Jack Emmert?

Far, far more was wrong with what Geko produced (or was in charge of producing) than the disconnect between damage and cast/animation time. Completely independent of such consideration, certain powers were insanely strong, ridiculously weak, or simply impractical with the reality of the PvE environment.

In the defense of the Devs, remember that until the mid-2000s the focus on power/spell design in many RPGs was still largely on "a few bread and butter attacks and some, neat quirky things players can do." It was only as the focus of MMOs pushed harder and harder toward raid/steamroller goals that many developers changed their focus. I've been playing RPGs for about 18 years and I think the first time I heard the expression "DPS" stated as such was in 2004. People always min/max'ed, of course, but there have been genre-wide changes in how that's evaluated since the old days.

Would you like us to stop raiding on your lawn?

Honestly, I think they *should* have designed the attack sets that way. The problem is they designed the initial attacks to be recharge-bound so until you get a bunch of attacks you're waiting for powers to recharge a lot. That waiting means the "neat quirky" attacks get immediately put to work in your attack chain as soon as you get them, which puts people into the mindset that every power should be usable as often as possible, which then causes a lot of friction when it comes to endurance balancing. If power X costs more endurance than power Y because it power X does more, players often won't see it that way. Instead, they'll see it as "I need to click power X as fast as possible because its often the only thing available."

They should have instituted short global cool downs and rapidly recharging "bread and butter" attacks so that players would be trained to understand that the "bread and butter" attacks are intended to be cycled quickly, but if you use these other special powers you will have to manage their endurance costs.

Because of the way recharge was used in the design of powers, powersets don't have "bread and butter" attacks. They just have attacks, and often not enough of them.

Ironically, the early attacks tend to be fast and the later attacks tend to be slower - they have longer cast times and animations. But that's kind of backwards. The early attacks should have had longer animations and the later attacks should have had faster ones, and then a few special powers could have longer cast times separate from that. Because while the animation times make sense when you look at individual powers, they don't make sense when you look at whole sets. You want a powerset to progress from the powers that are weaker but you can use all the time, to the powers that are stronger and you can use only some of the time. Longer cast times means DPA and DPE are lower for those early attacks, and the percentage of the time you're using them is higher. Think original Flares. You can quickly make full attack chains when you have the higher cast time powers up front. Then, as you level you get access to the faster, higher DPA higher DPE powers that are fast enough you can insert them into your normal attack chain with very little cost but with a lot of gain. Think Blaze. The progression makes a lot more sense this way. Then you can still have "finishers" that have longer animation times but are powerful enough that even with longish cast times they are still powerful enough to use, and look impressive also: think Nova and Total Focus.

We aren't in an open system where people can take whatever powers they want from any random powerset, but the powers are still designed like we can. Recharge is based on what the power "wants" not based on what the powerset that power is in "needs."

Trick question: why does Power Blast have to have a longer recharge than Power Bolt? Hint: there's actually no *holistic* game balance reason why it must. There are, of course, design rules that mandate it. But the question is what purpose are those design rules serving? That's not so simple of a question to answer in this specific case.

And now that time period has set into the general population that Rad is/was the only buff/debuff set that you need/want to kill AVs/GMs.

You know, that kinda reminds me of a similar nerf done to CO on release date. Made the game play very different from that of beta...

...though the reasons of the timing of the changes left many to suggest the issue was of *monetary in motive rather than that of a stubborn vision.

*Note: That is, it was suspected Cryptic was afraid to make these changes in beta for the fear of driving away potential players including lifetime subbers.

Yeah pick up a Marvel comic and CoH had a page spread in it. That's what made me join.

PS to the idiot that neg repped me for that for my above comment I wasn't drawing a direct distinction between Jack and marketing but simply pointing out that every bad side has a good one. Sorry your tiny brain couldn't grasp that relatively simple concept

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

This is something I've thought about a lot over the past few years and I'm not sure what my opinion is anymore. Balancing 8 or 9 attacks is pretty tricky, and I can see why someone creating a new game could struggle with it.

Classically, most computer RPGs prior to the 2000s ignored both casting time and recharge time, and animation time was mostly an after thought. The only limiting factor was how much mana/endurance you had. To create incentives to use more than one attack spell, developers fiddled with things like reagents, and negative side effects of casting. One particularly common theme was AoE powers that could hit your own team; this is now less popular because of how easy it makes griefing, but deciding which shaped AoE to use meant more when you had to both hit the enemy and avoid your friends.

Recharge time as a limiting factor may seem like an obvious game addition, but I didn't see much of it until the 2000s. Powers prior that we didn't want folks using too often got the treatment nukes get in this game. I think that when it first came into use developers thought it was enough to balance around. And it would have been, if this game was WoW, where recharge rates are static, power shapes are fairly uniform, and everything boils down easily to DPS calculations.

DPA is an interesting case because there IS at least one early game where it had a significant impact: Diablo II. There were actually enhancements that could increase your animation speeds, but because that game is frame based it quickly led to people min/maxing to calculate how much %Haste you needed to net a whole number of dropped frames.

Looked at another way, DPA even has an impact in games as old as Asteroids and Donkey Kong, but I don't know if they were ever thought of that way. I think to draw those assumptions in the early 2000s would have been unlikely. And, indeed, the powers were eventually. I will say though that if I ever launch my own MMO Arcanna, I want you beta testing my work.

Actually I have talked to Devs from three different games I have played. I was out drinking beer in 100 degree heat with Devs in Austin which was fun, and I got to hang out at a bar with Devs from another game and argue nuts and bolts of PvP gaming, and traded e-mails with people from this game back when the game was new. I also got to play with some of the old PnP game people and talk PnP gaming with them. Sandy Petersen was really interesting to talk with and had some interesting ideas about games which seem to hold true even in computer games now.

Posi got heat for that rather large announcement about what was going to happen to AE exploiters...that thread was huge. But I think he escaped from that after a while...can't remember if it was that or another thread that came close to rivaling the ED thread...

Castle got/still gets heat for i13 PvP

I think BABs only got some heat for Energy Transfer's animation change...I think subconsciously I wasn't okay with the change even though I understood why...because I noticed I stopped playing my EM Brute and Stalker...

A+ thread btw

See, this I don't get. Why would you suggest early attacks be slower than later attacks? If this were purely based on DPA, why not just balance DPA to be better on the later attacks, but still make them slower? And while the idea behind finishers is good, the finishers we have are all crap. Total Focus has rather low DPA and things like snipes are just atrocious. I actually think that making low-level attacks have crappy DPA compared to the higher level ones only serves to make them much less useful, and potentially utterly redundant.

As far as the concept of building the sets around a few key attacks and making the rest into "extras," I don't actually dislike this approach. The game currently works because MOST sets have enough "just attacks" to form an attack chain without recharge reduction. In a sense, because these attacks are close to interchangeable, they just pad each other up.

That is, until you look at Blast sets. Unlike Melee sets that have a large collection of generally samey attacks, Blast sets have a grab bag of attacks all with different purposes. They have a snipe power, which I'm not sure even HAS a purpose, they have a nuke which is useful only occasionally and they have, on average, two AoE attacks that aren't very useful against hard targets, accompanied by three single-target attacks with questionable usefulness against large groups of enemies. In a sense, the tools within a Blast set's tool kit have functions that don't overlap much, and as such leave you with too few powers to cycle. Certain Blast sets are kind enough to let us cycle our first two attacks like Archery and Fire do, for which I am eternally grateful, but certain sets not only don't let us do that (like Dual Pistols), but actually don't feature a third single-target attack (like Assault Rifle and Electrical Blast). This is problematic, because these sets deprive you of your "bread and butter" attacks and instead bog you down with "exotic" attacks, making performance... Questionable. Suffice it to say that it takes some acrobatics to make an Electrical Blaster deal damage.

While I don't mind the concept of bread and butter attacks, I DO mind the way most other MMOs do it, which is basically to give you ONE AND ONLY ONE auto-attack then then at most two or three other powers to use until you're mid-way through the game. And even them, most of those extra attacks are redundant anyway. Champions Online was terrible like that, with a never-ending auto-attack and no recharge on my basic attacks, such that I never really needed more than one anyway.

There's also one interesting point to City of Heroes that most other MMOs don't really touch on too much, and that's massive overkill. Other MMOs tend to have stronger, longer-lasting enemies taken out with attacks that deliver their damage in smaller chunks. As such, you can just fire on your enemy until it drops dead and not worry about wasting firepower. In City of Heroes, a damage dealer who is often capable of one-shotting things WILL waste a lot of effort overkilling enemies with little health left. As such, having small attacks to hit enemies with little health left is actually a valid tactical challenge. Yes, you could hit a quarter-health Rikti Monkey with Energy Transfer, but... Why would you when you can even Brawl it to death? When powers cost both energy and recharge, when you use them becomes more of a tactical choice.

***

As an idle point of curiosity, why is linear maths inherently worse for games? I've been hearing this a lot over the years, and I have so ideas, but I'd really like to hear a more founded answer, if possible.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think that a lot of the heat in that thread was generated by people who thought they were falling under Posi's definition of "exploiters" and were thus in danger of having characters deleted. Things died down a fair bit once they realised that it was only the real edge cases who were being punished.

I'd love to see stats on what that did to the percentage of EM characters played and created. My anecdotal experience is that the set is now very rare, and no one I know creates new characters with the powerset any more. Hence, I feel they still have work to do on the powerset as a whole.

Stacking. Your ability to survive things is inversely proportional to your damage admittance, which is defined as 100% minus your mitigation percentage. As your mitigation approaches 100%, survival time approaches infinity. This makes your survival increase for, say, +5% additional damage resistance or defense accelerate in benefit every time you add it. That makes it potentially undesirable from a balance perspective to provide anyone with +5% DR, because they might be able to add it to existing mitigation and get a major bump in survival, even though it doesn't do much for people who don't have any mitigation to start with.

Making such boosts proportional lets them affect the survival time in a consistent way, no matter what the existing base mitigation is. This is seen as allowing more balance flexibility in the survival benefits you can offer characters, because it benefits everyone equally. You can freely offer boosts for people who have no mitigation baseline without creating gods out of those with a high existing baseline.

Edit: Consider a Tanker with 75% damage resistance, and a Blaster with none. The Tanker can already take 4x as much damage as the Blaster, even assuming for some reason they start at the same hit points. Now give both characters an additional 15% damage resistance. The Tanker goes to 90% DR and the Blaster goes to 15%. The Tanker is now able to take 10x as much damage as the unprotected blaster (a 2.5x improvement), while the blaster can now take about 18% more damage than when he was unprotected (1.18x improvement). Contrast that with a change that just improves how much damage that both of them can survive by 15%.

Other than hurt feelings, there's no reason to stop playing Energy Melee, as it's still probably one of the highest, if not THE highest, damage sets out there. The Energy Transfer change did little to affect that.

I see. I've actually had Arcana correct me on that point no less than three times in the past, and eventually I got the message. I've long since lost my original survivability comparison formulas, but I agree - the "value" of defensive numbers increases as the base you add them over grows.

But what way is there around that? In City of Heroes, we add them together as percent points, seemingly simply because that doesn't give one source of, say, defence priority over another. How would that work on a multiplicative basis? Percent calculations require a base to work off of, but the only way I can conceive of is to have this rigged as percentage off percentage off percentage, instead of percentage plus percentage and so on.

Let's use your example of a Tanker and a Blaster. I assume you mean the Tanker would go up by 15% of 75% and the Blaster would go up 15% of... What? Can't be 15% of zero because that's zero, but what, then? 15% of 1? Just add 15%? And suppose the Tanker got this 75% from two powers. What would the powers look like? Two 50% resistance increases? Because that would end up at 0.5*(1+0.5) = 0.75, which would then end up as 0.75*(1+0.15), for a total of 0.5*(1+0.5)*(1+0.15). Is that what we're looking for?

Assuming that it's something like this, wouldn't that then become a bit confusing? You'd think taking two 50% increases would mean you go to 100% and should take no damage, but what you get instead is half and a half of half. And if you grab a fair bit of these, then instinctive prediction goes out the window. Your total protection is about half and a third and a quarter of a third of half, or 0.5 + (0.33 + 0.4*0.33)*0.5.

That's not to say that "5% resistance over 0% resistance only makes you 1/20 harder to kill but that same 5% resistance over 90% resistance makes you 2/3 harder to kill" is any less confusing or more intuitive. I guess it's still harder to balance, though.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'll add a +1 to that feeling.

This is easily disproven, Sam. It's perhaps not a discussion best made in this thread, but all we have to do is build some attack chains in comparative sets - work that's already been done. EM is a notable DPS laggard now if you operate under any kind of decent recharge buffs. Remember, you don't have to be some sort of IO'd god to operate under large recharge buffs - all you need is some teammates with powers like Speed Boost, Accelerate Metabolism or Adrenaline Boost. As soon as you do that, EM goes way behind many of its peers. If it had strong AoE damage that might keep people interested in it, but it's actually in the bottom of that pack (it always was).

Right now, if you choose what to play with an eye to relative performance between sets you'd never choose EM. You'd choose it when relative performance isn't a factor, such as when you choose it for concept. Performance considerations say you shouldn't choose it.

I think its just the typical game player who can't separate reality from fantasy. Some decision was made about the game. Instead of getting over it they have focused on it and have created some sort of fantasy world where they were this knight in shining armor, the only person who knew the right answer, and if only the game company listened to Little Timmy Post-a-lot then everything would be rainbows and sunshine. Of course some people's read or listen count is about 1/100th of their post count so of course they think they were the only person who ever complained about ED or made some other suggestion.

I would

It's important to keep the dev and the character separate

I dunno which RPGs you played but I heard 'DPS' in Meridian59 and in EverQuest and that was well before the 'mid-2000s'.

This is true for most controversies though - a lot of comment arises from those who might not even be impacted by the change. Uncertainty can easily create outrage though.

Also, the AE changes was a great example of Posi getting things right and wrong at the same time: right, because things like the badges and AE farm-ability needed to be changed, and wrong because it shouldn't have made it to live as it did given the changes that followed. Bannings were only one part of the issue in those changes.

It was also somewhat of a bad thing in that, they talked about disciplinary action on the boards [not specifics, at least, but still] and encouraged discussion on disciplinary action. Before the action was taken.

Just a really poorly handled situation in my view, and came off harkening back to the 3 minions schtick.