Black Scorpion's Guide to Farewell Posts
By
Angry_Citizen,
Posted on: 2012-10-16 17:56 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Thanks for giving us a little peek behind the scenes, Scorpion. I can only imagine how much "fun" it was, trying to duct tape new features onto that legacy code. Which is yet another reason it's a shame that COH2 never got off the ground...I would love to see what kind of systems you guys could come up with, building from the ground up with 8 years of hindsight.
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Still monitoring this frequency... just realized I'd never logged into the forums from my new workstation. Wow. Yet another depressing thing.
Thanks so much for all the hard work! You have/had (ARGH!) my dream job. I wish you only the best. Hey, thanks again. Just because I can.
Here's a very random, technical/bug question:
For years(?) there has been some kind of bug with the character age recording. I can't tell you what triggers it, but the result seems to be that the characters age (in hours) gets shifted one decimal point. So say a character that I just *coughPLd* will be 67 hours old. I didn't mind this so much for new alts...but it made it impossible to find out how much time I put into some of my old alts.
Any idea what was going on here?
I reported this bug at least twice and I'm pretty sure the response both times was "there is no bug".
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I'm guessing the stat being checked was total time, and the method you were checking that was clicking on an NPC and being told your total time that way. (if this is inaccurate let me know and I'll try to think about how that was done instead). It was pretty much just a count of seconds stored on your character and updated each time your character was saved to the db. If that count was accurate in the db, then the output method probably had some sort of bug - that was probably traceable. If the count was not correct in the db, then there was some sort of subtle db container bug - and that usually rated a complete table flip on the "scale of how hard this bug is going to be to fix" meter.
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Originally Posted by Lobster
For years(?) there has been some kind of bug with the character age recording. I can't tell you what triggers it, but the result seems to be that the characters age (in hours) gets shifted one decimal point. So say a character that I just *coughPLd* will be 67 hours old. I didn't mind this so much for new alts...but it made it impossible to find out how much time I put into some of my old alts.
Any idea what was going on here? I reported this bug at least twice and I'm pretty sure the response both times was "there is no bug". |
Okay just thought of a long standing 'bug' that's been out ever since CoV was released (or the first issue after cov forgot 
).
In Seer Marino's arc, you get a mission in Mercy Island to do whatever (look for info on Ghost Widow ?).
That mission is inside an actual building in Mercy. Kind of like St. Martial Giza temple missions.
You complete that mission and the next mission you get is also in Mercy; however, the UI marker for the mission is off and has always been off. If you look at the mini-map, I think, the marker was correct but the actual in-game UI marker was in/at the doors into and out of the building you were in.
Only logging out and then back in "solved" the issue.
What's up with that? 
Sure it's a very low priority bug to fix but...you can't tell me Null the Gull couldn't have solved the issue within the time frame the bug has been around (again, since CoV or whenever Seer Marino was introduced). 
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Thanks so much for all your work on the game, Black Scorpion. I wish we could have seen everything that you had in store for it.
Edit: I see you mentioned the possibility of powerset/AT respecs. Was that actually planned/in the works? Can you say how would it have worked?
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Originally Posted by Liquid
Thanks so much for all your work on the game, Black Scorpion.
Edit: I see you mentioned the possibility of powerset/AT respecs. Was that actually planned/in the works? Can you say how would it have worked? |
I agree. >I wish we could have seen everything that you had in store for it.
Damn, powerset/AT respecs would've been cool...
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1. thank you for all your hard work
2. can you tell me more about the reward tables for incarnate trials, how they were awarded etc?
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Waypoints were always sent to the client in terms of the final destination - just the X,Y,Z of where you were to go. The pathfinding beacon system would try to construct the actual shown waypoint at whatever transitional doors stood between you and the destination. This system had some edge case problems - the pathing could get caught in a loop sometimes, but it worked most of the time. It's also possible from your description that it was trying to do the pathfinding "too early" - as in, while you were inside the door instead of just outside of the door - and that's why it was pointing back at the door you came from. Logging in and out would cause it to remake that path at your new position, which would be valid.|
Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
Okay just thought of a long standing 'bug' that's been out ever since CoV was released (or the first issue after cov forgot
).In Seer Marino's arc, you get a mission in Mercy Island to do whatever (look for info on Ghost Widow ?). That mission is inside an actual building in Mercy. Kind of like St. Martial Giza temple missions. You complete that mission and the next mission you get is also in Mercy; however, the UI marker for the mission is off and has always been off. If you look at the mini-map, I think, the marker was correct but the actual in-game UI marker was in/at the doors into and out of the building you were in. Only logging out and then back in "solved" the issue. What's up with that? |
Actual bugs with that pathing were terra incognita, we no longer had enough knowledge around the team to figure out how that system worked on the level of comprehension necessary to resolve it. It would have been first rediscovery then resolution - and the rediscovery task never seemed worth it in terms of time investment, considering how apparently minor the issues were. It could have been a trivial fix, but the knowledge of where and how to find that trivial fix in the system was not in anyone's head. While we did push a lot into those darker areas, some (pathing, collision) were still very dimly understood.
It's also possible the system that send the next waypoint to the client was broken in some way. There were some ways to advance a task (delivery tasks/dialog trees) that weren't 100% on the "oh and now you have to send all the updated task status stuff to the client" portion of doing things. Again, logging in and out would cause the server to resend all the client data from scratch, which usually fixed those sorts of bugs.
I remember someone in a team I was on summoning Amy Jonsson to help out in a particularly difficult mission. She turned up, and we all thought she was going to help..... and then she slaughtered the entire party.
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Technically, if we had done it it would likely have been similar to a respec/second build process but with resetting even more decisions on the part of character creation. 50% of the work would have been in UI at least. Likely it would have been presented a high value MTX to cover the amount of work that would need to go into it, but even then it was likely to be too rare to pay for itself, I imagine. (And the opportunity costs of someone full respeccing instead of making an alt also came up in discussions)|
Originally Posted by Liquid
Thanks so much for all your work on the game, Black Scorpion. I wish we could have seen everything that you had in store for it.
Edit: I see you mentioned the possibility of powerset/AT respecs. Was that actually planned/in the works? Can you say how would it have worked? |
Design wise, it also wasn't being pushed for because a) it did have a high technical cost, and b) we didn't want to diminish the value of alts. If we had managed to get more of an account wide inventory concept, a lot of the reason to full respec would have gone away, in my opinion, and I tended to push more on that angle because it seemed a closer goal.
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Probably the Gang bug at work. We were cleaning up bugs caused by needing to allow Vigilantes (internally Heroes) to seamlessly team with Villains on Villain maps (and vice versa with Rogues) for a very, very long time. When we came up with systemic fixes, flawed (but "worked at the time") data was exposed that needed to be fixed. The hostility system on COH was not really equipped to handle what Going Rogue needed, and it tended to show.
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Originally Posted by Kallandra
I remember someone in a team I was on summoning Amy Jonsson to help out in a particularly difficult mission. She turned up, and we all thought she was going to help..... and then she slaughtered the entire party.
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We tracked how long you were engaged in the trial (in case you joined midway, for instance) and if you were active.|
Originally Posted by Kractis_Sky
can you tell me more about the reward tables for incarnate trials, how they were awarded etc?
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If you were marked as "not active", you got the 10 threads table. This calculation was the source of much controversy outside of the studio, but Baryonyx and Positron worked tirelessly to ensure fairness - it was very heavily weighted in the player's favor and made substantial accounting for all ATs. (This isn't to say we never had any bugs with it, but that was the design intention as I recall).
The calculations for stages engaged in the trial were crafted for each trial individually, and we did see some strange results on occasion - the system was resilient to disconnects but esp. in the early days of I20 when the TUT could accidentally send you to someone else's mission map it proved to be not *that* resilient. This did have an effect on what mix of rarities were in your reward pool at the end of the IT - and at least for a brief period if you were only in for say, a very short time, it could give you 10 threads as well, but I am hazy on that point.
At the end, if you were "active", you got to roll in a pool based upon stages engaged - this looked something like 40% Common, 30% Uncommon, 25% Rare, 5% Very Rare if you were there for the whole time. Partial time looked like 60% Common, 30% Uncommon, 10% Rare.
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First off, thanks for all you've done. It must have been a nightmare trying to fix eight+ year old code, especially if a lot of the original authors aren't there anymore.|
Originally Posted by Black Scorpion
Hello Villains and Heroes,
Things I Wanted To Fix
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More account-wide stuff would have been great. One of the few things that irked me was, for people with alt-itis (i.e. everyone), grinding out the accolades on every alt was sometimes a chore. 100 Fake Nemesi here, six Task Forces there, and don't even get me started on Geas of the Kind Ones.
If you don't mind going into what-if land, would it have been within the realm of possibility for Accolades to be account-wide? (subject to level restrictions).
Farewell, and thanks again!
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Likely all of them. We may have done some sort of partial thing where each 1 character you had with the accolade counted as 20% of the benefit from that accolade - the idea being if you had 5 of them you'd get the accolade on all your characters. I think the level restriction would have been something small, like 4, just to keep you from getting them in the tutorial or really early on.|
Originally Posted by Interface
More account-wide stuff would have been great. One of the few things that irked me was, for people with alt-itis (i.e. everyone), grinding out the accolades on every alt was sometimes a chore. 100 Fake Nemesi here, six Task Forces there, and don't even get me started on Geas of the Kind Ones.
If you don't mind going into what-if land, would it have been within the realm of possibility for Accolades to be account-wide? (subject to level restrictions). |
A lot of the 100 kill X badges we had some thought experiments about what we could do there, but it came down to the fact that most of our creative ideas didn't work well with preserving people's currently earned credit towards that badge, and we wanted to be backwards compatible with the changes.
I would have liked to see the "ungettable badges" become account wide. DOPE and Doorbuster were examples of how I wanted that to unfold, but they were both hacks compared to how I wanted it to go.
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Originally Posted by Black Scorpion
Waypoints were always sent to the client in terms of the final destination - just the X,Y,Z of where you were to go. The pathfinding beacon system would try to construct the actual shown waypoint at whatever transitional doors stood between you and the destination. This system had some edge case problems - the pathing could get caught in a loop sometimes, but it worked most of the time. It's also possible from your description that it was trying to do the pathfinding "too early" - as in, while you were inside the door instead of just outside of the door - and that's why it was pointing back at the door you came from. Logging in and out would cause it to remake that path at your new position, which would be valid.
Actual bugs with that pathing were terra incognita, we no longer had enough knowledge around the team to figure out how that system worked on the level of comprehension necessary to resolve it. It would have been first rediscovery then resolution - and the rediscovery task never seemed worth it in terms of time investment, considering how apparently minor the issues were. It could have been a trivial fix, but the knowledge of where and how to find that trivial fix in the system was not in anyone's head. While we did push a lot into those darker areas, some (pathing, collision) were still very dimly understood. It's also possible the system that send the next waypoint to the client was broken in some way. There were some ways to advance a task (delivery tasks/dialog trees) that weren't 100% on the "oh and now you have to send all the updated task status stuff to the client" portion of doing things. Again, logging in and out would cause the server to resend all the client data from scratch, which usually fixed those sorts of bugs. |
Ah okay, cool! Thanks for the info.!
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Black Scorpion
We tracked how long you were engaged in the trial (in case you joined midway, for instance) and if you were active.
If you were marked as "not active", you got the 10 threads table. This calculation was the source of much controversy outside of the studio, but Baryonyx and Positron worked tirelessly to ensure fairness - it was very heavily weighted in the player's favor and made substantial accounting for all ATs. (This isn't to say we never had any bugs with it, but that was the design intention as I recall). The calculations for stages engaged in the trial were crafted for each trial individually, and we did see some strange results on occasion - the system was resilient to disconnects but esp. in the early days of I20 when the TUT could accidentally send you to someone else's mission map it proved to be not *that* resilient. This did have an effect on what mix of rarities were in your reward pool at the end of the IT - and at least for a brief period if you were only in for say, a very short time, it could give you 10 threads as well, but I am hazy on that point. At the end, if you were "active", you got to roll in a pool based upon stages engaged - this looked something like 40% Common, 30% Uncommon, 25% Rare, 5% Very Rare if you were there for the whole time. Partial time looked like 60% Common, 30% Uncommon, 10% Rare. |
Hmm, interesting.
One more question about the iTrials...
When the UG (and Keyes/etc...) got "buffed" so that the UG always gave a Rare or Very Rare; I've been in runs where one person in particular (an sgmate) always seemed to dc mid-way through but he'd get back in 5 minutes or so.
He always got the 10 thread drop (I'm pretty sure at least).
So did the system know that you went through stages 1-3 of the UG; then dc then come back for stages 5 (maybe even 4-5) or was it a "fresh start" when you entered back into the iTrial?
Leader of The LEGION/Fallen LEGION on the Liberty server!
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Quote:
Should have remembered the previous presence, that behavior sounds like a bug. The system shouldn't have ditched the history that quickly.
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Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
So did the system know that you went through stages 1-3 of the UG; then dc then come back for stages 5 (maybe even 4-5) or was it a "fresh start" when you entered back into the iTrial?
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All I want to say at this momment is..Thank you so much for this game. I hate MMOs, But sure enough, I really liked this one, and only played this one from it's start. And so did my mother, father, wife and I was going to buy my 3 1/2 year old daughter her own account right, and I mean right before I found out about this games closing. And yes old people like this game too I am 40, so my parents are up there 
Take care brother gamer.
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Thanks for the info. This, right here, embodies two of the best things about CoH; that the devs were constantly coming up with more quality of life improvements, and that they actually talk to to the players. Most game designers seem to think the players should be thanking them for taking their money.|
Originally Posted by Black Scorpion
Likely all of them. We may have done some sort of partial thing where each 1 character you had with the accolade counted as 20% of the benefit from that accolade - the idea being if you had 5 of them you'd get the accolade on all your characters. I think the level restriction would have been something small, like 4, just to keep you from getting them in the tutorial or really early on.
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If you're still there, there's one tiny thing that's been bothering me for months now. In Studio 55, on the middle floor is a small off the way bar with a pair of restroom doors. Over the ladies' room door is a select volume (the cursor turns to a blue hand), although clicking it does nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/8KkEP.jpg
What was planned for this? Would Bobcat run over and attack if a male character clicks it? An unmarked mission where Snakes slither out of the toilets? Personally, I was envisioning a Deus Ex type scenario the next time you talk to Calvin Scott. "By the way, $name, stay out of the ladies restroom. That kind of activity embarrasses the Resistance more than it does you."
Thanks for posting all this, Black Scorpion. Some very interesting insights here.
Speaking of odd things in maps, any idea what (if anything) was planned for the hidden, normally inaccessible portal warehouses in King's Row and Port Oakes?
The ones in Talos and Sharkhead that only Praetorians can get into kind of make sense if they were intended to be Rift Enclosure transit points before that got scrapped, or possibly the destination for the Go to Primal Earth mission, even if the door isn't the same place as the transition missions drop you off at.
Dear Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney,
THANK YOU for your many contributions to City of Heroes!! It wasn't the first MMORPG gamer friends showed me but it was the first I played for more than a few hours and the only one I've stuck with. While other MMORPGs had various things going for them, none entertained me nearly as well.
Since we are sharing memories, as an older gamer (50s) I was favorably impressed at how well this MMO could emulate the experience one has in live action role-playing and tabletop (pen and dice) gaming. I still love all the nifty emotes built into CoH and the versatility of the character/costumes creator. It was clear that a lot of thought had gone into game balance, and overall I think you were highly successful in this and many other areas.
Yeah the bugs and glitches could be annoying, but occasionally also funny. One of my characters had a rescue mission and was leading the NPC out but when we got to the final ramp (sorry I've no idea now which mission this was) the NPC would turn around and walk away, then would follow again only to repeat. I was fortunate in that my petition found a game staff GM able to assist me fairly quickly. The GM asked me to invite him to team and appeared as a camera (like when watching a match in the Arena). I showed him what was happening and he said, ok, try leading her (the NPC) out again. I said, "Alright but she won't follow me" and the GM said, "That's okay; she knows me." That and a million other little memories still make me smile.
I started under Issue 15 and was entirely happy with CoH and with each Issue the development team took this really great game and made it even greater!! You all did a fantastic job!!
THANK YOU!!!
/em fancybow
John
aka @Kristoff von Gelmini, leader of small SG bases (Infinity/Victory/Virtue/Protector), member of The House of Tera (Justice) and various others (Champion/Infinity/Victory/Guardian/Freedom).
Late to this thread, as I've been away from the forums for a few days.
Black Scorp,
- Thanks, for the stuff you did. This is the only MMO I've ever come close to wanting to play forever. Everyone who had a role in it gets my thanks, and yours wasn't a small role.
- Thanks, for the stuff you're describing that you didn't get to work/fix/implement. A lot of it sounds cool and/or I would have liked to have seen it work that way.
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Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
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Originally Posted by Black Scorpion
We tracked how long you were engaged in the trial (in case you joined midway, for instance) and if you were active.
If you were marked as "not active", you got the 10 threads table. This calculation was the source of much controversy outside of the studio, but Baryonyx and Positron worked tirelessly to ensure fairness - it was very heavily weighted in the player's favor and made substantial accounting for all ATs. (This isn't to say we never had any bugs with it, but that was the design intention as I recall). The calculations for stages engaged in the trial were crafted for each trial individually, and we did see some strange results on occasion - the system was resilient to disconnects but esp. in the early days of I20 when the TUT could accidentally send you to someone else's mission map it proved to be not *that* resilient. This did have an effect on what mix of rarities were in your reward pool at the end of the IT - and at least for a brief period if you were only in for say, a very short time, it could give you 10 threads as well, but I am hazy on that point. At the end, if you were "active", you got to roll in a pool based upon stages engaged - this looked something like 40% Common, 30% Uncommon, 25% Rare, 5% Very Rare if you were there for the whole time. Partial time looked like 60% Common, 30% Uncommon, 10% Rare. |
AAH but it was completely broken when it came to Masterminds. They did not calculate Pet involvement. My husband ran a Merc/FF MM during Itrials and if he wasn't constantly spamming bubbles he got the "Thanks for coming" Table. Even if he was actively managing his pets and not guarding and charging.
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Off and on, I've toyed with the idea, but there were critical problems with the math in certain areas, like AoE ally buffs, which are a lot easier to solve with custom critters. I would look at it, think about it, and then put it back on the shelf.
I believe I solved those problems at the beginning of the year. As soon as Blaster fixes were launched in I24, I was planning on hitting you with an email describing "a point-based open power-tree epic archetype."
I wish we could have kicked that around.
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