther attack, you can. if you are in the middle of a fight, you dont need to, you can chain some attacks and skip a little on the end of the animations. if eagles claw allowed another animation to start while your character was "falling" back to the ground, it could look totally freegin awsome, and would improve its DPA without ruining its badass-ery animation. jump in air, POW!, flip and as you start coming back down, THUNDER KICK IN FACE!

this change would improve MA DPA and DPS both, by allowing eagles claw to be worked into an attack chain without killing its speed, AND it would still keep the much loved OMG KICK animation.

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That's not exactly how it works. First of all, most attack animations have a rooted portion that cannot be interrupted (normally), but transition to a non-rooted animation that is interruptible and can be interrupted by another power activation. When attacks return to a "stance" that's basically what's happening: the stance is generally not part of the attack's animation per se, but it is part of the animation sequence that is triggered by that power. Activation time (cast time) essentially plays no role in how animations play or don't play.

Second, if my understanding of the animation engine is accurate, you can't just allow thunder kick (for example) to activate right in the middle of eagle's claw, because the character won't just execute a thunder kick in mid air, the character will jump to the beginning of the thunder kick animation which will probably skip them back to the ground instantly. The current game engine doesn't support skeletal animation blending, and this won't appear visually correct.

Finally, I asked BaB if there were any opportunities to shave animation frames here and there from MA and the result is the MA set as it is now. Ironically, the current MA times would have made MA into a good single target performer relative to other melee primaries, except for the fact that BaB redid *all* the melee animation times and put MA back into the middle as a result (in particular, turning Katana from mediocre into a monster in one jump).

Castle:

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What's broken and why is it taking so long to fix? The key problem here is way back when, someone decided it would be a good idea to have three separate keyboard input interpreters and any changes done have to play "house of cards" game with the three.

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Probably the same guy that decided to implement three random number generators for the drop code, at least one of which was apparently about as unpredictable as a traffic light.


BaB:

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It's pretty fun to wander over into programmer land and causally ask, "So what's up with the chat bug?"

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I'd say that's probably fair game after that thing with pohsyb and the doughnut.


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They have said that not having reliable repro steps makes this particular bug nigh-impossible to track down, so if anyone can figure out a way of making this happen 100% of the time, I'm sure those guys would name children after you or something.

I'd even push for Posi to hand out the vaunted 'badge-which-must-not-be-named"

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Hmm, you know I think I might have something there: I have some notes scribbled about that sitting on my desk, but I haven't actually tested for reproducibility recently. I'll go check it out when I get home tonight.

I already have the badge that must not be named, but I'm still waiting on /em I9BetaSecretHandshake.

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How can Statesman fight against LR with his SS and win?

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Critters use different damage modifier tables than we do. Statesman as an AV does far more damage with an attack than a player would do with the same attack.

Also: critters do not use the exact same version of most attack powersets than we do - actually, theirs tends to be intrinsicly weaker, but they more than make up for that by having much larger modifiers.

For reference, if you take a player melee attack power and give it to a level 50 tanker (who slots it to +100% damage) and a level 50 archvillain, the AV will be hitting about 10 times harder with that power.

(The reason why custom critters in the AE are often extremely strong offensively relative to their standard PvE counterparts is that custom critters are getting player versions of the powers *and* retaining very high critter modifiers, albeit slightly lower modifiers than standard PvE critters.)

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So you have time to giggle like a schoolgirl for hours on end but not enough time to give us juggle animations that work while flying?

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Actually, BaB keeps using that as an excuse to get people in the office to be videotaped trying to juggle while jumping on a trampoline for an animation reference.

Which, incidentally, is also the reason why Martial Arts was claimed to be the reason for the lack of long skirts for females for years.

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I rate Arcanaville even higher at Highly Reliable/Functionally Accurate. While not a dev his posts have been more accurate than theirs, and unlike the devs since he is not an NCSoft employee he has no motivation to disemble.

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I have a weird extra advantage here over the devs. Every time I say *anything* about Paragon Studios or the devs, even in jest, I think very carefully about whether or not I'm inappropriately misrepresenting them. Psychologically speaking, most people don't think nearly as hard about whether they are about to misrepresent their own selves.

In other words, I'm always thinking "will Castle agree with this in principle tomorrow" but Castle probably rarely says "will I agree with this in principle tomorrow." Its just not something most people do.



Also, it helps that I'm always right. Like when I said it wouldn't take very much code changes to implement power animation customization and BaB (long ago) said it would? Yeah, its like that.**

(Of course, it will still take thirty-two billion man hours to make new animations for everything, but that's completely irrelevant to me being always right)


** Its a bit more complicated than that, but that's *also* irrelevant to me always being right so that's the story I'm sticking with. Also, I know BaB is hard at work on I16, only reading the forums irregularly, doesn't save PMs, and unlikely to be in a position to contradict me. And he's an incredibly wonderful human being who wouldn't take revenge on a small joke by replacing all my power animations with whirlwind. And he's currently on probation and can't kill another forum poster without invoking the three-strikes rule.

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The animation system *itself* is a very complex system, but the connection between the powers system and the animation system is, if a bit Rube Goldbergian, not very complex or fragile.


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You're contradicting yourself.

Rube Goldberg:

2. deviously complex and impractical

If the connection is "Rube Goldbergian" as you put it, that implies it is also complex and impractical(to change).

Consiering the number of animation and effect breaks the seem to have happend recently, I'm thinking it's more fragile than you're giving it credit for.

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No, I'm not because whatever the dictionary.com definition of the term, "Rube Goldberg-like" only has to invoke the illustrations of Rube Goldberg. The design of the powers system/animation system interface does. But its not especially complex. Although some Rube Goldberg systems are highly complex, not all are: the defining characteristic of Rube Goldberg systems are that they are more complex than they need to be. That doesn't mean they are very complex as such.

(Example: this is from the Rube Goldberg site in which sitting on a cushion forces air through a tube which blows an ice boat to a lighted cigar butt popping a balloon which causes a dictator to think he's been shot and fall over backward onto shutter bulb. That's characteristicly ridiculously more complex than necessary, but not very complex to understand in general).

Also, you're conflating animation issues within the animation engine with the connection between the powers system and the animation system. Given a particular power, and a particular set of starting states for the character in question, I can predict with basically 100% accuracy what sequence of animations will play for that character, at least for all the powers and entity states for which I'm aware. The system does not seem to "break" in that case.

It is large enough in detail, however, that sometimes mistakes are made. That has nothing to do with the "fragility" of the system though.



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The real issue (for BaB, anyway) is aesthetic, since picking animations that are too short would induce pauses at the end of attacks, and picking animations too randomly can create transition problems in some unusual cases where powers were not designed to follow each other.

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Which is why I said "if they still looked OK" after being re-timed, assuming BaBs wasn't re-timing them each by hand.

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My original quote in full:

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Actually, due to the mechanics of animation rooting and cast time enforcement, balance isn't really an issue. If the player picks an animation that is shorter than the cast time, cast time will still be enforced. If the player picks an animation time that is longer than the cast time, the rooted time of that animation will be enforced. The player could theoretically nerf themselves with a longer animation, but they could not buff themselves with a shorter one.

The issue was never stated as a balance issue for that reason. The real issue (for BaB, anyway) is aesthetic, since picking animations that are too short would induce pauses at the end of attacks, and picking animations too randomly can create transition problems in some unusual cases where powers were not designed to follow each other.

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This was in direct response to this quote of yours:

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-Cast times for animations are not standard, greatly cutting down what animations could be swapped around without impacting power balance. Unless a system was created to auto re-time them and assuming they still looked OK...or unless you created dozens of versions of the KO Blow animation to fit every conceivable cast time, I wouldn't see the work involved being worth it just for something as minor as every attack having one alternate animation.

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In other words, I'm saying that you do not need to retime the animations for balance purposes because the current game mechanics already take care of that: you imply that balance issues prevent using different animations unless they were somehow "retimed" for the cast time in question. However, even if the powers aren't "retimed" there is still the aesthetic problem of unwanted pauses after animations in some cases. But artificially speeding up or slowing down the animations just to stretch or compress them into the correct cast time is an even worse aesthetic problem in the general case.

This is more obvious within context.


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My guess that such a feature is added in some form within the next twelve months is much, much higher (better than even money: I'd take that bet).

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I wouldn't lay any money down until I saw how Going Rogue performs. It's quite possible there will be some "team restructuring" if GR doesn't live up to what NCSoft hopes, and that would alter the scope of any subsequent development of the game.

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Anything is possible, especially for people who predict "anything is possible." However, this is one of those predictions that has the additional benefit of the 100% safety margin of being impossible to disprove since we don't know what NCSoft is "hoping."

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Knowing that:

-You've implied in the past the animation and power systems effects were held together by Elmer's glue and thumbtacks, and that changing animations was cumbersome.

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Actually, BaB never implied the power and animation systems were held together by Elmer's glue and thumbtacks. Actually, they are held together by (arrays of) PFXs. The animation system *itself* is a very complex system, but the connection between the powers system and the animation system is, if a bit Rube Goldbergian, not very complex or fragile.

Changing animations isn't cumbersome per se. Actually making animations themselves, whether for power customization or just a brand new power itself, is somewhat cumbersome.


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-Cast times for animations are not standard, greatly cutting down what animations could be swapped around without impacting power balance. Unless a system was created to auto re-time them and assuming they still looked OK...or unless you created dozens of versions of the KO Blow animation to fit every conceivable cast time, I wouldn't see the work involved being worth it just for something as minor as every attack having one alternate animation.

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Actually, due to the mechanics of animation rooting and cast time enforcement, balance isn't really an issue. If the player picks an animation that is shorter than the cast time, cast time will still be enforced. If the player picks an animation time that is longer than the cast time, the rooted time of that animation will be enforced. The player could theoretically nerf themselves with a longer animation, but they could not buff themselves with a shorter one.

The issue was never stated as a balance issue for that reason. The real issue (for BaB, anyway) is aesthetic, since picking animations that are too short would induce pauses at the end of attacks, and picking animations too randomly can create transition problems in some unusual cases where powers were not designed to follow each other.


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-You're already swamped with work doing just the particle effects tinting aspect of power customization, which as far as we know is the extent of the customization i16 will offer(the already existing weapon customization system not withstanding).

-Melee sets without weapons are the minority. There's more bang/buck ratio for putting work in to custom weapons and tinting particle effects.

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Hmm: assuming you count spines and claws as weapon sets for this purpose then by my mental count 3 of 8 scrapper primaries, 6 of 9 tanker secondaries, 6 of 9 brute primaries, and 4 of 8 stalker primaries are essentially unarmed melee attack sets: that's 19 of 34 or 56%. That doesn't count melee attacks in dominator assault sets, blaster secondaries, or power pool attacks like boxing and air superiority. Melee attacks without weapons are actually in the majority, and melee attack powersets are also in the majority.


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...and combining that with the answers you've commonly given about things like power customization and your posting history, I suspected that you and the other devs would deem swapping cast animations, along with things like changing emination points (ie Laser Eye Beams from my hands) or entire particle types (Ice Blast being able to shoot fire balls) as being beyond your means to deliver.

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It was always said that it would require a tech change to deliver. Although I will grant you that I've always been much less pessimistic about the actual work game-engine side than BaB has been.


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In short, alternate cast animations seems like a long shot given the things you've said, and we'd have to very very lucky to roll that seven.

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In terms of what BaB has actually said about the subject, three things would have been actual impediments to customized power animations:

1. The game engine would need to be modified to support alternate animations
2. New animations would take a significant amount of time to create
3. Power customization (on that level) would have to be made a sufficiently high priority to allocate resources to do both.

Given the stated direction of I16, both #1 and #3 are now on shaky ground and the conditions surrounding both shouldn't be presumed to be the same any more. #2 is the only bottleneck, and its impossible to judge how much of one it is relative to the priority that power customization might now have.

Without speaking to Knockout Blow itself, I'd say my own estimate for the probability that I16 either introduces custom power animations or creates the opportunity to customize power animations (in at least some limited form) is something between about one in ten (and I don't actually know if it is or is not coming: that's a genuine guestimate). Low, but not astronomically low. My guess that such a feature is added in some form within the next twelve months is much, much higher (better than even money: I'd take that bet).

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I don't blame you, combos are problematic to compute dynamically. Even if you had an actual calculator that simulated attack usage, it'd have to look ahead long enough to make sure powers will be recharged in the future.

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Also there is the fact that combos have increased chance of failure. Where attacks have just 5% chance to fail, combos need 3 consecutive tests against that floor not to fail. That is a bigger issue than looking ahead.

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That isn't even the real problem. When I scripted up a dual blades attack generator back when DB first came out, the real headache came when I realized that even when I play DB, I will often change attack sequence on the fly when a power fails and breaks a combo, in order to align myself with an alternate (useful) combo. Its usually the case (if you are specifically talking about generating damage against a single target, like an AV or a pylon) that whether an attack hits or misses doesn't change which attack would be best to use next. That's not true for Dual Blades because a miss that breaks a combo can suddenly change the relative values of the next few attacks.

One of these days I'll blow the dust off of that offensive sim that I wrote to pair with the mitigation one and try to resolve those problems. I think, in fact, I have a min/max (alpha-beta) algorithm that would work fairly well to try to determine reasonable if not perfectly optimal chains, but I'm honestly writing too much code now to want to invent all new coding projects at the moment. And I'm not so much interested in singular-target optimal chains as I am in mixed-target damage calculations (which optimum attack chains are not very good at estimating in my opinion).

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Yep, that's the correct formula. Actually, Kosmos (if memory serves) posted the correct closed form formula for the finite power series summation a while back in one of the dominator threads: its basically p/(1-p) * (1-p^n) which basically agrees with your expression. Its been so long since I've had to handle finite series summation that frankly I'd forgotten how to derive this one directly.

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That why I like us over here in the Scrapper forums. We're one of the few groups of number crunchers I've seen that, if pushed, will put our noses to the grindstone and incorporate all of the previously ignored variables just to show how little they actually mean, especially within the context of stable, survivable builds.

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It hasn't always been so. But over the very long haul, the one thing that seems to separate the scrapper forums from the other forums is a much more evolutionary acceptance of mathematical analysis, provided that it turns out to be sufficiently accurate to be useful.

Its worth noting that attack chain math first shows up (to the best of my knowledge) in serious form on the blaster forums, not the scrapper forums. But it was much more rapidly refined and accepted on the scrapper forums. Mitigation calculations first show up on the tanker forums - and in a much more sophisticated form than the scrapper forums in general - but they were much more quickly refined and accepted on the scrapper forums ("quickly" is a relative term though: my scrapper comparison articles took three issues to become generally accepted). Really, no one picked up where Havok and Circeus left off on the tanker forums, but its pretty clear if I disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't be taking all of scrapper-mathdom with me.

It reached the point fairly quickly on the scrapper forums where someone like Stupid_Fanboy says "Claws is broken, here's why" and posts calculations, the scrapper forums are generally open to the discussion (and this was years ago). Werner faced (relatively) little resistance with his attack chain + pylon calculations, and he's now considered a reasonable authority on the subject because his calculations were tested in-game by enough people with very little controversy. Provided only that you put enough effort into it to convince the (scrapper) forums that you've put reasonable thought into it and you aren't posting a mess of numerical gibberish *and* the calculation attempts to measure something interesting, the scrapper forums will test almost anything (which reminds me, I still have to work on that all-SO Regen AV build).

For the most part, there is a presumption that calculations are useful when done right and are worth discussing, but few people invest too much emotionally in them on the scrapper forums to make them seriously controversial. At the moment, that environment is still fairly unique; however, that's slowly changing: I think the Defender forums would be equally accepting of calculation-based analysis if it wasn't for the fact that the things they have to calculate are often an order of magnitude more complex at times**; they are almost as accepting as the scrapper forums are in general set analysis with soft-calculation guidence.


** Sitting on my computer is a spreadsheet with calculations for a Defender primary/secondary comparison which is an extrapolation of the PeakDR + MitigationFactor analysis I did back in I10ish. However, it currently can't pass reasonable scrutiny and I haven't had the time to fully test in-game many of its assumptions. Its incredibly difficult to make something workable that actually makes useful predictions on that side of the fence. I wish I could make it work, because I think the Defender forums have generally the right mindset to make good use of it if I could: they would probably accept reasonable calculations if they could be demonstrated to reflect in-game reality, and conversely they would tend to suppress the urge to use the numbers to "prove" particular sets "not worth playing" which is always a danger of analysis like that.

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1) ArcanaTime can be off by a lot in itself as it doesn't take into account server lag which can at times be measured in multiple seconds (Arc may have addressed this in his/her original post as a caveat, I can't remember).

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No, lag isn't a factor because queued attacks are already at the server. As soon as ArcanaTime is over, they'll fire.

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Even so, network lag can still cause problems. When I push a button, it takes some time for that event to get sent to the servers. There is a difference between when I do something, and when the servers *know* I did something. That could still cause a delay between when an attack *should* go off, and when it actually *does* go off.

That delay can be eliminated with attack queueing. If you queue an attack (tell the server to fire it, while you are still executing a different attack) that message gets sent to the server *immediately*. Even if it takes 300 milliseconds to get to the servers from your computer, as long as you send it 300ms before the attack *could* fire, that command will be waiting on the servers for the moment when the attack can actually be fired. Queueing attacks (if you do it fast enough) eliminates network lag. The server basically has a queue of attacks, and fires them off as fast as possible. So if you queue that attack chain above, the amount of time it takes should be the *fastest* that the game servers can possible execute them, which is another way of saying that's how long that attack chain theoretically takes.


...


If you are a DPS fanatic, it also means a few other things. It means whenever you are not queueing attacks, you are taking a substantial penalty in damage over time. Just the act of switching targets when one dies and re-activating the attack (instead of switching targets *before* it dies and queueing the next attack, assuming it dies) costs more in damage over time than the difference between the best and worst single target attack sets in any archetype. And it means ironically very short cast time attacks (i.e. 0.83 seconds) aren't necessarily as good as they appear, because its surprisingly difficult to keep such attacks queued ahead of time. They are not bad, but difficult to *make work* as fast as they could be.

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Original article here.

Now, of course some momentary internet hiccough of several seconds is going to mess with your damage no matter what you attempt to do, but that's a level of connectivity disruption far outside the norm and not intrinsicly accountable (heck, you could just get plain d/ced and have your damage drop to zero).

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Also, given J_Bs posting history it's pretty clear what he means.

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I'm very familiar with Johnny's campaigns and posting history, but I'm just not clear on what the inference is.

Whether or not any powers ever get alternate animations has nothing to do with luck. I've never personally been against the idea of having alternate power animations, quite the opposite. We've simply lacked the tech to do that and the time to create said animations.

The infamous knockout blow animation wasn't even something that I animated, so I have no attachment to it and don't feel any need to defend it's quality. I happen to like it, I know plenty of others do as well, and I know a great deal of people who don't.

What any of that has to do with 'knowing BABs' and the likelihood of this happening at any time is where I'm confused.

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J_B has consistently misinterpreted all red name posts stating that something might be either "hard" or "time consuming" as being, therefore, unlikely to occur as if you and Castle picked your own daily task list and decided to avoid the toughies instead of, say, doing what your presumptive bosses might have assigned to you that week.

I'm picturing something like:

Positron: BaB, I'd like to you work on power animation customization.

BaB: But that's hard. And it would take up like my whole day.

Positron: err, well, how about just making a new sit emote and taking the rest of the day off?

BaB: Ok. But just for males. I'll do the female version next tuesday after my morning nap.

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Based on what i've read about how the engine handles powers and animations i'd sort of expect BAB to run screaming into the night if he was told that they were adding alternate animations to all the powers.

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Technically speaking, whether I16 allows alternate animations for powers is a separate question from whether BaB is asked to create a large library of options for us to choose from. The game engine has no real limitation on the colors that you can assign to a costume piece, but that doesn't mean we are actually presented with the complete RGB palette.

As to the workload involved, BaB's primary job is to make animations. Its all the same to him which animations he makes. If he's told to spend the next ten weeks making new animations for player powers its no different than being asked to spend the next ten weeks making new animations for new critters for I18. When BaB says the level of effort would be very high, he's not saying its too high for him to do, he's saying its high enough that its not a task that would be assigned to him (tying him up from doing anything else) lightly.

But its not like BaB makes up his own tasking: if Positron said to go make custom player animations, that's what BaB would be working on tomorrow. To get the level of customization most players desire though, could take a single person years to create without additional assistance. My guess is that if customized animations are ever introduced, they will be phased into the game in batches, much like customized weapons were. Although there are some kick-start opportunities: its possible to make a database of all non-weapon "blast" animations, for example, and allow players to swap animations of equal or longer animation time.**



** If the devs allowed players to pick animations that had *longer* rooted times than the standard one, rather than just exactly equal, in effect the players could be essentially getting a damage debuff for customization. Har, har, har.

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If you want to talk about failure to understand things I recall a thread where you had no idea how to create a good short arc and figured you could just do w/e you did in a long arc.

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Memory like a steel sieve. The question was specifically whether writing a short arc used a completely different set of skills than writing a long arc. My position then and now is that while short arcs and long arcs prioritize different things sometimes, there exists no skill that you can use in a short arc that you cannot use to similar effect in a long arc, which means the total skill set you can bring to bear on a long arc is a superset of the one you can use to author a short arc. Which is just another way of saying short arcs don't use any unique skills.

That's not a debatable opinion. Its logically impossible to be false, since its always possible to write a long arc that is an anthological sum of multiple short arcs. I can always take the product of any short arc writer and include it in a longer arc. This should be another one of those trivially simple concepts to understand, given that all it requires is a fundamental understanding of what a "superset" is.


This is why your particular judgements aren't especially troubling to me. The effort it would take to be sufficiently wrong to be in agreement with you is never going to be worth the cost of being that wrong. Its just an unavoidable writeoff.

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I love what KO blow does, I hate how it looks doing it.

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Hey, if we're really lucky, i16 will allow alternate animations for our powers.

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Knowing BaBs, we would have to be astronomically lucky.


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I think I know me, and I have no idea what you're inferring.

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I know both of you, and I have an idea.

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Whatever, I guess we should just get used to the bug. Just like my Bruiser will always stand at range and throw rocks, however long I play this game. /kvetch

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Haven't played your Thugs Mastermind in a while? This bug was fixed with Issue 14. Castle adjusted the pet AI and made pets immune to modifictions to their recharge, which was interfering with the way pets cycled their powers. Your Bruiser should be acting like a Brute, now.

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They've also added some new tech designed to improve the AI of critters, or at least the part of the AI that decides what attacks to use. Its still relatively new and I don't know all of the details of how its being used, but I would expect to see changes and tweaks to AI over time which attempt to leverage the new technology.

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Interestingly enough, that's probably how I'd do it to. I'm curious as to what the "appropriate" workaround for all of the various powers would be. Personally, I think that it would be best to set then as such: Rise of the Phoenix and Soul Transfer do stun and damage; Revive provides a heal; Resurgence acts as just like it normally does without the healing or endurance return and lower +rech value (making it kind of like Rage); Unstoppable, OwtS, and Elude all operate exactly the same only are capable of being used while dead and heal the user to 25% hp and 25% end.

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I would tone down rezzes when used while alive, and boost (in some way) tier9s when used while dead, for basic cost/benefit reasons.

So RotP would do less damage when used while alive, ST would not stun at mag 30 when used while alive, and Revive would not heal as strongly while alive. Conversely, Elude would probably include a strong heal (for me, probably 40% slottable at least), and I'd consider something like a +heal/+health for Unstoppable (keeping in mind that if you had Dull Pain up under Unstoppable, well since you're dead now you don't). I think the tier9s have to bounce you back to a strong position if they are going to be used when dead, or it won't be an especially useful tactic to use (and you've already paid the death penalty to get into that situation in the first place).

Stuff like that. I don't know if the devs would go for an idea like this, but that's how I would do it if I was asked to do it.

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Also, good to know that using /bug means absolutely nothing.

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It doesn't mean nothing. It just means level 1 tech support here is no different than level 1 tech support everywhere else.

I used to wonder why the /bug report box was so short. Now I believe that if the problem can't be completely explained in detail in the /bug box, its probably too complex for the /bug mechanism anyway.

For me personally, I /bug any bug for which if I were to take a picture of my screen and draw an arrow on it with the words "look here" it would be obvious what the problem was. If I can't do that in theory, I post or PM. Especially bugs that are non-trivial to reproduce, intermittent, or require more than casual knowledge of the game to understand is not "working as intended."

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Just wanted to be sure. I'm not going to try and change who you are, people have to want to change.

Regardless of your years of experience I'm willing to bet thousands of years of experience trumps it.

Interesting stuff, I like learning more about the regulars in this game.

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Well, seeing as you're going back to the "people have to want to change" well, I don't mind asking how many times did I have to explain to you that the Elusivity implementation differed from my openly published original suggestion? By my count it was three. It has nothing but the math I would expect a junior high school student to be able to do in two minutes as a homework assignment. So I think you are not a good judge of what is easy or hard.

And when you find the person with thousands of years of experience explaining things to the City of Heroes playerbase on these forums, tell him happy birthday for me and I'll be more than happy to defer to his collected wisdom. Until then mine still trumps yours, takes the trick, makes the contract, and completes the grand slam.

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If you want this suggestion to have any real weight, perhaps you can come up with alternate tier 9s for all the other secondaries. Then folks could comment on balance. Without a balance discussion, I don't see something like this ever happening.

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The logical extension of my idea for Soul Transfer, but I suppose also extensible to Claws' idea, is to make the other scrapper/brute/tanker/stalker tier9 powers castable when dead (with appropriate modifications to make that functionality make sense).

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What about those power sets that already have self-res powers that aren't tier 9s (re: Regen and Willpower). Will they get similar treatment to their res powers? If Revive was actually able to be used out of combat as a third heal, it might actually be worth taking (though would still suck compared to all of the other self rezzes out there).

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I think giving self-rezzes alternate behavior when alive has a certain appeal, and giving tier9 powers the ability to be used when dead has some appeal. I doing both simultaneously has the problem that the two powersets in question may benefit too much from getting two bites at that apple. If I was going to do both ideas, I would probably state that *if* the set has a self-rez (that is not a tier 9) then it will get an alternate still-alive behavior and its tier9 will be left alone. If the set doesn't have a self-rez, the tier9 will be set to be castable when dead. No one** should get both.


** Unless the devs add a Zombie secondary for scrappers, brutes, and stalkers in I16 (primary for tankers).

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Let's see:
99% of game changes involve nothing higher than elementary school math ---- check
Communicated to a group that ilicits predictable, consistent, and rudimentary social trends ---- check.

Yep way beyond what a competent PR person could handle.

Or, more like what one could handle while simultaneously typing up a public address for something that actually matters while talking to their wife on the bluetooth during their morning commute to the office.

You can't be seriously thinking this game is somehow overly complex or that the group of users are somehow incredibly unique. But maybe you do, CoX forums are srs bsns.

Please tell me your last post was actually an attempt at humor. If so kudos, it is funny, but you needed a smiley or smirk to make sure we know it is intended as humor.

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I'm deadly serious, and I speak from years of experience.

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FWIW, I took courses in business communication and PR while in college. I *could* filter everything I say with marketing doublespeak and spin. I choose not to. Sometimes, that causes me a lot of grief from the fans, other times, I get called to the carpet by my boss. I can live with that, though, since I believe that what I am doing is overall beneficial to everyone concerned.

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It wouldn't really matter if you did. To eliminate the pain, you'd have to be able to consistently do three things I don't think were on the curriculum:

1. Know what everyone else is saying about that particular topic and make sure you explicitly deny you're saying any of those things (unless you are).

2. Know all of the computational and informational errors that your audience is prone to, extrapolate what conclusions those errors would draw, and then deny those, also explicitly.

3. Know all of the presumed intentional assumptions likely to be drawn, and negate all of the false ones, also explicitly.

I'm not making this up: when I wrote the I7 critter accuracy change guide, I directly addressed all three. Unless you're an expert on the player-side chatter of the topic *and* the game mechanics the topic addresses on the design side *and* think the Rosetta Stone is just a heavier form of Sudoku, anything you're likely to say is going to be turned into tapioca pretty quickly. The only advantage I have is that my opinions don't rest in the head of the chief powers designer for the game, so I'm "plausibly deniable" on both sides.

Throwing a PR person into the mix would be like having a bedouin try to mediate a debate between an eskimo and a penguin over the best texture for shaved ice.