Pscythe

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Network Traffic Tools

In some instances, the issues you may be experiencing with the game are a result of failed connections along the way to the servers and not simply a problem on your machine.
The following tools can be downloaded and run to test the stability of your routing/connection to the various CoH servers.
<ul type="square">[*] Windows 2000 and XP - ftp://ftp.coh.com/support_tool/netinfotool_XP2k.exe [*] Windows 98 and Millenium - ftp://ftp.coh.com/support_tool/netinfotool_98me.exe[/LIST]


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These links no longer work. Apparently they now have a single tool for any version of Windows. The following link works:
ftp://ftp.coh.com/support_tool/netinfotool_allos.exe

Don't be too hard on yourself Arcana. The work you do is appreciated by many people here. Everyone makes mistakes.

For what it's worth, I tried to do some theoretical analysis on question #2. I'm certainly not skilled at this sort of thing, so I may have goofed something up.

The scenario is having one PC being attacked by 10 NPCs. For simplicity, I'm assuming the NPCs are all using the same attack, and attacking simultaneously, i.e. round 1 - all NPCs attack once, round 2 - they all attack again, etc. All attacks have an accuracy of 20%. There's a miss-streak limit of 8. It's also assuming the new streak-breaker fix is in place, i.e. so that it doesn't take a successful hit to start the streak tracking.

The question is: What are the chances that at least half of the 10 NPCs will miss 8 times in a row, creating a situation where 5 of them will then be auto-hitting on round 9? Note: this should result in at least 6 "simultaneous" hits taking place on round 9, because either more than 5 will have missed, or if it was exactly 5, one of the remaining 5 should hit (5 chances at 20%).

Please correct me if I'm doing something wrong here:

A 20% accuracy is a 80% chance to miss. The chance that a single NPC will miss 8 times in a row is:
(80/100)^8 = 0.16777216, or about 17%.

The chance that at least 5 of the 10 NPCs will miss 8 times in a row is (meaning at least 6 hits will occur on the ninth round):
COMBIN(10,5)*(0.16777216)^5*(1-0.16777216)^(10-5) = 0.013372457302% ~ 1.34%

*Note: the COMBIN() function is an Excel function. I got the formula from the following site and modified it slightly.

For comparison the chance that at least 6 of the 10 NPCs will all hit on the same round (streak-breaker aside) is:
COMBIN(10,6)*(.2)^6*(1-.2)^(10-6) = 0.005505024000% ~ 0.55%

So, the streak-breaker can increase the chances of clustered hits, but I guess the chances aren't all that great. Real experiments are probably still warranted, however.

FYI: I asked WeirdBeard what else might cause a streak to be reset, other than a hit. He replied "Streak tracking resets every time you zone."

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I did locate a small bug, which is now fixed internally. Essentially the streak breaker would not become active until you landed your first hit (so you have to do it yourself, no freebies). Pretty minor in the grand scheme of all things accuracy-related, but it's fixed now regardless. Note that this bug affected players and non-players alike.

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Interesting. If it's true that the streak-breaker didn't kick in until the first hit, that would seem to refute my claim that the streak-breaker may be the cause of hit-clustering (in a low to-hit scenario anyway). [Note: I'm not saying hit-clustering doesn't happen, I believe it does, but the streak-breaker might not be the current primary cause.] Assuming the streak-breaker is tracked separately for each "critter", the clustering effect may be negligible for critters with a low to-hit, as each individual streak would start at a somewhat random time. However, when this bug fix goes into effect, it may make the hit-clustering issue even worse. Are we sure this was actually a bug and not intended behavior?

WierdBeard, would you reconsider fixing this "bug"? The current behavior actually seems like a good thing in that it should minimize hit-clustering. Maybe that's why it was written that way in the first place. Making this change will have little impact on players, who have long attack histories, but critters tend to have fairly short histories, which also tend to be in synch with those around them.

Actually, this brings up a related question. What events cause a player's streak to reset? Obviously hitting does, but is that it? Does logging out cause it to reset? Does zoning? Dying? Or, does the first streak start at the time the character is created and continues from there?

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Its worth noting that it isn't quite this simple: for the streakbreaker to kick in on all of the villains simultaneously, the implication is that all of them were unlucky enough to miss often enough to *force* the streakbreaker to kick in simultaneously. In other words, a really bad bad-luck streak on the villains suddenly turns into a bad luck event for us.


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Well, I don't think it would have to be all of them for a noticeable effect. For example, let's say my SR scrapper is surrounded by 10 identical even-con minions. Let's also say that my scrapper's melee defense is enough to lower their melee attacks to 20% to-hit, and that they are using only melee attacks. I'm not sure what the odds are on missing 8 times in a row with a 20% chance to-hit, but it can't be that low. So I don't think it's that unlikely that after 8 rounds (assuming one attack per minon per round) of attacks, that maybe only 5 of the minions hit me during that time. Now comes the 9th round and suddenly 5 of the minions (the 5 that haven't hit me yet) are all going to hit me at the same time. Statistically, one of the 5 that already hit me, will hit me again this round, too. So that's at least 6 roughly simultaneous hits coming at me. That's a lot. Without the streak-breaker I should only expect to be hit twice per round.

If someone can quickly compute the odds on 5 out of 10 minions, with a 20% chance to hit, missing 8 times in a row, and also the odds of 6 of those minions hitting at the same time normally. It might be interesting to compare the numbers.

However, you are correct in that some simulations need to be run to determine the real effect. I'll see if I can work on that.

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So what you are advocating here is a reverse streak-breaker for hitting PCs. Basically, if you have a +70% DEF *all* NPCs attacking you should have a very hard time hitting you and it should force misses based on that chart against their probability to hit.

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Not quite what I had in mind, but it was just a vague concept to begin with. I was thinking something more like: if I get missed X times in a row by all attackers, then the next single attack against me will auto-hit. It's kind of the same system, but it considers everything attacking me as one attacker. I'm not sure exactly how X would be determined. It probably isn't fair to base it solely on the defenders defense value. I suppose it could be like the existing system in that it could just use the lowest accuracy of all the attacks in the current streak (regardless of source). I can see potential problems with that, but it's just a basic idea.

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It's an interesting thought and probably would make defensive sets better. It may be a bit powerful

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It certainly would need to be worked out so as not to be overly powerful (and I can see how it could be).

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Critters get the benefits of the system as well.

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Assuming "critters" means enemies (as opposed to pets), I have to say that I think this is a bad idea. Actually, I think the streak-breaker in general might be a bad idea. I realize long miss streaks are bad, but I'd be willing to live with them as long as the average accuracy was correct. However, I can live with the streak-breaker for players, but I think it's a bad idea for enemies (at least as implemented).

The reason it seems like a bad idea to me is it appears biased against defensive sets. First of all, my SR Scrapper and Ninjitsu Stalker have spent many powers and slots to greatly minimize their chances of being hit. The fact that minions will always get to hit them after enough misses, just seems wrong to me. Being that it's not easy to push minion to-hit below 20% anymore, it doesn't take long before that auto-hit happens.

Second, there's a more significant implication here that may not have been considered. To illustrate, here's a phenomenon that I've experienced many times with my scrapper and stalker (especially in the low to mid levels): I spot a mob of say 10 white or yellow minions with maybe a LT or two. I jump in the middle and take few or no hits for 20 seconds or more, then all of a sudden - WAM - I suffer several hits all at the same time. This concern has been voiced by myself and others in the past, but it has generally been shrugged off as random bad luck, or biased observation. However, it now appears that what's happening is that during those first 20 seconds or so the misses are all legitimate, then suddenly the streak-breaker kicks in for all of them at the same time! This concentrates the damage into a very short window and makes it very difficult to deal with. I think this is completely unfair to defensive sets. I would think this problem would be even more apparent with Ice Tankers, who are supposed to have many minions attacking them at the same time.

Since regeneration and resistance sets have lower defense, they will naturally get hit more often, but because of that the streak-breaker will rarely come into play and the hits they experience will be more evenly distributed (something that regeneration sets, in particular, excel at dealing with). So the bias is that defensive sets will tend to have their damage clustered, which is always bad. So, I guess this is just another reason why regen and resistance are superior to defense.

Just off the top of my head, a better system might be to reverse the way the streak-breaker works for enemies, i.e. tie the streak to the defender, not the attacker. So, if my SR scrapper gets missed X times in a row, then the next attack by a single attacker will get an auto-hit and then the streak resets. This would help spread the auto-hits out over time, instead of concentrating them. There might be an issue with the lowest accuracy thing, as it might then be beneficial to keep minions around while fighting a boss, but something can probably be tweaked there. I'm not sure if this is a better solution or not, just a thought.

Has anyone looked into how the streak-breaker should affect overall accuracy? Many people have done accuracy tests without factoring this system into the equation, but the streak-breaker should inflate accuracy to some degree. I'm not sure how to calculate what the actual hit-ratio should be, but it should be higher than the accuracy. It would be interesting to know what the effect would be.

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How do you guys like the Toggle Drop on him? Is it too nasty or does it add a nice challenge?

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Haven't faced him yet, but sounds like an interesting challenge.

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Thats why I posted the costs for rooms as he asked for. Working on getting more accurate numbers

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Maybe this will help: Base Calculator and Layout

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On weekends let's say that 40 members sign in for an average of 4 hours each (in sg mode, above lv25 or equivalent time on lower lvs).

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First, nice post Magpie. I agree with your general assessment. Second, I realize you were going for "best case," but I think it's really much worse than you predict. Another factor is that players start gaining infamy/influence at a progressively lower rate somewhere in their 20s and none post 35 if they run in SG-mode all the time. Our SG has already been having discussions about this. We want to get a nice base ASAP, but we also want to be able to buy enhancements for our villains. I, for one, don't plan to run in SG-mode much post 20 (or whenever the infamy drop becomes noticeable). Ideally this wouldn't be an issue after I have one L40, as I could mule infamy to my lower toons, but I'm not so sure about that. With heroes, the influence doesn't really start to pile up until the 40s, so I'm not expecting villains to really have a lot of excess infamy until they increase the level cap. (Or, at least not for several months, whichever comes first.)

I think that, at least for a while, most people are not going to want to run in SG-mode in their late 20s and 30s, so that they can buy at least some SOs. That's just going to further compound the problem you have detailed, by significantly reducing the average prestige per hour, IMO.

I would be much happier if the frequency of drops were decreased, but the chances that any given drop that I did receive was something I could really use.

Take a minute to determine who might be the best puller on the team. This seems so obvious that it shouldn't need mentioning, but I've been on way too many teams where a scrapper or tank insists on trying to pull, when there's a perfectly good blaster with a snipe on the team. If the blaster doesn't yet know how to properly pull, it doesn't take long to teach them.

Also, please keep in mind that defenders are part blaster! Most people seem to forget this. A lot of defenders have a snipe (mine had his at 4th level). However, in the low levels I would frequently find that I was completely ignored whenever I offered to pull. Trust me, defenders are often very good pullers. They have to be when they solo.