Arcanaville

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It wasn't just elusivity that was nerfed but defense as well. I'm not sure on all the numbers but since i14 went live I hit defense based toons noticibly more often.

My accuracy on each attack is about 70% and I have about 75% global accuracy but I also have targeting drone plus the perception IO for the to hit buff. Same exact build as i13 but I hit much more often.

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Well, I hd no idea that the perception IO gave a tohit buff. Thanks for that tidbit. That was exactly the kind of thing that I was looking for. I'll be sure to have it on my stalker. Got any idea how much the tohit buff on it is?

Is there someplace that I could figure out the PvP tohit formula and the defense numbers? I used to go by an old site by arcanaville. I have no idea if he's still playing CoH or if his forum posts are still up to date. I'm just returning to the game after being gone a year. I see that Red Tomax's site is still intact, but it doesn't have a lot of the info that I am looking for. Is this info being published somewhere?

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Not sure what site you're referring to, but my guide to defense is more or less up to date except for Elusivity: paragonwiki has fairly up to date articles that incorporate my information for the layperson to calculate with. I posted the DR formulas a while ago in my Guide to Diminishing Returns and the latest version of my Damage Spreadsheet has a quick and dirty sheet for calculating DR for different attributes.

And yes, I'm still here and still playing.

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I mean, you're (presumably) in this mess as a hero, contacted by DATA to do some investigative work; in theory, you should be able to compensate for a contact that's being less than honest with you.

"Compensating" for a dishonest Contact, in most player's minds, means "disembowel him and find someone else to work with".

If this was a tabletop game, players confronted with /Hide's duplicity would immediately try to Take A Third Option. If the players try to go Off The Rails and the GM won't let them, they'll probably be upset and they'll probably be right.

For my part, I wouldn't take orders from a Contact whom I knew wasn't trustworthy. Any damn thing could be at the end of that rainbow: get duped into destroying the world, helping a villain conquer the world, unleash the Rularuu, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER.... You can't play games with "the company". The players have to be certain that their employers aren't going to use them as pawns, sell them out, set them up or otherwise jerk their chains. Forcing me to go along with an untrustworthy Contact just because the format allows you to do it is playing in bad faith.

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Interestingly, I'm currently working on scripting an arc that does, in fact, have a less than 100% trustworthy contact. But I agree with Venture that this is very treacherous (pun intended) territory because I don't care how often the devs do it, and how often other players attempt to do it, this always sucks if you discover this fact early on and then have to follow the railroad tracks to stupidville.

I think the solution to this problem is to give the player a reason to work with the contact in spite of the contact's duplicity. The player could be enticed to try to outsmart the contact, for example as a double agent of another character *in* the missions, although this is probably very difficult to pull off. You could also try to take the player off the tracks momentarily: the contact could say do X, the player might think its better to do Y, and the mission offers both choices prior to mission complete. This is potentially even harder to pull off successfully without seeming contrived, but has massive payoff in gameplay if its done deftly.

I remember when the first "I remember when" thread was posted, and everything in it was either stuff from beta, or that happened barely a couple weeks before.

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From what I've seen custom mobs don't even NEED tier 9 powers. Not like you can't make a tough mob without them and some of those (like Electric) are sooo annoying to fight.

Seems to me the timers on powers are buggered up though. Custom mobs recast powers FAST. As was stated heals come too close together, another though is Holds. A week Earth mob for example will spam Immob and Hold forever until he gets bored and uses his secondary set. If this were a player with only those 2 attacks they would have dead time after casting them both.

It's like everything is 3 slotted for everything. They don't have purples, they have ultra-violets. lol

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In general, custom critters have the same powers we do, minus changes designed to make them more useable by the AI (for example, radiation toggle debuffs became clicks). But they do not have more aggressive recharge than we do for the same powers, nor do custom critters "slot" anything.

The problem is that most players are comparing custom critters to standard critters, but custom critters are really using player powers at player strengths, and intentionally so by the devs.

Most critters cannot perma-hold out of the box at even con, deliberately so. Carnie Illusionists, for example, have a deliberate gap between cycles of blind, until you get to higher than even con (where the duration increases due to the level scaler). But player powers are often designed to be perma out of the box, or nearly so, and that wasn't altered for custom critters. Again: intentionally so.

The guiding principle on the custom critter powers that was expressed to me was basically: they should have our versions of the powers they get, unless that is provably broken (for the critter) or wildly overpowered (emphasis on "wildly").

Good luck and take care, Ex Ex.

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A red name commented on this during (I think) closed beta. The tier 9 powers that are typically used in last-ditch situations by critters, including temp godmodes and nukes, have to be specially coded by the AI to be used at low health. Some existing critters already in-game prior to i14 required those powers, so they'd been given special treatment already; for example, Nova and Unstoppable.

But if a powerset hasn't been used by critters prior to i14 the power can end up getting used oddly and/or badly. Critters tend to open with Inferno, for example, then stand there helpless without endurance (assuming, that is, that there's anything left to attack it). Some of the godmode powers don't get used at all.

I thought that pohsyb was going to address this in the now-near-mythical AI update that he and Arcanaville were planning out during closed beta, but if that update ever happened, it passed me by. As far as I can tell AI still has the same issues it did in closed beta. It's a little frustrating at times, but on the other hand I understand the problem; you can't make an infinitely complex AI or the combat server would grind to a halt during large battles.

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Actually, the AI was slightly tweaked in the area of attack selection, although you would have to be testing it carefully to notice because the change was not dramatic (I think dramatic changes were shelved to prevent them from delaying the release of the issue if the critters went bonkers).

When a critter uses something like a tier 9 isn't actually an AI issue per se, but rather an issue with the way the power is tagged. I will try to send the powers that be a list of powers that appear to be tagged incorrectly this weekend, or thereabouts (if I have time: might be very busy this weekend). The AI itself is not a culprit here, though (at least, not for the most part: if the AI gets "stuck" a critter could still end up not using a tier 9 because it has stopped using *anything* besides a particular power).

I *think* - I'm not certain - that no "tier 9" attack or defense should literally drain a critter to zero: *most* have been changed to not do that. I'll check all of them when I take my tier 9 pass and see if any of them are still defined to do that and ask the devs if that is intentional: since so many were changed to not do that, my guess is that its likely an oversight.

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I understand that it could be a great deal of work, and it is something that does not occur in the developer created content, but I think anything that promotes storytelling is beneficial to the MA.

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It does happen, but extremely sparingly (the freakshow costume and the nictus one come to mind). The problem I see is that if this feature existed it probably wouldn't be used sparingly.

The one compromise I can think of would be if they ever get around to allowing MA missions to grant temp powers, they could allow mission designers to create temp costume powers similar to the halloween costumes. If the players really wanted to "opt out" they could, or for RP-purposes they could opt in and use them.

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If I've added right (and I'm sure Arcanaville will correct me if I haven't....) I've reviewed 25 arcs so far with an average rating of exactly 3 stars.

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3.0 with review ratings as they stand. 2.96 if you had known how to rate a zero initially.

Ratings breakdown for first 25 ratings:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Rating #
1 4
2 5
3 6
4 7
5 3
</pre><hr />

Insufficient data for statistical analysis, except in two areas that I won't comment on lest I accidentally influence the review process. Maybe after the first 100 ratings, assuming Venture doesn't kill himself first.

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The actual limit appears to be 99.2%, plus arcs take up more space on Live than they did on Test. By my count we lost 4% of arc size when Issue 14 went live, and no red name has commented on the issue. Very frustrating.

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One of mine was published at 99.78% (I subsequently edited it down slightly, to 99.1%).

At least *some* of the growth from test to live seems to be related to the nbsp issue or similar text growth: for many of the text blanks if I copied them, deleted them, and then repasted them within the editor, my mission side dropped anywhere from 0.01% to 0.10%.

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The crazy idea was that rather than being an upload limit the publishing slot represented an advertising limit.

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I expect something like this would just push people to other places for advertising. You'd end up with a lot more channel chatter advertising missions, and then front missions whose description lists IDs for the authors other missions. It would increase frustration at being unable to find a mission you played before because you don't remember the number. Finally, people would have to turn to external sites to search for missions.

I'd much rather have better ways for searching missions, including level range, etc.

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I'm not sure its a *good* idea, I just think its not a crazy one.

But in response to your comments above:

1. Forcing players to advertise elsewhere outside the game is not as problematic as it seems, because the vast majority of players are unlikely to use those search systems, and the intent of the idea is to consider the search space in-game itself as the more critical limited resource, not the storage associated with the published missions. In other words, basically working as intended.

2. Front missions listing IDs is also working as intended, insofar as unless that mission itself is a good one, listing IDs is of no value.

3. It would not be difficult to ensure that once a player played a mission once, it displayed in a list of previously played missions whether it was listed in global search or not.

4. People don't *have* to search for missions in external sites. They may or may not *want* to, but that's a totally different issue.


There is *no* "better way" of searching for missions that allows players to publish without limit, because the problem (at least the one I'm referencing here) has nothing to do with being unable to find something you have a specific criteria to find. The issue is more one of being able to effectively browse.

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I'm not getting why people are upset at the 3-storyarc limit.

Personally, it probably should have started out as 1

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I've had the crazy idea that actually, we should have had exactly one. But not in the way you might think.


The crazy idea was that rather than being an upload limit the publishing slot represented an advertising limit. Players could upload whatever they wanted up to some higher resource limit, say ten or fifteen arcs. However, the search and browse pages would only show *one* arc of yours; you could only *advertise* one arc. Basically, the devs would be limiting advertising space, not publishing space (at least, not as severely). Butif you knew the ArcID number, you could play any uploaded arc.

The idea here was that players would use the publishing slot to draw attention to their publishing skills, and given that they would try to make that arc the best possible one they thought they had. If players liked it, they could "bookmark" it or "subscribe" to it, and from that arc they could get a list of your other arcs if they wanted to play more from you. If not, they could search for what *other* people thought represented their best work.

To make this work, players could flag any of their "real" arcs as the "published" ones, and the others would simply drop out of search, much like "broken" arcs do now: they would no longer appear in search, but they would not lose ratings and rankings if they were "de-advertised."


So, if you want to make a serious arc, a goofy arc, a canon arc, whatever, you can still do that and have more arcs available for people to play. But to get people to actually play any of them, you have to convince them you're worth their attention, and so you pick the arc you think best represents your skills, and use that to advertise yourself. And because you can change it periodically without losing ratings, you could show different sides of yourself at different times to try to appeal to different groups of players. Long, difficult serious arc one month: short, humorous, silly arc the next.


Actually, the more I think about this crazy idea, the less crazy it sounds to me.

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For my purposes here, a Mary Sue is a character of either sex that a) is an obvious stand-in for the author, which is adequately demonstrated by the character being one of the author's PCs or an Expy (thinly disguised version) of such, and b) is being repeatedly glorified by the arc, constantly telling us how powerful/intelligent/wonderful/special/etc. the character is.

[/ QUOTE ]I realize that's your personal criteria, but I'm just going to chip in here and say for me, only that second condition is necessary for me to consider a character a Mary Sue. Making the Mary Sue also be the author's character just makes the problem worse. (There are a couple of descriptive words I would use for it that would probably end up getting modded - suffice to say "pleasing to the self")

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I think in this context "obvious stand-in" doesn't have to be specifically the author's character; it could simply be a character that appears to be obviously designed around very personalized wish-fulfillment. Actually being someone's character, though, is obviously a strong suggestion in combination with the second criteria.

The reason why I think the first criteria is an important hedge for the second one is that I don't think something like the aspects of Rularuu count as Mary Sues, even though they are generally described as being very special and immensely powerful in general. It simply doesn't appear as if they are really wish-fulfillment entities in general. Lord Nemesis might be highly overused, but even when written as incredibly smart and powerful, he isn't normally considered a Mary Sue (the big problem with writing for Lord Nemesis is that if you aren't as smart as he's supposed to be, you can only *say* he's smart, not *show* he's smart, which is a writing problem, but not automatically a Mary Sue problem).

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So they're hiring a Powers guy? CASTLE GOT SH*TCANNED NOOOO!

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The team already has more than one powers guy (Sunstorm, for example). Castle is now more the Powers Mastermind. They're probably looking to get him another level 2 pet.

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(I'm only going to discuss some technical points in the review of my arc.) I didn't have a problem with Bluehawk's AI when I fought her with either my Scrappers, Mastermind (Bots/Storm) or Peacebringer. She did malfunction as described in Act III as an ally. I'm aware of the problems with Devices but it is the best fit for the character, a basic Action Girl. Ninjitsu would be nice but a) it's bugged to hell and back (you do NOT want to fight an EB with it unless you like getting Crane Kicked for about 3500-4000) and b) the +Defense and heal would make her a lot tougher. I expect the devs will fix the AI issues with Devices in another patch or three. If not I'll think about what else I could give her. MA/AR might be interesting.

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Purely technical note on /Dev: based on testing, the AI is slightly tweaked from beta, and /Dev critters do not always "lock into" spamming web grenade (as in: use nothing else). But they still spam it even while using other attacks often, and still can get "temporarily" locked in, then break out of the cycle.

I would expect AI improvements to be ongoing, slow, and unpredictable in schedule, but that's just my own opinion for whatever its worth.

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What is pushing you over the limit? Custom critters? How many do you need to make useable opponents? Are all the enemies Custom?

Costumes are especially problematic. Set all color options that are not in use (or not visible) in a particular costume piece to Black since the files store it in an RGB value. This will reduce the file size significantly.

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False.

Edit: actually technically true, but unhelpful to mission size. See the link above for more info.

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1.) Large outdoor map with incredibly tough opponents. The nav bar reads, "Defeat all!". Somewhere on the map is a glowy named "Defeat all!".

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I thought about making a mission where the Nav read "Defeat All" and when you enter the mission, the first critter you met was a minion called "All." Then have all the other minions behind him called "All" and make it a defeat-all anyway.

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It got me thinking, what if using the MA system there were Hall of Fames for every server, and maybe one miscellaneous Hall that would include worthy forumites for various hard to achieve categories, like Bill and his guides, and Zombie Man, Arcana and so on.

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To be fair, I think I'm a hard to achieve category only for everyone else: I achieved Arcanadom with somewhat less difficulty.

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As of Issue 14, there are 5, 313 animations in the game. 2,246 for the &amp;#8220;male&amp;#8221; rig, 700 for &amp;#8220;female&amp;#8221;, and 720 for &amp;#8220;huge&amp;#8221;.

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Curious, why the order of magnitude disrepancy?

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By default, everyone (player characters) use the Male animations. The Female and Huge animations are there specifically to override the Male animations, when the animators (or animator as the case may be) specifically want to create a different animation, usually for appearance or stylistic reasons (for example, the running animations are not all the same).

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All I'm saying is that the mathematics behind the HOF requirements (assuming it is 4.5+ as originally stated in prerelease materials) are unfeasible even for an amazing, high quality arc that's getting plenty of votes. We'll be lucky if we have even a handful of HOF arcs after many weeks based on the ability to knock a ranking down extremely hard with a 0 or 1 star rating.

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I am reasonably certain that if HoF is datamined to be essentially unachievable, the devs will lower the requirement. However, there's no way to be certain what the "correct" level is until the devs have a better handle on the level of player participation in the ratings system and the way players decide to rate on average. In fact, none of us can know that, since none of us really has any real idea what the pertinent variables are yet: the MA hasn't existed on live long enough to make reasonable predictions.

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I'm trying to design a Prevent Jailbreak mission and I need the boss to be in the back of the mission to give the player time to stop him from the time he triggers until he reaches the door/elevator, but no matter what I set (Back, Middle, Front, Any) I keep getting him right at the beginning of the mission.

I've tried the Zig map and the Police Station map and I get the same issue. Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong? I'd like his placement to be similar to Sid's in Ascendant's "Johnny Sonata and the Hitmen" arc.

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One way to improve your odds of things spawning where you want them is to make sure that element is one of the first objectives listed in your arc. See the FAQ linked in my sig for more information.

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This banning with no oversight is kinda chilling. People are worried about 1 star bandits. What if a group goes around and hits the report button x number of times? on an arc that has been getting 4 and 5 stars up to that point? Banned no oversight. Better luck in your repost?

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This was asked during closed beta, and I believe a redname stated that they would be looking for activity like this: people consistently 1-starring arcs or reporting content without cause run the risk of being detected and having punitive action taken against them. Presumably, if they get a rash of autobanned content that gets overturned on review, they will start looking carefully at who is doing the reporting.

Which means, by the way, that anyone thinking along the lines of "well fine if people can do X I might as well do Y myself" should strongly reconsider.

I think the general idea to use a console graphic to visually notify when you are within a certain range of an audible blinkie to support people with limited hearing is an excellent idea. There are, of course, minor quibbles over the details (blinking, size-variable, absolute range, etc) but the principle is sound game design.


On an unrelated note:

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I should know better - my MA is in Deaf Studies/ASL Linguistics.

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Mission Architect? Nope. Martial Arts? Nope. Master of Arts degree?. Whew.

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I beg to differ, using your sample. There is code, albeit generic, that reads the data from power blast; this code could be tangled with other code.

I also would point out, that evidence tends to speak out for itelf. Look at the bizarre malfunctions when the game gets an upgrade. For instance, remember the trade function was borked when I13 was introduced? If you think about it, what did the tray window functionality had to directly do with crafting, once more using your example of power blast; should it not be some standard code that provides the trade functionality and then look up tables for the items traded? So while I could see errors in the database due to inception of more things that can be traded, I can not really see why the main trade functionality code would be impacted. The chat issue where colored chat went away during I12, what did that had to do with what was done with I12? Once you look at the body of observables, its hard to not believe CoX is suffering from spaguetti code at some level of borkness. Considering that the errors are not by the droves but in limited quantities, the code can not be too borked and a couple of months of clean-up should remedy this situation.

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As I said, I'm very certain there are weird coding oddities in the current codebase. In fact, I can name actual specifics. But what I said was that in this case coding practices themselves are irrelevant to the latest crop of game balancing changes. In fact, in probably the vast overwhelming majority of cases the codebase itself is not responsible.

ED was not due to any code issues, nor was the GDN. Hover wasn't changed because of odd code, but because the animation itself was missing a flag. No Regen nerf, or Invuln nerf, or Controller nerf was ever really the fault of faulty code. In fact, I am having difficulty remembering more than a couple balance changes that had anything *remotely* to do with actual game code.

The other bugs you mention are important, but not relevant to the topic of publishing the intent of powers, or trying to reduce the amount of rebalancing that happens. With a 100% perfect code base we'd have fewer functional bugs but we'd have virtually the exact same powers balancing environment.


Now, your level of optimism regarding how long it would take to completely clean up the code base is laudable, but off by an order of magnitude. While I haven't actually seen the code of the game engine, I'm probably more familiar with its structure than anyone outside the code team, and what I know suggests six months wouldn't get you past the animation system, much less the powers system. It would probably take more than six months just to learn what the code was *supposed to do* before mucking with rewriting it.

They don't muck with it because the code is, in fact, highly abstracted from the actual data of the game, where the game itself is actually designed, so during normal game implementation from the designers the state of the code is not usually an issue. However, whenever they *do* muck with it, like when they add new features to the game as a whole, we then see how difficult it is to manage that codebase. I14 beta is a prime example of that.

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Also, I was saddened that there wasnt a place to put stuns, confusion, and kb/d in the calculations...

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That would be ... non-trivial to add. I was derailed just trying to add endurance drain in a meaningful way. If and when I return to that spreadsheet, its endurance drain that I would want to incorporate next. Stuns and KB would be a bit more difficult.

Confusion - that would be very difficult to incorporate.

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http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...umber=12617471

Have fun.

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Unless you're a skilled Excel jockey, I would recommend not *adding* a column, but throwing your numbers into the "sandbox" column near the middle of the sheet. It was put there for that purpose, so formulas and references wouldn't explode when things were moved around.

Also, you'll need to have at least some knowledge of how powers are defined, because the sheet defines things like defense and resistance by scale number. That's so that the sheet can compare the difference between tankers and scrappers, say, by simply flipping the modifiers.