Arcanaville

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Arcana's setup is more complicated for the 6 badges, and even MORE of a hassle than what currently exists

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By that logic, it would be simpler to eliminate the veteran award badges and just have the first player you log into after the veteran reward is triggered to be presented with the award choice panel, and that selection would then be enforced on all characters from that point on.

Unless, of course, your objective is to actually provide a choice in the first place. In which case, no, it isn't actually very complicated at all, as evidenced by the fact that the interface metaphor already exists in the game, and isn't functionally overloaded. To actually provide a choice, you have to add out of necessity the choice-delivering activity.


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So what if it overloads the setting a badge as a title, we're talking a grand total of 6 badges to check against.

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Functional overload in user interfaces is nearly axiomatically bad. It always presumes two choices are correlated and when they are not the user interface is provably broken. In this case, the decision to set a title and the decision to want the badge immediately applied to all other characters is *not* by any means correlated. That makes it broken by definition. I can't imagine a UI designer signing off on that sort of thing, ever, although then again I should know better by now not to say that aloud.

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so I've never quite been sure what the difference is in Medium and Long. (Perhaps the number of missions?)

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Its calculated based on number of missions and the objectives within those missions. During closed beta, the number of missions was so heavily weighted in the calculation that in effect the size was practically proportional to the number of missions in a majority of cases. This was tweaked to add more weight to objectives such as escorts and defeat all in particular. I don't know what the actual formula for calculating length is.

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Not sure if this qualifies, but as the situation no longer exists its probably safe to state:

[Pre-I9 Hamidon] Entering the Hamidon goo will buff Hamidon's mez resistance.


I should mention that while many people thought this was true, some raid leaders knew it to be false but encouraged the belief anyway, for a variety of practical reasons.

[/ QUOTE ]Another that was frequently spouted by a Champion raid leader about the old Hamidon raid: teleporting to the hospital or your base when defeated triggers Mito splits. Actually, if i recall correctly, he used to claim anyone leaving the Hive could trigger it.

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Another one I've heard on more than one server: AoEs cause splits.

Technically, there is a minor truth element to this: damage caused splits, so splitting a mito and then hitting the split with splash damage was not recommended. But there's no way to increase the probability of splitting a single mito by any action separate from actually shooting at it. Killing it really really fast did seem to reduce the chances of the split occuring, though.

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This isn't really a "powers" myth, but it amused me to no end, so I'll share.

I don't remember the specifics, but I was on a team with a fire/kin who was talking about how they moved from farm map A to farm map B (names removed to protect the (not-so) innocent). When I asked why the answer was "All of the good drops have been farmed out of it, so I moved on". I had no response at all, it was like a mag 30 stun hit me behind the keyboard.

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There may actually have been truth to this at one time. IIRC, shortly after IOs and Salvage were introduced someone discovered that if you ran certain missions in a certain way, you would get exactly the same drops in the same order every time. I believe it had to do with how the intern (I hope, anyway) seeded the salvage drops when you entered a mission. They fixed that little bug a while back, though, so even if this validated what the player believed at one time, it no longer applies.

[/ QUOTE ]It was a bug in the initialization of the RNG responsible for rewards; on certain specific missions (generally, missions filled with special enemies like 7th Generation Paragon Protectors) the drops were always the same. To my knowledge, none of the missions known to be bugged were ever considered farm maps.

All of the other missions had drops functioning normally.

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Actually, it was the fact that the drop system had more than one RNG in use, at least one of which was "home-grown." In other words, totally freaking broken.

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Perhaps more significantly Blasters are explicitly intended to be damage dealers with two powersets directly supporting that archetypal design. The ranged modifier notwithstanding, Castle explicitly stated that the intent of the I11 Blaster changes was *not* to make ranged damage preeminent, but to better balance the choice between ranged and melee offense, to better represent the archetype as a damage dealer with both ranged and melee options.

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so dev blasters are the developers running joke?

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In general. Obviously, /dev blasters have limited melee offensive options in particular. However, its true for most sets of powersets that the members of the set are intended to represent a range of options centered around a particular set of features, but representing extremes in different directions. You see this in the Controller primaries and the Scrapper secondaries most vividly. Dominators, interestingly enough, seem to have one of the smaller ranges in qualitative design extremes (at least in my opinion).

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I think where Blasters have a "Secondary" is with the control powers in their Secondary. While their melee attacks are at Primary level, their control powers aren't.

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Control powers in blaster primaries are not intrinsicly stronger; there's no advantage or disadvantage to control powers being in a blaster primary or secondary that I'm aware of.

Important to remember that all utilitarian arguments notwithstanding, blasters have at least two control-significant primaries dating back to release: energy (knockback), and Ice (slow/hold). It isn't just the damage modifier changes that are making blasters and dominators more closely related than they were originally intended to be.

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Arcanaville and I actually already discussed this in a different thread, although she never answered to my satisfaction why she didn't think it was a good idea.

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What I said was that it was while it was a reasonable attempt to rank arcs with substantial ratings associated with them, it doesn't do well with arcs with only a few ratings. While the whole *point* of such a system is to dampen the effects of a few ratings, it also makes it (as an inescapable side-effect) impossible for ratings to serve one of their intended purposes, which is to distinguish better arcs and draw attention to them. By definition, an arc won't be designated as a "good" arc until its gotten so many ratings that the whole purpose of drawing attention to them is rendered moot.

Thus, it can help rank the most frequently rated arcs, but can't be used to attract attention to new or underplayed arcs. It might make a good HoF tool, but its not a good "diamond in the rough" tool.

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I miss something fo sure, and it's why im posting! If you know the answer, plz help me.

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Critters (most of them) have base 50% chance to hit, before accuracy bonuses. As a result, 45% defense is the most that does anything (unless the critter has tohit buffs) because the game engine does not allow defense to reduce the intermediate chance to hit below 5%. So nothing more than 45% helps, except to cancel tohit buffs.

When you attack a critter, your base chance to hit is not 50%. Its 75% for sufficiently high levels and when attacking an even con critter. Which means for a critter to soft-cap *you* requires 70% defense in that circumstance.

Your base chance to hit the critter will go down if the critter is higher combat level than you, and will go up if you are lower than level 20 (see the section on beginner's luck on the very page on paragonwiki you link to under Attack Mechanics).

Bottom line: the "soft cap" is not 45% universally: its 45% for anything with base 50% chance to hit. That's only true for most (not all) critters, and players vs players in PvP combat. That's not true for players attacking critters. The details are explained (as previously mentioned) in the Attack Mechanics wiki page.

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If I Remember correctly awhile back Arcanaville had posted some research on how the female models were made inferior to the male ones because of discrepancies in combat stance and attack animations.

I suspect this is related to that and would explain why it's no longer used in game.

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Actually, Arcanaville did that analysis after release when the discussed changes had already been eliminated. What Arcanaville brought up was minute differences in animation times due to different skeletal compositions, minute being on the order of a single clock interval. As she found it, the basic male skeleton was the only one that had truly accurate animation times listed. The huge and female models, thanks to differences in structure, size and speed, actually attacked very slightly slower even though they used the same animations.

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Correction and clarification:

All entities in the game have a model type: in the case of player characters there are three: the Player-Male, Player-Female, and Player-Huge models (male, female, and huge for short). Whenever an entity has to do something that plays an animation, the game engine first checks to see if there is an animation specifically written for that model type. If there isn't, the game then plays the Male one.

Most player actions just have a Male animation, which all models use by default. However, when the animator actually *wants* the Female or Huge models to play a different animation (lets say, the Female running animation) then the animator makes one for that specific model to override the Male default one.

Some attacks actually have specific animations for Female models relative to Male ones (ditto: Huge). When that happens, sometimes the two aren't identical. Often in the past the Female one was longer, and therefore slower. Sometimes this was by just a frame or two, but in rare cases the disparity was significant: as much as a 7 or 8 frames (a quarter of a second). When that happened, Females using that attack basically attacked slower than Males. In only one case did I find a Female animation that was faster than the Male one.

(I don't think this was a deliberate act of sexist nerfing: rather I think that its simply the case that the animators tend to make the Male animations first, and then if they think the Female animation should be different they go back later and make a different Female one. When they do, they are often adding what they believe to be "female characteristics" to the motion, which tends to add frames rather than subtract them. The same problem tended to happen to Huge animations as well, albeit less often.)

I notified BaB of the discrepancies where I found them, and he did a pretty good job of redoing them to make them either identical or within a frame or so of each other. Due to the mechanics of "ArcanaTime" the difference of a frame or two is unlikely to have any impact on the overall rate of fire for players. All of this was during the I10-I12 time frame and has nothing to do specifically with changes in animations from beta to release.


By the way, at the same time I noted (half-jokingly, really) the fact that females are sometimes slower than males, I also noted that sometimes left-handed punches are slower than right-handed ones, and sometimes attacks take longer when flying. Left-handed flying women were definitely at a distinct disadvantage. Most of those have been cleaned up as well, although there are a few that linger here and there.

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dude, the basic premise of the "buffs" is to make the dominator the first primary/primary AT in the game

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Arguably, Scrappers were intended to be balanced between their primary and secondary powerset. Perhaps more significantly Blasters are explicitly intended to be damage dealers with two powersets directly supporting that archetypal design. The ranged modifier notwithstanding, Castle explicitly stated that the intent of the I11 Blaster changes was *not* to make ranged damage preeminent, but to better balance the choice between ranged and melee offense, to better represent the archetype as a damage dealer with both ranged and melee options.

So Blasters are actually comparable to Dominators in terms of dual-primary design. It may not have always been that way, but its definitely that way now.

In any event, the Primary/Secondary distinction has always been significantly overplayed by the players, relative to the importance that the devs themselves give to it.

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1. Log into a character with the badge.
2. Open up the badge window.
3. Click on the events tab (unless new "account badges" tab is made in which case open that instead), click on existing badge.
4. Game now (after change) understands that your account should have the badge and sets the flag on the account to award it to all characters from that point on.

Clear now?


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Well, that's clearer. Also clearly undesirable. It functionally overloads the act of setting a badge as your title to propagating that badge to other characters.

This makes a lot more sense, and accomodates more character options:

1. Add an "Claimable Badge" badge tab
2. For each event, add a "Event badge" which shows up under the Claimable Badges tab comparable to the veteran rewards badges. Give that badge a claimable reward which is the actual badge for the Event.
3. Upon logging in any character during the event timeframe, award the Event Claimable badge to the *account*, which by extension will award that badge to every character in that account when they next log in, including characters created after that point in time.
4. If the player wants that specific Event badge on any specific character, they can simply claim it in the same manner that they claim veteran awards.

Players can now award the badge to any characters they want, no characters they don't want, it still requires actually logging in during the event at least once, it leverages a pre-existing mechanism and UI metaphor to claim the award, and requires no more tech than the above suggestion (which both revolve around a feature to award an account-based reward based on an in-game action, which I'm not sure currently exists at the moment).

My questions were not based on not understanding your original post, but requesting clear restatement as it seemed extremely improper design at first glance, but with sufficient ambiguity that it was possible you meant something else completely different.

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I would definitely be interested in seeing those stats you were talking about that pertain to 5 star ratings and very large arcs.

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Here's a sample of data I took from May 18th:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
arcs VS S M L VL
5 3 486 446 941 1107
4 1006 6305 2620 2766 2677
3 1383 3040 1005 667 649
2 385 876 301 151 128
1 193 692 199 92 77
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This is a breakdown of rating by size. This is all freely available information, by the way, if you're crazy enough to collect it: the devs are not generous with their datamining information, even with (maybe especially with) me. Note the interesting pattern that if you exclude 5-star arcs, most of the ratings regardless of rating-stars are for small arcs: this suggests that small arcs are played more often than any other size arc (they are at least rated more often). My guess is that VS arcs are much less likely to be good stories *or* good farms, and players are realizing that.

However, 5-star arcs don't fit that pattern. Since there is a clear skew towards Small sized (by flag) arcs, the fact that most 5-star arcs are VL (and the longer the arc the more 5-star arcs it has) implies that there is a very strong bias away from giving smaller arcs a 5-star rating. In fact, VS arcs have trouble getting even a 4-star rating.

There's a lot of data points I'm trying to keep track of as often as I can remember to. But given the various sources of uncertainty in the data (in terms of trying to extrapolate to information I don't have access to) I'm still gathering as much information as I can before I draw any conclusions, as suggestive as the data I have currently seems to be (also, I'm collecting more data now than when I first started, as some of the early data began to show signs of patterns I didn't expect - for instance, there's just the slightest hint that the day of the week you first publish can influence your rating, but the signal is not strong enough with my current data to conclude its statistically significant).

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It sounds like you'd need some form of placeholder badge just for the optional badge trigger, similar to the veteran award badges (I'm assuming using /settitle commands themselves would not be considered an elegant solution for most players).

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How about opening the badge window and click on the badge? The /settitle command isn't required.

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What I'm not getting here is that since the only time people can do that is if they already have the badge, what action are you suggesting selecting the title ought to perform? It can't be to award the badge for that character, since that character can't click on a badge they don't have yet, and doesn't need to click on a badge they already have.

Unless, as I mentioned, there exists somewhere (for example, in an "Account-wide" tab) where the badge exists that the player can click on, that would award the badge to that character specifically, even if they don't actually have that badge awarded to that character yet (i.e. a placeholder). Analogous to how veteran bonuses are awarded, where the bonus is technically awarded to the entire account, but have to be "retrieved" for each character independently (with the consequence that the player can decide when and if each character should receive the award).

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What if the badge did not award until the badge was awarded naturally (log in during event date) OR selected as a title at least once? This way those that don't want it on all characters can be happy, while those that would like it on all characters will be happy.

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How would you mechanically provide an interface to allow the player to "select" the title for the badge if the badge hadn't been awarded yet? It sounds like you'd need some form of placeholder badge just for the optional badge trigger, similar to the veteran award badges (I'm assuming using /settitle commands themselves would not be considered an elegant solution for most players).

Not sure if this qualifies, but as the situation no longer exists its probably safe to state:

[Pre-I9 Hamidon] Entering the Hamidon goo will buff Hamidon's mez resistance.


I should mention that while many people thought this was true, some raid leaders knew it to be false but encouraged the belief anyway, for a variety of practical reasons.

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Actually, the most reasonable interpretation of the data is that statistically speaking the average rater perceives the average arc to be closer to 3.6 stars rather than 3 stars, and ratings skew towards that number. The curve is also much sharper than expected for a normal distribution, which implies that the skew is quite strong (suggesting people are reluctant to give out 5s, 2s, and 1s).

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It seems like we are assuming that there are more 4/3 votes when there could actually be more 5/1 votes. How did you come to this conclusion when we are looking at averages? You can't conclusively separate 4/3 star ratings from 5/1 star ratings in an average, can you?

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See my previous post: short answer is that a) I'm specifically talking about averages above, and not specific votes, and b) there is *some* evidence that 5-votes are not more common than the averages suggest. Some of that is buried in the information that can be gleaned from the MA, however.

In all cases, we're generally talking about statistically likely theories, not demonstrative proof of individual voting patterns.

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It is rather telling. From that data, it seems that most players are inclined to rate favorably, but a core group is determined to downrate higher rated arcs. Unfortunate, but unsurprising.

I don't even look through rated arcs anymore -- I scroll through the arcs that have never been played or rated looking for something that piques my interest. I've found some really good arcs that way, but it's time-consuming. Though a little reading never hurt anyone.



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Really ? So if 60% of the arcs aren't 5* the system isn't working ?

Seems that data shows most of the stories are horribly overrated

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Actually, the most reasonable interpretation of the data is that statistically speaking the average rater perceives the average arc to be closer to 3.6 stars rather than 3 stars, and ratings skew towards that number. The curve is also much sharper than expected for a normal distribution, which implies that the skew is quite strong (suggesting people are reluctant to give out 5s, 2s, and 1s).


(also, there is some evidence to suggest that zero-star ratings are very rare; given that doing so requires special knowledge of how the rating system works, this is not unexpected)

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Actually with the situation you describe its much more likely that people are given out alot of 4 star ratings because they don't want to give the arc a bad rating but don't think its very good.

If there is raw data perhaps more could be read into it. Seeing as it hasn't been presented there is little to discuss.

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If that was the only effect, it should have not only increased the number of 4-star arcs, but also the number of 5-star arcs (because such a strong skew should have significantly increased the number of arcs that managed to reach 4.5 stars). I don't see that occuring, so the change can't be just an independent spike at 4-stars. The fact that the ratings distribution is off-center and spills into the 3-star category but not the 5-star category suggests that at least the average is weighted towards a number between 4 and 3, not 4 and 5. That says nothing about individual voting, only averages which is why I only mentioned averages. I don't know if there are a lot of 4 votes. I only know the *average* is skewing that way.

In the absence of additional information, the simplest conclusion is, as I mentioned, not to assume that people are "horribly overrating" arcs but rather that the ratings are skewed away from 3 (which ought to be the "average" for most rating schemes) and towards a number between 3 and 4, and higher than 3.5. Beyond that, assuming some linear interpolation its possible to roughly estimate the actual average rating of all the arcs, given the ratings distribution. Its about 3.6, which is why I stated the skew as about 0.6 or half a star. What is specifically causing that skew, in terms of individual votes, is something the data currently doesn't say (or rather, that isn't apparent to me from my current analysis of the data).

There is some additional data that I have, but I'm not ready to write it all up yet. However, I'll note something else with regard to ratings distributions. Interestingly, for all star ratings the most common arc *size* is S(mall) - this suggests that S-sized arcs are the most commonly played arc size. This is true *except* for 5-star arcs: for those, the most common arc size is actually VL(arge). In fact, the longer the arc, the more of them have 5-stars, in direct opposition to the intrinsic size distribution. The most logical conclusion is that while players seem to give out 4s more often than you'd expect, they are also extremely unlikely to give out 5s unless some critical content threshold is achieved, and while large size is not necessarily an advantage, small size is a definite penalty. This suggests, if nothing else, that 5-star ratings are not being given out trivially. The numbers say nothing about the *standards* of the raters, which might be high or low, but it does suggests something about the amount of thought placed on 5-star ratings specifically.

This also suggests a possible theory for the ratings skew: a pile-up at 4-stars where people are intrinsicly more likely to rate higher, except for 5-stars which has a critical threshold. That doesn't suggests a specific spike at 4-stars, but rather a more general trend towards higher ratings except for 5. The combination of the two doesn't generate "horribly overrated" arcs, though, since the net effect is to increase average ratings only somewhat.

Worth noting: when the discussion of the 5-star system occured during beta, I did theorize that the system combined with the DC/HoF awards would combine to skew ratings off-center, gravitating to a point probably between 3.0 (the ratings center-point) and 4.5 (the threshold for earning a ratings-induced award), and furthermore that this would be amplified by the requirement to award integer stars, and there were serious problems with the granularity of the scale, Likert notwithstanding (in this case, I don't think Likert is even applicable due to the overall nature of the ratings system).

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brutes must play non stop. there is no waiting for people to res. no waiting for people to catch up. no waiting for fulcrum to recharge. no waiting for a fresh sb/fort/forge. no waiting.

not all brute secondaries can even play like that. MOST have serious end issues especially playing in a team like this. multiple brutes in a team means one has fury, the rest do not.

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FALSE. Brutes 'must' play 'non-stop'? No, brutes CAN play non-stop, build high fury, and out-damage scrappers AND out survive them AND out aggro manage them, which means they can outclass scrappers in everything. OR they CAN take their time, at which point they do less damage than scrappers, but still retain advantages in survivability and aggro management.

So in those two play-styles, the brute is better at everything in one, while trading dmg for survivability in the other. And as has been mentioned by other posters, the playstyle where brutes are universally superior is a playstyle shared by both at's and the majority of those who play them. If you still consider that parity, then I guess we'll just have to respectfully disagree.

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That's not exactly a fair evaluation. First of all, this presumes that the "benefits" being counted are always benefits, and they aren't always. For example, Brutes don't actually have "aggro manangement" they have aggro drawing ability. That's not always welcome to all players: in fact a big problem with low level tankers for many less-experienced players is Gauntlet-cide.

Second of all, this is a weirdly character-centric perspective when talking about playstyle. When a player plays with a particular playstyle, its not always a "choice" in the sense being discussed here. Its often just their playstyle, period. Its a false option to suggest that players that play Brutes always have the "option" to speed up and generate more damage, because that option may simply not exist for the player even if it exists for the character (Brute).

Mechanically speaking, the Brute is trading higher offense for lower survivability when going faster, on the presumption that going faster induces more incoming damage. Some players compensate through altered tactics and build strategies, but others can't or don't. For some players, the hurdle required to overcome to make this change is trivial, but for others its not. The archetype isn't balanced for expert players, but the playerbase as a whole where that trade is significant.

Reminder: the majority of this game's playerbase gains significant debt. They were not able to solo blasters or keep them consistently alive in teams prior to I11 (and who knows what the situation is now). They still use SOs. They can't always find the trainers.

The performance tradeoffs are designed for the average player. For players like us that are extremely build and playstyle-capable, the game doesn't (and couldn't really) offer "even" trades. Instead, it just tries to fence us in so we don't go too crazy off the map. If you think Brutes are better than Scrappers in virtually all cases for expert players, that's probably not seen as an especially important problem to resolve.


Incidentally, on the subject of Fury generation. My own personal experience from both conventional play and explicit testing is that in teams in high density single-level maps, its possible to generate and then consistently maintain high Fury, although I doubt the average player can do it consistently. Solo, especially in indoor multi-level maps, its essentially impossible except in bursts. The spawn density is simply too low while solo (on any difficulty level) for most maps to provide enough "fury-fuel" to do that, and any map with doors, elevators, and hallways is likely to provide too much travel distance to maintain high levels of fury spawn to spawn. The playstyle also requires significant attention paid to endurance efficiency in terms of both build and combat activity. Given that toggle-management is a curse word in this game in many circles, I doubt if a lot of players besides the very performance-minded would go through the trouble.

(The irony and the catch is that Fury is a form of ram-jet: high fury = higher endurance efficiency = higher activity rate = high fury. Fury does not have a linear learning curve: if you can't manage it well, you likely can't manage it at all.)

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It is rather telling. From that data, it seems that most players are inclined to rate favorably, but a core group is determined to downrate higher rated arcs. Unfortunate, but unsurprising.

I don't even look through rated arcs anymore -- I scroll through the arcs that have never been played or rated looking for something that piques my interest. I've found some really good arcs that way, but it's time-consuming. Though a little reading never hurt anyone.



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Really ? So if 60% of the arcs aren't 5* the system isn't working ?

Seems that data shows most of the stories are horribly overrated

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Actually, the most reasonable interpretation of the data is that statistically speaking the average rater perceives the average arc to be closer to 3.6 stars rather than 3 stars, and ratings skew towards that number. The curve is also much sharper than expected for a normal distribution, which implies that the skew is quite strong (suggesting people are reluctant to give out 5s, 2s, and 1s).


(also, there is some evidence to suggest that zero-star ratings are very rare; given that doing so requires special knowledge of how the rating system works, this is not unexpected)

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*Which* issues actually become material issues the devs will have to address isn't obvious to me at the moment.

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The (if it ever happens, new) dominator vs. blaster issue seems pretty obvious to me, but blasters are apparently popular, so they may be able to hold on to their popularity even vs. (if it ever happens, new) dominators.

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Given the current population disparity, the skew between blasters and dominators would have to be enormous to create a serious archetypal balance problem. Also, most players play below level 40, and at lower levels (especially below 30) there is still a significant difference in capability and playstyle between dominators (even projecting the Dominator2.0 changes) and blasters.

However I do see Dominator2.0s potentially filling in a niche that has never been adequately filled in the past in my opinion: magically themed offensive controllers are a lot easier to simulate with 2.0 Dominators (with or without pets) than with Blasters or Controllers. Back in the day, one of the more interesting questions (to me) was "what would Dr. Strange be" in CoH. No answer was really satisfying then, but today I'd say without hesitation "2.0 Dominator." The powersets aren't exactly there, but the archetypal design clearly has the best fit.


I think a more problematic archetype comparison is corruptors vs defenders. The problem isn't absolute magnitude of the powers: that's something most players have only a vague sense of anyway. Its more the case that a corruptor is a much more easy to solo defender. The numbers are different, but not so different that the average player is going to notice much on the buff side, but will perceive the difference in offensive due to faster kill-speed and soloability.

I'm not sure how the Brute/Scrapper comparison will play out, because it all depends on the perception of how easy it is to generate and sustain high fury. Whether it is or is not easy is a technical balance question, but its the perception itself that is most relevant to archetype popularity. There seems to be two strong camps regarding that issue, and its unclear to me which is the more popular opinion, and by how much.

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Isn't the whole Going Rogue thing going to force the developers to reconcile the archetype issues created by the CoH team model versus CoV self-reliance model?

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Eventually, yes. However, since villain archetypes are less popular than hero archetypes, at least initially the shift I suspect will occur from (at least some) hero types to villain types will not be seen as a problem. It might be a year or more before any strong reverse skew between, say, scrappers and brutes affects the population numbers enough for the devs to notice and be required to take action.

Also, ignoring powerset availability issues, different players will see different choices between all of the different melee archetypes (and other choices) simply due to playstyle and skillset differences. So many of the differences between the CoH and CoV archetypes won't unilaterally skew in one direction or the other, at least in my judgement. I think more casual, lower performance players will still prefer scrappers to brutes, ignoring powerset availability issues. Higher performance players are likely to skew more towards brutes. But the net skew might be very low. *Which* issues actually become material issues the devs will have to address isn't obvious to me at the moment.

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Tanks have a role. To fill that role they are given specific tools and are balanced accordingly. They are given aggro management and the mitigation to survive it. If I remember my CoH history, tank taunt used to be single target and they didn't have gauntlet, correct? But at that time, they were unkillable as well.

The devs decided that this lacked balance all over the place. So they decreased the mitigation side and increased the ability to control aggro.

Now tanks can fill their role but still be taken down IF the incoming damage surpasses their extreme mitigation.

Still with me? More aggro management means more mitigation.

Scrappers are the flip side to the tank. They don't have gauntlet. Their only taunt is single target. They have very low aggro management. If we left them at that, no one would ever play a scrapper. So what do they have to balance the AT? High damage.

Then we have the brute. It starts out doing less damage than the tank, with less aggro management than the tank and the same mitigation as the scrapper. As with the scrapper, if we left it like this, no one would play it. So it, too, has the ability to do more damage, but unlike the scrapper, it must WORK FOR IT.

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Just as an FYI, there's a missing element to this line of thought. The CoH archetypes were originally designed with significant self-awareness of the notion of traditional MMO roles. Blasters, Tankers, Defenders, and Controllers were designed with at least some nominal role in mind. Scrappers were actually defined to be the one archetype that wasn't anchored to a team role: it was the "solo-friendly" archetype. Over time, that was blurred by the shifting realization that CoH appealed to soloers much more strongly than originally anticipated, *and* the increasing realization that MMMOs don't automatically imply induced teaming.

The CoV archetypes were *not* designed in that way. They were *all* designed to be much more carefully balanced between soloing and teaming. They were designed as soloers with a team contribution, not parts of a team with some ability to solo. As a result, "role" plays a much weaker role in the design of CoV archetypes. And as a consequence, its much more difficult to state with the same level of certainty and unambiguousness that any one particular charateristic of a CoV archetype is specifically there for some specific team role reason.

It also creates situations which can appear contradictory to some. For example, Brutes are designed to be most similar to Scrappers, not Tankers, in the sense that they are *not* the primary aggro control archetype. Masterminds are the primary aggro control archetype. However, that doesn't mean MMs have the role and the tools exclusively, as Brutes have some of those tools as well. That's not a contradiction, because CoV archetypes were not intended to be pigeonholed in the same way that CoH archetypes initially were. Furthermore, it may seem nonsensical that the archetype whose damage mitigation is most buffable to tanker levels is the brute if the brute is not the primary aggro control archetype, but again that's because Brutes aren't as strongly defined by their team role as Tankers are.


Why do brutes have more health than scrappers? In my opinion, the most likely reason why brutes have higher health (and its not really very much higher) is that it was intended to compensate for the initial "start up" damage that brutes must endure while building up Fury. I don't think there was any additional serious numerical analysis done to determine how much might be necessary, or even *if* it was actually necessary**. The devs have traditionally *not* spent loads of time doing (appropriate) numerical analysis to set the numbers of powersets, and there's no evidence they did so when designing the Brute archetype. They did what they nearly always do in those circumstances: they set the numbers to what they thought sounded like it made sense, then playtested it to see if their assumptions were strongly contradicted. That methodology simply cannot tell the difference really between 105% scrapper health, 115% scrapper health, and probably 125% scrapper health. In other words, its not set to the value the devs want, its set to a value that the devs can't prove they don't want.


** The CoV beta discussions regarding Fury and Ice powers strongly suggest that numerical analysis was either not being done, or not being done properly, with regard to any of the mechanics of Fury. That is separate from the fact that Fury was tweaked more than once, and never with specific calculated numerical justification.

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I would be curious if the devs could mine the raw stats on how many people vote 1 vs 3 stars.

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As of the last time I checked, of the arcs that were rated at all, 9.69% were rated 5-stars, 55.79% were rated 4-stars, 23.71% were rated 3-stars, 6.46% were rated 2-stars, and 4.34% were rated 1-star.

(28.22% of all arcs were unrated at the time)

This is not the same thing as an answer to your question, but its generally suggestive.

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Not to sound like sour grapes here

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Sorry, but I clipped the part after this where you managed to achieve exactly what you first stated you didn't intend to achieve, by complaining about the devs being unable to achieve that which you believe they first stated their intentions to achieve.

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I'm curious as to why people are allowed to rate before spending, say, 5-10 minutes on a mission.

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Let's say i enter a mission. The very first thing I see in front of me is that every single foe in the mission is an Elite Boss (AV downgraded to EB, won't ever be less than EB even in heroic.)

Should I be forced to wait 5-10 minutes to rate that thing 1 star?

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Yes.

Better that than the alternatives.

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Is it? Consider a mission that someone dislikes because of extreme difficulty, and under the current system would give a 2. Now imagine that person having to spend ten minutes stewing over the fact that they have to spend ten minutes stewing before rating. This is unlikely to make them more generous.

Let me put it this way: if the *devs* put in a ten minute wait, I wouldn't hold that against the player, even if I was tempted to do so, to try to be as objective as possible. However, if the *player* somehow had the ability to flag their mission as "cannot rate until at least ten minutes of play has elapsed" I *would* hold that against the player if it turns out they've also decided to inflict ten minutes of continual stupid on me.

You might argue that if I really didn't like it, I should abandon it without rating at all, but that would make this feature a sycophant-switch, invalidly skewing ratings upward. I might tolerate the ten minutes out of principle if I felt that the author did that deliberately.