Lucks and Insights do not work the way you think
By
Amarsir,
Posted on: 2006-06-06 11:23 in Player Guides
Oh good. I don't actually have the worst luck in the universe after all. I'm going to Vegas.
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Although I cannot say she was the first to put it this way, it was Kali's multiple reports of lucks "not working until enough of them were used" that got me thinking that they might not have been broken, just weaker than advertised. Which caused me to run specific tests looking for the ramp up/ramp down behavior, which I was able to reproduce consistently in at least one instance.
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The best I could really come up with, when reporting these things, was "this is really weird behavior." The number of times I'd pop three lucks and have a boss chain multiple hits on me was higher than it felt like it should have been if I was flooring those bosses. Of all the reasons that this would happen, I would say that "these are about half as effective as the text says they are" was not on my list.
And it's true, I never set out to test it because I assumed the 25% number was accurate, and because it's a pain to test accuracy and defense inspirations due to the short duration. I also got annoyed with the people telling me I was imagining things and telling me to get 10,000 hit samples when the issue was with boss fights.
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More than likely, F, it just gets lost in the code. There's alot of it and if they lose a key programmer or two, it becomes difficult to track down some of this stuff
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Shame on them if they have this massive engine and do not have it documented properly. As professionals they ought to know better.
F
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The best I could really come up with, when reporting these things, was "this is really weird behavior." The number of times I'd pop three lucks and have a boss chain multiple hits on me was higher than it felt like it should have been if I was flooring those bosses. Of all the reasons that this would happen, I would say that "these are about half as effective as the text says they are" was not on my list.
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This really illustrates what I am talking about though Kali... as a vet gamer and someone who just freaking knows the game backwards and forwards, you can just TELL something is wrong, intuitively, "by feel." There are people who just discount this but I think it is foolish to do so -- just as it would be to discount a tennis player telling you that his service motion doesn't "feel" right even though he has no "first serve percentage" stats to back him up.
We have been playing this game for a long time... for hours at a time. We can TELL when something looks funky, with or without the stats to prove it. And my point is that just as a coach should listen to his tennis player saying, "My serve doesn't feel right," the devs should listen when multiple vet players say, "This or that doesn't feel right." Stop trying to assume people are trying to get each other nerfed or themselves buffed or whatever, and realize that most people really do just have the good of the game in mind when they report these things.
F
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Although I cannot say she was the first to put it this way, it was Kali's multiple reports of lucks "not working until enough of them were used" that got me thinking that they might not have been broken, just weaker than advertised. Which caused me to run specific tests looking for the ramp up/ramp down behavior, which I was able to reproduce consistently in at least one instance.
[/ QUOTE ]
The best I could really come up with, when reporting these things, was "this is really weird behavior." The number of times I'd pop three lucks and have a boss chain multiple hits on me was higher than it felt like it should have been if I was flooring those bosses. Of all the reasons that this would happen, I would say that "these are about half as effective as the text says they are" was not on my list.
And it's true, I never set out to test it because I assumed the 25% number was accurate, and because it's a pain to test accuracy and defense inspirations due to the short duration. I also got annoyed with the people telling me I was imagining things and telling me to get 10,000 hit samples when the issue was with boss fights.
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One things for sure. If you start popping lucks after combat has begun... there's a damned good chance that you're going to get floored or hurt real bad. ALways seemed like the effect wasn't instantaneous.
This also explains the last battle I fought with my rad defender. I was 49 fighting a level 52 malta titan. With 4 lucks and RI running that thing was hitting me like crazy. The combination of debuff and lucks should have had him whistlin dixie. Instead I was getting hammered like a drunken fratboy. The only reason I won was Enverating field, temp invul and a couple large resistance inspires. THe lucks didn't even seem to be there.
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Actually, I think the problem in this case was that there were a lot of very experienced people on both sides of this issue who were going by feel, and no one wanted to do controlled testing of something like this, because controlled testing is not easy to do (ten bucks says no one comes close to guessing what sort of testing uncovered this).
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If I was going to test a transient defense buff like Lucks, I might consider using Rain powers.
Using Ice Storm, it seems like you should easily be able to fit about 150 tics into the duration of one single Luck (more if you use Hasten).
But this seems too easy to be the answer.
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Yeah, and you know I test in PvE, so thats not a viable option. If you are at all curious, my tests were not with my MA/SR, and they were ultimately suicidal.
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Ever notice how right after some releases some people complained about accuracy.... and were blown off?
Makes you wonder now don't it?
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This also explains the last battle I fought with my rad defender. I was 49 fighting a level 52 malta titan. With 4 lucks and RI running that thing was hitting me like crazy. The combination of debuff and lucks should have had him whistlin dixie. Instead I was getting hammered like a drunken fratboy. The only reason I won was Enverating field, temp invul and a couple large resistance inspires. THe lucks didn't even seem to be there.
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If this battle was relatively recent, given what we now know about lucks, this definitely would not have been enough to floor that titan boss (with the purple patch acting on RI and the four lucks "only" offering 50% defense against something with 80% base tohit). But on top of that, and my memory is a bit sketchy on them, its possible their energy blasts have -DEF debuffs - which would also be boosted by the 3 level difference. And all Malta seem to be accuracy-boosted on top of that.
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One things for sure. If you start popping lucks after combat has begun... there's a damned good chance that you're going to get floored or hurt real bad. ALways seemed like the effect wasn't instantaneous.
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As a super reflexes scrapper, I have often wondered if the reported "delay" in lucks working was based at least partially on a lot of people underestimating the number of attacks with -DEF in them (in combination with what we now know to be our overestimating the insps themselves): players who use lucks a lot might be simply seeing the cascade failure that defense sets are more used to seeing. Just one hit from a defense debuffing attack prior to using lucks looks like its capable of negating a whole luck or more. Which means it might take one more luck on average to get the same performance if you let them shoot first, than if you pop them first (assuming you're only hit once). Until the debuff wears off, and then suddenly the extra lucks suddenly floor the target.
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So that means it takes 6 lucks to equal the defense protection that mog gives minus the psi of course?
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Minus the psi and toxic.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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One things for sure. If you start popping lucks after combat has begun... there's a damned good chance that you're going to get floored or hurt real bad. ALways seemed like the effect wasn't instantaneous.
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All of these instances, lucks were popped before a fight. Often, I'd pop lucks during the fight and the boss would start missing.
I usually don't wait until I get hit to pop lucks, though. 
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This also explains the last battle I fought with my rad defender. I was 49 fighting a level 52 malta titan. With 4 lucks and RI running that thing was hitting me like crazy. The combination of debuff and lucks should have had him whistlin dixie. Instead I was getting hammered like a drunken fratboy. The only reason I won was Enverating field, temp invul and a couple large resistance inspires. THe lucks didn't even seem to be there.
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Also, the 65% or so debuff effectiveness.
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With this level of QA, Cryptic is really squandering the first-mover advantage in the superhero MMORPG genre. If they don't get their act together, and Marvel or DC come out with something better, they're going to eat Cryptic's lunch but good.
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As someone who does bug testing, it's actually very easy to miss bugs that seem blindingly obvious once they are discovered. Especially in software that is being constantly tweaked by multiple people. As much as people like to rant about this sort of thing, it really does fall under 'these things happen sometimes'. And they happen to everyone.
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Yeah, and you know I test in PvE, so thats not a viable option. If you are at all curious, my tests were not with my MA/SR, and they were ultimately suicidal.
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Because it would be interesting:
Time to death against a "reliable" "fast" damage source (PBAoE DoT, ...).
I can't say for sure how easy it'd be to find a damage source that's "just right", but it'd be an interesting approach.
A somewhat less interesting option would be to look for streakbreaker boundraries. You wouldn't be able to get precise values, but should be able to tell the difference between 12.5% and 25%.
But that would have been a much too easy guess.
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Because it would be interesting:
Time to death against a "reliable" "fast" damage source (PBAoE DoT, ...).
I can't say for sure how easy it'd be to find a damage source that's "just right", but it'd be an interesting approach.
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I got lucky. There's a level 50 contact that just happens to give out a mission very early on that generates a large number of attackers in a very small area that cycle attacks very quickly that an unstoppable scrapper can survive when using at least three small lucks.
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With this level of QA, Cryptic is really squandering the first-mover advantage in the superhero MMORPG genre. If they don't get their act together, and Marvel or DC come out with something better, they're going to eat Cryptic's lunch but good.
[/ QUOTE ]
As someone who does bug testing, it's actually very easy to miss bugs that seem blindingly obvious once they are discovered. Especially in software that is being constantly tweaked by multiple people. As much as people like to rant about this sort of thing, it really does fall under 'these things happen sometimes'. And they happen to everyone.
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Yup. It's unfair to toss a ton of blame in cases like this. Hindsight is always 20/20. Also, customers tend to only remember the handful of bugs they found and reported and ended up being verified and fixed. They tend to ignore (or not ever see) the hundreds of false reports of bugs that devs will spend thousands of hours testing and checking for and end up finding nothing.
Or in this case, Arcana was looking for one type of bug ("inconsistent behavior"), and found something completely different. It happens. Anyone who thinks that debugging software is easy has never done it.
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Or in this case, Arcana was looking for one type of bug ("inconsistent behavior"), and found something completely different. It happens.
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Actually, I was specifically looking for scaling behavior, and I found it in one.
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Anyone who thinks that debugging software is easy has never done it.
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Fixing software can sometimes be a complicated task. Finding bugs like this *should be* easy. I say, *should be* easy because it often isn't, but when it is, *that* is in and of itself a problem.
Sometimes, you have to take a step back, and realize not even your designers and developers have what they need, and give it to them. Historical Precident is not hard to find.
Someone once explained to me the difference between the design of a nuclear submarine, and a jetliner. Jetliners are designed to hide the details of their construction and operation from the passengers, because the passengers are presumed to be, on average, much more likely to cause problems than solve them. Nuclear submarines are designed to show all of their inner workings to every single passenger, unavoidably, because its presumed every single passenger is much more likely to spot and address problems than cause them.
Even if the weird ugly details of the game mechanics are hidden from *us*, the game should be shoving them in the face of every Cryptic playtester and designer constantly, inescapably, obtrusively (at least while testing) - so that if something isn't happening the way they think it ought to, it hits them over the head day after day after day.
If I were in charge, that would be the number one feature I would ask the coders to add for me. And I wouldn't take no for an answer.
(and then I would order them to fix stacking)
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this wasn't always the case. I've noticed lucks diminishing in effectiveness after i4. I used to be able to pop 4 lucks as a blaster and go to town without fear. Now I pop 2 with my brute who's EA and a lot get's through.
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Yeah, I could swear that right around I5 or so, I started to notice that popping just two Lucks wasn't cutting it against bosses anymore, and I started to take three or four.
It really seems like they were stronger in the old days...
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As someone who does bug testing, it's actually very easy to miss bugs that seem blindingly obvious once they are discovered. Especially in software that is being constantly tweaked by multiple people. As much as people like to rant about this sort of thing, it really does fall under 'these things happen sometimes'. And they happen to everyone.
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This would carry a bit more weight if players had not been complaining for many months about issues like Acc insps not seeming to do much good, 3 lucks not flooring bosses, and the like. Every time we said these things, we were completely blown off by the devs as being off our rockers. That means that, apparently, they didn't even bother to check.
It's one thing when you check and you miss the bug. It's another when you completely blow off the bug report as if the person making it belongs in a nut house, and then it turns out the bug was real. The wave-of-the-hand, "working as intended", "show me the numbers" attitude is what bugs me the most. Especially given how they have been WRONG about these basic things time, and time, and time again... and every single time it was done with the same casual wave of the hand until someone finally figured out how to definitively prove what the veteran players could "feel" or "sense" just by playing the game.
The proof is in the pudding here. The vets have been right over and over again about this sort of stuff. This is not a one-time thing. It's just the most blatant case of it.
F
One of the main reasons I have started moving towards a new game is because of issues like this. It would be safe for me to say at least 3 other people in my SG are on there way out because of things like this.
It's not one issue or two issues or that we don't like the game it's quite the opposite. It's the Impale of Thorns being bugged, to certain powers not doing what there supposed to do, to being ignored when legitimate complaints are brought up. I am saddened that a game as good as this is being held back by the very people who had made it succesful. I8 is probably a do or die moment for this game. They are well on the way of the infamous AC 2. A game that had so much potential but was killed by the Devs who wouldn't listen till it was to late.
How many people reporting a problem should it take before the Devs spend dozens to hundreds of hours checking code?
1? 10? 100? 1000? Even 1000 people is less than 1% of the database...
Or perhaps there is a core group of a dozen or so players the Devs should always 'listen to'-- even when those players disagree with each other?
I don't think it's an easy question to answer.
In any case, kudos to the OP for catching the issue, and kudos to the devs for checking it out.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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Or perhaps there is a core group of a dozen or so players the Devs should always 'listen to'-- even when those players disagree with each other?
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When in doubt, they should always listen to me and do whatever I say. Its not always the best thing, but its a good rule of thumb. And not just for the devs, either.
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Or perhaps there is a core group of a dozen or so players the Devs should always 'listen to'-- even when those players disagree with each other?
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When in doubt, they should always listen to me and do whatever I say. Its not always the best thing, but its a good rule of thumb. And not just for the devs, either.
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let me know if they buy that. I have some Ideas about defiance that I'd like to funnel through you.
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Or perhaps there is a core group of a dozen or so players the Devs should always 'listen to'-- even when those players disagree with each other?
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When in doubt, they should always listen to me and do whatever I say. Its not always the best thing, but its a good rule of thumb. And not just for the devs, either.
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let me know if they buy that. I have some Ideas about defiance that I'd like to funnel through you.
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If the devs obeyed me on matters of defiance, there'd be no defiance for you to have ideas about.
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YOU ARE MY DAMNED HERO <3
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An interesting theory is that lucks *are* "+25% defense" relative to base 50% tohit. Perhaps in the distant past, all critter types had base 50% tohit (and they do again). Lucks date to that time when a player popped a luck, he was reducing net tohit by 25% for all attackers; +12.5 percentage points DEF = "+25% defense" colloquially. Given other things I've seen and heard, this is not a bad theory.
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That's kind of what I suspected when I read the Prima guide. The top of this thread confirms it, for me..
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So that means it takes 6 lucks to equal the defense protection that mog gives minus the psi of course?
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As of this morning, four (barring tohit buffs).
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