Samuel_Tow
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As best I've been able to find, the most relevant meaning of the word "pontificate" is "to speak in a pompous or dogmatic manner," which I don't think is what you meant. And that's not to be a jerk, but I honestly don't understand the title. Did you mean "ponder" or "contemplate," perhaps?
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To point, one of the reasons I'm still here with City of Heroes is that pretty much all other MMOs suck, more or less. They're replete with annoying time sinks, don't give a crap about storyline, style or setting and are all too focused on the mechanics of the game that they sell themselves as "Market + loot + raids + crafting... Oh, and with a super hero skin." They're not fun to play, they're not fun to read and they don't give me as much operating freedom as City of Heroes
I'm in this game for the characters - MY characters - and for the interesting story, for what that's worth. A robust character designer, the ability to pick and customize my own powers and the ability to not just write my own story but having that be relevant (or at least not contradicted by the game) is key. It has continually kept inspiring me to write and create, which is more than I can say about World of Lineage: Galaxies. -
What's a favicon?
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A few things:
1. Customization for Epic and Pool powers. I know that's breaking the rules, but it has to be said.
2. Wing auras: Right now our "full body" auras aren't full body. They don't affect our wings. I could, for example, have an aura that sets my entire body on fire constantly, but I can never set my winds on fire. Would it be possible to extend the current auras to include a few "and wings" options if a character has wings selected?
3. Aura wings: No, that's not a duplicate. I want to see wings that don't have any sort of physical form, but are instead completely and entirely a visual effect. Think Demon Summoning Fire Whip attacks, with or without the self-illuminated 3D core, only shaped like wings and flapping. Crystal wings, ice wings, rock wings, energy wings and so forth would be good additions. Preferably at character creation.
4. Aura capes: Same as above, but with capes. I'm not sure if the cape rig can handle this, but I envision putting a sprite effect at every vertex of an invisible cape and running with that. Would that be possible to do?
5. Aura-only costume items in general: Think a tail made out of energy. Not a 3D mesh, just effects. Not think about a character that has no torso and legs, just a head, goves and boots connected by a body-shaped cloud of glowing light. Or a character with a head made entire of aura. No face, no hair, no details. Just aura. Well, OK, possibly with additional colourable aura options for eyes and possibly mouth.
6. Aura weapons for all weapon sets, including firearms. For completeness' sake, I mean: Aura Broadsword, Aura Katana, Aura Dual Blades, Aura Axe, Aura Mace, Aura Shield, Aura Bow, Aura Claws, Aura Assault Rifle, Aura Pulse Rifle, Aura Dual Pistols. Some of those actually do exist in the face of Vanguard items, but more would be better, and not all have Vanguard variants. And Vanguard weapons are energy weapons. I'm talking also adding fire weapons, ice weapons, gaseous weapons and so forth.
7. Footsteps aura: You know that one mission from Tavish Bell where Baphomet rampaged through a blue lab, burning holes in the walls? Remember he footsteps he left behind all over the place? Simple horizontal sprites with a hoof patter, occasionally smoking or burning. Could this be added to players so that, for instance, a walking player would leave a trail of puddles of fire when he walked?
8. A higher-rez runes aura: The rune sprites for the one we have now are horribly low-res. Can you make one that's higher resolution and looks less seriously pixellated?
9. More per-bodypart auras: I'm talking about being able to put an aura only on one fist, on one leg or on one eye. If I'm using a single eye patch, I may want to have only my other eye glowing, and right now only Combat Auras can do that. If I'm using a big robotic arm, I may want just that arm to glow, and currently few auras can do that, mostly the Alpha and the Omega (somewhere, Xan Kreigor is filing a lawsuit). It might bloat the list of aura setups somewhat, but it has room to expand.
10. Non-constant toggle aura effects: You know how the Praetorian PPD officers' shields only trigger when hey get hit? Can we have that as an option for ALL toggle powers? For instance, I'm running Fire Shield, but with this option, I'm not actually on fire most of the time. When I get hit, THEN my fire shield flares up, absorbs the damage, stays lit for a while, say two seconds, then turns off again, unless someone hits me in the meantime, at which point its timer resets. Should be using existing tech, since PPPD officers already have that.
11. An alternate Energy Blast: I'm talking the entire set. Right now, the set is using some combination of toothpase energy and Kirby dots that don't really look bad, but also doesn't look as much like energy as it should. I'd like to see an alternate set of effects that are closer to the Praetorian PPD's power gauntlets, in that it's less a mess of effects and more just a seamless beam of light. As an option, at least. And do something with Sniper Blast. It's disappointingly pathetic as an animation.
12. "No pulse or fade" options for ALL powers that pulse or fade: Stealth powers make your character model turn transparent and hard to see. Some defence toggles make your character pulse brighter or darker. An option exists to disable both of those effects, but right now it only ever affects Dark Armour and nothing else. It should be allowed to affect ALL powers that pulse or fade, such as Electric Armour shields, Energy Aura's Energy Cloak, ALL Stalker Hide powers and so forth.
13. More energy Aura customization options: Right now, Energy Aura effects look like Kinetics buffs, which look horrible. I'd like to see customization for all Energy Aura shields to include Forcefields-like colourable bubbles (aligned better than the bugged custom forcefields) as customization options for the three shields. There's a bubble already in place for Energy Drain. In addition to that, I want to see Beehive Barrier shields like what the Praetorian PPD have going on, again as options for the set's shields.
Which reminds me...
14. Fix the numerous FX bugs. Here's a short list:
* Custom forcefield effects are locked to the character's hitbox position, but not to the character's body, meaning that the bubbles don't move with the characters, meaning that you can jump, sit or often just step out of your bubble if your power animation moves you away from your character away from his hit box.
* Poison Gas Trap's gas field summon still doesn't take custom colours. It always spawns as a whitish cyan, almost like steam. The only thing that custom colours change is the colour of the vial and the colour of the initial particle spray, but the actual big hinkin' cloud is unaffected.
* Trip Mines and Time Bombs take two colours, but only use one, and they use this colour for both the lasers/light AND for the colour of the explosion.
* Dark Melee custom power effects are neither bright nor dark, which means they look bad in both bright and dark colours. They should really be split into bright and dark themes, or at the very least be all made subtractive so that picking black/black (as one might with the powers of darkness) doesn't make them transparent and borderline invisible.
* Ninja Genin still lack ANY visual representation for their first upgrade, and have lacked one since they traded their bows for shuriken and lost their quivers. They need SOMETHING there to show that they have been upgraded if I have my pet screen set to hide passive powers.
15. More colours for all custom powers: Some powers - namely ice-, earth- and air-related ones, have a hugely diminished colour palette to choose for, essentially restricted to dull, white-washed colours that don't really change much of anything on the powers. Please consider adding more colour options and letting us actually customize the things. It's painful to be able to colour half of Storm Summonning, but not the other.
That's all I can think of at the moment. I only got to about page 2 before I posted, however, for fear of forgetting what I was going to say, so if I come up with anything else, I'll append or repost.
*edit*
Here's another one!
16. Power customization for weapon sets: Right now, sets like Broadsword, Claws and Assault Rifle have baked-in power colours that the team never got around to touching since they already had weapon customization and further customization wasn't as important at the time. However, suppose I want my sword to swing not with that white arc, but with a blood red arc to match that blood red blade? Or suppose I want my sword to swing with a train of fire, or a trail of ice, or that one little edge trail from the Knives of Artemis Head Splitter. Or suppose I want my Flamethrower to shoot green flames and my Burst to fire instant-hit tracers. That's kind of what I mean.
*edit*
And before I forget!
17. Glowing Hair: Just take the regular hair meshes, get rid of the textures and shaders, apply a flat colour and make it always retain the same level of brightness, the same way as the Resistance glowing gloves and chests, or Positron's Tron stripes. This would allow us to more easily make eldritch or alien characters, as well as be just dang cool to see in the dark. -
Yes, Glowing Hair. No, that's not a typo. I didn't accidentally hit G instead of F.
This should be a simple solution to explain - I want to see hair options that look exactly like our existing hairs, but instead of shaders and textures, they consist of just one flat unshaded colour which is constantly bright, even in the dark. You know how the Resistance chest and gloves have those glowing lines? Like that, only over the entire surface of the hair.
If you've noticed, we have a few "hair aura" options but, to be honest, they're not very good. A glowing hair model, by contrast, would look pretty cool, even if it loses surface shaping, especially on eldritch characters and aliens.
I lack the photoshop skills (along with PhotoShop) to make a mock-up of this and such an idea is beyond simple pigg diving, so I don't have any reference pics, unfortunately. -
Quote:Fairly easily - I make a Fire Blast character and, upon using a power, conclude that this power burns enemies.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
How do you currently choose between Fire Blast and Ice Blast?
More seriously - what you describe are fairly broad character aspects, like asking me how I picked my character's class. Broad aspects have fairly obvious results that can be determined even just from reading their descriptions most of the time. This is a good example of choices that don't give you much ability to comprehend them beforehand (unless you run through all then umbers), but still give you IMMEDIATE and CLEAR feedback once you're done making them.
I'm more talking about choosing between minor stats, like a few percent defence vs. a few percent resistance vs. a little more health. This is no longer an obvious choice, since no matter what I pick, I won't be able to tell what the result is without running tests and collecting statistics data. What's more, unlike picking between Ice and Fire, this is no longer a thematic choice. It's fairly easy to determine if my character should shoot fire or freeze things based on even the broadest of concept designs. It's not quite as obvious if my character should be a smidgen more resistant or a smidgen more elusive, when the net effects are practically unnoticeable.
If you choose to break your system down into very large chunks where every choice is ground and impactful, then I have no issue. Again - giving me the choice between being able to climb or being able to swim may not allow me to predict which will be how useful without expert knowledge of the content, but I will be able to SEE the difference more or less immediately after I make the choice.
What I fear is that you envision a complex system that tasks players to work hard at creating strong builds while simultaneously denying them the ability to understand what they're doing. It doesn't matter how complex you make the math - such a system will always be min/maxable, just limited by people's ability to do so. If you break your system down into small numerical stats and boosts, it will be a min/maxable system. The only way I can see a system where understanding the underlying mechanics isn't necessary - again - a system comprised of VERY few VERY large choices. -
Quote:I never saw Disembowel as a stabbing attack. At best, with that interpretation, it's a scraping attack. When I say "thrusting attack," I mean a straight thrust - tip forward, handle pushing it in. Disembowel is still a slash, just a very... Awkward slash.Originally Posted by IanTheM1
Does Disembowel not count? It can look a bit off depending on the enemy/angle, but it is kind of meant to be you thrusting into their guts..
"There's nothing wrong with more customization" is an inherently flawed premise. Ignoring the opportunity cost of actually working on "more customization," that is only good if it doesn't look bad, and stabbing people with an axe looks bad. If you want a reducto ad absurdum argument, why don't we add assault rifles to the Broadsword customization options and have our characters slash at people with a sniper rifle? That's more customization, right? You need a better argument than just "more customization."Quote:Originally Posted by Moderated_IRL
I'm well aware that stabbing is a major part of sword fighting. I'm also aware that no one actually used weapons like CoH animations depict; however, because of the generic use on the animations, I think it would work fine. If you don't like the weapons: don't use them. There's nothing wrong with more customization.
Incidentally, you seem to suggest that because the animations are already not very good, we should go ahead and make them worse, as well as further limiting their potential for customization. I disagree. I want each weapon to have its own unique animations or, failing that, to at least have room for the addition of unique custom animations.
Let me put things into perspective: "Polearms" as a powerset is something that often gets suggested. These come in four shapes, however: Staves that can't cut or pierce but can still swing and thrust, Scythes that CAN cut and pierce but can only swing and not stab, Polearms that can cut and pierce as well as swing and thrust and Spears which can only pierce and can mostly just stab if occasionally swing. You can't make one set which includes all four, because it will either be the wrong damage type or include or exclude abilities that some of the others should have.
Asking for customization that allows you to stab people with a morning star mace is on the same level of visual unappeal as throwing your pistols to hit enemies with or using a sword to shoot arrows. Yes, the animations rig can handle it, but I don't want to see it. I hold City of Heroes to a certain standard of visual quality, and throwing in every awkward and unappealing option one can think of so players can use if they don't mind it being wrong and ugly is something I hope never happens. THE GAME should not be this awkward.
If you want dual axes or dual maces, you are free to suggest a set like that, but I don't want existing sets to be made even less interesting by robbing them of their weapon-specific animations, or at least making those animations make no sense. -
Can someone provide a glossary for the uninitiated? I have no earthly clue what you people are talking about.
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Quote:My problem has always been uninformed choices. Whenever I make a choice in a game, I want to have some reassurance that the choice I just made is, if not right, then at least "not wrong." I need feedback on the choices I make. When I take a new power, I want to start the next fight and immediately see, clearly and obviously that "Yes! This power is helping me in such and such way!" The system you're describing is purpose-designed to deny me the ability to infer this by gleaning the internal mechanics, which means you have to ensure that I be able to tell what the choices I made do immediately. And, frankly, I doubt you could do that, even if I believed you wanted to.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The short answer is, and your example is more extreme than is necessary, to make the choices less one-dimensional. Even if they aren't intrinsically min/maxable, one-dimensional choices tend to *encourage* min/maxing psychologically. Consider: the 1acc5dmg slotting pattern was *not* necessarily the optimal slotting pattern at the time it was being used in all the situations it was being used in. What it was, was easy to *claim* was optimal with a trivial statement about damage. More complex choices don't just make the choices more complex, they eliminate the ability for people to incorrectly simplify them with misleadingly simply language. Its "obvious" more damage is better. Its not more obvious that more damage against undead is better than a higher critical chance against robots.
You criticise choices with obvious right and wrong answers, and to some extent I can see that. If we are given choice, then it shouldn't be loaded. But what's equally bad - and indeed worse, in my opinion - is choices with meaningless answers. If I don't understand what my options do, then I don't care which one I pick. If I don't care which one I pick and instead resort to eeny meeny miny mo, then that choice has failed anyway. Only this time, the choice has failed as a choice AND possibly gimped me.
Yes, in some games, I'm capable or running enough content that I am able to "sense" what my stats do after enough trial and error. I'm also not at all ashamed to say that any game which is designed to expect me to do this is going to deplete my patience long before I have enough experience to know this.
Put simply, I would sooner have NO choice, than have to choose between options I don't understand and cannot test out within a reasonable span of time. -
Quote:That's one reason I keep saying that game graphics these days are "good enough." Yeah, sure, there's more that can be done with them, but my question is... Is it really worth it? How much more time should we spend making what already looks good look better, possibly at the cost of spending money on something else?Originally Posted by Santorican
That makes me sad, I still notice the reflections every where I go. Desensitizing is bad
Maybe it's just me, but I'm over buying games because they look good. If I want something that looks like a CGI movie, I can watch a CGI movie. Avatar comes to mind. Personally, I'd play a game with graphics on the level of City of Heroes without a second thought (provided it didn't lag like hell) if the game were fun to play. I don't feel the need for my good games to have all the latest DX11 bells and whistles before I give it the light of day.
Are good graphics cool to have? Oh hell yes! But not at the cost of performance and not with the idea that THAT will be the game's primary selling point. -
Quote:Good point. I hadn't thought of that. I'm not sure how that would work out in practice, but I've no reason to believe it would favour either effect.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Like this:
Net damage = Base Damage / (Resistance rating/100) * (Total Debuff Rating/100)
Gotcha. Let me make sure I get this right. By "enveloping resistance debuff," you mean a debuff that's essentially one step before the resistance buffs. It increases the damage you take first, then runs that damage through whatever resistances you have, do I have that right? That actually sounds like a good way to handle it. Again, I'm not sure how that would work out in real circumstances, but the system doesn't seem to present any questionable situations like I mentioned before. Far as that's the case, I'm good either way.Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Net damage = Base Damage / (Resistance rating/100 - Total Debuff Rating/100)
But with a catch: they could only subtract against powers. They could not "debuff" something that doesn't exist. So if your resistance looks like this:
100 (base) + 100 + 75 + 50 + 80 = 405
A 100 point power debuff would reduce that to 305. But a 500 point power debuff would only reduce that to 100: it could debuff the 305 points given by powers, but not the base value. Its intended to answer the question "how do you debuff a power that isn't there?" My system gives an explicit answer to that: power debuffers can't: they can only debuff what you buff, at most. They can only nullify powers. Global debuffs don't attack powers they are in effect global amplifiers for effects, and affect you the character. Thus they can in theory debuff your resistance to "below zero" but only mathematically. In "reality" they aren't doing so, they are just "encasing" you in a debuffing envelope that essentially amplifies all damage that enters it.
This sounds complicated but only because CoH doesn't have a notion of "enveloping effects." My game would have such effects, and in a game where this was clearly spelled out I don't think it would be difficult to intuit the difference. The number one enveloping effect I would add to my repertoire would be Ablative Armor Effects. I.e. external hit point shields, or if you are familiar with that other game, Force Fields.
So if the enemy enveloped you in a resistance debuff bubble, it would work like the first formula: it would look like a straight up amplification of all damage, which is easy enough to understand. If an enemy targeted you with a power neutralizer that would temporarily strip some of your protection away, but only if you actually *have* such protection, and only up to the maximum amount you have. Power neutralizers would tend to be uncommon, though.
*edit*
Also, yes, I did mean to say 200 that time. And on that subject - if you don't intend for resistance rating to go below 100, you can easily just translate the UI display to show 100 points less than you have. So the UI will tell you you have 0 resistance, but the game will calculate as if you had 100, and when you get a buff and end up with 150 resistance, the game would calculate it as though you have 250. Just sayin'. -
One thing which concerns me is that the developers seem to have made it an objective to keep people perpetually and constantly interested in end game. So even when the current "stuff" grows old and stale, they'll be trying to add more. More raids, more powers, more unlocks and so forth.
I'm not sure the current over-interest in end game will ever end, or at the very least will end any time soon. And I'm not sure it's intended to. -
Quote:That's actually more or less my standpoint in all of this: What's a good way to tie up all the numbers in such a manner that I get ONE answer at the end of the day. And in a lot of instances, it's possible. Let me give you one specific example of a spreadsheet I have going. It's a way to calculate a powerset combo's final, total cost, post enhancements and including click powers. Here's how it works:Originally Posted by Obitus
Practical build decisions, for which I agree recharge isn't purely a matter of evaluating the proportional benefit to usage rate. Then again, it isn't purely a matter of evaluating time saved, either.
I need a formula for calculating ED values, including Incarnate powers, which already exists on ParagonWiki from a couple of places. I take all of my powers, assign the number and type of enhancements they're supposed to take, then calculate that back into their raw values: enhanced damage, enhanced recharge, enhanced cost. From those, I calculate enhanced DPE, EPS, DPS, DPA and EPA, plus "uptime," which is calculated as animation time divided by cycle.
Once I have that, I start adding powers to the "queue," starting either from the most useful ones, like Dark Regen, or from the ones with the highest DPA, and totalling up both their DPS and EPS, up until I exceed 100% uptime. Once that's done, I slap my toggles with their costs and possible DPS values on top of that. This gives me a final "running cost" for EVERYTHING, but disregards recovery. I next subtract whatever recovery I get from base, Stamina and other recovery buffs like Superior Conditioning over a base of 100 points of endurance, or more if I'm seeing endurance bar increasing buffs like Physical Perfection.
This whole thing then gives me a final "running cost" of a particular build. If that cost is around 1.0 to 1.5 points lost per second, I consider this "good." If it's less... Well, suffice it to say that I don't see this in characters I care to calculate for, and if I see more than that, then I do what I can to either reduce costs or improve recovery, or both. Cardiac Alpha is always an option.
I have this whole thing strapped in a template spreadsheet, which I've used several times already, and which I've designed at least a few builds around. This, more or less, is the context within which I see in-game numbers. Less so in a theoretical context, but more so in the "So how many toggles can I run, then?" one.
Again - this isn't to argue, but more to ground the discussion a little bit in both anecdote and specific implementation. -
Quote:Then we define the "benefit" in different ways. You seem to define it as a percentage off the original, which I disagree with. I would, in fact, define the benefit of recharge as "BaseRecharge - FinalRecharge," or "how many seconds did I gain? This, in fact, tells me where my slots are best placed.Originally Posted by Obitus
I'm not defending the formula itself. I'm defending the idea that recharge enhancements provide a linear benefit in principle. The formula you keep pounding into the ground simply determines a power's cooldown. The formula does not, in any obvious way, attempt to evaluate the benefit of the bonuses in question, which are inherently proportional.You're essentially saying that the benefit is not linear because you chose to evaluate the benefit using a non-linear formula.
Suppose I have a power with a 1000 second recharge and one with a 10 second recharge. I slot them both with a 33% recharge enhancement. The former drops to ~750 while the latter drops to ~7.5 seconds. The former is now 250 seconds faster, that's over 4 minutes faster. If this were an important power, I would be waiting FOUR MINUTES less. The latter, on the other hand, gained less than three seconds. Suffice it to say that I won't be bothering slotting that one unless it's very important.
Yes, I'm aware that for attack chains, even shy seconds can mean the difference between keeping an attack and ditching it, but that's not down to recharge, it's down to attack cycle, which as I explained before ignores base recharge, and is an additive stat, to boot. However, for long-recharge powers, raw time is what counts, most usually the difference between raw recharge and raw duration. An easy example:
Rage is a power which recharges in 240 seconds and with an effect that lasts for 120 seconds. If you stack a second Rage buff on top of the previous one, then when the previous buff expires, it won't slap you with a severe defence debuff. Therefore, the objective here is to get Rage's recharge under 2 minutes. Not to 50%, not to half, not to 1/(1/240), but to two minutes. The power could have recharged in 180 seconds and I'd still only care to bring it down to 120. the power could recharge in 600 seconds and I'd still ideally shoot for bringing it down to 120. Because that raw second period is what I need, irrespective of enhancement efficiency or "benefit" or what have you.
In fact, your way of computing benefit serves only to evaluate enhancement/buff efficiency. "How many percent improvement can I get for this many percent improvement?" Sure, when you start hitting the ED cap, this can be meaningful, such as how much recharge do you get out of 3 level 50 Commons, as opposed to what percentage you're putting in, but you're still comparing a power with itself. You need to either give the power a raw, non-percentage score, or otherwise compare it with another power or an external statistic. Otherwise you have no frame of reference for what the effect of said power would be in practice.
I'm not saying your numbers are invalid. They are, in fact, perfectly true. I'm saying that they're not as meaningful as you make them out to be, because they are solely contained within the thing that you are trying to measure, and no measurement can ever be meaningful without an external frame of reference. Because comparing a power with itself isn't very useful. Real use comes from either comparing powers to each other, or otherwise drawing absolute scores for powers against the world.
Let me put things into perspective: Say you take Quickness from Super Reflexes and you have no other buffs or enhancements slotted. This power provides a 20% recharge reduction buff to your character as a whole. Well, then every single one of your powers will be able to be used 120% more often, and I can say this for all powers across the board, aside from those that aren't affected by recharge. But this is not a meaningful statistic. All it means is I know what your buff is. But is that buff meaningful in Elude? By how much? Does it allow you to stack Practiced Brawler now when you couldn't before? Does it allow you stack Hasten, or at least bring you closer? How much more of ten can you use Shield Charge? 20% more often? 20% of what? I don't remember the power's base recharge.
"We are done," you say. Have it your way. I'm not arguing to prove you wrong or to make myself appear smart. I enjoy the maths of it, and I'd prefer to stick to that and not resort to bickering. -
Quote:The formula you're USING isn't the formula you're DEFENDING. You're using a reinterpretation and extension of the original formula which nullifies its meaning. It's like saying that the result of adding 50 damage to my attack is 50 damage +5 damage -5 damage. You negate a formula and return to the original variable, yet you claim that it is somehow useful. What you do is take a non-linear formula, run it through the inverse formula and get a return that's equal to the input and you claim that that is linear. It's not. Furthermore, it's not the formula in question to begin with.Originally Posted by Obitus
Oh, so first the recharge formula is totally unintuitive, but now suddenly it's so simple you don't need a formula at all. The number the recharge enhancement provides is sufficient on its face? Fascinating. In other words, you've admitted that recharge enhancements provide a linear benefit to usage rate.
The formula in question, the one you're defending, is a fractional function. It has a discontinuity within 100% negative of its base, it tends towards infinity and it does not, crucially, provide a linear result for a linear output, specifically since its output is meaningful data.
I expect a result that is a result, not a result which just loops my input back at me. If I tell the system that my power recharges 33% faster, I expect the system to tell me how fast that makes the power recharge. If I ask the system what it means for my power to recharge 100% faster and the system tells me my power recharges twice as fast, this is not a meaningful result. I know what "100% increase" means without needing to run calculations. Even if you insist on remembering all of your powers' recharges by percentage values, you still need to convert that to real time once you start using it. A fraction is only meaningful when computed against the number that it is a fraction from.Quote:Originally Posted by Obitus
When presented with a bonus that says it gives you a 33% improvement, what do you expect but a proportional gain? Saying that you can use your power five times more often than before is absolutely valid and meaningful.
You put words in my mouth. I never claimed a linear formula is superior to a fractional one. The very basis of the original post was an attempt to replace the factional formulas we have in-game now with linear ones. I'm not convinced this is necessary, or indeed good. Nor did I really claim that Arcana's formula was linear - it's not. Its variable is still in denominator.Quote:If you think I'm just being difficult, wait til Arcanaville gets back to your alleged response to her mitigation system, which presumes at its base a linear increase in lifespan. You hand-waved that premise with your talk of fractional formulas, without even pausing to consider what benefit the formula is designed to provide.
As a point of fact, I discussed a purely linear system already, back before in the thread. The very simplest linear return formula for resistance you can have is:
Net Damage = Base Damage - Resistance. If you have 100 resistance, you resist 100 points of damage. If the damage you're taking is less than 100 points, you either take no damage or take some minimum required amount. It doesn't get simpler than that, both to compute and to comprehend. However, it doesn't make for a very balanced system, because this requires that damage either nor vary by much, thereby giving results close to a percentage-based system, or otherwise creates a scant few situation where resistance is balanced and many situations of either total immunity or resistance irrelevance. 100 points of resistance in City of Heroes, for instance, would make a character immune to all but a few specific attacks from minions, but would be completely pointless against something even as powerful as a boss, let alone an AV.
That depends on how you measure the benefit. I actually like Arcana's metric of "the most damage you can survive," as it's both tangible and easy to model. It beats my "survival time" metric in that it's easier to explain and visualise. And even then, it depends on what you measure by. Let's go back to Arcana's formula and run some numbers.Quote:Whether we're talking Recovery, Regeneration, Recharge in CoH -- or resistance as it's used in other games and in Arcana's proposal -- the benefit is linear. CoH Recharge is only exceptional because of the activation time bottleneck, which -- for the last time -- we have to ignore in principle because the developers themselves ignored it.
Net damage = Base Damage / (Resistance rating/100)
Base damage 100, resistance going from 0 to 50 in increments of 10:
00: 100
10: 90.91
20: 83.33
30: 76.92
40: 71.42
50: 66.66
This is clearly not linear, because for each step of 10 resistance rating we get an ever-decreasing return on the reduction of incoming damage. But in the case of damage, we're not just looking at individual attacks and how they're reduced, we're looking at the impact this has on survival. Hence where the "how much damage can you survive" metric comes in. However, unlike what you're showing me in the above formula, this isn't achieved by dividing base damage by everything all over again. This requires a brand new parameter - hit points (ignoring defence and regeneration for the sake of simplicity).
That's why, when I set my examples, I include an extra parameter: Hit Points. The actual total damage one can survive actually looks more like this:
Attacks To Kill = Hit points/Net Damage =
= Hit Points/(Base Damage/(Resistance/100)) =
= (Hit Points*(Resistance/100))/Base Damage =
= ((Hit Points*Resistance)/100)/Base Damage =
= (Hit Points*Resistance)/(100*Base Damage)
= Resistance*(Hit Points/100Base Damage)
or
Attacks To Kill = Resistance*(Hit Points/(100*Base Damage))
This is a linear function. In this case, Hit Points and Base Damage are set parameters and 100 is a constant, while Damage To Kill is the actual function. You don't get much more linear than this, hence why I have no problem with Arcana's methods, but still have questions regarding corner cases. I bastardised the formula a great deal for the sake of mathematical proof, and the final incarnations may or may not make the problematic cases evident, but they still exist.
I'm not sure what you think I "handwaved" about the formula, exactly, when all I actually did was ask questions of specific instances and how those would be handled, which I feel is a legitimate question.
*edit*
On reflection, the interpretation I used the first time is different from the interpretation I used the second time, to the point where I suspect I may have misinterpreted the model originally, which could be what was producing the odd results. I'll have to re-evaluate, because the interpretation of the model I listed here doesn't seem to show the same problem. And I think I know why: The original interpretation asks HOW MUCH DAMAGE you can survive, whereas the current interpretation asks HOW MANY ATTACKS that deal this much damage you can survive. I'm not sure which one is more accurate, but my original questions remain - what do you do about debuffs and where do you place your caps?
*edit*
I think I know where the discrepancy between the two interpretations comes in. The first one represented the maximal survivable damage as a function of the base damage a character is taking for a set amount of hit points and for a set resistance value. The one I redid in this post measured the maximal number of attacks taken before death as a function of resistance itself for a given base attack damage and a given amount of hit points. One is fractional, the other linear, and I'm willing to stick to the latter since that actually uses resistance as a variable, which it should be. I'll have to think a little more about this. -
Quote:Why are you even running numbers, then? 1+2 is always 3 regardless of whether you send it back and forth through a formula. You will always get the same result that you input into that sequence, so why bother calculate?Originally Posted by Obitus
With 100% recharge enhancement: 10 / (1+1)= 5. 10 / 5 = 2 uses of the power over 10 seconds, or a 200% usage rate.
With 200% recharge enhancement: 10 / (1+2)=3.33. 10 / 3.33 = 3 uses of the power over 10 seconds, or a 300% usage rate.
As well, I don't agree that how many times more often a power can be used enhanced as opposed to unenhanced is a meaningful metric, because it's a metric dependent on the power's base recharge, which isn't actually featured in the metric itself. When I ask "2 and 3 what?" that's a meaningful question. You can answer "2 and 3 times more often" but I'll just go ahead and ask how often it was to begin with.
You can take Elude with a recharge time of 1000 and make it useful 5 times more often, and that STILL won't give you you a power that's useful more often than Build Up which recharges in 90 seconds. What matters about a power isn't how much often you can use it now than before, it's how often you can use it, period. I can slot a 33.3% recharge enhancement in Elude and get it down to ~750 seconds, but that's still over 10 minutes. I can take Elude and recharge cap it at 200 seconds of recharge, but that's STILL over two minutes. That's still a long time to wait, and crucially, it's still longer than its effect lasts.
The formula you're using does nothing more than to reiterate your power's enhancement. If you've slotted a power for 50% recharge, then it will be useful 150% more often. I don't need a formula to tell you that, because all you do is add 100% to your enhancement value, a calculation that's easy enough to do by eye that one can extrapolate the result straight of of a power's stated enhancement values.
Here it is in simple terms - when I ask how often I can use a power, I don't want to be told "Five times more often than before." I want to be told something on the order of "Once per 10 minutes" or "Five times a minute." Original recharge features nowhere in this. If I've enhanced Trip Mine to recharge in 5 minutes, then that's twice every ten minutes. If I have a power with a recharge of 10 seconds, that six times per minute. The original recharge isn't relevant. Only the current recharge is, and while you can time this per minute or hour or second, this doesn't change that fact.
Only "uses over its base cooldown" is a useless metric, because base cooldown is irrelevant for anything other that the satisfaction of great enhancement. What matters is where the rubber meets the road, which is actual recharge. When I hit an enemy with an attack, it doesn't matter what that attack was at base value and how much it has increased. What matters is the orange number of the enemy's head. If my attack says 100 points of damage, I don't care if that was twice 50, five times 20 or once 100. It's 100 points of damage, and that's all that matters.Quote:Originally Posted by Obitus
1000 / 909 seconds = 1.10, or 110% uses of the power over its base cooldown period.
1000 / 833 = 1.20, or 120% uses of the power over its base cooldown period.
1000 / 796 = 1.30, or 130% uses of the power over its base cooldown period.
I fail to see what cars have anything to do with anything about anything. That's why I skipped commenting about them before. You don't count a car's speed based on how much higher or lower it is than its "default" speed (even if a car's "default" speed weren't 0). What you're suggesting is the following: A specific car is rated to be most fuel-efficient when driving at 50mph. I want to drive that car around a residential neighbourhood. Am I going to drive at 25mph, or am I going to drive at 50% speed? Say I next want to take it on the highway and gun it to 75. Am I driving at 75mph or am I driving at 150%?Quote:Originally Posted by Obitus
No diminished returns. Again, are you saying that cars have diminished returns because they can't ever achieve an instantaneous travel time (infinite speed)?
Now suppose I sit down in another car that's rated to be most fuel-efficient at 100mph and I want to drive that in a residential neighbourhood. Should I drive it at 50% like the other? No, because that would be too fast. So what should I drive it at? Well, I want 25 and I'm counting off 100, so 25/100, or... OK, I should run that at 25%. So how about highway speed? I'm not sure, but I think that's 75% speed.
So you see where I'm going with this? Relative speed does not matter, because relative speed is not what determines when your power will recharge unless you want to be doing constant mental arithmetic and calculating final recharge anyway. At any one point in time when I ask myself "When will I be able to use this power again," I want my answer counted in seconds or minutes, not in percent proportions from a base I probably don't remember at this point. If I want to know how often I can use a power, I can divide its current recharge measured in seconds by 60 to get uses per minute or by 3600 to get uses per hour.
*edit*
I don't want to come off like I'm picking a fight, by the way. That's not my point. I'm not setting out to prove anyone right or to prove anyone wrong. I'm just trying to stick to the facts and stick to the maths as much as possible. I just don't feel like the metric in question is very useful. -
Quote:Ah, so THAT is who Riptide was supposed to be!Originally Posted by Wicked_Wendy
Mako?
-
Question: What do you do about the stabbing attacks, specifically Assassin's Blades? The nonsense of stabbing with a mace notwithstanding, what do you do about stabbing with axes? And, if you look at the animations, that's not restricted to just jabbing a barb at the tip of an axe into an enemy, those animations depict thrusting almost the entire length of the blade up to where the hand grips the hilt through the enemy. This means thrusting the entire axe head through an enemy's torso and out the other end.
Cross-weapon customization is not a good idea. It looks goofy with weapon-specific animations that already exist and it limits the extent of future customization options to only those that work for ALL weapons. Broadsword is already a victim of this, sharing all but one of its animations with Battle Axe and War Mace. This means our characters swing the sword like it's a club, and it also means that Broadsword has not a single thrusting attack, which contrary to what Fantasy games may have convinced you, is a MAJOR part in how swords tended to be used. Yes, we do have a unique stab animation for Stalker Broadsword's Assassin's Sword, and that's a step in the right direction because this animation IS NOT available for Axe and Mace. Nor could it be.
I've been pushing for Axe Stalkers for some time, which means they'll need their own Assassin's Axe. I can all but guarantee that if that set proliferation were to happen, you will NOT see them reuse the sword stab. On the contrary, I envision them using some kind of draw-back overhead strike aimed either at the enemy's head or neck. As it should be.
---
Weapon power animations should be made to be as close to fitting for the weapon as possible. Generic animations that can be used with all types of weapons just end up not looking good with any type of weapon. -
Quote:I have a question here: how do you handle debuffs? Specifically, I'm speaking about resistance debuffs that extend past (what I assume to be) the base of 100 defence unassisted? Let's run a simple experiment to illustrate.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Net damage = Base Damage / (Resistance rating/100)
If you have a power with Def rating of +100, that +100 will provide the same incremental benefit to someone with a Def rating of 300 or 400 (I'm eliminating the issue of typing for simplicity here). In what sense is this true? In the sense of survivable damage. Someone with a defense rating of 300 can survive three times more damage than someone with rating 100. If you add a +100 rating power, they will be able to survive four times more damage. Call the amount of damage you can survive sustained X. Def rating 300 gives you 3X. Def rating 400 gives you 4X, an increase of X. Def rating of 500 gives you 5X, an increase of X again.
You have 1000 health. How much damage can you sustain before you die? In other words, how much Base Damage do you need for Net Damage to equal 1000, or:
Base Damage = Net Damage*(Resistance/100)
At a base resistance rating of 100, you'd be able to survive 1000 points of damage, as expected. No improvement. At a resistance rating of 100, you'd be able to survive 2000 damage, or twice the amount, as one would expect. So what if you don't have any Resistance Rating but you get debuffed? Say by -50 resistance rating, for the sake of argument. Now we have an interesting example that I want to write in full:
Base Damage = 1000*(50/100) = 1000*0.5 = 500
By debuffing your resistance by just 50, I was able to half the damage you are able to survive, whereas it took you 100 to double it. Suppose I wanted to slash the damage you survive by a quarter. How much would I need? Turns out that a 75 resistance rating debuff will get the job done, reducing the damage you are able to survive down to 250. In fact, it gets really fun when I debuff your resistance rating down to 0, because we hit upon a discontinuity point where we need to do division by zero in the original formula. Understandably, that's not going to be allowed, but still.
Returning to my original question: What do you do about debuffs? You can't debuff your resistance rating by much more than 95 below base, yet you can allow it to go over base by as much as 1000. So what resistance rating debuffs do you envision using, how do you handle them and how do they compare to resistance rating buffs? Are you going to hard-limit resistance rating to never drop below 100? To never drop below 50? How do you make sure people with no resistance rating buffs don't get completely destroyed by resistance rating debuffs while still making those debuffs meaningful to oppose a person with a high resistance rating?
We're still looking at a fractional function, and I wanted to ask if you could provide a few more specific examples, at least for resistance, to see how the system works in both directions. Because I'll admit - your system works reasonably well in the positive spectrum, but it's the negative that concerns me. -
Quote:Question: 2 and 3 what? What you've done is essentially eliminated a fraction. Allow me to demonstrate:Originally Posted by Obitus
It is absolutely linear. You're just measuring the wrong attribute. A 100% buff to recharge reduction means you can use the power 200% as often. A 200% buff to recharge means you can use the power 300% as often.
1 / (1+1) = 0.5; 1 / 0.5 = 2
1 / (1+2) = 0.333; 1 / 0.333 = 3
1 / (1+1) = 0.5; 1 / 0.5 = 1/(1 / (1+1)) = 1+1
That whole division accomplishes nothing. You take a number, put it as the denominator of a fraction, then divided one by the fraction, doing nothing more than flipping that number right back to numerator and back to itself. That's like saying a square root function is linear because sqrt(10)^2 = 10 and sqrt(11)^2 = 11. Or, even more fun, that a Sine function is linear because ArcSin(Sin(10)) = 10 and ArcSin(Sin(11)) = 11. You can't take a function then wrap the reverse function around it and call it linear. All you're doing is cancelling the functions out and leaving a basic parameter that equals itself.
A linear function takes the form of f(x)= a*x + b, or in other words it's a function where your variable is only ever multiplied by or divided by a constant or parameter, and where it isn't wrapped up in another mathematical function like a root or an absolute value or the like. This is because such a function produces a linear increase in the result for a linear increase in the variable. Anything else is not a linear function. Furthermore, any function where your variable is in a denominator is not linear just by the definition of what a linear function is, nor does it produce a linear increase in results for a linear increase in the variable. This isn't something that needs proving.
Back to recharge, let's examine a few examples. A power normally recharges in 1000 seconds, say Elude. We shall try this power with 10% recharge, 20% recharge and 30% recharge.
10: 1000/(1+0.1) ~ 909 seconds
20: 1000/(1+0.2) ~ 833 seconds
30: 1000/(1+0.3) ~ 769 seconds
Adding 10% recharge took 91 seconds out of the power's recharge. Adding another 10% recharge took 76 seconds out of it. Adding another 10% recharge still took just 64 seconds out of the power. This is not a linear function, because for a linear increase of recharge slotting, the function does not return a linear increase in final recharge. It returns a diminishing return, in fact, characteristic of a fractional function.
Specifically for recharge, there's no point in examining anything more than... Well, a power's recharge. Dividing the power's original recharge by its enhanced recharge will do nothing but return the value of enhancement, and that's largely irrelevant anyway. The one meaningful metric to do with recharge is cycle, which is essentially recharge plus animation, and for a power of this long a recharge, animation isn't a meaningful contributor to cycle.
As for damage resistance following that function or a similar one... Well, for that I'll have to address Arcana's numbers. -
Quote:OK, let's roll with that. For the sake of argument, let's assume that you are capable of designing a system with no wrong choices, where everything I pick, I pick because that's what I want to do and not because it constitutes better performance. I'm down with that. In fact, I'd like to play such a game, provided you didn't leave in choices which gimp me anyway, with no ability to predict which they are. Let's assume that. I have two questions, then:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
You think you don't know, because you think one power must be better than the other, and that fact is obscured by details difficult to decipher. You think *someone* knows the correct answer. In my game, the answer would be: if you want to be fast, fear or poison something, or get more health, you would pick the first power. If you want special ability vs undead, you would get the second power. If you have no preference, you would flip a coin.
Properly designed, if the intent was to eliminate a quantitative way of judging, there wouldn't just be a very difficult one you couldn't do, there would simply be no way to do it at all. That's not impossible. Its not even especially difficult, engineering-wise. The differences would be provably qualitative only.
1. Why even bother with small percentage values that have non-obvious effects? If you don't want me min-maxing, would you then offer me 3% resistance to cold damage? Would you offer me an extra 1% chance to score a critical hit? Would you, in the broader sense, offer me choices which are only meaningful within a min/max context? I have two ways to make decisions: One is based on understanding the underlying system and being deduce the significance of each choice even if it isn't directly obvious, and the other is by simply making a choice and looking for the effect it has. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If you give me a system that I cannot comprehend, then you CANNOT give me choices that don't have obvious consequences.
2. Why even bother bundling effects? Suppose I'm given the ability to have more damage and more resistance to toxic attacks, or I'm able to have more speed and more accuracy. Suppose I want more damage and more accuracy but I care nothing for speed and toxic resistance? I want both choices equally, so I must find some way to differentiate between them. If I were given a choice of damage, accuracy, speed and toxic resistance with the ability to pick only two, then that would be a far superior situation, but would you go for that?
This really comes down to the fact that players like to know what they are doing and not just pressing "Random" at every choice, and when players are given bundle choices, they tend to evaluate everything in the bundle. IF you can design a system which doesn't task the player with min-maxing, then you NEED to break those bundles up into individual items and you HAVE to make each choice's effect obvious through play.
What you're describing is a rather very complex control scheme that relies on six axis of movement with no camera orientation limitation.Quote:Originally Posted by McNum
I just want one thing from CoH2 that this game isn't capable of: A flight mode that supports aerobatics.
When I pull back hard during a flight, it doesn't mean I want to go straight up, it means I'm going for a loop, and why not do a barrel roll when I press the move left/right buttons twice while flying forward? I also want to be able to fly upside down. Couple that with an aura or power that leaves a trail and you've got a fun aerobatics team in the making.
Right now, we have three axis of locomotion: left-right, forward-backward and up-down (jump-down), and we have full control over yaw (turning left and right along the vertical line) half-way control over pitch (looking up and down) which is limited from straight down to straight up and allows for no upside-down camera, and we lack any control over our roll orientation. I'm not sure how complex it would be to implement what's missing, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the engine may have trouble drawing a non-standard camera orientation. That, and not only would this only benefit Fly, it also has the potential to make the control scheme far more complex than it strictly needs to be.
For reference, I direct anyone to check out any of the Descent games. They have the kind of controls I just described, and this can make them profoundly confusing, to the point of eliminating any notion of "up and down."
That said, in an ideal world, HELL YEAH would I wan that kind of flying!
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By the way, the formula I suggested earlier, the one about calculating the defence you need to gain a certain "survival time" under a theoretical example, the one that goes like:
Defence = (Attacks*(1 - BaseTohit) - 10)/Attacks
Also suffers from the same problems depicted in my above post. This formula supports an Attack variable in the range of 20 to 200. Anything above 200 puts your defence above the soft cap and anything under 20 puts your defence in the negative.
However, that's what defence debuffs effectively do - they act like negative defence buffs, meaning the formula would have to support Attack values between 0 and 20. And here's where the problems start.
The formula I've chosen is also a fraction formula. What that means is that it has no value for a Defence Rating of 0 and for Defence Ratings close to zero, say 0.0001, it corresponds to defence numbers of close to negative infinity. As I said before, the formula breaks even at a Defence Rating of 20, but the formula hits the -45% defence softcap (the 5% to-hit floor) at just a little over 10.526 Defence Rating, and from there back it drops first into sub-5% to-hit, and then into negative to-hit. The [0.05;0.95] bounding would would prevent that, yes, but look at the numbers and how they turn out, roughly:
10-20 Defence Rating takes you from the 5% to-hit floor to the 50% to-hit base. 20-200 Rating takes you from the 50% to-hit base to the 95%. That's not "fair enough," because I ask you the following: What numbers would defence debuffs have? Seriously. Let's take the simplest example of a 10 point Defence Rating debuff. How would it perform? Well, against a defence-capped character, that would bring his Defence Rating down from 200 to 190, bringing actual defence down from 45% to around 44.74%, consistent with taking away 10 seconds of survivability. Now suppose you slap a character who has no defence with that debuff. His defence will go from 0% to -50%, bounded to 45%.
The result of this is that defence debuffs will utterly destroy people who didn't have defence to begin with while having very little effect against those with high defence values, which is what defence debuffs should be aiming at, in my opinion.
When you institute diminishing returns, you usually end up with rampantly accelerated returns on the opposite end of the scale, and you end up with unpredictable levels or return on debuffs because of it. -
Quote:This is one thing I really hate about games. The game asks me to make a choice. I don't know what to pick, so I pick one at random. Did I make the right choice? I don't know. What did my decision change? I can't tell. Is my character stronger now, and in what way? I have no idea. THE ONLY way to proceed in such a situation, if you even care about building a character at all, is to do your homework and find out what effect your choices are having.Originally Posted by Combat
I cannot tell from the numbers if a WoW character is good or bad. That upsets me, because I don't understand how to make a character better. To continue using WoW, I don't know whether I can survive a raid boss, or if the many types of "endurance" powers will keep the blue bar full, or whether my character does enough damage for high-end raiding.
That's not to say I want a min-maxable system. On the contrary, I want a very simple system that leaves little room for that. I want a system that has no ambiguous choices. If I have to make a choice between two options, then I want the result to be obvious as soon as I make it. If I have to pick between Murrumbidgee and Homunculus, then I want to see what these do even if I don't understand the terminology. Say I pick Murrumbidgee and the game tells me "You can now summon forth the powers of a large river and blast enemies with it!" and if I chose Homunculus, the game tells me "You can create an inanimate golem to fight by your side." I don't need to know the numbers to SEE the effect my choices have.
Granted, this will make the creation of a fine-grained system where one character has 5% more health but 10% less attack with the same skillset, but that's a system I will not miss. Less calculating, more clear choices with clear consequences. -
Quote:The problem with that is that the recharge system is not actually intuitive. I've had to explain to people on numerous occasions that reducing your recharge by 100% does not, in fact, make the power recharge instantly, but rather makes it recharge in half the time. To this day I don't know how to explain this in simple terms without simply giving people the "FinalRecharge = BaseRecharge/(1 + RechargeBuff)" It is not intuitive if you have to resort to a formula to grasp it.Originally Posted by Fulmens
My suggestion:
Add up all the Defense, add it to a basic 100% "Defense", and divide the to-hit by the total.
100 defense: Hit normally [100% of incoming "hits" land]
200 defense: hit half normal amount [50% of incoming "hits" land]
300 defense: hit 1/3 of normal amount [100/300]
1000 defense: hit 10% of the time [100/1000]
Likewise, 1000 resist would take 10% damage.
It would give the same sort of curve as Recharge does.
Furthermore, this is not a linear formula. Again, it is a fractional formula, just explored in the other direction. With BaseRecharge as a constant and RechargeBuff as the variable, you have a discontinuity point around -1 (around 100% recharge debuff) and the return is diminishing because you're basically drawing up a concave decline. As a point of fact, even for values of RechargeBuff approaching infinity, FinalRecharge will still tend towards 0.
The problem here is that you seem to want to treat Defence as an additive and subtractive parameter. For instance, if I have 500 defence and add another 500 defence, I have 1000 defence. Which really breaks down once we examine the area of debuffs. For starters, unlike with Recharge, your formula makes no accounting for defence debuffs. If you start with 100 defence and get hit every time and then get debuffed by 50 defence, what does that mean? Do you get hit 3 times out of every 2 attacks? Furthermore, what numbers do you give to debuffs?
Suppose we give defence a floor of 100 for consistency's sake. Suppose, furthermore, that an enemy has a denuff of 50 defence. Against a character with no defence, this would be effective. Against a character with 100 defence, this will reduce mitigation from 0.5 to 0.66, or it will make you get hit around 33% more often. Against a character with 1000 defence, this would instead reduce it from 0.1 to ~0.105, or it will make you get hit a little over 5% more. Not only does your defence number have less of an impact the higher your defence goes, but said defence becomes harder and harder to debuff.
I'm not sure how applicable this is to a click-n-kill RPG, myself. Though I'll grant you one thing - this is more or less how fighting games tend to work out. I don't need to name names, since most any one-on-one fighter works out the same way. Every attack you make, every move you perform, comes with an opportunity cost, represented by the time it leaves you vulnerable and unable to block. If you can catch the enemy with the attack, then that vulnerability doesn't matter, but if an enemy blocks your attack or dodges it, this leaves you open for quite a serious counter-attack. Now, obviously, not all moves are fast enough to capitalise on all vulnerabilities, which means that the longer an attack leaves you vulnerable, the worse the punishment you're going to take when it bombs.Quote:Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Anyway, one system I have seen used to some effect is a "domination" one. It basically works like this: an attacker and a defender each have a score called "Position." The Position value is sort of like "Soft Hitpoints." It is reduced any time you have a very close call with an attacker, get shoved, thrown backwards, use an especially powerful attack that unbalances you (especially if you *miss* a very powerful attack), and so on. However, when you successfully strike an enemy, use certain powers, or are rallied by a teammate, you can build a little Position back up. In game it would be displayed as a meter similar to Health or Energy that rises and falls much more quickly.
Defense and resistance is then treated like this: every attack is checked to see if you dodged first, then for deflection, then for resistance. The amount you dodge reduces the amount that you have to deflect, and the amount you deflect reduces the amount you have to resist. All three of these values are weighted more or less the same, except that Resistance is much less penalized by Position than Dodge is, and Dodge is affected by position loss less often. Thus a character with very good Dodge capabilities is able to survive more or less unscathed as long as she is played fast and nimble, concentrating on keeping her Position high. A Resistance based character is played to take the damage, and while it has some defenses, they whittle away after a few hits.
This isn't really as easily adapted to an RPG that mostly consists of clicking tray icons with the mouse and using the keyboard to turn. Granted, this isn't how we all play it (I don't), but this IS the basic structure that the game is based upon. Positioning matters in a general sense, and you're rarely required to keep to very tight timing. Even "Mega attack! Get away!" mechanics give you a good 8-10 seconds to respond. What you're suggesting feels like the Archvillan "purple tirangles of doom." You can't hold an Archvillan for most of the time, but you CAN when the triangles show up. The problem is that they're hard to see and don't stay up long enough, so reacting to them is disproportionately difficult from the rest of the game.
Additionally, what you propose seems applicable to one-on-one fights where you can keep your eyes glued to the enemy's position metre, but this is really difficult to do in a larger fight with even as few as six enemies, which even just +2 will give you. It's hard enough to keep track of just their health, and most people don't bother to keep track of their endurance, but to capitalise on such a system would simply require a game that's far more dynamic than this one.
I'm not actually saying that this is an inherently BAD idea, mind you. Hell, for one of the many up-and-coming Action-MMOs, this might be great. However, to this day I still play City of Heroes with ~300 Ping time, so anything that happens can only happen after my reaction time, plus a third of a second on top, and in a large fight, my reaction time is not fast. Certainly not fast enough to catch an enemy using a 1.67s attack. -
Quote:I'm with venture on this one. I feel that problems should only be addressed when they are or are about to become problems, at least when it comes to social interaction. We've seen this here on the forums more than a few times when heavy-handed moderation has tried to change the way we BEHAVE, more than just making sure we don't cause trouble.Originally Posted by Zombie Man
What if a channel is created for the sharing of a specific info, such as the formation of a TF or badge hunting, with the express intention that it isn't a discussion channel, because the one who made it and the ones who join it already belong to social channels and don't want another quickly scrolling channel spamming their chat window?
As long as a channel is not kept private and only to people who have out-of-game personal agreements on how to use it, then this channel should only be moderated when its misuse is causing a problem or liable to cause a problem.
I liken this to the Help channel. It's for help, not for looking for teams or for idle chit-chat because it keeps people from asking questions and getting answers. Yet I don't feel that the occasional off-the-cuffs exchange, especially with the same people asking for help, is detrimental to this process. I myself have been involved with banter with a person asking for help, only to cut the conversation short to answer a question which came up in the channel in the meantime.
Having an admit step in and moderate hurts, always and every time. As such, it should not be done if there's nothing to gain. -
Quote:Defence is a bad example because it's hard to "visualise." But the system works just as well for Resistance (for half the final "Resistance Rating" values), but the result from such would be largely the same. I don't want to get mired into even more unnecessary calculations, so let's use some imaginary numbers.Originally Posted by SlyGuyMcFly
It's only diminishing returns if you look at it in terms of actual defence numbers (which would mean bugger all under this system). It's not really diminishing returns, because each point of Defence Rating would be as valuable as the previous one, and as the next one. In other words, since you're not collecting IO bonuses with +3.75% S/L Defence but rather IO bonuses with +5 S/L D.Rating, there is no loss (or gain) of value as you stack each point. Except perhaps compared to getting increased resistance or something. I think layering protections would be unusually powerful under a system like this one.
You turn on a toggle that takes you from 10 to 20 Resistance Rating and notice that an enemy who previously hit you for 100 now hits you for 90. Now imagine you have around 900 Resistance Rating already. An attack that deals 100 damage normally only hits you for 15. You run a toggle which gives you another 10 Resistance Rating and notice that this attack now hits you for 14.95. My first question would be: "The hell?" While I may be theoretically aware of what that minute percentage does for my overall mitigation, the fact remains that I see almost no change in the damage I'm taking.
This creates a system that makes the player wonder "What's the point of going for more Rating if all it'll do is drop the damage I'm taking by half a point?" And I would not blame a player for asking that. Of course, once I plot the defence curve on a flat, I'll see that that half a point actually equals a ton of mitigation because it's on the steep end of the slope, but you try telling that to a player who spent a considerable investment to see almost nothing change on his end.
And, yes, if need be I can run the numbers and present a real example, but unlike Arcana, I'm lazy and incompetent.
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I can already hear people asking "So? Right now a player will scoff if offered 1.75% defence and ask what the hell that'll do, unaware that this percentage can count for a lot if you have a lot of defence before it." That's true, I agree, but here's the kicker - I don't feel that "softcapping" defence or even resistance should be part of the regular game as it is now. OF COURSE the last few percent before the defence softcap matter a lot. That's how the numbers work out, but as far as I'm concerned, this shouldn't be coming up. The fact of the matter is that the slope doesn't get really very steep until around 35-40% defence, and players shouldn't be hitting their own caps by themselves.