seebs

I believe it can be playable with Intel HD graphics, but it may be a bit limited. There's an Acer TimelineX 13" laptop with an nVidia 540M which can run it at 50+fps in Ultra. No, really.

There are two points to consider when asking how much effect musculature has on my contribution:

1. The effect of musculature on my direct damage.
2. The effect of musculature on my total contribution.

But wait! There's another pair to consider:
1. The effect on my total contribution of me having musculature.
2. The effect on my total contribution of other people having musculature.

Where a buffer gets the most benefit from musculature is probably the effect on total damage of other people having it. If the amount of damage my multipliers and bonuses are applying to goes up, the net effect of those bonuses goes up...

MHO: No archetype that some players are enjoying is superfluous. The game is not, in general, so hard that you have to eke out every last point of performance; you can focus on what's fun and run with it.

I have blasters, not because they're necessarily "better" than corruptors or scrappers, but because I enjoy playing them or they fit a theme.

BTW, a side note: I've picked up another MMO that I also play now, and I've learned that I can do this there, too. I just play stuff that's fun, and as long as I'm basically decent at the game, I get groups and have fun. Now I sort of wonder whether my inability to do this back in That Other Game was because I'd not been enlightened or because the game didn't allow it.

CoH, though, remains my absolute favorite game for pure concept play. In CoH, when I see a ninjas/trick-arrow MM with no pets and lacking some of the generally-accepted "good" powers, I don't think "what an idiot", I think "wow, what an awesomely-done archer concept build".

What about an authentic Red Ryder BB gun for sets that use guns?

Well, I do have a psych degree.

But really, it's a fascinating thing. And it seems to me that it's probably a much saner response to your internal state than spending immense amounts of effort trying to Be Normal.

You know...

I have a webpage (l2pnoob.org) dedicated to trying to explain to people that the point of MMOs is not to have the l33test loot, or have the best rewards, but to enjoy playing.

Steelclaw, would you mind if I were to use you as an example there? I think you've got one of the best examples I've seen of playing a game on your own terms, completely disregarding what other people seem to enjoy. And I honestly find it really cheering. I could never do that, I can't understand how it's fun, but you take such evident joy in it.

Silly me. I thought that, since I had built a Windows machine to run games, the new launcher wouldn't be a big deal.

Wrong.

The new launcher requires administrative access. Why? according to them, it's so it can update some registry entries.

This is... Not secure. Not sane. Not consistent with the very clear and consistent advice MS gives about developing for modern Windows.

Look, I know you guys don't get a vote in this crap. Just... if people are wondering why some of us log in less than we used to, or possibly never? Yeah, the thing where I now have to give a program written by a known-sleazy company unbounded admin privs in order to play the game is gonna be a factor there.

There is no excuse for this. If my game files are all writable by the user that actually runs the game, then we're done; the ncsoft launcher could keep its data in a location that doesn't require admin privileges to write. Then, in the absolutely certain event that there is a bug in the ncsoft launcher, it can't be used to escalate privileges.

Seriously, basic security concept: Don't run with privileges you don't need. If rewriting the program from the ground up in a different way lets you succeed without a privilege, you didn't need it; refer back to point A.

I dunno. I've been out a bit, and I'm actually sorta wanting to play again (kept my accounts active against such an eventuality...), but this launcher thing pretty much instantly killed my enthusiasm. Yeah, I know. You guys don't get a vote. Maybe you can pass on to the people who do get a vote. Of course, the way ncsoft is run, presumably there is no communication at all between the people mandating that you run the launcher and the people who are trying to find new ways every day to make it suck more.

The bio thing reminds me:

I come from a mostly-RP background. All my friends are RPers. So I started playing CoH, and I talked to people, and one of the people I met early on was @Twoflower.

So.

I spent a month, maybe two, thinking that people looking for "AE teams" were getting groups together to RP through the cool player-written story content. I didn't go because I'm mostly shy and introverted, and don't like to hang out with strangers usually.

... Well, for "shy and introverted" read "autistic". Not really thread-related, but I'd point out that CoH has done a ton to help me be more comfortable trying to interact with strangers, thanks to good experiences.

You may be able to find my threads on such topics as:

1. Is there any way for a low level character to afford enhancements without a high level character funding them?
2. How on earth can a "defender" set without healing work?

FWIW, the big thing that I was missing for the second: Regen continues in combat. If I'd known that I think I woulda been fine.

If hiding the post count would make us behave better, then the theory that this is something we are "better than" has been empirically disproven.

Not all "divisions" are bad. Knowing whether people are experienced or not can be very useful. Not always in giving them free credibility; a stupid post from someone who's been posting for a long time is a lot more telling than the same post as someone's 3rd post.

Wow. I had no idea. Yeah, I'm getting that.

... I mean, I barely even log in these days, and I'm still getting that.

There is a fairly simple way to implement "defense" formulas, which is to do them as multiplicative rather than additive.

Say what?

Okay, right now, say you have a 50% chance to hit. You attack someone with 25% defense. Okay, 50% - 25% = 25%. You now have a 25% chance to hit. That's additive/subtractive.

What if, instead, it were multiplicative? In the same scenario, attack someone who reduces your chance to hit by 25% of itself. So, 50% - (50% * 25%) = 37.5%. (An easy way to understand this is to call 25% defense a 75% hit chance multiplier).

Now, what this does is... The more of them you have, the less the additional ones matter.

Say you have two 25% defense abilities up. Under the normal system, that gives you a 0% chance to hit, which is then saturated at 5%. Under the multiplicative system, you have 50% * 75% * 75%, which ends up being 9/32, or a little over 25%.

Obviously, this would imply a MASSIVE rebalancing of all sorts of stuff. But! It would give you a system under which there aren't "caps" for defense, and where buffers are always useful. As is, another layer of +defense is totally wasted once everyone's soft capped, which they tend to be.

Thank you for the reminder that, if my guide does not mention the importance of autopowers, it should be updated to do so. Yes, definitely, there should be a reminder to turn on an autopower.

It's in my sig now, I believe.

I don't think the devs put in information barriers for a reason other than "don't have a good plan for how to make the information available cheaply".