Thanks for all the stuff, can you do it better?

I believe I've mentioned this before, but I find your consistent line of thinking across threads on this subject somewhat... I want to say "puzzling," but let's go with "interesting." That line I'm referring to is the notion that in order for a game to be better, its underlying subsystems have to be obfuscated from players, who must instead make decisions partially or entirely uninformed, shaped by other factors. I can see why you'd want to hide a game's "numbers" if they're easily gamable and how you'd want to make them impenetrable to prevent having only one "best" solution to any real problem, but...

To me, this is kind of a "last-generation" problem mostly true for games that revolve heavily around stats and numbers and much less so around their actual gameplay. It's very telling, for instance, that in City of Heroes, travel powers are often seen as unnecessary if you have some other means of rapid transport, because a travel power doesn't really contribute to a game's numbers. There are no high places you can only reach via flight, there are no shortcuts you can take with teleportation, there are no fast enemies you can chase down with super speed. That sort of thing.

What I'm saying is that it seems to me like you can balance a game around asking players to pick from a pool of actual abilities that alter how their character behaves, not just what stats it has and can apply. The ability to climb certain surfaces, the block and/or counter-attack, the ability to drive certain vehicles, the ability to fly. The ability to use certain weapons vs. other weapons and so forth. Of course, numbers will always come into play, but when your "meta-game" doesn't involve around modifying those numbers but rather on what you do via your keyboard and mouse - timing, precision, aiming, etc. - seems like it would need a lot less intentional obfuscation since it create a game that's less about crunching numbers and more about the muscle memory needed to pull off the gameplay it's based around.

I may be biassed, because even though I often drop out of the habit, I'm still an action gamer at heart. I like being able to the precision of my mouse hand, the speed of my judgement and my knowledge of which enemies will act in what way allowing me to win where just trading blows would have killed me ten times over. It's one reason I keep mentioning Space Marines so often. It just seems to me that the more we focus on balancing the books, as it were, the more we end up with a very flat, basic type of gameplay where actual real-time involvement is very low and most time is spent watching cooldowns and following attack chains, with most of the actual "fighting" being done via Excel and external build planners. Something as simple as a dodge move and a block move can turn a game upside down in such a way that you'd need coupious amounts of numbers changes to achieve.

This is something I personally don't get, and I don't mean this as a criticism. Very often, I'll hear people comment on how the class structure is restrictive and they want to "liberate" themselves from it and go with something freeform and... To be honest, that's scary to me. It's not that I can't make decisions of my own, even if that's part of it. It's more that... Classes are designed by people I'd at least assume to be professionals, who know balance and have worked to ensure not only that I can't be too strong, but also that I can't be too weak. A lot of the work is done for me, so I can, to a large extent, just follow the plotted line and still be sure to have a workable character.

To me, a free-form character creation system is kind of the same as a character creator that asked you to design your own character mesh in 3DS Max or something similar. Sure, it would make for a LOT more freedom, but it would also require a lot more work and a lot more talent to pull off even something half-way decent, while at the same time running a big chance of creating a complete disaster. The alternative, then, becomes for me to just go ahead and use other people's designs as my own, which kind of defeats the purpose of customizability. A friend of mine plays League of Legends with a Firefox window open to MOBAfire at all times, basically following the character guides posted there step by step, level by level, item by item. And if you're gonna' do that, what's the point of being given a choice in the first place.

More choice doesn't actually give more choice, not always at least. More choice means more responsibility on the shoulders of the chooser and for someone who can't min/max well enough to figure out what the better builds are or, like me, couldn't be arsed to, this doesn't offer more options. It offers far less. Right now, I can pick any powerset combo from one of four ATs and be sure that I'll have a perfectly serviceable character all the way through. It may not be great, but it also won't be crap. Toss me into a pool of unsorted options, though, and nine times out of ten I'll make something that simply doesn't work, because I'm simply not that good at figuring these things out, and because figuring these things out simply isn't fun for me.

This is exactly what I see as the biggest problem with the base builder. Sure, item positioning is so versatile that you can create almost anything just out of square blocks, but it takes so much work fine-tuning and so much artistry which I don't have that I did it once (with mediocre results) and I don't intend to try again. It's a major pain in the *** for not a lot of return, comparatively. Or, for another example, take Alex Dai's pic in my sig. It's AWESOME and easily the best Xanta's ever looked by a MILE. It's better than anything any pre-fab costume creator could ever have created because an actual artist - and a very talented one at that - worked on this. But I can't draw for crap, so I could never have been able to do this. The game, however, let me do it because it didn't ask me to be a great artist to make a decent costume. In much the same way, it doesn't ask me to be a great player to figure out how to make a character not die repeatedly (turns out the answer was "don't play anything without status protection").

Basically, "liberating" myself from the confines of a game system that professionals have designed has, historically, brought me more ill than good. It's a lot more work for a lot less fun.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That specific thing probably is doable IMO, as long as you were careful to control what the ATs capabilities were. But you'd have to be careful that the build couldn't jump from point Blaster to point Tanker (to use 2 examples) too easily.

Incidentally, a power selection could be invisioned as coming from an item you buy from a "power shop," and can never trade. If you ever want to do a mind screw on yourself, you can make similar comparisons:
- XP is actually Influence you can only spend in a single shop, which may or may not accept refunds, but always under its own rules
- Animation Time is a Hold players cast on themselves as a penalty for using a power
- Gear is just a tradeable power
- A powerset is usually just a branch in a complicated skill tree that has no backward respec path
- A class is one step above a powerset in said tree
- Both of the above statements are generally true even if the player must play the game for a while before selecting the powerset or class. If they can't respec out of it, it probably meets the definition of "class."


It may also be worth mentioning that my statement earlier about respecs presenting a problem for classless systems was just one example. There are a few other significant hurdles to consider as well. One of the most daunting is that in an MMO, you are likely to constantly be adding new powers. In a game like CoX, that can be challenging as it stands. Slipping new powers into a classless system is a lot more perilious IMO.

I think the biggest problem is the players themselves. More complexity and more versatility are not always good, and I recall players on these very forums praising City of Heroes for being "MMO lite" many years ago. As Arcana proves, no matter how complex, arcane and obfuscated you make a system, people will always figure it out, but the farther along the line you go, the more limited your audience becomes just because you exceed players' "couldn't be arsed" threshold. I have, for instance, spoken with Nuclear Toast on a few occasions, and his reasons for not bothering with Inventions or Incarnates much mirror my own - too much of a bother to be fun. I guess that's he and I get along.

My point here is that what you two are describing is a system of character building I not only WOULDN'T use, but also COULDN'T use. Even if I could figure it out, it's just no fun. If you're coming from the position that planning and making builds is "the game," then I can see how my position might seem absurd, but to me, "the game" is everything that happens AFTER the build is done - it's the beating stuff up, running missions, exploring the world and actually USING the character. The process of building said character is never fun or entertaining to me. It's a cost I have to pay in order to enjoy what I see as "the game." To be quite honest, if I could just pick what my powers looked like and let the game figure out how to make them work best, I would. I might still want to know what's being done behind the scenes, but I wouldn't bother with numbers if I didn't feel like I had to.

Hell, I wouldn't bother with Inventions if I didn't feel like I had to, but it's the "average player" that sets the bar, and the "average player" apparently CAN be arsed to bother.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Because you want a game, and Arcanaville wants a cosmogeny. Or in Bartle terms, you want the ultimate achiever experience, and she wants the ultimate explorer one.

Potatoes, potatohs. It's all economy.

That's... not even on the same planet as what we're discussing. It might be orbiting the same star, but there's some cold vacuum of space between here and there.

My aimbot is more precise than your mouse-hand, meatbag.

From a developer's point of view the thing you're asking for is ironically far less human. There's nothing for you to do except try to get as good at the game as a robot already is.

Oh! Hey! Welcome to the Tertiary Orbiting Station around Planet Arcanaville!

mumblemumbleobfuscationmumble*.

Although thinking about it, if that really does bother you, maybe it's the ultimate Killer experience you want.

Edit : Hang on a second, wasn't Obfuscation Station the Schoolhouse Rock on cryptology?

I am watching World of Warcraft's next expansion with a very great deal of unfortunately non-professional interest. To be honest I agree with many of the points you've raised, tangentally related as they may be to the discussion before that. WoW, Farmville, League of Legends, Minecraft... there are very good reasons for their success. I am (and presumably Blizzard also is) rather surprised Diablo 3 wasn't a bigger hit, although I suppose once the post-mortem is finished, the reasons will be clear (personally, I think the two real stakes to its heart were lack of customization -- even if, as they said, players can't really tell, it's still an investment -- and how anachronistically boxed-in the world feels). And who knows; maybe they'll release an upgrade to it that brings it out of the grave. Or maybe Torchlight 2 will steal its thunder entirely.

What Arcanaville has alluded to is... not any of those things. Elder Scrolls goes to kindergarten, maybe. I do not think it would be terribly successful**, but I do think it would be enormously interesting.

*i KNOW, shut up. it's easier this way.
**pre-"singularity," a term i use with great reservation and only for its brevity

When you want your characters to be able to take more damage, do you take tough or do you slot sprint? How do you *know* its better to take tough than slot sprint? Are you certain the speed increase you get from slotting sprint won't allow for more damage mitigation? Have you done the analysis to be certain?

Any good powers system that offers options should have an intuitive path to choosing those options that may not be optimal, but allows for approximation and reasonable decisions. There should be structure to those decisions, so you aren't choosing between a million different options, but between three or four different options, each of which could have five or six different variations, each of which may have several ways to tweak them.

If you want more defense you take a defense power. If you want more speed you take a running power. To a first order approximation that will always be a reasonable choice. You may have different defense options, but there will always be a reason for taking them. One buffs you a lot. One buffs you less, but also buffs your team mates. Which one do you choose? It depends on which one you want to do. Once you decide you hate your team mates and want a power that buffs just you, you're done. Until it comes time to tweak that power with enhancements: do you want more defense, or do you want it to cost less to run?

In another thread the subject of incomparables came up. One way to make systems with lots of choices more manageable is to make those choices obvious qualitative choices rather than quantitative choices. Do you want to do this, or that. Those choices aren't quantifiable because they are an expression of value that is dependent on the player. And because they aren't quantifiable, they aren't directly comparable.

There's absolutely no reason for a complex system to present its choices in a complex way, unless you are attempting to trick people into thinking the system is more complex than it is. A good system is one that presents its choices in the simplest way possible but still generates rich complex results.

So? I'm not obligated to stick to whatever sub-thread you've chosen to restrict yourself to. If it doesn't pertain to what you were saying, all that means is what I said doesn't pertain to what you were saying. If I quoted you (and I don't remember either way) and yet went off in a different direction, all that means is I used your post as a starting point. I'm not obligated to stick to your topic of conversation, nor are you obligated to reply to me if what I'm saying isn't what you were talking about, if all you'll say is that what I was saying isn't what you were talking about.

There's a reason systems like PunkBuster and Valve Anit-Cheat systems exist - to ensure it's the player playing the game, rather than the computer. Play any action game and you'll find the computer can always do it better than you because it controls the environment and has direct access to all of its variables, plus a much faster calculating processor that's much more suited to that particular task. And this ignores the fact that "numbers" are even less human than that, because all you need to beat numbers is bigger numbers, and MMO critters typically get away with cheating on a truly shameless scale.

If you're suggesting that other players, on an even keel, will be better and balancing their numbers better than I can balance mine, then you're probably right. The reason for this is half that I'm not very good at balancing numbers and half that I honestly don't give a toss about being better than other people. My constant call to arms is "enough," in the sense that I want numbers that are "good enough" to get through the game, irrespective of whether they're great or better than anybody else's.

And at the end of the day, those are two different sorts of skillsets that you're comparing, as well as two different types of gaming experiences. One is pretty much entirely based around preparing for any situation and "winning" a fight long before you show up while the other is entirely built around having the player react to a situation as it develops and making decisions in real time. Complexity can creep over both, yes, and there's a reason I don't play any of the Devil May Cry games despite their being entirely skill-based - I'm just not good enough. But there's nothing more or less human about relying on the skills of hand-eye coordination as opposed to relying on university mathematics.

So? What Arcana alluded to is also not a three-headed monkey... I assume, but I don't see how that's any more relevant to anything I've said so far.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The thing is, though, I've yet to see such a system. I've tried games touted as being very versatile and customizable, only to drown in stats and not know which way to go. How much defence is enough defence so I can start building for damage? Should I slot for fire protection heavily? Will I meet many fire-using enemies? Experience has taught me that when people set out to make an "open-ended" system, they just toss out a list of options and number of points and let the player sort it out, often with no way to know what he's getting into until he's sunk 20 points into the thing.

The Diablo 2 system was once touted as being very versatile since it allowed for many ways to build what is essentially the same character. That may have been so, but there were FAR more ways to build "a character" than there were ways to build even a half-way decent character. For instance I went through two complete playthroughs before the game just NOW decided to let me know I should probably have been building for elemental damage 20 levels ago, because all of a sudden half my enemies were IMMUNE to physical damage. How do you fight an enemy that's immune to physical damage with a sword? Hell if I know, because I could never figure that out. And that game didn't have respecs, I remind you.

Basically what I'm saying is the more complex a system is, the more responsibility falls to me to know what I'm doing, as opposed to on the system to prevent me from hurting myself. And the more it's my responsibility to build right, the more likely I am to build wrong because Ooh! I can jump good! Gotta' have that! Ohh! I can run fast! Gotta' have that, too! What do you mean dual-wielding two-handed swords is worse than dual-wielding one-handed ones? They look cooler! The more responsibility you put on my shoulders, the more room there is to fail and the more of those touted options end up being big mistakes. Right now in City of Heroes, there is no powerset combo that's "wrong." You can still gimp a character if you set out to do it - say, Toggle Man, the Determinator, etc. - but if you just stick to what you're given, you're pretty much guaranteed to do at least well enough.

I know you can say the same for a skill-based type of game like Darksiders, but at least there you can figure out what you're doing wrong by trial and error just in the process of playing the game. For instance, I figured out I can't do a scythe charge attack against swarms of spiders even though it seems like that should be the best tactic, just because the charge attack is slow and I keep getting interrupted. OK, fair enough, I'll use something faster. That's not the case for even the City of Heroes system, where stats decide whether you win or lose a lot of the time.

I can, for instance, tell that my SJ/SR Scrapper is using up more endurance than she should be, but figuring out WHY that is isn't as simple. I did figure it out... By plotting all of her powers on an Excel spreadsheet and charting DPE, EPS and EPA, eventually discovering Shin Breaker was costing WAY more endurance than it should (that's been fixed) and that Spinning Strike is balanced as an AoE, thus using it on single targets is a mistake. But I know this because I ran the numbers. Figuring this out in general play would have been impossible, because by level 38 or so, I still had no idea why she sucked wind. And when it comes to Inventions, I haven't the foggiest. Should I shoot for more defence? Which sets offer that for what powers? How much is it? How much do I need? What else do I need? I'm not picky here, I just don't want to feel like a wimp.

Arcana, you describe a system that... I want to say "intuitive." If that can be done, I'd go for it, definitely. But I'll believe it CAN be done when I see it. I've seen far too many games bragging about their customization that I just never understood what to do in.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You are a very verbose individual.

Yo don' know! I do what I wan'!

Anywho.

If that were literally the case, then two things would be true: aimbots etc could be eliminated by shuffling the memory positions of data each time the program was started, and players could not solo GMs.

That's how you win every fight. Whether it's by training or repetition, ensuring you're better equipped, or prank calling your opponent to tell them their mother's in the hospital with pneumonia and might not last the night, by the point a conflict has actually begun the possible outcomes have essentially collapsed.

Edit : It's almost like, when engaged, one uses a "mind of no mind..."

No it's not! Wrong, wrong, wrong --

What? Why did you pull a random sentence off the end of a paragraph and take it personally?

This is why I said you're on a different planet of this discussion. Which wasn't an insult, incidentally. The methodology or control mechanics of the game you are playing has very little bearing on the aspect of design you are discussing. What I imagine Arcanaville is imagining could just as easily work like the paragraph above as it could Dwarf Fortress. Actually, that isn't exactly true -- it *has* to work in some ways more like the paragraph above than Dwarf Fortress. But in any case the things you're objecting to are almost completely divorced from the things you've described yourself as wanting or not wanting.

And anyway, the fun part is dead now. Thanks, Porlock.

Me either. But that doesn't mean its impossible to be invented. And I don't subscribe to the notion that lots of smart people make games, so if it was possible it would already have been done. Its probably more likely that everyone capable of doing it is making ten times more money doing something else.


See, that's amusing to me because I've never, ever done that. I play my characters and when they burn up endurance too fast I slot more end reduce and I build up a sense of how my character plays over time.

And then I hit 50 and Mids my brains out. But I don't chart out endurance to figure out I should maybe slot more end reduce into my attacks. Enhancements cost something between nothing and twice nothing when you're leveling if you just dump your drops into the market. But I would rather learn by learning, than by calculating. And its always worked for me.

Now, if you want to get the best performance, you have to min/max, and that takes effort. But I don't honestly expend a lot of concern over players who wants to be the best and only wants the effort required to be on their terms. That's a shame, not a design problem.

Investment banking, the pancakers. The ethical ones are in biosciences. There's a terrifying thought for you.

Although that's another example of math being done for math's sake, completely disconnected from reality. I remember in the aftermath of the banking crisis people were saying they were worried if investment banking compensation was reduced you'd see a massive drain of smart people from the banking industry.

To which my first reply was "what smart people?"

My second reply was "I would rather have dumb people that don't understand how derivatives work and stay the hell away from them handling my money, thanks. By all means let all those 'smart' people leave the financial world and see if they can find real jobs."

I remember watching old Quake 3 Arena demos with bots on the highest difficulty. When moving about, they would constantly keep the player in their crosshairs, even through walls, even across the map, even when there's no way at all to actually see the player. When using the machinegun, the bot would swing its sights out of position with every shot because it knew where the next bullet would deflect to, thus ensuring perfect accuracy with an otherwise scatter-fire hit-scan machinegun.

And it's not a question of "shuffling memory positions." The game's software needs to know where everyone is at all times and what they're doing in order for the game to work. Bots, therefore, don't have to rely on actually perceiving and judging the world. They have access to the process with controls this world directly. It's be like you and me having a role-playing argument, only I'm the writer of the fictional universe we're arguing about and know all manner of unpublished little quirks that exist nowhere but inside my head. It would put you at a severe disadvantage simply because what I know is impossible for you to know as I haven't expressed it in any way. It's what makes people think I'm just being stubborn and picky when try to get help for my own character concepts.

And besides, while an aim bot might be more accurate than a player, "accuracy" isn't the only thing that matters in your basic FPS game. It's why people have been able to beat Nightmare bots in Quake 3 and so forth. These games are designed in such a way as to demand situational awareness, good judgement and unorthodox play. I, for instance, beat UT2003's Xan Kreigor by admitting he's better than me by a wide margin and learning his habits. After a while, I realised he liked using the rocket launcher at range, which has moving projectile that can be dodged. I then proceeded to repeatedly goad him into fighting me in a very long corridor where I could dodge his rockets while I peppered him with the "accurate" alt fire of the hit-scan chaingun. I beat a computer - an aim bot, essentially, who was significantly better than me basically by outsmarting him and findin an aspect of the game the AI simply wasn't programmed to capitalise on, and indeed which it later transpired not many people even realised was a thing.

There is more to a game for a player to do than balance a spreadsheet, and I personally feel more accomplished when it feels like my actions matter in the moment, rather than when it feels like I'm just tracing through steps.

That's not even remotely true, not for most action games. Many, as you'll note, intentionally put you on an even keel with your enemy. The oldest of the olds, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, had no such thing as preparation. You picked a character, your enemy who's likely some total stranger in the arcade picked a character and you go for it. Sure, you could see who he picked and pick accordingly, but most characters were well balanced against each other. Who won in the end was mostly based on who did the right things in the actual fight.

Yes, experience and knowledge of the game are a massive help. Of course they are. But all they do is better enable you to analyse each situation and find a proper course of action. What I'm saying is the game never came down to picking the right stats, then following a bullet list of what to do and then you're guaranteed to win. Decisions are made on a moment-by-moment basis. I've fought a number of people who tried to use "a mind of no mind" and they quickly become predictable and easy to trip up. An action game player who trusts expectations rather than immediate awareness will always be predictable and susceptible to unexpected event.

Sure, that's true in City of Heroes, as well, when a mission throws me a messed-up curveball. The trouble is that in a game where I need to have won my battle before it even started... There isn't terribly much I can do to respond to a changing situation short of running away and out of the instance to force enemies to lose aggro and then start planning all over again. Sure, if I have a God Mode power I could use that, but not all sets and indeed not all ATs do.

I didn't take it personally. I just didn't want to repeat the same thing as what I'd said before, so I replaced it with a Curse of Monkey Island reference.

Not entirely. What I imagine Arcana is imagining is a system of character building where the actual process of building a character is a meta-game drive in itself. People of this game have sometimes stated that they spend more time in Mids' Hero and Villain Designer and they enjoy number-crunching more than actually playing the game. Yes, I've seen people use those exact words, though not often. Why I bring up things other than the character-building meta-game is to illustrate that a game doesn't need to obfuscate its mechanics in order to give people meaningful character-building options. What it needs to do is not rely on numbers to such a large extent and instead rely on giving players actual gameplay choices. Let me explain.

Right now when it comes to personal defence sets, I have a choice between stats. Do I want defence numbers or resistance numbers or regeneration numbers or some combination of a little of all of the above? I don't know and, frankly, it doesn't really matter. All of those do the same thing - they keep me from dying for me doing nothing at all. There's nothing I can do to affect whether I dodge an attack or not, because whether I dodge an attack or not comes down to a roll of the dice. Sure, I can stack the odds in my favour, but that's still numbers. I don't actually DO anything to defend myself. People have left their character in the middle of a throng of enemies then walked off to take a dump and returned to find their character bobbing and weaving, seemingly completely unharmed. Well, of course it comes down to balancing the books, then.

Suppose I had a choice between dodging or blocking or interrupting enemies? Suppose I had to choose how high up the enemy attack chain I want to be able to block with no ill effect. Suppose I had to choose between blocking just forward or blocking in all directions? Yes, stats obviously come into those as any game is ultimately built on stats, but what I'm saying is you're not asking the player to try and balance those stats. To me, stats should serve gameplay, not the other way around. To me, "the game" should be what you do from when you see an enemy to when that enemy drops, with "stats" serving only to enable you to be in a position to make decisions in battle.

When people speak about customizability yet bring up many different stat combinations which cause characters to "behave" differently, I see a problem. To me, actual customizability comes when you're able to pick what you want to do without having to mess with the behind-the-scenes mechanics that make it work. Jack Emmert wanted City of Heroes to be a game like this, which is why he held out till he left that real power numbers weren't needed. The trouble is that the system Geck and the others made for him was in no way instinctively predictable and was, as well, based around a sum of small percentages that aren't obvious from actual play. This was a system where you needed to balance the numbers, hence why numbers are necessary here, but that doesn't have to be the case everywhere. In fact, I would seriously prefer a game where I never had to see a number at all.

Funny enough, other than the number of potion equvalents I'm carrying, Darksiders is a game that has nearly no numbers anywhere in its playtime.

Did you just call me a prologue? Well that's offensive. I've always fancied myself more an epilogue sort of person.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't believe it's impossible to do, I just don't ever expect to see it, and the reason for this is the game industry is experiencing a "stupid spell" right now, and has for quote a few years now, MMOs especially. What you suggest, upon reflection, is a smart game, whereas what's likely to be made is a skin-swap for WoW or Lineage II. It's always one or the other. What's also likely to be made is more and more complex character-building with no thought as to player's own use.

I scoured WOWwiki for hours and for the life of me, I couldn't find what "attack rating" actually means. The reason I did this is a friend of mine was convinced he was missing too much after a recent patch and wanted to know roughly how much attack rating he would need to not miss as much, and it he would have to swap too much of his gear and skills to do it. If it wasn't much, he could do it. If it as too much, he'd pretty much walk away from the game. I looked, and I couldn't tell him. Best I could figure out was his attack rating should give him 95% accuracy, which we both new couldn't be right.

It just feels to me like MMOs and RPGs of recent times are built for the kind of people who'd make their own spreadsheets, because they're comprised of a zillion 0.67% buffs to a zillion different stats that you need to figure out how to balance. Honestly, if I can figure that out just by trying my hand at it, I should probably go work as an air traffic controller. The local airport control tower is badly understaffed.

You slot more endurance WHERE? Once upon a time, I made my best to slot my toggles for endurance reduction. When that didn't work, I double-slotted them for endurance reduction. Why? Well, obviously, that's where most of my endurance is going, right? They drain me constantly, surely that's what costs me the most... Only toggles are probably the cheapest part of a character's powers, and it took me sitting down and charting each power's cost over time to actually see that my regular attacks cost me between 0.8 and 1.1 end/s while most armour toggles were just, what? 0.26 end/s? I slotted Combat Jumping for endurance reduction, for crap's sake!

The game doesn't let me put five slots in five different powers, check what they do and then move them around if I don't like it. Respecs, even today, are limited and I'd rather not be put in a position of having to buy one. What this means is I'm left enhancing a little bit here and a little bit there and trying to spot a minute difference. I owned a number of cats once. I'd watch them grow up and to me, it was pretty much always the same cat year after year. Then an old friend would drop by and go "Woah! Your cat got big!" and I'd be like "Really? I never noticed." Small changes over a long period of time are hard to track, especially when you don't even know what you're tracking and the game varies so much.

The fact of the matter is it took me doing this:
To figure out which powers to slot for what and which powers did what. And I played with that set. Did you know Subdual - the immobilizing power - was good at doing damage? I didn't, because it's DoT and I just hadn't noticed. Did you also know it's crap for endurance? I didn't, because I just haven't noticed. Did you know that Psychic Tornao becomes more efficient than a single-target attack only if it hits four or more powers? I didn't know that, either. And it's not like I didn't HAVE to know this. I wasn't using Stamina, remember? Without that, I pretty much had to squeeze every ounce of performance out of every power or else I'd spend 3/4 of my time Alt-Tabbed to let my endurance recover to full.

You're probably just smarter and more observant than I am, but I am incapable of deducing numbers from observing behaviour.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The context of your statement indicates that you do not understand what I am talking about. I don't mean a software bot controlled by the game; I mean an independent agent.

...The context of your statement indicates that you do not understand what I am talking about.

You were more clever than the person who programmed the bot was able to anticipate. Excellent! That's a good way to be. However, it doesn't mean you had (as we were previously discussing) better reflexes than the bot. It means you were able to apply a creative problem-solving strategy, despite not knowing the *exact* parameters of the machine you were playing with.

That's the game Arcana wants.


Good for them!

...I feel a bit like a broken record today.

You're totally hung up on this obfuscation thing. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

Oh god, I think I just remembered you from the Champions forums. Not sure if it's the same user-name or not. Anyway, what you need to understand...

THAT YOU CAN SEE. THEY ARE BY YOUR STANDARDS OBFUSCATED. #$I(JLSKADFMN.

Canny, I get his sig now. And I just did some estimations. I am so, so sorry. I owe you drinks. A big gift basket of them. One will be missing.

Continuing on well after the story has ended? Fair enough!

I've always felt one of the unfortunate early mistakes that still affects things today was the decision to let us slot all of these things in arbitrary powers with absolutely /no/ indication from the game what would or wouldn't help us.

Even with the advent of real numbers, I'm of the opinion the game just doesn't give us enough information to work with to make some kinds of decisions in a reasonable timeframe.

On the other hand, once you know that "activated powers burn more endurance than toggles" you now have a general rule to work with and you don't need to sit down and math out whether you should slot end redux in attacks or toggles on future characters. You've got a basic heuristic you can work with that will get Good Enough Results on levelling builds.

I just think the game should /tell/ us this somehow.

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

Missed this in the chaos.

Well, there's "smart" people, and then there's people who notice the same thing you did and write bankerbots to take advantage of it.

Now go one step further. That's the player side of the game. The developer side of the game is different. Somehow, they have to know how to make a "block forward" and "block spherical" power that is reasonably balanced. They need to knock how much the block power should block and how often the interrupt ability should interrupt. The player doesn't need to know these things precisely, or even at all, but the devs do.

When you say the game shouldn't have to "obfuscate the numbers" actually, it does. The players either see the qualitative differences, or they see the quantitative differences between the powers, but within the game engine itself its all numbers. The system must be capable of showing the devs the numbers, so the devs know how to design things. It must then make the qualitative differences preeminent, so most players focus on those. You can call that obfuscation if you wish, but its not a bad thing in this context. You mention Darksiders as a game with no numbers intruding on your gameplay. That's a form of obfuscation, because there are numbers ultimately governing your gameplay.

The game just tricked you into thinking you don't need to know them. If the qualitative differences are strong enough, many players will settle for that, which means they won't feel compelled to learn the numbers. That's the best outcome possible here. Its not really possible to make a game in which knowing the numbers plus having unlimited analysis capability wouldn't provide an advantage. But we can reduce the edge to make the effort less worthwhile relative to just playing the game. That can be an actual design goal of a game, but it ultimately comes down to a combination of qualitative diversity, and mechanical obfuscation.

Incidentally, obfuscation is not the same thing as concealment. The SR passive resistances are not concealed. What they do is precisely known. Their survival value is obfuscated, because its mechanics make it impossible to compare in any simple fashion to any of the standard static mitigation types. The truth is virtually nobody knows what they are actually worth exactly. And to the extent that I know, I can't even trivially describe because of its highly complex situational nature. But anyone can play SR and formulate a subjective opinion fairly easily and fairly quickly. Just one very difficult to put in a spreadsheet and calculate around.

The entire game could be like that: I believe its actually possible to construct a game in which many elements are easier to create an intuitive value for than to measure, even if no data is concealed from the player. If enough elements are, that swings the balance to subjective evaluation and in-game playtesting, and away from numerical paper min/maxing.

In I24, there's an invention proc that offers scaling resistance. Starting from 100%, the lower your health the higher the resistance. It offers MIN((100 - Health)/9,10)% res. Zero at full health, 10% at 10% health, and linearly increasing from full to ten. No concealment, perfect transparency. What's it worth?

I'd call it worthless, unless maybe I could stack at least five of them.

This is a proc that is virtually built for Willpower Armor. When will gets hit hard and you have to break up your DPS to start eating skittles and such it is bad. What is worse? Into a very long TF, no skittles left, and victory in sight, but a health bar creeping (creeping!) downward. Will has nothing it can do but watch. A proc like that would be worth a lot to turn the tide of battle. But it takes 1 enhance slot, and I do not see it helping many other armor types with better built in solutions (heals etc)

Honestly? I would not object to an idea like this. Having a generic set for each AT that does a specified type of damage no matter what it looks like, has no overall secondary effect (like knockback) and has the option to choose your own look and animations would really be pretty appealing to me.