Arcanaville

That sounds more like a vote for Hostess.

But could you clear a map with it for full XP?

Its important, I believe, that while keeping the victims of the shooting in our thoughts we give no more power to the gunman than he deserves. Which is to say, none. You don't attack a public place in a stunt like this unless you want to divert people's attention to yourself, something I have no intention of doing. I have honestly already forgotten his name.

A week from now, a month from now, a year from now I will be interested to know, from a pathological perspective, why this person did what they did. At the moment, as that knowledge serves no immediate beneficial purpose, I don't really care. I don't even care enough about him to denigrate him.

Its difficult, for some impossible, but we shouldn't let a random nobody steal any more from us than we can prevent, and that includes living our lives as if he's unimportant. His victims are important. He's not.

The reason why the system of +5 sword of thwacking vs +4 armor of unthwacking works is actually because GMs consciously ensure that the range of combat makes sense during play. You don't have players with +3 power scooters going up against enemies with +30 hand grenades. Which we had here. A human being wouldn't allow that to continue.

This is how having many different effects you can mix and match helps. If you debuff endurance discount so attacks cost more *and* you also continue to apply drain, the enddisc debuff will hit both ranks proportionately hard, but the drain will stack up faster on the minions, disabling them quicker.

The only real problem this sort of thing has is that you have to be very careful about stacking.

Actually, its two things. One: human GMs that can bend the rules. Two: the rate of combat.

Setting aside regeneration is actually something you can't validly do when comparing the systems. How fast do D&D characters regenerate? That's actually the most important question you can ask about a combat system: what is sustainable? In most pnp games sustainability is extremely low. In CoH its far higher normally, and can be made even higher than that. That one difference changes everything.

You're mistaken.

There are many parts to the game that produce visually different results. That produce mechanically different results. That have different functional gameplay.

But that's irrelevant. Eric Schaefer does understand this fundamental point about game design:

I know what Power Blast will do in the game. And I know there's no way to teleport yourself a better version of Power Blast. I know if you run away from critters you'll take less damage. I don't have to care how many possible ways there are to run away. I only need to know that while you run away they can't really shoot at you effectively, and you can't shoot back effectively. I also don't have to be particularly accurate with my guestimates on how much loss in effectiveness that situation has.

This game, like most games, is ultimately balanced around progressional rewards. XP, in other words, and secondarily influence and drops. Its possible to determine optimal rates of earning XP under different conditions that the game balances for. Its possible to declare situations out of bounds on the high side that are tolerated but not balanced for. And its also possible to declare situations out of bounds on the low side that because they are on the low side, we don't care about them at all. If you want to hover snipe your way to level 50, since that's ten times slower than normal soloing I don't care if the critters can't shoot back.

I don't have to analyze how every single piece of the game can possibly function, any more than I have to track every air molecule in the sky to know its going to rain. I especially don't need to track every droplet of water in the sky to know that if I go outside I'll get wet.


Its not particularly easy. Its not spectacularly hard. Its just not done. I'm sure gaming history is full of people who have made the claim that it was possible and then failed miserably to actually be able to do it. That impresses me not even a little bit.

The world worked fine in the days of Roman numerals. It just works far better with Arabic arithmetic.

I don't doubt that its possible to create a good game without a strong mathematical foundation. I question why its presented as an either/or proposition more times than not. You can make a good game in BASIC. But I would be astonished if the game development community, and only the game development community, constantly recruited programmers who only knew BASIC just because its possible to make a good game in BASIC. Its possible. It also permanently anchors you in the dark ages of what's possible.

One person making a game in BASIC is a curiosity. The whole industry doing it is mass insanity.

The problem with endurance drain effects is that they leverage only two endurance affecting effects: direct -end and -recovery. Both are heavily backloaded effects: they allow the critter to continue to attack until they run out of endurance, they just will run out earlier. They take away the future, but they do nothing to the present.

That's not impossible to change. Critters use endurance just like we do (lots of players think they don't). Small attacks use a little end, big attacks use a lot. Can we drain a critter so they can use the small ones now, but not the big ones now, as in an immediate effect? Yes: we can debuff MaxEnd. By lowering the maximum amount of endurance they have without touching recovery rate per se, we can continue to allow them to use small attacks but we can put a ceiling on the largest attack they can use, and that can essentially take effect instantly.

We can also manipulate endurance usage: we can debuff EndDisc - endurance discount. By debuffing it, we can make all the critter's attacks take more endurance. So instead of halting recovery, we can make the critter burn through endurance faster. The more the critter attacks, the faster they will burn through endurance and the faster they will tap out. This would be particularly useful against bosses.

And debuffing EndDisc while more backloaded has a similar side effect as debuffing MaxEnd. Once a critter is reduced to zero endurance, without -recovery they will still recover endurance. They will do so in ticks just like we do. They will have zero end, and then suddenly they will suddenly have 6.67% more endurance which they can use to attack. On a minion, that's 6.67 end: the largest attack they can use with that one tick of recovery burns 6.67 end. But on a boss its 13.33 end: bosses can use larger attacks with that recovery tick. Unless we make their attacks cost more, like if we debuff endurance discount.

The game currently doesn't begin to scratch the surface of what's possible with drain effects. Its just a question of putting the right set of them together in a balanced fashion. The rest is numbers tweaking (but would take several more pages to illustrate the calculations necessary to do so).

This is just one of those things where I've come to realize game designers aren't students of their own field. When he says he doesn't balance the game, he's simply introduced a different balancing system into the game: one where powers and abilities degrade in relative ability with progression, so there's an automatic negative reinforcement that the more powerful an ability is in terms of its ability to make you level, the less amount of time you can use it for - because it will outlevel itself.

Around these parts we system engineers call that "intrinsic reward rate-based balance."

And if he really doesn't balance the system, why is he concerned about ironing out the "crazy peaks?" Because he does care about balance, he just wants to do it the long way.


Also, the really different way he thinks he's doing it now is how Cryptic and now Paragon Studios has done it for about ten years, initially because it was the only way they knew how, and now because it would be too complicated to do it any other way. Arbiter Hawk seems to be the most number crunching dev we've had since Weirdbeard, but he doesn't use that number crunching to "balance" the game in the conventional sense, but to generate the results he's aiming for, which aren't necessarily what traditional balance would dictate. Its still very much balance by iteration.

I reiterate the question: what do you think I mean when I say "make endurance drain work?"

One day I should write a book on CoH. I could call it &^!@ The Devs Said.

Of course, all the devs would have to be dead before then, or at least incapable of significant travel.

I'm not a WoW expert, but based on what I do know about WoW I would say that fundamentally speaking WoW is a much simpler game to analyze. There's more "stuff" but the stuff itself is not difficult to figure out what it does precisely.

CoH combat is actually very complex to analyze, relative to practically all other MMOs. And that's because most MMOs are built on models that make them easy to analyze so the *developers* can predict what will happen. The original CoH devs got that one horribly, horribly wrong in this game. They created a game that exceeded their ability to analyze. Eight years later we're still developing the analysis tools to analyze this game.

Its not so much outrageous so much as its never going to happen. The devs have already announced the snipe change. The change already exists in the I24 build. They aren't going to completely reverse the work they did on them without some direct evidence that those changes *don't* work at all. Which you won't be able to provide prior to I24 reaching beta.

If you're going to play the min/max metagame against your players, you have to be better mathematicians. And that ain't hard for real mathematicians. We're still discussing the true benefit of Scourge years later, and the only credible answer anyone has to how strong the SR passive resistances are is "I think Arcanaville said something like 15% a few years ago**." And yet, there's nothing difficult to explain when it comes to how either works. They are just difficult to min/max around without complex math.

If you play this meta game for real, its actually easier to design a game difficult to min/max than it is to analyze a game made difficult to analyze. The advantage is with the system designer. But only if they actually play the game to win.

From a game design perspective, the problem isn't math. The problem is moves. CoH is designed for combat to resolve itself in a small number of moves (i.e. attacks). And that reduces the level of complexity of combat substantially. That puts the designers in a whole in terms of the maximum complexity horizon they can introduce. But its not impossible to still make a highly complex and unpredictable game within those limits.

Unfortunately, the main area we see this in CoH is in scaling stacking debuffs. A critter group that is a pushover at +0x2 suddenly becomes a nightmare at +0x6 when their debuffs start self-amplifying and the speed at which they can suddenly kill you rises exponentially.


** Closer to 24%, actually

Of course, that's one perspective. There were a lot of people who for a long time complained that the LRSF and STF were fairly exclusive, and there existed no way to build power to eventually beat it if you couldn't already beat it. Until the invention system came along and created a treadmill that wasn't directly connected to it, but indirectly provided just such a progressional path.

People don't want treadmills, until they need treadmills. And there's no such thing as never needing one for all players: unless the content is so easy everyone can do it with their eyes closed, reasonably difficult high end content will eventually escape the capabilities of some players. And then its either provide a path to grow, which inevitably creates some creep, or tell them tough luck.

Here, there is no universally best choice.

You're talking theoretical. There's no reason to talk theoretical. We know what happens here. We know what happened in CO. Case closed.

Hold that thought.

Now go back and actually read what I said:

When I say make endurance drain work properly, do you actually believe I mean "make short circuit work properly, because if I'm going to make endurance drain work effectively, I'm only going to improve it for powers that are already effective."

The following Electric Blast powers have endurance drain effects in them and have more than melee or PBAoE range and are available prior to level 31.

Charged Bolts
Lightning Bolt
Ball Lightning
Zapp
Tesla Cage
Voltaic Sentinel


Because you've shown a cavalier attitude towards eliminating powers other players actually use. People actually use short circuit. There are players actually looking forward to the fast snipe. Some people like the unique aspect of Voltaic Sentinel and want only minor adjustments to the power to improve its effectiveness without altering what it does fundamentally.

If you don't like a power, don't take it. If you don't like it to the point of deciding its time to get rid of it entirely, you have to be prepared to defend that suggestion against every other player that is equally justified in challenging that suggestion. You should not be expecting lots of people to sympathize with your position that the power they are currently getting use out of should be yanked out of their build and replaced with something completely different.

You have to realize you're not just asking for something, you're also asking to take something away. It is in fact completely insane to think that asking for Short Circuit to turn into a single target attack would not generate massive opposition. There are people nervous about the I24 Nuke changes which are almost entirely beneficial. And they do have a right to express their concern about that change. Short Circuit to Dehydrate by comparison is the eponymous sprouting of a cottage.

If you're saying a balanced freeform system will have tradeoffs, and all tradeoff systems are archetype systems in disguise, it will be an archetype system in disguise as you define it. But not as I define it, since it would be impossible to create an archetype system which mirrored its behavior, which is how I define archetype system in disguise.

Here's a tradeoff system that reformats the tradeoffs so that instead of advantages and disadvantages, you have a continuum of options. Suppose you were to create a bunch of attributes, lets call them A, B, and C, and suppose you allowed players to allocate points to these three in any way they wanted. These would be dials that would set three different parameters of their character.

The thing is, these three things don't directly affect anything. Instead, a different set of attributes is calculated from them. V, W, X, Y, and Z are all functions of A, B, and C. Perhaps V is the sum of A and B. W is the product of A and B. X is A/B. You have to choose how to allocate points to A, B, and C, but doing so affects lots of different things.

This is pretty abstract, so it appears confusing, but that's a separate issue. I could call A, B, and C Resilience, Strength, and Endurance. You the player get to choose how much to strengthen each base attribute. But that will affect your derived attributes in different ways. Resilience times Strength might be your Offensive Power. Resilience plus Strength might be your Survivability. Strength/Resilience might be your Speed. Ground the relationships in conceptual touchstones and you can make it intuitive in theory.

But that's a side issue. The design balance issue is that you can embed tradeoffs without needing to invoke actual tradeoffs by simply engineering the actual game mechanics to enforce tradeoffs which the players have full control of, but cannot multilaterally optimize. The players never "give up" anything. They simply can't gain in all directions simultaneously.

What's more, you design the game so that every strength *is* a weakness. The more resistant you are to other things pushing you around, the more resistant you are to moving as well: you're slower. Shields that block incoming damage also partially reduce your damage. Ranged attacks are easier to use on distant targets, but harder to use when someone is standing next to you interfering with your aim. You don't ask the players to give up something to get something, you just make sure nothing is universally good.

There's only one real requirement, and its unfortunately for the MMO industry a doozy. The mechanics and the abilities system *must* be tuned to each other. They cannot be designed independently of each other.

But that's not how MMOs are typically created. And without extremely strong synchronicity, it doesn't work.

In the next patch to the game, Positron in Steel Canyon is thirty feet tall. Do you:

a) Bug it

b) Wait a few years to see if the writers explain it

Because in my opinion, our demorecord feature has always been an enormous untapped strategic tool that could have been developed to add a unique feature to the game that would make the addition of the Architect look like adding a new hat.

Imagine if the game recorded everything we did. Imagine if we could play back everything we did. Imagine if we could share that one time when that thing happened that we never saw before. Imagine video diaries of characters. Animated comic book versions of our story arcs instead of just souvenirs. And they could be made a lot smaller: a half-hour BAF with everything happening in it compresses down to about four megs down from 35 as a test. Four gigabytes could probably hold the entire leveling career of the average character.

The machinima opportunities would be just a niche use of something that could be a primary feature of the game. But even there, I bet you could sell quite a few copies of the game to people who just wanted to make superpowered video animations. But the ability to forward a bullet-time floating camera quick-edit video of a particularly interesting mission to a friend? Who can do that now?

We almost can now. And apparently Paragon Studios thinks that ability is a nuisance, not an opportunity. To me, its completely unfathomable. If it was me, I would hire someone whose sole responsibility was making /demorecord work properly. That would be the only thing he did, from eight am to five pm, Monday to Friday, every week, every month, every year. He would keep working on it until the feature worked perfectly, and he would be empowered to shoot any programmer that broke it.

What about the Incarnate system as its actually implemented gives you that idea?

There's probably no change the devs can make for which that's not true. The I24 blaster sustain changes are going to be good for the average player, and the stuff of wet dreams for min/maxers. But that doesn't mean the average players shouldn't get the good stuff.

Also, although I mentioned increasing slot count, I didn't specify by how many. I did not mean to imply I think Kheldians should get another forty slots to fully slot each of the other two forms. That would be ridiculous. The calculations I did a few years ago suggested that number should be roughly six per alternate form.

At lower levels, what Electric loses compared to Energy in single target offense it makes up for by having a stackable hold. Until I24 rolls around, the single most critical issue for Blasters as datamined by the devs was survivability, not single target offense. Blasters died, often. Higher mitigation therefore should be weighted strongly relative to offense when it comes to comparing blaster primaries for average players under leveling conditions. Electric has a way to permanently disable a boss. Energy doesn't in the general case, unless you count power pushing them while chasing after them.

The notion of a continuous uninterrupted single target chain is itself a fiction for most players of all primaries. Without significant recharge slotting, Energy Blast can't do that with Bolt, Blast, and Burst any more than Electric can with its attacks. So that's not a binary difference either: its one of degree.

In either event, I'd probably just increase Tesla Cage to be a 0.8 DS attack with a 0.5 net DoT and call it a day on single target. I think making endurance drain work properly is a far more important issue to Electric Blast, particularly lower level Electric Blast.

Me too. Maybe one day I'll make one.