Arcanaville

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Hey the book lady replied to me.

Round 2.

Champion Calvin
Freedom Frank
Guardian Greg
Infinity Isaiah
Justice Jeremy
Liberty Lionel
Protector Paul
Triumph Theodore (like the chipmunk )
Victory Victor

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There is a Victor in the building... and my dogs name is Frank Black but no cigars for females yet!

Please channel harder or use the internets to help you figure it out.

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I wish I had more time to put my search-fu to work for me, but its a busy week and I'm going to have to take a guess and say its either:

Freedom Floyd

or

Justice Josh

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Ex Libris quick question for you, are any of those models actually from CoV or CoH, cause some of the buildings look familair

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I believe photo #3 is a sneak peak at SexyJay's promotion to instanced map designer for Issue 12: Orenbegans Invade Candyland.

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Ok, but I can't talk about Issue 11 or beyond... but that's pretty much what you guys WANT me to talk about so we are at an impass.

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Not a problem. Lets talk Defense. Or blaster secondaries. Market dynamics? Tanker mechanics?

Hey, where's the fire? Come back!

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Besides, EvilGeko and Angry-Citizen would kidnap me, lock me in a room and do horrible things to me.

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Dude.

All I would do is make you fix MoG.

And nerf mobs' Sm, Le resists.

And [censored for the benefit of the children].

And I'd probably help AC make you fix Stalkers.

That's all.

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You forgot "and then sell you on eBay."

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Interesting. Pohsyb apparently does not qualify as a dev according to the tracker.


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The tracker probably only tracks CoH devs.

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And it doesn't answer my question.

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Lighthouse did answer your question, just not in the way you want. He specifically said they haven't (and possibly might not) announced the schedule for performing the purge, and that customers should presume they could happen at any time after the deadline.

This means you can guess when it might happen, but you should not be surprised if your guess is wrong. Basically, the answer is "they aren't saying."

I am reasonably certain that the process could run with the servers up, and with the servers down, and they could decide to go either way for any one of a number of reasons.

I am even more certain that Lighthouse did not specifically intend to say "on August 29th the names will be freed after a server downtime." I'm pretty certain he's saying that you shouldn't even presume it will necessarily run *on* the 29th: that's only the first day its allowed to run by policy. Because its a manual process, they could decide to run it on the 30th. Or not at all until just before the Character Name Check goes online. They seem to not want to lock themselves into a specific announced implementation strategy for something they probably wish to do at their own discretion.

In their place, I would probably act similarly.

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There are plenty of clues the rikti invasion is happening while on the map the rikti are invading, before a single message ever appears. The purpose of the warnings was for people in other zones to know where the invasion is occuring and come join if they wanted to.

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The original purpose to the warnings was almost certainly to warn people in the zone that an invasion was imminent, because the warning signs would not be recognized by players who were not intimately familiar with the invasion design (in other words, *most* players), and because originally players were not debt-protected during them.

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I've seen numbers that suggest permanent DP is possible, but I'm not yet rich enough to see it for myself. Still, I'm slavering at the bit to give it a try.

How far away are we, in straight numbers, from being able to hit permanent IH? I'm assuming that picking the right primary will be important for slotting specific types of sets that give more regen bonus, like maybe broadsword's parry for LOTG-set or some such.

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Well, you can't get something below 20% of its base recharge. So for IH, that's 1000/5 = 200s. That's still nearly two minutes of downtime.

Assume you slot with 6 level 50 IOs. That's 118.16% after ED. Add 70% from Hasten. Add another 85% from IOs. That's still only 273.16%. Add that to the base and you're still 130% away from the recharge cap. You'd need a couple Speed Boosts.

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SF, are you sure about that? I could've sworn the recharge of IH was much lower than that. Memory and MIDs (can't access CoD atm) tell me the base recharge on IH is 650. So at the recharge cap, it'd be 130 seconds, or 40 seconds of downtime.

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Its still 650 seconds recharge, 90 seconds uptime.

I'm still working on an updated and cleaned up version of this guide. It has a lot of historical junk in it that was there to forestall questions, because a lot of this stuff was debated at a time when there were multiple conflicting sources of information for various numbers. But actually, this *is* basically the source for this stuff these days, so I am working on a version that eliminates some of the historical and outdated stuff, and collapsing the guide to current information only. This version, being in the guides section, will always be around for historical reference any way. Its taking a bit of time to come up with a format I'm comfortable with, in terms of readability. But hopefully, sometime before Issue 11 rolls around, I should have it done. It might even fit in one post: that would be the first time in several versions.

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Isn't it the case that the only thing you floor with 45% Defense is an even con Minion? What if you go up against, say, a +4 Minion (a not uncommon occurance in my gameplay)? Or an Archvillain? If Defense in excess of 45% is wasted in PvE, why does the huge amount of Defense in Elude seem to help so much (even with IOs)? Perhaps the developers know that defense in excess of 45% is not wasted?

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In I6, a +4 minion's base tohit would have been 70%, relative to an even minion's base tohit of 50%. From I7 to today, a +4 minion's base tohit is now still 50%, and it gets an accuracy bonus of 1.2. As a result, since defense subtracts from tohit, but does nothing to accuracy, the best you can do is still 45% defense.

Proportionately speaking, the best you can do in both cases is the same thing: reduce net tohit to 10% of its original value. For even minion, that is dropping from 50% to 5%. For +4 minion, its dropping from 70% to 7%. That is comparable to, and analogously functioning as, the 90% resistance cap.

Having more than 45% defense helps under three cases:

1. Fighting things higher than +5. At +6 and higher, critters start getting higher tohit again. However, as a practical matter, fighting +6s is a losing proposition all around: your damage is so low, that its only worth doing for bragging rights.

2. Fighting things with tohit buffs. Unusual, but not totally unheard of in PvE, especially post I6. And the quartz eminators that the DE drop emit a +100% tohit buff to everything in range. That's enough to nullify well-slotted Elude plus well slotted toggles plus well-slotted passives combined. And in PvP, the unusual thing is fighting someone *without* tohit buffs.

3. Fighting things with defense debuffs. Especially high order ones like those possessed by the Rularuu. Or the really big ones you can see in PvP. And some of those are unresistable, which means the SR resistance to defense debuffs doesn't affect them, and you feel them at full strength. And some of them autohit.

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He might be posting this for the benefit of any player returning for the account reactivation this weekend, since they probably haven't read/ posted in the previous discussions regarding this issue.

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Just in case those players don't read the forums, it might be a good idea to periodically anounce this in-game in a way that can't be accidentally overlooked, like say in the admin channel.

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Anyone has have a fresh look upon SR since Inventions came out?

I've been toying with my SR scrappers and respeced them to add more slots to their defense powers ( even the passive ). By simply 5-6 slotting a few sets of Serendipity and also slotting all my Pbaoe attacks with Multistrikes , i bumped up my aoe defenses and melee defenses by a few percents. I wonder if i i was wasting my time but somehow i really feel my SR is doing ALOT better than before. Now im even considering dropping AidSelf and going for Tough and Weave instead since the endurance cost of pretty much all my powers has been reduced by over 80% ( to all attacks and every toggles ).

Any people have some insights to share? Are IOs the long waited "Fix" for SR?

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I don't know if I would call it a fix, but because of the way defense stacks, every percent counts for SR: positional defenses can be expensive to get in the sets because they require five or six of a single set, and many of the sets are pricey (not all), but if you can get them, you can increase SR to very high levels of defense. Its not difficult to get to the 35%-40% range without too much difficulty, and that is a substantial improvement in strength. Going tough/weave opens another possibility: getting to the "magic 45%" mark where you begin to floor foes without tohit bonuses. Slotted weave is about 6%, and tough can take the steadfast protection Res/+3%def IO, so the fighting pool actually has almost 9% defense to all theoretically within it. That's most of the way from the about 30% defense SR has to the magic 45%. Set bonuses and power pools can get you the rest of the way.

That's a pseudo perma-elude build there, at least for PvP (in PvE, just barely getting to 45% is of no use against any attacker with any tohit buffs at all).

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its a matter of keeping the name they have versus losing it to someone who was highly unlikely to ever use it

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I'm guessing a majority of the people that abandon the game do not return, but Cryptic and NCSoft seem to be implying that a significant number come back, enough to complain about losing names when they return. So I'm not sure it can be taken for granted that its "highly unlikely" that they will never return.

If nothing else, those freebee temporary reactivations cause a lot of people to return to the game, at least temporarily. A large unknown is how many of those people *might have* returned to the game, but were sufficiently upset over losing the names of their characters that they elected not to.

I'm not arguing against the currently announced system: I think few people could argue that there is enough time invested in a level 6 to seriously bemoan the loss of its name. But I am suggesting that the general argument, that *no level* should be safe, by default, and that if *any* level is protected, that's only doing those accounts a favor, isn't the perspective that is most consistent with what is actually "fair" in the broad sense, and what's best for the game as a whole.

I do understand the point about people transferring: here you have a case that *someone* is going to lose their previously established name, and the only question is who. But I think the problem with that scenario is that its far too easy to exploit. If I want a name, and its taken on my server by an inactive account, I can make a character on another server, pay to transfer them to my server and bump the name, and then delete the character and name change myself to the now vacated name.

This means that while the mechanism could be originally designed to protect active name users when they transfer to servers that have inactive users with the same name, it ultimately degrades to anyone that can pay, can bump any inactive name. And there's no reason that should be tolerable, unless you are prepared to allow that in other circumstances, like me simply outbidding you for your character's name. Again, the issue here is that inactive accounts are not being given the same treatment as active accounts.

I don't think people who don't pay to stay active should get things that the people who do pay to stay active get. That line of thinking leads to people being able to go back and buy the veteran badges after having not subscribed for a long time. But I don't know if names are specifically shared resources that people should "rent." I think that a different and completely valid perspective is that names are things that people *contribute* to the game. When I make a character with a certain name, I've *added* that name to the game. Its a contribution to the game that has nothing to do with resources I'm leasing to play the game. The opposing viewpoint suggests that the namespace is a giant invisible list of all possible names, that we players check out, and then check back in, like library books. I don't really subscribe to that viewpoint, though. I *create* my names. I don't select them from a list of all possible names. So I don't think that I'm obligated to "return them" even if I was no longer an active subscriber.

Keep in mind I'm not talking explicitly about legal rights or anything like that, but rather illustrating the point of view.

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It's still showing special treatment to them. You're right, name purging is a nessecary evil. But at the same time, how is it right for names to still be taken up by accounts that have been inactive for a year, two years, since CoH launch? Compared to all the other MMOs and their inactive account policies out there, inactive accounts here are practically pampered to.

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Special treatment implies different treatment. So in what way are they being treated special?

Special treatment is when you single them out and take away their names. And while that might be necessary in some cases, that is different treatment from all other customers.

By what definition of the word "special" are inactive accounts getting special treatment.


Asking "how is it right" is asking the wrong question, because it presumes what it argues: that by default, its a given that inactive accounts should not be allowed to hold their names, so an argument has to be made for why they should keep what by default they should so obviously lose.

The default, though, is that they should keep their names, because that's always been the policy of the game. The question is "why should someone be allowed to take it away?" And it has to be something other than the simple case of money, or else that argument can be generalized to argue that names could be outbid by people with more money.

I cannot think of a reasonable argument that says "if I pay X, I deserve preferential treatment over the person that no longer pays X, but someone who pays 2X should get no more preferential treatment than me."

The reason I cannot give NCSoft a hundred bucks and take one of your character names away is not because you have some special right to the name, or there is a cosmic law that says fifteen bucks buys name-theft deflection. The reason is that its bad business to treat customers that way. By extension, NCSoft has made the calculated business decision that they want to minimize the number of character names they take away from previous customers, because treating them in that way negatively impacts their ability to lure them back to the game, and its public knowledge that NCSoft's business model presumes that MMO players are fickle, leave and join games regularly, and they are taking the combined approach of trying to make sure that when someone leaves an NCSoft game, NCSoft has another game they can move to, and contrawise, after they've been gone awhile, NCSoft might be able to lure them back to games they previously left.

That business decision mandates treating "former customers" as "continuing customers" just not current customers of a paticular given game, which means they believe its in their best interests to treat those former customers in a manner consistent with the belief that many will ultimately return.


Would you feel any differently if NCSoft gave people the option to remain "paying customers" that could inactivate, but maintain their characters, at a cost of two cents per century? Or are you saying that its not enough that they be paying customers, but you have a specific price in mind for what they should be forced to pay to maintain their character names, or else its not fair to current playing customers?

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Because you're favoring long gone customers that may never come back, over your current paying ones. And that just isn't right.

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I feel I need to address this specifically. NCSoft is not favoring inactive customers over paying customers. NCSoft is not giving anything to inactive customers that playing customers don't get. They aren't getting any special treatment.

What you want is to specifically take away things from inactive customers. And there's no reason to expect to have that right, even as a paying customer.

If its just about money, how about I pay more to NCSoft to take *your* names away. After all, why should they *favor* you over me, when I pay more money.

We are customers of NCSoft and Cryptic, and those old inactive customers were and are customers of NCSoft and Cryptic. I believe things like name purge to be a necessary [u]evil[u] with emphasis on evil. Because I don't feel any specific right to take things away from other customers, even currently inactive ones. There's all sorts of reasons for a person to be inactive, but I neither want to, nor need to judge those reasons, since I don't care. They were and are customers, and they did and do deserve to be treated just as fairly as we do. And that includes not taking things away from them when it isn't necessary. And aggressive name purge is not necessary.

Its a "wanna have" for some and a "need to have" for none, and given that, I see no reason to specifically take things away from other customers that was never mine to begin with.

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Explain to me why someone who made a lv 50 named whatever. And never plays again why his name should be forever locked out of use?

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Someone who never will play again should have their names recycled. However, there's no way to *know* that they will never play again. No matter how long they've been away, NCSoft is presumably always trying to get them back, with each new issue. And presumably, they occasionally do. And in their opinion, leaving that possibility open is part of their long term business strategy, not just for CoH, but for all NCSoft games in general.


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And on a side note: I played casually since launch and had my first 50 in less than a year. and that was WITHOUT the number of PL missions that used to be around. I know people who made 50 in a week exploiting missions such as the old COT portals, Werewolf herding, mole machines not to mention those damg Winter Lords. So don't make the mistake in believeing all lv 50's were earned. a fair number of them were Powerleveled in alot shorter time than you would guess.

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Fascinating, but irrelevant. The issue is not whether someone got to 50 the slow way, the fast way, was PLed to 50, or got magicked 50 levels from the level-fairy. The issue is whether or not there exists the possibility that such a player might return on their own or could be enticed to do so.

The presumption NCSoft and Cryptic are making is once someone makes a character with a certain name on a particular server, everyone else has no claim to it. The issue is not "why should they get to keep the name" but rather "what right does anyone else have to it?" And the answer is: none, but what they invent. The name purge invents one, and its a small, conservative one, balanced against the fact that, as a matter of policy, one of the lures that CoH is designed to have to attract old customers back is that their old characters will be waiting for them if they decide to return.

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Energy Blast :
Strengths: constant knockdown ability.

Weaknesses: AoEs scatter mobs. Knockdown is intermittent. Relatively slow attack animations.

Energy Blast is a strange primary. It can use BU for an alpha strike, but isn't a major alpha strike set. Due to slower animations, and a single-target orientation, its fights last longer... thus Build-Up isn't as useful as Targetting Drone. What makes it strange is its damage mitigation. While other sets rely on a particular power or two to mitigate damage, and then on the other powers for offense, Energy Blast has damage mitigation in every power, and thus defends itself best by constantly blasting a single target. Thus, the secondary for Energy seems least useful in damage mitigation.

It does not need single-target attacks from the secondary, and since it focuses on knocking enemies back constantly, it has little use for a melee-strong secondary. The best damage mitigation is a "use and forget" power like Ice Patch or Cloaking Device, rather than active mezzing powers like Freezing Touch. Lastly, since it's a bit lacking in AoEs, it seems as if it has use for Trip Mine.

So, I'm putting Devices again as the most synergistic secondary. /Energy just doesn't get enough out of Power Boost, though Boost Range is nice with Energy/, and we're wasting all of its melee attacks. Ice's Ice Patch is completely against the knockback from Energy/. Basically, Energy/ works so poorly with melee powers that we're left looking only at support powers. Devices, with the ability of Caltrops to aid in keeping enemies away, with Targetting Drone helping the longer fights, Smoke Grenade with long-term pre-alpha defense, etc, just gives the best all-around support for a long-fight, single-target set like Energy/. And that's without Trip Mine.

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Odd. I would have considered Energy/Devices to be one of the least synergistic combinations I could think off. Energy gains nothing specifically from /Devices that /Devices doesn't just do by itself, with the possible exception of power pushing things onto trip mines.

On the other hand, there is significant synergy between Energy Blast and the set you think is very low on the synergy scale: energy manipulation. Energy manipulation provides several synergistic properties specifically to Energy blast:

1. Very few critters are simultaneously resistant to disorient and knockback. That means the combination of the two is much more likely to be disabling to any targets you have to face, then either one separately.

2. Powerboost boosts flight speed, which is highly useful for hover blasting. Energy blast, with its intrinsic knockback, tends to find itself in many more situations where hover-blasting is a good choice of tactic: even in teamed situations where aggro is fully controlled, there is a potential desire to hover-blast. Powerboost accelerates hover, which is unsuppressed flight movement.

3. Energy blasting does not have the alpha strike potential of Fire blast, nor the control of Ice. Therefore, it is more reliant on non-stop firing than the average blasting set: idling can be lethal. Energy manipulation has conserve power to allow for more continuous blasting. More endurance helps everyone, but Energy blast is much more closely reliant on continuous activity for survival, separate from better kill speed.

4. Unlike /Fire, /Devices, /Ice, and even /Elec, Energy Manipulation does not specifically have any requirement to have critters in specific locations or bunched up to gain its full potential, which means Energy Manipulation is the secondary least likely to conflict with the knockback of Energy blast. In fact, you could argue that scattering targets before engaging in melee blapping with them has a beneficial effect: it either forces those targets to attack from range, lowering their damage, or run back towards you, which temporarily stops them from attacking altogether.

5. Related to #1 above, most blaster primaries have stackable mez. Ice blast does, and so does Electric blast. Technically, AR and Archery do as well, although it takes significant slotting to stack the disorients for any length of time. But Energy blast does not have a specific stackable mez, which can be problematic for dealing with foes such as mezzing bosses. Total focus fills a significant hole in Energy blast, by giving the combo a mag 4 mez that can affect bosses. Its a good attack for all blasters to have in theory, but it serves a very specific role in Energy blast. Especially in the late game, epic power pools have things like holds and sleeps, which can stack with the holds and sleeps in sets like Sonic blast, Electric Blast, and Ice Blast. There is nothing that "stacks" with Energy's KB in a productive way, which further emphasizes a need for a disabling power like total focus in the late game.

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The issues are become more dynamic instead of the old mision rote and this too is a credit to the Devs...and hey, didn't the beloved Arcanaville suggest something akin to a plane rescue mission (Saucer raid) in her suggestions to Crytpic awhile back?

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I did, but I wasn't thinking of what the devs implemented in I10. One thing I *did* challenge the devs on subsequent to that, though, is the notion that players should be able to permanently alter the shared MMO landscape, particularly the PvE environment, something that isn't ordinarily done in "traditional" MMOs for the most part. They aren't there yet, but the "invasion trigger" intrinsic in the RWZ task force is a step in that direction.

Ordinarily, there is a fear that if you allow players to alter the shared PvE landscape, they could do so in ways that other players don't necessarily approve of, and losing that control is not a comforting thought. And right now, there are people that think the zone invasions are too powerful, too disruptive, too difficult to opt out of. However, I think that is the future of MMO evolution. Player X will do something that will temporarily, or down the road permanently, change the game for Player Y. And Player Y will just have to deal with it, as part of the price of living in a shared environment. Some players will prefer stability over dynamics, and there will be games for them. But I think in the long run, the draw that is intrinsic in being able to affect your world in a permanent way will slowly ratchet games in the direction of placing more power into player hands to shape the world they are in.

It'll have to be done slowly, carefully, and incrementally, but one day a group of players are doing to do Positron's task force, and when the second group comes along, Positron is going to say someone already did it. There will be always be another thing they can do, another task that Positron can give out, but the previous one will get done once, or failed once, and that's it. If someone fails to save the war walls, the war walls will come down. And with the right game design and infrastructure, that will be a much better game. Not everyone will want to play a game like that, but I suspect that in the long run, most will end up playing a game like that regardless.

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Has anyone tried to get Elude near perma with IO recharge bonuses?

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The game-limit cap is 500% recharge, which means the absolute best you could ever do, with twenty kinetics speed boosting you, is 200 seconds of recharge time on Elude, which is three minutes up, 20 seconds down. Literally impossible to do better than that, no matter what.

As a practical matter, the best you can do by yourself is perma-hasten (+0.7), 6-slot elude with level 50 IOs (+1.1816), quickness (+0.2), 5 LoTG IOs (5 x +0.075), and 5 set recharge bonuses like those in Red Fortune (5 x +0.05). That would be a total of 3.7 recharge on Elude, and a net recharge time of 270 seconds. That's about 180 up, 90 down.

You can do *a little* better than that by squeezing a little more recharge bonuses out of the IO sets, but not a lot: there's a basic limit to the number of recharge bonuses you can get given that they tend to be tier 5 bonuses and therefore require a lot of slots in the right powers. As indicated above, Powerfist has made such a build (and he's tossed in a base empowerment speed buff to get down to about 70 seconds of downtime).

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It is also fixing a problem that outside of maybe the STF and a few forum built superteams, isn't even on the radar of your average player.

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Just because its not "on the radar" of the average player, doesn't mean it doesn't affect them. The average player can't describe what ED even does, which means as much as I personally think it was a horrible implementation of a reasonable idea, its probably true that most of the people who dislike it dislike it because they think they should, not because they have any idea what they are disliking.

Conversely, there are a lot of things that players *would* take issue with, if only they understood what was actually going on. The average super reflexes scrapper did not know that force field bubbles were actually not stacking with their defenses at one time: I know, I ran with lots of SR scrappers that continued to run their toggles while bubbled back in the day, when it made virtually no sense or difference to do so. That problem wasn't "on the radar" of practically *any* player - very few of us knew the problem even existed - but that fact made it no less of an important problem.

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You both have good ideas and presentation, but I think I'm going to have to side with Arcanaville on this one. IF the current situation is a problem (I would cast it as a 'sleeper' problem. It could explode into a full blown issue at any moment, but right now, too few regular players exploit it for it to be an issue) then having each buff have the same effect would be the best solution.

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read how people do STF and you will see the problem. Get 8 /rad controllers and the tf takes 45 minutes. Get a team with no controllers and defenders and you probably can't do the tf at all.

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With virtually no buffs, debuffs, or control, I don't think a team with zero controllers and defenders really has a right to complain the high-end game content wasn't specifically designed for them.

I think the first time I did it on live, I was the only rad controller. I think I might have been the only rad. We had a kinetics or two, though. And only seven people at the end. And no temp powers.

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Take the hypothetical 50% defense buffers. The first buffer will drop incoming damage by half, and so will the second, and so will the third, and by the third you're already at 87.5% damage mitigation, which is pretty super. Bringing in a fourth will raise that another 6%; a fifth will raise that another 3%, and so forth.

In reality, though, while each of those latter additions is still stopping 50% of the damage that would have penetrated in their absence, the actual threat is relatively fixed. When you add a new teammate, the opposition simply doesn't ramp massively, so there isn't a huge operational difference between stopping ~93% incoming damage and stopping ~96% incoming damage, even though one lets through twice as much damage at the other. For nearly any circumstance I can imagine in the game we all play, no one is going to care about taking 3% less damage when looking for teammates. Even the 6% is pretty questionable.

As a consequence, it's still not going to be in your favor regardless to try and keep pushing in more defensive buffers after some point. You'd hit an effective ceiling if not an actual cap and look to build teams where you're getting the least combinatorial inhibition, and that'll be made worse by the fact that the buff recipient's own powers count against the diminishing returns.

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But that's the point: to forestall when that happens, not to eliminate it. You're saying that at some point, it is of limited benefit to add more defense buffers. That's true, but right now, that situation is also true, and the number is lower. Its bad all around. If you have a +DEF buffer, you get more additional benefit from an additional +DEF buffer over a +RES buffer to a point and then the additional +DEF buffs have *no* additional benefit, because you've hit the tohit floor. That's doubly wrong. It should be incrementally more even, until you reach a point where *no* additional protection of any kind is really necessary, but up to that point any form of additional protection is comparable in all but the fine details.

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Perhaps Cryptic should impliments a 10% "own project" time like Google, where their art/code/numbers people get 10% of their paid time to devote to any feature they like.

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It hasn't worked out real well for Google - it has (mostly) produced a bunch of poor-to-middling applications that will be fixed and finished at some uncertain future date.

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Yeah, it's worked out just terribly for them. Would that CoH enjoyed the same level of failure as Google.

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I see - you assume that somehow the 10% program is a significant contributor to that sucess. Care to back up that assumption with facts?

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They attract a significant amount of talent with the 10% program, among other things. If the 10% program *never* generates a single commericially viable product, it will still have been worth it. If it does, it will be even more worth it.

The presumption Google is making is two-fold. One: happy workers are more productive workers, and the very people they tend to attract and seek out are the kind of people that need the 10% program. Two: 99.99% of all ideas suck, and its virtually impossible to target only the good ones. So you let smart people go after as many as is reasonably possible, like trying to buy as many tickets to the lottery as possible.

If the 10% program generates *one* commerically viable blockbuster for Google, anytime in the next ten years, the program will ultimately be a wild success for Google.

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If I could create custom missions and tfs and trials, I probably wouldnt sleep...ever...again.

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Hmm. Social life, or custom mission editor. An interesting choice, in a crystal-meth sort of sense.

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Aim's Average Damage Buff

Using the values previously obtained for Aim's recharge, Aim with 3 recharge SO's and no Hasten offers the following average damage buff:
37.37 seconds of downtime operating at 100% damage and 10 seconds of uptime operating at 162.5% damage;
(37.37s(100) + 10s(162.5))/47.37 total seconds = 113.19% average damage,
and a +13.19% average damage buff for Blasters.
For Defenders: +10.56% average damage buff
For Corruptors, Dominators: +8.97% average damage buff


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One point to consider: Aim (and Build Up) have activation times, and while they are activating you can't attack. So actually, in the above example, Aim is up for 10, recharging for 37.37 seconds, and activating for 1.17 seconds. The total cycle of Aim is 48.54 seconds, not 47.37 seconds. And the damage profile of Aim is actually 37.37 seconds of 100% damage, 10 seconds of 162.5% damage, and 1.17 seconds of zero damage (on average). That means the average damage buff of Aim is:

(37.37 * 100% + 10 * 162.5% + 0 * 1.17) / 48.54s = 110.47%, or 10.47% (for blasters).


Also, more importantly, this presumes unslotted attacks. If the attacks are presumed to be slotted +95% damage on average, then in actuality the damage cycle looks like this:

(37.37 * 195% + 10 * 257.5% + 0 * 1.17) / 48.54s = 203.18%

That is 203.18-195 = 8.18% base damage increase, or 203.18/195 = 1.042 = 4.2% net damage increase.

(Note: assault is +10.5% base damage increase for blasters)

In other words, the more damage you do, the greater the penalty for standing around doing nothing but glowing yellow. Of course, if you do not have a full attack chain, then there is no real penalty for using Aim: this is an average number presuming a full attack chain.


One more little complicating factor that makes these numbers actually slightly low estimates. Because actual attacks have activation times, Aim can actually "last" a little longer than ten seconds. That's because Aim doesn't have to be up when the shot *lands* but only when it activates. If 9.5 seconds after activating Aim you fire an attack that takes two seconds to activate, then that attack will be buffed, and the net benefit of Aim will actually be, in a sense, 11.5 seconds long.