Lucks and Insights do not work the way you think
By
Amarsir,
Posted on: 2006-06-06 11:23 in Player Guides
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Don't we WANT the devs to find the bugs and exterminate them? Do people really prefer playing a BUGGED game?
And yet, apparently some people do. I just don't get it.
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I agree. I also believe that some people are so sensitive to criticism about anything they like, that they'll irrationally reply with something negative as a knee-jerk reaction without even bothering to think about the subject being discussed, because they love their opinion more than they love anything else, even the truth.
It's a psychological thing, imho, and I think it's even more obvious when you discuss something that's a problem that's not so numbers-related, or more tangentally numbers-related than what we're discussing now.
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Psychologically speaking, don't underestimate that you're talking about the defense of authority figures. A lot of perfectly nice, well-meaning people are raised to think "be good, do what you're told, respect authority, and don't make trouble." In that paradigm, it's very easy to view anyone with an issue as a "troublemaker."
Without getting into detail, I'm reminded of a time in college when some of us had a very specific issue with a particular professor. What struck me was not that some students defended him, but that in conversation they would fabricate excuses on the fly in order to do so. I actually had this conversation:<ul type="square">Them: "Well it's the best he could come up with on a day's notice."
Me: "Day's notice? He's been teaching this class for at least 5 years."
Them: "Well maybe he lost his notes and had to replace them."
Me: "Older students say he did the same thing when they had him."
Them: "Well maybe the department never gave him the syllabus to begin with."[/list]I suppose that attitude helps provide stability to the world but at times it does stand in the way of progress.
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In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive.
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You've made me smile on numerous occaisions.
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Bah! Any idiot can post a bit of random nonsense and get a laugh or two..
I mean just look at Foo..
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And before this becomes too much of a "thank god they listen to Arcana" thread, I think a little perspective is in order.
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Ahh, despair.com, a wonderful website for all your cynical, pessemistic needs. If you are feeling too happy, just visit this site to bring you back to earth (with a crash 
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A few things.
As others have said.. this makes a lot of sense. It always felt like defense insps only worked half the time.. but that was because they were only half as powerfull as we thought! Why has no one thought of this before. We have had TWO YEARS and no one thought of this? Amazing. Behold the power of blind faith in text descriptions of powers.
Posts like this always make me feel so horrible! In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive. I'm not good at collecting info. I don't post anything insightfull, and I can't even argue various important points right. At best I am just a forum oddball, and all that does is get my unusualy high postcount pointed out to me.
Blah..
::Goes to try and do something usefull.::
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If only you had 18,000 posts.
Oh, you have been insightful, too. I think you've made some fairly good points about enhancements and whether something like that is a good idea for a game like this.
Just for the record: I never really seriously sought dev attention for the annoying hit streaks through stacked lucks. I took it as given that I really was having bad luck, although the number of bad luck streaks was a bit high. Lacking something like Infernal's portal (and I definitely didn't think of that), it's difficult to test Luck numbers.
Also, I was definitely annoyed at posters much less polite than Arcana who'd get extra-flamey and insist that it's morally wrong to say that something appears to be working funny without posting 10,000 hit tests signed in triplicate.
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As an aside, every single bug I have ever reported since CoH beta has been fixed (or at least acknowledged as a known bug with a fix in the works). I have never used /bug for an issue I have found and had it result in nothing.
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Er, so you don't report textual bugs in the dialogue/mission text? Or maybe they've decided to just ignore the /bugs I send about typos, misspellings, etc.
It'd be sort of neat if there was a public bug log (bugzilla style) that people could point to, attach demos/testcases, etc. The forums and PMs feel a little haphazard as a bug reporting & discussing mechanism (and /bug is a joke, if only for its very limited text area). But given how hard it would be to set that up for a closed-source product, I can see why it could be a resource drain instead.
Task Forces shouldn't need 8 people to start ... it's not fun.
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This isn't complaining, this is QA testing to make the game better.
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Foo, do you ever get the odd feeling that a certain number of people who play the game and post to the forums don't want the game to get better? It seems inconceivable to me that this would be so (if you play the game, and pay for it, why would you not want the best you can have for your money?), and yet it seems to be. Almost any time someone dares point out that accuracy seems not to be working right, or damage is off from what one would expect, or anything like that -- frequently even when there ARE good numbers to back it up -- there is no shortage of people coming out of the woodwork to gainsay them.
And I just don't really understand it. If there really is a bug that's making the streak-breaker not work, for example, and the streak-breaker is SUPPOSED to work, then why would you try to shout down someone who had posted evidence that the streak-breaker is broken? If Luck is supposed to be a +25% buff and has been for 2+ years, and you find out that it isn't, why in the world would someone flame you for posting it?
Don't we WANT the devs to find the bugs and exterminate them? Do people really prefer playing a BUGGED game?
And yet, apparently some people do. I just don't get it.
F
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Hey, I don't mind people posting about problems with the game. Find a problem, test it out, post you finding in the form of facts and details. Sure, I'm all for that. Reminding the developes that the problem still needs attention, keeping them up to date and providing a gentle reminder in case they've forgotten. Sure I'm fine with that too.
Jumping on the boards and spouting venom just because something in the game irks them is something altogether different. If people can't see the difference than I may finally understand why they are so confused as to why the developers don't respond immediately and why other players will react by posting their own overemotional replies.
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I think there are red names that would listen to anyone who:
* is respectful, even if angry
* is patient, even if anxious
* knows what the heck they are talking about, and is willing to learn to speak their language when they talk about it
* Knows and respects the difference between reporting something is broken, and complaining about something that you don't approve of.
* Checks first, reports second; not the other way around.
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This is the kind of stuff I approve of and have absolutely no problems with. I'd do more of it myself but it seems that most people beat me to these kinds of issues and look into them with far more skill and understanding than I might be willing to with my limited play time. Why add my lesser insights to the discussion if there isn't going to be said anything that hasn't already been said, and probably much better than I could have said it? I tend to reserve my posting for those places where I perceive my insights to have value, and occassionally those times when I post without thinking and then have to appologize later for being a temporary idiot. 
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Posts like this always make me feel so horrible! In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive.
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Being productive has its disadvantages. While I was off testing things, Pilcrow used 7,241 CoH eval keys to steal the "most helpful poster" title from me, I just know he did.
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You succeed to YOUR expectations.
Look at the GM and AV change thread - your PLAYERS do not agree. You steal the FUN out of the game for Risk vs Reward mantra you Devs constantly spew.
STOP balancing the game against the Uber builds and balance it for the CASUAL gamer. I was in a mission at level 21 with my controller where I had to tell the tank to stop leading and let me do it because he was repeatedly getting killed and required full time healing because his Fire tank did not know to take Tough.
Yeah, how fun was it for him? It sucked having only the tank die 3 times and having my controller take over the tank job - in fact the tank could have turned his armor off after that because he no longer served his function.
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The AVs and GMs needed the buffs. As for how much they were buffed, I have seen that the developers now appear to be overdoing things rather than underdoing things, and doing so intentionally. I think they would rather put the player in a situation where they are underperforming and tweak from there to find a more balanced solution, rather than introduce a situation where the player is overperforming and have to introduce another change where the players will most undoubtably view it as a negative change.
You can see these things in the prestige costs of the bases when they were first introduced. You can see it in how the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification were introduced. The problem however is in being patient while waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of the follow up changes to start introducing the rest of the changes to bring us closer to that baseline that the developers are working towards.
So far we have seen the new Defense changes introduces in Issue 7 which are the other side of the coin for some of the Global Defense changes. We're still waiting for new enhancements, tweaks to prestige costs and a lot of other things in the game. As far as that it's all about resources. Some things are easier to change, while others take more resources in the form of time, manpower, technical prowess in relation to the technical limitations imposed by the game and cost.
So rather than get over emotional about this I recommend you be patient and enjoy the games as best you can while waiting for that other shoe. It may be a matter of alterig your perception to help yourself enjoy the game, maybe even changing how you approach the game in general.
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Posts like this always make me feel so horrible! In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive.
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Being productive has its disadvantages. While I was off testing things, Pilcrow used 7,241 CoH eval keys to steal the "most helpful poster" title from me, I just know he did.
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I got nominated for it by a few posters and I am just a dumb blond
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Posts like this always make me feel so horrible! In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive.
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Being productive has its disadvantages. While I was off testing things, Pilcrow used 7,241 CoH eval keys to steal the "most helpful poster" title from me, I just know he did.
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I got nominated for it by a few posters and I am just a dumb blond
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Well, at least you aren't being ignored most of the time. The few exceptions to when I'm getting ignored are those times when I'm being flamed to a crispy crunchy core. Sometime because I hit the nail on the head and the truth hurts, and others because I have a tendancy to either misrepresent my intentions or I get overemotional and post something stupid to which I have to either restate myself more clearly or appoligize for being a temporary idiot.
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If one "swing" corresponds to a larger number of attacks, it seems like the 10k number would be off by several orders of magnitude.
But I probably just read too much into the presence of that number. I can be fairly good at that...
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I actually used the 10k figure because that numbers actually gets bandied about when people start discussing statistics on the boards. You hear people who know the term "sample size", and perhaps little else, suggest that anything less than 10k worth of hit/miss data is insufficient to draw conclusion from.
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That's what I figured, and the reason I brought it up in the first place. By doing so, you (intentionally or not) implied a connection between one swing and one attack. And that makes 10k a gross exaggeration in this case. Make it 50 and I might buy it.
I probably wouldn't have mentioned it if I hadn't believed that you were using 10k because it's being thrown around (and thought that others might get the same impression).
While 10k samples might be nice if you're trying to determine the value of Lucks to 12.5%, a thousand should be more than enough to show that the value is "far" from 25%.
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I am, however, a professional trout-swinger. Like my father before me.
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Me, I juggle bass.
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We all know that Arcana doesn't swing trout
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Damn straight.
Err...
...this is a compliment, right?
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I think so, but I can't be sure.
Give me some time to think about it.
Hmm. Trouts can be tasty... <trails off>
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Posts like this always make me feel so horrible! In my 11 thousand + posts I haven't done anything productive.
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Being productive has its disadvantages. While I was off testing things, Pilcrow used 7,241 CoH eval keys to steal the "most helpful poster" title from me, I just know he did.
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I got nominated for it by a few posters and I am just a dumb blond
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least you got nominated! i was on the ballot last year and scarcely got a mention this time around. I need talk to my campaign manager for next year.
Level 50 is a journey, not a destination.
▲Scrapper Issues List - Going Rogue Edition▲
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While 10k samples might be nice if you're trying to determine the value of Lucks to 12.5%, a thousand should be more than enough to show that the value is "far" from 25%.
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In this case, since the actual value for two lucks (50% mitigation, 50% incoming damage) is a factor of five from the expected value of two lucks (90% mitigation, 10% incoming damage), it took even less than that.
But you really need to factor everything else out, and just see a bunch of guaranteed to be identical swings with two, and then with four, and then the results become blatant. Four drops all attackers to the floor, so you can see what "the floor" looks like. Then two *should* also drop all the attackers to the floor, but it so very obviously doesn't. Three, if you pay careful attention, looks like something in the middle.
And if you use, say, an unstoppable scrapper to test with, you can use the health bar as a nice proxy for average incoming damage. Its crude, and I wouldn't be able to tell how strong lucks actually were, but I could tell that they were vastly lower than +25% defense, but also couldn't be much lower than about 12% defense. And the test is reproducible as many times as you like.
Its so blatant, that I didn't even think it was worth computing the actual scores from the demorecords, although I was prepared to do that if necessary. The signal is very strong, and most importantly, I could describe exactly how to reproduce the experiment if I needed to (as it turned out, I didn't need to).
Now, this is not the same thing as someone saying "very often, I seem to miss a lot, like I only hit the target two or three times out of ten, when I must be at 90% tohit or better" because *that* sort of thing is bound to happen occasionally, and is vulnerable to selection bias. Without a lot of additional details, even if someone says "I've been playing since beta, and I know this is wrong" I'm not likely to pursue that very far myself.
But "sometimes, it seems like lucks don't work until I pop one or two more than I think I need" was rattling around in my head when I happened to be doing inspiration-related tests. And that isn't a "1000 swing" issue.
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While 10k samples might be nice if you're trying to determine the value of Lucks to 12.5%, a thousand should be more than enough to show that the value is "far" from 25%.
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But "sometimes, it seems like lucks don't work until I pop one or two more than I think I need" was rattling around in my head when I happened to be doing inspiration-related tests. And that isn't a "1000 swing" issue.
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Oh, I completely agree.
The point I was trying to make was this:
People were claiming in this thread that reports about this very issue were faced with complaints that they required 10000 attacks in order for the claim to be taken seriously.
Showing that a value differs from another value by a "sizeable" amount (like say 12.5% instead of 25%) simply doesn't require that many samples, so anyone insisting on more than say 1000 samples in order to show that Lucks "aren't working as they should" simply don't know what they're talking about.
So either people put unreasonable demands on the ones originally talking about this issue, or people are misremembering what those demands were.
I may have missed it but how did you do the test? I must know.
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So either people put unreasonable demands on the ones originally talking about this issue, or people are misremembering what those demands were.
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Possibly. As I mentioned previously, sometimes high samples are necessary, and sometimes not. But I also worry often that because of the particular way I reject one person's problem report as unlikely, someone else with less understanding of the issues might reject someone else's problem report for the same reason, but in an inapplicable way.
Moral to the story is speak for yourself only, and not with the words of others. In particular, echoing mine without proper context is likely to get you into trouble. I hope no one ever rejects someone's problem report "just because they think Arcanaville would." That would be wrong.
Especially because in this case, I never really rejected any of these types of reports, so much as I didn't really know what to do about them, if anything, based on what I originally thought was being reported.
One more thing on this subject: never exaggerate or use hyperbole to draw attention to a problem. It only confuses the issue. It seems obvious to me that at least some people who sensed there was a problem elected to overdramatize the problem, in a way that made sense to them given what they thought the problem was. If you thought lucks occasionally stopped working, then exaggerating the effect by claiming "sometimes I would pop an entire tray of lucks and they still wouldn't do anything" sounds good. But in fact, it only served to blur the actual symptoms of the problem, and in retrospect, it now appears clear that no one should have been able to claim that particular symptom truthfully.
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One more thing on this subject: never exaggerate or use hyperbole to draw attention to a problem. It only confuses the issue. It seems obvious to me that at least some people who sensed there was a problem elected to overdramatize the problem, in a way that made sense to them given what they thought the problem was. If you thought lucks occasionally stopped working, then exaggerating the effect by claiming "sometimes I would pop an entire tray of lucks and they still wouldn't do anything" sounds good. But in fact, it only served to blur the actual symptoms of the problem, and in retrospect, it now appears clear that no one should have been able to claim that particular symptom truthfully.
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Precisely why I try to communicate how many inspirations I used how many hits and misses were involved, and whether anything changed after I stacked more onto the problem.
Not to say I haven't been guilty of overdramatizing things, but I like to think that in this particular matter, I elected more for precision. 
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I am one of those that also thinks Lucks used to be more effective. Pop one and it was a dramatic increase in safety. Maybe this was a change that occured around the time of the global defense changes?
I actually like the values for the inspirations now, though I agree with Arcana that Lucks and Insights should have the same percentages.
A number of us have suggested similar changes in the past. Buff resistance inspirations, nerf tohit and defense inspirations since they are so powerful compared to defense sets. And that seems to have been the idea for a lot of us since Sturdies came about. Or that's when I really started noticing those comments and chimed in agreement.
That said, I am glad we know about this now, and I hope the Devs fix the text descriptions soon enough, so that the rest of the players have the chance to see what the real values are.
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I may have missed it but how did you do the test? I must know.
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I was originally testing the performance of Invuln and SR in Maria's Infernal mission, specifically in the portal room. I let it spawn a ton of portal pets and let them shoot at me. While testing Invuln with and without inspirations, I noticed that three lucks seemed to be working a lot better than two - and with twelve or more portal pets and Infernal shooting at you constantly, you tend to notice any differences fast. I then noticed that with four, an unstoppable scrapper could pretty much tank the room for the entire duration of unstoppable (so long as Infernal shot from range, instead of swinging in melee). The difference between two lucks and four lucks was unbelievably large.
So I did several tests at two lucks, three lucks, and four lucks, and watched the survival over three minutes (with enough lucks). I was able to measure that, to within a large but manageable margin for error, I was taking a lot more than five times the damage at two lucks as four - which is getting suggestive that lucks were not 25% def, but rather closer to 15% def. Which made me think that perhaps what was happening was that somehow, lucks were obeying the AT modifier: instead of being 25%, maybe its only 25% for tankers, say, but 18.75% for scrappers, or something similar. Actually, that would *still* be too high to explain what I saw, but maybe it was something like that.
Turns out lucks do not obey the modifier, but they are in fact weaker in base value. Voila.
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Cuddles I agree.
I see the Devs doing one thing whether it is purposeful or by accident:
Creating TIMESINKS.
1) Lowering overall damage with Issue 5, Issue 6 and ED but NOT lowering Mob hit points.
2) Buffing AVs that were not HARD to fight but SLOW to fight and making them even SLOWER.
3) Making any FAST XP opportunities disappear. Sewer Trial, Giant Monsters and hell even Hydras in Perez had their XP lowered because players used to go 7-10 on the streets and 10-14 fighting Hydras and this was UNACCEPTABLE.
4) Costumes - is their any larger Timesink in the game than costumes?
5) Hamidon "Raid" - He doesn't Move, The Mitos don't move. It is fish in a barrel at its worst. It is a timesink. Hami-O's used to buff you to Uber levels - Nerfed down and all to "balance" a level 50 end game that DOES NOT EXIST. That was a YEAR AGO.
This game has lost many of the creative people they added to write content. They just quit, why? Perhaps the "Vision" was to create Timesinks and not to creatively add Content.
I hear Recluses Victory is fun - but what is it? A level 50 TIMESINK. You don't get better, faster, stronger = Timesink.
Well, since MMOs are all about timesinks I don't really see your point heh.
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I see the Devs doing one thing whether it is purposeful or by accident:
Creating TIMESINKS.
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Well, mislabelling the inspirations only created a timesink for me, so it was a very inefficient one.
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Foo, do you ever get the odd feeling that a certain number of people who play the game and post to the forums don't want the game to get better? It seems inconceivable to me that this would be so (if you play the game, and pay for it, why would you not want the best you can have for your money?), and yet it seems to be.
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I want the game to get better. One primary way for this to happen is to NOT have the devs chasing every johnny-sob-story about how Accuracy doesn't work right, when the numbers on base accuracy have always held as correct.
Wasting time looking at "streaks" is just that, wasting time. Either the sample has an even distribution, or it doesn't. But nobody has ever posted a sample without one.
Whatever, I swear off these topics forever. You'd rather make up bad motivations for me than take me seriously anyway.