How many times must I die to ambushes before I can re-complain?

Ten more turtles would be awesome. That pretty sums up Mario Strikers though I think.

I think you are mistaking System Design with Game Programming. And System Design most certainly involves math. They're all interlinked, so it's very disingenuous to claim they are not involved.

That said, it looks like the argument is going to devolve into definition quabble, which is silly .

I'm not entirely 100% sure, but it seems like ALL of Malaise's attacks bypass my defenses.

Here is my description of the Malta Gunslinger: A guy with no powers, and often with no depth perception who can hit me reliably through soft-capped defenses with a revolver held sideways. I guess they took Lrrrr's advice and instead of shooting where I was they shot where I was going to be.

Oh, and how can we forget our dear friend, the Avalanche Shaman? Yeah, sure, you can just move, but there's no reason for that debuff to be unresistable in the first place.

You are quite right, I forgot about that.

Its still only one enemy out of a whole mob, though

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I see you've never been to Praetoria, citizen.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Yeah, you've never played Praetoria thats on live at the moment... Because something must have broken a while back to make the above no longer true.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I think you can simulate the same issue with AE though, if you set the 2nd ambush to occur at say, 3/4 health, or whatnot instead of defeat. Of course, I think that actually requires named entities for AE to handle it.

MIs just anger me, not because they're difficult (the AI is easy to outsmart), but because they cheat. Both by being able to attack / summon pets while phased, and by being able to phase while mezzed.

NPCs getting stronger or different versions of powers that players have I can deal with, because the AI is stupid and needs a mathematical advantage to not be completely trivial. Sure, I'm annoyed at enemies who have things that look like toggles but turn out to auto powers and can't be suppressed by mez / endurance drain (spines Wardens I'm looking at you). Even those aren't as blatantly cheating as MIs though.

Back on the topic of autohit defense debuffs, I seem to recall Antimatter from Tina's having Rad Infection in Tina's arc, and ranging from a nightmare on teams that rely on defense to a complete joke on teams that have other forms of mitigation.

I think it's mostly the wide gap between "Woohoo I'm invincible" and "OMG I just got 2-shot" the gets frustrating, especially when there's little to no warning it's about to happen. I'm not sure how to fix that with defense, though, because of its binary nature.

Absolutely incorrect.

The creative side of game design says "I want to give a damage resist bonus to a powerset that's linked to health. When the player's health drops below a certain point, they start getting damage resist, and it keeps going up until they've got a whopping chunk of it when they're almost dead. It keeps them from dying immediately and makes fights more intense as the player struggles to finish off the enemy while watching their health hover around this tiny little sliver. But they can't have so much of it that they'd just be invincible."

The math side of game design says "Okay, the best way to do that would be the formula y = -x + 60. When the player's health drops below 60%, they start gaining 1% damage resist for every 1% health they lose, up to just below 60% damage resist, since they'd have to be at 0 health to get a full 60% resist."

Math explains this to creative. Creative may want the damage resist to be gained faster, like 1.5% damage resist for every 1% health but starting at a lower threshold, or maybe they want damage resist to be gained at an ever increasing rate so that from 50% to 25% health the player wouldn't get a lot of damage resist, but below 25% they start earning buckets. Whatever creative thinks would result in the most interesting yet balanced outcome, math would come up with a formula to represent it.

Once creative approves of math's math, the math goes to the actual programmer, who translates the equation I gave above into code, applying sanity checks so that the player doesn't have -15% damage resist at 75% health, for example (unless creative wants that to happen), and generally making sure that it actually works in the game. The programmer doesn't necessarily care what the equation is and might not even be all that proficient in math except insofar as they need to know it to be able to translate it into code.

So no, the math side of game design is not the same as programming. When players reverse engineer the algorithms in the game, they don't know or care how it's implemented in the programming. All they want is to figure out that y = -x + 60 so that they can know that when they're at 15% health, they have 45% damage resist. You think the formula given for hit chance at the top of this page has anything to do with real code?

They were very obviously intended for the 40+ game and then arbitrarily scaled down to 1-20.

As mentioned, you're skipping a step.

(1) Start with a qualitative description of how something should work conceptually.

"Defense is an attribute that causes enemies attacks to be more likely to miss when they attack you."

(2) Design an approach that implements that.

"Everything has a 50% chance to hit players, and defense modifies that chance directly down (or up for defense penalties)"

(3) Then programmers implement what was designed in step 2.

115. critter.finalHitChance = 0.5 - player.getDefense()

Arcanaville is talking about step 2.

Do you think it was a conscious decision on his part that it worked out to be quite so heinous in cases like this? Honestly, a lot of stuff he did seemed like it ended up the way it was because it was the result of multiple decisions for which no one had considered how (or perhaps if) they would combine into a net result.

You're definitely in trouble when I am the one being more concise than you.

The problem with this argument is that the 1-20 game was the only part that actually worked. Every other bracket in the game could stand to have its difficulty increased, but 1-20 was the point where in the general case the game hit the balance objectives. Add to the fact that new players are being shoved into Praetoria by default and the difficulty increase becomes an utterly boneheaded decision.

I've argued for years that the game needs to be harder. I'm not on board with this.

Any mission that requires me to change difficulty is too hard.

A difficult mission should mean that I have to play less aggressively and/or use more inspirations than I'm used to or such. It should not mean that I have to send the character a mile or more out of his way to change settings and then do it again afterward to keep the rest of the game from being a snoozefest. If they'd get rid of the stupid NPCs and put difficult adjustment on the mission menu where it belongs I'd consider it, but under these circumstances I'm just going to drop the trash and move on.

Which is another reason why spiking the punch is a bad idea: people just don't have to put up with it, so they won't. The new DE aren't "making a statement" or anything, they just tell me which tips to dismiss.

Oh, they're making a statement all right, and that statement is "oh, so you wanna soft-cap everything? Well eat this!" Unfortunately that statement also means "oh, so your entire powerset has been balanced around having a certain level of defense? Well here's the finger, thanks for showing up, don't forget to tip your nurse on the way back from the hospital."

If it makes you feel any better, EVERY game that I've seen that has an avoidance mechanic has incredible problems balancing it to the satisfaction of the players. Usually, the avoidance characters wind up weaker than characters that rely on damage reduction or healing.

Not if you're normally playing beyond +0/x1. If you play on ANY difficulty higher than that, then you have no reasonable expectation that you'll be able to handle any particular mission solo.

If you're willing to accept that the rewards you'd be getting for lowering the difficulty that much will be significantly less than they'd be at standard difficulty, I wouldn't mind seeing it either. I don't think enough people want to play the content just for playing the content's sake, however, to make this happen.

As Venture said upthread, if it's too hard at normal difficulty, it's too hard. Forcing it to be easier by shifting the level at which you fight to be able to complete the mission at all means there's something wrong with the design of the missions.


I don't mind dying in the lower levels every once in a while. Sometimes I go a long time between defeats, depending on what AT I'm using. But I'm not everyone else, and what I find fun isn't what others do. I think the Devs have the right idea in Praetoria, but they turned the knob to 11 when it doesn't need to be higher than an 8.

Yes, actually you do, because +0/x1 is the default assuming an average player with an average build using SOs. If you are anywhere above that, you should not be playing on +0/x1.

The other solution is to lengthen the fights and increase health pools. I don't think that would really work for this game though. Would hit too hard on the theme.

That's the standard difficulty. If any particular mission is too hard for you on that difficulty, then you have a right to complain. But then I don't find the real risk of defeat to be too hard. If you're saying you have some right to be able to play every mission at +1-4/x2-8, then I'll just say I disagree.

That makes no sense. Some villain groups cause me to lower my difficulty. But then, that's fair and right IMO because other than TFs I play on a higher difficult level than standard.

If I can play many missions on +1/x4 with little risk of defeat, I should be able to play all missions on +1/x4 with some risk of defeat, with some encounters on +1/x4 presenting a significant risk of defeat. I should not face a significant risk of defeat on every "trash" encounter within the mission. Turning down my difficulty is about as acceptable to me as leaving a mission to buy inspirations (in this day and age of inspiration combining.)

Ok, so when you play content that is supposed to be harder (TFs) you deliberately make it easier? Ok you know what, that makes absolutely no sense.