thunderforce
-
Posts
471 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Store
Articles
Patch Notes
Posts posted by thunderforce
-
-
58 minutes ago, Patti said:
What if players used the test server to test this for the GMs?
I did. The response was largely a suggestion that /levelupxp might work differently, and also the realisation that respecs are cheap and I might as well do it on live.
-
14 minutes ago, GM Conviction said:
Is it possible that just waiting and trying again resolves the issue? Sure, I personally haven't seen that occur. I'm not saying that it hasn't but, I have not had a player comeback to me saying that is what they did and it worked.
That seems unremarkable if that's not a thing you advise players to do. Of course, players only come back and say "I did XYZ and it worked" if XYZ is one of the things you advise them to do.
Also, it's possible that some of the current remedies actually work and some don't. Perhaps busy zones do matter. I hope to shed some light on the other cases when I have time.
18 minutes ago, GM Conviction said:If you wish to test that scenario of just waiting to resolve the failure, feel free.
The only thing I can test is assertions of the form "respecs are likely to fail under these circumstances". I don't have a convenient way to produce failed respecs for testing purposes.
However, the GM team here is in a position to actually test this on a grand scale. When a player has exactly one of the supposed common problems, have half of all GMs advise people to use the supposed remedy; the other half, advise them to wait a bit. Document the results, being careful not just to rely on impressions of the outcomes. The benefit would be that in the long run players could be given better advice.
20 minutes ago, GM Conviction said:Has it being debunked?
Yes, not just "always" (although I submit that GMs should not make "hyperbolic" statements that an uninformed player would take as simple statements of fact; with no prior knowledge, anyone would have taken the statement that it fails "every time" as literally meaning just that) but, as I said, that it is "very likely" seems to be debunked. If the odds of a failure with uncashed levels are 90% - which sounds like "very likely" to me - the odds of my three consecutive respecs all working are one in a thousand (even if we suppose for the sake of argument that using /levelupxp is special and that VEAT forced respecs are special, so the successes there don't count against the idea that uncashed levels matter). The simpler explanation is that in fact respecs with untrained levels are not "very likely" to fail.
24 minutes ago, GM Conviction said:What I think would be more interesting is to see is that of those who do have failure how many of them are because they have untrained levels, or because they were in a busy area, or they were in an SG.
"Because" is an awkward word here because it is very hard for either of us to demonstrate a causal relationship. All we can do is try and demonstrate a correlation, or the lack thereof.
I think it is instructive to consider this: if my hypothesis is correct, if untrained levels have nothing to do with it, but because most respecs work, if you tell a player to train their levels they usually come back and say it works - how would your observations be different from reality? I submit that in fact they would not be different.
-
34 minutes ago, GM Kaiju said:
I think you are getting hung up on the wording and missing the intent. You are correct, the GM team deals with the occasions Respecs fail, not when they succeed.
99% of the time when a Respec fails and a player requests help, the solution is one of the ones mentioned by the GMs you noted.
It seems increasingly likely to me that it's not the "solution" at all, it's just that most respecs succeed and so if the player stops whatever they were doing at the time of the first failure, it appears that that solved the problem when in fact it's pure coincidence. We could equally be in a position where when a respec fails, the answer is "turn off your aura", and hey presto, that works. We just happen to have fixated on things which naturally one would expect to be likely to true of a player trying a respec, because that appears to be the common element. In that case the advice would be no better than "wait a bit and try again", even if the intent was good.
(That said, I might try the same process in busy zones, in SG bases, in Flashback mode...)
38 minutes ago, GM Kaiju said:A developer would have to determine what exactly causes a failure
Until they do so, it doesn't seem harmful to collect what facts we can as players. Already the idea that you must train your untrained levels, or even that it is very likely to fail if you don't, has been debunked. This will let better advice be given to other players.
42 minutes ago, GM Kaiju said:I think you are getting hung up on the wording
I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest the wording should not include things now definitely known to be false.
-
On 6/19/2020 at 7:12 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:
FAQ:
Q: Whut?
A: Yup.
Hang on, you seem to have missed out the bit where you promise to double the
ISKinf I send you... -
8 hours ago, Greycat said:
See, here's the thing I have with the "untrained levels" one - If this were the trigger, I think we'd see a *lot* more VEATs have failed respecs.
Well, exactly. That was my first objection to the idea that it was an "automatic fail"; it's in the first paragraph of the OP. But the response to that was that the VEAT forced-respecs are special somehow, which seemed unlikely but is not impossible.
-
15 minutes ago, SuperPlyx said:
Altho I am guilty of repeating the "Don't be in SG base" multiple times. I always respec in the base and respec a fair amount. I did a respec this morning to move one slot on my farmer.
I have never had a respec fail.
Apropos of which, now respecs don't enforce that the slotting pattern be possible with normal levelling, it would be nice if there was an alternative mode that was less of a pain to move two slots.
I wouldn't be surprised if "in SG base" turned out to be another one of these things that's just often where people try respecs because it's convenient.
-
We had a discussion on Discord today where a GM said that respeccing with earned but untrained levels is "an automatic fail"; it "fails every time". What about VEATs, who always do an untrained respec at 24? Well, they are somehow special.
I went onto the beta server and started an energy/invul scrapper; did /levelupxp 11, levelled to 10, respecced. It worked. Reported back to Discord.
Manga (Community Helper) suggested /levelupxp was somehow special and this might not apply in normal play; another GM said it "fails with untrained levels in the vast majority of cases".
As it happens I have some characters on live with untrained levels. I've respecced an energy/fire scrapper (trained 12, earned 13); a fire/energy dominator (trained 22, earned 27); and an energy/energy blaster (trained 18, earned 19). All three worked first time. Obviously it doesn't fail "every time", but also, if it fails in the "vast majority" of cases, how lucky am I? (For example, if the "vast majority" is 3/4 of the time, the odds of this happening are 1/64).
(Also, GMs only know about the cases where it _does_ fail; without knowing how many try it and succeed, how can we know if it's a majority, vast or otherwise?)
I'm posting this because it seems increasingly likely to me that at least some of the things we think don't make respecs work are guesswork, perpetuated by confirmation bias and the way that anything that's likely to be true of a character respeccing is likely to be blamed. "Don't be in a busy zone" - most characters are in busy zones. "Don't be in an SG base" - that's where I keep my enhancement storage. "Don't have untrained levels" - why would you train a level when you planned a respec? But because respecs work most of the time, the player changes this thing and, hey presto, it looks like changing the thing fixed the problem.
So... it would be very useful if people reading this, when they're doing a respec _anyway_, would first try it in one of the not-recommended ways - busy zone, SG base, uncashed levels, in TF/Flashback mode - and report back here.
-
1
-
-
On 4/15/2020 at 5:48 PM, Cinnder said:
Maria Jenkins, Prevent Shadowhunter's resurrection, mish end dialogue:
'Good work, Character. We need to do this occassionally to prevent Shadowhunter's ressurection.'
Plus at least one other use of "ressurection" and one of "ressurect".
-
It really is best to have someone proofread a large suggestion of this kind before posting it, I'm afraid.
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
-
Ghost Widow's 40-45 arc, defeat 20 Circle, the clue says: "The Tome of Tormvodel? I know of it. It's secrets are useless to us, but if you truly sought to restore a ghost to it's body, perhaps it could work."
Two misused "it's".
-
I know that i27 has eaten at least some of these messages.
-
47 minutes ago, Shenanigunner said:
Four times now in less than two weeks, I've had something like the following encounter:
- NEWB: Can someone explain Combat Teleport?
- ME: Fast, short-range TP, can be executed repeatedly.
- BIGGUS DICKUS: Well, yes, three times.
What server is this on? I've not seen anything like this (specifically, the lengthy doubling-down) on Reunion, even speaking as a notoriously acerbic player myself.
-
1
-
1
-
38 minutes ago, parabola said:
I've been following this thread with interest and this is a point I'm genuinely curious about. I'm wondering what effect more detailed information about sale prices would have on a market that uses blind bidding.
The market should not use blind bidding. Inching up bids to find the sale price is the worst downside, but not the only one. Let players who want to buy or sell now - or to post the best offer for a quicker transaction - just see the other bids.
39 minutes ago, parabola said:Knowing every sale price there has ever been for a lotg for example doesn't tell you anything about either the supply or the demand at the time of each sale. When setting your buy or sale price you would still have to base your descision on where the market seems to be right now, not where it was in the past.
I think "right now" can reasonably be thought of as more than five transactions, though. The eyeblink we get may just reflect someone fatfingering a bid or sell offer, or dumping something in a hurry. I think "now" covers a week, given the way prices naturally change at the weekend as people have more time to play.
-
10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:
--- If you like the market the way it is, then you may have a distinct bias on this subject which is not necessarily shared by all players. ---
10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:There are two wholly unhelpful things to say:
- "I can do it, so anyone can."
and
- "You can always just spend Merits."
Well, I don't like the market the way it is - indeed in the early days on Homecoming I got quite severely lambasted for suggesting the market interface showed more data, although I hope we're over that phase now - so:
Whether the first of these is unhelpful really depends on what "it" is. If "it" is convert Merits to Boosters and AH same, then yes, anyone can do that. It is not an operation too complex for anyone who can manage the rest of the City interface, and in and of itself it makes plenty of money.
I don't think anyone is saying the second thing; what people are saying is the related (but true) observation that the Merit Vendor does provide an upper bound on AH prices.
10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:The seeding of Salvage has been a pretty solid addition, although I think the values are frankly too high.
The seed prices haven't been relevant for months and will never be relevant again absent some major change, so who cares?
10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:The Enhancements especially are "newb traps" and sit on the market for months at a time.
To have a lot of them to sell you have to be doing Field Crafter, in which case you're hardly new. Simply checking the price history would tell anyone they're worthless (and in the department of "I can do it, so anyone can", I don't think it is unreasonable to expect someone who wants to sell something to see what it's worth, especially if the price display bug is fixed); and matters would be further improved if the AH interface showed more data (eg if you know there was one of something sold in the last month, it's a safe bet it'll take a while to shift).
10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:Alternatively, "Fair Price Range Recommendations" for each item based on impartial, factual data (not supply and demand, but the game's likelihood of dropping/availability and cost of crafting, et cetera).
This is a complex proposal - "impartial, factual data" is a handwave over the fact that choosing the right data to present is itself a loaded question (eg "400% increase in revenue" can be a true fact presented by a RL startup, but it still can be masking the fact that in Q1 it was $1 and in Q2 it was $4) - and seems to have little merit compared to just giving more information about price history and buy and sell offers.
10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:Yeah, I know . . . this one's probably going to be super unpopular, especially for the biggest marketeers.
The linked proposal is a bad idea for two reasons. First of all, any increase in transaction fees encourages off-market sales. This is awkward, makes price history even less accessible (worse for the novice than for the experienced trader), and means that to buy or sell expensive stuff at all you have to know where to ask.
Secondly, it's a solution in search of a problem. There was a real problem on live inasmuch as the most expensive enhancements commanded huge prices, sometimes in the billions; and part of that was down to the fact that old players had billions accumulated (from the pre-AH years with almost no inf sinks) and could outbid any new player. That isn't the case here - there are rich players, but the disparity is not as great, converter roulette means supply can increase to the point where the most expensive enhancements cost 20 million not 2 billion, and factors like selling converters mean that it is relatively easy for poor players to get some of the money from rich marketeers who need those converters for their own operations.10 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:Let's keep pushing for City of Heroes to maintain its crown of the Most Accessible MMO!
City of Heroes doesn't have that crown. If nothing else, "City of Heroes but without inventions" used to exist and was considerably more accessible.
ETA: Converter roulette is the key insight here.
On live, a lot of money was made by flipping. From the point of view of a producer (someone who gets drops and wants money) or a consumer (someone who has money and wants enhancements), a flipper is a middleman who extracts money and adds no value. In game as in RL, producers and consumers have no use for such middlemen and would like to eliminate them. Hence the adversarial relationship between "ebil" marketeers and other players who wanted to limit their time in the AH.
But on HC, the equivalent is converter roulette. Now the middleman _does_ add value; I sell my useless IO and they use their specialised knowledge to turn it into a useful one, which I or someone like me will be happy to buy. The middlemen compete with each other - if LOTG Recharges command a high price, they all want to produce more and to price them relatively low so their stock will sell. This is a far healthier situation for everyone - including the player who wants to have as little as practical to do with the AH - and does not need to be changed radically.
I proposed some pretty radical approaches on live - the most obvious being that you could only, by price, sell a proportion of the items you had bought on the AH. I would not propose those now because the situation on HC doesn't need or want them.
-
5
-
-
7 hours ago, Ender Shadowborne said:
Uhhhh..... still though.... Shouldn’t the signs still at least be somewhat accurate? Like the signs alone.....
The signs are accurate; the map is what is wrong. You can tell this because if the map was accurate, it would be impossible to go from Yellow to Green line without travelling between the tram lines.
Since no-one in their right mind would design a tram system with two lines that have no interchange, presumably the interchange at Paragon Hauptbahnhof was destroyed in the Rikti War, and it has since been restored to service.
-
21 minutes ago, Hew said:
People would murder you if you automatically took items off the AH that didnt sell within x days/months/years.
They spent hard earned inf to list the damn thing to start with. You pay to list, you pay to collect.
If the time period is long - months, not days - they've probably forgotten about it (and/or the game).
(But I agree there's a lot of nonexistent problems being fixed here. To my mind, the problems are the noob trap of the Merit Vendor, the lack of data, and the bugs.)
-
1
-
-
On 12/16/2020 at 1:29 AM, arthurh35353 said:
The thing with everything about the market (and buying things off the market) is that it really is gated on people willing to spend the most time on... not playing the game.
Other things are so ludicrously expensive that most people don't even know they exist without being told things (like expensive pay 2 win items, or buying super-packs for the only way to get things like brainstorms and boosters. Boosters are supposed to be *common* salvage according to it description, yet is effectively the most expensive "common" salvage in existence. Even more so, if you factor that you need at least 5 per IO basic or set enhancement to use. That actually makes them effectively more expensive than Catalysts.
Now, I agree that the market is, in a sense, not playing the game, but a bit of a bag on the side of the game - but two things:
On Homecoming, you can get far more goodies with far less time spent in the AH than on live. This is good and should not be tampered with carelessly.
You don't _need_ boosters at all; ED means boosters typically give very marginal benefits, and in particular if you're boosting a basic IO in a slot that could sensibly take a set IO, something has gone very awry.
On 12/16/2020 at 5:38 AM, Ignatz the Insane said:But I still have reservations on the current system because the friends I've recruited to play have been at best lukewarm with the same system, and have ended up leaving the game.
On a personal note, the arrangement I have with my more casual-interest friends is "give me your crafting stuff; I'll give you sets". This is an extremely good deal (not many novices slot ATOs at level 10), and if they want to take an interest in crafting later than can.
On 12/16/2020 at 2:46 PM, S P A C E S said:Converters are the defining factor in the current game for deciding who is fighting for inf, and who has more info than they know how to use. The prices of every enhancement are so dependent upon the conversion process that any use of merits other than for buying converters is sub-optimal.
I'm surprised every time I find it's still true, but boosters are very seriously close to converters for merit sales - close enough that the time you save not dragging endless stacks of converters into the market might make up the difference. But this is why I propose making merits directly AH-tradeable.
-
Hopefully uncontroversial:
- Just have the Merit Vendor warn you, with one of those "never show this again" tickyboxes, that stuff might be cheaper on the AH and it might be more efficient to turn your merits into converters/boosters and sell those. Yes, we can brainstorm more complex changes, but right now "new player earns merits" -> "new player spends 100(s) on ATO(s)" -> "someone enlightens new player who is vexed" is an open wound; slap a bandage over it.
- Better yet, cut out a lot of the merit derivative stuff by making merits directly tradeable on the AH.
- As a very definite stretch goal, match merit buy/sell offers on the AH up with special salvage buy/sell offers when possible.
Probably still controversial:
There's definitely MMOs out there with worse AH implementations, but the way the City hides almost all the information is terrible (and no, it is not how any real-world trading process whatsoever works) - and perhaps after a year of Homecoming we know that the way people make money isn't now by being more willing to put up with that, as it was on live, but by (eg) using converters to provide a service to other players.
Show us the buy offers, and let us "buy now". Show us the sell offers, and let us "sell now". Show us more than an eyeblink of price history.
This would not ruin "market PVP". In EVE, players can see the last year of transactions for any commodity, both as a simple list and in a wide variety of chart formats. They can see every buy offer [1]; see every sell offer. EVE is not short of cutthroat market activity!
[1] In the "region" they are in, yes, but the City's market doesn't have any idea of where the item physically is.
-
On 12/11/2020 at 6:08 PM, Kallisti said:
Would it not be better to link to the Google Docs spreadsheets where these lists are maintained and updatable by the community as they are built?
Speaking as the angel of cynicism I quite like the idea that people who want to change them have to get set up to edit the Wiki, because we could really use more people who are.
(The more I think about this the more I think, yeah, just keep them as a gateway edit...)
-
GM Kal has been creating https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Indomitable_Base_List (and the four obvious equivalents). I feel a bit ambivalent about whether it should be done here or on the FBSA Wiki. What do other people think?
-
Just now, Monos King said:
So, actually, I'm not down with removing level shifts. At least not until MMs are fixed, to which then I would be more receptive. People forget how devastating playing upper content was for MMs back when pets could be facing up to +6 enemies...MMs were relegated to depleted corruptors. Alpha was a real life saver there.
I think there's two things going on here; yes, MMs struggle more with +4 missions than other characters, and yes, that should be addressed... but I don't think the way to do that is to cut the top off the difficulty slider so it effectively goes from -4 to +1.
-
1
-
-
20 hours ago, Puma said:
That will literally just drive people away.
Er... I said the short-term consequences would be drastic.
20 hours ago, Puma said:I worked hard for my incarnate shifts. Taking them away is not going to make the game more enjoyable for me. It will make it far less...suddenly making it harder and taking more time to do the same old boring content I've done a million times before.
You didn't work hard for them for two reasons; you were playing a videogame, which I hope you enjoy, which isn't work; and you can get incarnate level shifts on Homecoming by doing anything at all because the early veteran level rewards give you enough stuff to craft a set. The only remotely challenging part is figuring out the incarnate crafting interface.
Taking them away would only make the game harder if you have notoriety set no higher than +1 even in DA (which is effectively -2); otherwise, you could just turn the notoriety down as needed. Frankly, I don't think many characters at level 50 with incarnate powers are going to find fighting -1s hard _at all_.
If you really find the game so boring you don't want to spend more time playing it, perhaps you're not the target audience.
-
1
-
-
Palatine, First Ward: "Even after the Hetman antagonzied them so?" I think the Klingons had an antagonziser booth?
Later, message in chat channel: "You were even offered the choice of interviewing the captured recon soldiers without intereference"; "interference".
-
12 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:
Ooh, this is also my chance to pitch for a setting between AV and EB.
This is a good idea, but I'd like to see an option for more general AV scaling. With 2 players (who don't have super-boffo builds), an AV is a tough fight. With 8, it's a speedbump.
So, what _actually_ causes respecs to fail?
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by thunderforce
Very probably you are not. If you have a cold, and I tell you to rub honey on your nose for a week, and you get better, the honey isn't a "solution" to the cold. The cold went away anyway.
You don't know that. It is quite possible that all three of those achieve nothing, but the second attempt just tends to work anyway.
It requires GMs to record one bit of information per failed respec ticket at the time they deal with it in the normal way (not to "drop whatever they are doing", as someone else said upthread). This is not an onerous task.
"This" is the point that the idea that untrained levels are likely to cause a failed respec has largely been debunked. But "this" is the point of this thread.
The harm is that players are given a small amount of pointless makework after a failed respec, but more importantly that we're less likely to get to the bottom of what (if anything) _does_ cause respecs to fail if we allow a mythology to build up supported by confirmation bias.