arcanaville
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Posts posted by arcanaville
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On 3/8/2020 at 8:21 AM, carroto said:
Way back in the early days Radiation Emission was very popular. Some people refused to run hard content without one on the team. I don't recall seeing a single one on HC. Regen Scrappers were popular too. I think I might have seen one since the game returned. I'm curious what power sets are like that for you. Those that seemed popular once but have fallen out of favor. Also please share any thoughts you might have on why you think things changed.
For Regen as a set I wonder if Arcanaville might have had something to do with it. As we came to a better understanding of damage mitigation and other game mechanics I think some of the shortcomings of the set became clearer. I'm sure that's not the only explanation though. There are plenty of people who don't know or don't care about game mechanics when they make their choices.
Probably another factor is simply that there are more sets to choose from these days, so it's only natural that we'd see less of any specific one of them. Plus many of the new sets are strong and offer things the older ones don't.
Very late to this discussion, but I'll just say that Regen was falling out of favor before the Instant Healing change, a long time ago, and probably not because of anything I had to say directly. Indirectly, my understanding of damage mitigation did permeate outward and cause many other people to evaluate the sets differently than originally, but you could say that about all offensive and defensive sets. Remember that the post Perma-Elude post Perma-IH world is the majority of the existence of the game: collectively we had no idea what was what back in I3.
The bottom line with regen is that absent exotic mechanics, you're left with a fundamental problem. Defense and Resistance scale, Regen does not. Which is to say, because defense and resistance block a percentage of the incoming damage, the more damage that comes in the more damage that gets blocked. But Regen is fixed: you heal the same amount per second no matter how much stuff is attacking you. This makes it tricky to balance for scrappers, really tricky to balance for end game scrappers, and an absolute nightmare to balance for tankers.
Tankers have fundamental problems that were being discussed when the game was still live; you combine the "Tankers should soak more damage" rule with the "everyone should be able to solo at similar speed" rule, and Tankers are already a contradiction. You add the damage mitigation that doesn't scale to the equation (which has a corollary: it has no downtime) and you have a very interesting game design problem to solve.
So why did Brutes get Regen, and why did Tankers get Willpower? That's a very long story. Short version: most people don't see Brutes the way they were originally designed, and players only got Willpower because the devs didn't understand its true power in the first place. I know because I warned them when it was still in beta.
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On 2/18/2020 at 6:02 PM, Redlynne said:
Another factor that I would cite for this is ... how EASY it was to team up in City of Heroes (even before Super Sidekicking). Just being able to invite ANYONE ... regardless of what level their character was ... into a team and be able to play together on a somewhat leveled playing field is something that far too many other games have just simply failed to replicate. The ease of being able to form a pick up group, and the joy of playing in one, is something that all too often seems to be either an afterthought or not even thought of at all for other games. Stuff like just being able to join a group to run a dungeon can sometimes turn into a horrendous chore where you can only run it with characters that haven't done it already (or whatever).
Actually, our team up mechanics were not particularly special originally, except for one thing that is so obvious most people don't even realize the impact this has on the entire game until they played other MMOs. What made teaming completely different from all other MMOs was a feature that had nothing to do with the teaming mechanics: travel powers.
Travel powers meant you could team with anyone, anywhere in the game world. We were so spoiled we sometimes got impatient waiting for someone in Skyway to get to us in PI. But travel powers meant you could team with almost any team anywhere, so quickly you could even switch to another alt and then get there in just a couple minutes.
Try doing that in most other MMOs. Heck, try doing that in Star Trek Online, where you supposedly have hyperspace drives and it still can take a huge amount of time for someone to get from one side of the quadrant to the other. CoH had, relative to other MMOs, super fast travel. Not only that, super fast travel *with no cooldowns*. And this was before base teleporters.
To join a team you have to get to the team. Most MMOs don't make that easy. Some make it ridiculously hard. When I was playing SWTOR, I was on a pick up team where someone tried to join, and we waited literally for twenty minutes for him to get to us before they and we gave up. Not only did it take several minutes for him to physically travel to approximately where we were, he had to *fight spawns on the only road* that led to us.
This is something that must have seemed like a good idea on paper, but was ludicrous in practice for an MMO. This only makes sense in a single player game - fighting on the only travel paths to a destination - which is one of the reasons why I coined the term "massively single player game" during SWTOR's Beta.
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20 hours ago, Redlynne said:
Personally speaking, I attribute this to the fact that the draw to play was ... spoiler alert ... HEROISM (at least until City of Villains came along). That set the "tone" for the community of Players that sprang up around the game, and that tone generally sided with "being heroic" and by extension being altruistic. Heroes (and Heroines) are the "good guys" side of things, rather than any kind of cutthroat "every man for themselves!" kind of vibe for the game. A lot of that no doubt had to do with the fact that PvP wasn't even in the game at first, so the community coalesced and congealed into being a friendly and welcoming place before the "trash talking PvP" culture had an opportunity to take root (let alone try and take over).
So City of Heroes called it's community to BE BETTER right from the get go, and I'd like to think that all this time later we're STILL trying to live up to that calling.
Why?
Because we're Heroes.
It's what we do ...
I'm sure there was some of that influence, but there are lots of games where the in-game fiction is player heroism and the playerbase is not nearly as altruistic or cooperative. I have often wondered how much the massive "failure" of the devs to make a balanced game contributed to this (I say failure because the original Cryptic devs did aim for a conventionally balanced classical MMO and missed spectacularly). City of Heroes was so broken in its game balance that the dog eat dog race to the top wasn't as strong or intense as it is elsewhere. I could just wander around the City with my Ill/Rad and help people take down Jack and Eochai because why not? I didn't need to grind my fingers to the bone trying to accumulate level 61 gear.
This is all relative of course: there were always people who thought the game was too grindy or too hard or whatever. But it was easy enough, wide open game play enough, that the people in a position to be helpful also had the time and inclination to be helpful. The game encouraged exploring the "power-space" of builds and abilities, and that encouraged people to share those explorations if for no other reason than it was more fun to share than to keep to themselves. Yes, some people tried to covet fire farms, but for every person doing that there were several sharing builds on how to solo a pylon eight seconds faster than the previous guy.
I have often wondered if this is even possible to replicate. These days most broken games are ripped apart by their playerbases, and most balanced games set the players against each other. To make a broken game that encourages its players to cultivate and celebrate that brokenness like it is a privilege, I'm not sure what magic game design dust can do that today starting from scratch.
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On 2/13/2020 at 8:10 PM, Redlynne said:
And THIS is why it's never too late to go check on things that everyone "KNOWS" is working right, just to make sure it is. After all, it's this kind of work that made @arcanaville mildly famous for a while (still...!) in figuring out how Defense ACTUALLY worked.
Good job @Bopper.
My rule was: when everyone thought the game was bugged I figured someone would eventually figure it out, but when everyone thought the game was working correctly that was when I should look really carefully, because who else would waste their time checking things everyone knew was working correctly.
Probably the most infamous incident of this was when everyone thought high defense was broken, and it turned out that since everyone was testing high defense with luck inspirations, it was actually *those* that were broken (technically, mislabeled). It didn't occur to anyone that inspirations could have a completely different value than what they were labelled as.
The Cryptic/Paragon devs did commendable work getting a 2004 MMO with 1990s technology to do things many 2020 MMOs don't do today. But they weren't immune to goofy errors either. I'm happy to see there are people still willing to put that kind of time into CoH to make it better for others. It was always the playerbase that was CoH's most valulable asset. In sixteen years since its launch I have yet to see its equal anywhere.
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16 hours ago, Call Me Awesome said:
Glad to see you back Arcana, you even got ME to understand how Defense and Soft Capping worked and I'm hardly a numbers nerd. Well, beyond focal lengths, f-stops and how much recording time I had left... something I had to do on my day job.😜
If only I could have got the devs to understand them ... just kidding (in case they are still lurking about).
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2 hours ago, Ulysses Dare said:
That brings to mind a question: why did the scrapper forums in particular draw this kind of scrutiny? Was it just random chance or was there something about scrappers in particular that drew in the players most prone to being analytical?
In my opinion coincidence and circumstance. First of all, defense sets were easier to look at analytically than any other, so originally it was the scrapper and tanker forums that had more math. Attack sets were actually the first that people wrote things like guides on, but very quickly the mathematical tools to look at those ran out, until people like TopDoc came along with his attack timing thread and I came along with my invention of DPA-focused analysis (in fact, I was the one that coined the acronym "DPA" which stands for "damage per activation-second" to distinguish from "DPS" which was "damage per second" and was used to describe an attacks damage over its recharge time). And looking at things like Control sets or Buff/Debuff sets with mathematical tools was simply beyond the scope of the kind of work most players would or could do.
Originally it was tankers that had more focused discussion on the math surrounding mitigation sets, not scrappers. But over time the discussion shifted towards Scrappers in part because I think Scrappers became the much more popular archetype, and in part because coincidentally many of the quantitative tankers retired and many of the newer quants happened to play scrappers. And when people started looking more closely at attack sets analytically, Scrappers could now look at both primaries and secondaries. Tankers could too, but for a long time Tankers were more focused on mitigation and crowd/aggro control, and less on offense (which was a mistake, but that's another story).
Scrapper mitigation sets were also more "interesting" to compare and quantify. Stone tankers were in the early days dominated by granite armor, and there were no SR or Regen tankers. Scrappers had an interesting set of mitigation sets to choose from: Regen, SR, and Invuln in particular seemed to be mechanical caricatures: heal, defense, resistance. Dark of course was always the odd one out, but still, if you wanted to analyze any part of the game mathematically, the obvious and "cleanest" thing to look at was heal/defense/resistance.
Over time the Scrapper forum gained the reputation of having the most quantitative discussion, and that reputation encouraged and amplified more of the same.
Of course, I was a regular on the scrapper forum, so in all honesty that had to contribute something. But conversely, initially I posted mostly on the Blaster forum, as that was what my main was. My second alt was a scrapper. But the scrapper and tanker forums were more receptive to most of my early mathematical ruminations, so that became a feedback loop of sorts.
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6 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:
I always rather enjoyed watching you lose your mind.
Well, the scrapper forums were one of the few places on Earth where math was a spectator sport.
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16 hours ago, Bopper said:
I absolutely empathize with you on this. One day you're merely doing tests to try to confirm an unconfirmed/misunderstood game mechanic, then the next you're reading source code and excel files leading to new discoveries to share. It escalates quickly.
I do appreciate your work, Arcanaville. Thanks for your contributions.
I didn't have the benefit of source code back in the day. I had to resort to less ... straight forward methods.
Discovery and sharing has to be its own reward. Because you can't farm merits with forum posts. Unfortunately.
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1 hour ago, Bopper said:
This is all true, and I suppose I should incorporate it into the guide. However at times it feels like I'm a teacher in a classroom full of students who get stuck on a certain problem and I'm afraid to add more complexities to that problem before they can solve the first one.
When I'm more motivated, I will revisit this.
Well, this is something you have to work your way up to. One day you're writing a guide to SR, and the next you're writing an entire guide to how tohit mechanics work and then you completely lose your mind and decide to compare scrapper secondaries by comparing average calculations to a hundred million iterations of a combat mechanics simulator and then pretty soon you're being credited with inventing your own measure of time. You have to learn to walk first, so you can stroll your way to the warp drive controls.
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Apologies for being very late to this party, but I just wanted to mention that the idea of calculating recharge using what Redlynne called a "points" system and Bopper highlights in his OP was the basis for the recharge guide I posted on the old forums, which itself was an update from an older guide written by another player who's name escapes me at the moment. The metaphor of recharge being about reaching a total score rather than being about reaching a total time, and recharge bonuses increasing your rate of points rather than decreasing your deadline time is a good one that most people seemed to get better than the algebra, and also is almost certainly how recharge actually works in the game as well (it is how I would implement it: with pure linear addition rather than any division with round off errors).
The super simple explanation we used to use was basically this: if a power took 450 seconds to recharge, assume that the power needed to gain 450 points to fully recharge, and assume the power gets one point per second. Then assume all recharge buffs boost that by exactly the bonus amount for as long as the buffs last. So if you're under +200% recharge, then every second you earn 3 points (1 + 200% more). Most people can then work out on paper with very simple math how long it takes for a power to recharge, or conversely how much recharge it would take - *roughly* - for the power to be perma.
One more thing: technically a power like Hasten with 120 seconds of duration and 450 seconds of base recharge takes more than 375% total recharge to become perma, because you have to factor in the activation time of the power (it is even more complicated than that, but that's a different rabbithole involving power activation delays). To a first order approximation, for Hasten to be perma it has to recharge in less than 119 seconds, so that there's enough time to activate it again before it expires. And that requires 378% recharge.
This is a small correction factor for a power like Hasten with long duration relative to cast time. But when you get into things like attack chains, as mentioned above, where cast time and cycle time are much closer, this is something that changes the math by more than a small amount.
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On 10/9/2019 at 10:20 PM, Duck-Smokes-Quack said:
I'm inclinded to agree clearly 😝
There was a realy, really, really long and detailed post from the old forums that basically showed how much /SR benifited from Tough (it was even more than Weave mathematically). I makes an enormous difference on paper.
Its one of those things that probably is impossible to notice in game, but on paper at least he (Arcanaville i think his name was?) concluded that it was a must have for /SR in particular.Must have, probably not. But much more benefit that people were giving it credit for. The biggest issue was getting the endurance to power it, and in the post-invention era this was less of an issue.
This presumed you took all the SR powers and had the maximum benefit from scaling resists.
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On 8/12/2019 at 1:09 AM, DSorrow said:
Arcanaville mentioned having done an XP scaling project for custom enemies in AE based on their ability selection so I hope our mathematical monarch could be summoned to tell us about also implementing such a system outside of AE.
The developers originally took standard rewards away from custom critters in AE, because it was too easy to make a critter that was basically a punching bag for power leveling. I worked with them to come up with a system that would "judge" a custom critter to determine if the critter was "dangerous enough" to award normal rewards. If not, rewards were nerfed on that custom critter.
That's a relatively simple system although the tricky part is actually making it not exploitable by enterprising players. Its possible to extend this outside of AE to modifying rewards in the normal content, but you have to consider two separate things. First, you have to consider what the appropriate scaling rules are in general. That's mathematically hard, but straight forward. The more critical thing is if you want this system to be automated, the system has to somehow figure out what the original intent of the content was, in order to "know" how to modify rewards. What I mean is, if there's some standard content that was explicitly intended to be a "gimme" for the players, it could be considered exploitable to allow players to "scale up" that content for more rewards, knowing that no matter how they scale it up it won't make it really any harder. And when it comes to end game content, there's often very good reasons why end game rewards seem "lower" than you'd expect for their difficulty - for example to prevent end game players from exponentially running away from the rest of the players with a cycle of escalating power gaining escalating rewards.
That kind of stuff would make a customizable reward system more tricky to think through what it is even supposed to do.
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I'll toss this out there as a related idea I was processing right up to shutdown. I had made the big defense spreadsheet where I tried to score defensive sets based on their survivability, using reasonable assumptions. It wasn't perfect and real world combat was highly situational, but it was an interesting and useful metric nonetheless. Could I do the same thing with attack sets?
The problem boiled down to the fact that to a first order approximation we can assume all defense powers are always on. Even things like heals can be estimated by averaging their heal out over time, as if they were a constant regen power that was always on. We could *roughly* estimate the strength of the set in a time-invariant way. But attack powers aren't like that, because of attack chains. It isn't possible to simply assume all attack powers are contributing an average amount of DPS all the time. Once your chain is full, no other powers "matter."
Long story short: I came up with a metric that tried to roughly guestimate how much damage an attack set could generate by using a rough heuristic. We start by taking all the attack powers and sorting them in descending order by DPA - using "Arcanatime" for the DPA. Basically, we assume that our highest DPA attack is being fired as often as possible, and then we assume that we will try to "fit in" our nest highest, and then our next highest, and so on. If we have AoEs, we assume a certain average number of targets, like three, and calculate as if that AoE was a single target attack with three times the damage.
Every attack has a DPS - a damage per second - over its total cycle time (recharge + cast time). If you use the attack as often as possible, that's how much damage it will do over time. If we start with the best DPA attack and work downward, we will add more and more DPS, but if we add everything we will be adding up attacks that take up more than 100% of the time - they won't "fit" into a real chain. So we calculate the attack's "uptime" which is Arcanatime / CycleTime. In other words, this is what percentage of the time you're "attacking" when you cycle that attack over and over. If you use an attack with one second arcanatime and ten seconds cycle time, you're "attacking" 10% of the time. The rest of the time you can use other attacks.
So keep adding up attacks until the cumulative total uptime is 100%. If you reach 95% and the next attack would take up another 10%, prorate - add half that attack's DPS to your running total. That's metaphorically like using the attack only some of the time.
You now have a list of attacks which are your best DPA attacks (with one "fractional" attack) that you could theoretically cycle constantly, and when you do you will do the total DPS of that set of attacks. This doesn't match reality perfectly, because in practice those attacks won't necessarily form a perfect attack chain. But it gives a kind of rough estimate for the theoretical maximum damage output of the set under theoretically optimal conditions.
PS: finding the optimal attack chain is probably a knapsack problem, which means there's no likely way to find it outside of a full search of all possible attack chains. That's why estimates like the above could be useful.
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On 8/5/2019 at 3:23 PM, Twisted Toon said:
I suppose I should have prefaced my assertion that you didn't work for NCSoft , etc with an, "As far as I know"... 🤔
Well, to be fair it was something I often stated on the forums, right up to the moment when it became false and I couldn't say it anymore.
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On 7/17/2019 at 6:34 PM, Obitus said:
Speaking of cultural moments, it's pleasantly surreal to be back on a CoH forum debating Arcanaville in 2019 😄
It is like we've been rebooted, only we're all still here just older. Kind of like Murphy Brown.
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On 7/17/2019 at 6:34 PM, Obitus said:
But however much credit you want to give Blizzard for making their own luck, once the momentum kicked in it kicked in hard, and every subsequent attempt to recreate their success on a traditional MMO subscription based model has failed, in some cases spectacularly. I don't think it's selling Blizzard/WoW short to argue that the cultural moment has passed, for games like that. Perhaps more to the point, the cultural moment for that sort of business model appears to have passed. Now we live in what some call "the attention economy," where publishers have more or less given up on trying to cultivate a solid base of loyal customers.
Instead, they go for a whale-milking F2P model: you create a wide-but-shallow userbase by releasing your game for free, and then you bombard your players with overpriced microtransactions to exploit the much smaller segment of compulsive spenders among them. This is appealing because it basically sidesteps the stunning amount of competition out there today; you don't have to spend wildly on marketing because the game itself is an advertisement - and your product doesn't need to shine particularly bright because you only need to addict a small percentage of your players.
I would argue that the F2P model is not a new model, but an old one wearing new technological clothes: the shareware model. You give the game away for free, then you see how many people are willing to pay for a better experience. It is just a much more refined version of that.
Incidentally, I would also argue that even the F2P model is evolving into something else, which ironically also existed once before. When the subscription model MMOs decided to adopt microtransactions and the free to play model, they had all these subscribers to deal with. Rather than jettisoning them, many (like CoH) implemented a hybrid model where subscribers could get "VIP benefits." So you had free to play players and VIPs, and then on top of that the F2P microtransaction model. This was seen as a way to transition from one model to the other, but not the ideal model. However, over time I've been seeing the hybrid model make a come back as an evolution of the F2P model rather than just a hack to the model. Especially when an F2P game reaches about three years old and the playerbase starts to mature, the hybrid VIP model seems to become more common.
The F2P model is more complicated than I think most game players give it credit for. It is not just about milking whales, it actually does in the monetization space what leveling does in the gameplay space. You have the noobs at the start, then the midlevel players, then the high tier players, then the endgame players, and each of these groups (and even more microslices of them) wants and needs different things. You also have the free to play players who never spend, the tee-totallers that spend a buck or two, the small time minnows, the mid range spenders, the high tier spenders, and the Godzillas. Each of them is like the different tiers of players: most players start as noobs and eventually some fraction move upward towards the end game; and most players start as free to play players and some fraction move upward towards Godzilla. Not everyone makes it to the end game, and not everyone becomes Godzilla. But you need monetization tools to deal with each kind of player just like you need different gameplay tools to deal with each kind of player, and I think microtransactions and VIP subscriptions are tools that can coexist in the same game.
Incidentally, one think I think people don't realize is that most microtransactions are "overpriced" not just to milk whales, but actually to improve the game for the people who don't spend. For every cash offer, there's players who buy and players who don't. Thus, some get an advantage and some don't. The more value is in that offer, the more the game edges toward pay to win. The less value, the more the game edges away from pay to win and the more valuable gameplay itself becomes - but the less money you generally make, because fewer players are buying it. A good F2P game tries to balance the two, deliberately giving the paying players as little as possible so they don't hurt the non-paying customers too much, while giving them enough to think it is worth spending at all. In that way, we make the spenders into patrons: they spend to keep the game alive, and in return they ask for relatively little. On paper at least, that's actually what *everyone* wants: the spenders get some value for their money, while the non-spenders don't think the spenders are getting too much for their money and the game operators keep the lights on.
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On 8/2/2019 at 5:02 AM, Twisted Toon said:
I'm sure someone had mentioned Arcanaville earlier. I'm also 99.9% certain that she has tested the combat code 6 ways from Sunday. She also never worked for, in any way, Cyptic, Paragon Studios, or NCSoft. If she didn't find anything wrong with the code, then I doubt there is anything wrong. If you doubt Arcanaville, when it comes to how things work in the game, then there's no hope for you.
I think Acranaville knows more about the game than any other individual, Dev or not.
Well, I did test both the combat random number generator and the streakbreaker. I was eventually able to test the combat random number generator to several million swings using combat logs. In fact, I was able to test it well enough to actually find an actual problem with it, just one no one would ever observe. The system rounded random rolls to the nearest 0.01%, at least in the combat logs. If it also did that in actual combat, and I think it did something like that, then there was a teeny tiny problem, the random rolls ranged from 0.00% to 100.00%. That looks like 10,000 possible rolls, but it is actually 10,001 possible rolls: it includes both zero and 100.00. Moreover, both zero and 100.00 showed up half as often as any other number, demonstrating this was a fencepost problem not a random generation problem. So it is kind of possible that a defense champ would be getting hit maybe one in a thousand times more often. Which human brains really cannot notice. I was also able to reverse engineer precisely where the streakbreaker cutoffs were from the data, accurate to about 0.2%. So I'm pretty sure I was testing correctly.
I never found a problem in the combat generator that would *noticeably* affect combat. And I'm pretty sure if there was one, it would have shown up in the data.
Incidentally, when the game was still running I had an open policy that if anyone thought there was a bug in the combat mechanics or the combat random rolls they could send me a demorecord to analyze. I think I analyzed about two hundred of them. No actual problems in those either.
One more correction: I did do a project for Paragon under contract once, near the end. I helped them restore standard rewards for custom critters used in Architect missions by creating a system that allowed the game to offer those rewards if the custom critters weren't "crippled" by the designer to make them easy to kill. Basically, you had to be at least as strong as the average normal critter at every level range to generate normal rewards.
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Will point out that WoW's celebrity endorsements came during a period when WoW was already unparalleled in subscriber count. You can say advertising was responsible for keeping it running near its apex for a long time, but I think it's not an accurate summary of how they got there.
How they got there is a question that haunted the industry for years. No one's been able to repeat WoW's success. SWTOR probably tried hardest, spending hundreds of millions on story content and copying WoW's combat model more-or-less wholesale, but of course they failed miserably, even despite the platinum Star Wars IP. At some point not long afterwards, most studios gave up on subscriptions entirely. If getting a huge subscriber base isn't going to work, then might as well move towards milking a relatively small base of whales, instead. (Free 2 play.)
I'm no expert on WoW, having only played it for like two weeks not long after it launched. The game didn't appeal to me, and of course I was already elbow deep in City of Heroes anyway.
That said, I don't think you can give Blizzard full credit for achieving such massive success with WoW. A lot of credit, sure; whatever their flaws, they do know how to polish a product. It was a decent IP too, etc etc - but it seems obvious in retrospect that WoW's greatest asset was its timing. The game arrived at right around the same time that household computers and broadband internet became truly mainstream, yet also well before social media, smartphones and the billion apps and games to follow started contending for the broader populace's attention. WoW also arrived on the leading edge of a wave of related cultural changes, small and large, ranging from the mainstreaming of so-called "nerd culture" to the wider phenomenon of social atomization that came with all of the above technological shifts (among others).
In short, WoW arrived just when playing online games to socialize lost its taboo, and when, for a whole host of reasons, online socializing in general became more attractive. Again, I have to give Blizzard a lot of credit for how they handled their unprecedented popularity; I'm sure a lesser studio would have faltered, but WoW caught lightning in a bottle.
What's my point? Well I guess there isn't one, except to say that you're right: the marketing blitz largely occurred after WoW blew everyone else out of the water. Then again, WoW did have probably a disproportionately large amount of buzz for an MMO back when it launched, what with the IP and Blizzard's reputation from games like Diablo. That buzz, combined with the confluence of happy coincidences described above, propelled the game to unprecedented success.
I doubt we'll ever see anything quite like it again.
It is hard to say, look at games like Fortnite come along and surprise everyone.
I think people are reluctant to give Blizzard credit for WoW, thinking that it was either being the first or coming along at the right time. But neither of those things really explains WoW's success. It is hard to remember in hindsight but WoW wasn't first: City of Heroes beat it by about six months. Heck, Eve Online beat us both by a year. EQ2, SWG, Guild Wars, Matrix Online, and Perfect World were all close contemporaries, along with a lot of others I can't even think of at the moment. They were not the first, and they were not all by themselves in the same time period.
I think Blizzard made many small but important decisions that propelled WoW to the front of the pack, and once there momentum took over. People were looking for something like WoW, and WoW crafted a game experience that was as close to dead center of the bullseye as you can get for the time. Momentum explains its huge success, but momentum was available to lots of games at the time, none of which achieved a tenth of the success that WoW did. Momentum wasn't about luck, it had to be taken hold of.
Will we see its like again? Maybe we already have. Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, DOTA, Fortnite. The game that I think most closely resembles World of Warcraft in terms of both its commercial success and its popular culture success? Minecraft.
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The hope is that when/if those large monoliths crash they will be replaced with many smaller and hungrier companies who are more in tune with customer need and desires. All of them started as smaller companies, and for many, their best games were conceived and produced while a smaller company.
Blizzard was a much smaller studio when they started Warcraft. Bioware was much smaller when they created KOtOR. Cryptic was a small company when they developed this game. All were later bought by the giants. Are the games produced by the giants better, or even as good as those produced by the companies they simply bought out?
This seems to me to be an extremely oversimplified view of those companies. For example you could argue that Blizzards eternal claim to fame is World of Warcraft, and that was created prior to the Activision merger. And by then Blizzard itself was a pretty large company that grew through acquisitions. In fact, Blizzard acquired Condor (aka Blizzard North studios) and they did all their best work while owned by Blizzard - the Diablo series.
Cryptic is an even worse example. Cryptic has three games on its resume as an independent studio: City of Heroes, Marvel Universe Online, and Champions Online. City of Heroes was almost a disaster: they had to completely reboot the development and push out two thirds of a game in an extremely rushed fashion. It almost didn't launch. MUO became a smoking crater of development that didn't launch at all. And Champions Online, well, it is decent. Post acquisition by Atari and later Perfect World, they did Star Trek Online, Neverwinter Online, and apparently are working on a Magic game. Really, STO and Neverwinter are better games than CO in my opinion, but you certainly can't see a marked drop in development quality over time. Cryptic games are just Cryptic games.
Bioware, I think, is a bottomless pit of discussion.
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Game balance, challenging PvE content for small and large groups, endgame progression, well-polished and distinctive class mechanics, PvP in general, and amount of available content. On the community side, WoW is basically unmatched in terms of guides, databases, wikis, and general min/maxing and quant stuff; when your community is big enough to have a hundred Arcanavilles on pure statistics, remarkable things happen.
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
World of Warcraft is typically very good at the things it tries to do. Those simply aren't the things many of us want out of a game. If you don't like Holy Trinity group dynamics in the first place, it doesn't really matter that the game implements them really well.
I am not an expert in all online game communities everywhere, but I've had some exposure here and there. Setting myself aside completely, I haven't seen many MMOs with the same quant community that CoH had. Games like WoW have very well developed player documentation guides and wikis to be sure: there's hundreds of times more man-hours into that kind of stuff in a game like WoW than we ever had. But the only time I've seen an MMO community have the same or superior level of quants that, say, the Scrapper forum had in CoH was probably in Eve Online.
Maybe I'm seeing this from a different perspective, but as "big" a game as WoW is, it isn't as complex as CoH when it comes to quantitative analysis. Consider just one thing. WoW is (like almost all MMOs) balanced with very carefully designed power activation cooldowns that essentially fix the DPS of an attack to some specific value if you use it as often as possible. There's no way to get more damage than that, which means the DPS of a WoW character is basically the sum of their cyclable attacks. You do have to factor in various buffs and situational factors, but it takes no time at all to calculate the DPS of a WoW player character. This is so simple and straight forward that back in the day raid leaders would sometimes use tools to monitor the DPS of individual players to see if they were reaching their DPS potential or not.
CoH doesn't have such cooldowns. We assemble attack chains. As a result, figuring out the DPS potential of a character build is extremely non-trivial. It is a task the entire community collectively spent six years figuring out, from Brawl indexes and Topdoc's cast time tables to DPA and Arcanatime. All of this was invented from scratch, because we couldn't borrow anything from any other game (first, because few other MMOs existed, and then later after they did exist they used combat mechanics that had nothing in common with CoH).
If you're a WoW quant, you can become an anything else quant with the same skills just different data. But you'd be useless in CoH without relearning everything from scratch. Because our mechanics are, relative to almost all other MMOs, "broken" in a way that the tools used to look at other MMOs simply don't work here. Here, the very first thing we looked at were DPS guides to attack powersets. Within a year we were telling everyone how those were good for their time but extremely misleading. But that's already good enough for almost all other MMOs.
This is a bit of an oversimplification to be sure. But I also think it is essentially true. We had the best quants solving the hardest problems in any MMO.
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I'm not sure what this is a reply to, because I'm not sure what "it" this refers to.
Intended to directly follow the last sentence of the (your) immediately previous post,
The article of mine linked above refers to a specific set of situations, prior to the game making changes which altered those situations somewhat (very specifically, adding Elusivity, which was an idea of mine but it wasn't incorporated in the way I described using it).
Ah. The problem I did not anticipate properly when I proposed Elusivity is that it isn't a blanket balancing solution. It is/was a tool, and one that had to be used carefully and surgically, no different than any other power or ability in a defensive set had to be balanced within its own situational context (i.e. the other powers in the set). However, it wasn't used in that way for various reasons, most notably that the mathematics involved in using it were time consuming for the devs to work with.
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No, it wasn't. And it doesn't exist in any form in PvE. Fighting +6 is bad because of the +tohit -- but it doesn't take anywhere near that to see >50% ehp loss vs defense-heavy sets due to accuracy increases.
I'm not sure what this is a reply to, because I'm not sure what "it" this refers to. The I7 combat mechanics changes altered the "purple patch" combat modifiers so that from +1 to +5 critters gained accuracy bonuses instead of tohit bonuses. This made their overall increase in accuracy hit defense sets and resistances sets more or less equally. In terms of averages, the "2 to 1" rule of thumb for damage mitigation worked from +1 through +5 for that reason. To a first order approximation (factoring out all the complexity I referred to above) accuracy bonuses are not a problem for defense, or rather not more of a problem than they are for everyone else. At least until you hit the ceiling. Above +90% accuracy bonuses there was the quirky problem that defense set with zero defense would now hit the ceiling: you can't get hit any more often than 95% of the time by attacks that aren't autohit, so accuracy bonuses higher than +90% didn't do anything to players that had no defense. Which means they could only continue to hurt players that did have at least some defense.
In terms of normal PvE critters with higher than 50% base to hit even without tohit buffs, my recollection is that Praetorian DE were the first sneaky bastards to get higher base tohit post Issue 7.
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So X resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 2X defense, but resistance is more smooth, which seems like resistance is better. But defense has an advantage that has nothing to do with damage. When an attack lands, you take damage and you also get hit by any secondary effects in the attack. Resistance reduces the damage. It generally doesn't help with any of the non-damage effects. Defense, on the other hand, works by making attacks miss entirely. So when defense "works" the entire attack fails: the damage misses, and all the secondary effects also miss. So the difference between 40% and 80% damage resistance is that 80% resistance reduces damage by 80% while 40% reduces *everything* by 80% - damage, debuffs, everything - because those things simply don't land 80% of the time (relative to not having defense).
This factor became more and more important, and is especially crucial in late added content. The only way to stay in the game is not to get hit.
Not quite.
One way to stay in the game is to not get hit.
The other way is to be tough enough to survive whatever you DO get hit by.
This is true, but in the end game the devs started stacking up a lot of debuffs, because they really couldn't keep adding damage since everything would start to one shot all the non-tanks. But those debuffs would quickly stack up if they all landed, and even debuffs you don't normally consider in most damage mitigation discussions start to become important. -Recharge, for example, could very quickly kill anything that relied on clicks for defensive purposes. -End would eliminate your toggles. And Slow would basically anchor you in place giving you no options for escaping the situation (short of teleporting away). In fact, slow plus -regen could kill an invuln just as much as spike damage, because if you can't run away and you stop healing, all the resistance in the world can't save you. It can only prolong the inevitable. This made non-damage resistances increasingly important for any non-defense heavy mitigation combos. Defense implicitly mitigated debuffs, but you could also have very high resistances to debuffing on top of damage resistance, at least situationally.
Really, no damage mitigation could keep you alive indefinitely against a significant number of genuinely strong attackers in CoH, because offense was pretty high in CoH. So the most important damage mitigation was strong offense: you had to kill them before they could stack up and kill you. And that's part of what made -recharge such a nasty debuff. It hurt the clicky-defense people, but it turned off everyone's offense. And once everyone in the team is no longer clicky healing or buffing or attacking, life gets very difficult very quickly.
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As to Mathematics, Arcana worked out on Live that Defense was just slightly over 2x better than equivallent Resistance.
So if you had a choice between +2% Defense and +4% Resist, you were better off with the additional Defense (up to Soft-Cap of course).
neither of those things is true. Arcanaville demonstrated Defense was inherently flawed. defense and resistance have accreating returns; getting some -- even what seems like a lot -- of one you don't have much of isn't worth getting what seems like a little of one you already have a great deal of. +2% resistance at 88% (mitigating 1/6th of incoming damage) is more valuable than 4% defense (mitigating ~1/11th of incoming damage) from zero.
The situation was a bit complicated because the question of how valuable defense and resistance were had both mathematical and situational complexities to the question.
Let's start with the simple question and work outward from there. What's more valuable, defense or resistance? Well, obviously values matter. 80% resistance is very likely to be more valuable than 8% defense. So how do we compare apples to apples?
We can consider the simplified case of damage mitigation. Resistance is easy (or easier): 50% resistance means you take half the damage that you would have taken if you didn't have the resistance. Is there a value for defense that generates the same result? Well, no. First of all, resistance is constant while defense is statistical. If someone shoots you with an attack that deals 100 damage per hit and they hit you ten times, that's 1000 damage. If you had 50% resistance, then that would be 500 damage. Period the end. With defense, there's statistics clouding things a bit. If a minion attacks you twenty times and you have no defense, *on average* they will hit you ten times. If those attacks deal 100 damage per hit, you'll get hit with 1000 damage. On Average. If you had 25% defense, then On Average you'd have been hit five times instead of ten, and you'd get 500 damage. On Average. In practice, you'll see different results at different times.
But if we consider the long term average, then 25% defense equals 50% resistance, right? Well, that depends. When the thing attacking you is a minion with base 50% tohit, then yes, on average, 25% defense will mitigate the same amount of damage that 50% resistance would. But then we have to consider not everything has base 50% tohit. Incarnates don't. Any critter that possesses tohit buffing powers don't. If you're crazy enough to fight +6 or higher, the combat modifiers start adding tohit increases again.
Still, most of the time most things attacking you outside of Incarnates (and a few other interdimensional thingies) have base 50% tohit, so in those situations 25% defense equals 50% resistance. Except there's one more thing about averages to consider. If you're hit over and over again with 50 damage attacks, you could pop heal inspirations if you get too low on health. But if you're occasionally hit with 100 damage attacks that's a little harder, because the damage is more bursty. Consider 40% defense and 80% resistance. There's a big difference between getting hit over and over with 200 point damage attacks and every so often getting hit with a 1000 point damage hit. In the long run it averages out. But you have to live long enough for it to average out.
So X resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 2X defense, but resistance is more smooth, which seems like resistance is better. But defense has an advantage that has nothing to do with damage. When an attack lands, you take damage and you also get hit by any secondary effects in the attack. Resistance reduces the damage. It generally doesn't help with any of the non-damage effects. Defense, on the other hand, works by making attacks miss entirely. So when defense "works" the entire attack fails: the damage misses, and all the secondary effects also miss. So the difference between 40% and 80% damage resistance is that 80% resistance reduces damage by 80% while 40% reduces *everything* by 80% - damage, debuffs, everything - because those things simply don't land 80% of the time (relative to not having defense).
But, just to try to shorten the story a bit, then you have to consider the effects of defense debuffs, tohit buffs, and the situational difference between the two: team defense buffs are more common than team resistance buffs, so if you have defense you likely have a lot of what everyone else on the team will get, whereas if you have resistance you may end up with both high res and high def in a team. Ditto inspirations.
Short answer: there's an X defense = 2X resistance rule of thumb that helps with the very high level damage mitigation mathy comparison. But in the real game, you always need to evaluate the specifics of the situation to know whether X defense or Y resistance is going to be more helpful in practice. The article of mine linked above refers to a specific set of situations, prior to the game making changes which altered those situations somewhat (very specifically, adding Elusivity, which was an idea of mine but it wasn't incorporated in the way I described using it).
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DPS Ranking for Blast Sets?
in Archetypes
Posted
Sorry for the late reply, I've been busy lately and only checking in periodically. I think this gives me a bit too much credit here. People were theorycrafting almost from day one. Beta, in fact. If I deserve credit for something here, it is bringing some formalism and rigor to the theorycrafting, and for making it a bit more accessible, such as it is, beyond the number crunchers. After all, people were building their "concept builds" using the Brawl Index before I ever invented DPA.
Also, the number crunchers I think contributed as much to concept building as anything else. There were a lot of concept builds that were unachievable, until the quants showed they were possible. No stamina builds, for example, were heavily analyzed by the quants. I made an SR build in the pre-IO era that had no stamina, to show it was possible. And most of the number crunchers I respected on the original forums were not religious min/maxers either: they took their number crunching in all sorts of "conceptual" directions, and most of them advised people to play what they liked, not to chase numerically optimal builds. I think the *core* of the numbers community were not pushing min/max as the correct way to play the game. There were people who did that, but I didn't tend to see them make original contributions to the quant community on the forums besides "look at my build" posts.
Personally, and I think I speak for a lot of the old school quants of City of Heroes, if you're using calculations to figure out how to play what you want to play, you're doing it right. If you're using calculations to judge how wrong other people's builds are, you're doing it wrong.