City of Heroes is the World Wrestling Federation of Superhero MMOs

His point was that we can't even begin to gather the game's population statistics, much less analyze how inherent Fitness influenced them. The fact that he used a fudged number to estimate just how impossible the task is only serves to reinforce his purpose in making the estimate in the first place.

Sheesh. Nice work.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I'm not. It's reaaaaaallly crazy.

There's an easier solution, you know, if we focus on the fact that we can only take four power pools. And if we simplify a lot.

Let's start by agreeing on some terminology. I'm going to use {x y} as shorthand for the binomial coefficient (= x!/(y!(x-y)!)), because I can't write the over/under notation on this forum.

Before inherent stamina, we had 10 power pools and four possible power pools we could take. Add one power pool as the 'no pool' option. But the binomial coefficient is exclusive, meaning that you can't take an item twice, and we have to disallow the 'zero pools' option because it isn't possible. I think it's valid to treat that as 10 power pools + 3 'empty' pools, or 13 choices for the four pool slots. That gives us { 13 4 } = 715 permutations.

If we assume that *everyone* had stamina (which was not true) then that condenses into { 12 3 } = 220 permutations. (9 remaining power pools, + 3 'empty' possible choices, into 3 slots, with the fourth slot filled by Fitness.)

After inherent stamina, we have 9 power pools and four possible pools to take. Still can't build a character with zero power pools. So the number of permutations is { 12 4 } = 495.

There's a lot to tweak in here. We're allowing the possibility of taking all four travel powers or none at all, and we're assuming Presence is taken as often as all the other pools. I think players gravitate toward the same pools (Leadership, Fighting, and Leaping for Combat Jumping) so often that there are far fewer options than we've calcuated here. And of course we're ignoring slotting. But it's a good rough cut.

I'm not sure it solves the argument, though. If you considered Stamina mandatory, then making Stamina inherent gave you a great many new combinations. If you didn't consider Stamina absolutely mandatory, then making it inherent cut the number of possibilities by a fairly drastic amount.

Personally, I had two characters out of about twenty that didn't have stamina. So I didn't exactly consider it mandatory. On the other hand, I don't think staminaless builds were very prevalent. Is the ability to be unique useful if nobody ever does it? (That brings up an uncomfortable corrollary: Am I nobody? )

I think we can say for certain that options were lost. Whether they were meaningful options is still up for debate. Regardless, they should give us more power pools, for those of us for whom uniqueness in gameplay is more important than uniqueness in costume.

There is so much in this game, other than costumes, that you can can have as unique a gaming experience as you wish. The only person stopping you from having a unique character build or gameplay experience, is you.

You build your characters in such a way because you concider certain powers and slotting options as nonsensecal, where others do not. I have had a fair few toons in my very nearly 4 years in this game, even though i've only got 4 of them to 50 so far, (Damn my altism). I have tried a few of each AT, but mostly I seem to end up enjoying blasters the most. Because of that about 40%, (give or take a bit) of my toons are blasters. and each one of them, pre and post Inherant Fitness, have had very different builds and had very different gaming experience. If you haven't that is more about you than what the game has to offer.

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.

You calculations have a fundamental flaw and its due to that "ordered to unordered correction factor" I mentioned above. You're weighting every possible combination of power pool selections equally, but they are not all equal. For example, in the calculations I mentioned above for the 8 power pick search (i.e. picks through level 14) I said there were 60,518 "ordered" picks. However, those were the sum total of all builds with zero power pools, one power pool, two power pools, etc. The actual number of builds with X amount of non-travel power pools and Y amount of travel power pools is given by this matrix:

where the first row is the total number of builds with zero travel pools and zero through four non-travel pools. Descending rows show total number of builds with one, two, three, and four travel pools and corresponding non-travel pools. Why I have to keep them separate is that travel pools have five powers, non-travel pools have four, so they create different possibilities in build sequences.

The total number of builds up to level 14 with zero travel and zero non-travel pools is only 9: that's because there are ten total primary and secondary powers available at level 14, and one of them you have to take (the first secondary). So you're taking eight of nine, and there's only nine possible powers you could drop.

Now, there's also only one way to have no power pools: there are no permutations to consider. But there are many ways to have one power pool, or two. And since I'm keeping them separate in my build computations, we have to consider all the combinations of ways to take zero through four non-travel and zero through four travel pools. The total number of combinations given six non-travel and four travel pools is given by a different matrix:

Since the build totals include the power pool constraint, impossible combinations are already zeroed out (as you can see from the first matrix). So the actual total number of possible build combinations for each possibility of travel and non-travel power pools is:

The largest number - 447,660 - sits atone travel power and two non-travel power pools, or three power pools total. In other words, if we are counting *all* possibilities, and not just "good" ones, then up to level 14 the power pool case with the highest number of possibilities is the case of three power pools: one travel and two non-travel. And the reason is basically that there are lots of power pools to choose from, and the total number of powers in primary and secondary is still low at level 14.

However, this is generalizable to higher levels. You cannot just examine the total number of possible ways to create a build with N number of power pools, because that presumes each N is equally diverse: it contains an equal number of options. But that's not true, and those numbers shift around as you change the constraints on the system like by adding or removing inherent fitness.


Incidentally, for anyone who cares:

Level 16: 48648888, 344529

The numbers are increasing so rapidly I'm now wondering if I will have to reoptimize for the search to complete in a reasonable amount of time. I did not expect to be searching fifty million build sequences just to get to level 16. Its entirely possible the explosive growth levels off as the number of options begins to fill the build space, but I doubt that's happening before level 30. By which time I might be searching billions of sequences and tens of millions of possible distinct builds.

You could always try and engineer the process to able to divide the build space into discrete sections, and then spread option analysis among distributed application nodes. Then you could load it up on something like Amazon's EC2 and finish execution much faster, for a nominal fee.

But that would be really crazy.

I wish, not clever enough to up with gimmick builds, just non FOTM builds.

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.

Or I could rewrite it as a breadth first search with heuristic compacting of the tree. But that would be *really* crazy.

And also a hundred times faster.

As Spoon's Wrestle Wrestle v-logs are unscripted, I've edited the above text to remove all the sentence fragments, most or all instances of "like" and split his stream of consciousness into paragraphs so it's easier to read, but that's essentially what he said. I've been trying to recreate it in my own words off-memory for some time, but I'm not the Spoony One so it hasn't worked. This is "Vince Ruso booking" in his own words, and I feel it's relevant to the rise of gimmicks and complexity for the sake of complexity we've seen in recent content in our very own City of Wrestling. Err... I mean City of Heroes.

Hmm... I need to make a wrestler hero at some point. Why haven't I done this before?

*edit*
In case you don't feel like watching a one-hour v-log, the "Vince Ruso booking" segment is only a few minutes in.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sorry to quote an older post but see....I just think they did the whole Doppleganger thing wrong.

I've yet to face my equal in this game short of an AV, and even those can be killed without too much trouble with the right build/IO/inspiration mix. Solo.

When I fight my Doppleganger I want it to be the REAL anti-ME. Its not. Its a weaker version of me. It doesn't have my Incarnate powers. It doesn't match my slotting. Its a pale reflection of my toon not matter what I know I'm going to beat my Doppleganger.

That's not how I had envisioned this being implemented. I really REALLY want to fight myself in the game. Now THAT would be a challenge.

Essentially you want to fight another player using your exact build in a PVP setting using PVE combat rules.

Good luck.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

This was attempted in the beta for Issue 4. As there were no villain ATs yet at the time, it was quickly shown that scrappers were wiping the floor with just about every other AT. At least that's how I remember it.

That sounds fun actually.

True. We just have to get around the rest of PVP's failings.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.