Enough with the 95% crap!

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Oh my god.


Word of advice: if you don't know, its probably best not to guess. Neither of these approaches would work for reasons having to do with a couple of misunderstandings you have about the way the game is coded and implemented in data.

There's a completely different way to implement such an idea in theory, which I'm not going to describe in detail because I think its an especially bad idea. But the first attempt cannot succeed because power data is not hard coded into the game engine, thus the tohit system has no way to know when a "tier 1" attack is being used: the code cannot reference that fact, ever. The second attempt fails because there's no way to signal the miss from one entity to the other, and no way to spawn the entity only on a miss.

I don't agree that supposition breaks NDA, but I removed it anyway.

1. So what you're saying is that the code that checks whether a hit occurs has no way of knowing the statistical data about the power being used, yet somehow the damage can be applied after the to-hit check passes or fails. If that's so, then that's just bad coding. It take's all of what..... one argument to pass a reference to the data.

The power doesn't have to be hard coded.... that's what data structs or objects are for.

2. If that's true, then you're suggesting that the game engine is not able to change. Again..... bad coding. I'm stumbling over a set engine that cannot be modified.... why? Why is that?

3. So a to-hit check that fails cannot cause other things to occur or not occur. How do chain powers work. They keep passing the chain effect off as long as the last chain hits.

4. Why would the powers have to be hard coded for the to-hit check to access data about the power?

I mean, I can understand that it could be coded this way, but then...... why? That's really really sloppy. Any coding that stands against change, is not good coding practice.

Explain how you know this please?


Besides, just because I can't get a guess right on how it occurs doesn't mean I can't create a model based off of the reflexes. Otherwise, you're suggesting I never bother designing before I code?

Also, just because there's some massive hurdle in the way NEVER implies that something cannot be done, only that the benefits would not be worth the work required.

Finally, I never understood a system of MISS. MISS is FAIL, and FAIL is not enjoyable.

To suggest that players be forced to accept a chance to miss a stationary object without intelligence at all...

Well... I'm just at odds with you on that one.


Besides, my suggestion to allow reduced damage on a hit capped.... is not much difference than the argument for blaster defiance, so I have some precedence on my side.

List the problems it introduces.

Besides, your solution changes nothing...... 95% hit cap is INHERENTLY soft cap. Soft cap means that you can raise a certain stat, but you don't see the effects unless your hit with an effect that lowers the stat or the enemy has an effect that counters the stat directly. You can raise DEF to 95%, but you don't see an effect unless you get hit with a DEF debuff.

Also, the problem you intend to solve is to reduce the frustration of a 5% miss rate.

My solution takes away the frustration. You have one power that you're guaranteed will never miss. I hardly find a miss frustrating unless I'm in a do or die, or I'm opening with a snipe/AS.

Then you can still hit him because the 5% chance to hit floor stays.

Lots of new code for bugger all benefit. Surely that won't break anywhere. It's also a completely different thing than what this thread was made to discuss. Oh, it'd also unfairly penalize all defense-based builds and enemies. Now imagine building for having absurd recharge on your first attack and slotting in six procs.

Your solution takes away the frustration for one attack. One. Out of between roughly six and eighteen a character is likely to have. So, no, it doesn't, not really.

Absurd recharge is fine. But procs wouldn't proc on a miss.... which is also fine

At this point..... you're asking for way too much.
Giving someone an option when they simply can't hit a target, fine.....

But you're suggesting we make accuracy meaningless.

At which point, I agree..... I don't think you should ever MISS personally based on some hit CAP.

But people around here are acting like your suggesting this somehow gets around DEF.

That's not what either of us are suggesting.

We're suggesting that the 5% hit penalty be avoidable somehow. That someone build to never miss, should in fact never miss a target without DEF.

A deflect due to DEF is not a MISS.

Except you still need a buttload of "meaningless" accuracy to reach that vaunted 100%.

Oh no, not another one of these discussions.

MMOs are not programs where everything is written in code. There's a game engine, and then there's data which represents all of the entities in the game, like powers. The tohit system resolves hits. Its not "passed" information about the power, its the other way around: when a power is activated the tohit system determines if that power hits its target, and then the rest of the information about the power is read to determine that power's effects. This allows the game engine to be generic, while the data describing the content of the game can change.


No, its that you don't understand how systems like this are written. In *every* game I've ever seen, the engine and the data are separated. Its how mods are made: they aren't made by actually hacking the game code. And when you make mods, you can only do what the engine already allows you to do, based on what the engine is written to handle.

No one is going to go randomly fiddling with the tohit code of the game just to start adding in special cases to it, like "if this power is green, go do something else entirely." And without that sort of special case code, there's no way to reference whether a power is a "tier 1 power" or not.

That doesn't mean it can't be changed, only that certain changes are much easier than others. See: Elusivity.


Powers are either flagged "autohit" or not (technically, they are flagged as either autohitting certain kinds of targets or not). If they are autohit, they do not roll a tohit roll before affecting their targets. If the are not autohit, they roll a tohit roll which they must pass for their effects to affect its targets (this is also why the suggestion above is nonsensical: its more that the powers call the tohit system rather than the other way around).

Chain induction requires a hit. However its an AoE with a 1 target cap (or rather, the jumps are) and the jump has enhanced accuracy. If there are no targets in range or the jump actually misses all of the targets in range, the jump fails.


Because the game engine can only reference what its programmed to reference. The tohit algorithm is not designed to reference the specific details of the power invoking it. Doing so would make the tohit code - which is used all over the place for a lot of things - larger, slower, and more unwieldy. Its not sloppy. Frankly, you're not the first person without experience coding games to make that claim. I'll give you this much: at least you haven't mentioned inheritance yet although you came close by mentioning objects. Powers are actually defined in an Excel spreadsheet that is then imported into custom database tables that are loaded into the game engine. This is common knowledge among players that keep track of such things.


1. I've been discussing the game implementation with the devs longer than most people have been playing the game now.

2. In particular, I discussed the tohit system with pohsyb until I was blue in the face back in I6 running up to the I7 accuracy changes. I actually posted a fairly detailed simplified algorithm for it back then, and I know quite a bit more since then.

3. All of the information I've provided here is also generally known and has been discussed on the forums in the past. I'm not the only player who could have answered your questions. I can think of a dozen more that could off the top of my head.

4. One third of what I know comes directly from the devs. One third comes from extremely systematic testing of the game itself. One third comes from basically remembering everything every other reputable player has ever discovered and described. That makes my batting average when discussing game implementation very, very high.


I'm suggesting not portraying certainty when you're actually wrong. It hurts credibility. That's why you should never guess, and really never guess and think your guesses couldn't possibly be wrong. Arcana's rule number one: all uninformed** guesses about City of Heroes game implementation are wrong. I've been saying that since 2006 or so, and so far no one has ever managed to break that rule.


** The only guesses that have ever been even partially right have been either informed by the devs, or informed through direct and meticulous testing of the game engine. Guesses based on textbooks are batting zero for the century.

Blarg....

So, it checks the to-hit result, and has a second part of the data describe what happens on a miss.

This is a circular debate.

That's exactly how I described it in my first post.

I never suggested the to-hit check know anything about a power. I suggested that it must know something because it knows to-hit chance. Which means that it carries information about a specific instance of the power (the power altered by the enhancements), unless the power is a simple struct and the mods are made to a generic structure passed into the to-hit algorithm.

I guess that's what you're essentially saying though, that the calculations that are done and data sent to the to-hit algorithm is a generic chance to hit, not a reference to the power itself.

You're wrong on one point though. A reference to the power wouldn't make the to-hit algorithm any slower unless the to-hit algorithm accessed too much of the data within the object it was sent.

I suppose the engine would have to expect a power object, and would have to be updated with the contents of the power object as they changed that. Then the power objects aren't a part of the game engine?

If that's so, then the game engine is VERY SLIM and VERY Generic. It would be moreso generic than I expected. It could be reused to make any MMO with any set of stats. Including an MMO without "powers", one that has an auto-attack.


YOU actually suggested the tohit algorithm should know anything about the power.

I suggested the power work differently if it misses.

Total aside: Does that mean CI is more likely to chain if there's a clump of enemies in the same area? Hm. I wonder how they made it so that the chains don't loop back.

Also, <3 Arca's thoroughness.

According to some dev posts I read way back, there's a way to flag a mob that's already been damaged by the attack.

It looks like each chain has a tohit check on all enemies within range. That leads to a high chance the chain will finish.... higher than a normal AoE.

I'm guess the chance to hit is lower than other AoEs to balance this?

You spoke directly about what a mob can supposedly do in Praetoria... I would say that if that were supposition, it should have been phrased as such and far less (for lack of a better word) authoritatively.

Either way, it is pro'ly best that you edited it. After all, I only mentioned it to keep you from getting in any kind of trouble.

While I certainly agree... it is also a bit amusing at times just how much reverence people pay her. She has kinda become, at this point, some sort of infallible gospel. That isn't meant to be a knock to Arcana because, frankly, she is pretty much ALWAYS right. In fact, I almost left off the qualifier there... but I feared that if I had, she would reply with a specific example of a time she was wrong!

Yep.


When a target is hit by the chain, it momentarily (for three seconds anyway) sets a flag on the target. The chain is configured with a special requires clause that basically makes the jump entities unable to target a foe that has been recently hit by a chain.

It's one of the many extremely irritating quirks this game has. And while it, by itself, doesn't stop me from playing it definitely reduces the amount of time I am able to play before immense frustration sets in, meaning instead of playing regularly month after month I might play for a week and then not touch the game for 3-4 months.

Nearly every other MMO on the market has no "accuracy" component. And if they do you almost never miss unless you're fighting something much higher in level than you or is specifically designed to be difficult to hit.

CoX uses a triple-redundant limiting system, which honestly is completely unnecessary and only leads to player frustration. You only need 1 limiter, not 3.

I've always said this game could be really great if they just smoothed out the 6-year old rough spots that have plagued it since day 1. But it seems unlikely anything is ever going to change. So while other games are busy making their games as fun to play as possible this one grinds its heels in, buries its head in the sand, and insists there is nothing wrong.

You'd be adding extra conditionals within one of the very critical loops in the combat engine. And you'd be retrieving power data from the powers database which is at the moment not processed in this way.


As far as I know, while there are major differences in the details, all modern MMOs are programmed this way.

See Cap. Fabulous' post on the subject. It's the same with me. Little nits that add up.

Is the flag caster-specific?

Nope. You can't chain jump to a target that was just chain jumped, whether it was one of your chains or someone else's. As long as there are other targets around, though, your chain induction will simply avoid that target and select another one to hit.

So Arcana, I was perusing your Scrapper secondary comparison, and it seems like it's in dire need of an update. Loaded question: what's the "best" secondary now? Is it still Regen? Or has Willpower or Shields taken the crown (my bet in on Willpower)?

Good to know. Continuing this topic derailment, is there a finite amount of jumps a power can make?

Very build dependent. Overall I'd say Willpower tends to be the strongest mitigation set across the widest range of possible builds from SOs to IOs. Shields isn't actually that strong, except in builds where you can build to soft cap where it then becomes a serious player because like Willpower it has other mitigation it can layer under the softcap (which is a problem for SR when talking about the strongest possible builds: its easy to softcap, but commensurately harder to get much else under it once you do).

I'm unlikely to update those comparisons any time soon, as they were done as much to explain the methodology of the analysis as anything else, which hasn't changed. In terms of comparisons, I shifted to the mitigation spreadsheet, which used to be downloadable but the link broke to it. I haven't had a chance to update it and upload it somewhere else yet. I was going to earlier but the Brute changes made me back off and decide to update it for those and upload a copy that was up to date, then the Brute changes were backed out and made that moot. Still, I should sanity check it before uploading the next version, as the last time I updated it was the I13 Invuln changes.

Chain induction jumps a maximum of four times. Theoretically, there's no limit if the devs wanted to make it jump more times than that. In fact, it would be easier to make a power that just kept jumping indefinitely until it either missed everything or ran out of targets. Making it jump exactly (or up to) four times is slightly more work. I think it may have actually originally done so in an early beta test of the power.