seebs

And thanks to Verisign, we now know that there are things which cannot be adequately explained by either alone.

Exactly. The analysis of the business model is completely unrelated to whether you love or hate the game. I happen to like the game a fair bit, but it doesn't matter. I can analyze business models of products I dislike, too.

You use the phrase "slap in the face" a lot. And just as a pure matter of writing and communications: I put it to you that by the end of a post like this, the fact that the heavy repetition of that phrase has me laughing out loud every time I see it and thinking in terms of a drinking game means that it is almost certainly not having the rhetorical effect that you intend.

*drinks

Why, yes.

See, this is equivocation. "Everything we put out" is a term that has changed meaning substantially between the first usage and the second usage.

Which is to say: "Everything we put out" has changed meaning.

Let us go to the... CAR ANALOGY!

My friend runs a car dealership. He used to have a TINY little dealership. Like. He had a car. You could go there, and buy the car, and then he'd have to get another. He got them from this very friendly young gentleman, although often the locks were not in the best of shape. So you could, on any given day, go to his dealership and buy The Car. It was about $500. So $500 got you every car he had to sell. Later, he made friends with a couple more friendly young gentleman, and he started having four cars at a time. So $500 no longer got you every car he had to sell; now, it would cost you $1,000 to get every car he had to sell. But wait! That's only twice as much! Yes, you see, when he increased the size of his dealership, he started stiffing his suppliers, and passing the savings on to the consumer! So $500 now got you two cars. But, at the same time, $500 only got you half of what he had to sell!

Now, imagine that instead of cars with oddly defective locks, we were investigating content produced by an MMO developer. At one point, "everything they had on offer" was a given amount of content. So for $15/month, you got that much content. Later, they started producing a lot more content. Three or four times more content, in fact! But you no longer got it all for $15 per month. Now, if you just kept paying $15/month, you got more content than you used to. But you also had the option of paying more, and getting even more content!

*drinks*

Maybe you could slow down and explain this part to me, because I might be missing something.

How does this show that they were capable of this pace previous to the Freedom model?

Because all you've done so far is show that:
1. At a time when they were receiving less money, they produced less stuff.
2. When they started receiving more money, they produced more stuff.

Now, this may be just one of those crazy thoughts I have sometimes, but it almost seems to me like this creates the impression of a correlation between receipt of money, and production of stuff. Also, I am given to understand that the people producing the stuff are in a relationship to Paragon Studios known as "employment", wherein they produce stuff in exchange for money. In many fields, where there is such a relationship, if you want more stuff produced, you generally hire more people (or more skilled people), which costs more money. This sort of suggests, dare I say it, an explanation for the apparent causal chain from "receive more money" to "produce more stuff".

What does the majority have to do with it? I am disputing your claims because your opinion is different from mine, and because it seems to me that this is a matter wherein it is possible to speak of evidence "supporting" one opinion or another, and furthermore where it seems to me that the evidence does not support yours.

I don't see why it should.

I'll take that bet, but I warn you, this time of day all that's left are the ones with the coconut on them, usually.

Not that I know of, it doesn't. It just sets the exact chance so that it'll average 1.5 per minute.

I know of at least one build in one MMO which is entirely built around exactly such a mechanic. The character gets a bunch of self-penalty-ally-buff powers, and a pool of corresponding enemy-debuff-self-buff powers. It's actually pretty awesome.

I suspect that, in addition to "it also helps other people", there's the issue that it is thus susceptible (perhaps) to +endmod or endredux.

Well, here's the thing: The system Arcanaville is describing is the only one that gives you the right answer to the question "what impact will this ability have on how long I survive in combat?".

And that, it turns out, is the only question we care about for defense and resistance.

The goal of evaluating powers which are intended to increase survivability is to see how much they increase survivability.

Hmm. Okay, lemme try a thought experiment. Let's imagine that there is a vast simplification of tax code, along the lines of the famed "New simplified IRS form" some comedian joked about:

How much did you make last year? ______
Send it in.

Imagine that the tax code is simplified such that you have your salary, and then you send in some percentage of it.

So when it starts out, you're making $100K (a nice round number), and The Tax Rate is 10%, so you get $90K. Obviously, if the tax rate increases by 1%, you lose $1K. So if it were 15%, you would get $85K, and so on.

But like most people, you don't actually care nearly as much about either your salary or the tax rate as you do about your take-home pay. That's what you have to match up against your mortgage and stuff. So if you're evaluating a possible tax increase, you aren't going to just say "well, 5% more means I have 5% less money", because it's not 5% of your money, it's 5% of the theoretical "before-taxes" value, which isn't what you're spending from.

So say the tax rate is 10%, and they decide that they need to fund the Federal Basketweaving Administration, and they increase it by 10%. The tax rate has increased by 10%. The tax rate has doubled. And the effect on you is that you lose 1/9th of the money you were taking home.

On the other hand, say that there are a few special categories, and since you're in the much-maligned group "people who have sometimes disagreed with Arcanaville on the forums", your tax rate is 80%. And then taxes are increased by 10%, so it goes to 90%. The tax rate for you has only increased by 1/8th (12.5%). But! The amount of money you get has halved.

So even though the absolute increase (10%) is the same, and the increase relative to what it already was (12.5%) is lower for you than it was for the people who were paying 10% before... The effect on you is much larger. It's half your income!

Damage works the same way. No one cares what the attacker would be doing if they hit 100% of the time and there were no resistance, except as a number to shove into equations. What we care about is the damage we are taking with or without a given power.

So say that I can currently, with regen floored (so we can ignore regen, and just count how long it takes me to take my health in damage), stand up to a given mob which deals only S/L damage for an average of a minute, and I get Tough. How long will I last now? We have no idea at all. Because we don't know what my resistance was before.

If I had no S/L resistance before, 15% resistance will reduce the damage I take by 15%, and I should last roughly 15% longer.

If I had 80% S/L resistance before, and I'm a tanker or brute, 15% resistance will increase my resistance to 90% (due to the cap). So it's reducing the damage I take from "20% of theoretical" to "10% of theoretical". Which means I'll take about half as much damage, which means I'll live twice as long. If the cap were 95%, I'd live four times as long.

And "how long would I live even without regen" is a pretty useful comparison to make!

So basically, the most useful thing to measure is how much damage you're taking ("admittance"). But powers all give mitigation. And converting between mitigation and admittance doesn't require much math. The trick is that, to accurately evaluate the benefit to you of a power, you have to do that conversion twice: Once on your mitigation without the power, once on your mitigation with the power. The compare the results, and you have the actual change in your experience.

So, say I'm building a fire tank because fire farms are simply THE most exciting content the game has to offer.

I start out with a 22.5% fire resistance power. How much does this help?

Without the power: I have no mitigation. I take 100% of incoming damage.
With the power: I have 22.5% mitigation. I take 77.5% of incoming damage.

Now, what happens when I add another 22.5% fire resistance power?

With only the first power: I have 22.5% mitigation. I take 77.5% of incoming damage.
With both powers: I have 45% mitigation. I take 55% of incoming damage.

And the meaningful change to me is: 55%/77.5% ~= .71, or 71%. I will take 71% as much damage with two powers as I did with one. So if with one power on, I was taking 100 damage per second of combat, with two on I will take about 71 damage per second of combat.

Third 22.5% power? I go from 45% to 67.5% mitigation, leaving me with 32.5% of incoming damage. If I was taking 100 damage per second with two powers, I'd be taking about 59 per second with three.

Now I go get me some IOs, and add about 30% to each power. That increases my mitigation to 87.75%. If I was taking 100 damage per second with all three powers unenhanced, I'll be taking about 38 damage per second now that I've I/Od them. If one of the sets has a 2.25% fire resistance buff, I'm up to 90%, and I'd be taking only 30 damage per second from that same input.

You'll note I've ignored defense completely. That's because, no matter what defense is doing, it's multiplying both sides of the comparison by the same amount. Similarly, if I'm evaluating defense, I ignore resistance, because whatever defense does, resistance is multiplying both sets by the same amount.

So how do I compare defense and resistance, then?

Simple! Do one comparison in which I change only defense, and see what the effect is, then another in which I change only resistance, and see what the effect is.

But in each case, I have to use the existing value, not 0, as my baseline to get accurate information. Because that is what answers the question I care about, which is "how much will this change my life."

Sadly, you posted this a little bit too late; it was seven days and about thirty minutes after the last time someone finally got it through to the devs that activation times have mechanical effects on the game, so they had forgotten. If you'd posted an hour earlier they might have been able to comprehend the words you were using, now we have to wait for Arcanaville to post a giant wall of text for them again.

Of course not!

Speaking only for myself: I do not particularly want quantifiable proof. In its absence, I will consider you to be one of those strange people the Internet produces who demand that other people believe something without providing evidence, but so what? I don't have any objection to thinking that.

It is up to you whether you wish to be taken seriously. If you do, you will provide quantifiable proof, or at least some pretty solid number-crunching to establish your credentials. If you don't do that, well. Why should anyone care what your opinions are?

You have forgotten a key qualifier: When you're good at something, never do it for free, unless doing so advances your goals in some way.

For instance, I know a fair bit about programming; I would go so far as to say that I think I am a pretty good programmer. So when I discovered that a (non-MMO) game I was playing had Lua scripting available within it, I wrote a medium-sized set of debugging utilities and game-engine-rule modifiers for it, which I posted free for anyone who wanted them. Why? Because it was fun. I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoyed having it be written, and it pleased me to see other people enjoying it.

If you can't remember that there are worthy goals other than money, you are missing out on the entire point of being good at something.

I feel I must point out that, assuming the car is moving away from you at this "fast" speed, this is absolutely true.

This is a really good insight. One of the things I quite like about CoH is that it has developed a culture which tends to favor people who think about what they are doing and make their choices intentionally.

I don't think the math works this way.

For simplicity, imagine a single power which is subject to this. It is set for 1 PPM, and it has a recharge of 10 seconds, so it goes off about one time in 6. You slot for recharge so it has a recharge of 5 seconds, now it will go off about one time in 12. So either way, 1 PPM, right?

But wait! Imagine that you have, not one such power, but five such powers, with activation times of 2 seconds.

Before the change, you could use one power every two seconds, and each power would have a 1/6 proc chance, so you'd get about 5 total procs per minute across those five powers. Now you slot for recharge, and the only thing that changes is the proc chance -- you now get about 2.5 total procs per minute across those 5 powers. Because at any given point, only a couple of them are recharging.

Since characters tend to have at least a few powers that are already recharged at any given point, it seems to me that this is not necessarily going to result in no decrease in procs from slotting lots of recharge.

Or through dev error. Which happens fairly often. Yeah, the false positive rate is low, but MMO player bases are huge. (And I have seen at least one MMO where a dev openly acknowledged that yes, he had made a mistake which resulted in that player being banned.)

CoH players are pretty cool. They know how to have fun.

Er.

Controller.

Don't let the use of melee confuse you -- his primary attacks are the webs.

Note that two server transfers = one rename.

Well, that's exactly what I've done.

Thing is, I really like costume sets, but I don't like odds period, great or otherwise. And I also anti-like some things that Super Packs can create. I recognize that this is probably sort of crazy, but that turns out to be of no relevance at all. The only thing that makes something good or bad entertainment is whether it entertains. If a thing makes me unhappy, it doesn't matter whether that's because I'm utterly bonkers -- it's still a bad purchase for me.

I would point out: I don't particularly object to gambling as a thing. The super packs clearly meet my understanding of the term, in that the outcomes are subject to chance and some are better than others. I don't really care. I don't particularly like gambling things, because I don't like not being able to say "if I spend $X, I will get the thing I want".

But if they didn't yield stuff I antiwanted, I might get some anyway, just because I have boatloads of spare points at the moment. I don't really object very strongly to gambling, I just find it vaguely upsetting.

I don't have any moral objection to gambling, I just think it's obviously gambling.

The entire point is: I can't. I can buy a chance to get it. I can buy a really high chance to get it.

But there is no amount of money where we can say "absolutely, 100%, if you spend this much, you will get the stuff you want". Can we think it's awfully likely? Sure. Say I spend $100 on points, and spend 9600 points on super packs. It is very, very, likely that I'll get the costume pieces.

Now, here's the question: Imagine that you were offered a deal. I spend $100 on super packs. If I get all the costume pieces, you get ALL the stuff that isn't the costume pieces. If I don't, you are killed.

Would you take it? I certainly hope not, that would be stupid. There is no guarantee.

I don't think I would be surprised; I've been getting stuff like that in MMOs for a long time. And I never ever use it, which is why I find it upsetting.

Honestly, if Super Packs had some kind of guarantee that, after N packs, you would have all the costume pieces no matter what, and didn't yield some of the weird stuff that cannot be generated through play, I'd probably have gotten N packs.

Amusingly, I actually don't want it fixed. My two accounts don't have the same billing date, but they both get their tokens at once -- which is fine by me.

Sort of. I am asserting that "what this means" can legitimately refer to either, and that people frequently get them tangled up as a result. The "meaning" of a thing can refer to communicative intent, or towards justifiable inferences from the thing.

There was a wonderful comment in an essay by Robertson Davies, in which he'd been trying to answer some questions a student had about his writing, but finally after one repetition too many of "so what you're trying to say is...", he shouted something to the effect of "I'm not TRYING to say it, you oaf, I AM saying it." And hung up.

That said... I am a bit fuzzy on the context of the "responsibility" to attempt to discover the intent of the speaker. To whom do I have this obligation? What goes wrong if I disregard it? In some cases (an ongoing conversation), the answer is obvious. In some, though, it is not as obvious to me that I have any obligation to go past "the speaker appears to be a jerk, but this piece remains interesting because..."

"Matters" for what purpose?

Consider, if you will, a picture of a political rally from 40 years ago. I might use it today as an illustration of the point "the issue you are freaking out about will seem ridiculous to your children". I am quite sure the people with their very sincerely intended signs did not mean to communicate the message "I am angry about something that will seem ridiculous in 40 years", but nonetheless, it's hard for a modern reader not to get that sense from it.

Or take the lovely picture of a protestor with a sign reading "Get a brain, MORANS". Does the fact that he certainly didn't intend his words to mean "I'm an idiot" drown out the right of readers to understand it that way?

The question of what a communication means is massively complicated by the observation that we can take it to mean things about the writer/speaker, and those things are not necessarily part of the original intent. This isn't quite in the same category as simply asserting that the speaker's intent doesn't matter, I don't think.

There was a recent example where someone drew some cute pictures, which were intended to promote a particular view about human relationships. The thing is, many people, on seeing these pictures, drew pretty much the opposite conclusion from them. Now, here's the thing. What the artist meant certainly matters in some ways... But if I happen to want people to draw the opposite conclusion, and I show people these pictures and point out my interpretation of the fact claims they represent, does it matter for my purposes? I'm not claiming the artist intended this; I'm claiming that these are interesting pictures which happen to illustrate my point. This doesn't change the fact that they'd also illustrate hers, if considered in a different way...