CormanStark

Just so it's not just the dominators talking about this, Gravity Control is going to get, if not love then a little bit of distracted affection according to Arbiter Hawk.
New Grav Tweaks

The Wormhole changes are nice, though WH suffers some from GC's internal inconsistencies (trying to have KB and lockdown in one set), and the other changes are small, but okay. There are still two problems not dealt with by these changes.

Dimension Shift - The toggle helps, but whatever benefit is gained by taking the mobs out of the fight is largely negated by teammates wasting attacks by trying (and failing) to take them down. Single biggest help? Make DS'ed enemies untargetable! It would be nice if you could make the status aura unmistakable, but when scrapperlock or blaster ????* is in full swing, people are just tabbing the targetting block and trying to mow down the baddies.

Propel - Impact is nice, as is the shortened animation. But seriously? The KB is useful once in a while. It really doesn't synergize with a control set that dumps heavy KB resistance on the potential targets. Thematically, a chance of a short term disorient would work (I just got hit with a forklift!?!) and would actually be of some benefit with immobilized mobs.

Well, as long as this has been raised from dead as a shambling undead mockery of all that is holy and right in the world, I might as well enjoy it!

I've seen many requests for a vehicle power pool. I'd be happy with alternate power animations for existing powers.

Flight: Mini-copter, jet pack, flying hover board, flying carpet. We have many wings now!
Super Speed: Motorcycle, horse (not likely!), hover (ground effect)/skate board.
Super Jump: Pogo Stick? (Help me out here!) We already have Piston Boots as a costume effect!
Teleport: Warp effect (walk into portal), tunnel/dig effect (if on ground at source & destination), blurred line connecting source/destination.

I'd be willing to pay for a "Travel" pack with animations like these! It would be worth more to me than a Party Pack!

Same here - video freezes, audio continues - very frequently when interacting with the UI. I managed to halt the client three time in a row in Peregrine City just by mousing over Detective McLeod in the contacts window. This definitely seems to be related to something unstable in the UI.

Not the first, not the last, but definitely somewhere in the middle!

I wouldn't mind seeing some feed back on one of mine:

Title: Punk 'n' Pie
Author: Desdinovab
Morality: Heroic
Level Range: 5-14
Arc ID: 148847
Description: Some of Paragon City's most vicious street gangs have put aside their differences and banded together. It's bad enough keeping them under control when they're fighting each other. If they get organized, there'll be big trouble!

I've been noticing this more lately: Sometimes walking NPCs, both enemies and civilians who are not aggroed will engage in a kind of crouching walk (very Groucho Marx like) for a few steps before reverting back to a normal upright walk.

I keep expecting a cigar and a wisecrack to follow, but I've been disappointed by both.

Ohhh! Can we get Randy Milholland to give us some of his heroes and/or villains from "Super Stupor"? (Being that the main cast of "Something Positive" are far too evil to be cast as megalomanicial omnicidal masterminds)

[ QUOTE ]

I of course would NOT publicize what the 'seed' value is. Otherwise the 5-star and 0-star cartels would know what to shoot for.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, that's more a question of removing outliers. One way of doing that once you have about 20 ratings or so would be to throw out the top and bottom 5% of the ratings, and then calculate the mean based on the middle 90%, which we hope is more representative of actual player reaction.

Interesting note: I saw in an Arcanaville post that the actual mean rating for arcs out in the wild is 3.6.

Tickets to claim come from other people running and rating arcs that YOU have authored. You get 5 tickets per star, and they can be claimed by any of your toons. You can decide how many to claim when click, so if you had 30 claimable tickets, you could claim 17 on one toon, and 13 on another.

For those of you with insanely high geek levels, here's the test code I used in Ruby to create the above output and to play with different parameters.

Most of you should probably just pretend I never posted this.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
class Critic
def initialize
@count = 0
end

def rate
@count += 1
if @count == 1
0.0
elsif rand(3) == 0
4.0
else
5.0
end
end # def rate
end # class Critic

def mean(sum, n)
sum.to_f / n.to_f
end

def beta_reduced_mean (sum, n, min_sample, default)
n2 = [0.0, (min_sample-n)].max.to_f
(sum.to_f + (default * n2)) / (n.to_f + n2)
end

def run(trials, default, critic)
ratings = total_stars = 0.0
1.upto(trials) do |trial|
ratings += 1.0
total_stars += stars = critic.rate
mean = mean(total_stars, ratings)
final_rating = beta_reduced_mean(total_stars, ratings, trials, default)
yield trial, stars, mean, final_rating
end
end

puts '-' * 55
c = Critic.new
run(15, 3.0, c) do |t, s, m, r|
print "#{'%02d' % t})",
" | #{'%0.0f' % s}",
" | #{'%0.0f' % m}(#{'%0.2f' % m})",
" | #{'%0.0f' % r}(#{'%0.2f' % r})",
"\n"
end

puts '','',''
</pre><hr />

This is a proposal for an alternate means of calculating and display the overall rating for an arc in the mission browser. It is derived from a formula that is used in QA to prevent exceptional conditions being reported when the sample size is too small to be statistically valid.

[color= orange]Warning:[/color] Moderate level code/math geek levels! Run!&lt;&lt;tweet!&gt;&gt;

The current method of calculating the rating is to take the mean average. This is calculated by summing up all the stars given the arc and dividing by the number of times the arc has been rated. Classic stuff, it can be coded as follows:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
function mean(float sum, float n)
return (sum / n)
end function
</pre><hr />

Of course, this has the problem that the first rating given to the arc has a completely disproportionate effect on the rating until other ratings follow. An arc with 1 five star will come up before an arc with 19 five stars and 1 four star. But griefers and cartels aside, the second arc is probably more reliably considered to be of high quality.

In other words, for small sample sizes, the mean is too volatile, or has too much beta which means it jumps around too much to get a good idea of what the real value is. One way to counter that is to assume that the arc is an average (3-star) arc at the beginning, with a history of say, 30 ratings behind it already, and let the actual ratings move it away from that value. Here's a first pass at that idea:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
final_rating = beta_reduced_mean_naive(total_stars, rated_count, 30.0, 3.0)
output(final_rating)


function beta_reduced_mean_naive (float sum, float n, float min_sample, float default)
return (sum + (default * min_sample)) / (n + min_sample)
end function
</pre><hr />

It's not bad, and as the number of real ratings grow, the seeded rating become less and less important. However, we can do better. We can't actually reach 5 stars (or 0 stars) no matter how good or bad the arc actually is. And if we have 60 real ratings, then about we have 90 total real and seed ratings, with 1/3 of them not reflecting reality. Furthermore, the impact of those 30 seed ratings never completely goes away. So, what we do is change the code so that as we gain real data, the seed data diminishes in absolute as well as relative value, until it goes away completely. Here's our improved function:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
function beta_reduced_mean (float sum, float n, float min_sample, float default)
float n2 = max(0.0, (min_sample - n))
return (sum + (default * n2)) / (n + n2)
end function
</pre><hr />

If this is run with the same parameters as above, then the first time it's rated it will give the same value, but when the number of real ratings is 30 or more, n2 is zero, and the seed data is completely ignored.

Here's my pseudo code for a test driver to the function. You can adapt this to any language you want, and try playing with different values for the number of trials and the default.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
function run(float trials, float default)
float ratings = 0.0
float total_stars = 0.0

float trial
for trial = 1.0 to trials step 1.0
ratings += 1.0
stars = get_player_rating()
total_stars = total_stars + stars
mean = mean(total_stars, ratings)
final_rating = beta_reduced_mean(total_stars, ratings, trials, default)

output(trial, stars, mean, final_rating)
next trial
end function
</pre><hr />

Here are some results based on assuming a history of 15 3-star ratings as the seed value. The columns are: Run #, rating given, stars w/ current mean method(same, showing 2 decimal places), stars with beta reduced mean method(same, showing two decimal places). For the ratings, I assume a common, aggravating complaint - you have a good arc that generally gets 4 and 5 star ratings, but the initial rating is a griefer or has some mission fetish ("I always 0-star any mission where I have to click a glowie!") and zero stars you. See how the last two columns begin far apart, but converge to the same value.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
01) | 0 | 0(0.00) | 3(2.80)
02) | 4 | 2(2.00) | 3(2.87)
03) | 4 | 3(2.67) | 3(2.93)
04) | 5 | 3(3.25) | 3(3.07)
05) | 4 | 3(3.40) | 3(3.13)
06) | 4 | 4(3.50) | 3(3.20)
07) | 4 | 4(3.57) | 3(3.27)
08) | 5 | 4(3.75) | 3(3.40)
09) | 5 | 4(3.89) | 4(3.53)
10) | 5 | 4(4.00) | 4(3.67)
11) | 5 | 4(4.09) | 4(3.80)
12) | 4 | 4(4.08) | 4(3.87)
13) | 5 | 4(4.15) | 4(4.00)
14) | 4 | 4(4.14) | 4(4.07)
15) | 4 | 4(4.13) | 4(4.13)
</pre><hr />

If this method of calculating ratings is adopted (I can dream!), I would strongly encourage the concurrent adoption of Arcanaville's suggestion that no ratings at all be shown until 3 or so ratings are in the can. Otherwise, you get a strange situation were the first rating is given, and both the giver and/or the author are wondering how you get a "3" out of a "5".

Note that this does NOT get rid of the issue of having many griefers and/or cartels forcing high/low ratings on the arc. That's a completely different issue altogether. This is simply designed to reduce the wild ratings jump when an arc is enduring its initial ratings.

A comparative rating system is probably the best (where the player is simply asked to decide which of two arcs is better) solution of all these issues, but is awkward to implement in a way that works well for the user.

I ran into this with a "Pledged of Steel" from the Legacy Chain.

For Mission Architect:
MA Arc Finder - Global cross server chat channel for finding and promoting mission arcs. Some helpful creator chatter about mission design and promotion - very helpful people. It's for real stories. Not farm friendly.

Right now, MA seems to be done completely. I'd hold on to your tickets for now.

I'm surprised no one has picked up on this:

[ QUOTE ]
5. Can you talk more about Dev Choice vs. Hall of Fame?
...
3. We also have a third tier of stories which we will talk about at a later date.

[/ QUOTE ]

PURE BASELESS RAMPANT SPECULATION FOLLOWS (i.e. the usual)

Maybe some missions will be ... real? In some sense of the word or another.