Fraktal

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Seriously, both games are missing the "super team" aspect, it's all just gangs led by a couple of supers. Please find a way to do this sort of thing.

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I totally agree with this. It was one of the most surprising elements for me early in COH. I kept wondering when we would stop fighting "gangs" and start fighting a real superhero team, but I don't think I ever did, from level 1 all the way to level 50.

Maybe they figure that's in the purview of PVP, but if so that's disappointing, given that I don't do PVP.

F

Oh I was just explaining why people are grumbling.... Not proposing that they change tankers. Inherently a tank in any standard MMO is more passive than active.

F

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Shouldn't scrappers have the same problem as tankers i.e. they hit stuff and get hit? Tho, they don't seem that they do. Is their "coolness" factor merely a function of their higher dmg?

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OK I am not going to speak to the coolness factor. But just in terms of why don't scrappers have the same problems... the idea is that both scrappers and tankers (and to an extent blasters) are one-trick ponies. Tankers absorb damage; scrappers deal it out. So why are tankers more unhappy?

I think the reason is that the one trick scrappers have is ACTIVE, and the trick that tankers have is PASSIVE. And for most players, active > passive in terms of fun.

F

Picking a guy up and hurling him at another guy would be too cool. I agree.

F

GP,

I don't think the problem is that you can't hold as much as before, by itself. That's true of controllers too. Why aren't they having as many problems/issues?

Because they can do lots else besides hold, and tankers basically can't. As a dominator (controller-esque) in COV, my plant/thorn can single-target hold a boss by stacking 2 holds on him. Once she gets him held, she can just re-apply each time the hold re-charges, and in between those times, can attack, confuse, immobilize, and otherwise deal with lots of other enemies. In other words, she has options. The tanker really doesn't.

When the ONLY thing you can do is lockdown and lockdown gets nerfed in one way or another, it feels a lot worse than when lockdown is just ONE of your duties (along with healing, pet control, etc).

F

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Okay, so I'm not sure what you are saying here. That locking down one/third of the spawn is enough for a Controller, but not enough for a Tanker? If it isn't enough for a tanker, why not?

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I think the problem with it is, that controllers can do more than just lock down 1/3 of the mobs. A *lot* more. I think of my illusion controller friend (I have not ever played a controller past level 10 or so). He got to 50... Illus/Rad. In a typical go at a large spawn:

1. He group invises us (= buffs us)
2. He accel matabolizes us (= buffs us even more)
3. He summons a pet that follows him around.
4. He turns invisible, runs into the middle of the spawn, and flashes them, locking (let's say for argument's sake) 1/3 of them down. His pet(s) that are following him, now go after a few more with an AOE etc.
5. He heals and single-target holds as needed.

Meanwhile, as a tanker, what can I bring to the table?
1. Lock down 1/3 of the mobs and...

....?

Do a little damage? Not enough to be worth even mentioning, really. Beyond that, what do I do.

The problem is the controller can lock down 1/3 of the mobs plus do a bunch more things for the team, including occupying another chunk beyond his 1/3 with pets and single-target lockdowns. All with zero (or near zero) chance of aggroing because he holds (aggro = zero during the hold) or his pet gets the aggro.

Meanwhile, at best I can lock down, and slightly damage, the guys "stuck" to my tanker.

This is why I think tankers are complaning. The only thing they could do was keep things stuck to them, so when keeping things stuck to them becomes hard or less effective, it's a major nerf.

The controller meanwhile, going from full spawn to 1/3 spawn lockdown, still has tons of other stuff he can do.

F

Yeah but Spirit...

That's one mission.

How would he feel if he had to play that character for 3 weeks straight, mission after mission. Would he get tired of how it played, or would he keep enjoying it? We don't know because, so far as I know, he has not tried any such thing.

One mission can't tell you how an AT plays. It gave him a still-shot. We have an entire 2-hour movie. Who has a better sense of the story?

My point was, the devs can tell you what they intended. We can say whether what was intended, seems to be how it actually plays.

F

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They already play incognito with the playerbase, mostly on pickups. This was noted by States himself on the "Ask Statesman"

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Clearly, they don't do it enough. Playing for an afternoon on a random template != sticking with, say, a fire/ice tanker for 20 levels straight.

F

Well now...

Let's remember that Statesman and the other devs (e.g. Geko, Castle) can tell you better than any player can, how the game is designed to work -- that is, how they intend it to play. They can even tell you about how it works under their test conditions, because I'm sure they've tested it.

What players know better is how the game actually plays under real gameplay conditions rather than in theory or in a manufactured test.

And so, the design is that the game should work as Statesman says. But the reality confronted by the players is not matching the design.

And you are right, that the only way to see this, is for them to get off their internal test box, and join live servers and play, not with each other, but with real groups of regular players.

There's a problem of course. If they go in as devs (i.e. known) they will not be able to get "normal" play out of the players for obvious reasons. If they go in "incognito" they will get normal play, but, there are ethical concerns (i.e., they could be accused of "spying" on the player base). So even that is not as simple as it sounds.

Some good time playing on the live servers, even if it's just soloing or grouping with other devs, would be well spent though, I think.

F

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Actually you say that they shouldn't ignore the threat attacking them directly or even taunts. I would agree with this for some mobs. However, to me, there would be some who might given that they're too mindless (Vaz and Hydra zombies and blobs respectively) or given to single mindedness(Cot and Tsoo Demons/Spirits) and strictly disciplined (Council, Nemesis and Malta) under normal circumstances. I thnk a case can be made for some who would by pass normal aggro rules as a strategy for winning.

Does that mean assault of Defenders/Controllers as THE primary targets in all cases? Not necessarily.

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An interesting question in all this is what happens in PVP?

I don't do PVP at all, so maybe this isn't an issue. Is PVP usually soloists in "every man for himself" mode? Or do you get teams fighting each other?

I would certainly ignore the tank and go for the healer/buffer FIRST if I were in PVP, because that's just what makes sense. The tank has the least ability to *do* anything to you, and good luck taking his HP down if he's got someone heal-camping him or buffing him. The defender, however, even buffed is a squishy, and you could seriously increase your chance of winning by getting rid of him first. The controller has all those holds (and the ability to toggle-drop) and is therefore extremely dangerous.

I agree, some minons, like the Vahz, are mindless. These guys could easily follow the normal (current) aggro rules. But any villain with half a brain, and certainly those being directed by LTs or especially Bosses, should be smart enough to size up the danger and figure out the proper order of attacking things, and just by common sense that order is NOT always Tanker first Defender last... and is usually the reverse.

I'd be interested to know what happens in PVP. How do defenders on teams survive without the stupidity of the AI on their side? And if they can survive PVP, then why wouldn't they survive in PVE also?

I'm just curious really.. I don't expect any of this to change.

F

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ANY competent team of ANY composition can do ANY mission without an AV in it on *heroic* without ever being in any significant danger and get xp for it at a reasonable rate.

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I agree with this.

The problem is, people find doing missions on heroic, although good at generating XP, rather boring. What teams are looking for, usually, is some sort of a challenge, but not *too much* of a challenge (it's no fun to die mutliple times a mission, but it's fun to have the risk of dying if you screw up big-time).

I think the problem some tankers are having is that, when the missions are set high enough to provide this challenge to the team, the tanker starts to feel much more squishy than one would expect for a tank. This is certainly not to say you should be able to stand in a room full of purples and your HP bar shouldn't move (as was the case under some conditions before). But if your team is fighting reds and purples, you should be able to tank them well enough to not be in need of *constant* healing.

Example: At one point some friends wanted to do one of the TFs (can't remember which) and my tanker, Liberty Lass, was the right level, so I offered to do it with them. Someone said, "Make sure you get a defender then, because LL will need someone to babysit her and heal her." At this point I bowed out of the TF. Liberty Lass is a tanker. She's *not* supposed to need someone to full-time baby-sit her through a task force on (or near) her own level. That people think she does (everyone agreed she'd need it, and they'd all done the TF before -- I had not) shows there is something wrong.

As the person you quoted also said, what good is taunting or "Gauntlet" if you can't survive the resulting aggro?

I tried to explain this to Statesman in a couple of PMs but I'm fairly sure we did not understand each other, or at least he did not understand me. As a tanker, I expect to be able to go in, taunt the room, and take the villains' alpha strike without dying and without assistance. I don't expect to be able to beat that room of villains, but I expect to be able to stand there and hold them at bay long enough that the rest of the team can finish them off. If I can do that without need of constant healing (sure, once in a while a heal will be needed because of some lucky blows or what have you, but not constantly), then I'm satisified. If I need to be "baby-sat" by at least one healer 24/7 through the entire process, then I'm not satisified.

And right now, I'm not satisfied. For all the good saying that will do.

F

Pretty much, Kali.

Too bad for Statesman I have a memory like an elephant.

F

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Do you guys really listen to our suggestions for powersets, costume options, map, etc....? If so can we have a example?

Oddly, ED came as a suggestion for diminishing returns on the forums. Archery and Sonics were both mentioned.

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I would like to know the name of the person who suggested this...

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I certainly am not presumptuous enough to think that any of my suggestions were listened to by themselves or had any affect on design changes. However, I was certainly one of the people on the forums calling for diminishing returns for enhancements, since about the time I got SOs at first, and saw how easy they made the game.

HOWEVER, in the defense of not only myself but the other people (there were some) calling for diminishing returns, some mitigating circumstances:

1. Mission difficulty settings did not exist back then -- everyone was playing on Heroic, and Heroic was a complete joke once you got a full set of SOs (as we all know, since many of us talk about playing on Rugged+ both solo and in teams on this very forum).
   
2. This was like I1 or maybe I2... there had not only been no defense nerfs but base defenses were buffed around that time for, e.g., SR scrappers and some others.
   
3. Nobody ever suggested a steep drop like they have now. People were talking gradual drops, such as, 33% for SO#1, 30% for #2, 25% for #2, 20% for #4, etc. Not 33, 33, 33, 5, 5, 5 or whatever they did now.
   
4. So far as I know, *all* discussion of diminishing returns was restricted to 'schedule A' (we didn't call it that then)... that is, the 33% adders, on the theory that tripling the base was not reasonable, because it forces people to enhance a certain way (and it does). I don't recall anyone complaining about defenses because defenses, at best, could only be slightly more than doubled. The concern was the RANGE, that the weakest a "schedule A"-enhanced power could be was X, and the strongest it could be was 3X, and how in the world coud the devs possibly balance an enemy for the guy with X and the guy with 3X?
   
5. I, at least, and I know a few others did as well, proposed that they RAISE the base while LOWERING the enhancements. The idea was, make it less critical exactly how you enhance your powers because they start out decent to begin with.

I am quite sure that *nobody* at the time (or ever) suggested slashing the base powers of defenses by 50% or more and THEN slashing the enhancement ability by 50% at the same time. Nobody was asking to lower the total maximum allowable offense or defense. People were trying to argue that the RANGE was making it very hard to balance, and that once you got SOs into all your slots the game (pre-difficulty "slider") was thus too easy.

Once they'd nerfed defenses and added a difficulty slider, neither I nor, most likely, anyone else who had been suggesting diminishing returns on enhancements would've thought it was necessary any longer.

This is all a way of saying that Statesman's comment was technically accurate (I and others did suggest "diminishing returns" for enhancements) but it's totally out of context, because we were suggesting it in a totally different setting, 3 or 4 publishes ago... NOT post I-5.

F

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With 2 SO's slotted, that puts my accuracy at 75x1.66 = 124.5
With an accuracy cap of 95%, I should always be at that vs even con minons- which the streakbreaker chart says I should have a maximum of 1 miss in a row, yet I can easily demonstrate otherwise. Why?

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Clearly, there is a bug, or a set of bugs.

Clearly, they refuse to admit even the possiblity of it, attributing any and all assertions of anomally or odd-seeming behavior to "observer error" (i.e. you notice missses more, and so on) or a lack of true "understanding" of the streak breaker code.

I write computer simulation models for a living. I also have written computer-based gaming engines (very simple ones to be sure). I have spent most of my life paying attention to random behavior and looking for anomalous behavior in a supposedly random milieu. After all that, I look at the behavior of their game, and how "streaky" hitting and missing seems to be, and I can say, "That doesn't look right."

What I lack are the tools to actually generate the data necessary to statistically document it not "looking right" -- but there's no question at all in my mind that if I were to do the data analysis, it would demonstrate beyond question that they have a bug, or a set of bugs, somewhere in their code.

Denial ain't a river in Egypt, fellas.

F

Guys let's remember, just because you do something that means the streakbreaker won't kick in for 100 misses, doesn't mean you're now going to have 100 misses. The odds of your 90% to-hit attacks missing 100 times in a row are STILL astronomically tiny. And the instant you hit with one of them the streak-breaker is re-set.

F

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Did you check your previously posted log file, to see if you ever missed more then 3 times in a row?

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This would be interesting.

More interesting would be to see what the breakdown is and whether the streak behaviour can be explained simply by random chance or not.

F

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In other words, what's the likehood of "cycles" of the same consecutive missing streak also occuring consecutively?

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As an example, someone posted having a demorecord that showed that when an enemy hit, the enemy ALWAYS hit exactly 3 times in a row. Every time a single hit landed, the next two ALWAYS landed. Every single time.

This should not be possible out of a properly-functioning random number generator. It might happen once in a while but there should be mixes of singleton hits and double hits and 4 hits and 9 hits and so on in between. 5 misses, 3 hits, 5 misses, 3 hits, 5 misses, 3 hits, like that... = something is wrong.

F

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Streak Breaker (I just talked to Poz about it
If you miss three times in a row, then your next attack will always hit.

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Then this is bugged. I missed 6 times in a row last night. You need to check it.

F

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As for 'Streaks' any true random number generator exhibits streaks.

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The problem isn't whether there should EVER be streaks (there should be), or whether there should EVER be occasional long one (there should be).

The question is whether those streaks occur with a greater frequency or with greater length than could be explained by random chance alone, or whether they occur with such frequency/length that the statistical likelihood that it's "just bad luck" is near zero.

Again, I'm happy to do the statistical test on this and put it to rest once and for all if you or someone else can provide me with a hit-miss sequence and a KNOWN to-hit probability.

What bothers me is that you guys (and most players) keep testing global averages and brushing aside streaks as "clearly not the problem" or "streaks always happen", but nobody wants to test it.

Let's do the test. How hard can it be? And then we will know for sure.

F

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Over the 4 day weekend, I left my computer running with Eviscerate on Autoattack. (Both my target and my character were set to not take damage so there was no worry about killing each other.)

I attacked a total of 38917 times.
I hit 29275 times.
I missed 9642 times.

That is a 75.22% overall to hit chance against an even level critter with no defense powers.

There is no "Accuracy Wrap Around" -- otherwise Blasters with Targetting Drone + Aim + Build Up would never, ever hit, which is not the case.

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Castle:

I have never doubted the total over a long, long term like this.

But what about RUNS? That is... if you had 29,000 hits in a row followed by 9,000 misses in a row, over your total, you still have 75% accuracy but clearly something would be wrong.

People have noticed things like, "When I miss, I always miss TWICE in a row..." or "When I get hit, I always get hit THREE times in a row, never once, twice, or four times" and this sort of thing.

I think there is a bug that is making RUNS happen, but not affecting the overall percentages (probably because runs of hits and misses are appropriately likely, so a long to-hit run may be likely 75% more often than a long miss run). What players notice is not long-term averages but unusual runs. For example tonight, I missed 6 times in a row with my tanker, who has an SO in every attack, invincibility, AND was using build-up. She should be at least 90% or so to hit in such cases (vs. yellow minions) and so 6 misses in a row seems very odd. When this was followed by 8 out of 11 attacks ALSO missing (each one at least 2 in a row) it starts to look suspicious. Admittedly this is a very tiny sample size, but is there any chance you guys could log not just the NUMBER of hits and misses but also the sequence? It would be useful to have this and test the sequence, to see if the length and frequency of runs is greater than one would expect due to random chance alone.

I would be happy to do the appropriate inferential statistics for you if you can provide me with the sequence. I just don't have the means to track a long enough sequence to obtain the data myself.

F

A giant insects MM set would rock.

A 'villains in tights' set might be cool too, where they look like classical supervillains.

F

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Gone also are the days of random pick up teams, at least for me. I used to pick up the odd team and risk it knowing that if things went south I could handle the aggro. Now I won't risk a team with out knowing the players.

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This is actually an important point.

Many's the time pre-I5 that Liberty Lass stood there and tanked a large group (taking damage but able to hold them off) while the rest of the team rezed and healed and came back into the fight. There's no chance she could do that now.

She still refuses to run, but she does a faceplant 3 seconds after the rest of the team.

F

Edit: Forget it. Not worth continuing the discussion with someone who refuses to actually read my statements.

F

I'm sorry but I made no false statement. I think we've gotten confused. Let's review.

Mieux said:

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But, at the same time, we gain the most benefit from Lucks, though at the low levels, it's probably difficult to notice.


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Notice: "at the low levels"... he was talking about low levels and that how much we benefit from luck is not as noticeable there. My (admittedly flippant) response was that, heck, at the low levels Luck is so much better than our total defense it's like our defense is the minor inspiration instead... by saying:

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At low levels, you could say instead, "Our defenses add a slight bonus to Luck, which is our mainstay." Because think about it... 12% defense with no real slots and only trainers = 12% defense. That's nothing... we get hit 4 out of 10 instead of 5 out of 10. Pop a luck... and now you have some actual defense.

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You then said,
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Except that that's a misrepresentation of the facts and the math involved. Since +def is a additive property (ok, subtractive) to a function that's then treated as a percentage, it becomes successively more valuable the more total points you have. I'll give some examples.

If you're starting at a 50% chance to get his (even con minnion), then the non-def guy popping a 25% luck will reduce his chance to get hit from 1 in 2, to 1 in 4 (cuts it in half). The SR scrapper, who already has say 25% +def from various powers drops his chance to get hit from 1 in 4 to 1 in 20 (he's floored the mnion at 5%).

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So you were talking about a guy with SOs while I was responding flippantly to a comment Mieux made about low level characters.

If you're going to argue about the math with me, that's fine, but let's at least make sure we are talking about the same thing.

In terms of actual math, unless they have changed the formula, minion to hit = 50%. FF is 12% base. With two trainers it's +10% or 13.2 base. This drops a minion's to hit from 50/100 to 36.8/100. Admittedly since I was doing "out of 10", I rounded up to 4/10. Pop a Luck on top of that, now you're at 38.8% base, or you have almost floored the minion (he's at 12.2% to hit). I didn't even say what the with-luck numbers were. I just said, "Now you have some actual defense."

I stand by my statement. At low levels when you have few slots and only trainers, Luck is a much better defense than our entire powerset. That's all I was talking about.

F

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If you're starting at a 50% chance to get his (even con minnion), then the non-def guy popping a 25% luck will reduce his chance to get hit from 1 in 2, to 1 in 4 (cuts it in half). The SR scrapper, who already has say 25% +def from various powers drops his chance to get hit from 1 in 4 to 1 in 20 (he's floored the mnion at 5%).

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Except that we were talking about newbs with no slots and trainers at best, NOT fully slotted-with-green SO people with 28% (effectively capped) defenses.

And the reality is that Arc is right -- it's not symmetric. Anyone can equal my best defense by popping a couple of pills. No other set works like that.

F