Arcanaville

An employee that once told me this I recommended they go off on their own and set up a bread shop. Which they did. I still sell meat. They now wear a paper hat.

The only thing I wish upon the people who make business suggestions is that they be forced to bet their livelihoods upon them.

Its fine if its subjective. Its just that if that subjective judgment doesn't have an explicit logical framework underpinning it, I would just be shooting in the dark attempting to think up alternatives that would alter that subjective judgment.

However, its worth considering this. If blaster improvements aren't "concentrated" on a power, and instead distributed among many powers, that doesn't automatically make no power mandatory. Its equally likely you've just made *all* powers mandatory instead. That's what happened to Super Reflexes for example. And this is actually more likely to occur with attack sets, because of the way our attack mechanics work. There are lots of games you can play with defensive powers to make them powerful but not synergistic. You could argue, for example, that Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom together are a bit less than the sum of the parts because of mechanical non-synergies. But that's much more difficult to do with attack powers. You make one really good power, and that power might be mandatory. But you make four better than average powers, and to get to the intended level of offense you'd have to take all of them. Conversely if you make any two strong enough to reach the intended level of offense, taking all four will be stronger yet without some weird lockout or momentum-like mechanic that makes the attacks anti-synergistic.

You yourself I believe said that one problem with granting snipes too high a buff was the worry that it would leave less room to buff everything else. But if that's true, its equally true that a buff spread out will have to obey the same rule, and whereas blasters could reach damage level X with just the snipe, they would only now reach it by taking four or five separate attacks, and anything less and they would reach a significantly lower damage level. Forcing people to take more powers to reach the same level of damage is equally unpalatable.

There are two reasons one might not be followed. One is that they go where others can't. The other is that they're heading in the wrong direction.

I suggested to Arbiter Hawk that one way to simultaneously address this problem for /Devices, and everyone else at the same time, was to create an inherent toggle that everyone got that simply suppressed stealth. If you really need to be visible, but you don't want to turn off whatever is making you invisible, you'd turn this toggle on. The toggle would cost zero, recharge zero, and never itself suppress.

Its a simple, if sledgehammer solution to the problem but it kills lots of birds with one stone.

That would be a much more efficient description of the movie.

My customers have a far greater stake in whether I continue to exist as a business that supports them, particularly those that receive irreproducible services, and they get exactly zero input into my business decisions.

In the novel, the bugs weren't described as superhuman. They were described as being comparable in threat to a human being, but their strength was their sheer numbers and the fact that bug soldiers were basically automatons that fought under central control. Ironically, in the novel the capabilities depicted in the movie would have been at least nominally effective. But I suppose to emphasize the fact that human were initially outmatched, Verhoeven simultaneously buffed the bugs and nerfed the humans.

Its another serious problem that the bugs are initially depicted as so strong it takes many humans to bring down one bug, and then later the bugs are depicted as using numbers to overwhelm a small number of humans. The excuse I suppose is that they all learned to kill them better after watching Doogie Howser's PSA.

There's a system for managing custom critters and their values. However, one of the big problems with many of the latest sets is that they are mechanically complex: this makes them non-trivial to simply port to the AE without studying them carefully. Consider that critters can't handle targeted toggles very well; that's why sets with them changed those powers into click versions for the AE. Sets with combos and momentum and other mechanical options require even more thought than that.

That, and creating new powersets has a higher priority than porting them to the AE, and the devs have been very busy making new powersets. Much more than has been announced so far.

Then I'm afraid I don't understand your position enough to comment around it. You say Assassin's strikes are acceptable among other things because the changes aren't gated around mechanics, but even if a substantial amount of the power of snipes isn't gated you'd still object because of the general problem of power concentration. But you're ok with power concentration in many other cases including but not limited to stalkers. That leaves no logical room to maneuver for the sniper changes, beyond I think that you just don't prefer any approach that focuses on them.

A power that completely throws off game balance is broken. The devs are compelled to change those.

A power that is overpowered is one that has more power than the devs would allow today. It may not be so powerful that they are compelled to change it.

A power that is an outlier is a power that exists at or slightly beyond the normal limits of what the devs are normally comfortable creating, generally exceptionally so. It might not be problematic on their own, but its far enough away from the target so as to not be an example to aim for ever again.

Whatever you want to call them, there are at least three classes of power level where you're admitting only two. Powers that are higher than normal, and exceptionally so, but not necessarily outside the limits of what the devs normally do; powers that have more power than the devs currently limit their designs to; powers that have so much power they break other parts of the design. The one in the middle is too powerful, but not so powerful it compels nerfs. Drain Psyche is one of those.

You believe, or at least have stated, that everything is either ok or broken and must be fixed. That's not how the devs operate, and that's not how you can operate in an MMO that is developed over time by different dev teams. Its not a semantic issue as you've described it, because there are three classes requiring three different terms, no matter what they are.

If the only statements you'll trust come directly from the devs, then I would suggest you take up this topic with them directly. Because that's what I do.

I don't doubt that, but the point was that its very easy to say there are alternatives and claim to be willing to accept the potentially very deleterious problems associated with those alternatives when you have no direct stake in whether those problems actually arise.

I see the forums are acting up again, and glitched out my post. On a lighter subject related to "purist" adaptations, I was talking to a friend this weekend about the various recent wide audience adaptations of Sherlock Holmes. In particular, the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies, the BBC Sherlock series, and the series House. One interesting point of discussion was the curious coincidence that within a five month span (by airing) Holmes fakes his death while apparently defeating Moriartiy to protect Watson in Game of Shadows, Sherlock fakes his death to protect Watson in The Reichenback Fall, and House fakes his death to help Wilson (aka Watson) in the series finale of House. Kind of a weird coincidence, if it is a coincidence.

Incidentally, I've liked all three interpretations to some degree. I loved House from the start, although its certainly had ups and downs since. I like the Robert Downey Jr. Holmes. And I really like the Sherlock series, although I think the second episode of season two is a much weaker episode than the book ends.

I think both are filmable for different reasons, but both became filmable by the same technique: focus. LA Confidential the movie is an attempt to capture the feel of LA Confidential the complex spaghetti plot rollercoaster with only the limited amount of detail you can fit on screen. Road to Perdition focuses on the father-son story and tones down everything else around it so its not too jarring for general audiences. Focus is what directors have to use to jettison some details, change others, and condense a novel into a film. And its never perfect, just like translations between languages are never perfect.


I don't fault him too much for that: I think he gets some of it, and he at least tries to be respectful to the material, but I just don't think he was careful enough. And his attempt to replicate the visuals of the book meant in certain critical areas he missed the feel by trying too hard to replicate the visual: the "book four" chapter trips exactly where I suspect Scott McCloud would say it was doomed to trip up: the book leveraged the fact that it was a discrete paneled page, so an animated version of it would by definition not work. It plays with the perception of time too much, which is its brilliance. Its genuinely "pictures and words" that are not just superior to the video version of the same content, but can't be replicated merely by video that tracks the pictures.

The shortest one should grab it and then jump into the fire. Then it would be canonical.

Yes. No.

I know what the devs mean when they use those two words, and I know what I mean when I use those two words. What do you mean when you use those two words, and what's the difference.

If you're 100% adamant about your position, what common ground do you hope will eventually exist?

You can't make that accusation stick. That's like complaining about a flood, and someone accusing you of preferring droughts. I don't dislike rain, but I'm still going to complain when enough of it falls to sweep houses away.

Starship Troopers doesn't get a few things wrong. It gets almost nothing right. And its not a bad action movie because it doesn't stick to the book. Its a bad action movie because the action is bad. Good action would still not follow the book because the book doesn't actually have that much action really. But it could still at least be good action.

The problem is that it doesn't take obsession to point out ST's flaws. It doesn't really take any more thought than I normally spend obeying traffic signals and much less than I spend setting up iTunes playlists. Transformers has a stupid story and some offensive elements but it has good action. That judgment has nothing to do with any fancy artistic analysis. The fancy artistic analysis is coming from the people who want to elevate Starship Troopers beyond its craftsmanship. It would take me less effort to prove Meet the Spartans was a critical sociological statement.

Most of the people who thought Starship Troopers was a dumb movie have never read the novel. I don't think its a bad movie because it doesn't follow the novel. I think its a bad movie that just happens to insult the fans of a classic science fiction novel for no good reason except for giggles. It would be just as bad if the novel was erased from history. It would just be far more inexplicable as to why anyone made it.

Hypothetically speaking, what would you say if snipes had two benefits, one of which was the insta-snipe under tohit buffed conditions, and the other was something that cause the use of the snipe to make other attacks more valuable as follow up attacks, that would work all the time regardless of tohit. Take, as an example, Eagle's Claw. It will increase the critical chance of follow up attacks. Ignoring the mechanical oddities of that feature, if snipes made follow up attacks better, and *only* for blasters, and *always* regardless of situation, and the tohit based insta-snipe was just an added feature of the power, would you say that was too much capability for one power to have, even though a substantial part of that capability was always on, and therefore no different in principle from assassin's strike-concentrated buffs (and incidentally, whether stalkers were designed to be focused on AS, many stalkers didn't take it due to its mechanical issues so I believe the situation to be roughly analogous: many stalkers had to respec into AS to get the benefits because not all originally had it).

1. That's not automatically true. We don't actually know enough about the internals of the superpack statistics to be able to conclude that. Much rests on the number of players that purchased packs, and how many they bought on average.

2. Even if this were true, it would not be directly relevant. What matters is how the announcement that exclusive rare items will eventually be made available ala carte would affect the purchasing decisions of the players in the future. If it causes enough people to believe its always better to wait, the amount of revenue you would lose would be significantly greater than the amount you'd calculate the loss to be using only past purchasing decisions as your guide.

I've read the article before, and the fact the author can say:

The film and the novel are surprisingly similar

Tells me everything I need to know about how far he's willing to reach to draw a conclusion. I'm surprised its not signed Reed Richards.

In the movie Watchmen, I think Snyder did an admirable job for the most part filming the practically unfilmable, and some of it is inspired (anything involving Rorschach, for example) he made one really critical mistake that seems insignificant to most people unfamiliar with the original comic series: he shifts one line from John to Laurie: "nothing ever ends." This is critical because that's the point of the entire story being vaporized: At the end, Adrian asks John if it all turns out ok in the end, and its John that delivers the line to Adrian. Adrian is asking for absolution from the one being he thinks can give it: John. John isn't God, but he's the closest thing to Adrian: someone that knows the future more certainly than Adrian envisions it. But John doesn't give it to him, and Adrian's look at the end says that: John is telling Adrian that ultimately, there is no "ultimate good" because there is no end to the story that you can then tally the good and the evil and weigh them. Adrian believes the ends justify the means, and he's just been told there's no end. Humans just aren't sophisticated enough to make those kinds of decisions, and no matter how smart Adrian is, he can't escape that limitation of human morality.

By shifting the statement to Laurie, it loses all of its meaning. Instead, John is ambivalent to Adrian at the end, which means Adrian ends the story with no doubts at all. And Laurie throws the line as just a quip. A small change in one sense, but nevertheless a very big change in the more important sense.

Starship Troopers makes those kinds of mistakes every few seconds, from beginning to end. Even if you judge it as satire, it makes horrible mistakes constantly which undercut that. Are we supposed to question whether the hyper-patriotism in ST can lead to fascism? Or are we supposed to laugh at the most incompetent space marine force ever filmed? They can't be scary and stupid at the same time: cf: Hogan's Heroes.

True effective satire is either light hearted and comedic, or its played straight but exaggerated. Starship Troopers never makes up its mind, never even tries to make up its mind, and in fact doesn't seem to think it even needs to make up its mind. Its wrong. Starship Troopers is Robocop with the cyborg cop replaced with Inspector Gadget.

And that's assuming you completely forget the book and not make the reasonable assumption that when you market yourself as a movie based on a book, you should make some attempt to preserve at least 0.51% of it so it doesn't round off to zero.


Getting back to the statement I quoted above, let me quote the article:

Uh, no. When Zim goads a student into attacking him and them disables him, that sets up a scene later in the book where that recruit eventually is kicked out for hitting an instructor. Its important because its intended to demonstrate just how different civilian "normal" society is from military life: the recruit is actually *amazed* the instructor is allowed to hit him, and *stupid enough* to admit he hit him back. No such thing happens in the movie, which makes the equivalent scene totally disconnected from the scene in the novel. When Rico is told that violence has resolved more conflicts in history, its a trigger for introspection by Rico like all of his morality class scenes: that's its reason for being there. Absolutely no such thing happens in the movie. The problem with them is not that Verhoeven exaggerates them, its that he eliminates the context for them. And without that context, those scenes become meaningless except for their shock value.

Considering the author of the article is talking about how movie critics just didn't get the movie, its ironic he didn't get the novel at all.


But to be honest, what really bothers me about Starship Troopers at the end of the day is this:

No, the problem is that its not that good of an action movie. Its an action movie where the heroic space marines stand in a circle shooting at one target. Where spaceships orbit a planet in very tight formation so they can't maneuver. Where they watch balls of light explode their fleetmates and it takes a while for it to dawn on them that something might be amiss. I understood the satire part when I first saw the movie in the theater, but the satire was constantly interrupted by the stupid.

If the point is to satirize fascism, the movie should not be making me think "man, fascism is really not getting a fair shake here."

You say that like its objectively true, when the counterpoint seems to be that the superpacks work as a product exactly the way they were implemented. I understand you would prefer they worked a different way, but that's not the same thing as constantly trying to assert the logic behind an apparently wildly successful product is fatally flawed.

If knowing the items will eventually be sold ala carte after the superpacks are discontinued reduces the amount of income they make on superpacks because a significant number of people wait, is that just an acceptable risk you're willing to take?

The devs don't generally use the word "overpowered" for the same reason they are very cautious about using the word "balance" - because the players make up their own definitions of both words.

Case in point: you don't care to know what the devs mean when they say what they say, you're just trying to explain why based on your definitions for everything what they say is inconsistent. Its not inconsistent at all, and I understand perfectly what they mean, because ironically I don't play word games with the devs.

Think Destiny. We can also play games with slotting and number of targets hit so that one or the other increases the duration of the buff rather than the magnitude. So lets say the power does 300% regen for 10 seconds, 200% regen for another 10 seconds, and 100% regen for another 10 seconds, over a 30 second duration. You could theoretically make it so that instead of becoming 600/400/200 over 30 seconds if it hits two targets, it becomes 300/200/100 over 60 seconds instead. In this way, the more targets you hit, the less often you have to use it to get the benefit, or alternatively you can use it more often to maintain the peak benefit. But hitting large numbers of targets doesn't make the peak performance of the power run amok.