Discussion: Live Patch Notes - 4/7/10

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

Radio Missions ? Contact Arcs ? Badging ? What do you mean? Almost all my time is spent trying to get better times on task forces.


The only way I can discern intent is by looking at what people actually do and the results of those actions.

The same way that the only way I can understand your statement that "Reward rate/Difficulty threshold" is by looking at the consequences and comparing to things in the game.

If you want to disregard my rankings of difficulty thats fine.

Here is a list of items in exactly the same category
Now just looking at these Positron can be completed in about the same amount of time a STF can but has nearly double the merit return. So by your description it should have a significantly greater threshold of difficulty ?

Oh and Positron is a no fail tf. You can lose all your team and still finish, all it requires is persistence.

We get Manticore at about a similar time to the RSF (Manticore is if anything faster) having a significantly Higher Threshold of difficulty ?

We have Reichsman at 20 merits which when you compare it to the other TFS is just mind boggling, and is why for most of the people I know its badge only or help out a friend that needs the badge.


12K powers a player can use to create a buffing ally ? You are making the problem much more complicated than it needs to be then throwing up your hands at the lack of a solution.

Lets break this down as if we were interested in solving the problem rather than making excuses about why it can't be done.

First lets describe the problem. Problem: Allies can be included in player generated content that enhance the players combat effectiveness by enhancing player abilities, or by decreasing enemy abilities while not doing damage to the enemies.

So now we have two sets of powers to worry about.

1. Powers that target allies.
2. Powers that target enemies but do no damage.


Now for the sake of argument lets say there is some sort of electronic list or filing system that has a record of the powers critters posses and is somehow amenable to mechanical manipulation of some kind or other. If you were to have such a list, you could immediately discard all the items that did damage to their targets. You could discard all the items that only affected the caster, and you would be left with a nice list of just the critters that actually needed review.

I really wish that someone would come up with mechanical marvels that could take the drudgery out of such tasks.

[ / sarcasm]

I have no idea how many developer created critters there are that have no attack powers, and only buff/debuff powers that do no damage. I would be real surprised if it was a large number. I would be even more surprised and shocked, if the information wasn't actually in a database.


I point that out because its the strawman you so gleefully created. The developers can't have any way to sort or categorize the powers or critters in their game for your scenario to be accurate.

Now actually taking a look at the list of powers that players can include with their custom allies. We get a somewhat smaller number than 12k to examine on the primary side there a 73 potential powers from control primay that could concievably fit the description and less than 100 additional on the secondary side.


Just how long and difficult was that supposed to be to look over ?

I don't beleive it's that simple. While the horde of NPC's is a giant problem as far as steamrolling through missions goes, you can still just as easily make NPC's who enhance your ability to fight things by buffing you while still allowing them to do damage. It wouldn't be *quite* as dramatic as what we had just before the patch, but it would probably be the next big thing.

I don't see being able to take short cuts in this.

*EDIT* - Though, if it were me, I'd probably just cap it at 3 allies a mission and call it a day. Hostages wouldn't count, of course.

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Inaccurate patch notes are inaccurate


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I LOL'd

If nothing else, you deserve a thank you for taking the time to actually pull together your information. I personally agree with everything you've said, and see it clear as day. But I'm sure someone will come along with yet another dev-scripted excuse.

I'm curious: Do people prefer the markets now, where it takes hundreds if not thousands of millions of inf. to buy one set, or the markets before, where it took weeks of sitting on bids to fill out the same set? Without ticket farms, the market blue-side would still be a barren sandheap, and given basic economic principles, would still have hyper-inflation.

As for AE PLs... The devs have been making the gave steadily more PL friendly for a long time now. This won't stop anything.

Oh man, I didn't even THINK of this! LOL IMOA...another patch that has destroyed a great game.

I assure you, your experience =/= everyone's experience. Speed runs are *not* standard. The reason Posi gives so many merits is because the data shows it takes the longest, on average, to complete. And by the way, merits are not the only reward in the game. Increasing your difficulty settings increases the number of mobs, which means you get increased inf/salvage/XP as well. Boom: increased rewards.

Yes, all true.

*facepalm*

"Now, for the sake of argument, let's assume that we have a tool (which the devs may or may not ACTUALLY HAVE) that proves my entire point."

We know that a lot of what the devs have is kludgy and old, and I would bet they don't have a list of all the available powers in a form that would be easily sorted like this. Would it be a good idea if they did? Of course. But you don't know they have that and therefore your "proof" is invalid.

But if you do, by all means, take the afternoon, compile your super-easy list, and send it on to the devs.

Gee, I wonder why.

Sigh. The market =/= the game. Shockingly, people can play the game quite happily without ever touching the market.

Seriously, hyperbole much? This patch (which Dr. Aeon already said is TEMPORARY) goes too far, I agree. How bout we all get our panties unbunched and wait the few weeks for the "permanent solution" before going off the deep end?

Oh wait, I forgot. It's an internet forum. Carry on, then.

Yes, the game is kaput! Ruined! Completely unplayable! And all by this patch! Let me find that cancel acount button ...

It was considered an exploit because people were making allies with no attacks but plenty of buffs and debuffs. If you had the allies doing damage, it would take away from xp and the usual farm map had max (30ish) allies. So if they had all of those allies attacking, it wouldnt give them any xp. A better fix that wouldnt upset the non-farmers people would have been making it so every ally set has some sort of attack and making it unselectable or only unselectable if they have some other attack.

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

I think you're missing what I'm saying. You could still make a farm mission where you have a few allies with attacks and buffs that marginally increase your fighting prowess. Yeah they'd cut into your EXP but you'd be aided by their presence by being able to take enemies down.

That said, I think you probably have the better point, and I might consider that level of farming 'acceptable'.

If it were up to me, I would likely just set it to 3 allies, then nerfs, and call it a day. Hostages and otherwise non-useful allies wouldn't count to this limit, of course.

But having allies in the mission wasn't what was the problem. Having allies that did nothing but buff you or debuff enemies was the problem. You could have allies that attack and it wasn't considered an exploit because your xp was taking a hit so while risk was going down so was reward. With allies that didnt attack you didnt lose xp so risk went way down but reward stayed the same. That was the reason for the knee jerk change.

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

If you believe that the development team hasn't created a tool even remotely close to something like this, you sir...I can't even finish it.

I understand there are dev fanbois, but this really cuts the cake. Tools created to assist in maintenance when it comes to databases and other types of technology in this industry are pretty much a requirement. Just wow. I guess if you didn't have a legit rebuttal, ignorance always works.

I'm saying it would be the *next* problem. You're better off addressing it now than, oh, say a year later.

However, I no longer agree that it would even be a problem, so I'm not gonna keep arguing for it.

Even if they had that list, I don't think it's working. Just look at all the imbalances with the powersets as they currently exist. Part of that problem is that many powers do things that don't have a quantifiable number to attach to them and call them balanced. You sort of just have to "feel" it out, which isn't often reliable. The flipside to this is something like Champions Online, where nearly every power is identical save for animation. Considering the options, I'd (obviously) rather have CoH's somewhat muddier spreadsheet.

Keep being a **** about it, though.

*EDIT* - qq more is hardly a comeback. If you have a point, make it.

/joke
Not enough DOOM. Ignored for making sense.

Really though it would nice if there were more missions like the cape and aura missions were there was an actual benifit for doing them beyond XP.

It *can* but apparently, given what the devs have stated, it apparently isn't on average, because the devs actually gave a formula for determining the number of merits that a task gives, which is *also* at the link I provided and I guess you didn't bother to read:

Lets shuffle that up a bit. The TimeModifier was defined to be just MedianTime/20, and the TimesRunModifier was just an uncertainty factor for any task which had not been run often enough for their datamining to generate good averages at the time the tables were computed. We'll assume TimesRunModifier was 1.0 for all the tasks we're concerned with at the moment the latest merit values were computed. And the ArtificialModifiers factor was acknowledged as a fudge factor mainly used to round up certain merit values that were just short of a random roll. Dropping that also, that gives us:

MedianTime * MedianTime * TaskModifier / MPM / 20

That's the actual reward computation. But we were talking about reward rates and how they related to difficulty. The reward rate is the reward divided by the time, and for our purposes, we'll call the intrinsic reward rate the reward divided by the median time. MPM is the baseline merit earning rate of 3.7, and that gives us:

Intrinsic reward rate = Median Time * TaskModifier / 74

I already listed the TaskModifier values. According to the devs, then, the merit value of any particular task is going to be proportional to a factor that increases *precisely* in the same way you ranked the difficulty of the tasks above, *and* also to its median time to completion. So basically, the reward rate of a task is proportional to its difficulty and the amount of time it takes to complete it.

The best explanation for the discrepancy between your estimates for the time it takes to complete those tasks and the dev computed numbers is that your estimates for what the median player does, as opposed to just what you've personally seen, is highly inaccurate.


No. What I said was that there were about twelve thousand powers in the system, of which probably a few hundred are the problematic ones. If you're not going to spend time actually reading my posts, don't expect me to take you seriously for much longer.


Yeah, lets. Lets not assume I've actually already broken the problem down as if I was interested in solving the problem, because I'm actually attempting to solve the problem. Because that would be crazy talk. I mean, who here thinks that's how I spend my time.


Stop. Problem #1. Are all buffs ally targeted? Accelerate Metabolism is not. Healing Aura is not. Dispersion Bubble is not.

To buff an ally, a power must at least be able to affect allies, but it doesn't have to target them. But even that is a little hazy. Some really important powers don't actually do *anything* at all. Fulcrum shift doesn't actually *do* anything. It casts two pseudo-pets that do all the work.

Problem #2. "...but do no damage." You'd think that was an easy one. But again, many powers work through pseudo-pets which you would have to trace manually. And damage itself? There's no flag called "damage" that is *guaranteed* to flag a power that does damage. There's a flag that usually indicates that a specific attribmod was defined to do damage, but there's no 100% guarantee its accurate at the moment, because until recently that flag wasn't used for anything by the game engine: if it was set wrong, no one would ever know (its now specifically being used by Dual Pistols, so it has to be correct for at least that set).

By coincidence, I actually had this conversation with a couple of the devs not that long ago. The logical filter for "power that does damage" was basically "power that affects Foes with attribmod that affects Target with an Abs for any of the attributes Smashing/Lethal/Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative/Toxic/Psionic/Special/Unique." Except it turns out to skip quite a few powers, like Rains.

An interesting odd exception to "power that targets enemies but does no damage" that I came up with: Gang War.


As everyone who studies this game and wants to know probably already knows, because its been common knowledge since at least 2006 if not earlier, the entire powers system is designed in Excel sheets.

I posted this "elsewhere" and rather than rewrite it, I might as well quote it:


There is no such database. There is no such entity of any kind query-capable that exists anywhere within Paragon Studios itself.


Your actually trying to argue with *me* that I'm creating improbable strawmen when discussing the actual internals of the game and its implementation? I sort of assumed that since you seem to think its open season on me, you might actually have some idea what the hell you are talking about. Since you don't, I'll spell it out for you:

Unless I specifically use the words "I'm just guessing" then when I say anything about the powers system, the powers implementation, the game code, the developers design tools, the developers design methodology, or the general game mechanics I am not guessing.

I almost never *have to* guess. In the specific case about how Castle manages and implements the powers system, the only person on Earth that knows more about that is Castle. After his morning coffee.


Custom allies are not necessarily exclusively the problem.


Accurately? As a matter of fact, I have a database of the custom critter powersets and reviewed it when this issue first arose. There are currently eight custom critter control primary sets that exist:

Demon Summoning
Earth Control
Fire Control
Gravity Control
Ice Control
Illusion Control
Mind Control
Plant Control

67 powers between them. But in terms of ally buffs or nondamaging debuffs, those are not exclusive to control primaries. In my first pass through the system, I found 27:

Dark Pit
Soul Drain
Quicksand
Earthquake
Volcanic Gasses
Lightning Clap
Smoke
Cinders
Wormhole
Shiver
Ice Slick
Glacier
Ice Patch
Chilling Embrace
Deceive
Flash
Spectral Terror
Confuse
Mass Hypnosis
Total Domination
Mass Confusion
Spore Burst
Seeds of Confusion
Spirit Tree
Drain Psyche
Fault
Hand Clap

There's more on the secondary side, because that's where so many of the buffing powers are, 107 in fact (I'm not going to list all of those). Definitely "more than a hundred" though. And that doesn't count iffy powers like Acid Arrow, which do minor damage but significant debuff.

It took me probably about a half hour to go through all of my own internal data to generate the two lists above, but those were very rough-cut passes through the system, and only for custom critters which I don't think you can say arbitrarily are the sole source of the issue they need to resolve (and actually, I wouldn't). To do a professional sweep, I would estimate an hour to double check those lists, and another two hours to scrutinize a set of borderline powers. And that's for me, and that's factoring in the fact that I just coincidentally have just the right tools and data in just the right form to do that analysis, purely by coincidence. I would need a day to generate such data for the rest of the powers system, including a cross reference to the critters allowed in the AE, and a couple days at least to analyze those data tables to come up with a list of all the potentially problematic problems within this context. And I would probably tell the devs that since they keep adding new critters to the AE, they should really do the ones that are in right now first, but immediately sweep the rest of the critters to prevent them from reopening this issue in a couple months.

And I really don't think there's anyone alive that can realistically do it accurately much faster than that, given the form the data exists and the amount of time it would take to become familiar with all of the corner cases that exist in the powers system, which I've spent years becoming proficient at recognizing at a glance.

If you have any other questions for me, they may have to wait because I'm packing up for some business travel. Whatever odd retort you compose I might not see until tomorrow. Although I'm crossing the dateline so I'm not sure if that is tomorrow tomorrow, or the next day tomorrow, or later today tomorrow. I hate long range flying.


* Note: Demon Summoning is not a control set, its a mastermind set. Rather than stealth edit that mistake out, I'll just mention that there's a reason why Demon Summoning was originally classified in my data as a control set and I never bothered to go back and reclassify it, and the list is a copy and paste from that data, but that's as far as I can explain that error.