Arcanaville

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Then one of them levels, and they defeat another 41 enemy. This is where it gets tricky. The level 40 earns Z. We can say that Z should be less than Y because the 40 had more help fighting the 41 this time than they did previously. But what's the relationship to X? That's the hard part.

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That's actually part of the intractibility problem I mentioned earlier. Its a specific instance of the more general problem of defining what is meant by "fairness" when the mathematics is going to end up with no general solution. And it won't, once you start adding situations like a level 45 and a level 41 attacking level 43s, compared to both of their solo performance.

What the current reward system does is basically state that the overriding requirement is no teaming penalty. In other words, under as many conditions as is possible to account for, a player should never earn *less* XP when on a team than when solo, when performing at basically the same activity level (unless they are above the combat level of the targets, where its possible due to saturation).

That's probably implemented too high for level differences higher than 3 (where the purple patch dictates that the reward system itself stops rewarding higher combat differences**) which is why I think the implementation is flawed. But I don't disagree with the principle itself, which is why I don't think the system is completely wrong.


** When you really come down to it, the flaw in the reward system is that when solo, the reward scaling interacts with the purple patch to dictate a break-even point at about +2 to +3. Its exponential nature is *intended by design* to prevent unlimited reward/risk-effort tradeoffs. But teaming blurs that distinction by allowing one party to get the reward while a different party accepts the risk/effort, which decouples the purple patch from the reward system, in effect breaking the purple patch in terms of rewards. But that could be factored back into the teaming reward algorithm itself by factoring in those reward ratios directly into the team proportion calculations, to prevent reward/risk-effort ratios higher than +3 from occuring by fiat. The implementation issue is that this might need to be implemented by table rather than formula, because its unclear to me that a singular formula can implement that behavior correctly for all levels, since levelling rates are intrinsicly different at different levels even after the recent XP normalization pass.

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you believe the current system is valid because it supports proper division of XP in the presence of ally effects.

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Actually, I don't think that: I think the current system isn't completely valid. I just think that one that is based foundationally on presumptive level-adjusted contribution is not that much better.


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IMHO, we should balance around the majority of the powers system, and if buff powers turn out to be outliers, address them separately, instead of the other way around.

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I believe that archetypal design balance presumptions override the individual powers mechanics concerns. Some archetypal contributions are intended to be highly level-sensitive, such as offense (or even moreso foe debuffing). However, others like ally buffing are explicitly not intended to be as sensitive to level scaling. As a result, archetypes designed to revolve around a high-degree of non-scaling team contributive effects should factor into the method for XP distribution in teams. Otherwise, the archetype team-specific balancing concerns would not be supported by the reward system: a highly contradictory state of affairs.

It isn't just buffing powers that are the problem: they are just the easiest to describe numerically. Take tankers. If a level 39 tanker discovers they can tank just as effectively for a level 40 team as a level 39 team, the level 39 tankers should receive more XP/min when tanking on the level 40 team, even though by the two-scrapper thought experiment, there are circumstances that suggest he should earn less (if the team is fighting 42s or higher, they would be +2 to the level 40s but +3 to the level 39, and depending on how you calculate, the XP curve would suggest that in isolation the tanker should earn less XP/min fighting +3s than +2s - other ways of calculation suggest this actually happens at the +3/+4 point, but that's not important here).

I don't think the two-scrapper thought experiment represents the bulk of all cases, but rather only a minority of them (at least hero-side: the intended design factors are different on the red-side).

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DPS- damage per second
DPA - damage per activation
arcanatime - damage per actvation times
EPS - endurance per second

Is there anymore? im only aware of these

i also heard of EGS :/

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"ArcanaTime" is a term coined to represent the calculated time that a power takes to execute, based on its published cast time. Its always longer due to the fact that the game servers process events in a particular way, and that way makes it impossible to "bookend" two attacks together any closer than about 0.132 seconds, *and* when an attack completes the game doesn't flag the character as ready to use another attack until the end of the *current* 0.132 second clock tick its processing.

The formula for it is ArcanaTime = [Round(CastTime / 0.132) + 1] * 0.132, and the thread which describes where this formula comes from is here. Its used to calculate DPA of attacks and also the total DPS of chains of attacks because its been demonstrated to very closely estimate the in-game performance of an attack chain where the attacks are queued and fired as quickly as the game will allow.

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The "two-scrapper experiment" unfortunately dodges the main problem in the way its described. In the way its described, its presuming that the two players do not actually assist each other, and therefore their overall team contribution can be expressed as the linear sum of their individual capabilities.

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While the two scrapper experiment does assume that the players don't assist each other, I respectfully disagree that this dodges the main problem. In my opinion, until you fix the case of XP leeching by a non-contributing team mate, buffers/debuffers are just as screwed when they're the higher level teammate and just as leechy when they're the low level teammate as scrappers are.

In other words, the two scrapper experiment examines a degenerate case that must follow the same rules as the more complex general case. If the degenerate case fails, which it currently does, the more general case fails too.

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It is a simplified degenerate case, and as such any proposal ought to say something at least nominally proper about it. However, because it eliminates all traces of the complexity of the problem, as opposed to reducing that complexity to a manageable level, it isn't particularly useful to propose solutions likely to work for the more complex case. Basically, it doesn't offer guidence as to what an XP algorithm might be doing wrong.


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That doesn't work in all cases, because it undervalues other contributions. Consider this hypothetical: imagine a level 35 (buffing) defender following a level 35 and level 40 blaster. If the defender buffs damage, then the defender's team contribution is actually *higher* when teamed with the level 40 blaster than with the level 35 blaster, simply by virtue of buffing a stronger ally. In this case, the primary contribution isn't offensive, and therefore isn't trivially scalable offensively.

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From the perspective of the blaster, no, the contribution of the defender is not higher if they are -5 to them than if they are even-con. The buffs are equivalent, and the defender is not going to be doing any damage to the enemy. Why should the defender get so close to the same relative XP? It's ridiculous.

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Relative to the defender the contribution to the team is numerically higher. Proportionately speaking, its identical (more or less) in both cases. The important thing is that relative to the level 35 blaster case, the defender ought to be making more XP, because their net numerical "activity" is higher, and relative to the level 40 blaster case, the proportional XP the defender is getting ought to be the same as the level 35 blaster case, which is another way of saying the defender should be getting numerically more XP (because the 35/40 team would obviously be getting more XP/min than the 35/35 team, all other things being equal).

Perhaps to put it more simply, if a 35 defender + 40 blaster runs missions at approximately the same rate as a level 40 defender + level 40 blaster, then both should get about the same amount of XP. Granted, the 40/40 team will run somewhat faster due to the defender's offensive output, but that difference will be low relative to, say, if the defender was replaced with a scrapper. However, in the case of a 35 scrapper/40 blaster vs 40 scrapper/40 blaster, the scrapper's primary contribution is offense, and that offense is highly devalued in the 35/40 case. In the 35/40 defender/blaster case, that's not true. So balancing strictly for the scrapper/scrapper case essentially applies a penalty to defenders, relative to their intended team contribution mechanisms.


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If you choose to pick an XP splitting mechanism that is based on a theoretical offensive contribution proportionality, you can make the mathematics work. But you'd be devaluing most of the *point* of actually teaming with anything other than offensive peers.

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Again, I have to disagree. Balance the equation for scrappers and everyone else will work out in an equitable fashion, because scrappers with no force multipliers are the best degenerate case to balance around.

If teaming with someone actually does help you defeat enemies faster, then you get faster XP no matter what scheme you use to do the division than if they didn't.

Here's another degenerate case for you: imagine the team is all the same level. Then my division system and the current one are equivalent. In that situation, are you encouraged to team only with offensive teammates? No, you're not. So my system of balancing doesn't inherently encourage only offensive teammates.

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I think you're hand-waving too much in the wrong way when dealing with degenerate cases, which is always a danger of using them in the first place. If the problem I'm specifying regarding your thought process is that it devalues non-offensive contributions at different combat levels that problem will disappear at identical combat levels. Its therefore not appropriate to use the degenerate case of equal combat levels to suggest the problem doesn't exist. Your system (or rather one that follows your thesis to its logical conclusion) seems to be that players should be valued based on assuming that their relative contributions in effect obey the purple patch, which is only true for foe effects and not ally effects. But of course it will converge on a solution that values everyone identically in the degenerate case of everyone being the same combat level. Its at different combat levels where I believe the problem actually occurs.


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Does my proposed system penalize buffers/debuffers who seek out higher level teams to buff and leech? Yes, but I think it should. Those situations are broken currently. Buffers/debuffers have to massively overperform in order to overcome the leech phenomenon the two scrapper experiment reveals. Most of them don't, and even if they did, what they're doing increases their rewards without significantly increasing risk, or (in my own parlance) increasing reward rates without significantly increasing complexity. If it rewards skill (your parlance) it's only the social skill used to con your way into a leeching situation, which is not a skill I think the game should be rewarding.

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I think you should replace the "two scrapper experiment" with the "two blaster experiment." It might be more illustrative. I don't think the typical blaster in-game finds an accompanying empathy defender to be a "leech" and in fact there is generally sizeable synergy between the two. However, in a scheme where the defender is a couple levels lower than the blaster, your system seems to suggest that even though the defender's net contribution to team speed is similar to what it would be if they were both the same level, they should earn significantly less XP.


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Anyway, this is all highly theoretical since IMHO the more promising avenue is making sure massive level disparity on teams doesn't happen in the first place. That would have many other benefits for teaming, actually, since it would mean you could run content other than specifically designed AE content and not have to worry about SKs. TFs and Trials in particular would be much easier to manage.

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A system where everyone autoSKs to the same level does dodge all problems involving trying to figure out what differing level characters ought to earn. However, something about that idea makes me just a little uneasy, although I'm not sure why. In things like task forces, it seems to me to be an "obviously" reasonable solution, but outside of that, something doesn't quite feel right about it, although I can't really put my finger on it yet.

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The two solutions available are: 1) try to rebalance the reward rates at all values of relative level that generate XP (which Arcanaville told me in PM she thinks is impossible, but it seems to me to be just a giant linear algebra problem with datamining as the source of the constants);

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I don't believe I said it was impossible, I think I said it was intractible. And not because the problem you're mentioning is not solvable, but rather because the problem as you're describing is functionally limited: it only encapsulates one point of view regarding XP splitting.

The "two-scrapper experiment" unfortunately dodges the main problem in the way its described. In the way its described, its presuming that the two players do not actually assist each other, and therefore their overall team contribution can be expressed as the linear sum of their individual capabilities.

That doesn't work in all cases, because it undervalues other contributions. Consider this hypothetical: imagine a level 35 (buffing) defender following a level 35 and level 40 blaster. If the defender buffs damage, then the defender's team contribution is actually *higher* when teamed with the level 40 blaster than with the level 35 blaster, simply by virtue of buffing a stronger ally. In this case, the primary contribution isn't offensive, and therefore isn't trivially scalable offensively.

If you choose to pick an XP splitting mechanism that is based on a theoretical offensive contribution proportionality, you can make the mathematics work. But you'd be devaluing most of the *point* of actually teaming with anything other than offensive peers. The intractible problem is coming up with an XP splitting algorithm that is likely to simultaneously represent the teaming contribution values that the teaming system in CoH actually attempts to encourage, while also balancing the XP reward rate to eliminate the possibility for low-level "piggybacking." I think all solutions there will come up significantly short in one or both goals.


Or to put it more directly, any system that ultimately tries to base its equations on what each team member "deserves" is going to find that word extremely difficult to define. Which is not to say the current system can't be improved, but rather that its not obvious that there exists an obviously "correct" way to do it that isn't really a collection of arbitrary compromises, chosen to minimize the behaviors you most want to suppress at least most of the time.

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I couldn't help but at least *try* to clear the entire room with the mega sonic spawns on Unyielding. I was able to do so 2 times out of 4 with my MA/SR, both times by using crane kick a lot (the two times I deliberately withheld CK to see what it was like when you couldn't scatter them apart, I eventually got unlucky and spiked to death while surrounded by a ton of them).

The room now spawns a combination of sonic LTs and bot minions, basically similar to the first mission of my Secret Weapons arc.

I'm not sure they changed since the last time I updated my damage spreadsheet calculator, but I'll try to check this week. If they changed, I'll try to post here.

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I had a couple people tell me that the mission spawned too many "background" LTs which, due to them being sonic buffers, were too difficult to clear. I did some testing last night and it seems if you run the mission on an even level difficulty, you could get situations where there was so many of them, unless you had a way of scattering them it could get pretty ridiculous. It seems that at some point within the last few patches, the mission background group lost a minion: that caused all of the map spawns to spawn as LTs. At high densities that could get problematic.

I've fixed that and one other small error I detected in the arc that snuck in there. Anyone who tried this arc and were stymied by being mobbed by a map full of sonic LTs should retry it.

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I beat it on a dom and a huntsman...

I guess it was meant for melee toons? I had little trouble.

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If you can stay at range, which a ranged toon can do without offensive penalty, the encounter is somewhat easier (due to the fact that MA critters like most PvE critters have much lower ranged damage modifier, among other reasons). Its also easier on heroic, when all the bosses scale down from Boss to LT rank.

The hardest difficulty level is probably Unyielding, when everything tends to be +2 and there's 50% to twice as many of them.

Although it was originally meant to be a step up from the RWZ Scrapper Challenge, its explicitly designed to allow anyone to try it, on at least heroic if not higher level. I believe the dynamic range of the mission from heroic to unyielding encompasses one of the widest possible high-level difficulty ranges the MA supports (or supported at the time it was written). Its been tweaked a few times to improve the overall balance (for example, it used to have too much -perception and too much overlapping damage auras, and at one point too many pets and confuse effects).


I was going to update the encounter, but I'm holding off until I15 goes live and stabilizes, because there are features in I15 I want to use.

Also, I thought I should mention that a couple of people have over time suggested that the mission was too easy, until I discovered they ignored the boss and just clicked the blinkie to complete. That is intended to be easy, if you decide to give up at some point (that feature is there to ensure that even if you give up, you can receieve the bonus tickets for all the kills you've accomplished up to that point).

If someone is actually capable of trivially defeating the entire mission on a difficulty level higher than heroic, while fighting all three spawn waves, I'd love to see a demorecord of it. Seeing what works would help me improve the next version without simply adding a ton of brute force to it (its easy to make it harder; its not easy to make it harder in a way that won't make it trivially impossible for most players).

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No. THE coolest bug was in i14 BETA when Arcanville found one that when you killed two Malta Titians in the MA you would merge into the the Zeus Titian!

Or something like that.

*summons Arcanville*

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That's not an animation bug

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YES IT IZ

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I think what he means is that if you had a Hercules class titan as an ally, and its health got low, it would merge with YOU and KILL YOU, forming a Zeus class titan.

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Yep, that was the bug. Basically, a Herc merge kills both Hercs and spawns a Zeus. In the MA there was a bug where a Herc ally would consider you an eligible merge partner, and if it got low in health it would merge with you, which would kill you and leave a Zeus standing in your place.

The best part of the bug: during the merge, the Herc would turn towards you and backflip onto you, while you turned towards the Herc and waved your hands at it.


Also, the summon works better with all three A's.

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To turn a hobby into a profession takes serious committment (time and monetary) from a person. If someone is only doing it as a hobby and is not serious enough to commit to it professionally, why should they expect their audience to take it seriously in return? Why should they be offended if people overlook their work in favor of something else? Do they really have the right to complain? Frankly, they should be glad that people are looking at it in the first place.

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This presumes the notion that "professionalism" is synonymous with "commitment" and that's not automatically true. The issue is the commitment itself, not the amateur or professional status.

Not all hobbies generate less effort and commitment than all professions, even when talking about specific people. I know many people that put more effort and commitment into their hobbies than their professions.

The statement "if someone is only doing it as a hobby ... why should they expect their audience to take it seriously?" suggests the more general question "why should *anyone* expect their audience to take them seriously?" I believe the answer to that general question is equally applicable to amateurs and professionals alike, in most fields.

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I agree with Mateo. The critter difficulties were added because some people specifically want a more challenging game, not because of anything to do with risk:reward.

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Actually, the difficulty settings were specifically added to allow authors to weaken critters, not strengthen them. Originally, critters had no difficulty settings at all, and were allowed to use *all* of the powers from both primary and secondary, with only small limits due to rank.

The case was made that this was too extreme, and the MA needed a way to reduce the power level of custom critters to some level between maximum and the level of most PvE critters. So first a single Standard/Hard/Extreme difficulty setting was added, then one per powerset, and now the Custom settings are being added in I15 to further improve the granularity of the options available.

But the impetus has generally been to reduce critters downward from Extreme. Not to increase critters upward from Standard.

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I did think of allowing ALL melee classes access to the Assault power sets, but I wondered about the balance of it. Scrappers do significant damage, so giving them ranged attacks might step on the toes of the Blasters.

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The Scrapper ranged damage modifier is actually very low: 0.5. Its just that none of the Scrapper attacks use ranged modifiers, even the ones with significant range. If they were given unadultered assault sets, they would be doing more damage with melee attacks than blasters (1.125 vs 1.0) but a lot less damage with ranged attacks (0.5 vs 1.125). So much so that I think Scrappers would probably call the situation unfairly low overall and demand a higher ranged modifier.

I honestly would not look forward to having that debate played out, given the wide range of possibilities that the playerbase overall seems to equate with "balanced."

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Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.

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Claimed myth by BaB, multiple times, followed by admission that redraw was not consistently implemented in the way he thought it was, and it wasn't a simple matter of "yes it's a myth/no it's not" after all.

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Its more complicated than that, partially because people paraphrased the assertion in ways they thought preserved the meaning, but often did not.

"Weapon draw causes the attack to take longer to animate." This one is true. If you play a weapon draw animation, that does *not* generally shorten the actual attack animation. So draw + attack takes longer to play than just "attack."

However: "weapon draw slows down your attacks." Ah, this one was *false*. While it took longer to animate the attack, generally speaking all attacks in weapon-based powersets had cast times set so that the total cast time of the attack was set to approximately the draw time + the attack animation time. Therefore, *if* you drew the weapon, the cast time was equal to the total animation time of draw + attack. However if your weapon was already drawn, you'd oly play the attack animation but the cast time would still be the same. You'd therefore get no attack chain speed advantage to not drawing the weapon. What would happen is the animation would play, and then there would be a noticable pause at the end of the attack animation where the player still couldn't attack yet (cast time still enforced) but the player wasn't animating anything.

"Weapon draw reduces your damage." This one was false, for the reason above.

Now we get to this one: "weapon draw doesn't affect your attacks." This one is ambiguous: its half true and half false. But discussions surrounding this very statement caused problems because some people would observe the attack animations and *see* it did affect the attacks, and other players would observe chains of attacks and *see* that it didn't. Thus the controversy.


As it turns out, virtually all of the older powersets were designed with weapon draw included in cast time, as BaB suggests. However, some newer powersets were not designed in that way (Dual Blades in particular) and thus weapon draw did slow them down.

However its also important to note that when people talk about weapon draw "slowing them down" they used to state that like it was a disadvantage. In fact, the sets for which weapon draw slowed them down were intrinsicly faster than the ones for which it did not: in other words, its better to have a set that weapon draw hurts rather than one in which it doesn't, which *further* confuses the issue. The issue is that all sets that aren't affected by weapon draw (that use weapns) are essentially unaffected because they behave as if they are always drawing: in other words, they are under the weapon draw penalty all the time.

Phrased this way: "some weapon sets are affected by weapon draw when they actually draw the weapon, the rest are affected by weapon draw delay all of the time regardless of whether they are actually drawing a weapon" it becomes a bit more clear what's going on.


Bottom line: "Weapon Draw Slows Down Your Attacks" was essentially a myth pre-I11. You were more likely to be slowed down by being a female (character) than by weapon draw prior to I11.

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Why ranged attacks?

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Just like in Hamidon Raids, each Blue Mitos have to be attacked with ranged attacks. I can't find the exact values, but I believe Blue Mitos resist ~90% of all melee attacks damage, regardless of type.

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It's not resistance, as there is no such thing as positional resistance. Instead, they basically have capped defense.


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I'll pay closer attention next time we run this, but swear I've hit them with Smite and MG for 1 pt of damage, in other words there was more than just defense at work there.

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I also swear I've hit those little things for trivial dmg before...

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If I remember correctly, the healing mitos have huge (90%) resistances if they are not held. The others have only 20% resistance to damage, but the yellows have I think 300% defense to ranged/AoE and the blues have 300% defense to melee/AoE (or the other way around: its been a while).

And yes: no such thing as "resistance to melee" because there's no such thing as melee damage. The game engine can't support it even if the devs wanted to add such a feature to Hamidon.

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Again, CoH: GR should prove you wrong there.

We have Devs devoted to keeping the current material up-to-date, and as bug-free as they can make it, along with adding new content within the current systems. Then we have a different set of Devs (maybe still reporting to the main ones, but most likely not the same ones) working on Going Rogue, which has new systems and diversity of content in it.

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We don't exactly know that for certain. I hope that's true, but there's no evidence of major system additions to the GR expansion (separate from the side-switching one itself).

We know the devs hired some presumptively hot-shot programmers to work on stuff for CoH, but I don't know if its been explicitly stated that they are working on new game systems for GR. Also: I'm always worried when someone is identified as, or worse self-identifies as a "high powered programmer." Most of the "high-powered programmers" I've met were just high. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with though.


Of course, if any of those type-R programmers wanna tell me how long it takes to eat a donut...

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Well I'll disagree about the MA system but if you say that the system that drives it will produce more robust content then I'll wait and see. But I (like most customers) who have played this game are going to base their opinions on history, not promised or implied futures. Historically speaking, what you've said here doesn't jibe.

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I'm not saying it *will* just that it *can*. And there is no historical reference here, because prior to NCSoft's acquisition the dev team did not have the resources to add new features to the game to leverage. This is the first time since release that the dev team has ever possessed the resources necessary to significantly expand the game capabilities. So this will be the first time we get to judge their commitment to doing so.


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Also you first mentioned that the new system that drives the MA was setup to deliver missions faster (which I can see). How is it going to make content more robust (i.e. diversity of content, not quantity content)?

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If you're spending all of your time editing your web pages in vi, you're not going to be thinking about making highly elaborate web pages at the same time, and if you do, you're going to be extremely limited in the number you can make. Better mission tools frees up the content creators to spend more time on the story and balance elements of the missions rather than the mechanics of just setting up a map.

Furthermore, and this is of course theoretical, the mission designers at Paragon Studios have a lot more input into making game engine changes than we do. If they aren't spending all their time hand-editing missions, they will have more time to spend thinking up new features they would like to add to their missions. The better the tools are for them, the more likely they are to request more features to use, as they'll have more time to use them.

Now if you want evidence that the MA could spur additional development into improving the game systems to make better content, I can at least point out that the MA was partially responsible for the devs reexamining the controlling AI in the game, and exploring ways to improve it (ways they are still working on now). I know that for a fact because I was the one that used the MA to explain my AI concerns to the devs during I14 beta, and I know that led to some additional thinking regarding the problem (it wasn't the only reason, but it was a coincident parallel investigation).

So technically, the MA may *force* the devs to improve the game engine in one ironic way: although the internal mission designers have a greater *voice* than we do, in a sense the devs can tell them "no" when they ask for an improvement in some area. But if the players find a defect in the game systems that the MA exposes, that can actually be a bigger problem they can't hand-wave away, and that could force the dev team to prioritize such problems much higher than in the past.


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The real shame here is that these guys have had 5 YEARS (not including ALL of the pre-release work so really 7-8 years) to get a clue.

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You may not have been around during the "15 people" discussions of a couple years ago, but its been established that the core CoH team was very quickly cut to a very small group responsible for maintaining the game by Cryptic soon after release. Separate from CoV development, CoH has operated under essentially a skeleton crew from about release to about the end of 2007. If they were handed the worlds greatest MMO idea before 2008, they would have been unable to do anything with it.

So while it would have been nice to have those three or four years back, the resources just weren't available to do much more than maintain the state of the game. In retrospect, the devs actually did rather well given the resources that were available. Evidence suggests NCSoft ne Paragon Studios is willing to put several times more resources into CoH development than Cryptic was willing to in the past, as evidenced by the fact that there are double or triple the people working on CoH now than in the past.

I don't expect miracles, but I do expect to see improvements in development cycles over time, as those resources get fully incorporated into the development cycles. The major change has been less Jack to Matt, and more Cryptic's checkbook to NCSoft's, and NCSoft's seems to be bigger.


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Now they're about to be trumped by the new slew of Super Hero MMOs coming out (DCO, MO, CO). I'm willing to bet that out of those three appearing within the next 2 years, one of them will effectively vapor CoH/V as it stands now.

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I doubt strongly that will happen with CO. Its always possible with DCUO, given the much larger amount of resources being poured into that game, anything is still possible. But I don't think its likely.


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Your comment about adding to the robustness of the MA system by allowing the coloring (i.e. hue) of standard mobs is *exactly* the care taker type of development I'm talking about.

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Just for reference, I made that comment to note that players asked for the ability to "reskin" existing mobs in the MA during I14 beta, and were told that was a very difficult thing to do for a number of reasons (many mobs don't use the same skeletons, for example). However, they said they would look into at least altering the color palatte, which they seem to have followed up on. Similarly, the devs said that map editing was a long-term goal, but they would at least look at adding the placement markers to the maps and evolving from there. They seem to have done that as well. This suggests that the development of the MA didn't end with I14 beta, but continued past that point for those features to be added in I15 now. So this suggests that the devs are continuing to commit resources to improving the MA. Although some of those feature improvements seem to be superficial or have growing pains (i.e. memory optimization, custom power settings) it does seem they are showing a commitment to continuing development on the MA. It hasn't been put into "maintenance mode" yet.


I'm not by any means declaring victory yet, I'm just acknowledging that the rules of the game itself have been changed in the last 18 months, and its worth giving the devs a fresh look within that context. Also, even if some changes are not popular or functioning as expected, that shouldn't detract from an objective evaluation of whether the current dev team is doing more to expand the game than has been done in the past.

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Dominators, interestingly enough, seem to have one of the smaller ranges in qualitative design extremes (at least in my opinion).

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This could be because Dominators have so few choices for Primaries and Secondaries. They do not have access to Illusion, which is one of the more unique examples of the Control Power Sets. And they have no version of Devices, which again is a unique example of a Blaster Secondary. Although a Dom Secondary with no melee attacks would probably be TOO limiting...

Mind Control and Psi Assault are fairly unique choices, though, Mind for the lack of a pet, and Psi for Drain Psyche in place of Power Boost or Aim/Build Up.

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Dominator variability isn't easy to pin on quantity of choices. When scrappers had only four secondaries, they had four really different secondaries. Honestly, I think in general the devs got better at selecting powersets intended to "fit" the archetype at the time CoV was being designed, and ironically that turned out to be something they ended up being slightly too good at.

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CoH has been in caretaker mode literally since release, with new additions to the game only being layered over the existing structure. At some point (earlier) the decision (at higher then the dev level) should have been made to put the resources into truly expanding the game. This decision was not made, and thus you have what a very finite set of instructions can produce.

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That appears to have changed circa November 2007, which is about the moment in time I first became aware of the project that became Real Numbers (and around the time of the NCSoft acquisition). The MA I believe has been in early development going back to at least the same time period. Since its a start-from-scratch project we're only seeing the earliest iterations of it. I don't think its fair to judge it in a long-term sense based on its current conditions. The devs have suggested that possible additions on the road map for the MA system are things like map editing. And the I15 version is introducing the ability to partially alter the appearance of standard critters (mostly color changes at the moment, but still an interesting and highly requested development).

Certainly, during the timeframe from that date to today, there seems to be a much higher degree of investment in expanding the game systems. Real Numbers was a significant investment in expanding the capabilities of the game systems, the MA was, the boxed expansion must have been worked on for a significant amount of that time, and even the changes to PvP in I13 (whatever you may think of them) required changes to the game engine to support. There are even hints the devs are looking to address the brain-dead AI subsystem. The devs are never as fast as I would like them to be, but they do appear to be both operating faster now than before, and operating under an expanded scope of what's fair game to work on.

It would have been nice if this had been happening since release, but its at least happening now.


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P.S. - the proper analogy would have been to say that the MA is more like using Front Page to make a web page. You can get it done fast and cheap, but it's not going to be very indepth.

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Probably a better analogy would be that the current MA is like Dreamweaver, and a very early beta of it.

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I usually only team when doing a task force.

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A scrapper that needs to team to do task forces? Burn the witch.

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That ofcourse STILL has NOTHING to do with whether one considers him a great communicator or not.

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I addressed this point separately and firstly in the very same post, and I signalled separation of topic appropriately ("As to whether...")

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Quoting a developer who left literally years ago when we have much more up-to-date consensus from someone who has been very transparent about the work he can and can't do on this game is just chasing misinformation to support your point.

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I should point out that as much respect as I have for BaBs, quoting an animator as contradicting a powers data designer over what the programmers can do is a bit quixotic.

[/ QUOTE ]Since it's an animation-based issue, I'd say quoting Geko is actually far more odd. It's an animation effort so it'd fall to him, and yes, programming would have to get involved but it doesn't change the fact that it's a cosmetic change to a single power's animation, and therefore in BABs' Bailiwick.

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The one possible advantage Geko had that BaB currently does not have is the input of the original animation engine programmer. For that matter, Geko had the advantage of making statements while he still *had* the original animation engine programmer still around to make them. It could actually be harder now when BaB said so than in the past when Geko said so.**

When it comes to modifying the elements of existing animation engine constructs, BaBs is still the expert, but I'm not sure anyone is what I would call an "expert" in the area of estimating the level of work required to alter the animation engine to support new features. In fact, my guess might literally be as good as any (unless those R-type programmers are tearing through it now).


You should also presume that whenever BaB says something "is difficult or impossible" there is the unspoken suffix "without it being so ugly I would rather slit my own throat than do it that way." There are things BaB says would be difficult or impossible that I can see relatively simple ways to accomplish, until I realize that they all have the side effects of either being visually ugly, or increasing the complexity level of the animation resources by an order of magnitude. This is also something that Geko may or may not have been thinking of when he made the statement in question.


** I'm assuming we're talking about interacting with the environment and throwing things in it, rather than literally replacing Hurl's animation with Propel's. Heck: I could probably do that myself.

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Something tells me I'm not alone on the valuation of his comm skills.

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The fact that he has a reputation among many as being a prevaricator when to the best of my ability to determine even in retrospect none of his public posts nor his PMs to me were either lies or even deliberately misleading statements suggests that at best he should strongly limit public comments to non-controversial subject matter.


As to whether he deserves to be considered among the most influential people in the MMO industry, I'd say the fact that he helped launch a game that is still running (no question that Jack pulled CoH from potential development hell to at least a launchable, if sometimes questionable, state) and probably influencing at least two other titles currently in development (CO and DCUO), and then on top of that is involved with the development and launch of two new MMO titles including a major license one (STO), is probably more than resume enough for that consideration.

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One final thing ... get rid of MAs and burn your world builder tool. I think it's far past the time for a more robust tool then something as simplistic and static as what they are using.

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Note: the MA is not the tool the devs have been using to create content all this time. The MA is an offshoot of an internal project to make a better (in terms of more streamlined) editing tool for mission design. In effect the players are getting a "lite" version of that newer tool. I believe its ultimately Hero-1's baby.

Their actual tools allow for far more customization than the MA (as evidenced by the fact that lots of PvE mission exceed its abilities in many areas) but my understanding is that those tools are the MMO equivalent of the days when we used to make web pages with vi and notepad.

I believe that at least part of the intent of the MA system long-term is to give their own mission designers tools that allow them to design missions much faster, allowing them to spend less time on mission mechanics and more time on either expanding mission depth or making more missions overall.

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Quoting a developer who left literally years ago when we have much more up-to-date consensus from someone who has been very transparent about the work he can and can't do on this game is just chasing misinformation to support your point.

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I should point out that as much respect as I have for BaBs, quoting an animator as contradicting a powers data designer over what the programmers can do is a bit quixotic.

Keep in mind that MMO development in general, and this game's development in particular, is highly compartmentalized. When Castle, BaB, and pohsyb (as representatives of data, animation, and code) all say something is "difficult" they are all saying completely different things. In fact, its very often the case that they won't all agree on the difficulty level of a particular thing, because their approach and familiarity with the cross-disciplinary aspects of the problem are much lower than their own base area of expertise.


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I'm sure you could simply send a PM to Arcanaville asking about Geko's Greatest Failings and hear a tale or two.

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Geko appears to have been mathematically over his head in terms of adapting PnP mechanical conventions to the requirements of CoH's gameplay environment. I don't think I've ever called him "retarded" though. I think his two critical faults were not recognizing how much influence human GMs have over preventing numerical saturation in PnP-like combat systems, and just not being all that good at math (a problem that I've been told by many sources is all too common in the game design industry).

Although, out of context many of the early powers design decisions are not difficult to portray as crimes against seventh grade mathematics.