macskull

Excelsior is far and away the highest-population server even though it has no particular designation while Torchbearer, which also lacks a particular designation - and was the first server - has a population only slightly higher than Indomitable (about 20 more people at the time of this post). Given your argument that Indomitable's low population can be traced solely back to its designation as "the PvP server," how do you explain Torchbearer's similar numbers?

To counter your anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence, most people I've seen on Facebook, Reddit, or the HC Discord asking which server to play on get told either Everlasting or Excelsior because that's where the people are. You might get a few players on Indomitable who otherwise wouldn't be there if it wasn't designed as "the PvP server," but not enough to significantly impact the server's population. What's happening on HC now is similar to what was happening the last year or two of the game's live run, where the vast majority of the population consolidated on Freedom and Virtue with a couple other servers competing for a distant third place.

What you said: I was addressing that statement at its face value when I clearly should have been looking for a deeper, more insightful meaning. How silly of me. Regarding the rest of your post... not really. The number of active zone PvPers is smaller than the number of arena PvPers. PvP happening in zones tends to be in RV and mainly occurs for a little while every so often. You can't just jump into the zone and find people most of the time, even on Excelsior. Indomitable's low population has more to do with the game's playerbase as a whole shrinking than it does its designation as any particular this-or-that server. The best anyone can do given the lack of any publicly-available historical data about server populations is make educated guesses, but "un-designating" Indomitable as the "unofficial PvP server" isn't going to magically bring its population up. This is a pretty socially-oriented MMO and players will gravitate toward the servers with the highest population. Eventually all that'll be left on Indomitable and Torchbearer are the people who want to play on low-population servers. EDIT: And Reunion, I suppose, but that's kind of a weird case. You can see on Discord's live graphs that Reunion's peak player numbers happen several hours before the rest of the servers, which makes sense considering it's the EU server.

None that are publicly available. The Discord graphs are useful for 24-hour and 7-day trends, but don't give any historical long-term data. It is interesting to watch though. Right now I'm just manually inputting data from the server status page's population numbers into a spreadsheet, which automatically updates the graph in my signature. It wouldn't be too hard (I assume) for someone to write a script which scrapes the numbers from the HTML and then saves them somewhere, but what little programming knowledge I had is 15 years old and that's beyond my abilities these days.

This is categorically false. Unless the server somehow managed to collect a large population and then have a mass exodus in the space of three days, anyways. Indomitable and Everlasting were launched on April 28, 2019. Indomitable was designated the unofficial PvP server on May 1, 2019. Besides, double XP didn't get turned off on Indomitable for another week after the announcement. It is true that most zone PvP happens on Excelsior these days, but that's by virtue of being the highest-population server. In the first 18-24 months Homecoming was around there was a pretty big overlap between the people who PvP'd in the arena and in zone, but once the novelty of the game being back wore off lots of the arena PvPers moved on and there was a slow zone PvPer exodus to Excelsior over summer/fall 2021. The problem with zone PvP is that it isn't reliable and is rarely if ever balanced, but that isn't usually a concern for those who enjoy it. Most organized PvP still happens on Indomitable.

A lot of this is perception. Population is definitely lower than it was over the winter but it isn't that much lower. This thread has been at least part of the reason I'm starting to track player numbers though, especially since we haven't had a statistics update in over two years. I just need a good way to automate the data collection and publish it so I'm not having to manually check and input data every week.

As promised, here's the update to my previous post: Envenomed Blades uses the following formula for determining damage: (0.15*Melee_Damage)*(0.16*minmax(power.base>rechargetime, 0, 20) + 0.36)/power.base>areafactor The damage scale is melee_damage, which means it can change depending on the AT in question but since Dominators are the only AT with access to this power that number will always be 58.3907 at level 50. Thankfully, Dominators have the second-highest melee damage scale in the game behind Scrappers (1.05 vs 1.125). Power.base>rechargetime is pretty self-explanatory: EB damage scales based on unmodified recharge time, capping at 20 seconds (powers with recharge times longer than 20 seconds gain no extra benefit). Power.base>areafactor is a little weirder, but basically it uses the same calculation as PPM for reducing damage in AoEs. If you're curious how areafactor is determined, it's using the following formula: areafactor = 1+(0.15*Radius)-(0.011*Radius*(360-Arc)/30) where radius = 0 for single-target powers, which makes areafactor = 1. Since @Carnifax mentioned earlier they were disappointed with the results of EB on Haunt, I'm going to assume EB works like Assault Hybrid, where a pet summoned while the caster has EB active will have EB's proc damage ability carried over to it. Like I mentioned in my last post, EB using melee_damage is especially shitty in this case because melee_damage for "minion pets" is 55.61, so your pets will be dealing less damage to begin with and they tend to have shorter-recharge attacks, resulting in even less extra damage per attack. EB uses a slightly different formula for location/toggle/auto powers that uses activation period instead of recharge time, but I'm not going to list that here. Interface DoTs don't use a dynamic formula like EB, instead theirs is like this: (0.125 * Melee_TempDamage) The above example is for interfaces which state they deal "moderate" DoT, but every DoT interface is similar. The interfaces which state they deal "minor" DoT use scale 0.1 instead of scale 0.125, so about 20% less. Using melee_tempdamage here means every AT/pet/critter in the game will use the exact same scale - each entity technically has its own value, but they're all set to the same number: 107.0897 at level 50 (this ensures procs deal the same damage across ATs, among other things). Already you can see this is almost twice as much as EB before we start factoring in recharge time and areafactor. Interface DoTs don't care about recharge time or areafactor. They're always the same number. It doesn't matter if you have a 1-second-recharge AoE with a 1000-foot radius, the DoT ticks will never change. TL;DR: Envenomed Blades sucks - a lot. That's at least partly by design, and I would not be at all surprised if similar changes made their way to other powers, like Interface procs. --- At least for the Electrical Affinity powers, maxtargets for PPM calculation purposes is always set to 5 regardless of what the actual maxtargets is. I don't know if this is the case for all chain powers, or only the EA ones. I'll have to test it sometime. I can't find the source at the moment, and this may have changed in the last 3 years, but minimum chance for a proc is always 5% plus an additional 1% for each PPM, so in this case a 3.5 PPM proc would be 8.5%.

I’m on mobile so I’ll try and update this with the math and stuff later when I get back to an actual computer, but Envenomed Blades and the DoT interfaces calculate damage very differently. Interface adds a fixed value of damage per tick regardless of the power which triggers it, while EB uses a calculation based on the base recharge time and areafactor (if applicable). EDIT: Oh, and the lookup table is different beyween the two as well. Interface procs use melee_tempdamage while EB uses melee_damage. I’ll explain why that’s particularly shitty when I update this post.

From the I26P2 patch notes: Envenomed Blades: Fixed a bug where this power would sometimes proc more than once. Procs now ignores damage buffs and enhancements. That last part is what really did it in. Martial was a top-tier secondary before this but the EB change combined with a few other tweaks to the set make it low-to-midrange now. (This also answers my question about when Trick Shot got turned into a proper chain attack, actually.)

At present I only have a small number of data points so there's actual data but not a lot - Saturday evening player count right now is down about 10% from what I was seeing in December, a couple weeks after page 3 was released. This is true, but the spike in population lasts for maybe a month.

I'm neither Bopper nor a dev but the reason there are two different chaining mechanisms is because until Electrical Affinity was released chain powers didn't really exist, they were just powers which created pseudopets which "jumped" like with your Jolting Chain example. Electrical Affinity is the first set to use the actual chain mechanic, which is more desirable since it's way easier to define priorities and conditions for the chaining effects. This particular example provides a really interesting look into how Trick Shot has changed since it first showed up in the Issue 24 beta before shutdown - if you look at the CoD entry from 2012 it uses pseudopets and even shares some code with Chain Induction. At some point I don't recall, it was updated to be an actual chain power. More on topic for the OP: the distinction between "single-target power which triggers pseudopets" and "chain power" is really really important from a proc standpoint. Chain powers have their own calculation for proc chance purposes: =PPM*((Base_recharge/(1+Recharge_slotting))+Activation_time)/(60*(0.25+0.75*(1+0.75*Max_targets))) where "Max_targets" can be dynamically defined but is currently always set to 5 regardless of actual max targets. To put that into actual readable format, it means chain powers are pretty bad for proc slotting. A 10-second recharge time power with a 2.03-second activation time and no slotted recharge has about 18% chance to fire on each target for a 3.5ppm proc, which is even worse than a comparable AoE's 22%. As far as pseudopet powers go, I'm fairly certain for any "jumps" procs will use the calculation of the parent power for determining proc chances, but someone feel free to correct me here.

I don't see any reason why this command should not exist. It's /altinvite minus the extra steps and the validation to check whether the target character is on the same account as the requesting character is already there.

Veng bait is still contribution!

There is, but it involves stripping all the item data out to prevent people from duplicating items and/or manually editing the demorecord file to give themselves a bunch of stuff they didn't have before. The import process also isn't automated and from my understanding can cause some stability issues when run on a populated server.

There are a few around.

I think this is the nail in the coffin to that argument, tbh. They had four years while the game was still live to go back and "un-nerf" stuff but they didn't touch a single thing.

Not a powers guy but travel suppression is implemented in movement powers on a per-power basis and it's pretty likely the NPC versions never got it added. There's not really any reason for them to have it either, the AI is pretty dumb.

Fly actually had that 50% tohit debuff at launch and it was simply added to the other travel powers in issue 4. Like you said, it lasted a week before implementing the current version of travel suppression. There's a whole bunch of people in this thread who're still blaming PvP for travel suppression being a thing, but if you'll direct your attention to your nearest PvP zone or arena map you'll find travel suppression is completely nonexistent in PvP. Those who want unsuppressed movement in PvE have plenty of options - click buffs, auto powers, and set bonuses aren't subject to travel suppression, nor are Combat Jumping and Hover.

Didn't read the thread, but: /jranger

I mean, I suppose it's a debate, in the sense that "gravity exists" is a debate.

I mean, you don't have to. Like multiple posters have said up-thread, you can ignore Energy Focus entirely and the set still performs better than it ever did. Basically, the set is a top-tier performer now and Energy Focus is a nice "sometimes" thing you can just ignore, or occasionally take advantage of. Every Scrapper/Stalker power which does not deal extra damage when it crits explicitly states this fact. Example: Concentrated Strike's power description which states "Concentrated Strike Criticals do not result in extra damage, instead they instantly recharge the Power Siphon [Build Up] power." Also, re: Energy Melee - current cycle time is 12.67 seconds for Energy Transfer, down from 22.67 seconds pre-I27 (and 21 seconds pre-I12). If you happen to have a stack of Energy Focus that cycle time becomes 11 seconds. Oh, and those 11- and 12.67-second cycle times can also crit for bonus damage which simply didn't exist before and Energy Transfer didn't have its damage scale lowered despite its recharge time being cut in half. It's true that you can no longer drop an enemy while hidden with a 1-second activation time power, but like... why would you have been doing that in the first place? ET didn't crit from hide and you sure as hell weren't going to use Assassin's Strike on most things - what were you opening with, Bone Smasher? You also said you would probably skip old Total Focus and take Placate and Air Superiority... which really makes me wonder how you were playing a Stalker.

Also Scourge. On higher-end teams at least, the slightly weaker buff/debuff ability a Corruptor brings is more than evened out by the higher damage especially against hard targets.

I'm defining "suppression" as "the power in question is active but provides no benefit" since that's consistent with the way the word was used in the patch notes for Issue 13 (quoted below). After re-reading your post I see we are saying the same thing though.

I'm assuming you're talking about Energy Melee here, but even if you pretend "the gimmick" doesn't exist the set is objectively better than it was even before the infamous ET nerf. The good part here is if you were one of those "people who enjoyed the old set and just wanted number tweaks" you got your tweaks and every single power in the set is better now - again, that's completely ignoring "the gimmick." More on topic: I don't mind the idea of combo mechanics (specifically build/spend-type) but lockout periods are annoying. Water Blast's is handled well enough where it isn't a big deal, but Psi Melee's is just super clunky and like @Luminara said upthread, having to watch an icon in the buff bar to get a consistent experience with Savage Melee is more than a little frustrating. EDIT: I suppose I was incorrect above when I said every power in EM had been tweaked - Barrage is still total poopoodoodoo (but if you do care about Energy Focus it might be worth using in some very specific situations) and Taunt/Placate/Build Up weren't touched. The other 7 powers in the set (6 for Stalkers since AS didn't get changed either) are objectively better than they used to be.