UberGuy

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While I'm certainly holding a hard line on the definition of the term "force multiplication" (with a reason: the definition I'm holding is one very commonly used in forum discussions), you're willing to throw out any sense of convention whatsoever to make your point. Fundamentally, you're saying that if we are willing to broaden the definition of something widely enough, consider enough edge cases, discount the actual scale effects of powers, and probably assume that players choose the most optimally efficient ways to play, a Scrapper is a force multiplier.

Given that broad scope in defining terms and conditions, we could probably also consider them one of the three major food groups, or a mid-sized sedan.

I mean, seriously, claiming that if force multipler character A only gets to function as such because character B keeps them alive, character B is therefore a force multiplier really stretches the limits of logic. If character A and the other 6 characters on the team we all Scrappers, there would be no force multipliers (+Dam/-DR) in play at all, proving character B doesn't supply any.

I don't think so. However, if the bug has been present since I9, it's possible that it would seem this way.

Based on the description pohsyb gave, the best case scenario is that the game actually gives you all the successful random drop rolls you get. So for people that the uninitialized variable worked out for just right, they would get all the drops they were due, while other people might get something less than that. However, as described, no one should be getting better drops (on average) than that.

However, if you are someone who's getting less than your "due" in drops, someone who's getting their "due" is going to seem like they have better luck than you.

I think an interesting question is: was this bug doing more than we know? We have TopDoc's pre-I16 farming thread, which seems to track pretty well with known drop probabilities. Other than that, we don't have a whole lot of other statistical data that I know of about pre-I16 drop averages. Is it possible a lot of people were getting less drops than the assigned probabilities would suggest? If so, fixing this bug might create some noticeable supply increases in pool As, purples and boss pool Cs.

That doesn't jive with testing I was involved in. At that time, you could always create an invasion as long as you didn't turn in salvage before the next in-game midnight after another invasion had been created.

Is it known to have changed to a random chance?

I rarely find this problematic. I just take some power at this level that doesn't need more than 4 slots. Often, I can stick something there that will get by with one slot, and use the level 50 slots elsewhere entirely.

Why think that, when no one generally perceived a difference until this issue?

Flea is channeling Teh Ocho!

I really feel this needs to be emphasized.

Some of the most regular TF runners I know run them at level 50 on well-established characters who are not only extra effective due to long familiarity, but also often well-honed builds, sometimes further enhanced with powerful Inventions. A TF at default difficulty is, for such people, absolutely no challenge at all.

I know full well not everyone wants or needs extra challenge, which is not an issue as long as the default settings remain available. However, taking extra challenge options away from the folks who actually make use of it really seems a poor route to follow. Especially when it's on what most people seem to use as their primary repeatable team content.

Please, look into what is behind this and see if there's a way to address it. If their is, please consider deferring this change until you can address the underlying problems some other way. Unless there is a serious stability issue involved, I have to wonder how critical it is to change this after it's been available for so long.

I actually learned a lot about how the reputation system works. The more rep people have, the more rep they grant or take away when they rep you.

I also appear to have made a long-term "rep stalker". Someone who gave me negative rep during the thread appears to be granting me negative rep as often as they can. They leave a consistent comment, a single dash.

Sadly for them, their rep-foo is less than some of their peers. Just one +rep from someone actually cool elsewhere undid their work and left be with a nice buffer against their ongoing nerd vengeance.

Are you actually clear on what's being discussed?

We've been able to run high-difficulty setting TFs since, what, Issue Two? Three?

Did it occur to you that no one "complaining" here might have been complaining about the ability to run things at -1?

While the bug has existed, I suspect the behavior we saw it cause in I16 has not actually been widespread. There are many ways this can happen. Particularly if your uninitialized structure is created on the stack and not the heap (which a local variable would be), there may have been close to deterministic values in memory where the uninitialized variables were mapped.

While it's impossible to prove now, the investigation was driven by the sense of change, not the other way around.

One thing I have learned playing this game is that people are actually quite sensitive to even small changes in existing patterns when they actually experience the patterns frequently. I once had a long debate here with Arcanaville because I did not believe this to be true, but experience here has taught me otherwise.

As someone who finds humorous the nearly ever present claims of accuracy nerfs every issue, I once found myself with a nagging sense that something was wrong with my own after a new patch. I refused to post on it for some time, convinced that it was a streak, my imagination, or both. However, after some time, I broke down and started making more careful measurements with Herostats. (This was before the hit messages in the combat logs). I found that my measured per-attack hit probabilities were consistently lower than my slotting predicted over a very large number of attacks. There was another patch only a few days later, and the "problem" went away.

So while the potential for this has been around a long time, my strong suspicion is that not-really-random factors masked it until now. In I16, with some significant code reshuffling, something else ended up in those uninitialized memory positions. Something that was a lot more inconvenient, and a lot more noticeable to people with the right experience.

That really doesn't seem a likely spot of contention. It's frankly far more convenient to do that sort of thing in normal missions.

I didn't ask permission to quote the PM that gave me this info, but it said that allowing players to change the level of mobs in the TFs caused "all kinds of problems". Whether those problems are technical or balance-related, I don't know. Edit: This was specifically in response to a question about "invincible" TFs, and the response was that they, specifically, are being targeted, not just -1 TFs.

That would be fine with me. I'm hopeful that, if this isn't some sort of brain fart, it's actually a precursor to a change of that sort.

Yeah, but the absolute rate of purples supplied per unit time decreased, while the most wildly conservative estimates would suggest that the absolute rate of purples demanded per unit time would remain constant. In reality, the demand rate almost certainly increased, because 50s were being produced very rapidly, and large amounts of new inf were being created in boss farms and redistributed through the market sale of lots of ticket-purchased recipes. (So actually, the ratio of purples to other recipes almost certainly decreased significantly, but I'm not sure that's specifically relevant.)

Rate actually produced is related to the rate placed on the market, based on the assumption that some percentage of players will sell some percentage of the purples that they get. Those percentages almost certainly change over time with other conditions. (There's lots of anecdotal evidence from this forum that higher sale prices get a larger percentage of people to sell their purple drops.)

Increased demand, increased availability of currency and decreased supply all point to radically increased prices, which is exactly what happened.

Bear in mind that the AE may use a separate set of similar-seeming rules. Remember, when the new settings first came out in beta, the AE ignored them completely.

With the help of the one person I could find on test logged in as a hero, I tested this on the Synapse TF. My settings were +2 foes set for a team of 6. What I saw (after the other chap dropped) were +0 and +1 foes spawned for what I would expect for a team of two characters.

Please read where I tested it and posted that, indeed, you cannot increase the difficulty. Including in Ouroboros.

Yes. You cannot change the level or number of foes in either direction.

I really don't understand why we can't increase the setting for TFs, and Ouro needs to allow the full range of settings, including -1s.

I really, really hope this is updated before it goes live.

Definitely not. There are still plenty of things with radical differences.

Guys, no. Just say no.

You've made it so you can't change the difficulty in Ourobros. (Yes, I tested this.)

Edit: It does still work in the AE, despite it being similar to "TF mode"

Yeah, I don't think anyone saying that was being serious.

WW/BM load times are completely dependent on the resources your system can throw at the game. I frequently run two copies of CoH on one machine, and the 2nd one is more slow and CPU bound because of they way the 1st instance locks in the video hardware acceleration. I often have a several second lock up on that 2nd instance if I visit the market, while I never have a problem with just one instance.

Mostly, the way the game loads the data or populates that screen (not sure which) seems to be the place they could most readily make improvements. It seems the client stops and does nothing else while that operation is taking place, which means people with slow or heavily loaded systems can actually time out when clicking the NPCs. It really should be better interleaved with other operations, like, oh, continuing the network interaction with the game server.

There was a seemingly similar problem a while back with people's contact lists - when you opened it your game choked while the list of contacts (which used to not be tabbed) was populated. The devs changed how it worked so it renders only a limited number of things at a time until the whole list is done. It causes a brief annoying screen blinking behavior when I open the list on my system, but at least it doesn't lock up my game. Maybe the market could be given a similar workover.