UberGuy
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I think that's a stretch. I won't say its impossible, but I find it hard to believe it was solely responsible.
I consider it more likely that 1Q 2009 was the global economy really tumbling into the crapper that was responsible for that. The very first thing that goes when times get tight are discretionary expenditures, and game subscriptions are right up there.
It may have contributed to some loss, but no one I know left over it. -
OT, but I was incredibly sad to discover that demo playbacks lost the ability to play sound. I haven't taken an in-game demo in a long time, so I missed that this bug/behavior had crept in. I was really looking forward to being able to use demos as a bit of a memory lane thing, but having them be silent is loses so much more of the effect. (I play with game sound and always have.)
And of course, we can't get that fixed now.
Oh, well. At least I have FRAPS. Actual movies take an asston more storage though. -
Quote:I think I remember reading that they changed the way these and bruising work so that they no longer do this. However, that might have just been something they planned to "fix". I have not tested it. I have a Tanker I can slap something around with in order to test it.Originally Posted by Shagster
Edit: And the -Resist procs from Achilles' Heel and Fury of the Gladiator work the same way, with a granted -resist power. So, they should bypass level differences too.
And no, I never mentioned the scale difference in damage for folks with and without Ultimates. Credit to Shags.
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Hey, all.
Following up on this thread, I want to keep giving more folks the opportunity to get Really Hard Way. We got it once with style, but there are more people who could not attend, so I want to keep rolling for a bit longer to give them a chance. There are also people who need Ready To Rumble (defeat all the AVs leading up to Tyrant in 8 mins or less).
Edit: I keep forgetting to post the time. You all can read my mind, right? 8 Eastern, 7 Central, 6 Mountain, 5 Pacific. If west-coast folks can get there by 6:00 or 6:30 Pacific, we can probably still get another run in - we've been doing 3 attempts per night so far, and it usually takes us half an hour or more to form initially, mostly just due to all the AT juggling and people running to buy Ultimates and other inspirations.
Let me throw out a plea to fellow Justice players - if you already have this badge, or are not a badger, please come help out those who still seek these badges. Justice has an awesome community of helpers, evidenced by how we still raid Hami and the RWZ. Let's keep that spirit rolling for folks looking for this big achievement.
The big things we need are, in rough order of priority.
- +3 characters. I'll take +2s, but only in limited quantities. I apologize in advance that +1s and +0s are straight out. If you need help getting on trials to help get you to at least +2, I'll see what I can do.
- Corruptors (+3) who can debuff resistance.
- Corruptors (+3) who deal decent DPS
- Other ATs (+3) who can debuff resistance - Defenders and Controllers
- ATs who deal high DPS "naturally": Blasters, Stalkers, Scrappers and Brutes. There's a tricky balance between how many of these we want versus how many non-scourging debuffers we want.
- ATs who can buff damage. Rad does both this and debuff DR. Kinetics naturally is good also, though it can't saturate Fulcrum Shift in the tail end of the Tyrant fight.
- Everyone else. This category is basically reserved for folks who need the badge but don't fit into the other categories.
Everyone needs to bring 3-5 Ultimate inspirations. These last 3 minutes and grant you an additional +1 level shift. They do not stack and cannot be wasted (you can't cast one while another is in effect.) You can buy them off the Auction House / Black Market, but they are expensive. You can buy them from Astral Christy in Ouroboros for 2 Astral Merits. Bear in mind that we may not have a use for either inf or Astrals much longer, and spend the currency that makes the most sense for your characters and plans.
Also bring +damage inspirations. Tier 3 (Large) or 4 (Super) damage inspirations are recommended. If you can bring Team inspirations or holiday damage inspirations, those can be a big help. A lot of people don't realize that the holiday damage inspirations work like a Fulcrum Shift that counts allies. The more people are nearby, the bigger the buff it gives ... to up to 16 targets in a 20' radius. That's right, the buff is stronger the more people are near and it buffs everyone who it counts for the buff.
I'm of the opinion now that any league that can reasonably get RHW can probably also get Ready To Rumble, especially if they actually try. Unless this turns out to be false, I will not call for Ultimates in the R2R phase, letting us save them for RHW
Please note that Triple Threat does not require the careful league composition and planning that either R2R or RHW do. If folks need that badge, I think we can make attempts for those off the schedule I am using for RHW attempts. -
Quote:As potent as a Son/Son defender is, I doubt it was adding 100% resistance debuff against a +5 AV all by itself. We had a Dark Miasma Corr, at least one Rad Controller, a Cold Domination Defender, a /Thermal Corr and I think some more /Rad and /Cold Corruptors. When we lost the Son/Son, we added a /Dark Corr and a Dark/Dark Controller, though I'm not sure what all else we lost. (I think we lost the /Thermal). While not all those powersets can maintain 100% uptime on it, they all have potent -resist powers.Originally Posted by Consultant
This is an approximate assessment of -res since I don't know how my teammates were playing their characters. but I've done many, many of these runs, and I think very high -res is the unappreciated "secret" of getting this badge, along with the other elements listed above.
There's no question that -resist is one of the only meaningful debuffs in this contest. Normally, -regen factors heavily into this kind of encounter, but Tyrant is completely immune to that - he has over 100% resistance to regen debuffs. That makes -res and -maxHP about the only things we can do to him that speeds him to defeat, and of those two, -res is far more available to us in large doses.
Getting lots of Corruptors is also key, because of how Tryrant's "favor of the well" works. The lower his HP get under 50% of his max, the higher his regen gets. But Scourge says the lower his HP gets under 50%, the more often Corruptors deal double damage. This can give a league the extra oomph to push past a place where otherwise, Tyrant's increased regen would eventually counter the league's DPS, but Scourge increases the DPS as his regen goes up.
A Corruptor inflicting Scourge consistently gives them the game's highest effective AT damage scale by a wide margin - the only real competitor is probably a Stalker with saturated crit chances (which may not be too outlandish in this fight). Due to other complexities, even dealing 100% Scourge might not definitively mean Corruptors become the most damaging AT out there, but I think it's very likely that it puts them on par with Blasters, Scrappers and recently-upgraded Stalkers. The beauty here though is that you get to have your cake and eat it too - top-flight DPS and the potential for lots of resistance debuff.
I think in the first league, we had a combination of enough Corruptors, enough resistance debuffing non-Corruptors, and enough high DPS "other" characters that we blasted through. Even without Scourge, that league would have gotten his regen to balance out our DPS at something low. (The way we blasted past R2R hints at this.) So the Scourge we did have pushed us over that edge. The second time around, I think we lost some of all of those things. We had fewer Corruptors relative to the league size, less total -res, and less "core" DPS. Our league size didn't drop very much, so Tyrant didn't get much easier to defeat. -
Quote:Oh, and I think that's exactly how the early devs viewed it, especially Statesman. The problem is that I think almost no MMO really fits that design ideal, because most (not all) of them rely on encounter resolution mechanisms that must follow strict rules for resolution, and then they eventually challenge players to optimize how they obey those rules.Originally Posted by Mind Forever Burning
Put another way: if you look at CoH as a strategy game, then failing to reveal mechanics seems like a huge blunder, but if you look at it as an interactive story-telling experience, it starts to make more sense.
The most prevalent example is combat, which many (but not all) mainstream MMOs put front and center in character progression. Combat in all video games follows rules that make up its "combat engine". There are no video games, for example, where combat works like it would in an Amber campaign. There are always things like checks on whether you hit, how much damage you deal, how many targets you can affect, etc. Once you introduce mechanisms like that, I consider it unfair to hide from the players how they work. There is some wiggle room here - you may not need to reveal everything, but any time you introduce an ability, I think the player should readily understand what that ability will do within the combat engine.*
Now, CoH is extremely focused on combat (and I love that about it), but not all games are like that. Nonetheless, other approaches to task resolution, such as puzzle solving or crafting, all still follow rules an engine can resolve, and players should understand those rules too. The more challenging the game makes a given task, the more players will want to understand the minutiae of the rules needed to complete it.
So, to try and clarify, I think the lesson is not that its wrong to hide what powers do, but that it's wrong to hide it when you build a system that asks players to use abilities in ways that compel players to know more about the abilities than you tell them. I think that's very hard to do right, especially in an MMO, where new designers rotate in over the years and build new challenges for players. It seems almost impossible to me that design rigor can be maintained such that the players are never tempted to look beyond the 4th wall and wonder how the things they do work in a detailed way, because someone who lives beyond the 4th wall will eventually create a challenge for the player that begs them to wonder just that.
* In these modern times, we're flooded with information about CoH's combat engine works, yet many players still have poor grasp of what some powers actually do because its so complicated. There's probably a lesson in there. -
A) I want to thank everyone who came out for this tonight. After all the hard work and instruction it took on Thursday to get Ready to Rumble, the league that got Really Hard Way tonight also got R2R without trying. We really rocked the trial on that run. We also had 2 successful runs getting Triple Threat. (We missed it once.)
B) There are still folks who need these badges. I am willing to keep running trials this coming week. I am currently planning Tuesday and Thursday, again at 8 Eastern, 7 Central, 6 Mountain and 5 Pacific. I know it can be hard for Pacific folks to hit that time, so I will also tentatively plan another overflow for Saturday.
Thanks again to all assisted!
Click on the image below for a larger version.
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Just a reminder, this is still on for tonight. We'll be starting at 8 PM Eastern, 7 Central, 6 Mountain, 5 Pacific, and I plan to run at least three tonight if we have the membership to support it. If more are needed, I will schedule them for next week.
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Quote:Other than stocking tons of stuff for builds (which other people still obtained plenty of), I'm not sure what in his post says much about whether he had any skill at PvP. Almost everything listed has to do with exploiting bugs in PvE.Originally Posted by CyberGlitch
This post restores my faith that winning at PVP was always about cheating and never about skill. Thanks, I feel better having proof of this.
I've almost exclusively been a PvE player. I pretty much have no dog in the fight to defend PvP players. But I have known a lot of people whose passion was for PvP and who had no qualms about exploiting the living crap out of the PvE game to cut to the chase in PvP. While I don't outright support that, I don't really blame them, either. If what you want is to PvP, and you find PvE boring, why would you want to slog through PvE stuff to get the goods for PvE play? Other games handled this much better than CoH (Guild Wars comes to mind), so I hardly think its a novel desire. -
Well, I just added one. In the scope of what some people have done, it's not all that, but it was a first for me. I just soloed two copies of Paladin in KR ... at the same time. I was on my Ice/Dark/Psy Corruptor. I did pretty much feed the first one to my Lore pets, I have Hybrid Assault, and I was using T3 Ageless (Partial Core) to keep myself in endurance and spam debuffs faster. And because Paladin is low-level, he's easier to defeat than a GM with a higher "true" level would be, despite GM scaling.
But it still felt pretty damn epic to me.
And I got a demo recording of it, too.
PS: I guess it might have been worth mentioning earlier that I had soloed Paladin on a Dark/Psi/Psy Defender before Incarnates. I decided to try it after Vigilance was added to Defenders. I then went out to Boomtown and soloed Babbage with the same character.
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It dawned on me that I know of something a player was responsible for adding who can't post any more to say they were.
Lucas suggested that taunt add a range debuff to targets. I believe the addition of this to the game can be directly attributed to his suggesting it, as it received positive dev responses, and appeared in the game very shortly thereafter.
Lucas passed away in mid-August.
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Quote:I also may be incorrect, but I also believe that to be the case. There was a post outlining the particulars of the I9 version of the Hamidon entities. That post (or perhaps it was a whole thread) was removed, and I believe Iakona received a ban.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Also, going strictly of secondhand information here so I may be way off, but I was under the impression that getting in trouble for leaking NPC powers from the Hami revamp was part of why Iakona "left".
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Quote:If it does come to that, while I don't think anyone would begrudge you (or anyone else) not soaking the time into a game that's not alive, I rather hope you maintain enough interest to linger on one of the community sites. Even if you didn't get seriously involved, I think your insights could do nothing but help the folks who, denied access to the full game, would inevitably seek to dig into the client and other info to build third party tools around keeping the memory and spirit of the game alive.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
At some point, if and when the end seems certain, I'll have to say my adeius as well.
It's a selfish hope to be sure, but I'd do my part to try and keep the community interesting .
But yes, though I hope its implied above, explicit thanks is in order for your involvement in the game. If I have any intellectual claim to fame, it's that I manage to warehouse a lot of info I've learned elsewhere. A great deal of info I've learned about CoH can be tied directly to you, either through your own discovery, or through posts making succinct description or analysis using info others had gleaned.
Starsman, I didn't hang out in the same forums as you as much, I don't think, but I learned a lot from you as well. -
Quote:Heh. I totally hadn't looked at that thread since the announcement.Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
For the record, UberGuy, I changed my rebuttal to you to a link to one of my suggestions before reading the game was getting cancelled. If I had read the notice first, I just would've kept fighting.
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I use that cartoon all to often to explain my own personality to others.
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I play the game hidden. I am almost always visible in global channels and to global friends, extremely rarely hiding from them, but I have been hidden from search since the option became available.
I even often hid from my own SGs, though when the option to specify what you wanted to hide from came about, my friends (who were often also in my SGs) could still see I was on that way.
By the way, you can tell when someone in your SG is playing while hidden by sorting the list by "Last on". If they stay near the top of the list, they're on-line. -
Quote:LOL!Originally Posted by Flea_Mark_Evil
I once ASed an AFK GM in Warburg. He teleported me to Atlas Park, let me die to drones and TPed me back. It was funny.
Ooh. That reminds me. Someone was serially abusing that on Justice. One of the people had a mission in which villains were already present, and the hero mission owner was broadcasting for teammates to help with the mission proper, intentionally duping the helpers into a trap.Quote:I used to love with arena matches bugged out and loaded you into some poor level 1's mission. I will confess I had no shame in murdering them.
Now, these folks weren't being very discrete about it this, so word was getting around that it was happening, yet they kept at it. Eventually, the leader of my SG got an invite for help that sounded suspiciously like the folks in question. Since we figured we knew what was up, we went in prepared. Even though we were PvE-centric players, we dabbled enough to know what to bring to deal with a small squad of Stalkers in a cave mission instance. As a result, the ambush did not flow the way they expected. We slaughtered them, several times, and it was awesome. Sadly, the dudes involved didn't seem to find the humor in it and actually got pissed. If they'd been better sports about getting whupped, odds are good, odds are good we'd have just left and let them carry on. Instead we reported them. I'm sure others had already reported them, but in any case, the whole episode apparently earned themselves a temp ban, as they were gone for a while after that. -
Quote:Case in point: at work I have written many a Python script that's used for system management and task automation. My team had some special requirements for code deployment that the corporate standard tools could not meet, so we had to roll our own. I wrote something that can take a bundle of files stored in a tarball and extract it to a server. How long does that sound like it should be, described like that? 4, 5 lines?Originally Posted by Starsman
Do this experiment: at random select 10 libraries/classes/whatever code files you are familiar with in one of those projects. Without opening them, guess how many lines of codes they have. Write it down. Then open them and count them. How many did you get right?
I am looking at a very simple piece of code right now, does nearly nothing. Its 112 lines of code. There is no optimization that can be done to it, itÂ’s rather sleek code. Best I can do is making it hard to read by bumping code lines on top of each other and deleting comments. This just makes it harder to work with later, though.
Now what if I said it had to map files from the SCM system's internal project structure to directories on servers? That target deployment directories could be nested? (So "foo_build" might deploy to /bin/foo, while "data_build" might deploy to /bin/foo/data.) What if you needed ways to filter what you extract so you could exclude targets, even if they're in the bundle? How about filtering my filename pattern? What if it had to support rolling back extracts if the deployment needed to be able to backed out? What if you wanted a report of what was not deployed, along with the reason why? If I added all of that, how long does that sound?
Even after importing external libraries for command-line parsing, logging, tar/gz file handling, directory and permissions management, and separating the actual SCM-to-directory mapping logic into a separate module, the script is just shy of 1000 lines long, including comments and whitespace. The mapping module is another 250 lines. The module for parsing the embedded manifest file is about 50 more lines.
I don't remember how long it took to write at this point, as it's been revised several times based on updated requirements. I think it has to have been on the order of 10 business days, especially once testing is included.
And that's written in something very high level that's super easy to prototype in. If I'd had to write it in C? Oh, lord. -
Quote:That's not the why. The existence of that tool vastly post-dates the decision to hide almost all entity information from the players, including that for their own characters. Power Analyzers were essentially hacked in with Real Numbers, which was the first serious foray into giving the players in-game numerical information.Originally Posted by Mister_Bison
Because you have an in-game tool to do exactly that, it's the power analyzer (MK3 to hit any mob). Once it has hit you have the hit entity's real numbers (attributes), and so this data would have come to nullify the need for this power.
The actual answer to the question is that the original game designers believed as a matter of game design philosophy that it was harmful for players to understand the game mechanics, because it was felt that this would lead them to focus on game mechanics themselves instead of playing the game as presented. They wanted us to enjoy the game for its qualitative features instead of its quantitative ones.
Personally, I think this was terribly misguided. Access to how something works does not primarily drive whether people focus on it. People who want to focus on those things will do so, and people who don't want to will not do so, whether the information is easy to access or not. Yes, there are some middle-ground folks who might swing one way or the other depending on what the game provides, but I suspect very much that they average out overall.
Unfortunately for this game's original devs, its designers were either very bad at math, or at least very bad at interpreting how the things math told them would translate into functional play. Because the players were largely disallowed from knowing the math or the numbers to plug into it, they could not detect this or show it except qualitatively, at run-time. That made it very hard to convince the devs of real performance issues, for either over-performing or under-performing things. -
I've been involved in various scales of software development and design for about 15 years now, and I'm closer to Arcanaville's position than Bison's.
Writing code to handle, say, damage boosts may not give much reusable code for, say, maxHealth boosts. There might be common code for accessing the raw data elements, but then a great deal of completely unshared code for how those data elements are processed once retrieved. -
Quote:For all that there are some weird immersion-breaking things wrong with it, I have, for a very long time, thought that sunsets in CoH were beautiful, particularly in certain zones. The ambient light colors are good, but I actually appreciate the image of the sun sinking below the horizon.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Last night, for only the second time ever, I watched a sunset.
One of the zones where I think this is prettiest, oddly, has one of the ugliest skylines. Sharkhead Isle has many tall industrial-looking towers and smokestacks, and a hazy quality to its skyline. The setting sun in that context looks very cinematic, IMO.
While not quite as pretty, I also think sunrises are done well. In this case it's not so much the sun itself coming over the horizon, but the ambient light. As it goes from pre-dawn twilight to the rising sun's light, it feels like morning light transitions to me. It's not perfect, but I always thought it was pretty darn good.
Sigh. Another thing to miss. -
Glad to see you were able to get VIP-ized, Bill.
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The offline + online aspect definitely reminded me a bit of Diablo 1.
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FWIW, I don't really think it's counter productive to mention that. At this point, I think the most sensible way for everyone to play the game it in the time left is to focus on what they enjoy the most about it. Clearly, you highly prioritize the "combat on cruise control" aspect of the game, so it makes sense for you to just really focus on that. In contrast, I have long been goal driven, so I'm striving for achieving those goals I hadn't reached yet. Neither of what clicks for you and I respectively might not work for someone else.
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For what it's worth, it really helped me to sit down and really think about why it stung so much to hear the game was going to end. Of course, there are a lot of reasons to really like this game, its community, etc., but I was able to distill it down to a few that were really the top reasons for me.
Just knowing the game was ending at a future time was more ... abstract somehow - it was this thing that sucked when I thought about it, but it was almost like I was avoiding thinking about why that was specifically so. Focusing my attention on the particulars was more painful and yet gave a sense of release. I don't know how to explain it - it both hurt more and felt better at the same time.
The other thing that felt better was to share those particulars with friends and loved ones. Explaining to someone else why losing CoH was painful helped me achieve the focus I describe above, and telling it a few times helped me really work it out of my system.
I don't know if those same things will help other people, but it did help me.
I'm still playing because my biggest focus is on my favorite characters, and I want to achieve all the things I can with them before the lights go out. I also want to play with and support the play of my in-game friends who feel similarly to me. Also, I'm stubborn.
