Arcanaville

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As of current definition by the devs themselves, time spent is a factor.

Trying to refer to rewards as "normalized" is, in and of itself, inaccurate. As rewards are still mutable through either randomization (drops) or merit/ticket adjustment.

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1. Specifically with regard to reward earning, the devs datamine reward earning rates. They do not balance anything against "rewards" per se.

2. Those earning rates are normalized** around a centerline earning rate which, depending on context, is either the average earning rate computed across the playerbase or a theoretical earning rate (typically when the entire earning curve is itself being evaluated).

Its actually possible to earn rewards at a non-zero rate and still be underperforming, because that earning rate is actually negative relative to the balance point.

3. All of this is not speculative, because its logically deducible from the devs prior statements on both how they datamine and how they balance based on that datamining, even going back to pre-release, and is consistent with everything I've ever been told about the process up to this point.

Time spent is ordinarily only a factor insofar as it obviously impacts earning rates. But the directly factored and directly balanced quantity is earning rate, not earnings.


** In mathematics within this context, normalization usually refers specifically to scaling some quantity or value to 1, adjusting all other quantities in relative proportion. More generally and somewhat more colloquially, it usually refers to proportional comparison to a standard. "Rewards" don't and can't have the property of being normalized on their own, but the measurements of reward earning rates can be. The phrase "normalized reward rates" can only be parsed as the numerical values of the rates themselves being normalized to some external standard, not as the rewards themselves being in some way "normalized" literally, for that reason.

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What would be the difference between what we have now and a system that was designed ground up for PvP?

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Every power and ability within the game would be designed on the assumption that it would be used against another player, and would not be added unless that addition was fair. In addition, the game mechanics would favor proportionality, without any positive feedback or accelerating benefit curves. Finally, numerical balance would be the overriding design priority, because numerical imbalances cannot be moderated when placed in the hands of players.

On top of that, every archetype or class in the game would have to satisfy two separate balance constraints: their contribution to PvE performance (which would be a combination of solo and teamed) would have to be similar, *and* their contribution to PvP kills (depending on the game either solo or within teams or both) would have to be similar. PvP is dominated by singular kills while PvE is dominated by continuous kills and those represent completely different balance constraints (to take an extreme position: a power that can one-shot anything short of AVs and GMs but recharges in ten minutes is a horrible PvE weapon but a fantastic PvP weapon).


If the original designers were actually serious about PvP from the start, they would have severely curtailed high-order AoEs and the balancing problems involved with them, they would have used multiplicative stacking in most of the stacking algorithms, they would have generated a better tohit resolution algorithm, they would have dampened high-order travel powers during combat, they would not have made melee-only archetypes, and they would have calibrated player health against player attacks and not just critter attacks. They would have factored in PvP issues with respect to attribute caps. And they would have put loads of thought into the effect of heals and regeneration on damage mitigation under PvP conditions.

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It is NOT a binary "risk vs reward" equation.

It's a trinary equation. "Risk + Time vs reward"

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Actually, oversimplified a bit, its always been "risk vs (normalized) reward rate" since the beginning of time for this game. And the oversimplification implies a specific falsehood: that the relationship is linear, monotonic, or continuous.

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So which conversation DID happen

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Castle: Hey BaB, check this thread out. Some people seem to be really upset about the PvP changes. What do you think I should say? I'm going to grab a Mountain Dew, be right back.

BaB: Gimme a sec, I'll check the thread out.

Castle: You know on second thought BaB maybe you shouldn't read that one. The last time I showed you a thread that ... BaB? BaB?

Positron: Dammit Castle you broke BaB again! Now we're going to have to delay power customization to I16!

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While I think that story tellers are going to love that, I really do think it's unfortunate for story players, because I consider it really unlikely that they can create a systematic way to give better reward for scarier critters under that design. Without a systematic approach, I think that means custom critters will default to baseline mob rewards, no matter how challenging they really are.

I think that's very unfortunate, because I think that increased challenge with appropriately increased reward really does attract a noticable part of the playerbase. However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.

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I'm not sure that view of critter rewards is really completely valid. Outside of the MA, *most* standard PvE critters of the same rank have the same XP value regardless of difficulty: its only highly exceptional critters that have different value, or entire classes of critter that collectively have XP bonuses. Not even for standard PvE critters is XP "hand-tweaked" to match difficulty.

Consider what you'd consider to be, on paper, a reasonable differential in XP between a Master Illusionist and a Freak Tank Swiper. Now compare to what they are actually set to.


I also don't think the underlying premise is entirely valid either. Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.

Beyond that, there is the fact that MA missions offer virtually travel-less mission running, AE tickets (which separate from debates over their award level have intrinsic advantages), and often much more streamlined mission objectives (its possible to avoid defeat alls, rescues, and other problematic mission objectives). All of those factor into the calculus of reward per unit effort that players will be considering when deciding whether to run AE mission arcs or not.

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I would like to know if to hit debuff on mob is the equivalent of def on self? for example, if I have 30% def and I hit a mob with a 5% to hit debuff, is it the equivalent of 35% def against that mob?

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Yes, unless the mobs has some form of debuff resistance. I believe all mobs that are +1 or higher has some form of debuff resistance, but I'm unsure right now. I know AVs have really high, a level 50 AV resists 85% of it.

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Higher ranks in general have innate debuff resistance. And on top of that any effect a player might try to apply to a target (damage, debuff, anything) is affected by combat modifiers (aka the purple patch) that reduces those effects against higher ranked targets. That last one isn't a "resistance" per se. Paragonwiki has combat modifier tables as well as I believe data on intrinsic tohit resistance of various kinds of critters.

But separate from all that, reducing an attacker's tohit by 5% is equivalent to increasing your own defense (relative to that attacker) by the same amount, since the net overall chance for an attacker to hit you is Tohit - Defense (very simplified: accuracy and floors and ceilings factor into that). Increasing one is the same as decreasing the other and vice versa.

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Just as an FYI/History review, at one time long ago, people were consistently talking about "DPS" when talking about attacks which was basically "damage per second." Attacks were rated and ranked based on the amount of damage they did per second, which was computed by dividing damage by the recharge time (or alternatively, just by the damage they did period, regardless of recharge or cast time).

I say "recharge time" because we didn't have good numbers for "activation time" back then, so recharge time was all we had. When we started to get good numbers for "cast time" people started talking about DPC - damage per cycle-second which was the damage per second, averaged over an entire firing cycle, which was cast time + recharge time.

It made no sense to me to talk about either DPS or DPC in general, so I started talking about DPA, and I defined the term to mean damage per activation-second. I wasn't the only one talking about this quantity back then: a few posters started talking about using this value rather than "DPS" when we started to have good numbers for cast time, but I think I was the first to use that specific acronym to reference it**. In fact, when I first started using the term it was a quantity I couldn't always compute, because the information wasn't consistently available. I actually helped make PQP measurements just to try to compute these values in some cases (the PQP was the Powers Quantification Project, and one of its subprojects was measuring the cast times for all of the player powers).

"DPA" now is generally recognized to mean "damage per second, averaged over the total time it takes from the moment of activation to the moment when the next attack can be activated." Or more colloquially "the amount of time the attack 'burns up.'" Cast time is the usual approximation for this window of time, but increasingly "ArcanaTime"*** is the preferred estimate for this time, as it reflects how the game works better and is much more consistent with sustained damage testing that other players have done (including Werner's).

People colloquially call DPA "damage per activation" even though that is a misnomer of sorts: "damage per activation" really just means "damage per use" or just "damage." But its shorter than "damage per activation-second" and the "-second" tends to be implied.



** In fact, there were some heated arguments back then about whether "damage per activation-second" should really be referred to as "DPS" because it was, in fact a damage per second metric (over the cast time) or DPC (damage per cast-second). I refused because DPS and DPC were already appropriated terms, and I continued to use the term DPA even when the other two terms were being used to refer to the same quantity in the same thread. It took a while for "DPA" to have the universally recognized meaning it does today.

*** I've made up a lot of terms that have entered the CoH lexicon, but ArcanaTime is not one of them. Someone else made that one up, and I only found out about it later.

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Castle at home reading the forum

Castle: Wow light house quit, yet another thread about how we should bring i12 back somehow, let me call babs.
Babs: Sup castle?
Castle: It's been months since i13 closed beta and ppl are still hating this new pvp and we actually lost ppl instead of attracting them.
Babs: I told you this would happen, just give them back their pvp man, you know I'll hook you up on the animations it's nothing.
Castle: Your right, but giving in is like admitting a mistake was made and heaven forbid i do that i'll just continue to pretend all these threads don't exist and just tell everyone it's a success and i think we'll pull through this :P
Babs: That's just wrong I'm getting off the phone with you man I'm a throw up listening to this.
Castle: Thats cool later Babs I'm a ignore these threads anyway, but i feel the need to respond to this thread i see about jello :P

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That conversation never happened.

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Just the part about you giving Castle free animations without a blood sacrifice makes it completely unbelievable.

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BTW...Rogue Expansion is um a bit late. This expansion should've been in place way before COV came out.

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This comment is a bit late. It should have been made by I2 to give them time to create the expansion.

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Since we will soon be able to pick individual powers above the minimum for each difficulty

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While I know they are planning to allow this to some extent, I did not read into what was said that it would be that granular.

I am primarily expecting them to isolate "problem" powers out, with Aim, Build Up and their cousins being frequent examples. I'm sure there will be more, but I am still expecting bulk settings.

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Just a point of reference: during closed beta I suggested (perhaps "suggested" is not quite the word, but we'll use it for now) that the devs implement a system whereby a minimum set of powers from each primary and secondary powerset would be considered the minimum required to prevent exploitive critter designs, and then all other powers would be optional for critter designers to add or subtract.

What I was told at the time was that it would take too long to implement such a solution, and the compromise interim solution was the difficulty setting(s) we have now. I don't have direct knowledge, but because of that I believe that the I15 settings will be basically discrete settings for individual powers.

Actually, the ability to customize critter power selection has a rather twisty trajectory, which unfortunately I don't think I can repeat (the phrase "blanket immunity from prosecution" comes to mind).

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roleplayers are always bad at math and economics

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I'm actually unaware of a market participation strategy that really requires any significant knowledge of either.

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Great satire, but... what exactly are you satirizing? I must have missed the uproar about multiple characters per account that inspired this...

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actually this is a satire of anti-powerleveling. How some players selfishness is hurting the game, how you can't have fun powerleveling, how there is one proper way of playing.

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I'm surprised to see there isn't an official power levelling thread yet, or if there is one I can't find it.

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That's because all the participants decided to skip the discussion about powerlevelling and jump right to talking about cake, and it was deleted about eight minutes after it was started.

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So after the big hammer descending on the MA with the last patch I haven't really used it. I just decided to go back and check it out on a whim. Not only is it empty, but half the arcs I choose do not even start. I'm guessing that they were invalidated when the patch hit and the players just decided it wasn't worth fixing them.

So great work on wrecking the entire thing. I doubt I'll bother with it any more, either. I get the feeling it's not worth it, much as the mission creators must have.

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I have no direct way to measure the number of players playing individual arcs, but I do have a way to observe and analyze the statistics of mission arc creation. As near as I can determine, the controversy surrounding the 5/5 patch and discussions have not altered arc creation in a statistically significant fashion. Except for a glitch upward followed by a correction downward during and immediately following reactivation week, the arc generation curve is remarkably steady.

As a cross-check, I also track the maximum ID number, which is a proxy measure for the amount of work being done in the MA. For every arc that ends up contributing to the total, about six ID numbers are burned through. That number has also remained fairly constant in the short term and only slowly varying over time in the long term, and also shows no signs of a sudden drop in activity.

My only proxy for arc running is the unrated curve, which measures the number and percentage of arcs that are unrated. That curve is also very smooth and shows no signs of a sudden change. Which means that while there is no doubt a reduction in participation, that reduction has not filtered to the percentage of the player population playing lots of different arcs rather than the same ones.


The issue with invalid arcs not dropping out of search is a problem, as is the larger problem of arcs being invalidated by patches in the first place; a fact I've mentioned to a red name or five. But while I cannot make any direct statements about player population participation percentages, player authorship activity seems to be largely unaffected materially, at least in terms of generating new arcs. I am concerned about "patch-exhaustion" however, causing authors of existing arcs to decide not to continually update their arcs in response to patches. I'm not entirely immune to the problem myself, actually.

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Although to you it seems self-evident that a small exposure to PvP would be all that is needed to demonstrate to everyone else what enjoyment can be gained there - there will still be a significant number (note, I don't say majority or even sizable minority) who would only try the activity enough times to get the extremely good rewards and then quit. In the short run, you have their numbers to boost the activity, but then lose them later.

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Consider the PvE game. How many players team? Now, of them, how many form and lead teams? A much lower percentage in my experience. In between "teamers" and "soloers" there exist a significant number of players who bridge the gap as "followers." They'll join teams, they like playing in teams, but don't want to be in charge of them.

No amount of exposure to PvE converts large numbers of people from followers into leaders. They've just reached the limit of participation they find enjoyable, and attempting to "convert" them has a greater chance of backfiring than it does converting them.


I don't think there exists any reasonable way to "convert" more than a handful of people to liking PvP that were not already predisposed to like it in the first place. In this case, its not the players that need to be altered to match the activity, its the activity that needs to be changed to match the playerbase. Or at the very least, elements have to be added to it that expand the range of activities to include things other players want to do, but in a relatively integrated whole.

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I think you should consider ways to write better. You seem to like the idea of avoiding improvement.

That begs the question that you actually know what "improvement" is, which would require setting yourself up as an authority.

Wasn't I just being accused of that?

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Technically speaking I can ask someone to speak Chinese better, even though I don't know how to do it. I wouldn't have any way to judge if they were, though, so its a slightly nonsensical request.

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For some PvPers, they wanna pwn up. But not just defeat you, they want to humiliate you if you let them.
Don't let them.

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A large number of players determined that the best way to achieve that goal was to avoid PvP. No one seemed to have a good story to sell to players why they should tolerate bad behavior when they could simply avoid it completely. That made advice such as the above lack a sizeable audience.

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Which is exactly why the rewards system fails.
If there were significant rewards then most peeps would hazard a journey into a zone.
They would then find that ignoring the idiots is easily achievable. They should be able to find someone that can tutor them so they can become survivable enough for their goals.

And then they would eventually find themselves in the situation where they crush the idiots, and that is one of the greatest things in video gaming. Regardless of genre.
However much immersion one can attain in PvE, dropping the PvP zone loudmouth is infinitely satisfying.

And I've seen players hand out fantastic rewards at the Arena.
Purple recipes.
50 million in inf.
Etc.

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The problem with this game design philosophy is that the amount of reward necessary to do this tends to be huge: it has to be equal to the normal level of PvE rewards available *plus* an additional bonus to compensate for people's innate dislike for the activity. That's why bribery tends not to work when attempted in so naked of a way: its intrinsicly unbalancing. Rewards can be adjusted to balance varying effort of activity that is otherwise (roughly) equally palatable, but rewards can only entice people to do what they don't want to do if those rewards are excessively high. And it includes the potential danger of setting off an upward spiral of rewards that have increasingly less meaning.

Its one thing to add rewards to PvP that equalize the reward system between PvP and PvE (assuming exploits are compensated for), because that's simply eliminating a PvP activity penalty. I'm generally in favor of that, at least in theory. But to then increase the PvP rewards until people who don't want to participate feel they have no choice but to do so because the rewards are simply too high to avoid is simply bad design in my opinion.

(This is irrelevant to *players* giving out large prizes, though. Players have to earn their prizes through some other means so by definition they can't "unbalance" the reward system no matter how large a set of prizes they give away for any activity. If they give out prizes for an activity that is out of whack with the rest of the game that will eventually self-correct by those players simply running out of rewards. So there's nothing intrinsicly wrong with that behavior except that its likely unsustainable on anything but a small scale.)

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I was under the understanding that the banned arcs would be unable to be unpublished so they would take up a slot.

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We're not talking about banned arcs but rather arcs that get broken for some reason or other, usually because a patch has invalidated the arc and made it unrunable. When that occurs, the MA is supposed to tag that arc as "unsearchable" when a player tries to play it and the arc fails to start, so that other players don't keep running into the same broken arc. That feature was added back in beta. However, it doesn't appear to be working in all cases, as there are broken arcs on the MA now that aren't (so far as we know) banned, but fail to start and therefore can't be run. Yet, they aren't dropping out of search so players still see them and can still try (and fail) to start them.

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For some PvPers, they wanna pwn up. But not just defeat you, they want to humiliate you if you let them.
Don't let them.

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A large number of players determined that the best way to achieve that goal was to avoid PvP. No one seemed to have a good story to sell to players why they should tolerate bad behavior when they could simply avoid it completely. That made advice such as the above lack a sizeable audience.

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Not that I have seen. Both DCUO and CO look like they are all melee characters scrappers, with a tanker toggle.

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I can't comment on what I haven't played, but if all their melee characters are "Scrappers", and that's the toughest "class," wouldn't that make them the toughest and most melee damaging?


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This quote pretty much says it all. You problem isn't with Tankers, but that Tankers exist at all. You don't want a Tank, you want a Scrapper; yet since something is tougher than a Scrapper, it automatically has to be the mirror of Superman (etc).

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I have always found it to be ironic that the only way to satisfy J_B's desires for tankers in this game that doesn't create intractible balance problems would be to eliminate them completely.

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How much time with that one character would each player get?

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It would be unfair if people had to take turns, because some people would never get a chance. Therefore, everyone would simultaneously log in to that character, and the character would do whatever the majority of players did at that instant in time. It would be a sort of Massively Majority Operated Role Playing Game.

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everyone should have only one character

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I thought you were suggesting that everyone should literally share one single character. That would actually make more sense. City of Hero would no longer have name collisions, because there would only be one name. City of Hero would no longer have outlier performance, because by definition everyone would have exactly median performance. And powerset balance becomes largely moot. PL would also become a moot point quickly enough.

The level of discourse on the forums would also significantly improve. No more PvP arguments. No more build arguments. No more "role" arguments. No more powerset proliferation demands. No more "devs hate villains" conspiracy theories (they'd be replaced by "devs hate the only character that exists" theories).

It would start to give the game a bit of a LaMOE feel, and I think the day job badges would become largely out of the question, but that's a small price to pay.

Letting everyone have at least one, much less two characters of their own opens the door to a lot of problems. Its really a half-measure at best.

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As a reviewer I honestly can't work out what the fuss is about, what the incentive can be to have your work reviewed by him when you could just as easily go to a specific site and read for yourself.

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I suspect that if you can't work out why people either like to read his reviews or submit to them, the problem is not specifically that there is no reason, but that its one that isn't obvious to you.

Honestly I'm not 100% certain either, but the fact that people do is really more significant than whether they ought to.

To put it another way, if a better way of reviewing exists that people want to submit to and read it would be a trivial exercise to prove that fact by counterexample rather than logical persuasion.

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I'm still curious as to why you think that every AT needs to use the same amount of endurance to fight the same target. It makes no sense.

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Actually, while there is no numerical justification for making everyone have *identical* DPE, there is a strong fundamental reason for everyone to have *similar* DPE. The reason is that outside of teams, DPE is a fundamental limiter to performance, and for high defense characters (anything as strong or stronger than a scrapper) DPE becomes the primary limiter to performance for most builds until you apply inventions to the build or the build has enhanced recovery. In this case, I'm using the word "performance" to mean levelling performance as a subset of all reward-earning ability, consistent with how the devs measure balance in the game.

Since the devs have a performance range within which they expect all powerset combinations to live within for the powersets and archetypes to be balanced, wide ranges of DPE create unnecessary problems for that balance requirement.

For something to be "damage-oriented" it only needs to be able to deal damage faster. It does not need to deal that damage more efficiently to the same degree. In the case of "damage-centric" archetypes like blasters, higher efficiency makes sense. But in the case of, say, scrappers and tankers, the 50% spread in DPE doesn't have a clear justification. And when it comes to balance-significant game elements, the burden of proof is on the differences. All such differences should have an explicit reason for being there, and the differences in DPE don't actually always appear to have an explicit reason for being there.

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Ok, I've replicated the issue and made a mission to showcase it. #172150, 'Tester Mission' (I know, I'm a naming genius). My initial run through, at difficulty level 4 on my 50 Widow-er, yielded 112 tickets for defeats, 100 tickets at completion, and the, 'One or more architect tickets were not rewarded because you have reached the ticket limit for this map.' notice.

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I managed to find some time to test this arc substantially, and it does in fact appear to have a 212 ticket cap being enforced on it regardless of circumstances. If you run it on an odd difficulty level solo, its almost impossible to hit that cap, but on an even number difficulty its possible, and it always triggers at 212. Furthermore, that cap seems to be enforced on all players of a team: when I tested with multiple players on a team (2 and 3) each individual player could earn up to 212 in my testing (although my 3 player team isn't conclusive since none of them hit the cap and I didn't have time to test multiple runs with that composition).

It seems that beyond the 1500 ticket cap announced there is a separate cap that is computed based on some statistic of the mission itself, possibly map size (probably not, although not definitively not spawn size).

Going to do more testing this week, although my time will be a little limited for the next week or two.


UPDATE: Synapse tells me that separate from the 1500 ticket cap, there is another ticket limit that is based on the number of spawns in the mission. I'll try to zero in on what those parameters are, unless a red name trumps me first by posting them.

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The problem seems to be that the critter and cvg files get reloaded if they exist on the machine, even if they no longer match those in the storyarc file.

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This is correct. I have experienced this to my frustration several times. I have seen this result in a custom critter being loaded twice - once as defined in a misson, and once as defined in my critter folder.

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The thing is, that's the behavior you want if you're sharing a custom critter among multiple story arcs. Otherwise you'd have to hand-edit the story arc file on one or more of the arcs sharing the custom critter. Likewise, if you edit a critter outside of any particular story arc, you want story arcs to show the changes you made.

It's a little weird, but I don't have a suggestion for alternate behavior that wouldn't be worse than what we have now.

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Yes, this is one of the ways that things can get messed up even on a single machine, much less transported between machines, which is the main reason I suggested testing the storyarc file itself in isolation.

This is one of those features that I'm not sure I'm all that thrilled with, because I don't like unannounced unconfirmed background changes in general, and also because the editor doesn't provide the logical alternative when that behavior is undesirable (which would be to use a "copy" of the referenced group or critter, rather than use it directly).