Arcanaville

The solo counter-example is obvious: an energy blaster that is getting mitigation from knockback is virtually guaranteed to have better performance than one that doesn't, because we already know that the average blaster was skating at the edge of survivability when last datamined. My own personal experience backs that up, but even if I'm an anomaly, the data implies this is true on average.

The most obvious teamed counter-example is the case of one melee character and one ranged character. Lets assume the melee character possesses the knockback. Crane Kick is a good example: it has about a mag 6 KB at level 50: I once measured that to throw a target about 20 feet or so at even con. Lets assume the more floaty physics engine throws the target 30 feet. At level 50, with swift slotted with one run SO, player run speed is 30.8 feet/sec. That means the worst case scenario is a one second gap in offense. However, that's the worst case scenario. The ranged attacks could defeat the target leaving the melee to switch to another target. The target could be knocked in the general direction of travel in which case much of the distance the melee character moves is distance the character would have to run anyway: it costs zero net time.

Lets assume the average offensive penalty is about half of the time to cover that knock distance: about half a second. That compares to about five or more seconds of damage mitigation. That's a ratio of ten to one, and that's probably being conservative.

But, you might object, the melee might not need the mitigation. Fair enough but we can't simply handwave it away: doing that says damage mitigation itself is always worthless, so only offensive benefits count. There's no point in discussing KB in that environment, and for that matter there's no point in discussing most whole archetypes in that environment. There has to be *some* conversion of offense to defense. And a ten to one ratio makes it difficult to state that the mitigation is not worth at least as much as the offensive penalty.

Lets flip this around and give the knockback to the ranged attacker. The ranged attacker could conceivably knock a target that was in range of the melee character out of range. That won't happen all the time, but at least sometimes. The question is whether the incremental benefit of having or not having the knockback is better. Leaving the knockback in, the target is knocked which affords five or more seconds of damage mitigation to one or the other player. If this is the ranged attacker, we're presuming for argument's sake that's noteworthy. If this is the melee attacker we're presuming this is less noteworthy, but still significant if the ratio of mitigation to offense is high enough.

Why would the ranged attacker shoot at a target the melee character was engaging? There are lots of reasons, but the most intelligent one is that there isn't anything else to engage. If that's the case, the knockback is inducing a small penalty.

But this is the case of KB's effects once the fight is fully engaged. What happens at the beginning of the fight? In this case, with one ranged and one melee attacker its a foregone conclusion that the ranged attacker will be able to engage first, in theory. In practice, the ranged attacker may not want to. Doing so will mean he or she gets the initial aggro, and the ranged attacker may not be able to withstand that initial aggro. The ranged attacker may decide to let the melee attacker attack first, and only engage targets whose aggro is already occupied. That creates another variant of the situation above.

But if the ranged attacker can attack with attacks with significant mitigation, that equation changes. In that case, the ranged attacker can attack first, using their ranged advantage, and that increases the amount of damage the team can deal overall. Removing that knockback entirely means you reduce those pulses of offensive penalty at the end of the fight, but you also reduce the opportunity for the ranged attacker to leverage range at the start of the fight. Those are purely offensive counter-balances, completely separate from the actual benefits of having more mitigation during the fight. Without doing a quantitative analysis, it seems likely to me that the net difference between the offensive advantage of frontloaded mitigation and the offensive advantage of lack of knockback disruption roughly cancel out: enough to make the mitigation component itself preeminent.


The general principle is that solo, there are far more ways for knockback to work in your favor than against you. In a team, there are far more ways for knockback to work against you than when you were solo, but there are also far more escape hatches for other players to nullify that disadvantage. That's one of the reasons why herding is not as popular now as it was in the past. Although the lower aggro cap plays a role, another factor is that the perception became increasingly obvious that AoE wiping out one spawn at a time was faster than the time to combine them. That amount of AoE also tends to saturate the environment to the point where a couple knocked targets do not have a big difference in offensive kill speed. In the same environments where the damage mitigation effect can become unnoticable, the scattering penalty can become equally unnoticable. That's not a coincidence, because the value of damage mitigation in a team with a lot of buffs is inversely related to kill speed (the phrase "a lot of buffs" is there because that statement is time-scale sensitive: its false for situations with longer time scales).

Actually, you're going to have to be very very specific here. Your original statement, and your last statement here, is that Knockbacks' advantages do not outweigh its disadvantages. I'm prepared to tackle that one. But if you're just going to fall back to "knockdown is better than knockback" which you just said is all you've ever said, then I should interpret your other statement in that context and assume you misspoke, and meant to say that knockback's advantages above and beyond knockdown do not outweigh its total disadvantages.

I'm not prepared to expend energy on that one. As I said, not dying is better than dying also. You can always find something better much of the time. Holds are better than immobilizes, for example. Critters that don't shoot back are far less of a threat than those that do. So first we can replace all the immobilizes with holds, and then eliminate the need to waste time with holds by just removing all the attacks from critters. There's no slippery slope here because there's no slope. Knockdown is better than knockback in the same way holds are better than immobilizes. Holds that always work are better than ones that don't in exactly the same way. Holds that always work are tantamount to critters that can't take actions. At no time does this slope upward or downward in any direction.


Now as to whether knockback's advantages outweigh its disadvantages exactly as stated, the reason I can think that is because if you put my energy blaster in a situation where knockback is essentially gone, such as when facing resistant enemies, if I don't significantly reduce my difficulty I die. Simple as that. And no amount of less scatter equals dead. If you converted all my KB to KD would my performance be better? It might. It would also improve if you doubled all my damage and I guarantee you I will have more fun with double damage and KB than with KD.

TL;DR: I can think its true because its true.

I've been right plenty of times in opposition to the collective wisdom of the playerbase, but in this case there is no collective wisdom of the playerbase that states knockback's advantages outweigh its disadvantages. The collective wisdom of the playerbase, to the extent that there exists any consensus here, is that its annoying and should be removed on that basis.

In either case, to disprove the statement that "the advantages of Knockback are not worth the disadvantages" I need only come up with a counter-example. But rather than do that, it would be more definitive to prove the inverse: that knockback's advantages outweigh its disadvantages on average, across all situations.

That's going to take some time, however, since there's... about fourteen different independent cases to consider.

Tractor beams seem the most straight forward approach, after first removing all the hazardous materials and then cutting up the hull. I'm sure the Federation's old buddies the First Federation could just plain yank the entire wreck into orbit and frisbee it into the Sun if they wanted.

Another possibility I thought was likely when the movie first came out was that the Federation would quickly quarantine the area (millions of tons of military hardware are lying at the end of a giant ditch) and then the star fleet corp of engineers would set up something like a temporary solar powered orbiting station with a space bridge that could easily transport the Enterprise in pieces into orbit, for salvage or destruction. Something like the equivalent of an orbiting oil drilling platform. Or, I suppose, something like Nero's ship in Abrams' Trek.

Tangent: I haven't used the 2012 edition, but Acronis has given me some unexplainable fits over the years and sometimes it just plain sucks up too much resources while its backing up for some reason, so I moved to ShadowProtect. Acronis' interface is a lot better, but I've found ShadowProtect to be much more bulletproof. That's important in any continuous incremental backup system and periodic verify is nice. A combination of the two would probably be the perfect backup solution.

Although, part of my opinion of both is due to the fact that I have to use these things in enterprise environments as well, and in enterprise environments I think SP is significantly more solid than Acronis.

My guess is that Avengers does about 60 million domestic this weekend, and I give Battleship about 50% odds of beating that mark for the weekend.

Unless you blame it on the law of conservation of mass.

Its a statement of fact, and its false.

Its possible I had it backwards and the message is actually a right to left stream with a 10 start, in which case the message is an IP address that resolves to a system within the Federal Express core network. But I assumed an MMO based entirely on delivery missions would be too depressing.

All good game designs - all of them - offer choices to the players that do not have obvious optimal solutions**. Choice with obvious optimal solutions are not real choices, at least none a legitimate game designer should take credit for. The most obvious way to provide non-trivial choices to players is to atomically bundle different things that cannot be identically optimized. Basically, that's the heart of advantage/disadvantage game design that no one alive has found a way to improve on, and I think is very likely to be mathematically impossible for any game that values player choices explicitly within its design.

Knockback is one of those rare effects in City of Heroes that is tactically neutral: it can have advantages or disadvantages depending on how it is deployed and depending on the skill of the player, and depending on the particular situation it is used in. Eliminating or greatly curtailing that aspect of knockback would be a case where the devs elected to take one of the few mechanically correct things in the original design of the game and nullifying it for no game design benefit. If the only game design benefit is "players would rather not see scatter" I reiterate that more players do not want to die, and accepting one preference without accepting the stronger one and altering the design of the game around it is not something I would be proud to put on my resume.


** Anything that doesn't offer such choices might be good, but its not a game

A few do, but I don't see how the source of the effect is relevant. More directly, many things in the game have as their *primary* intended effect an attempt to kill the player.

Some people don't like scatter but I'll bet even more don't like dying. And yet the game explicitly tries to kill you, while it does not explicitly force you to scatter enemies nearly as often. I should not have to state the obvious, that just because players don't like a thing that does not mean the game would be better without that thing, and therefore any attempt to argue the justification of a game element by appealing to the percentage of players that explicitly enjoy that game element is, or at least should be, worth exactly nothing in and of itself to a game designer.

Clearly, Zwillinger was trying to transmit a binary message encoded in his laugh, and in fact the H's and A's form a four octet binary message with a 01 stop, the exclamation mark emphasizing the stop. That can't be a coincidence. The binary message is 168 213 85 85, which is clearly an IP address, which resolves to an address within the PCS-FLA block, which is assigned to the Pinellas County school system in Florida.

Obviously, Paragon Studios is working on a scholastic MMO where players level students from level K through level 12. Its unclear if it is an archetype-based MMO or a skill-tree based MMO although it does appear to have tiered content with gating and strongly discourages PvP.

I'm not sure its a casual-friendly game, since the website suggests the "vision" is for 100% of all players to reach the level cap in a fixed amount of time, and participation in the end game appears to be almost mandatory. Use of the exemplar system is strongly discouraged.

It looks like it might have The Dark Knight's legs, or maybe even a bit better than that, which would imply Avengers eventually coasts to a $650million-ish domestic tally like six months from now.

The international appeal of Avengers seems to be much higher though, which means that could translate into about $1.5, $1.6 billion worldwide. That would project Avengers to be the third highest grossing movie worldwide after Titanic and Avatar.

I think it would be difficult to surpass Titanic and take the #2 spot in this original release of the movie.

I'm all for it, but technically I should have said the game allows characters to die. It also allows players to die as well, but even fewer players are effective after death as characters are.

Most powersets also lose effectiveness from dying. Willpower, Dark Armor, and Fiery Aura are notable rare exceptions. Why does the game allow players to die?

The cottage rule requires that the devs not change the execution mechanics of a power, eliminate a primary effect benefit of a power, or alter the order of a power within a powerset, without a balance-significant reason for doing so that cannot be satisfied in any other practical way.

That definition is canonical, and neither the gravity changes nor the stalker changes violated the rule in any way.

I am unaware of any such specific rule, except to say that of course the average such defeat times of all existing sets for a particular archetype is logically going to be near the devs' intended target, and some of the game's bedrock damage and health tables are designed around the assumption that when slotted with SOs it takes three to four attacks to defeat an even con minion for an archetype with base damage (i.e. damage modifier = 1.0).

Since the Earth is in orbit around the Sun, why doesn't Mjolnir stay in place when Thor isn't holding it and burrow through the Earth?

The way I look at the enchantment of Mjolnir, however any being describes it, whether that's Thor or Odin himself, those are just an English description of what the enchantment actually does. The words have to be translated, sort of like a program, from English to either some form of supertechnological implementation or a magical one. But either way, the technology of the magic probably does something much more complex than the words themselves.

The joke above illustrates the point: can God make an rock He can't lift? Translate that to Odin: can Odin make a rock that cannot be moved and then a weapon that cannot be stopped? What happens when they meet? The answer is: something happens, but what happens depends on the exact enchantment each really possesses.

Consider Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Much of Asimov's robot stories were based on loopholes in those laws, or cases where the laws were implemented in a way that did not anticipate a very unusual circumstance. One story posited that as robot was programmed to obey the laws by giving them weights, such that each law had a much higher weight than the successive laws forcing the robot to obey the highest weight law. Then one day the robot was faced with a situation involving a very weak command (law 2) and certain destruction (law 3) and the weight of law three became high enough to equal the weight of law 2, causing the robot to become deadlocked between the two laws.

Similarly, Mjolnir is somehow enchanted to obey its commandment ("only those worthy may wield you, and in doing so gain the godly powers of Thor") but how the hammer attempts to obey that enchantment is, in some sense, a black box program we don't know the details of, and have to extrapolate from what we see it do.


I'm pretty sure if Mjolnir was on the moon, and Superman pushed the moon, Mjolnir would continue to rest on the surface of the moon. I suspect, though, that if Superman tried to move a small enough portion of the moon Mjolnir would then resist that motion because it would interpret that as an attempt to lift it. But how Mjolnir makes that determination is probably unknowable.

I think hoverblasting is an independent thing from sniping: in fact in my experience they have very little tactical overlap (although I used to do this pulling thing in the STF where I would snipe-pull one of the AVs by initiating a snipe from hover and then detoggling hover to yank myself out of line of sight rapidly, I don't think that counts).

Hoverblasting works best when you have counter mez: it works really well if you are energy blast, and if you can manipulate the enemy AI and are in the right setting it can be practically cheating. Outside of those circumstances, its an ok tactic made far less useful than it used to be by the devs when they decided long ago that shooting at things that couldn't hurt you back was something that should only be true for controllers and tankers.

And what makes you think I'm ignoring the fact that you're playing a version of Staff sufficiently different from the other three versions that any perceptions you might have as a result of gameplay would not be directly generalizable to the other versions, even though your commentary on the set is not restricted to that specific version alone? I simply did not reference it, given the fact that the point I did make, which was that you apparently had no experience with any of the four versions before making your initial assertions about the set, superceded that observation.

And I do not accept your characterizations of your follow up posts as being "just" anything. They were explicitly stated by you to represent the justifications you had and the analysis you claimed to have done to reach the conclusions you did, in a completely unambiguous and impossible to misinterpret way. Several times you defended those calculations as being the foundation for your belief that your opinions were not just subjective in nature.

In fact you yourself repeatedly stated that your assertions were not just opinions, but something significantly stronger than that:

Here you state, in no uncertain terms, that your evaluation of Staff is not based on subjective feeling at all, but based on the analysis you presented. And when you do that, you cannot simply state that the various calculations and analyses you presented were just tangents to some other point. They were, and are legitimately a valid point of contention when presented as objective and foundational analysis.

Subjective opinions and perceptions are one thing, but once an objective analysis is presented as such, its fair game to be countered with objective counter-analysis. And while you can attempt to repudiate their importance without actually withdrawing them, as I mentioned previously this has a negative impact on credibility. And ultimately, the forums are not populated by a collection of fact-checkers. Most people cannot triple check every single calculations and logical argument for errors. Most of time, readers have to choose to accept most of what they read based on their assessment of the credibility of the speaker: there are insufficient hours in the day for anything else most of the time. Whether someone is credible has no impact on whether they are right or wrong, but it has a huge impact on whether anyone will care if they are right or wrong in the long run.

Both Tony Stark and Howard Stark were partially inspired by Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes married Jean Peters in 1957 when Hughes was 52 and Peters was 31.

Hughes' life also provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for Tony being born in 1971. Hughes' first wife divorced him in 1929, and he was a known partier and womanizer throughout the 30s and 40s. Also, while Hughes met Peters in 1947, it was Peters who put off a relationship with Hughes because of her career as an actress. An analogous thing could easily have happened to Stark: many failed relationships and attempts at relationships before finally finding the right woman in the late 60s, after he had settled down a bit himself.

(Hughes did not have children with Peters, but the timing is the critical element here).

Then there's that, which is at least for me synergistic.

Your consistent level of certainty would greatly simplify discussions, if it was contagious.

I think Banner would have said that whether he remembered or not, since his last memories are probably being on the Shield Helicarrier, and then sitting in a crater on the ground; I think he'd have put two and two together.

Although in the Incredible Hulk movie Banner does say that he sometimes gets flashes and impressions of his time as the Hulk, but no details, maybe like a dream you can't quite remember.