Arcanaville

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Poor analogy Arcana.

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I wasn't analogizing. You made a specific statement about badges, and how in your opinion because their value is so low (to you), and it potentially encourages obsessive and otherwise unhealthy behavior, you'd have no problem with eliminating them. The exact same thing can be said about loot, only moreso, because there is no question whatsoever that it generates even more obsessive and unhealthy behavior, and there are at least as many people who find it uninteresting to the game as badges. Whether loot is useful or not, or easier to obtain or not, is irrelevant to that perspective.

As a completely separate issue I think there are issues between individual badges, relative to the badge system as a whole, that has nothing to do with your perspective on what should and should not be added to the game, since I don't particularly share it.

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The OCD necessary to care about these badges isn't healthy. They should be removed. Or lowered to one point above the last badge so that the accomplishment is meaningless. In any event, feel free to disagree, but I don't think any developer should encourage the type of behavior I see badgers exhibit.

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You mean like the greedy obsessive attitude that surrounds loot?

I think there is a point to be made that before they were already unleashed the devs should have put more thought into the long-term accomplishment badges. If I was in charge way back when, I would have rubber-stamped Popular and set fire to Empath. The simple reasoning would be that people wouldn't have to do anything special to earn Popular: at different rates, people would be assured of earning it eventually, if only they played the same alt long enough, and conversely, there are practical limits to how much "better" any player could be at earning it: since you can only earn it via earned influence, and not transactional influence, you can only earn it faster by playing longer (or by optimizing your activities along influence-earning lines). By my estimates, it would only take a few years of completely normal play to eventually earn Popular with a level 50 alt. Its "epic" but not "ridiculously epic" for a game that was also going to offer veteran rewards for players that were around for as much as four years or more.

But empath is a bit different, because there's no such meaningful progress you can make in conventional play, even as a dedicated healer. Its not beyond reasonable for even dedicated players to be getting only a couple of ticks on this badge in a year, and that is otherwise optimal players. Non-optimal players, except by using loopholes, have zero chance of gaining this badge in conventional play any time this century.

Conceptually, I believe its perfectly reasonable, all other things being equal, to have rewards that take a long time to earn. And there's no way to prevent such rewards from enticing players to attempt to sustain that level of effort for a longer period of time than most would consider healthy. What *is* a problem, by the devs own previous statements, is shunting players into performing activities outside the scope of the game's design. Popular encourages people to play the game, even if it *also* encourages players to heavily optimize their play to earn it. Empath encourages people to not play the game. That is a critical distinction between the two, that is not subjective within the context of game design.

Having said all of that, you cannot introduce the rewards, then eliminate the opportunity to achieve them by permanent fiat without removing the existence of the rewards. Doing so breaks trust between the development team and the playerbase. It says when the devs first introduce an award, the most logical strategy for earning it is to discover the quickest way to achieve it, even if its broken, and pursue it as rapidly as possible, for fear of the devs eventually eliminating all possible ways of achieving them. I don't mind slow-going Popular, even if I don't earn it before 2009. Its always going to be there, and I'm always going to be slowing homing in on it. If the devs took the action you suggest, I would never feel comfortable doing that ever again, because I would have no faith that such a strategy would not have a good chance of being rendered moot down the road.

I *already* have absolutely no intention of trusting the devs on matters of economy. After hinting that influence was highly inflated and overabundant, and after signalling an attempt to defuse that by introducing a prestige-based economy, they eventually introduced another economy that was much more powerful, that did in fact rely on influence. I am therefore never going to trust the devs to "reset" an economy ever again, no matter what they say. Because once you prove your values are situational, they can no longer be relied upon. I'll stop caring about earning influence when I hit the trillion inf mark. And I'm not kidding about that number, because I don't trust the devs won't at some future date decide to reverses-split everyone 100-1 to reduce the amount of influence in the economy, based on the highest earners. I always intend to be one of them.

At the moment, I *do* trust the devs to allow me to play the game at my own pace, eventually achieving any long-range reward I want to, if I choose to do so at a slower than optimal pace. But they get only one chance at having that trust from me. Break it once, and they never get it back.

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Does this move mean Pohsyb gets a new Box?

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If they put pohsyb's box into another box to ship it, should they open the outer box to let pohsyb's box out, or should pohsyb open the inner box and simply expand into the larger box?

These are the sorts of questions that made it extremely difficult for me to take higher education seriously.

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It simply prints unix to the screen. Basically, (unix)["have"]+"fun"-0x60 = "un". &unix["\021%six\012\0"] is "%six\n", which is the first argument of the printf statement.

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It does basically print "unix" but that's not technically an explanation.

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Along those lines, my all time favorite is still:

main() { printf(&unix["\021%six\012\0"],(unix)["have"]+"fun"-0x60);}

I doubt if these days one programmer in ten thousand can actually explain what this does.

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"Bombs out with an incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'printf'". What's hard about that?

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It didn't do that back in 1987, when K&R was the law of the land. You'd need to turn off ansi compliance, and compile on a unix system, if you want to actually compile this thing instead of attempting to figure out what it does.

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My faves though are the short and totally inexplicable ones.

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Along those lines, my all time favorite is still:

main() { printf(&unix["\021%six\012\0"],(unix)["have"]+"fun"-0x60);}

I doubt if these days one programmer in ten thousand can actually explain what this does.

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In I7, all critters have base tohit of 50%, and have intrinsic accuracy bonuses based on rank:

Monsters, Giant Monsters, AVs, Controller Pets: 1.5

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(emphasis mine)

Do you have any confirmation from a dev that pets work that way now? Iakona's Issue 7 data still shows them having the same base hit chances as players and a 1.0 multiplier.

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This one is still a standing question for me. I'm inclined to believe Iakona's tables; the guide reflects the information originally given to me just prior to Issue 7, and it might have been slightly in error on this specific point (since the issue of what is a "critter" has some colloquial ambiguity). I've been meaning to simply put it to the test at some point, but I haven't had the chance to do so: other things keep coming up.

For that matter, I have most of the feedback from this thread incorporated into the next version, but I haven't had a chance to properly format it yet, also because of general time constraints.

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The developer is essentially a work for hire which contracts out to the publisher to develope "X" work.

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If that were true, there would be no intellectual property for NCSoft to buy, because they would already own it all.

Every developer/publisher contract is different, and there are different terms for every project. MMOs are probably significantly different from most games, because of the implied ongoing development intrinsic in the project: in effect the developer is never "done."


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It's because NCSoft didn't want to fund a developer that is also developing for a rival publisher. Since Cryptic was developing for both NCSoft and Microsoft, some funds would definitely go generally Cryptic in general and you couldn't account for some dollars. Also there would still be staff that would share technology, resources and expertise between the two development teams. It's not like there was a chinese wall between the two teams. NCSoft, in the end, was hesitant to provide lots of money to a developer where that money might end up helping to develop a rival game. There was a serious conflict of interest and it's clear this buyout shows it.

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While it does happen that a developer will take publisher money and work on another project, this is called "theft" and doesn't happen for long if the publisher becomes aware of it.


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That's not what I'm saying. I was just criticizing the marketing b.s. that's was drolled out to calm the masses when the MUO announcement was made. There was a clear conflict of interest and contrary to what everyone was saying that one developer could develop for two competing rival publishers in the same genre that clearly is not the case. I just think that the people who raised concerns about the funding and development of CoH by Cryptic after the MUO announcement were proven right.

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The fact that there was an actual CoH team that could be lifted straight out of Cryptic and handed to NCSoft suggests you were wrong: there was an actual clear demarc between the CoH team and the MUO (and everyone else) team. In any case, this proves nothing because I'm certain that if NCSoft didn't buy the CoH team, Cryptic would have eventually spun them off into a separate entity, or otherwise separated them from the core company when it got close to the point where Cryptic was supporting more than one active MMO. Just for the administrative issues that would resolve if nothing else.

It *is* possible that Cryptic/Jack might have been resistant to developing things in CoH that would have competed directly with things being developed in MUO: I don't deny that. But I think the main benefits that are going to come from the spin off have less to do with MUO, and more to do with the fact that CoH will now be ruled less by Jack's "vision" of what the game should be (which had good points and bad points in my opinion), and more by what Matt and Brian's view of what the game should evolve into (which is uncharted territory, but might have more unrestricted possibilities). There are a couple of things that I know were "old school" barriers to certain things that players wanted to have, and I have it on good authority that some of those appear to be gone.

In other words, I think CoH under Statesman was more inclined to avoid doing things they thought might not work, and I think CoH under Positron/NCNorCal might be more inclined to do things even if they think there's a chance they might not work, and I think the playerbase overall will perceive that as a net benefit, because it will be a more dynamic evolution to the game (more Issues per year is probably only the tip of the iceberg, *what* they do in those issues I suspect will surprise many).

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I think you had him at "tied to a chair."

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We took it to PMs after that.

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The reason I can't send Manticore a PM is because his PM box is currently filled up with the "safe word?"

Go, Fish!

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then they would out-damage the Scrapper even more if they use their Secondary.


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blasters secondary is NOT based on melee !!! it's support !!!


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As a matter of fact, when the blaster archetype was originally created, it was explicitly created with a "Ranged Damage" primary and a "Melee Damage" secondary. They were explicitly called that. The names were changed from "Melee" to "Manipulation" after the fact, but the melee damage heritage is blatantly obvious in the design of the manipulation powersets.

But the original concept for the blaster - a concept that was never retracted right up to release - was for the archetype to do "Damage, and More Damage." The problem is that fundamentally, blasters do not really get the full effect of the "More Damage" part of their archetype definition unless they are in melee range.

Its the fundamental flaw in the archetype's design, going all the way back to the invention of the archetype system itself, that has never been fully or directly addressed by the devs to this day.

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Some of the stuff covered may be "as intended" (being able to put toggles on unaffectable targets), but things like being able to total focus an unaffectable target, pretty clearly are not.

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I do not believe you are actually affecting an untouchable target, I believe the game is first rezzing the target, then marking the target untouchable, and then relocating the target, in that order. The game doesn't seem capable of performing those acts "simultaneously" so there is a momentary gap between rez and untouchable - the devs remarked about this gap when discussing being killed (in PvE) right through self-rezzes that supposedly make you unkillable for a period of time.

Interestingly, the game has these gaps between supposedly "adjacent" effects a lot. Try this one: activate rest, then click on a power like a toggle. During the interruptible window, the power will queue, and not interrupt Rest, and the power ordinarily wouldn't be activatable during Rest itself, but when queued it will actually activate right at the moment between when Rest is interruptible, and its activated and blocking further power activations: there is a split second (probably one server clock tick) where Rest is neither interruptible nor actually active either.

Actually, what seems to be a possibly trivial fix for this one issue is to add two steps to the respawn process: first, relocate the player to a holding bin outside the normal arena reachable map but still on the map itself. Then rez. Then mark untouchable. Then mark the player untargetable. Then relocate *again* to the actual arena spawn point, then remove the untouchable and untargetable status.

That should allow the devs to rez the player safely, and then apply the "untouchable" buff, then break contact with anyone having them targeted, then safely relocating to a new spawn point (as I understand it, the entire problem lies with the fact that "untouchable" and "untargetable" are actually implemented in the game as *buffs*, and by definition, you can't buff a dead body: the game has to rez you in order to make you untouchable, with obvious consequences).

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And that's the sort of marketing genius that brought the world "New Coke".

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That's not quite true. The problem with "New Coke" was not that Coca Cola attempted to overleverage their brand, the problem was that they almost destroyed their brand by altering the foundation upon which it was built: Coke.

Brands are *not* self-standing entities, no matter how much some marketing dweeb in a suit thinks it so with Powerpoint charts to match. Brands are *extensions* of actual *things*. Coke, the brand, can be used to sell two cents of bottled water for three bucks, if you leverage it right. But only if Coke, the brand, is supported by Coke, the product that people identify with Coke.

"New Coke" was a ridiculous twin-mistake. First, some idiot thought that since Coke was so well established brand-wise, people were drinking whatever came in the red can, no matter what it tasted like, so they could fiddle with it without risk.

Second, some even bigger idiot thought that the results of the Pepsi Challenge were authoritative. The problem with the Pepsi Challenge was this: people are not stupid. Pepsi Challenge booths were giving away free cans of Pepsi to anyone who picked the Pepsi; they were not giving away free cans of Coke to people who picked the Coke. I got a lot of free soda from the Pepsi Challege. When Coke itself attempted to reproduce the results of the Pepsi Challenge in their own labs, they made a second error: they attempted to judge people's reactions to drinking an entire can of soda based on one sip. As anyone who actually drinks soda will tell you, when you're thirsty, the first sip of Pepsi, which is sweeter, tastes better than the first sip of Coke, which tastes less sweet. After the first sip, however, Pepsi starts to taste sweeter and sweeter, while Coke tends not to. For some people, that's good, and for others, not so good.

The people for whom that was not so good tended to be - surprise - Coke drinkers. The recipe change was not going to make them happy, and Coke was supposed to know that there were, oh, quite a few of those people, seeing as they were their customers.


Basically, NCsoft can attempt to leverage the license of CoH to sell all sorts of other crap. Some will try it and buy it just because its City of Heroes crap. The ones who don't care will continue to play the game itself with hardly a hiccough.

But actually mess with the *game* in an attempt to create cross-sell opportunities too much, and you'll lose customers of the base game. And without CoH the game, there is no CoH the brand. That's what New Coke is supposed to teach marketing people.

Many, I find, tend not to learn that particular lesson from that particular fiasco.

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hmmm. They have an opening for "Powers Designer".

hey Castle, can I use you as a reference?

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*cracks Fanboy upside the head with a Nerf bat*

Silly fool. We want Arcanaville to take that job.

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They can't afford her hourly rate.

That said, give Fanboy the job because he listens to Arcana.

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Bill's right. I steal ideas from... err, listen to Arcana all the time. She's definitely outside their price range too.

me? I'm a poor grad student. I'll work for free CoH and some ramen.

I'm not joking though. I'm really thinking of sending them a resume for this.

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Heck, they already get plenty of my time for free. I'd probably take the job as a hobby if I could telecommute. They probably wouldn't even need to provide training: its not like I don't know about The_I_Win_Button or anything.

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I would guess that each of us, without exception*, has a favorite axe to grind and hopes it gets more attention with a larger dev team.

*OK, maybe not EvilGeko.

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There's always MoG.

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You make EG sad...

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He can respec out of it an unlimited number of times: he'll be fine.

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It's also good to know that attacks can have more than one damage type. So what's usually said about smashing defense working against say a cold/smashing attack is probably true in *most* cases, but not necessarily all. Great info.

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To be specific, when someone says that smashing defense will (probably) work on an attack that does smashing and cold damage they are likely to be correct, because *usually* if an attack does two different types of damage, it will also be attack-typed with those two types. But this is not guaranteed.

What is guaranteed is that if an attack is *typed* cold and smashing, you will always get to use the higher of your cold and smashing defense against that attack, always. What you have to remember is that "cold and smashing typed" is not guaranteed to be the same thing as "cold and smashing damage."

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Arcanaville or one of the other math mavens can correct me or flesh out the details, but it seems to me that the more costumes you have, the more likely you are to get a repeat costume and the less likely you are to get the last remaining costume to complete the set of 33.

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By my rough back of the envelope calculations, you'd have to get about 135 random costume drops before you get all 33 (assuming there are 33), on average (of course, it could be much lower or higher depending on your luck).

The estimated number you'll likely have after reaching Ostentatious (50 costume drops) is about 26 to 27 of them (in fact, upon reaching Ostentatious with my main I did actually have 26 of the costume powers).

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New clue is "THISISNOTAHIDDENMESSAGEMARCIAN" backwards.

Sorry, couldn't resist getting one for a change.

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I had a Games magazine flashback.

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Outstanding guide, Arcanaville. I have to pick a nit with your level scaling info for accuracy.

These are the numbers I got from Pohsyb back in I6. Unless you're privy to some updated information, they should be the correct ones. (It's identical to yours until you get to +6, where it drops off more quickly.)

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Foes your level have not changed. You have a 75% chance to hit and your powers are 100% effective.
Foes 1 level above you - You have a 65% chance to hit and your powers are 90% effective.
Foes 2 levels above you - You have a 56% chance to hit and your powers are 80% effective.
Foes 3 levels above you - You have a 48% chance to hit and your powers are 65% effective.
Foes 4 levels above you - You have a 39% chance to hit and your powers are 48% effective.
Foes 5 levels above you - You have a 30% chance to hit and your powers are 30% effective.
Foes 6 levels above you - You have a 20% chance to hit and your powers are 15% effective.
Foes 7 levels above you - You have a 8% chance to hit and your powers are 8% effective.

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For some reason, I merged the tohit table up to +5, and forgot to do the rest. I initially thought the 34 was a typo, but it was actually a sign of the glitch. Good catch: corrected in the next draft.

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So... if we can only create a door to the Ouroboros Citadel after we've been exposed to time travel, and we can only time travel by going to the Ouroboros Citadel, how do we get exposed to time travel in the first place?

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We flashback to the mission that unlocks the Ouroboros Citadel, which we missed the first time because we couldn't get to it because we didn't unlock time travel because we couldn't do the Ouroboros unlock mission to unlock time travel.

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I'm not entirely sure it works that way. I recall it actively weakening each effect produced by the target. For instance, if I were to, say, hit a Fortunata Boss with Weaken (Fortunata bosses have an active mez protection toggle that CAN be weakened by, well, Weaken), I'd be able to hold her in (I think) two shots as opposed to the three or four. Either way, it's noticeable.

Whereas if I were to hit a normal boss, I'd still have to hit them twice with a hold to hold them. It doesn't actively work against native mez protection; it simply works against any effects that are actively causing mez protection.

I think your quoted poster was wanting Frozen Aura to actively lower native mez protection. I don't think it's doable. However, an anti-power boost? Sure, it might be interesting.

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You're absolutely right: powers like Benumb can only debuff actual powers, not intrinsic mez protection. So it would mostly work against the mez protection of things with active mez protection, like you mention. However, it still has the additional side effect also mentioned: it would reduce the durations of mezzes that affected critters use. This might be helpful for the specific case of critters that use AoE mezzes: even taunted, they can strike unprotected squishies and mez them, but a weakened mez would wear off much faster.

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could you make a power which imposes a penalty to mobs' resistance to mez powers?

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I believe its possible to debuff critter mez resistance, which would make all mezzes (or at least mezzes of the types being debuffed) last longer. Almost anything that can be buffed can be debuffed, and mez resistance can be buffed (i.e. accelerate metabolism).

However, I think you might have meant mez protection, not resistance, and the answer is also yes, and interestingly enough, one of the examples of where this actually exists is very relevent to /Ice tankers in theory: Benumb, the cold domination power, debuffs mez protection (weaken is the other power I'm aware of that does this). This also has an odd side effect (depending on your point of view): it simultaneously debuffs the target's own mez durations (mez duration and mez magnitude are both affected by something called mez strength which is what is increased by mez enhancements in individual powers, and debuffed by benumb).

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Castle, I honestly think that the fundamental flaw of data mining is that it looks at the whole spectrum of players. Your average CoH player, who frankly isn't very good, will do far better on a tank because it is the hardest AT to die on. Another way to put it is a FoTM is not broken unless in the hands of a good enough player.

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That's not a fundamental flaw, that's a fundamental difference of opinion.

There are many people who believe that the powersets should be balanced for their performance when handed to some arbitrarily skilled player, who presumably gets something close to optimal performance out of the set. Those are simply presumed to be the players that "count" when it comes to balancing, and all other players' performance is presumed to be unimportant relative to that standard.

The devs don't have that opinion. They attempt to balance the powersets based on the average skill level of the players actually currently playing the game, and that means the average performance of a set across all players, both the best and the worst, is relevant. I'm not sure I would do it that way (actually, I'm sure I wouldn't do it that way), but its not fundamentally flawed.

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Does Hamidon have any attacks that are exclusions? Where some are unresisted? Nictus damage has a similar feature.

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The pre-I9 Hamidon had untyped attacks that did untyped damage. Meaning, no defense worked on the attacks, and no resistance worked on the damage. The I9+ Hamidon is a little different: the attacks are all still untyped (no defense works on them), but some of them do untyped damage as before, some do toxic, and therefore resistable, and some of them do "special" which means no resistance *power* resists their damage, but the resistance conferred by EoEs (essence of the earth inspiration) does resist its damage, much like ambrosia and the crystal titan (they use two different "special" damage flags so the inspirations do not work across those two).

Most of these are vestigal information from much older versions that linger on: I've noted them and corrected them for the next version. I'll also be taking another pass through all the links: Paragonwiki links in particular are likely to be broken since their relocation.