Thunderforce

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Was on an ITF with my Granite Tanker last night. We skipped up to Romulous and just after his first rez the ambush spawned crying "We must stop them" at which point almost everyone on the team mapserver'd. So they succeeded, briefly

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Aha. I was the /wp scrapper who spent half the TF faceplanting comically. Note to self - make sure where the aggro is before rushing into a group of bosses and hitting Dragon's Tail!

Cimerora NPC dialogue is a bit of a joke.

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OK, every time we hear about an upcoming issue/expansion the Co€ community drops the speculation into overdrive. every time we come up with "hell yeah" and "this is going to be sooooo cool" followed by wild fligths of fancy about what it could possibly include and how its going to be the greatest thing since sliced onions.

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Eh? Generally the usual forum suspects immediately proclaim how it has less content than a Jeffrey Archer novel, how the game will surely collapse as everyone goes to play Champions Online, and how they are definitely leaving forever just like they did after every issue since ED.

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Seriously, CoH is made to be played with just about any AT combination. It usually comes down to the player, not what they play.

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But that doesn't mean there aren't some good combinations - and some lousy ones, for all that the game is (thankfully) much less rigid about team makeup than hem-hem a certain other game with a tank/heal/DPS trinity.

For example, no matter how good the players are, a team entirely composed of team-build empaths is going to be a trifle dull as you zoom around gradually nibbling monsters to death.

My top pick would be a kinetics defender and seven en/en blappers. :-)

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I think I would give DA a well deserved revamp. rework it into that horror film inspired zone that its always should have been and it would get a big old abandoned Moth cathedral

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And crypts and vaults beneath DA, like the tunnels beneath new-Faultline (_not_ a separate zone like the Tunnels of the Trolls). The art and suchlike could be used in a few other places - obviously if there was a BP arc some of its missions would happen in mausoleums, and a quick skim of existing content would reveal other missions that could be moved to the new tileset (off the top of my head, one of the Hansens has a mission where the fluff text says "mausoleum" but it actually looks suspiciously like a normal cave). If the zone map showed the tunnels and entrances helpfully and they weren't stocked with rock-hard monsters they could provide a useful alternative to super jumping into buildings in the fog.

DA obviously _does_ have vast crypts beneath it. They should be modelled. :-)

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But the amount you can store in the Auction House is pitiful (18 on my oldest toon i think)

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But those 18 slots can store 180 recipes or 180 salvage or 18 enhancements. If you have a character that doesn't use the AH, I have several, they can be used to store a huge amount of stuff.


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Not even to sell stuff? If so, that's a bit like saying "if you're a nudist, you can keep a lot of tools in your wardrobe". Sure, but it doesn't tell the average Joe much.

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I'm advocating a personal base that would work like an account/side wide house for your characters. So each server/side would have a separate one

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Me, I don't see that it shouldn't cross servers, since the AH does.

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Apart from storage as I see it above and perhaps access to a SG base I don't think there should be any functionality to personal spaces. As you say you earn that for SG bases, adding it to in effect free space would be counter productive.

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It would be free space, but the facilities could cost influence. Also, you don't earn your first 300,000 prestige of SG base (but see below).

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I think I would probably make the personal space subject to a booster pack (which would generate funds for the game) but also reduce the amount of data storage that the devs would need because not everyone would buy the booster.


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The data storage requirement is laughably tiny. The issue with paid boosters is the same one that keeps coming up with PEARS; if it's less good than a personal SG base, why bother? Having to pay money definitely qualifies.

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If you say that each house is individual to the character with all slots open your looking at 3Mb or more of storage/transfer.

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At a generous estimate, the cost of backed-up racked good quality disc in a server facility is ten times the cost of just buying a disc. Right now, a terabyte goes for about 60 quid (no serious effort made to find the cheapest possible). So that 3Mb of backed-up etc storage will cost about 1/5 of a penny.

I don't think there is _any_ set of estimates that can make the data storage requirement for PEARS come out to anything but trivial sums of money.

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The devs have already said that they don't want to increase our personal storage as they fear that too many people would hoard stuff and kill the AH.

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Now here's the core of the problem. Here, I'm talking only about "could PEARS remove the incentive to have a personal SG that means that few people join other SGs". I realise there are other reasons why PEARS might be interesting.

Right now, a personal SG base can easily store 270 invention salvage items. (I'm going to talk about invention salvage because that's the capacity that is hardest to get - inspiration and enhancement racks are huge by comparison). With work you can increase that to 540, but all you need to get 270 is to borrow a friend for ten minutes, get 12 copies of yourself in the SG, and slap down a workshop and nine storage racks.

But as long as that's true, it doesn't matter how good PEARS are. If PEARS are much worse than a personal SG - say, I have to pay real money for significant storage - I'll just have the personal SG. But if PEARS are as good as a personal SG - and right now that means "can store 270 salvage items for little or no effort" - whoops, I'll have a personal SG _as well_, and we've just doubled everyone's personal storage which is a no-no.

The only way this could be made to work is if SGs gained that 20,000 prestige per member on a per account basis, with multiple alts not counting. I can't see that being a popular decision.

Summary - I don't think PEARS can solve the original problem, that of people using personal SGs and not joining SGs with other players, because personal SGs are just too good, and will stay that good regardless of how good PEARS are.

The only thing I can see that might work is to make PEARS as good as personal SGs - maybe with one or two chrome features like tailor access, but if you have a PEARS then your toons can only count once in an SG for the 15-member prestige awards. So if I've got a personal SG, I can go right on using it (so no cries of NERF DOOM etc); if I prefer a PEARS, I can't get two lots of free storage.

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I think its really important that PEARS(tm) should not undermine sg bases in any way.

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That should not be an issue. Anything (like PEARS) that decreases the incentive to create personal SGs will naturally promote SG bases.

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I know some players have definite views on storage not being account wide, but other games do this

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You're getting dragged into a diversion here. Storage is *already* account-wide at least across a particular server because of personal SGs. Don't argue about whether it *should* be - as long as PEARS don't make it significantly more so, the issue isn't pertinent.

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I've just had another random idea. Keep PEARS(tm) as purely personal for your toon as far as storage is concerned.

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Terrible. We started with PEARS as a way to reduce the incentive to have personal SGs, and now you want to make them less useful than personal SGs!

That said, the idea of an SG base item that gives access to account-wide storage isn't a bad one, as another way to diminish the incentive to have personal SGs.

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the music sure does need a re-vamb, every MMO i ever played has a looped music trough the game while COX is the only quiet game without any background music.
also, the music of pocked D needs it's own slider, not everyone likes the music of pocket D.

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So you want a slider to mute the one bit of looped background music in the game, and to add looped background music to the rest of the game.

I actually agree that the way veteran players can feed stuff to new alts makes a lot of difference compared to being a genuinely fresh alt. Always has. Some of us will remember the old days, when a genuinely new toon would only slot TO End Redux and Accuracy in order to save a bit of money - and even then you'd face a nasty choice between DOs now and SOs later.

But the point of this suggestion - which I like - is to eliminate the conflict between wanting to be in a real SG and wanting to make use of a personal SG base; and a personal SG base makes feeding stuff to new alts very easy. As long as the personal living space isn't any _better_ for that than personal SGs, it won't exacerbate the new-alt problem; and if it's _worse_ than a personal SG, it won't make people stop using personal SGs.

For example, it's sheer madness to have the personal living space accessible only by finding a green door with three Mortificators in front of it. If it's harder to get to than an SG base, people will go right on using personal SGs. (That said, I've no problem with customisation for chrome there - for example, if you can establish where your living space's front door is and as a result you have a choice of coming out there rather than the Base Portal, cool.)

Quite. "%%" isn't a typo; it's a bug.

I've given up seriously trying to clean this particular Augean stable, but whoever wrote Envoy of Shadows really needs to read up on "its" and "it's".

I think I am finished; the version linked above is as good as it'll get, at least until i15 changes everything.

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Say a new arc goes up on the MA. It's never been played before, and it hasn't been tested by the writer so there's no data at all on rewards or average play time. How are the xp/inf/tickets awarded to the first team of players to run through the arc?

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Well, new arcs are a problem, as detailed upthread. For the first few playthroughs (perhaps half a dozen?), there'd have to be a kludge. I've got a better one than my initial idea:

Rewards are at the normal rate, but if an arc turns out to be too rewarding after those first few playthroughs, toons who were on them retroactively get something like debt for all MA awards, reducing their ticket/XP/inf rate until they've paid off the extra gains. This is nicer in that it's invisible to players who don't go seeking farms, but there's a "publish farm, play once, unpublish" abuse where you never let a farm arc reach the point of having had those first few playthroughs. When an arc was unpublished, the pseudo-debt would have to be assessed based on the playthroughs so far, no matter how few there were.

I know that looks complicated, but it's invisible to any player who doesn't go on a just-published farming arc. Even to one who does (perhaps innocently) it's just a modest dropoff in the reward rate in subsequent missions.

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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.

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Tracking would seem to be pointless, though, as at that point aren't you're simply issuing fixed amounts of xp etc per unit time spent in the mission?

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Actually, that's an interesting point. It's not _quite_ that straightforward - if you do a mission faster than average that's just gravy for you (so good play is still rewarded), and the scoring system could also take into account the rate of player defeats and debt - but in principle, yes, I am working towards a fixed reward/time thing (except arguably with no _lower_ limit), and put like that the idea is not so attractive.

I observe, though, the adjustment doesn't have to be directly proportional. The mass of middle-of-the-road missions with roughly average reward/time ratios need not face any adjustments at all. Rewards would be what you normally expect - sure, some of those missions will offer a slightly higher reward rate than others, but no more so than cherry-picking canon content. That way, this scheme would not be fixed reward/time; it would just prevent excessive reward/time.

Secondly, I think a reward per defeated enemy meets player expectations better than a lump sum at the end of the mission.

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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.

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Yeah that could work very well too.

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There are a couple of gotchas.

When an arc's very new, it has to start at the bottom of the reward curve. Otherwise I can publish a farm, play it once, unpublish it, make some trivial change (or copy the file locally or whatever to make it a "new" arc), republish it... To avoid totally discouraging people from trying new arcs, an arc whose reward ratio rose would have to award tickets/XP/etc retroactively to people who'd played it before.

Also, I bet there's an AFK attack to make your farm look harmless. To a degree that's self-limiting (you've got to tie up an account for a long period of time for each slow run, and each fast run erodes the effect of it) but the tracking code might reasonably ignore long periods of time with no enemy defeats in.

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I agree with all of the above-quoted, but I think the best way for the Devs to control the rate at which we level is to put a cap on it - make the cap high enough that only farmers and powerlevellers will ever hit it, but cap it nonetheless.

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I was thinking about that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like it could be quite a tricky thing to do.

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Very much. Not to repeat myself, but there's an easier solution, completely automated. Track rewards/time from MA missions. Adjust rewards for each mission based on that ratio.

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But tell me this, if a dev' slaps a suspension/ban to a player for a fair chunk of time. Do you really think they'll stick around?

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Possibly not, but so what? Players leave and players join every month. That doesn't mean the game has a problem with dwindling numbers, no matter how often Chicken Little says it does; and that doesn't mean that a trivial proportion of players leaving over some particular development will induce such a problem.

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I personally definitively thing MA play should be rewarded to get people to actually use it, problem is that will always leave people looking for the next so-called exploit and from an RP stance it makes very little sense.

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It's not like the _game_ makes sense from an RP stance, assuming that that means an argument-from-realism. Consider the number of magic defeat-anything devices available in the city (which clearly _can_ be manufactured because new ones keep turning up), the number of superheroes, and the way every zone is more or less totally walled off from every other zone. How long would it take you to clear Atlas Park completely of criminals? How about Crey's Folly?

But this isn't particularly remarkable; the game is not a roleplaying game, for all that some of the players roleplay. It's a sort of tactical-combat-gaining-rewards game, and _that_ makes just as much sense in the MA as outside it.

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2) Lower the XP and particularly the Inf from the MA. It's fake fighting, and in that world any hero who boasted 'I've defeated a virtual Lord Recluse' would be laughed out of Pocket D. Why do you get full influence for beating up holograms? Do someone explain that to me. Risk/reward? Rubbish.

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Err, that's an argument from realism, which is generally a hint that you're chasing down a blind alley. In terms of gameplay, they're the same. The risks are in principle the same. All that's necessary is to get the rewards straight.

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Much like in real life, farmers work tirelessly for items which we buy with our money.

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A bogus analogy doesn't help any. Unlike in real life, farmers also have an insatiable appetite for the equivalent of food. So do they increase the overall supply? I don't know and _neither do you_.

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THE LAST thing this game needs is MORE people quitting.

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This is a very familiar argument. It's so familiar, in fact, because I've heard it about every change made for the last four years. Curiously, however, the game still seems to have plenty of players and as far as anyone knows the subscription numbers are pretty flat.

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With farmers, more infamy and recipes are being driven into the black market (which with a player-driven economy is important)

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That's an oversimplification. Farmers generate stuff, but they also generate demand. Kinds of farming that predominantly generate stuff (i12 ITF spamming, say) probably reduces stuff prices - but to assume that the current kind of farming (which also is boosting people to L50 in no time at all) produces more stuff than demand is quite unjustified.

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A lack of purples, we could reasonably assume would deter people from making new characters because they won't be able to squeeze the absolute potential from their characters.

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Can we reasonably assume that? It has never once crossed my mind to care whether I'll be able to munchkin out a character I'm effectively finished with.

Seems to me that the purples are there to satisfy people who like the kind of press-lever-for-food-pellet grinding that typifies WoW. I see why NC want those customers, but I doubt they are the majority in a game which never used to have any of that nonsense at all; and the very nature of that gameplay is that the rewards can be spun out very thinly. The last thing you want, if you're trying to harness that kind of obsessiveness, is an easy way to get purples.

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if in the worst scenario possible, the market runs dry

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... which it never did pre-MA, so why should it post-MA-farming?

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Like i keep saying to the devs: what can be farmed, WILL be farmed, at LEAST by SOME people.

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What an amazing insight. I'm sure that will come as news to them and they will value your input.

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Position's ... read's ... they're ... thing's like Comic's ... , They're

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Proofreader? I physically winced at "thing's like Comic's".

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Am i the only one failing to see this market death that every one else is experiencing?


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No, you're not. Quite the opposite. I was away for about 2-3 weeks after the release of i14; I came back to find, across half a dozen toons, that every single one of the "bid stupidly low and leave it" requests I had out there had filled.

Rare salvage is way down. Recipes seem to be more readily available. Who cares if common salvage is up? The savings on one rare will pay for a whole lot of common salvage even at the current prices.

Besides - OK, I'm not a big fan of the MA, but I can bring myself to play the occasional mission. Solo a boss+guards+glowies, takes half an hour, you'll easily come away with 400 tickets. That will buy you a bucket of common salvage the size of your head, giving you whatever you needed and a vast chunk of influence to buy the next things you need, or five uncommons you're missing.

Also, as one other poster points out - it'll only last as long as the majority of MA players haven't noticed that common salvage rolls are a good way to turn tickets into influence. It's self-adjusting; I think the availability of stuff from the MA is just right, and it's only a matter of waiting until players adjust.

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Question is, can they fix it? Old McPandora's Box has been opened, but can it be shut so MA is all about 'cool' and 'fun' (Posi's words of the month, it seems) player-created story arcs? Should they fix it, or are they reaping what they've sewn?

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As a side note; mmogchart has Eve at 250,000 subscribers, steadily increasing, CoX at around 130,000, and LOTRO around 140,000 but with a sharp decline after an initial peak.

I think it can be fixed, but I don't think this exercise in whack-a-mole is the way to do it, beyond fixing the most egregious abused.

I would automatically gather data on the reward/playtime ratio of every arc, and adjust the rewards (again automatically) based on that ratio. An arc with few or no playthroughs would initially award stuff at a low rate, but more XP (+ tickets etc) would be awarded later if the arc didn't turn out to be a giveaway.

This is inherently self-adjusting, and runs unattended. Fill a map with minions that give Lieut XP? You'll find, in that map, "Lieut XP" drops to be no better than minion XP.

Every now and then I get fed up of having to run taskforces and big teams on silent, and look into this again.

Today's experiment was interesting; replace every sound in the game with an ogg file of silence, as short as possible (unless it is a loop, in which case I used about ten seconds of silence) to minimise the amount of ogg decoding to be done. Somewhat to my surprise, this worked; the lag spikes are very much reduced.

If conversely the replacement files contain the original ogg data, the lag spikes still exist. I tested this in case the issue was simply with the game ungzipping piggs on the fly.

The next step, I think, is to bisect the set of sound files repeatedly in the hope of identifying one effect or a small subset of the effects which get played very often; but it's twenty to five, so maybe not tonight.

I've corrected some errors (and added the i13 arcs) and posted a new version at http://chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damer...ingsshort.text

Corrections are welcome.