Accuracy WAS Nerfed

He realized he was wrong, isn't a man enough to admit that, but smart enough not to go on with his rant.

But does the act of observing them inherently change the situation (ie does the act of observing the real numbers change their outcomes more favorably)?

I'm really hoping it's option 2.

Maybe he's trying to respond, but keeps missing.

Actually, yes. There are players who have done solo and duo Mothership raids.

Eh, there was a sillier thread early in the weekend. It's gone now, so i'll say no more about it.

lmao!

Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

You also skip over a pretty important "fact" in those events. They were players with heavily tweaked and "time expensive" or "farm expensive" or "auction house expensive" IO builds.

Players who have accomplished such events were not casual players with Single Origin builds, mixed SO/IO builds, or casual IO builds.

The reality is, not everybody in the game has Perma Phantom Army. Not everybody in the game has perma-AM. Not everybody in the game has Perma-Hasten, Soft-capped defenses, high regeneration, and high recovery. I've been biting my tongue since Oedipus's way out of line quote from earlier in the thread:

The number of players who have Illusion builds that are capable of doing this can probably be counted without even having to use all your fingers and toes. The number of players that can pull this off is not, by any means, a significant amount of the player-base.

Which is just one of the many reasons the developers haven't taken any steps to "deal with" builds that players can see as over-powered. Very few players ever reach that over-powered state, and the developers are largely content to allow the players to feel a sense of achievement at successfully working the Invention System to do something their character was never designed to do to begin with.

Now really where did this come from? There are always top end players and builds, and there always will be. Just because person "x" can't do something doesn't mean person "y" also can't. The game mechanics work just the same for everyone. A casual player on straight SO enhancements deals with the precise same tohit and accuracy mechanics that an optimized extreme IO build character does.

I guess the thread's drifting from incorrect assumptions on the part of the OP into irrelevancies of what high end players can do. A very few select players have managed to solo virtually everything in the game short of Hamidon. Heck, I've soloed a lot of content with some of my more powerful characters; I do have a perma-PA Ill/Rad as well as numerous soft capped high damage characters. I wouldn't try some of the things others have pulled off though, primarily because it isn't worth the time and effort to me... not because they're impossible. I'll also freely admit that there are players more skilled than I am, and I can respect that.

Knowing that a very few dedicated players can pull off amazing things gives others something to shoot for and in my opinion is a good thing; but the rest of the players are still capable of managing nearly anything in the game if they play well and have a decent team; they don't even need to have an uber-fantastic build.

Yes, dedicated players will have better characters than casual ones, that's the nature of every game out there. Even back when SO's were the best there was a dedicated player simply built and played his character better than a casual player did.

So accuracy WAS nerfed! It used to be 75%!!!

Yes, which is why I compare it to phantom army. It can be hard to:

Tell which of them are phased
Even if you can tell, to target them (clicking is hard, tab even harder)

This makes none of the dark miasma heals, tohit debuffs, or controls usable except fearsome stare.

*sigh*
Nowhere in the post i was replying to was it specified that the activity was being done by average players. In fact the offhand reference to soloing GMs implies that the statement was about what it was possible for characters to do in the game, period. Not average or below average characters, but characters across the performance spectrum, which would include high end builds.

The discrepancy is probably due to quantum. I.e., he wasn't watching the screen closely enough.

oh my god...it's a...I dare not say it...
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[spoiler alert]

NEMESIS PLOT!!!

I have played, on and off, since before the release of issue one.

The 1.0 modifier and the 75% have both been around since then and to my knowledge the launch of the game.

Mids is taking a shortcut in how it displays the information.

To the original idea, if accuracy were to be adjusted by the devs, and should they wish to hide this fact, were I a Dev, I would simply tweak the random number generation process for To_Hit calls. I do not believe that any such thing, hidden or declared has happened.

You have not answered a key question in your assumed 'nerf.' Why would the Dev team change a process that has worked and is working? A core game mechanic that players by and large are quite happy with.

Should you be tempted to say that you still believe accuracy not to be working as declared, and that it was not changed on purpose, then it is a BUG not a nerf, and you should be prepared to post a significant amount of data supporting your claim.

Sets of to-hit rolls, reported and derived hit chances. The power used, level of the target, level of the 'Hero/Villian,' how the power was slotted, etc. Blocks of data with N lower then a few thousand really wont show anything. Even with a large data set, all you will really show is that random number generators in computer games are not perfect. I also suspect the streak break code will skew the results.

I have, over the years, watched many 'Acc Nerf' threads go by. None I have read showed anything other then game mechanics working as advertised.

No, Balseraph is Brian Urbanek. When Geko was here, Balseraph was working on The Saga of Ryzom. I don't think he joined Cryptic until late 2008.

That's not ENTIRELY true. There was that one bug that caused people to whiff on gray enemies.

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

Actually, its due to a different rule most players have forgotten, but which the devs also acknowledged. Its the "three shots rule." The game was originally designed around the basic premise that three "standard" attacks (read: three tier 1/2 blaster attacks at the original 1.0 modifier) would defeat a normal even con minion. That speed, coupled with unbalanced AoEs, originally promoted the sense that killing was better than mitigating.

But while that explains where the original encouragement came from, it doesn't fully explain why it took root so quickly and so pervasively. It didn't start that way. It wasn't until maybe I2 when this concept fully solidified in public opinion.

What I was saying, and it seems it was worth saying because I'm now repeating, was that after careful consideration the OP really isn't interested in anyone correcting his understanding of game mechanics, as you were pointing out in your post; he is convinced that accuracy was nerfed, and that if his understanding of the mechanics is at fault, all it means is that the problem lies elsewhere. I'm pretty sure that's what he meant when he said:

"Accuracy reduction is not a myth. And I will be the first to acknowledge my own in-game testing seems to point that the "math" being presented works out correctly. The point of what I posted is that we noticebaly began missing suddenly, like 3, 4 and 5 times in a row and now requiring 2 accuracy enhancements or a higher level IO to compensate for it. I have been here since CoH Beta and this was never the case."

So when you said:

"B_D, please, you were mistaken. It's totally forgivable that you got this stuff mixed up. It's not rocket science, but it is kind of complicated. There was no nerf. You've got some of the people most knowledgeable about game's hit-chance mechanics that exist in the player community responding to you in this thread. They're correct here.

Think about it. If Mid's contained information showing the kind of discrepancy you're describing, and if the makers of Mid's really trusted their powers info enough to believe that discrepancy was valid, do you really think the makers of Mid's wouldn't have come to the forums posting about it? Or that someone using Mid's wouldn't have noticed by now?"

I don't think it matters to the OP. Either our information proves accuracy was nerfed, or our information is wrong. Either way, I don't think our corrections are meaningful to the OP. I'm not even sure the OP is reading my posts at all.

They make too much sense for him to understand.

But that has nothing to do with geko's statement, at least the part you quoted:

He's saying:

1. Don't use it all the time.

2. Use it specifically in situations where without it you'll die.

All I said was that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that statement. All the problems you mention about the power are lesser evils to the alternative, which is to die. If you're not going to die in that situation, you were really not supposed to be using the power.

The real catch to black hole is that many CoH players simply do not like highly situational powers. And that actually traces back to a totally different error on the part of the devs: balancing attacks with long recharge, and balancing defensive sets with power layering. If players could make full attack chains with fewer attacks, and enable the core protections of their defensive sets with fewer powers (for those with defenses) there would be less antagonism towards situational powers, I think.

The other catch is that when you compare Black Hole to, say, Mutation, no player gets blamed for using Mutation, because obviously Mutation virtually always makes sense when its used, even with its drawbacks. But if you use Black Hole, it can be almost impossible to prove that its use was necessary rather than punitive. But both powers are only intended to be used when players are about to die, Mutation later than sooner.

I'm well aware of the mechanical flaws in the power, but geko's statement wasn't addressing its flaws, just the intent of its usage benefit. And while we might question that benefit in retrospect, I don't think its fair to knock that statement at the time, when it was unclear if it really would be seen in the long run as too punitive given its situational nature.

I should point out that there was a debate for months on the forums (and in-game) about whether Elude was too punitive for its benefit - the I2 click defense version that is more or less the version we have now, as opposed to the toggle PFF/Superspeed odd ball. The end crash was seen by many as so detrimental to offense that it made the power almost pointless (I should point out that at the time SR scrappers were often running toggles inside of Elude - there was no such thing as a "soft cap" back then with critters easily reaching 100% tohit and more). And in a crazy twist you could never have predicted, with so many high-end SR scrappers aiming for soft-capped defenses with inventions, I'm sure some of them would actually consider the old I1 toggle Elude to actually be more useful - it would be a better panic button when soft-capped defenses fail, and it doubles as a travel power.


Edit: on the subject of foe intangibles in general, back when this was being discussed for the 38,714th time in I14 I suggested the following:

1. Add a visual effect that was obvious to intangible foes.
2. Add a way to tab through non-intangible foes, skipping intangible ones.
3. Add an effect to foe intangibles which temporarily stopped their powers from recharging and halted regeneration and recovery, so that in effect they are time-stopped within the intangible effect (so they do not emerge stronger than when they went in).
4. Add a random foe effect on emerge from intangible, random damage in particular, as an effect of returning to normal space that could be enhanced. This makes foe intangible powers attacks with an intermediate intangible, rather than a pure intangible effect only.
5. Replace AoE intangible with cones, or some other directional effect, so they can be aimed.

I think I see. I just read it as though you were correcting what I had said, but I think I get what you were saying now.

Possible. He was involved in a pretty involved market discussion (in the Test Server forum of all places) and when presented with some detailed information that was contrary to his position, he moderated his viewpoint to something more middle-ground. That doesn't seem to be going on here, though.

Edit:
For many but certainly not all players, the change to make Fitness inherent is a nice band-aid for this. I know it lets some things I dropped off the bottom of my power pick priority list fit back on my characters, though perhaps with limited slotting.

I doubt that will help Black Hole and its cousins much. Although, while typing that post above, it occurred to me that the *ultimate* in situational usage intangibles that would *never* be questioned when used is this one:

1. Toggle.
2. 15' radius PBAoE.
3. Usable while dead.

As a toggle and PBAoE, it you could turn it off and on, like Choking Cloud. You could maneuver around and only affect the targets you wanted to. And if you could use it while dead, you could theoretically intangible away all the critters around you when the team wiped, allowing them to rez in perfect safety. It would be like an inverse Soul Transfer.

Few people would take it still, but no one would complain about it anymore. At worst, team mates would tell you to turn it off if you were using it while everyone was still alive. Although to be honest, a controllable toggle foe intangible might actually be too powerful.