Oedipus_Tex

Well, we can all at least breathe a temporary sigh of relief that the Real Auction Money House and Always On DRM monstrosity has so far only really made an appearance in one major game so far, and that game is currently being ripped apart by massively negative reviews and even coverage in Forbes magazine.

To put it the way I was it written in one Amazon review, that threshold is the difference between gamers making games for gamers, and business people making products for gamers.

Let me clarify: I would have included a Disbelieve mechanic if I had written this spell at the beginning of time, and only if we were forced to keep the Invulnerable aspect. A chance for the army to Phase on a missed Psi roll, at least, would create a threshold of risk where all 3 Phantoms could be inactivated at the same time due to a skill check. What we have now is a power that is active essentially 100% of the time once you reach the right Recharge threshold. Recharge isn't a contested attribute in most situations where the army is used, so the results are very undynamic. There also currently aren't a lot of good ways to make an enemy "immune" to Phantom Army like they are to other Control powers, without also making the enemy ignore Taunts, or letting them be hit by a one-off exotic mechanic. Having a control sometimes fail is an inherent aspect of their design, and Phantom Army doesn't do that nearly enough, IMO.

If I had the authority to make the army no longer invulernable, they would have the stats of the new Jack Frost. 25% Defense to all, 35% Defense to Fire/Cold (replaced with Energy/Psi). This would stack with Group Invisibility. A Dominator could soft cap them with some effort, but you'd have to remain within a distance of them for them to keep it.

More importantly, the army wouldn't get a free pass against every enemy that normally penalizes pets or adds, which is IMO is the truly egregious element of "Invulnerable," not just the not dying part.

No, and unsurprisingly that ability appeared on a class that an edition prior had been considered underpowered... sound like any arguments we hear around here sometimes?

What's craziest about it is that spell actually made it into the video game versions. So my Cleric would run up to a dragon with 4 or 5 copies of it loaded and just spam it until the boss instantly died.

In many video game representations of that ruleset, it's also possible for spell casters to simply outrun melees and never get hit or for melees to run away from spells while they are still "forming". In PVP in this COX actually this also happens; the "AI" (i.e. the other player) is generally smart enough to run out of "patch" powers of any kind if they can, which dramatically affects those powers and their value in the game.

I'm not so sure. The Harm spell required a touch attack and drained you to 1 HP in one cast. If you dodged it I think you still took half damage. Poor dragons and mind flayers never knew what hit them. I miss being that overpowered.

(This is to say nothing of the various instant death spells that peppered the earliest versions of the game and the arduous process of getting a resurrection, if you got one at all.)

What I was actually referring to is the absence of a soft cap. It doesn't exist because what amounts to enemy ToHit/Accuracy is highly variable. You can generally hit a point where you can expect most enemies to miss, but enemies with abilities that boost Accuracy and Defense are extremely common. Enemies with extra defense are also much more common where in CoX they are nearly absent or at least highly avoidable.

Some smearing of the soft cap does happen in CoX but the context is key. What's the probablity of finding a relevant group in CoX that cannot reduce your defense or increase its accuracy? What if in our theoretical MMO that group is also only really encountered on a far off island? What if that island is only really easily accessible to one class (maybe not even the one known for fighting)?

The mechanics need to basically work but the mechanics are not the game without any thought about level design, character mobility, or AI. PVP, where the AI is basically tuned to extremely high levels (according to some ) tends to reveal how Stealth and Mobility can impact gameplay in the extreme, and sometimes in ways that require you to modify the values predicted by a model that cannot account for these elements.

Well again I don't think he's saying (and I'm definitely not) that you don't want good calculations underpinning your design. The City of Heroes Defense system is a mess because of that sort of thing. Although what's interesting about that is the City of Heroes Defense system (ignoring Resists and Regen and so on for the moment) is essentially identical to the one used by Dungeons and Dragons for the past 25 years (1d20, 1 always misses, 20 always hits).

What's different about CoX versus D&D is the enemies.

I think the problem is people oversimplify the issue with RPGs specifically. I am not saying you shouldn't design with some idea of how numerical systems will operate. The City of Heroes defense calculations are a testament to that.

But I also think there is a widespread idea that even before a product launches you should be able to tell from a spreadsheet exactly how combat mechanics will play out. There is really only one way for that to happen in reality: your system has to be be highly predictable. Unfortunately, sustained fun and high predictability do not frequently get along. There are plenty of very well balanced Korean grind MMOs, and not a whole lot else.

To put this in CoX-explicit terms, anyone who says they can predict combat outcomes from a system where players are allowed to Fly, Super Speed and Teleport without actually interacting with those systems in a typical game environment is simply mistaken. It's impossible.

We also have to remember that we are not talking about a project a single individual would be creating. Game balance is a product that is a vision of a team, often driven by a Project Manager who only has so much time to review decisions. Over the long term, in an MMO in particular, it's not possible to maintain complete oversight of every system. The only way around this, once again, is to use very predictable gear/monsters/potions/etc.

A sequel to one of Schaefer's games that his team didn't participate in was recently released (I can't name the game by name I suspect) and did exactly this. It's a phenomenal flop--a gear grind game with boring gear, and where because of character movement speed and how that interacts with powers a subset of players was able to sidestep many of the excessively tuned abilities.

A final point to remember is that most games (and MMOs in particular) are broken at their most vulnerable spot. For RPGs this is usually the "farming spot." All that work you put into balance doesn't mean much if players can find an exploit in one place they can farm. Exploitation of this kind isn't a feature of combat mechanics per se, it's usually more a feature of level design, critter distribution, and AI.

[EDIT: I just re-read this and it sounds a little preachy. Not trying to lecture, I just have a lot to say. My apologies if it sounds like I'm chastising.]

Well what really strikes me about his approach is that he actually usually ends up with a finished game. For a small publisher, just getting the game out the door on a reasonable budget and having it not totally suck is a major feat.

There are so many small things that can wreck an RPG (action or not). I don't blame him for not running complicated models beyond basic assumptions about stat distribution, because in the end it won't matter if you find out one class can consistently use skill to dodge the monsters completely, because of the distribution of the monsters or gear, not because of the mathematical model underpinning the game. This specific scenario has played out in most games in one form or another.

Actually IMO what most game designers believe is that power balance is more of an issue of balance over time than an issue of balance at the flood gates. Or, if they don't believe that at first, they eventually believe it once the game has existed for a while.

Creating balance isn't necessarily difficult. Maintaining it takes a serious, dedicated effort though. Every member of staff has to be on board and continually maintain not just the powers themselves, but the monsters, the gear/enhancements, the potions/inspirations, the encounters, what happens when two or more power sets collide, enemy AI, and dozens of other factors.

This is basically why while it is possible to theorize about a perfectly balanced MMO, no one has ever actually seen one.

In the case of City of Heroes, had I been asked to work on this game 10 years ago, and saw in the plans that we intended to have players capable of flying during combat, I would almost certainly have blundered into many of the issues we now identify as mistakes. What I hope most people realize, though, is that in a slightly different set of circumstances flying characters could easily have been game breaking. Even seemingly innocuous factors like how fast players can move and whether to allow resurrection during combat can swing the balance of a game in surprisingly drastic ways.

This is correct. It's true of most (all?) spherical blasts with knockback. It's also true if you have a spherical blast like Fireball and add a knockback proc to it.

Basically, knockback direction is usually (always?) determined by calculating the angle between the caster and the target. The location of the power itself rarely (never?) matters.

The reason some powers knock back in a direction different than the caster's apparent location is that they summon a pseudo pet, who becomes the "caster" for the purposes of knockback. Lightning Storm is an obvious example. A less obvious example is Jolting Chain, which summons psuedo-pets to do its work, and will tend to scatter lower level enemies because of it.

Atomic Blast can't be slotted for Hold duration. You're right about Psychic Wail being pretty incredible though. And Dreadful Wail will be one of the best powers in the game if it doesn't lose the -resist and slottable stun.

I agree with you. There would be a deafening amount of screaming about it, most likely. But IMO the army should be both buffable and killable as a normal pet. (Your enemies, after all "believe" that you can buff and heal the army, and that they are possible to kill.)

I wouldn't oppose it, but a higher damage cap isn't going to lift Tankers up much higher than where they are. I think the issue most of us have is not with the Tanker damage caps per se and more with posters who characterize Tankers as abysmal and pathetic characters unable to fight their way out of a wet paper bag. The language used to describe Tankers doesn't match the nature of the buff request.

How about "role playing" versus "twitch?" And your description of CoX combat is pretty far off the mark anyway.

Regardless, those games are really weird things to reference if you're upset about CoX not modeling comic books. Game #2 is awful at it because Power Sets are treated as Classes. As I recall, at launch it didn't even HAVE a Invulnerability set (and I think it still doesn't). The game suggests building super strength characters using the Ice powerset! And it's so rigid that Electric and Plant characters are always healers, Fire and Ice are always tanks... wow that game was just terrible.

Johnny, we've already been through a couple of times in other thread why damage and strength are not synonmous. How much strength is equal to an extremely high dose of radiation? How much strength is equal to an arrow aimed into an eyeball? How much strength is equal to stealing an enemy's soul? There aren't answers to these questions, because strength is not the same thing as damage.

In other words, Archery and Assault Rifle both exist in the same game because damage is completely abstract.

Also, Arcana summed up the level issue succintly. What you're asking for is for Tankers to beat everything, and while most of us have our disagreements with each other about other things, we also all mostly agree why that Tankers beating everything needs to not happen.