Samuel_Tow
-
Posts
14730 -
Joined
-
Speaking of no shadows for the invisible, I find it supremely disappointing that there are no shadows for capes and equivalents. I mean, we see them in real-time reflections, but not in shadows? The result is that my cloaked assassin who normally has a long, flowing cape behind her has a "naked" shadow with huge shoulders because the High Collar Cape collar still casts a shadow but the cape doesn't.
Also, "double shadows" over water are really distracting. As we all know, most bodies of water in the game have a "floor" that's about four feet under the surface to simulate... I'm not sure what. Deep murky water without having to render a bottom and apply effects. The problem is that when anything casts a shadow over water, it casts one shadow on the surface and one on the very obvious floor. -
Quote:I have no problem with Placate resistance in much the same way as I have no problem with Confuse resistance or any other type. The problem is that Placate's full effect fails not based on resisting foes but rather based on circumstances which are often beyond your control. The easiest example is the Assassin's Strike Demoralisation effect - this is auto-hit on all targets around the surviving assassination victim and the debuffs last for a while. This in itself represents a buff which will cause an enemy to "remember" you after a Placate effect runs out. As well, many sets come with debuffs attached to every attack, such as Broadsword. Any enemy you hit suffers a defence debuff effect which causes Placate to goof.Originally Posted by Leo_G
Not tripping over his own feet. Foes *shouldn't* be stupid. Some will be oblivious and some won't. In real circumstances, facing varied opponents, you must bring into consideration the intelligence level and perceptive abilities of the opponent. In game circumstances, some just aren't going to forget about you and you have to keep this occurrence within the breadth of possible scenarios as not to be caught off guard. I usually just expect the foe to always attack after placate wears.
But beyond that explanation, some foes just resist placate.
This makes the mechanic far more complicated than it has any reason to be, and either dependent on blind luck or outright not working. I've pretty much given up on using Placate for anything more than a temporary reprieve from one enemy, because that's all it does almost every time I use it. And it's not a question of "some enemies are dumber than others." ALL enemies who are susceptible to confuse are susceptible to confuse at all times (external buffs notwithstanding). You can hit them, you can debuff them, you can kill their buddies, but these confused enemies will remain confused. Confuse effects don't have a random chance to work and a random chance to break on their own
No, no, I like your solution, but I don't think we could make an argument convincing enough to get Castle's descendants to hear us. And you are correct in that some kind of unbreakability of Hide is needed to make this work. In my original suggestion, I offered to place such unbreakability on Hide for one or two seconds after a Placate, so that you could Placate and have a small window of opportunity to act where you cannot be suppressed, after which things return to normal.Quote:Just offering solutions that would most easily solve the problem. Even if the hidden effect granted was delayed, it would still be broken if an enemy attacks at the same time. So it's not really solving anything, if the problem being solved is aggro infringing on Stalker offense.
This isn't always possible, even absent of constant damage auras. With one enemy, this is easy. With up to three enemies, this is doable. With five enemies, however, they stagger their attacks between them in such a way that you often have no window of opportunity to get a Placate Critical off without one of them missing. And while I know that if I "just use Placate" with no sense of timing, it will probably get interrupted, but this is one thing I hope to change. City of Heroes isn't the right game for such split-second twitch reflexes. Yes, it's possible to time it. Yes, I've done it. I still want a more secure way to do so without relying on unreliable timing.Quote:But rule of thumb in using placate is to literally wait until after the foe attacks and/or using soft control before using placate. Common sense really, but it's generally to be expected, even on defense characters, to have placate stripped if you simply use placate when you want to crit. You have to time its use. -
Quote:You'll never get better numbers because having multiple secondary effects to choose from is considered a major benefit which requires that the secondary effects be crap in order to be balanced. If they could just boost the set's numbers sufficiently for it to be good, I wouldn't have much to complain about, but this will not happen. Not without a miracle attached.Originally Posted by Premonitions
Swap ammo would be fine with better numbers
-
Quote:No, I run it on a Wondows PC. I know Ambient Occlusion with a particularly high Shader setting produces ABYSMAL performance with any amount of Anti-Alising, but I have my Occlusion shut down entirely. It overrides Anti-Alising in generl, producing smooth edges for nearby objects but horrible jaggies for buildings in the distance, which are typically a lot more prone to pixelisation anyway. AO also produces weird coloured for and lighting in some instances (like the Fixadine dens for the Destroyers).Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
You using a mac, Sam?
I have the same issues but find the game looks 100% more appealing with JUST the shadows turned on. You'd be amazed what those shadows do for visual appeal.
So AO lags, produces jaggies and often looks weird. Not worth running it.
---
I've actually found that I can run pretty high-quality shadows as long as I keep them very short-ranged. Right now I have the highest resolution shadow shader with the finest blur on it, running at the shortest distance, and I'm getting very pretty shadows with a fairly solid framerate, outside of Praetoria, of course. Yeah, it's a bit odd that buildings don't cast shadows when you fly above them because you're out of range, but the framerate is worth it. And, yes, Shadows DO make quite a big impact on the game, especially higher-quality shadows. -
Quote:I disagree on a fundamental level, in that I disagree with the notion of "skippable" power. There should never be a power in a powerset that a person can look at and go "That's worthless!" That's not to say that every person should want to take ever power, merely that every person should have to THINK before deciding if he wants a power, and eventually make that decision based on preference, not obvious mechanical inferiority.Originally Posted by MajorDecoy
I think it's okay if you decide that you don't want Bitter Freeze Ray; skip it. If someone else wants it because they're happy to use it, I don't see a problem. As long as the power is useful and the power set it's in is not under performing, everything's good.
I very much disagree that as long as a set works and a power isn't broken-bad in it, then that power is fine. It isn't. No set should be allowed to be competitive with other sets while only taking half of its powers. This makes it a clearly SUPERIOR set because it can have the same amount of performance while allowing you to take many OTHER powers from elsewhere and boost its performance above the norm. Furthermore, no power should ever be so bad that taking it is pointless (ye olde Temperature Protection) just because the set it's in is otherwise competent even without it. This is bad balance.
Everything we are offered to take should be worth taking in and of itself. Not in a "greater than the sum of its parts" set. Not within a set that's good anyway even without it. The power should be good in isolation. Not necessarily AS good as comparable powers in other sets, but good nonetheless. Any power I'm offered to take should make me WANT to take it, and a great many right now don't do that. -
Quote:1 and 2 are impactful, in the sense that they don't penalise Stalkers for things beyond their control. It's kind of odd that a Stalker can sometimes prefer to NOT defeat an enemy so that other enemies will be debuffed, when really, the ultimate goal of Assassin's Strike should be to kill as big a thing as you can get away with in one hit. It can't one-shot everything, obviously, but that should be the ideal goal. Allowing the beduff to fire whether an enemy survives or not gives Stalkers use of one of their stronger utilities at all times.Originally Posted by Leo_G
Suggestions 1 and 2 sound wishful rather than impactful. It's akin to saying "My suggestion = make people like Stalkers. The end." The issues brought up are already know but apparently they aren't as simple to fix as saying "Fix nao".
Beyond that, I've faced the problem of shared aggro pretty much every time I've teamed. If I'm late to assume my position next to what I'll be assassinating and a team-mate of mine starts the fight first, I will almost always have an enemy peel off and attack me before I've been able to pull an Assassin's Strike off. Luckily, they usually miss, at least against my defence-based Stalkers, but the point remains - if they have no way to know I'm not there, they shouldn't attack me. I have no problem with enemies attacking me if I ran away to rehide and tried to assassinate that boss my team-mate is fighting, since then I'll have revealed myself beforehand. But being attacked without ever taking part in the fight is just... Ugh...
And, yes, "I'm also aware that not all of these are possible, but I intend to list them anyway." From the original post.
Characters can resist their own powers, which is why most of our self-buffs are tagged as "Unresistable." It might be problematic when it comes to Pool and Epic powers, however, since Stalkers would then need to have their own custom versions of the things.Quote:3 might be possible but not in that way. I wonder if they could simply tag Stalker debuffs as granted temp powers so that, despite the foe being debuffed, it'll aggro as if it debuffed itself. Not sure what other kind of effects this would have (because I just thought it up) but it'll probably allow the Stalkers debuffs to seem to not discriminate vs foe level (weaker foes wouldn't be debuffed greatly but harder foes will feel it as if hit by an even level foe). Just for reference, this is how demoralize works and it's a debuff that doesn't draw aggro.
More generally, though, what I dislike about this bug isn't that enemies won't stay placated, but that they will only stay placated under what is almost arbitrary rules. I've had instances where I can placate an enemy, walk around a corner and that enemy will never come after me. I've had instances where I'll placate an enemy and run far away, and that enemy will take off after me as soon as the Placate wears off. You can tell what the enemy will do, in fact, based on how he reacts. If the enemy drops to non-combat pose, then he won't remember you. If he stays in combat pose and keeps rotating to face you but not attacking, he'll resume firing as soon as the Placate wears off.
Frankly, I find the ability to Platace one enemy and then run around a corner, pulling the fight away from him should be a staple in a Stalker's arsenal, but as it stands right now, it only works under very contrived circumstances. Again, a Stalker is tripping over his own feet.
Plain making the Hidden status not breakable by being attacked is one of my ultimate dreams, but I both don't expect to see it happen and I don't think we can call it suppressing on taking damage a "bug" that needs to be "fixed." It would certainly make Stalkers less irritating and remove the advantage defence sets have, but that's not what I was aiming to fix here.Quote:For 4, I think, if we're talking purely offensive, making the Hidden effects it grants unbreakable unless the stalker takes an offensive action would be a simple solution, IMO.
My problem is with Placate, in that probably 2 times out of 3 I'll get my Hidden status granted by Placate interrupted before the Placate power has even finished animating. Yes, I still placated an enemy, but half the power's effect comes in giving you a Hidden status with which to score a Hidden critical, and it simply gives no guaranteed window of opportunity to do so. Hell, I've had my Hidden status interrupted by the enemy I Placated
Basically, I want Placate to ensure that I have at least the opportunity to attack while still Hidden if I act fast, but not necessarily the opportunity to walk 20 yards and hit an enemy on the other side of the room while a Marcone Capo is unloading his Tommygun on me.
Incidentally, Placate's Hidden status WILL NOT interrupt from DOT effects resulting in from a power that hit before Placate triggered. So if you're under the effect of a Capo's Full auto and you Placate after it has started, you won't lose your Hide status to his rolling DOT. This is kind of how I want to see attacks during and shortly after the animation handled on the player's end - a period of unsuppressability that lasts, say, 1 or 2 seconds after the animations has finished, just enough to act.
---
As for Placate causing aggro, I could be wrong or operating on old information. I could swear I've seen it cause aggro, but I may be wrong. If I am, then Point 5 is already true and fixed
-
Quote:You're speaking from the context of the City of Heroes character building system, which is not a very open-ended one. You get two powersets and a host of moderately-useful pools to choose from. Once you have a pack of powers and you're more or less expected to take them all, it makes no difference what any of the powers do and what any of the powers cost, because the utility and cost is that of the package as a whole.Originally Posted by MajorDecoy
But you have to consider what other powers a character has when considering balance. Resilience on a Regeneration scrapper is something you can take or leave. Resilience on an Invulnerability Tanker? If I had that, I could consider skipping Tough (unless it was a very strict concept build, I'd probably still want Weave).
Rage is awesome for a Super Strength tanker, but would you call it a good power for a Master Mind?
In isolation, no power is good or bad.
When this becomes meaningful is when you start trying to develop a more open system where powers ARE judged against each other, rather than sets judged against sets. Most RPGs don't give you the opportunity to even TAKE all of your skills, let alone take and upgrade them, while City of Heroes does. You have 18 powerset powers and 24 power picks total, so you very much CAN take all of "your powers" and still take two powers for travel and even then still take all of "your other powers" from the Epic which matches your set combo.
However, even in City of Heroes, I don't want to ignore power-to-power balance, because I still ask these questions: If my passives give me most of my resistances, why would I bother with my toggles at all? And even if I bother with my toggles, I'm still going to feel like a fool for draining so much endurance and hurting my offence for what amounts to bupkis in the long run. I dislike splitting powers into "good" and "bad" with the only reason existing to take the bad powers being that they stack with the good.
Again: Bitter Freeze Ray. This has got to be one of the DUMBEST powers in the entire game, yet every time I bring up its horrible balance, people tell me "Well, it stacks with Freeze Ray, so it's good!" So? It's still a crappy power on absolutely every front. I feel like a slobbering idiot every time I use that, and I feel even worse when I remember that I took and slotted that abomination. I want a power to be good worth taking ON ITS OWN before it even factors into your build. That's what it comes down to. -
I'm pretty sure that what an NPC shows on right-click is set individually for each NPC. I say this because old NPCs don't have this problem, they still display the Info option. Newer NPCs, even when they show up in old content, tend to not have that.
And, yes, it's annoying and it's one of those things that I really want to see fixed but never expect to actually see. It's like Maria Jenkins' typo-ridden bio, or anything Praetor Sinclair ever says. -
There's no question that Ultra Mode looks great, and there are a few things you can tweak to get reasonable goodies with acceptable performance. However, it still bugs me that it taxes my system by this much. Sure, it's not top-of-the-line amazing, but I have a GeForce GTX 285, an I7 processor and 8GB of RAM, and the thing still chugs down to below 30 FPS in a lot of places, and that's without Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field or Bloom, and with the other Ultra Mode settings at about half-and-half.
The game looks amazing for a game of this age, and "good" for current day gaming, but it just hurts my brain every time I see my picture skipping because I looked towards the old town in Cap Au Diable or because I went into a Warehouse large room. -
Quote:So, you're saying that that official statement that this wasn't about server mergers was lying to our faces? Wow, and I thought I had a low opinion of the development team. Can I have my fanboy pass back, please?Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
They once said there'd be no server list merge too. Hell, they once said they weren't going to merge the forum communities.
Reality check: They will not tell us their long term plans, and a business will do everything it can to reduce costs and maximise profits. -
Preface: I consider most of those to be bugs, rather than balancing decisions, as a lot of them have been confirmed to be. I'm also aware that not all of these are possible, but I intend to list them anyway. My intention isn't to overpower Stalkers or even make them any stronger, but rather to just cut down on the ways the game cheats them. With all of this said:
1. Make the Assassin's Strike Demoralise effect trigger even if your assassination target dies. This has been said to be technically difficult, but it's worth doing if at all possible.
2. Fix Stalker shared aggro so that enemies don't attack a Stalker who is hidden and has taken no action just because his team-mates drew aggro. Only add a Stalker to NPCs' "aggro list" or equivalent once that NPC has been able to catch sight of the Stalker.
3. Make Placate override previous debuffs in the enemy AI's mind. Right now, if you have a debuff placed on an NPC (such as the Assassin's Strike demoralise effect) and you Placate said enemy, the enemy will still keep aggro on you, and resume attacking you as soon as you can be targeted. Normal enemy behaviour in this case is to ignore the Stalker entirely until the enemy has a chance to aggro on the Stalker all over again.
4. Delay the Placate power's Hidden effect so that it occurs right at the end of the power, as opposed to the beginning of it. Right now, it's very possible to placate an enemy, Hide and be hit, suppressing the Hide effect, all before the power's animation is done playing. Furthermore, make the Hidden effect impossible to suppress by enemy attacks for precisely 1 second after its application, giving the Stalker the chance to at fire off an attack from Hide if he does so immediately.
5. Make Placate not draw aggro. At all. Right now if you placate an enemy while hidden and without engaging a spawn, you may not be attacked immediately, but as soon as that enemy recovers from the placate, he WILL attack you, hidden or not. Make Placate not draw aggro the same way Confuse powers don't.
That's all I can think of at the moment. -
I'm pretty sure this has been bugged since ragdolls came out, but I wouldn't expect to see a fix to it ever. It's not popular enough for the development team to bother with.
-
Quote:Not universally, no. For one, you can't divide all sets into resistance/defence. Where would Willpower fall? What about Regeneration?Originally Posted by LVConvert
Resistance sets generally have a heal power included, while defense sets generally do not, right? I want to say universally but that would require me to look it up...but anyways, doesn't that have to be taken into account when scheming to change how these powers work?
Secondly, Ninjutsu is a defence-based set and that has a heal - Kuji-In Something. Additionally, Electrical Armour is a resistance-based set, kind of, but that doesn't have a full heal, or at the very least didn't use to. Also, Stone Armour is a primarily defence-based set. Rock Armour, Crystal Armour and Minerals are defence toggles. Yet that has a heal in Earth's Embrace. Also, if we count Electric Melee's energise, then we have to count Energy Aura's Energy Drain, which has a heal component to it, yet Energy Aura is a defence set, pretty much.
Finally, no, heals and other aspects don't have to be taken into account when devising formulas, because these concern the mechanics of receiving and resisting damage, as well as the mechanics of dodging and blocking attacks. Regeneration and heals are not relevant to those, at least to the extent that they're not and should not be members of each other's formulas and methods of operation. You don't resist less damage if you regenerate more, for instance. -
Quote:Yes. He's a friend of mine whom I've tried to recruit into City of Heroes multiple times. I even shared my buddy code with him, so he technically owns pre-GR City of Heroes. But he keeps saying he prefers Fantasy and that he really enjoys the gear grind (which I don't believe, since all I've heard from him is complaining about rotten team-mates and cheap raid mechanics) and so City of Heroes isn't for him. I tried to tell him about Inventions and Incarnates recently, which I KNOW he'd like, but he doesn't seem to be into super heroes or contemporary settings. He's currently playing Aion, so I can't say his leaving WoW was much of an improvementOriginally Posted by Leo_G
And you're sure that this friend of yours isn't just you in this story, correct?
We're not arguing, and the discussion concerns hypothetical situations and proposed game design ideas. Which is fun in its own way, since I don't have to stop every two sentences to explain how "this wouldn't work in City of Heroes." That's kind of this whole thread - what would you do if you were making a game from scratch.Quote:Then I'm unsure what you and Arcana are arguing about.
I've played games irresponsibly, and the result is that I hate said games. If I just pick "what's fun," I end up with a crappy character who can't tie his own shoelaces without dying and losing progress. Been there, done that, and a LOT of times. And even if we assume that I'm just picking things that sound fun, a typical RPG still makes me choose between 1.3% something or 2.2% something else, usually picking between two things I don't understand. Do I want 5 more points in my Palingenesis or are those 5 points better spent in my Mallard, or should instead I hold out until my Grubstake opens up and invest 10 points into that all at once?Quote:I think you're just taking things too seriously. When you first pick up an RPG, you're suppose to make a character you simply like and have fun with it. For instance, new game has a scythe so I'll probably gravitate to making a character with that weapon regardless if it's a spell-cast weapon or a melee weapon or usable by both. Then I'll just make a character I 'want'. So he'll be a shape shifting scythe user with some necromantic spells or something. Later, after I learn more about the game is when/if I optimize. If I'm having fun, I might just restart the character and do it 'right', in a sense. Or I may find something even more fun than a scythe.
My problem with RPGs in general is that even when they're not about numbers, they're still about numbers. My character is not a collection of abilities, he's a collection of percentages, points totals and numerical effects. I can't pick "Strength" and know that my character is strong. I have to invest points into Strength and decide how many I want to pit in it and how many I should put in something else. I know the intention is to allow the player to customize his or her character, but to me it just represents a gate. I want a certain character, which I pretty much decide before I create said character, and then I have to figure out what I need to do to achieve this character. The more the system tries to hide my ability to understand it, predict it and chart a path to that character ONCE, the more of a chore levelling up feels, and it really shouldn't.
I've never, ever seen character building or planning as fun in any sense of the word. The only time it's even remotely like fun is when I'm done with it, or alternately when I've planned it out beforehand and I can just follow down the list. And even then, it's not fun so much as less of a chore. I have pretty loose standards when it comes to character mechanics. So long as the character is "decent" and does all the things I need said character to do, I don't care if he hits for 1000 or 2000 or if he "crits" once or twice every five hits. If I ever found a game where performance were treated as customization the way costume selection is, I might change my mind, but every RPG I've ever played has treated mechanical customization with hostility, like the game is constantly trying to screw me over and waiting for me to make the wrong pick.
In a lot of ways, this is great for people who play the game with a self-avatar and shoot for being as strong as they can get away with. I tend to build my characters like the actors in a play, and I have pretty strong limitations on who should be how strong compared to who else. Right now, this is not enforceable since even my strongest characters are at most slightly above average, and I REALLY don't want to go lower than that. -
Quote:Again, I apologise for misinterpreting your post and insulting you. You're right in that I should have been more careful when it comes to this kind of response, and you're right that it was unfair. I'm sorry I did that to you, and I don't want to try and find excuses for why it was OK for me to do that. It wasn't.Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
I like you Sam. If you read my post as an attack then I apologize. But I also think your appraisal of me is unfair. It would take you like two seconds to find a post from me about something I don't like. I have always been very vocal about what I think could be improved. I think it is only fair to be equally vocal with praise when things go right.
To a large extent, I'm still bitter over all the recent unpleasantries and all the creative ways people came up with to insult me, but I should not take that out on you, as to the best of my memory, you've done and said nothing bad to me personally. -
Quote:You say "this" and then proceed to put words in my mouth the same way you claim I did to the OP? Strange, strange indeed.Originally Posted by Furio
This.
But, that's obviously because we agree with the point of view and must therefore be sheep. Good thing we have folks like Sam around to tell us how things really are.
If I misread, I apologise. I saw a LOT of sarcastic "you're stupid for being discontent" posts quite recently, so I may be seeing things. Of course, you could have explained this to me instead of continuing the trend of intelligence-insulting sarcasm, but that's your pick, not mine. -
*redacted*
-
Quote:Not quite. Enemy BASE to-hit is 50%, but only even con minions ever actually have JUST that. Enemies gain accuracy boosts to all of their powers (think of it as accuracy slotting) based on their rank and on their con to the player. A lot of enemies also have high-accuracy attacks, and some have to-hit buffs on top of that.Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Well, it's sort of weird how it works out. It turns out a big part of the reason 45% is often twice as good as 40% is actually that enemy ToHit rarely varies. The hitroll in this game is actually more or less the same as in a d20 game (where normally a 1 always misses and a 20 always hits). The difference in those games is that you pretty much never know much much ToHit the enemy will have, so more defense is always better.
Now, of course, if you manage to "soft-cap" your defence against enemies of sufficiently high rank and level, then yes, everything lower/smaller than that will still have its to-hit as floored as its accuracy bonuses will allow (you can't floor an enemy down to 5% if he has ANY accuracy), but those with to-hit buffs will still present a problem as those counteract defence rather very directly. -
Arcana, you really should check out the defence thread here in general discussions. It seems to cover a lot of these concepts/
Quote:This is kind of part of where we disagree, and this is my shortcomings coming to the forefront. Ideally, I want a game where anything I pick works, and I will keep saying as much. In practice, I quickly grow to despise games I don't understand.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Interesting to note that in a system like this, it is easy to know what a power will do *incrementally* but harder to know what a group of powers will do in sum. Three five percent defense powers stacked together in CoH is fifteen percent defense. Three five point defense powers stacked together in the system above is an effective 13.55 point defense cumulative. Its not designed to make it easy for people to calculate final totals. Its designed to make it easier for players to make incremental decisions. Is this power worth taking now? Should I take that power instead. If I don't take this power now, what happens if I take it later. That's actually not entirely unintentional.
Which would you rather have: a power that absorbs 30% of all incoming damage, or a power that *reflects* 15% back at the attacker? Which would you rather have: a power that deals 100 points of damage to a single target, or one that only deals 50 but will increase chances of the next attack doing double damage by 15%? If your accuracy dropped by 10% for every 20 feet away the target was, is it better to enhance accuracy or damage? If an attack modification increased *both* damage *and* endurance costs proportionately, is it still as valuable to boost damage? If every critter had attacks with different ranges, would it be advantageous to attempt to boost your range? I can ensure the math is complex enough that the min/maxers can't help you. And when I eliminate the ability for the min/maxers to dictate what is the "best" and "worst" build, I free players to decide purely on the basis of preference, at least to a very large extent. If you take no attacks at all, you're still gimp. But if I build for range and you build for speed, I won't be the idiot and you won't be the genius: both would work, because the game would be designed to ensure that both work. Just differently.
I remember a friend of mine playing WoW and saying he was missing too much. He asked me if I could somehow help him out, and my first question to him was "Well, what's your current accuracy?" He didn't know. I asked him what they measured accuracy in. "Attack Rating." Yes, but what percent chance to hit does your attack rating equal? "He didn't know." Funny thing is, after trawling their equivalent to ParagonWiki for close to an hour, I STILL didn't know. We ended the day not even knowing if he was actually missing stuff a lot or if he was imagining it or if he somehow ended up fighting things that were difficult to hit. My friend isn't very savvy and observant of numbers, so he hadn't kept track of the circumstances, and I'm not very familiar with the game, so I didn't know the first thing.
In the end, my friend discontinued his subscription. And while that may sound contrived, that WAS one of the reasons he gave me when I asked him. "They patched the game and ruined my character and I couldn't fix him." He'll be back, I know him well enough, but that just goes to show you what an inherently unknowable game that nevertheless asks you to make decisions could lead a player to - very basic discontent and frustration.
I've played a great many RPGs where the min/max game was so complex I ended up throwing my hands in the air and looking for a better game. Do I want a sword which does 50 damage, is fast, does fear, poison and gives me some extra heath, or should I take the hammer which deals 100 points, is slow, does paralyse, steals slife and is extra strong against undead? I don't know. I cannot know. The sheer amount of knowledge and work I need to know is not acceptable. So I end up having to make a choice between between two things I cannot comprehend. This hurts my brain, I choose at random and end up having no idea what's good and what's bad. And given my luck and odd preferences, I invariably always end with the crappiest equipment because I seem to favour the least useful stats, I die a lot, the game's horrid "XP Loss" death penalty hits me faster than I can level up and I end up hating the game for the rest of my life.
I just described the sum total of my experience in Diablo 2. I'm sure you've seen my "love" for the game from other posts. Suffice it to say I don't recall ever having anything nice to say about that... That thing.
City of Heroes is indeed mechanically simple but intuitively difficult, but intuition is easy to fix once you have the knowledge, and the knowledge needed isn't actually all that much. Once I know the mechanics and the numbers, it's fairly easy for me to make an informed decision and get back to punching things. That's really what it comes down to for me. I HATE character-building in every RPG I've ever played. Every time anything comes down to numbers, I hate it. RPGs shouldn't just not be about spreadsheets. I don't want them to be about numbers at all. I don't want them to be about optimization, maximization and statistic. If they are, then I just want them to be simple and gamable so I can find the "right" answer very simply and game the game very easily and in so doing sidestep the build-making process.
I vastly prefer RPG style games that don't deal with stats and numbers but in monolithic specific abilities. Either you can break a lock or you can't. Either you can climb walls or you can't. Large decisions with immediately obvious consequences. Not "5 more points of this." Just "you can now do this." I know games like Soul Reaver aren't RPGs, but I've always wanted to see an RPG drawn along those lines. You can take the ability to fly, climb, swim, phase through grates, shoot and so forth, and that's that. There's no min/maxing of the stats of these abilities.
This is the part where people tell me "MMORPGs aren't for you!" but City of Heroes has so far sufficed. It's knowable if one is willing to do the research, and it's not all that complex. So long as I have the numbers crunched and the build planned, I'm having fun. The times when the game REALLY drags is when I have to stop killing things and start making decisions. -
Here's an interesting thought experiment, let's say regarding defence. Right now, we have a linear stat curve fro 0% to 45% (rather, from -45% to 45%), and a concave slope curve for the resulting mitigation. So why don't we flip that around. Why don't we examine the results as a linear set and deduce a back formula for calculating how much defence that equates to? Why not introduce "defence ratings?" Well, for a few reasons, but let's look at how one such system might work.
Let's define a basic pattern example. You have 1000 hit points and you get hit with 1 attack per second for 100 points of damage each until you die. Your "Defence Rating" is the time it takes for you to die in this situation, ignoring resistance and regeneration and assuming a predictable repeating sequence of hits and misses. First, the proper formula. How do we calculate how long a character will survive? To do that, we need to find the number of attacks a character will need to sustain, counting both hits and misses, before the damage taken equals the character's health. This goes something like this:
Attacks*100*(1 - BaseTohit - Defence) = HP or
Attacks = HP/(100*(1 - BaseTohit - Defence)) or
Attacks = 1000/(100*(1 - BaseTohit - Defence)) or
Attacks = 10/(1 - BaseTohit - Defence)
What this means that a character without any defence, fighting an even-level minion, will survive for 10(1 - 0.5 - 0) = 20 seconds, or he will have a "Defence Rating" of 20.
How about the reverse? Suppose I already know how long a character is supposed to survive and I need to know how much defence would ensure this happens? I need to deduce Defence from Attacks.
Attacks*100*(1 - BaseTohit - Defence) = 1000 or
Attacks*(1 - BaseTohit) - Attacks*Defence = 10 or
Attacks*Defence = Attacks*(1 - BaseTohit) - 10 or
Defence = (Attacks*(1 - BaseTohit) - 10)/Attacks
So let's go back and ensure I didn't screw up. I want to have a Defence Rating of 20. How much defence would that equate to?
(20*(1 - 0.5) - 10)/20 = (20*0.5 - 10)/20 = (10 - 10)/20 = 0
OK, so in order to achieve a Defence Rating of 20, we need to have 0% defence. So it works, at least for the base case scenario. Let's get some more mileage out of it. Completely out of a hat, I say a player has a Defence Rating of 100 (the player survives the example for 100 seconds on the nose). What actual defence would the player need to have? Well...
(100*(1 - 0.5) - 10)/100 = (100*0.5 -10)/100 = (50 - 10)/100 = 40/100 = 40%
What, seriously, is it? Well, yeah. I was kind of cheeky saying "out of a hat," since 40% defence in this example is something I know from memory. But let's be even more adventurous. Let's go 1000 Defence Rating. What then? Well, let's see.
(1000*(1 - 0.5) - 10)/1000 = (1000*0.5 -10)/1000 = (500 - 10)/1000 = 490/1000 = 49%
OK, so that's a little outside the realm of the defence softcap (that actually caps at a "Defence Rating" of 200) but it gave us a meaningful answer. In fact, I can give the calculation as large a number as you want and it will still work. An attack rating of, say, 10 000 000 comes up to 49.9999%.
Clearly, a Defence Rating system would work, and it would give you a linear increase in survivability for a linear increase in rating, and with a few more tweaks, it could probably give you a direct tug of war between defence and resistance. And as long as the rating isn't given a concrete explanation in terms of what fictional example it uses or how it's calculated, and indeed what it equates in terms of defence, people will probably not notice the HIDEOUS diminishing returns it represents.
What diminishing returns? Well, for ever point of Defence Rating, the player gains one more second of life in the specific example, and that can be correlated to one more "unit" of life all told. However, the defence that each unit equates to drops SIGNIFICANTLY as the numbers grow higher. Let's have a simple example comparison.
Let's say we go from a Defence Rating of 20 to a Rating of 25 and compare that to going from a Defence Rating of 195 to a rating of 200. I'll save you the calculations and give you the results straight away:
20 = 0% defence
25 = 10% defence
195 = ~44.87% defence
200 = 45% defence
See the difference? Gaining 5 points of Defence Rating when you're at the base ups your effective defence by a full 10%, whereas going 5 points up from 195 to 200 ups your defence by less than 0.2%. That's a decrease of 50 times. I really don't see such a severe case of diminishing returns as being very fare.
---
As far as my version of "Defence Rating" goes, yes, that's specifically only against even con minions and it disregards accuracy, but that's mostly because I didn't exactly put much work into it. It's also based on starting point of 20 and an end point of 200, but that's easily changed by varying the attack damage and the level of hit points, as well as translating the final numbers down. For instance, if you have an attack that still deals 100 points of damage but the example character has 10 000 hit points and every defence rating is calculated at 200 points over what it says on the interface, you will have a defence rating window of 0 to 1800 to dole out as you please.
I'm still not a fan of this suggestion, even though I'm the one making it. I just figured I may as well contribute something to the thread other than shooting down other people's ideas. -
Quote:This is actually something that I'd like to look at, myself. I remember Arcana once talked about "weaning people off AoE," and I know that every time the subject of making battles with larger numbers of weaker enemies, people always bring up the problem of this making AoE even more prolific and punishing single-target damage even more.Originally Posted by Combat
I would build the game in two directions (which is somewhat what has happened). First, I would build the game for bigger battles. As a solo hero, you would be equal to an enormous amount of minions, a large amount of lts, and a fair amount of bosses. Essentially, the aggro cap would be larger and powers would hit more targets, mobs would be designed to pose less threat in lower numbers. This give the potential for the game to feel epic to those who like mowing downs tons of guys.
The other direction is the polar opposite: I would try to create creative one-on-one encounters with AVs, GMs, and the like, and I would try to put these encounters throughout the game, starting at nearly the beginning.
So what if we got rid of the distinction, at least to a large extent? Arcana's suggestion was to have AoE attacks given a specific level of damage which was spread around the enemies you hit, so the more the affected targets, the less damage they took. I can see this going in the opposite direction, as well - single-target attacks could be defined as smaller-scale AoEs that condense this damage into a single target when just one target is affected.
This kind of setup should allow everyone to have access to decent levels of AoE, or at least decent enough to handle armies of underlings, but still give them the ability to focus their damage enough to oppose single, tough foes. I can even see a system in place for choosing if you want to focus your damage or spread it out.
To my eyes, this would sidestep the problem of hurting people by not giving them enough AoE or enough single-target and having to compensate them, and it should open the game up to fights of various sizes without outstripping its own in-game systems. After all, just today my Stalker was jumped by no less than 30 Ghouls, pretty much all at once. For lack of AoE damage, even if I were completely immortal, it would still have taken a very long time to deal with those. And before that, the same Stalker ran the "Save TPN from 100 Weakened Destroyers" mission. Not fun, either.
While I believe that some characters should be able to specialise in concentrated damage and some in AoE, I fully believe that all should have significant skill in both, if the game is to provide fights both of the huge 1-on-50 varieties and of the equally epic 1-on-1 without either being totally hamstrung in either situation, as right now sets like Blaster Assault Rife and Stalker Martial Arts are.
And while I know this is wholly impractical for an addition to THIS game, that's exactly what makes it a meaningful suggestion for a sequel. -
Quote:I can run an Unreal Engine game at 60 FPS at any one point anywhere in the game irrespective of the amount of things going on on the screen. I have yet to play an Unreal Engine game that City of Heroes looks better than. I can play any Source Engine game and never see any slowdown at any point, and this includes instances that throw far more props at me than the game is intended to allow. Some of the older Source engine games are on about the same level of graphical quality as City of Heroes, some of the newer ones are far superior.Originally Posted by Auroxis
In my experience it runs well and looks better than a lot of the other MMO games out there.
Maybe my standards are too low, maybe yours are too high, or maybe I'm not aware of the exact performance numbers and the industry standards.
I play City of Heroes at give or take medium Ultra Mode settings, without any Ambient Occlusion, with mid-level reflections and high-quality but short-range shadows, without Bloom or Depth of Field and with conservative anti-alising and texture filtring. I will routinely see my framerate drop below 45 FPS doing nothing but looking in a specific direction. This is true all over Praetoria, this is true in many places in Cap Au Diable, especially in Grandville, this is true in a variety of Praetorian Labs rooms, as well as in the new warehouse big rooms, and none of these require more than just me as a single player. I see plenty of instances where my framerate drops to below 30 FPS, which I find to be unacceptable with a machine as meaty as I have.
Let me put it this way - ever since I got my current video card at around the summer of last year, I have not found a single game that has shown me any degree of framerate slowdown that I've been able to see at the maximal settings that it provides. City of Heroes is quite literally the ONLY game I currently own that lags for me. And it's one of the most spartan-looking games with the worst graphics that I still play to this day. City of Heroes is ugly, which I wouldn't mind all that much if it didn't make my system stutter and cough, all the while reminding me that I could be playing something which looks ten times better while have twice the framerate.
---
Incidentally, the ONLY other game that I have consistently failed to run at even medium details without graphical slowdown is Criostasis, a game which appears so badly coded that a powerful machine from three years after the game came out still can't run it for ****. And it's not all that good of a game, anyway. -
Quote:Or people are fully aware of what is being suggested and still dislike the idea. Posting a one-sided dib at unspecified people helps no-one in this situation.Originally Posted by MunkiLord
It's because people are afraid of the boogeyman* and close minded. The boogeyman represents anything people don't understand or fear.
-
Quote:So a game which produces a universally worse framerate than games which look many times better and have far more advanced visual effects "is fine?" I wouldn't complain if it at least ran well, but it doesn't even do that.Originally Posted by Auroxis
The game engine is fine, there is no need for CoH2.
-
Quote:Only it doesn't. If you have two powers providing 5% damage resistance resisting a 100 point attack, then under your proposed system they would reduce that to 90.25, or will constitute not the 10% resistance one would expect, but instead a 9.75% resistance. This is because you're not reducing incoming damage by the sum of your resistance powers, but rather by how much they resist each other. In other words, you're dropping it down to 95% of 95%, rather than by 90%.Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
1 * (1 - R1) * (1 - R2) * (1 - R3)...
then it's easy to say what a power that grants 5% defense or resistance does: it reduces your incoming damage by 5%.
Not only is this LESS intuitive (at least to me) and much more difficult to figure out without sitting down to crunch the numbers, it's also segregates single large resistance buffs from multiple small ones. Let me explain.
Two cases:
Case 1 - you're opposing a 100 point attack and you have a single 50% resistance power. You drop the attacks damage by 50% and only suffer 50 points of damage.
Case 2 - you're opposing the same 100 point attack, but you have five powers, each providing 10% damage resistance. You then get:
100*(1-0.1)*(1-0.1)*(1-0.1)*(1-0.1)*(1-0.1) = 100*(1-0.1)^5 = 100*0.9^5 = 100*0.59049 = 59.049
You get 5 times 10% damage resistance, but you don't resist the 50% a person would infer. Instead, you resist just shy over 40%. That's unexpected, and it's much LESS than the above-mentioned single power.
This isn't even diminishing returns. This is diminishing returns based on number of buffs. Such a system would be hideously complicated for a player to predict even with full knowledge of the system, and such systems are generally not revealed to the player anyway, so you have an instance where people take resistance powers with specific resistance values, but when the player looks at the damage they're taking, this damage doesn't correspond to anything the player would expect to see.
But that's just it - the results I'm drawing from the suggested formula are not intuitive. I have no way of predicting what amount of damage resistance I'll get based on what amount of damage resistance I actually have without sitting down and crunching the numbers by myself. And these suggested numbers are neither hard nor complex. They're just time-consuming. And I'm not sure they end making the abstract of "mitigation" any easier to comprehend, either. I mean, let's check it.Quote:Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
Bear in mind that many of our current mechanics basically come from a human-powered game that uses simple math because humans are bad at arithmetic - there's no technical or design reason to do so. Better hard math and intuitive results than easy math and confusing results.
Let's examine 85% resistance vs. 85%+5% resistance vs. 90% resistance vs. 80+10% resistance vs. 45%+45% resistance, all against a 100 point attack. By your formula, those would admit 15 points, 14.25 points, 10 points, 18 points 30.25 points, respectively. If we compare all of those to the basic 85% resistance, we get the following ratios:
85 vs. 85+5: ~1.053, which is close to a 5% increase in mitigation, but not quite. OK, inaccurate and rough, but it is within a percent of 5%.
85 vs. 90: 1.5, or a 50% increase in mitigation. This must be what we're so afraid people won't understand or be able to predict.
85 vs. 80+10: ~0.833, or a DROP of shy under 17%. Wait, what? Wasn't increasing my resistance supposed to, you know, increase my resistance? Surely 80+10 should yield more than 85... Right? It may sound obtuse coming from me, but this is a legitimate question for a new player to ask.
85 vs 45+45: ~0.496. "The hell? I went from 80% resistance to 90% resistance but my mitigation dropped BY HALF? What gives?" Yes, that's an over 50% DECREASE of mitigation.
Yes, a 5% increase in damage resistance does yield "just about" 5% increase in mitigation, but only under very specific circumstances when one has to decide whether an extra 5% from a new power is worth it. However, if one is moving slotting around or deciding if he can't swap, say, Manoeuvres for Weave, or indeed if he can turn off his toggles when running Unstoppable, then the numbers become not just far more complicated, but badly misleading, as well.
And the last one, by the way, is a question I've asked myself before. If I run Unstoppable on an Invulnerability Scrapper, can I turn off Temporary Invulnerability? If I'm running Elude on a SR Scrapper, can I turn off my other toggles?
---
The more complex the connection between the numbers you pick and the results they yield, the more you will frustrate your player.