Hit Rate

[Luminara]

20 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

A one in twenty chance to fumble has always seemed appropriate to me.

 

But there is no chance to fumble in Co*.  Fireball doesn't have a 5% chance to hit teammates clustered around the primary target.  I don't have a 5% chance to deal damage to myself when I miss with Incandescent Strike.  No-one puts NPC allies to Sleep 5% of the time when they use Frozen Aura.  Fumbles don't exist in this game (though, they could, by tacking a short duration Confuse to misses (this would primarily affect teams, which would make it comparatively unfair and discourage teaming)).

What does exist is an arbitrarily assigned waste of time, one which isn't even fairly constrained to that 5% across the board, since, as I've noted in this thread (and others), it's not applied to chains of mixed vectors (and this reality of the streak breaker is something which has always gnawed at the back of my mind... the game was specifically designed to require players to mix single-target and AoE powers, or to wait for powers to recharge if players wished to avoid mixing vectors, yet neither Cryptic nor Paragon ever made any attempt to address this, which implies that the waste of time was deliberate and intentional, and that we were deliberately and intentionally misled about it).  That our time means so little that it can be thrown into the void with misses says something, both about the game itself and about how we value that time.  And I don't know about you, but I've learned that my time is, in truth, far more valuable than I realized when I was younger.

 

You know I love you, Bill (not that way, put your pants back on (please put your pants back on (put your pants back on right now))), but I strongly disagree with your assessment of the miss function being appropriate.  As long as it represents nothing more than "Fuck you, your time is worthless", it's not appropriate, it's not worthwhile and it's not a useful mechanic for improving the game or our enjoyment of it.  It really does need to go away, or be overhauled to represent something more than a middle finger salute.

[Bill Z Bubba]

27 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Fireball doesn't have a 5% chance to hit teammates clustered around the primary target.  I don't have a 5% chance to deal damage to myself when I miss with Incandescent Strike.  No-one puts NPC allies to Sleep 5% of the time when they use Frozen Aura. 

 

I would love all of these things.

 

28 minutes ago, Luminara said:

And I don't know about you, but I've learned that my time is, in truth, far more valuable than I realized when I was younger.

 

Illusion, lunchtime, planned obsolescence, temporary retirement, blah, blah. Time no longer means much to me.

 

30 minutes ago, Luminara said:

You know I love you, Bill (not that way, put your pants back on (please put your pants back on (put your pants back on right now))), but I strongly disagree with your assessment of the miss function being appropriate.  As long as it represents nothing more than "Fuck you, your time is worthless", it's not appropriate, it's not worthwhile and it's not a useful mechanic for improving the game or our enjoyment of it.  It really does need to go away, or be overhauled to represent something more than a middle finger salute.

 

Ok. Get rid of it. But it has to go both ways. So get your pants back on, too.

 

No wait, what I meant was that if we can build to always hit, something will have to be done about defense. Why does it make more sense that we should never have to miss than for us to never get hit? Why is building for tohit/acc any different than building for the defense softcap?

 

So sure, remove the 95% cap. But only if you remove the 5% limit on the other side as well. That would be fair, right?

[Bill Z Bubba]

In other words, I GET the annoyance. It's exactly what prompted me to start a thread talking about how my favorite thing to do in this game suddenly became far less fun. To the point where I no longer do it and suddenly I find my time in game is drastically reduced. The ridiculous tank overbuffs didn't help anything either.

 

So sure, change it. But I'd like to see exactly how yall propose to change it.

 

If I eat a buncha huge insights, does that mean I can hit a +50 100% of the time? How's that gonna work in PvP? How do we make it where a -10 enemy has a 0% chance to ever hit us but a +10 enemy might? Do we completely overhaul the "purple patch" mechanics?

 

I'm curious now.

[Aurora_Girl]

Sure, you can hit a +50 mob 100% of the time...for 0.0000000006% of the damage you'd deal to a +0. 

 

There's your trade-off. 

[tidge]

I long ago accepted the particular misery of having 95% chance to hit with all of a character's AoE and still seeing more than one MISS! per spawn.... n almost every spawn... but I don't like it. I'm not entirely convinced that the AoE streakbreaker is really working against single spawns of many mobs... and since I usually have %proc in AoE, I half-wonder how those could be affecting it.

 

The most annoying aspect is switching between ST and AoE, since the streakbreaker count is different. It's highly annoying to miss an enemy with an AOE and then miss with a ST.

 

Almost all of my gripes are perception bias, but much of MY perception would be improved if I could see the actual attack roll in the combat monitor and not have to crawl the combat logs for them.

[Bill Z Bubba]

4 minutes ago, Aurora_Girl said:

Sure, you can hit a +50 mob 100% of the time...for 0.0000000006% of the damage you'd deal to a +0. 

 

There's your trade-off. 

 

You haven't answered any of the other questions.

 

How, exactly, do you implement this? What happens when we turn HitChance = Clamp(AccMods × Clamp(BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods)) into HitChance = AccMods × (BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods) in every area of the game? How does PvP Elusivity play into this?

[Bill Z Bubba]

Even if we do nothing but change Clamp from 5-95% to 5-100%, what are the consequences?

[Sovera]

16 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

You haven't answered any of the other questions.

 

How, exactly, do you implement this? What happens when we turn HitChance = Clamp(AccMods × Clamp(BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods)) into HitChance = AccMods × (BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods) in every area of the game? How does PvP Elusivity play into this?

 

You're being obtuse on purpose, Bill. Devs come up with these maths, then tweak them according to need.

 

Empirically other games managed this, so we can manage it here as well. Even as much as saying PvP remains untouched for the 2% of the population who play it. 

 

If it's the scenario that a level 1 guzzles yellow inspirations and hits a level 50, so what? Okay, they hit it, and they did 1 damage. Woop? Even hitting +5 already reduces our strongest attacks to double digits.

[Black Zot]

12 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Even if we do nothing but change Clamp from 5-95% to 5-100%, what are the consequences?

 

The game becomes more fun.

[Andreah]

Imagine if the random number generator had moods.

 

One day, you log in, you character falls out of bed, stubs a toe on the door, drops their favorite coffee cup, backs the car into a fire hydrant, and then can't hit those -49 skulls to save their life.

 

And a week later, the stars align, and not only can't they miss, but no one can hit them either, and they win $10 on a lottery ticket AND a costume contest for 100 Million inf.

 

Designing a uniformly distributed and also very streaky (sequentially correlated) random number generator is not difficult. Streakiness could even have multiple characteristic time correlation cycles in it. Think of it like the old fad of Biorhythms. 

 

One can do the opposite too; there's such a thing as QRNG's -- Quasi random number generators, which are specifically non-clumpy. 

[Bill Z Bubba]

3 minutes ago, Black Zot said:

The game becomes more fun.

 

Well if that's the only fucking criteria that matters, fix everything.

 

Make all team buffs affect the player. Why should that poor defender be able to increase someone else's density but not their own? Or grant mez protection to others but not themselves?

 

Get rid of the purple patch completely. It's not fun to miss that +4 AV more than we miss the +0 AV. Doing less damage is a waste of time, too. Be done with it.

 

etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

[Andreah]

24 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Even if we do nothing but change Clamp from 5-95% to 5-100%, what are the consequences?

I would prefer the hit determination algorithm be altered so that the chance asymptotically approaches 100% for sufficiently high to-hit+accuracy vs defense, but never gets all the way.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 12/22/2021 at 7:29 PM, Albion said:

There is no such thing, Batallion will hunt us all down.

 

Hudson!  This little girl survived longer than that with no weapons and no training!

[Ukase]

On 12/23/2021 at 12:33 AM, Lunchmoney said:

Perceptual bias I think is the term you are looking for.

Close. It's Perception Bias. 

[Ukase]

12 minutes ago, Andreah said:

Imagine if the random number generator had moods.

Are you suggesting it doesn't? 

[Sovera]

7 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

Well if that's the only fucking criteria that matters, fix everything.

 

Make all team buffs affect the player. Why should that poor defender be able to increase someone else's density but not their own? Or grant mez protection to others but not themselves?

 

Get rid of the purple patch completely. It's not fun to miss that +4 AV more than we miss the +0 AV. Doing less damage is a waste of time, too. Be done with it.

 

etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

 

 

That's the slippery slope with ill intent that comics are known for. Oh, alternate universe where there is an utopia? Obviously it had to be built on the backs of genocide and a behind-the-scenes mass slavery. Oh killing the Joker? Well obviously it turns the hero into a monster who then proceeds to kill everyone who breaks the law, including jaywalking.

 

Lets not do this. Paraphrasing Luminara I love you (but not in that way either, pants stay on) but the onus is on you to say why removing the 5% miss chance in PvE would break the game.

 

I don't care about PvP so the 5% can say, and I don't care about mobs hitting me and always having a 5% chance to hit. We already have a ToHit chart that shows how much is needed to reach 100% (in this case 95%) chance of hitting a critter. If a person wants to build to reach 100% against +4 they can. Or they decide they don't care and they don't. Like we already have.

[Shred Monkey]

I've never doubted the way the system assigns tohit %s.

 

I've often doubted the randomness of the game's RNG.  

 

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Sovera said:

Lets not do this.

 

I agree.

[Aurora_Girl]

1 hour ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

I agree.

 

Somebody's gotta get this man some fuckin' wassail before he burns the whole thing down. 

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Why does it make more sense that we should never have to miss than for us to never get hit? Why is building for tohit/acc any different than building for the defense softcap?

 

So sure, remove the 95% cap. But only if you remove the 5% limit on the other side as well. That would be fair, right?

 

That's something I've put a lot of thought into over the past 18 months.  Specifically, the question, "Is there any functional difference between never being hit, and only being hit so infrequently that base regen + unslotted Health is sufficient to bring you back to full HP before the next time you're hit?"

 

Answer: no.  Immortality is immortality.

 

That soft cap served a purpose when the game was originally released.  The design revolved around ensuring that critters had some semblance of parity with players, to instill a sense of challenge into the game.  Then toggle mutual exclusivity was removed.  Then Defense was adjusted.  And then it was adjusted again.  And then critter hit chances were adjusted.  And then the Invention system was introduced... at which point, the original intent behind and purpose of hit caps had become so distorted, after so many changes, that it ceased to be relevant.  But it remained in place and attempts were made to make it relevant, but it remained little more than a vestigial mechanic and a running joke about Accuracy nerfs on the forums.  BUT, the irrelevance of hit caps wasn't immediately apparent back then because the methods of reaching the soft cap were financially difficult to achieve.

 

Fast forward to today.  The foundation of the economy has been shifted to merits.  The inf* cap and one's ability to run a "rewarding" mission at high speed (farming) are no longer limiting factors on builds.  IOs are cheap, and even for "broke" characters, easily obtainable via converters.  Other enhancements, such as Winter sets, are still comparatively inexpensive.  Even more changes have been made, such as allowing HOs to go up to 53 without requiring random luck, and other special enhancements being combinable with HOs.  Achieving the soft cap has become so easy that we now discuss it as though it were the norm.

 

The point I'm (finally) getting to is that we're not only now seeing that the soft cap, that the entire hit check mechanic, is flawed, because we've been playing this game for years and years and becoming bored with it, it's that the problem has been there since the first changes were implemented, and it's become blatantly obvious now that we're able to take a wide variety of characters and explore that problem in depth.

 

The soft cap is irrelevant.  It lost its purpose when the first changes to Defense were made, when the hit check equation was adjusted, when critter base hit was reduced, when IOs were added.  It's a limit that we still have because it provides the perception of the possibility of being defeated, but in truth, that's all it is.  Smoke and mirrors.  Obfuscation of its irrelevancy.  We tell ourselves that we need that 5% chance of failure to make us feel like we have something to lose, but the reality is, we're lying to ourselves so we don't feel as bad about being overpowered.  Having an astronomically low chance of being defeated doesn't make the game feel challenging, it doesn't add excitement, it doesn't give us a sense of risk, it's just a balm we slather on our consciences.

 

Yes, get rid of the soft cap if the hit check mechanic is addressed.  It's outdated and it's time for us to find a better way to express critter challenge.

 

2 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

If I eat a buncha huge insights, does that mean I can hit a +50 100% of the time? How's that gonna work in PvP? How do we make it where a -10 enemy has a 0% chance to ever hit us but a +10 enemy might? Do we completely overhaul the "purple patch" mechanics?

 

Do we adjust the purple patch?  Only to the degree necessary to ensure that it remains as in-force as it is currently.  It makes no sense for us to be more capable against stronger and deadlier foes.  We should be missing against +20 enemies.  We should be hit harder and more often by +37 enemies.  We should fear things so far beyond our level range that we turn and run.  The purple patch is still relevant, and still serves a purpose.

 

PvP, I'd leave with the existing hit check system.  It makes sense to miss in PvP, and it serves a purpose to have a soft cap, because both ensure that the winner isn't the first person to make contact.  If, and only if, PvP players agree that they need the mechanic addressed in PvP, they can have a roundtable with the HC team.

 

If it were in my demesne, I'd allow slotted Accuracy or Accuracy set bonuses to scale the 95% limit upward, on a diminishing returns system.  Not ToHit, as that's already powerful enough.  It wouldn't have to go all the way to 100%, and it might take a pile of Accuracy to scale up to an "acceptable" value, but it would go light years toward addressing the frustration created by the hit check system.

 

I'd also do the same thing with Defense.  If you're rocking Defense in excess of the soft cap, that excess should represent some degree of improvement.  Again, maybe not all the way to 0%, but some shifting of the cap downward.  But I'd also completely remove the aggro cap.  NOT the AoE cap, just the aggro cap.  This would create the challenge which is lacking in the game as a whole, but especially for Defense-based characters and tankers/brutes.  Go ahead, round up the entire map with your character who's pushed his/her Defense to the point of only having a 1.7% chance to be hit, but bear in mind that an infinite number of attacks coming at you is going to ensure that you'll eat floor at some point.  Playing a Resistance-based or hybrid mitigation character?  Well, now you can find out where your real limits are, rather than simply manipulating the aggro cap to give yourself the equivalent of Invisibility by aggroing one spawn and training it all over the map.

 

We're sitting here in a twilight situation, not playing the game as it was originally designed, but also not playing a fully updated game.  Some things were changed very quickly after launch.  Other things were changed a year or two later.  Bit by bit, parts of the game were updated, but the basic conceits and concepts behind some things were fossilized and left in the ground, and they lost meaning as the game evolved.  The hit check system is one of the mechanics still trundling along in the Jurassic era of the game, never truly evolving, because the economical situation (rampant inflation) that existed on the original servers hid the problems with it from the general public, and the developers clung to the 5% chance idea like a starving tick on a hound.  A 1 in 20 chance of being hit would mean something, if aggro didn't cap at 16 or 17.  A 5% chance to miss might be useful, if missing actually put us at risk or had consequences beyond forcing us to use one more attack.  Neither of these are true any more.  They haven't been for a very, very long time.

[arcane]

Yeah it’s a no from me dawg

[Pzn]

28 minutes ago, Luminara said:

The soft cap is irrelevant.  It lost its purpose when the first changes to Defense were made, when the hit check equation was adjusted, when critter base hit was reduced, when IOs were added.  It's a limit that we still have because it provides the perception of the possibility of being defeated, but in truth, that's all it is.  Smoke and mirrors.  Obfuscation of its irrelevancy.  We tell ourselves that we need that 5% chance of failure to make us feel like we have something to lose, but the reality is, we're lying to ourselves so we don't feel as bad about being overpowered.  Having an astronomically low chance of being defeated doesn't make the game feel challenging, it doesn't add excitement, it doesn't give us a sense of risk, it's just a balm we slather on our consciences.

Completely disagree here.  There's a huge difference between a soft capped character with capped DDR and no DDR at all.  You would be essentially eliminating the chance of cascading defense failure and giving everyone in the game super reflexes instead of the flimsy IO defense they currently have.

[Andreah]

I think it's fun to discuss mechanical issues and speculate around possible fixes, both large and small. But I don't expect (or even support) making such changes any time soon. So, enjoy the discussion and don't worry about your expensive build being wrecked.

Edited December 24, 2021 by Andreah

[Pzn]

If it ain't broke don't fix it

[MJB]

 

i think its safe to say pvp is not a limiting factor here