Black Scorpion
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Posts
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Joined
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Black Pebble asked me what your shirt meant - and I realized I went to the same university. Small world.
I'm going to miss it too. -
Quote:1. The badges system got its data from two general places - one was special "buckets" which didn't start being tracked until they were created by a badge, and the other was general character data which always existed. Badges given upon first login in I2 would have been possible for things like the story badges which were given out b/c a player had a specific souvenir clue (general character data) or reached a particular level (general character data) - but healing and kills were all "buckets" which were only established by the creation of badges which started counting them. Pretty much if we weren't actively storing something in the database, it wasn't countable. Even if a stat was possible to be automatically tracked (kills of a certain VG, for instance) it wasn't actually stored in the database unless a corresponding bucket existed, and the buckets were only made when a badge which examined that bucket was added to the game.Originally Posted by Interface
Thanks for the info. If this is going to be an 'ask a dev technical stuff' thread, two other things have always interested me. When Issue 2 launched, players were given a bunch of badges as soon as they logged in, which meant the game had been gathering data for a long time, probably since launch. My question is, in addition to the stuff you got badges for, what other information was datamined? Missions taken? Inspirations used? Blind invites received? Times jumped?
Second, something I was wondering since day one. Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems that when you use an inspiration in combat, and another drops seconds later, it's more likely to be of the exact type you used. Is there any mathematical truth to this, or just my whiskey-fueled ravings?
Once again, thanks to ALL the devs for a great time!!
There were many "layers" of datamining, some of which were more in use than others. There was a major project underway when everything shut down to fix/improve/retrofit the various layers into something more befitting what we needed. We did track number of missions completed on individual characters, and we had a general bucket for salvage earned/consumed across an entire server, as well as general stats for TF/Flashback completions, times, etc. Datamining tended to be put in as needed for new systems - Incarnate Trials got their own special logging, the Market got some other, and so on. Insp use, jumps, invites weren't tracked by any of those systems.
2. No, there was no code or data that could have caused this. I would hazard this might have been just happenstance and confirmation bias at work. -
Quote:The actual point where MARTY would kick in and stop you was extremely, extremely high, by design. Lower (but still high) rates drew our attention, but didn't engage the panic button. As we resolved the biggest systemic issues, we would have reevaluated the rates over time.Originally Posted by Rent_
Black Scorpion, can you tell me a bit about MARTY? What did you Devs consider 'too fast' for powerlevelling? And when would the XP start to be restricted. I was still powerlevelling characters quite fast and never noticed any reduced XP.
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Quote:We had no effective means of counting pet management, so as part of the design we gave a AT weighting factor to MMs (and a lesser one to some other ATs IIRC). We tuned it up several times, but it became difficult to judge if it was at a good place or not because a lot of the feedback was mixed between how it had been and how it was after the changes. I would have been interested to know if it was still happening after about the first or second patch following Keyes, which is when we increased the MM weighting factor. Sorry for the lousy player experience on that.Originally Posted by MrsAlphaOne
AAH but it was completely broken when it came to Masterminds. They did not calculate Pet involvement. My husband ran a Merc/FF MM during Itrials and if he wasn't constantly spamming bubbles he got the "Thanks for coming" Table. Even if he was actively managing his pets and not guarding and charging.
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Quote:I'd have to look at when they got put into the map files for a more accurate guess, but some point (pre I15) Praetoria was just a 1-7 early game experience, so them being Rift Enclosure exits makes sense. Strange they would have shown up so early, though.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Thanks for posting all this, Black Scorpion. Some very interesting insights here.
Speaking of odd things in maps, any idea what (if anything) was planned for the hidden, normally inaccessible portal warehouses in King's Row and Port Oakes?
The ones in Talos and Sharkhead that only Praetorians can get into kind of make sense if they were intended to be Rift Enclosure transit points before that got scrapped, or possibly the destination for the Go to Primal Earth mission, even if the door isn't the same place as the transition missions drop you off at. -
Quote:Almost certainly a bug with a misplaced door volume or some such, or an unfinished easter egg plaque. Game thinks your cursor is over an interactable, but there's nothing actually hooked up to it. If it had the door prop it would have done the generic "You Cannot Enter." Would have to look at the map itself in the editor to know why.Originally Posted by Interface
Thanks for the info. This, right here, embodies two of the best things about CoH; that the devs were constantly coming up with more quality of life improvements, and that they actually talk to to the players. Most game designers seem to think the players should be thanking them for taking their money.
If you're still there, there's one tiny thing that's been bothering me for months now. In Studio 55, on the middle floor is a small off the way bar with a pair of restroom doors. Over the ladies' room door is a select volume (the cursor turns to a blue hand), although clicking it does nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/8KkEP.jpg
What was planned for this? Would Bobcat run over and attack if a male character clicks it? An unmarked mission where Snakes slither out of the toilets? Personally, I was envisioning a Deus Ex type scenario the next time you talk to Calvin Scott. "By the way, $name, stay out of the ladies restroom. That kind of activity embarrasses the Resistance more than it does you." -
Quote:Should have remembered the previous presence, that behavior sounds like a bug. The system shouldn't have ditched the history that quickly.Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
So did the system know that you went through stages 1-3 of the UG; then dc then come back for stages 5 (maybe even 4-5) or was it a "fresh start" when you entered back into the iTrial?
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Quote:Likely all of them. We may have done some sort of partial thing where each 1 character you had with the accolade counted as 20% of the benefit from that accolade - the idea being if you had 5 of them you'd get the accolade on all your characters. I think the level restriction would have been something small, like 4, just to keep you from getting them in the tutorial or really early on.Originally Posted by Interface
More account-wide stuff would have been great. One of the few things that irked me was, for people with alt-itis (i.e. everyone), grinding out the accolades on every alt was sometimes a chore. 100 Fake Nemesi here, six Task Forces there, and don't even get me started on Geas of the Kind Ones.
If you don't mind going into what-if land, would it have been within the realm of possibility for Accolades to be account-wide? (subject to level restrictions).
A lot of the 100 kill X badges we had some thought experiments about what we could do there, but it came down to the fact that most of our creative ideas didn't work well with preserving people's currently earned credit towards that badge, and we wanted to be backwards compatible with the changes.
I would have liked to see the "ungettable badges" become account wide. DOPE and Doorbuster were examples of how I wanted that to unfold, but they were both hacks compared to how I wanted it to go. -
Quote:We tracked how long you were engaged in the trial (in case you joined midway, for instance) and if you were active.Originally Posted by Kractis_Sky
can you tell me more about the reward tables for incarnate trials, how they were awarded etc?
If you were marked as "not active", you got the 10 threads table. This calculation was the source of much controversy outside of the studio, but Baryonyx and Positron worked tirelessly to ensure fairness - it was very heavily weighted in the player's favor and made substantial accounting for all ATs. (This isn't to say we never had any bugs with it, but that was the design intention as I recall).
The calculations for stages engaged in the trial were crafted for each trial individually, and we did see some strange results on occasion - the system was resilient to disconnects but esp. in the early days of I20 when the TUT could accidentally send you to someone else's mission map it proved to be not *that* resilient. This did have an effect on what mix of rarities were in your reward pool at the end of the IT - and at least for a brief period if you were only in for say, a very short time, it could give you 10 threads as well, but I am hazy on that point.
At the end, if you were "active", you got to roll in a pool based upon stages engaged - this looked something like 40% Common, 30% Uncommon, 25% Rare, 5% Very Rare if you were there for the whole time. Partial time looked like 60% Common, 30% Uncommon, 10% Rare. -
Quote:Probably the Gang bug at work. We were cleaning up bugs caused by needing to allow Vigilantes (internally Heroes) to seamlessly team with Villains on Villain maps (and vice versa with Rogues) for a very, very long time. When we came up with systemic fixes, flawed (but "worked at the time") data was exposed that needed to be fixed. The hostility system on COH was not really equipped to handle what Going Rogue needed, and it tended to show.Originally Posted by Kallandra
I remember someone in a team I was on summoning Amy Jonsson to help out in a particularly difficult mission. She turned up, and we all thought she was going to help..... and then she slaughtered the entire party.
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Quote:Technically, if we had done it it would likely have been similar to a respec/second build process but with resetting even more decisions on the part of character creation. 50% of the work would have been in UI at least. Likely it would have been presented a high value MTX to cover the amount of work that would need to go into it, but even then it was likely to be too rare to pay for itself, I imagine. (And the opportunity costs of someone full respeccing instead of making an alt also came up in discussions)Originally Posted by Liquid
Thanks so much for all your work on the game, Black Scorpion. I wish we could have seen everything that you had in store for it.
Edit: I see you mentioned the possibility of powerset/AT respecs. Was that actually planned/in the works? Can you say how would it have worked?
Design wise, it also wasn't being pushed for because a) it did have a high technical cost, and b) we didn't want to diminish the value of alts. If we had managed to get more of an account wide inventory concept, a lot of the reason to full respec would have gone away, in my opinion, and I tended to push more on that angle because it seemed a closer goal. -
Quote:Waypoints were always sent to the client in terms of the final destination - just the X,Y,Z of where you were to go. The pathfinding beacon system would try to construct the actual shown waypoint at whatever transitional doors stood between you and the destination. This system had some edge case problems - the pathing could get caught in a loop sometimes, but it worked most of the time. It's also possible from your description that it was trying to do the pathfinding "too early" - as in, while you were inside the door instead of just outside of the door - and that's why it was pointing back at the door you came from. Logging in and out would cause it to remake that path at your new position, which would be valid.Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
Okay just thought of a long standing 'bug' that's been out ever since CoV was released (or the first issue after cov forgot).
In Seer Marino's arc, you get a mission in Mercy Island to do whatever (look for info on Ghost Widow ?).
That mission is inside an actual building in Mercy. Kind of like St. Martial Giza temple missions.
You complete that mission and the next mission you get is also in Mercy; however, the UI marker for the mission is off and has always been off. If you look at the mini-map, I think, the marker was correct but the actual in-game UI marker was in/at the doors into and out of the building you were in.
Only logging out and then back in "solved" the issue.
What's up with that?
Actual bugs with that pathing were terra incognita, we no longer had enough knowledge around the team to figure out how that system worked on the level of comprehension necessary to resolve it. It would have been first rediscovery then resolution - and the rediscovery task never seemed worth it in terms of time investment, considering how apparently minor the issues were. It could have been a trivial fix, but the knowledge of where and how to find that trivial fix in the system was not in anyone's head. While we did push a lot into those darker areas, some (pathing, collision) were still very dimly understood.
It's also possible the system that send the next waypoint to the client was broken in some way. There were some ways to advance a task (delivery tasks/dialog trees) that weren't 100% on the "oh and now you have to send all the updated task status stuff to the client" portion of doing things. Again, logging in and out would cause the server to resend all the client data from scratch, which usually fixed those sorts of bugs. -
Quote:I'm guessing the stat being checked was total time, and the method you were checking that was clicking on an NPC and being told your total time that way. (if this is inaccurate let me know and I'll try to think about how that was done instead). It was pretty much just a count of seconds stored on your character and updated each time your character was saved to the db. If that count was accurate in the db, then the output method probably had some sort of bug - that was probably traceable. If the count was not correct in the db, then there was some sort of subtle db container bug - and that usually rated a complete table flip on the "scale of how hard this bug is going to be to fix" meter.Originally Posted by Lobster
For years(?) there has been some kind of bug with the character age recording. I can't tell you what triggers it, but the result seems to be that the characters age (in hours) gets shifted one decimal point. So say a character that I just *coughPLd* will be 67 hours old. I didn't mind this so much for new alts...but it made it impossible to find out how much time I put into some of my old alts.
Any idea what was going on here?
I reported this bug at least twice and I'm pretty sure the response both times was "there is no bug". -
Quote:All tank powers were AOEs. They had to be so that the thought behind Gauntlet works - the power hits everyone in say, a 15 ft radius. Then each element of the power (the mods) had a definition for who it affected. The damage, secondary effect, etc would say radius 0/0 - code for "primary target only", so it would only damage the person you punched. The taunt effect would not have a radius defined, so it would hit everything in the 15 ft radius.Originally Posted by Rangle M. Down
Can you tell us what was up with Gauntlet causing hidden to-hit rolls for tanks in PvE content?
The powers system didn't know when it was making To Hit Rolls if any of the mods inside the power would actually affect who it was trying to hit, so it would roll the To Hit anyway and let the mod code see if anything actually happened as a result. I think all of those To Hit rolls would be reported, so I imagine that is what you're referring to. And I am also pretty sure they contributed to streakbreaker, so it was probably undesired that such things were happening off "powers system trickery" like the above.
We had a lot of situations where "power system trickery" was being used to do useful script-like things, but kept tripping on embedded assumptions in the powers system. For instance, we used a power on all of the Incarnate AVs to scale some aspects of HP and damage based upon how many active players were in the mission/trial map. At some point this power, even though it's "hit" was merely incrementing a script counter, started being treated like a normal attack by the AI - thus you had pets charging Marauder as soon as he appeared - after all, he just "attacked" them! -
Quote:Allies on missions, rescued and "kidnap" npcs, scientists in Warburg (well technically that was a zone variant but it shared a lot of script), Desdemona. Anything on a mission that followed players around. It was all driven by the same root script - designers just filled out some various parameters. It had several interesting quirks.Originally Posted by Angry_Citizen
What is the general escort script? This sounds scary. Ha.
Since it was "one size fits all" it was relatively difficult to change the behavior without possibly breaking all escorts in the game. This happened distressingly often. -
Hello Villains and Heroes,
I am rather late to the game when it comes to farewell posts. Largely because I, like several of the devs, did not want to believe what I was hearing and experiencing, was true. As soon as I posted this, it would mark the end of the chapter. Over the years Ive grown to know just about every little part of this cantankerous virtual metropolis known as City of Villains / City of Heroes and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible and one of the most awful moments of dawning realization was when I realized Id have to stop plugging away at the mantra of FIX ALL THE THINGS that hung on my wall. That Id never get to show Dr. Aeon, Arbiter Hawk, Viridian or Protean a new cool thing they could do. While it is a small industry and we may work together in the future, it will be different.
So after spending all too much time dwelling on what has been lost, I figured Id take some time and focus on the good memories I had plugging away at COH. I would like to try and answer your unresolved questions regarding systems and technology as best as I can I know Positron collected some of that with regards to lore previously, but RL intervened (Scorpy has to buy his armor polish somehow) and I have not been as available as Id like to be. I will try to keep up on this thread and answer additional questions, to varying levels of technical exactitude based upon what I can recall. If you want to know more about something, ask - but if you ask a lot of questions, expect brief answers.
So here are some untold stories and useful facts Ive always wanted to tell:
Woofers
Woofers was invented during the first Player Summit while I was idly bantering with players between sessions. The first canine companion had been introduced, and I wanted to start the rumor that a canine Freedom Phalanx member was soon to come. With the aid of the players, Black Pebble, the community team and the content developers, Rex Woofers gradually filtered into our lighter side of the lore. We often joked about when he would appear in game, but I figure eventually it would have happened as he was beginning to grow on people.
Branforth the Seer
I wrote the Branforth the Seer Omega Team letter. It was one of the first pieces of content I did after coming on board. Horatio (Bruce) vetoed several stanzas which referred to prospective / potential future content. Some of this made it into the game or was planned.
(Moonbase, total powerset/archetype respecs, Battalion)
To guard us all from threat of doom, forces gather upon a moon,
Cosmic rays will unmake their fate, allowing transformations great,
The shooter comes a swordsman now, ice-woman takes the healers plow,
Beautiful creatures must be slain, before they see their homes again.
(Water blast, water control, etc, and an underwater base or zone, Coralax/Leviathan content, Pandoras Box)
You cannot breathe; you gasp for air, while trapped in underwater lair,
Legends old and gods will sleep, consort with creatures of the deep,
Aqual powers shall rise once more, joining the fight upon our shore,
But none can save that fateful box, which is resealed and cased in locks.
Oil Slick Arrow Fix
Originally this Oil Slick Target spawned the fire patch after being defeated. This occasionally failed under heavy load. The best guess as to why was that somehow if the map was busy the dead target wouldnt get a chance to do its post-death AI on the same tick it died, and that the system would never retry the post-death power missing the window entirely and spawning no fire. I restructured the power such that the Oil Slick spawned the Target as a pet, and had a power which it could use to target its dead pet once and only once and had this pseudo rez spawned the fire patch. After that the problem seemed to disappear.
Anti-Matter suck in the Keyes walkways
No one knew our pathfinding and collision code well enough to figure out why this was happening. We boiled it down to AM getting interrupted in AI fly mode (ignore all collision) and switching to AI walk mode instead. Our code protected against things trying to walk with their head in collision or their feet in collision, but didnt work in the case of straddling collision like AM could sometimes do. The hack fix was to make him never ever leave AI fly mode under any circumstances. A similar bug happened when the mobs inside the Keyes bunkers used AI jump mode (ignore collision, natch) to escape through the doors there was probably some arcane art to preventing them from being able to jump out of prison cells, but no one knew what it was and we couldnt figure it out in time. We had to go with it as was, and stay away from entity-doors in other content. I dont think we would ever have been able to dig into that area deeply enough to fix it.
Badges
I loved writing the new badges trying to fix some badge issues. Originally we werent planning on having Praetorian specific badges or variant text for some badges after changing Alignments, but I added them in anyway. I really wanted to elevate many badges to account-wide status and had a low-priority technology project simmering that would have made that happen. Technical implementation of the badge system made going back in to improve how older badges worked a dicey proposition.
Null the Gull
Null was the practical realization that some things that were technical issues could actually be resolved without additional technologies needing to be added. I did want to get his features in a more natural and useful form, but I more importantly wanted the features out there, somewhere, even if it was a giant hack. One day I would have fixed it.
Things I Wanted To Fix
- Incarnate components and other rewards could have been greatly simplified. More account-wide aspects. I wanted to do a currency consolidation and revamp project across multiple systems, and some true salvage consolidation.
- A system so we could more easily add new features to Mission Architect.
- A more flexible UI framework so we could actually improve UI without impacting core technology time.
- Consolidating TO/DO/SO scale enhancements into a streamlined system.
- Transition some elements of powers, AI, and UI to our new scripting framework.
- Veteran time and more out-of-game promotions like referral bonuses and special codes.
- A hot script system so we could add some minor content without a build. (This would have been extremely handy given the current circumstance )
Top Five Bugs- Wielding people as weapons.
- MARTY becoming self-aware and going haywire.
- Base Items becoming self-aware and attacking villains.
- Having the fix to Base Items go horribly awry and cause them to attack everyone.
- Discovering two unrelated bugs in the general escort script that resulted in the script having kind of, sort of worked for *years*, because they just happened to be broken in a very particular way. The analogy is discovering a collapsed bridge after an earthquake, and realizing the additional earth and the rubble made a fairly smooth path over the chasm.
Thank you for your dauntless efforts regarding #saveCOH and AP33. Several times since I first heard the news this armor has come close to rusting. Every moment has been a treasure.
Until next time,
Your pal in the high-powered armor,
Tim Black Scorpion Sweeney -
Hey all,
Just popping by to confirm that Primal Duray's teleport is at a base 2 minute recharge. However if Praetorian Duray (or a clone) is alive he will refresh the cooldown of his buddy Primal Duray's teleport much sooner than that, leading to more teleports.
So yes, the people reporting it one way and the people reporting it another way are both right.
Your bud in the high-powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
Quote:I am now. I will look into it. Thanks for the information.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Black Scorpion, are you aware that this same 100% DR thing happens with The Honoree in the Lady Grey TF? His Unstoppable comes back pretty fast. It's not unheard of for LGTFs to effectively fail because they brought too much L/S damage to that fight.
Your bud in the Incarnate powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
Quote:There is a line missing from the patch notes:Originally Posted by AquaJAWS
Do you not get 1 merit for acquiring all 10 acids in a standard run? It only mentions grenades.
Are the 2 merits for completing the Antacid and Well Stocked badges occur in addition to the 1 merit from defeating Marauder?
Do the merit counts for the standard run assume you also kill 30 of the adds that come in?
* 1 Merit will be awarded when acquiring 10 Acids.
Each element listed there is independently awarded (for instance, 10 grenades + 30 reinforcements + Marauder = 3 merits. Antacid (which includes 10 acids) + 30 reinforcements + Marauder = 5 merits in total.)
The "standard run" = 4 merits does include the 30 reinforcements merit. (10 grenades + 10 acids + 30 reinforcements + Marauder)
That was the intention. His static resistance and his Berserker Rage power stacking to over 100% was an oversight. His Unstoppable will still push past 100% for that period, though.Quote:Originally Posted by enderbean
Also does the change to Marauder's S/L resistance make having scrappers and brutes on a MoLambda run feasible now?
Your bud in the Incarnate-powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
Hey all,
Interface procs should have been obeying the standard 10 second per proc in toggle/auto/location power rules from the start. The fact that they weren't was the result of a bug which we are addressing with this patch. Any information I or anyone else at Paragon may have given to the contrary in the past was in error: The intention is that Interface procs behave as close to "having a proc IO slotted in all powers" as possible, and we are making these and the future changes to better achieve that intent.
The issue that rain powers are now only hitting 1 target per 10 seconds is a side-effect of the fix which we will be addressing in a future build. Rain powers should have chance to hit all targets with the proc (but only one "round" of application per 10 seconds across all powers of this category).
Your bud in the Incarnate-powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
Hey all,
Interface procs should have been obeying the standard 10 second per proc in toggle/auto/location power rules from the start. The fact that they weren't was the result of a bug which we are addressing with this patch. Any information I or anyone else at Paragon may have given to the contrary in the past was in error: The intention is that Interface procs behave as close to "having a proc IO slotted in all powers" as possible, and we are making these and the future changes to better achieve that intent.
The issue that rain powers are now only hitting 1 target per 10 seconds is a side-effect of the fix which we will be addressing in a future build. Rain powers should have chance to hit all targets with the proc (but only one "round" of application per 10 seconds across all powers of this category).
Your bud in the Incarnate-powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
Quote:Credit towards the assist badges is never reset by the WST changes. Once you've gotten "credit" it stays with you.Originally Posted by Zwillinger
I'll get someone to respond here to this question, if I can.
What will reset is the fact that you've done your first WST already for the reward period. After this change is made the very next time you run the WST you will get the double merits and XP or a Notice if eligible, but not credit towards the assist. Any credit you earned previously is still yours to keep.
Your bud in the high-powered armor requiring weekly tuning,
Black Scorpion -
Yes, some players will see the Respec badges appear in their "Most Recent" window again when they log into Issue 20 - a consequence of making them accessible to side-switchers properly.
Previously the badges were tied to earned and used respecs (which just happened to be only accessible via those trials), now they are tied directly to running the Respec Trials content itself - 1 for 1, for a total of 6. The respec mechanics themselves weren't changed.
Hope that clears it up.
Your bud in the badge-covered powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
Quote:Yes. When Issue 20 launches any level 50 with Going Rogue can participate in the Incarnate Trials and earn progress towards unlocking the Incarnate slots. This includes Alpha; you can earn the unlock via Incarnate Trials instead of going through Ramiel's arc.Originally Posted by Lady_Sadako
So does this mean we will be able to run the Trial with alts that we want to turn into Incarnates instead of putting them through Ramiel's arc?
Your bud in the high-powered armor,
Black Scorpion -
The check for in combat actually is checking if you were hit by a hostile power recently. There is a special map-wide power in Ouroboros which technically counts as hostile as the result of a minor unrelated technical limitation. In Issue 20 we made a fix to the limitation and can now flag powers like these as not counting as hits for purposes of things like suppressing Hide or triggering the in combat slotting check and related cooldown. Ouroboros is on our list of places to make this fix, but if you know of other maps that are causing this it is probably the same cause and the same fix, so we would like to know about them. Thanks in advance.
Your bud in the high-powered armor,
Black Scorpion