Arcanaville

I give up trying to figure this one out. Please explain how the announcement about the freebie friday program was misleading. Please explain how an announcement that doesn't in any way mention what the program items were going to be could have overpromised anything. Please explain what your expectations were for a stated test of a pilot program that hadn't been finalized yet was going to be and how this test failed to achieve them.

As it does for me at times, when it comes to creating characters. But all I'm saying is that its likely most people who hate knockback are likely to avoid sets with lots of it. Not all of them, just the majority of them.

You must be reading a different set of posts than I am. What obvious fact has A_F asserted that everyone is disagreeing with? If its this one:

Or the ideas surrounding it, I suspect people are disagreeing with the specific portrayal rather than the underlying mechanics. It also suggests there's nothing in between the completely disinterested and the hard core marketeers. I suspect there are a lot of people who efficiently *use* the markets without specifically manipulating them. For most of the existence of the markets, that accurately described my relationship to them. For those people, they can have full awareness of the markets mechanics without explicitly acting to "take advantage" of other players.

On the other hand, if you're referring to more or less any of A_Fs replies to my posts, you'll have to be more specific because all of those are complete rubbish.

But my suspicion is that the problem Another_Fan has is that he's compelled to disagree so strongly that he's easily maneuvered into saying blatantly false things just to disagree, which tends to rub people the wrong way because its so transparently combative to do so.

I suspect anything I type smells like trail mix and candy bars, but Pareto aside it seems like Fourspeed's analysis and mine converge around the 100 trillion influence mark, plus or minus a factor of two (Fourspeed guestimates 150 trillion inf), which was Fourspeed's original lower estimate of merit in the first place. If that is true then that is roughly consistent with the devs report of 12 trillion inf for Scrappers and there's no obvious contradiction there. The current anomaly is that while I think there are reasonable explanations for this, that estimate presumes a far lower net influence earning rate than earnings-based estimates suggest, and it suggests weath concentration far higher than traditional estimates would ordinarily project.

I think at this point barring new data, some of us are casually wondering what can cause these anomalies, while some - I think Fourspeed in particular - is wondering what fundamentally causes the CoH economy to at least appear at odds with the behavior of normal economies. At this point I'm currently wondering what other possible avenues for data collection exist that might not have been explored yet. I've been fighting a cold recently so I haven't finished looking at prestige yet, and I'm not sure if that data will show anything specific in any case.

Probably non-exclusively.

That's likely to be true, but I'm not sure how to connect it to the statement "most of the people who hate knockback don't tend to play energy blasters." I still don't see how its at all likely that most people who play energy blast could possibly hate knockback when knockback is its signature secondary effect. Every single attack deals knockback: it can't be avoided by selecting attacks that don't have it.

My guess is that most players don't have strong feelings either way, so the statement "energy blasters would rejoice" is already on thin ice, but even if most people did have strong opinions energy blast itself would seem to self-select players that like knockback.

*Some* energy blasters might rejoice (and the number is certainly non-zero) but saying "energy blasters would rejoice" when the number is almost certainly a minority seems highly misrepresenting.


So setting aside the general discussion of knockback, the statement that if the IO was global energy blasters would rejoice seems unlikely. Its likely that whether the number of players that like knockback is high or low, they would be concentrated in the sets that actually have it. Its likely the many of them would not use it at all. And of the ones that do, there is no reason to believe that they would not want to do so specifically for a select power rather than all of them simultaneously.

I like KB and my favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip. Are you saying that since you hate KB and you play characters with a lot of KB that you believe most people who hate KB play characters with lots of KB anyway, or are you saying most don't but you're an exception, or are you saying you believe that somewhere among the words I've typed I said that there exist no players that hate KB and play any character that has a lot of knockback, and you are attempting to provide a counter-example?

Or perhaps they are just not marketed well.

Actually, I believe that is the little-used archaic formal way of saying "and why, exactly, I'ma-be using MY army to fight Longbow?"


Alternatively, perhaps the game believes this is how you sarcastically reply to people commenting on your eloquence as judged by brainwashed people.

Its also possible DC didn't think the suit had merit, or may have even realized it was counterproductive. Marvel was working with Microsoft on a Marvel MMO at the time, and the thinking was that Marvel was suing NCSoft as a way to hobble the competition. But the gist of their lawsuit (the core parts of it anyway) was that the City of Heroes character creator could be used to make reasonable facsimiles of Marvel characters. Had they prevailed at trial, the legal precedent would have been set that game operators would have to make certain their character creators *could not* make infringing works at all, which would have been nightmarish for Marvel itself - and DC.

It was obvious they were going to lose when the presiding judge threw out all evidence of infringement created by Marvel and its agents themselves. In doing so, the court implicitly was signalling they were going to rule on the basis of whether NCSoft itself infringed on Marvel copyrights, and not whether it created tools which could be used to do so. So only the acts of NCSoft itself or its customers were relevant, and possible infringing works created by Marvel itself were not.

As to the issue of policing infringing works, NCSoft never explicitly won the right to allow its customers to create infringing works. In fact the opposite is true. If I recall correctly they argued safe harbor that as a service provider they could not be held responsible for the actions of their customers provided they took reasonable steps to deter infringement. Whether they won or lost the lawsuit would not have altered their responsibility to continue to police the game for infringement, as has been suggested.

As much as I love energy/energy, when this was debated way back when I was forced to conclude that, even before I had significant experience with the combination, the case for electric/electric was strong enough that it probably held the advantage over energy/energy as a blapper combination back then. Its probably the second easiest blapper to make work in some fashion, after Sonic/Energy.

Actually, either you are saying exactly that, or your "not really" statement is false. Because if you are not in the majority of players who hate knockback but play energy blasters, my original statement that people who hate knockback tend not to play energy blasters would be true by reasonable inference.

That would be the incorrect lesson. What's damaged is not the conclusion, but the efficacy of the methodology.

When you test to see if a stove is too hot by touching it and burn your hand, the wrong lesson to learn is to not touch hot stoves. The right lesson to learn is to not check to see if something is too hot to touch by touching it.

The people who were accumulating a billion inf and then spending it on apocalypses were not hoarding. The ones whose net liquid influence continued rising faster than they were generating influence through gameplay were net influence sinks: leaving the game would remove a sink.

If you're going to troll, try to at least read the entire post you're going to troll first.

I suspect the people who hate knockback don't tend to play energy blasters. Which makes your last statement highly suspect.

The simple connect the dots analyses of NCSoft revenue numbers were projecting this game would be dead in 2007, and 2008, and 2009, and 2010. That tends to damage their credibility somewhat.

I would prefer a video myself. I suspect that half of that comes from draining the minions and the rest comes from blapping the bosses, but its difficult to say without a blow by blow analysis of the fights. But I should point out that both /energy and /electric blasters were blapping through missions long before inventions existed and long after ED was instituted. I suspect you're either underestimating your skill or overestimating the average skill of City of Heroes players.

If you are talking about influence in circulation as opposed to simply existing, then I think the influence whales aren't really influence sinks when they quit in a net sense. And the reason is exactly what you mention: that most players accumulating influence at a relatively high rate is likely to be accumulating influence faster than they are creating it, which means they are a net influence sink while they are playing in the first place. Quitting takes that influence "out of circulation" but its debatable as to whether it was genuinely in circulation in the first place. The people who reduce the pool of circulating influence are the spenders, not the hoarders, when they leave the game. More specifically, its the people who create influence through gameplay and then spend it that contribute the most to increasing the total amount of circulating influence in the game.

I should point out that Shocking Grasp has almost twice the DPA of thunder strike, but more importantly unless you have freem levels of recharge using one rarely precludes using the other as well. Shocking Grasp plus Charged Brawl deals far more damage than Thunder Strike in significantly less time. But regardless, a blapper would be using all three to significant effect.

Except the devs themselves. The devs have tossed out numbers that imply the amount of influence in the game is on the order of about 100 trillion inf. The question is whether that estimate is correct. One possible source of error is the devs could have merely counted only the amount of influence stored on characters (a relatively easy thing to datamine), and not included influence that exists not on characters, such as in global mail and stored in the market in various forms.

If we assume there's three major likely pools of influence - character storage, market transactions, and global email - if we assume the devs at least counted character storage, that leaves global email and the markets. We don't have good visibility into global email storage, but the combination of the limited number of storage messages and the expiration of those messages make them a poor long term storage method. Its likely that amount of influence is low relative to the amount stored in the markets, presuming the amount in the markets is significant. That leaves the markets themselves.

So formulating a decent estimate of how much influence is likely to exist in the markets is useful for constraining the sources for possible error on the part of the devs' influence reporting.

To be precise, because this conflates a lot of things into the same wording:

1. Blasters by intent are intended to fight in melee range at least some of the time.

2. Blasters by design are not very good at it in most cases.

3. Blasters by observational datamining appear extremely bad at it in most cases.

4. Blasters by dev acknowledgement do not consistently have the tools to survive in melee range effectively, without levels of skill considered very high relative to the average player.

So whether Blasters are a "melee archetype" depends on what you mean by that. Are they intended to fight in melee range sometimes? Yes. But then again you could say that about many controllers. Are they given the tools to be effective as a melee ranged archetype? Speaking as someone who has played their main as a blapper for six years out of eight, I would say no.

The criteria for proliferation is not how many powers you can reuse, but rather how much work it would take to make a proliferated set. Those seem related, and they generally are for melee sets: if you can reuse most or all of the attacks proliferating from scrappers to stalkers, that implies there's not much work to do to proliferate. But that's because there's very straight-forward rules for proliferating a melee set from scrappers to stalkers and tankers and brutes, or vice versa. Because blasters manipulation sets are all over the map, and because both players and developers are unhappy with the general state of them, there aren't the same trivial rules for proliferation. So even if you can theoretically reuse a lot of powers, there aren't specific guidelines for how many to keep and what to add. A manipulation set is not a minimally altered melee set, like stalker melee sets are relative to scrapper sets. Because its no longer a case of just porting but re-engineering that tends to mean that they are not good automatic proliferation candidates. That doesn't mean they can't proliferate those sets, but it does mean they won't be proliferated like most sets are: they will be constructed to be manipulation sets and called "proliferated" but they will be proliferated mostly in general concept. Even when powers are reused, a lot of thought will go into *which* powers are reused, which makes those powers not as free of effort as it may seem.

Possibly. There is something to consider from the opposite direction. The game design role of being defeated is to act as an incentive to avoid being defeated. This psychological pressure to avoid defeat (at least most of the time) is generally what gives combat any meaning for most players.

If the visual representation of defeat has the impact you conjecture it does (and it probably does) that would suggest that the presentation of death was providing a significant component of that game design element of psychological avoidance. And that suggests that the mechanical penalty of being defeated can be lower than it would have to be to satisfy the same game design requirement if the presentation of defeat were more palatable.

Something to consider from a holistic perspective. Death/Defeat is there for a reason, and its logical to ask if the way defeat is presented assists in satisfying that requirement, and conversely what removing it would then logically mean. Our death penalty is pretty light as those things go; so light hard core MMO players essentially do not notice it at all. But casual players do, and specifically for them its worth wondering if part of the reason our death penalty can be mechanically low is because the presentation of defeat is enough to motivate them to take combat seriously enough to be meaningful to them.

1. Every developer adheres to the cottage rule. Every developer has, from Geko on down.

2. Long before there was a "cottage post" *I* posted the exact wording of the rules that comprised the "cottage" rule without calling them such, in reference to people making suggestions about radically altering powersets. Those were the rules Castle was *given* and understood he was required to operate within, long before he had the authority to make any such design rules himself. The notion that the cottage rule was either an invention of Castle's or that he was its primary adherent is actually extremely far off-base. As the design lead, the ultimate enforcer of the cottage rule is Positron. There would be no cottage rule if Positron didn't agree with it. Positron is singularly responsible for the design latitude of all of the game's designers.

3. Defiance and Vigilance have never violated the Cottage Rule. First of all, their creation cannot, by definition, break the cottage rule. Since that time, neither power has had a major effect removed, and neither power operates differently (they are both passives).

4. Mentioning Defiance and Vigilance suggests you don't know why the cottage rule exists. It basically exists because of the First Law of MMOs:

* No matter what it does or how it works or when you can use it, someone loves everything you make, and someone else hates it.

The fact that everything is hated by someone means you'll hear complaints about everything. The fact that everything is loved by someone means every time you change something you'll piss off someone else. The cottage rule is the *only* design rule that protects players. The *only* one. It says that the devs should not change something in a negative that will radically alter something players already have unless there's a very good reason for doing so. And that rule exists within the context of the rule that players should expect certain kinds of changes as a matter of course. Numerical tweaks to powers, for example. The rule covers changes larger than that. It covers changing clicks to toggles, or changing heals to defensive buffs. This is done only as a last resort as the devs see it.

Not as you see it, but as they see it. And every change you mention is either a change that did not remove an effect from a power (i.e. making Dark Armors non-exclusive is not a cottage rule violation because it does not in any way remove an effect from the player), numerical changes (which the cottage rule does not address), or stated to be related to balance (the most dramatic of which was probably the addition of Singularity to Gravity).

Its your opinion that the changes made to Stalkers could have been made in other ways, but the cottage rule doesn't mention your name or mine. Even so, what change made to stalkers was a cottage rule violation? I can't see one myself. What was removed from Stalkers without a good balance significant reason? What power changed mechanically in terms of its execution? What power changed its tier of availability? Those are the only three things the cottage rule covers.


But this bears repeating: the cottage rule is the only design rule, to my knowledge, that protects players. Every other design rules essentially tells the designers to either "do what they think is best" or "do what we've done in the past." One, and only one rule, says "don't change things players expect unless you have to." And laughably, its the rule that players ask to be repealed the most often. As if it was just a scribble on a piece of paper that could actually be repealed, and not an expression of the values of the developers that make the game that is not mutable.

In any case, the cottage rule does not stand in the way of anything except unnecessary changes. It protects some of the players from some of the other players that assume they know what the entire playerbase wants.

And of course, the rule is invoked by the players far more than the devs. Because while players may guess at what are and are not cottage rule violations, the devs themselves almost *never* state why they elect not to do something. They only say why they did do something after they've done it. They never say why they don't, because they know those reasons could change and what they don't do today they might do tomorrow. And they don't need to wade through all the nonsense of people throwing back their own reasons at them from long ago that aren't relevant any more.

More often than not, the reason why the devs aren't doing something a particular player wants isn't because of the cottage rule, but just because at the moment they don't want to. Think of all the things you aren't doing now, and ask yourself how many are because you just don't want to. That's the reason 99.9% of the time for the devs also, but no one wants to believe its just that simple. Probably because their idea is obviously so good the devs need more reason than that.

I never said anything about what the IO did or didn't do. If you like it and are going to use it, great. I'm not begrudging any player that wants them and intends to use them. I can see some powers where it makes a lot of sense in fact.


However, if you're going to attempt to justify its existence with statements like "its completely optional" I'm free to challenge that statement, for instance by asking if the fact that its optional should have any bearing on whether its a good idea. Are all optional things, or even most of them, good for the game? Conversely, why are bad ideas better if they are made optional?

Lots of options would not be: in particular things that break the design or balance rules of the game, but were made optional for players to follow. That's the sort of thing that would kill the game remarkably fast: fast enough for me to bet real cash on.

There are lots of reasons why this IO is not good for the game in the long term. Probably the most significant reason is that its existence is tacit acknowledgement that the players expect and can continue to expect the game to present conditions where its true that KD is generally better than KB, and those are situations where moving the target is almost never better than leaving the target to move as it wills, because its almost always going to move in an idiot manner that always benefits the player.

The devs may be conceding the point, or they may be ignoring the point, but either way they won't tell us. Either they'll change it one day or they won't, and if they do they'll argue they never said otherwise and the players will say that they signalled it would never change by designing the game around the notion that critters will always move in best manner possible for players most of the time. And they'll both be right, but in a much more important way they'll both be very wrong.