Random Hit roll counter

How high is high enough? Player base chance to hit an even conning critter with no defense is three out of four. That's already hitting "most of the time." Everything you hit less often than that was *designed* to be hit less often than that. Increasing player accuracy to compensate is counterproductive: the devs would just make the critters even harder to hit, since that's what they did in the first place.

If the devs had it to do over again, they probably wouldn't even make a system where you could miss a meaningful amount of time. Some players can handle missing, and some just can't. It has nothing to do with fun, unfun, too much, too little, too random, not random enough. Some people simply cannot handle missing in a game. We're really just dancing around that fact with mechanical compromises.

*Why* this is true is a separate discussion issue. The original devs came from a very PnP-influenced mindset where missing happens all the time. They probably didn't even think it would be an issue. And honestly while people can throw theories around (if you can think it, I've probably already posted it) I really don't know for certain the fundamental reason why some players cannot handle missing. But I suspect its due to the fact that the devs made so much of the rest of the game's mechanics too predictable. Predictability breeds the expectation of predictability everywhere. Because there is no randomness or variation at all in power effects, we can actually calculate almost precisely what our powers will do. And they always work in exactly precisely the same way under the same conditions. *Except* for whether the powers hit the target or not. If damage was variable, if effects were variable, if there were chances to avoid or shake off secondary effects rather than perfectly predictable mechanics for this, I think players would focus less on missing.

Its neither here nor there, though. If the devs get a do-over they will probably deemphasize missing. If I had a do-over I would deemphasize predictability. I doubt that philosophical difference will ever be put to a definitive test anytime soon.


By the way, I slot accuracy TOs and DOs. Some players think its pointless, but to be frank most players think all sorts of odd things, not just restricted to accuracy. You can try to help players out, but at some point you can't target incorrect player perceptions and still have a remotely sane game.

Accuracy TOs are, in fact, the only TOs I slot.

This points to one of the great things about this game. It allows people (within a given range) to shape their powers how they choose, whether those choices are good ones or not. If they decide that heavily slotting a power for X is the way to go, they can do it. Their perceptions can mask what effects their strategies are actually accomplishing, but if they have more fun as a result of it, it really doesn't matter what they're doing. It's things like the streakbreaker, and soft caps, that keep these outlier players within shouting distance of the majority of the group. They can't gimp themselves (either by choice or by accident) too bad.

For repetitive activity, the human brain/mind expects to see a 70% success rate or higher. This probably has to do with evolutionary/survival reasons and is pretty much 'hardwired' into human biology.

Once success falls below that threshold, repeating the task becomes progressively more uncomfortable, psychologically speaking. Different people tolerate low success rates differently; some will quit trying, some will keep on and attempt to find 'other ways' to bring the success rate up to 70%, etc.

Well, how about as high as that accuracy buff they had to add is? or half of it per enhancement?

That's the point they set as a baseline after all. It was meant to degrade to the point where it disappears at the time accuracy enhancers catch up to the value it provided.
Why not just make the accuracy enhancers catch up earlier so we don't need the degrading buff?

That's simple enough.



Edit:
Making enhancements provide more value is a lot less "giving them free power" than a buff they don't even have to slot for.

"Increasing player accuracy to compensate is counterproductive: the devs would just make the critters even harder to hit"

What do you think the degrading accuracy buff did?
They just said "here, free accuracy because you need it" when they could have buffed accuracy enhancements to the same value so people still had to slot for it and sacrifice other enhancements to do so like it should be.


I think my idea is a lot better than a free global accuracy buff.




Edit 2:
The point is it's an alternative to a free global buff to accuracy for everyone that would have solved the issue just as easily, if not more easily.
It would require less coding and actually make players want to slot the accuracy enhancements more at low levels rather than slotting as many of them as they can "because it's required" or slottign noen of them "because the global buff is enough and 8% is worthless".

By the way, 8% is the ++ level as well. The TOs degrade as soon as you level up anyway so they're even less helpful.




Edit 3:
It's not like they have enough slots to abuse it at early levels, but if they did then they would be sacrificing any other enhancements they could slot.

Right now, most low level enhancements are ignored as worthless because we need to slot for accuracy and endurance reduction first and foremost, then damage if we even slot for that.
Sure, soem may slot mez powers for more mez time, and we may use the occasional recharge, but they are all too low level to allow us any room to use anything else in our limited slots.

Out of curiosity, do you have any citations for this number?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

I too would love to see a cite for this, because it seems completely absurd. I can think of dozens of repetitive activities where a sub-70% is normal.

So can I. Many of them are problematic behaviors, like gambling at slot machines. Or playing Microsoft's Solitaire.

This is one of those facts I can't pinpoint. I know I've run across it several times in various psychology and criminology classes, having to do with risk/reward, expectation, and addictive behaviors. I know there's a cite out there that is available, but I don't have it handy. My search-fu is not so good.

I would also like to point out the difference between nature and nurture and how one can override the other. When I say 'hardwired to expect a 70% success rate or better' this is a much softer thing than if I were to say 'this loudspeaker is hardwired to produce sound at 70db.'

An individual can have very different expectations and tolerate very different results, but the overall, gestalt result over a good sample size will have people exhibiting the least discomfort when a repetitive task presents success rates of 70% or better.

I'm betting it's because the expected reward is greater than 70% of the losses.

After all, the payback rate for slot machines is supposed to be 95% from what I have heard, but it doesn't say who that 95% will go to or how it is divided up.


People expect to get lucky.

Also, addiction to risks like that aren't common enough to claim "the majority of people do so", so the 70% number above, which is likely for most people not as susceptible to addiction, still stands.


But of course, the level of risk/loss we are willing to tolerate or work through depends on the situation.

A video game is hard to tolerate risk and loss because it's a completely controllable world, by someone, and supposed to be fun, not drudgery and disappointment.

We expect to be rewarded fairly quickly and easily in games compared to other things.


This also comes into play with work. We've always had the old adage "if you work hard you'll reach your goals" which keeps us working hard even if we hate the job or it really isn't good enough to get anywhere.
It comes from a time when working hard really could get you ready for the future and make your future life easier, but that was because our lives were no where near as dependent on the world and people around us.
It was practically a guarantee back then.





Anyway, it doesn't surprise me that most people are unwilling/unable to go through much frustration when playing a game unless the rewards are worth more than all the frustration until you get them.
There are exceptions, but this mostly rings true.

That's why mmos have to constantly be tweaking to be the best/most fun or they will lose more players than they gain and spiral into shutdown.

Down with the 95% tohit cap! May it miss in hell forever!

Not universally true. People play all sorts of games where their success percentage is lower than that. Not everyone who plays basketball, for example, has a 70% shooting percentage. Even moreso baseball. And when people play games of chance, like slot machines or casino table games, virtually all of them have lower than 70% success rates. I'm honestly not sure what your reference is for the 70% number, because its not a number I've ever seen come up in any psychological or games study.

Edit: responded before reading the rest of the thread. Normally I don't do that but I got distracted. In any case, studies suggest the tolerable success rate seems to be dependent on circumstance, but in many cases can be very low. Also, what defines "success" is also significant: hitting with a swing is a form of success, but for many people its less important than defeating the target before dying, which is another form of success.

Problem #1: "Beginner's luck" is a tohit buff, not an accuracy buff. There's no universal conversion between the two. Beginners luck is stronger than comparable accuracy when tohit gets worse and weaker when tohit gets better, and that is almost certainly intentional.

Problem #2: The intent was to provide the most benefit to the lowest level players when not only enhancements but slots themselves were in short supply. Increasing the strength of accuracy enhancements while leaving the rest alone simply creates the situation where accuracy slotting is so much more beneficial to use than any other kind of enhancement that its essentially a design-forced behavior. At the moment accuracy and damage have comparable benefit at lower levels which makes it an entirely personal preference-driven choice to slot to hit harder or slot to hit more often. In terms of overall average DPS and average DPE, the net result is the same.

Problem #3: Exemplar. To make this work you'd have to make special weird scaling tables for accuracy under exemplar with special code needed to implement it. A lot of extra work for questionable benefit.

MMOs all have - even WoW - niche appeal. No MMO can or ever will satisfy the majority of all game players. I would bet that the vast majority of CoX players would quit out of frustration if we had the cut-throat and nearly unregulated economy of Eve Online. On the other hand, Eve Online has more players than we do. Is that because Eve Online has the better model than we do? Not really: WoW players would also revolt, and they outnumber Eve Online players over thirty to one. This is what makes it so dangerous to extrapolate either player preferences or subscriber numbers into "what all/most gamers want." Most don't want City of Heroes no matter what our combat mechanics are. Of those that do, some like hitting and missing, and some don't. Thinking you know for certain what would happen if you changed that dynamic radically is never a safe assumption.

When CO was in beta I predicted that the endurance building mechanic, which allowed for a much higher activity level than CoX, would not be universally seen as a good thing. Some people would love it, and others would hate the gameplay it promoted, and neither would be the vanishingly small minority to the other. And I think its fair to say that prediction was confirmed: some people definitely liked it, and like it to this day. For others it became a strong contributing factor to becoming quickly bored with the kind of combat it encouraged.

There was no "right" choice there. You were going to lose some very large percentage of players either way. The question was not how to keep them all, but which ones you wanted to keep. The same thing is true with hitting and missing. You lose missing, and you keep the people that want to hit all the time. You lose the people that actually want to see evasion in the game, which explicitly requires missing. You pick one, and you let the chips fall where they may.

I know that one of the biggest factors to me giving up on The Other Superhero Game was the fact there was no genuine 'miss' mechanic. Some people hate missing? Sure, that's their thing. I hate getting HIT. It upsets the hell out of me. I spend hundreds of millions on IO builds to ensure my blasters dodge. I play Super Reflexes, Shields, Energy Aura on my melee types. I run masterminds, but that's mostly because aggro management can let me take fewer hits. (And theoretically, I could eventually softcap, but that's down the road and only on some mastermind builds)

On the other hand, I know and understand that getting to where I can rely on not getting hit is a lot of work, and something I have to earn, not something I can claim by birthright. I bite my lip and deal with my early level vulnerability (or just find a team full of suckers to shield me), and know that my time will inevitably come.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Well, there is no genuine hit or miss mechanic in CoH either.
There is no aiming or dodging, just standing there and hoping "please don't let the RNG make them hit me" and "please let the RNG make me hit them every time".


I really would like actual action/fps gameplay for a superhero mmo, or any mmo with a lot of customization.
It's much more fun and logical than having all hit or miss events being just "random" despite firing an AoE directly into the chest of one enemy. Having an AoE miss a guy who is completely surrounded by the effect is really disappointing.

CoH abstracts that away, and most MMOs that do so do so deliberately to emphasize other elements of gameplay. The tohit system in CoH is no less "genuine" in that regard.

And until you see MMOs integrated with Wii Fit boards or Microsoft Kinects, you won't see a "genuine" dodging mechanic either.

Abstractions are often important elements to successful games. In an age with 3D graphics and complex combat simulations, people still play chess, the ultimate in abstracted combat.

As Arcana said, it's a matter of abstraction.. And various other MMO's particular method has every attack within range hitting always period. No missing. Their particular brand of 'evasion' is just a reduction in damage.. And more perversely, you frequently get better damage mitigation from their edition of Invulnerability than you do by attempting to not be hit in the first place.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.