Mind Forever Burning

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Hmmm. Count me as someone who's confused about this thread. You said you wanted to review arcs that had been poorly rated by Venture ... and then you go on to review a work that had 4 stars.

Since when is 4 stars a bad review?

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That must have been an oversight. The stated intent was to play and rate only arcs that Venture gave 3 stars or less to. Clearly I didn't double check that submissions were following the rules. Which one was this?

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KD, two questions for you: Did you come up with this idea becasue you played arcs reviewed by Venture and found that your taste in arcs differed greatly from his? How often did you agree with his comments and how often did you disagree?

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Basically I wanted to try to see how fair Venture's reviews were. He seems at first blush to be overly colored by personal tastes (dislikes for Nemesis and time travel, etc). Overall it seems like I'm a little more generous than he is. Also, it's pretty clear that different reviewers are going to have different likes and dislikes, so it's very possible to get a bad review just because you caught someone the wrong way.

Link to original review?

Hm. I remember that entry popup, and only got the impression that I'd tried to simply not do the mission and gotten "rubber banded" back into it, so to speak.

Either way, though, destroying the pedestal would've been one of the first things I suggested, and Azuria still should have listened to me if I had a whole pile of amulets. If I'd done the mission hundreds of times those things should've come up before.

This past weekend I said my final goodbyes to a good friend and fellow gamer.

I won't go into the personal details; that's not why I'm writing this. I will say that, although he was not a City Of player, he attended GenCon and Origins for most of the last ten years and many of you who go to those cons have probably seen him around.

He was admitted to the ER with extremely high blood pressure, which had weakened his heart to such an extent that he required immediate surgery. He never recovered. He had just turned forty.

I know it's a stereotype to say all gamers are overweight. Still, I know from personal experience that gaming can be extremely sedentary, and the social structure around it can lend itself to poor eating habits. Those factors along with our general societal trends can put gamers in a pretty high risk category for obesity and its related health problems.

Please, take care of yourselves. Get some exercise. Eat leafy greens and other vegetables. Get regular check-ups from your physician and follow his or her advice. And encourage your friends to do the same.

Respectfully,

- KD

Apologies for the dry spell. I've had a lot of other things on my mind.

Arc #2622, "A Tangle in Time"
tl;dr: 3 stars
Pros: Intriguing use of MA, some character development
Cons: Powerposing, plot inconsistencies, borderline Idiot Ball, unsatisfying ending

Reviewed: 6/18/2009
Level range: 5-54
Character used: lvl 36 SS/WP brute (pretending to be heroic)

I'm going to keep the summary short on this one, since a lot of the action is somewhat self-explanatory.

Azuria approaches you saying an Oranbegan ruin excavation has revealed a powerful artifact which can affect the time stream. She wants you to visit the site and use an amulet she's given you to "lock" it from use by anyone. You wander the site (which is actually Cimeroran, not Oranbegan, but really that's a good thing), talk to some police officers (actually custom characters), fight a mysterious figure named Mobiosea, and apply the amulet to the artifact, a pedestal. At that point a ghostly voice (nit: I thought it was the 2nd police officer talking to me, since he was right there; that was confusing) warns me to back off. Of course it turns out to be the only way to end the mission, so here goes.

Whoops. Returning to Azuria gives you exactly the same mission text as before, and she sends you back into the same map with the same tasks. The flavor text is different and the map is short so it didn't get tiresome. You go through everything again, though this time Mobiosea (clearly intended to suggest Moebius - kudos for avoiding Significant Anagrams) taunts you more directly, saying he'll only let you out of the loop if you kick out all the PPD from the excavation site.

Third time's a charm? Nope. You follow Mobiosea's instructions and defeat all the PPD this time (?!), but you're still stuck.

Returning to Azuria, you show her all the accumulated amulets she's given you and she suddenly believes you. Not only that, she knows who Mobiosea is and sends you on a mission to stomp him, this time in an actual Oranbegan map (contrary to the mission entry pop-up, I was *not* pleased by the change of scenery). You do so, with the predictable non-result.

Finally you decide the heck with it, you're just going to destroy the pedestal over Azuria's objections (despite her having instructed you to do just that in Act Four, though you never got a chance). You do so and then face Mobiosea one final time, and then you're free.

On the final map you encounter the two custom police officers who'd been present in Acts One through Three, only this time they're clearly borderline insane from having been put through the same wringer you were. The handling of their characters and the transformation between One and Five was quite good, and I gave the mission a plus one star for this.

Let me start off by saying I was initially predisposed to like this arc. I quite enjoyed Groundhog Day, which was clearly an inspiration. But I really feel like the plot just doesn't work. My character fell into lock step with Mobiosea too easily**, when the obvious solutions - showing Azuria the accumulated amulets, or even just going ahead and destroying the pedestal - were staring me in the face. This is the borderline Idiot Ball I mentioned in the tl;dr line. We might also throw it to Azuria for failing to listen to me when I said I was stuck in a loop the first time - after all, we're dealing with a time stream manipulation device! - especially since she turns out later to know exactly who Mobiosea is.

In addition, it's pretty unclear what Mobiosea's power (or its limits) were by the end of the story. It's also unclear why you got caught up in the mess to begin with, since Azuria's amulet was apparently not a threat to Mobiosea. I think there's a considerable amount of Fridge Logic in the plot and if the author sat down and thought things through, they'd realize that events unfolding the way they do here just isn't the most likely outcome given the characters and setup. That's a problem, and one that would require a major rewrite to fix.

I do give kudos for the two custom police officers, though. Their dialog and transformation was the most entertaining aspect of the arc for me. I almost wish the arc were structured as an attempt to free them from their loop, rather than myself - that would have felt more heroic and might have lent itself to solutions for some of the other plot problems.

** I note that the police officers who were being "killed" in the original script are now merely "defeated" and medicom'd out, but still...

Are you sure the factions in "Origins of Power" offer bonus XP? I have this weird feeling you were getting boosts from patrol XP without realizing it, especially if you've been in the MA with that character for a while.

There is a bug with arc bonus XP which could also explain it, though I don't know for certain whether the Origins of Power arc has this bug. (I know Croatoa blueside does for sure, and at least one of the RWZ arcs.) But that's very definitely a property of the arc completion bonus and has no effect on per-critter defeat XP.

Oh, and that technique where you don't have to return to the contact between missions? That's not an Ouroboros mechanic per se, it's present in early content from initial CoH release (and so is reflected in that content when run via Ouroboros). The only problem with it is that you earn mission bonuses on each "segment" of the mission as if you were on Heroic/Villainous, which can be a penalty if the contact wasn't very far anyway.

Finally, I agree with you regarding that arc's writing quality. Frankly, nearly all of the content released since NCSoft bought the property has been sub-par IMHO. I don't know if you've run the VEAT arcs yet, but ugh, they are embarrassingly bad.

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Set enemy group alignment to "Rogue" (Which makes the escort hostile), and set combat abilities to "Pacifist" (So the escort won't aggro on the player). Now you've got an escort that the player can choose to fail, but it won't attack the player so they have a choice whether they want to complete/fail the mission.

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Huh. Now I've got something I need to try.

Your suggestion ties RP/plot elements to game reward mechanics. I think it would be better to separate them.

BTW, you can nearly recreate the second scenario using a regular MA mission that the character exemplars down into.

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Noticing the AV was hostile I attacked and killed it; it never fired back. Then I clicked on the glowie and got Mission Failed.

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I keep reading this, and I keep failing to understand how it's possible to set this up in the MA. I might run the arc just to find out.

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I would like that suggestion to be implemented for Trial accounts.

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I thought trial accounts couldn't access the MA at all?

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The highest any of my villains have gotten is my fire/psi dom, at about 180 million, and that build is still in progress.

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Just in case you hadn't heard, there are a ton of changes coming down the pipe for doms, particularly /psi. I'd recommend checking out the changes on the Training Room before dumping too much inf into the build.

Smurph, sorry for the huge threadjack. Hopefully it's been entertaining, or at least thought provoking.

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What the current reward system does is basically state that the overriding requirement is no teaming penalty. In other words, under as many conditions as is possible to account for, a player should never earn *less* XP when on a team than when solo, when performing at basically the same activity level (unless they are above the combat level of the targets, where its possible due to saturation).

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It's fascinating to me that you made this statement, because that's exactly the principle I was trying to get at with the 2-scrapper experiment. If you run the experiment, you'll find that the higher level teammate is always penalized relative to what they can earn solo. The fact that the 2-scrapper experiment fails tells me that under most circumstances the whole system fails. The exceptional case involves buffers, where their contribution to the team may not be significantly diminished by their lower level due to buff mechanics.

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Typically these systems quantify challlenge by levels or "challenge ratings". The wider the gap between a character's level and the level or challenge rating of something they overcome, the more progress they make towards their next progress threshold.

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I think you misunderstand me. If a character undergoes two encounters, they should definitely earn more XP from the more difficult one, assuming other factors are equivalent.

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But that's not the assertion that led me to launch into the background of the systems. Specfically, it was the assertion that the character who's better at something should get the greater reward for it.

...

Under your principles, the level 45 Scrapper should make more progress towards being level 46 in that encounter than the level 41 one should, even though (as the game stands), he's facing significantly less threat.

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I seem to have misspoken. What I meant was that the character who's better should get the greater proportion of the reward. And when I say that I have a specific mathematical formula in mind, where XP is generated and then divided proportional to relative level differences, so it's probably not surprising that I confused everyone since I didn't actually state the formula.

One other factor is that I'm primarily concerned with reward rates, and only care about rewards per encounter to the extent that they contribute to rate (the other part of the equation being the encounter rate, i.e. defeat rate, obviously).

Hang on, I'm about to respond to an earlier point of Arcanaville that will hopefully clear the air, because I suspect we're all actually in violent agreement with each other.

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You must be a real [censored] joy to team with.

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I generally solo, but when I do form teams, I follow pretty strict rules about what levels I invite. I don't invite higher level characters so that they don't get shafted, and I don't invite anyone lower than -2 to the general team level unless there are SK spots.

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Typically these systems quantify challlenge by levels or "challenge ratings". The wider the gap between a character's level and the level or challenge rating of something they overcome, the more progress they make towards their next progress threshold.

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I think you misunderstand me. If a character undergoes two encounters, they should definitely earn more XP from the more difficult one, assuming other factors are equivalent.

But that's a comparison between the character and the enemy levels. There is also the comparison between the character and the teammate levels.

So, taking a specific situation:

If two level 40s defeat a level 40 enemy, they get X. Let's use this as the baseline.

If two level 40s defeat a level 41 enemy, they should get something greater than X, say Y. This satisfies your criteria.

Then one of them levels, and they defeat another 41 enemy. This is where it gets tricky. The level 40 earns Z. We can say that Z should be less than Y because the 40 had more help fighting the 41 this time than they did previously. But what's the relationship to X? That's the hard part.

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(1) If you are doing something that's harder for you than someone else, it makes sense for you to get more reward.

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I absolutely disagree with this. If two people are doing something, and one person is more effective at it, the person who's more effective should get more reward. Period. Otherwise, the less effective person is incented to put themselves in situations where overall it's actually more beneficial to everyone for them to back away and let the more effective person do everything.

Which, of course, is the situation we find ourselves in today.

Carrying this principle to its logical conclusion is what causes leeching. If the devs hadn't put arbitrary XP gain limits on level differential, your principle says that a theoretical team with 50 members, of each level from 1 to 50 inclusive, fighting one AV, would get increasing rewards as you go down the chain from the 50 to the 1. No one below 42 or so is even going to hit that AV, so if they're damage ATs, the situation is patently ridiculous.

But even for buffers it's all wrong; the level 1 certainly isn't buffing the 50s "better" than a 48 would, and yet your principle says they should get higher rewards from the defeat. That's nonsensical to me. At best, taking into account Arcanaville's position, all the buffers from 42 on down should be equivalent and should get something, since they can still buff even if they can't attack. But I argue that the 42s etc just have no business being on the team to begin with, and the fact that they can affect the outcome because buffs don't diminish is a design flaw that should be corrected and not an inherent to be balanced against.

I really have to wonder what other MMOs do.

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this wont explain why i got a minus in xp in front of the mish door, say the 4 1st mobs, then get a lil more on the rest of the map.

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Were you on a team where some members were sk'd or exemplared? SK/EX seems to have a funny lag issue at mission start, where the first few mobs the XP is earned and divided as if the SK/EX weren't there.

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It isn't just buffing powers that are the problem: they are just the easiest to describe numerically. Take tankers. If a level 39 tanker discovers they can tank just as effectively for a level 40 team as a level 39 team, the level 39 tankers should receive more XP/min when tanking on the level 40 team...

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Here's the crux of the disagreement then. I don't see why this should be true. At best they should be earning the same XP/min since their contribution is proportionally the same (assuming all they do is tank - if they also do damage or control, their contribution is proportionally somewhat less).

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There are a few potential pitfalls to the auto-SK feature. It doesn't address the problem that people who are contributing less are getting equivalent XP. You look at a level 8 who joins a level 40's mission. Just like current SKing, he doesn't have his powers nearly as well as enhanced as the 40, doesn't have stamina for potential endurance issues and doesn't have the power selections to deal with situations that a level 40 has to deal with.

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That's true, but that's addressed by the fact that with less effective teammates the team overall is earning lower XP rates.

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It is a simplified degenerate case, and as such any proposal ought to say something at least nominally proper about it. However, because it eliminates all traces of the complexity of the problem, as opposed to reducing that complexity to a manageable level, it isn't particularly useful to propose solutions likely to work for the more complex case. Basically, it doesn't offer guidence as to what an XP algorithm might be doing wrong.

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Sure it does. For two scrappers who aren't otherwise affecting each others' play, the next XP reward rate should be the same teamed as not teamed, assuming you and your teammate are both going full steam ahead. The current system doesn't accomplish that, so it's broken. If you don't agree with that basic premise, then the rest of the discussion is moot.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a valid guiding principle and everything that follows from it is straightforward math (assuming you can datamine the relevant constants in the matrix).

I started responding to the rest of your points (I will cede that my same-level degenerate case wasn't representative, but I'm glad you explained further what your point was) but quickly realized we'd get into the weeds of details.

I think the crux of the difference of opinions here is this: you believe the current system is valid because it supports proper division of XP in the presence of ally effects. I actually disagree with the latter point, but even if it were true - is that the right way to govern XP division? The majority of player powers are not ally effects. And under the current XP division system, which assumes that players are proportionally effective even at vastly lower combat levels, aren't we penalizing everyone but buffers? Damage, control effects, and debuffs are all vastly less effective when the team is fighting higher level foes, so teams are discouraged from carrying lower level members that aren't buffers.

IMHO, we should balance around the majority of the powers system, and if buff powers turn out to be outliers, address them separately, instead of the other way around. Again IMHO the fix would be to apply diminishing returns to higher-level buff recipients, but make it one way (i.e. no accelerated returns from buffing lower-level buff recipients - otherwise un-teamed angeling becomes too much of a power play).

Hey Smurph,

For your next experiment, you might consider designing a team specifically to defeat Lord Recluse serially. He's worth a boat load of XP.

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I've had my disagreements and battles with Smurph, but in this instance he's doing something immensely valuable for the game's population, shining a spotlight on a dev-created minefield where they refuse to provide useful, well defined guidelines while threatening players with bans and other punitive measures.

As with their original reluctance to give players meaningful information about powers- if they don't tell us the numbers, we have to find them out ourselves.

For that he deserves a hearty round of applause.

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I agree wholeheartedly. In fact Smurphy did a lot to change my thinking about how the devs should have handled the MA release debacle - if we'd had people like Smurphy doing things like this in closed beta, the devs probably would have been more prepared for what happened in live. Instead, what I remember is that nearly everyone was focused on using the MA for storytelling (myself included), like good little lemmings, and we led the game neatly off a cliff.

The devs should be seeking out people like Smurphy and rewarding them for efforts like this. If I were on the dev team I would be nominating Smurphy for Bug Hunter.

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I don't believe I said it was impossible, I think I said it was intractible. And not because the problem you're mentioning is not solvable, but rather because the problem as you're describing is functionally limited: it only encapsulates one point of view regarding XP splitting.


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Well, perhaps you'll forgive me for misinterpreting your words. I had honestly forgotten the buff/debuff part of the debate.

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The "two-scrapper experiment" unfortunately dodges the main problem in the way its described. In the way its described, its presuming that the two players do not actually assist each other, and therefore their overall team contribution can be expressed as the linear sum of their individual capabilities.

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While the two scrapper experiment does assume that the players don't assist each other, I respectfully disagree that this dodges the main problem. In my opinion, until you fix the case of XP leeching by a non-contributing team mate, buffers/debuffers are just as screwed when they're the higher level teammate and just as leechy when they're the low level teammate as scrappers are.

In other words, the two scrapper experiment examines a degenerate case that must follow the same rules as the more complex general case. If the degenerate case fails, which it currently does, the more general case fails too.

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That doesn't work in all cases, because it undervalues other contributions. Consider this hypothetical: imagine a level 35 (buffing) defender following a level 35 and level 40 blaster. If the defender buffs damage, then the defender's team contribution is actually *higher* when teamed with the level 40 blaster than with the level 35 blaster, simply by virtue of buffing a stronger ally. In this case, the primary contribution isn't offensive, and therefore isn't trivially scalable offensively.

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From the perspective of the blaster, no, the contribution of the defender is not higher if they are -5 to them than if they are even-con. The buffs are equivalent, and the defender is not going to be doing any damage to the enemy. Why should the defender get so close to the same relative XP? It's ridiculous.

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If you choose to pick an XP splitting mechanism that is based on a theoretical offensive contribution proportionality, you can make the mathematics work. But you'd be devaluing most of the *point* of actually teaming with anything other than offensive peers.

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Again, I have to disagree. Balance the equation for scrappers and everyone else will work out in an equitable fashion, because scrappers with no force multipliers are the best degenerate case to balance around.

If teaming with someone actually does help you defeat enemies faster, then you get faster XP no matter what scheme you use to do the division than if they didn't.

Here's another degenerate case for you: imagine the team is all the same level. Then my division system and the current one are equivalent. In that situation, are you encouraged to team only with offensive teammates? No, you're not. So my system of balancing doesn't inherently encourage only offensive teammates.

Does my proposed system penalize buffers/debuffers who seek out higher level teams to buff and leech? Yes, but I think it should. Those situations are broken currently. Buffers/debuffers have to massively overperform in order to overcome the leech phenomenon the two scrapper experiment reveals. Most of them don't, and even if they did, what they're doing increases their rewards without significantly increasing risk, or (in my own parlance) increasing reward rates without significantly increasing complexity. If it rewards skill (your parlance) it's only the social skill used to con your way into a leeching situation, which is not a skill I think the game should be rewarding.

Anyway, this is all highly theoretical since IMHO the more promising avenue is making sure massive level disparity on teams doesn't happen in the first place. That would have many other benefits for teaming, actually, since it would mean you could run content other than specifically designed AE content and not have to worry about SKs. TFs and Trials in particular would be much easier to manage.