Arcanaville

This statement is only true for a subset of the forum community. Removing the word "only" makes it true for the rest of the forum community.

True, but its become more clear to me now that almost *none* of the numbers really mean what most players think they mean, and actually thinking they mean something actually misleads players more than it guides them. What does 41% defense mean? The english sentence that best answers that question doesn't even contain the number 41. Percentages in particular are highly problematic.

Also, my original equations above aren't actually diminishing returns equations. They are more properly described as multiplicative constant return equations.

In any event, if I were designing a combat system from scratch today, I would deliberately make the base numbers not mean things the mechanics wouldn't obey. In other words, either 41% defense means 41 percent of something specific and meaningful, or its a 41 rating and the percents and the misleading connection to hit chance goes out the window. To reinforce that, it would be a 410 rating to shatter the association completely.

To be honest, I wouldn't even have "resistance" and "defense" in my game. Those things are inversely related to survivability, and why should the game force people to think about inverse relationships. I would rate so-called resistance abilities and defensive ones by admittance, the made-up metric I invented that no one else uses that specifies how much damage gets through rather than gets blocked. Or more specifically, by inverse admittance.

A 100 rating resistance power would be twice as strong as a 200 rating resistance power. Meaning you'd live twice as long with the 200 power. That's really easy for the casuals to figure out. The *math* is a lot harder for the min/maxers to deal with, but tough.

I'd take that bet. However, I must take note here that only one person can really take that bet, and I'm one and oh against this particular individual.

You really think that, don't you? The second sentence, not the third.

For the record, I believe in design balance not numerical balance. To me, numbers are the language of game design. Numerical balance for the sake of numerical balance is like always speaking in Haiku.

It is *impossible* to numerically balance single target damage and AoE damage. They are not structurally congruent: there will always be an infinite number of situations where one or the other is vastly superior. The only numerical solution is to give everyone the same amount of each. Ditto regeneration and mitigation, ditto defense and resistance, ditto resistance debuffs and damage buffs.

The only way to balance these things numerically is to make sure everyone has the same amount of all of them. All other forms of presumptive numerical balancing are trivially assailable.

In another thread the subject of incomparables was mentioned. I believe the thing that a game like ours must balance is gameplay opportunity. And the presumption is that all reasonable gameplay opportunities have the same value: they are in effect incomparables. Within that context, the best possible quantitative expression of that design should be made. In that sense, "balance" isn't about equality at all in a quantitative sense, its about everything hitting their targets. The equality assertion occurs at the qualitative level.


Its often come up where people question what exactly I mean when I say I believe in quantative balancing, but only within the scope of design balance, and I do not believe in the philosophy that "game balance" requires homogenization. This is what I mean. Homogenization doesn't create game balance in my judgment, it eliminates gameplay opportunities by reducing the number of different possibilities. It doesn't balance: it destroys. It doesn't have to balance, when there's only one thing left.

The very first homogeneity-breaking design decision made in this version of City of Heroes was the invention of the archetype: a decision that was derided for a long time after launch. Having seen what happens when they don't exist, its obvious that the benefits of archetypes has historically been vastly underestimated.


Everyone has their own notion of game design and what they believe "balance" means. However, its critically important to note that there is no such thing as a singular quantitative objective: there isn't a "right answer" that calculations eventually deliver. My calculations will take me to places other people's calculations will not, and its not because of arithmetical errors. Its because of a fundamental difference of opinion in where the game should go. Numbers are silent on that question.

I wouldn't put that on your job application for game designer.

Only if the DR system was written by idiots.

The alternative which works equally well for the mitigators is to simply use variations of the duration equation for magnitude stacking of defense and resistance.

I.e. Damage = BaseDamage / (1 + NetResistanceBuff)

A combination of diminishing stacking returns, plus buff stack limits. The latter actually exists now in a form 99.999% of the playerbase is unaware the devs could retroactively implement at any time (think: Hybrid).

Stack caps address superstacking the same buffs. DR addresses attempting to get around that by stacking different buffs. You can still stack different *kinds* of buffs, but that's not a problem: that's the reason different kinds of buffs exist.

Does it create problems? Sure. Are they worse than what we have now? That's a purely subjective call. If we had them to begin with, asking for what we have now would be equally insane.


Necessary to get the results you want? Probably. Necessary in the absolute sense? Ask the PvPers.

Even over the internet, you'd still technically be outside their window. And walls, and doors.


Unless, OH MY GOD THE STREAM IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

The holy trinity of ERP: Empathy, Devices, and Mind Control on the blue side; Pain Domination, Electric Control and Beast Mastery on the red side.


And Mod09 missed this thread by mere days.

The devs agree, which is why I would love for them to be convinced the players are equally perturbed about the side effects of not addressing the problem, so that cottage rule protection is significantly weakened.

Don't even kid about it. First you make a badge, then everyone has to farm it. Farming ERP is the seventh seal of the apocalypse (which is why it requires a golden censer).

How many people's sex lives are you observing from outside their windows?

You assume I'm actually remotely concerned about the consequences of promoting this topic. Actually, if I was in charge I would have done it years ago and taken the heat for it gladly. So by all means, continue.

That does seem strange. No discussion of a spanking for anything less than a B? Are you sure you weren't on Infinity?

Look, for the last time there is no City of Heroes 2, and it's not a joint collaboration with Cinemax.

Don't say I didn't provide fair warning. There is only one solution to the issue of saturation buffing creating imbalances at the caps. One. And once the devs decide its necessarily, it will no longer matter if its unpalatable.

It also makes sense that if your super attack that drains you of all strength fails to kill everything, the guy you missed with that super attack should be able to walk up to you and bash your head with a rock, or at least shoot you with his pistol and kill you dead.

Discussing saturation buffing is opening Pandora's box. Demanding the devs take action in situations where buffing easily sends people to the caps leads to only one place, and its not rebalancing the caps.

And as I keep telling people, warning them actually, you can ask the devs to look. You cannot control what they do once they see. To get what you want here, you have to convince the devs its worth looking at this situation, *and then* in rapid succession convince them that cap adjustments are the correct avenue to address them. Good luck with that.

Not specifically to single you out, but I love how players enjoy telling the devs what they were thinking when they made a change, based on their logical conclusions about what they must have been thinking, regardless of what they were actually thinking. I can tell you it impresses them to no end to know there are people that know what they are thinking better than they do.

Alternatively, its possible the effect was designed with SOs in mind for its base behavior, and then inventions were considered to determine how well it could be made to perform by players that use them.

Actually, that's a really bad example. Surviving Really Hard Way attempts is 90% skill, 10% archetype ability. Since lightning kills anyone that doesn't maneuver correctly. Generally, I tend to live longer on such runs and fire more consistently that most melee characters (who are under generally higher threat from high density lightning bursts from nearby players).

Blasters are more likely to die during Lambda attempts, during TPNs, during lots of incarnate content given players of equal skill. But not so much Really Hard Way. In fact, in an ironic twist in one hard way attempt I ended up dying often because far from being out DPSed, I was so good at sidestepping lightning and resuming attacking on my Blaster that Tyrant aggroed on me as the only thing dealing damage to him several times.

If anything, one of the big complaints about later trials is that they seem to deliberately try to make life difficult for melee relative to ranged archetypes.

I have never understood people who lack the self-preservation skills to take every possible precaution to not have a public presentation implode. Like, say, rehearsing.

Becoming the game's best farmer means the same thing to me as becoming its most accurate superjumper. I would be impressed by the effort put into achieving that goal, but at the end of the day its more of a curiosity than anything else.

I think that once the changes actually hit beta, a compromise can be made. Arbiter Hawk is not unreasonable about that, and I am willing to let the Drain Psyche issue drop until we actually have a better idea what everyone is actually getting, and that survives the first beta balance pass.

I accept the fact that not everyone uses Drain Psyche in a way that makes its net results overpowered, and that min/maxers have invested a lot in optimizing the power. My main complaint about DP is in fact that it has these two regimes of performance. But I honestly don't think DP will remain in its current configuration for very long once the sustain powers arrive. Given the devs reluctance to nerf it, there are still alternatives that would allow DP to retain its top end power while granting lower performance players most or all of the sustain benefits everyone else is getting. I can think of several ways to do that, but I don't know how useful it is to expend too much energy debating them in a vacuum.

We really need to see how the clicks work in I24: Energize, Force of Thunder, and Touch of Beyond. How they are balanced relative to stacking and recharge is critical to any real discussion about what happens to DP in the future.