New efforts!

[Codewalker]

I went back and found that the Archetype modifier had been reduced.

If the Defender modifier table was indeed reduced, then it would affect any -Resistance power that Defenders have*, not just Enervating Field. Defenders had Sonic Resonance and Sonic Attack in I5; any AT modifier changes certainly would have affected that as well. As Sonic was actually introduced in I5, it seems likely that any modifier changes were intended to balance that set rather than a specific nerf to Radiation.

* Except for Tar Patch. Tar Patch is a bad example, because it's a pseudopet, so it uses Pet modifiers, not Defender modifiers. It only changes when a dev remembers to update it, and they were notoriously bad at remembering to do that.

[Vee]

There was only one power that fit the criteria given.

If people are complaining that people in New York City were forced to pay a tax and head of the IRS responded, "You're wrong, every person in the US living in a city with a French statue in its harbor of 300' or more had to pay that tax," as if there were more than one city fitting that criteria and a category of cities were affected when in fact the only city fitting the category described is New York City the phrasing is obfuscatory at best. Normal English usage does not refer to one thing with the word "all", which is why phrases like, "All Black presidents of the United States...", "All female prime ministers of the UK...", and "All the people who shot at JFK from the Dallas Book Depository..." rarely see use.

You will perhaps be sympathetic to my declining to discuss this matter further. I have had one person flatly state what I related did not occur, necessitating digging up posts from nine years ago, and have just now had to clarify a misunderstanding of what I related that went on to an accusation that I, "...jump[ed] straight to 'dev lied'...." It is every bit as unpleasant as the events from 10 years ago.

Syberghost made a general statement about jumping straight to 'devs lied,' which shouldn't be taken as an accusation that you jumped straight there. It's clear from the narrative you've given that you didn't jump straight there.

Sorry you feel persecuted from the responses you've gotten here. Having read the thread I don't see anything inflammatory, but this seems to be a particular sore spot for you.

[blacksly]

If the Defender modifier table was indeed reduced, then it would affect any -Resistance power that Defenders have*, not just Enervating Field. Defenders had Sonic Resonance and Sonic Attack in I5; any AT modifier changes certainly would have affected that as well. As Sonic was actually introduced in I5, it seems likely that any modifier changes were intended to balance that set rather than a specific nerf to Radiation.

* Except for Tar Patch. Tar Patch is a bad example, because it's a pseudopet, so it uses Pet modifiers, not Defender modifiers. It only changes when a dev remembers to update it, and they were notoriously bad at remembering to do that.

Freezing Rain also, right? In fact, that would be the problem... the two main -Resist powers against which you'd compare Enervating Field to see if they also got modified were both pseudopet powers, so they both may have been missed. And without a before-and-after comparison for Sonic, that couldn't be used. So it's true that Enervating Field was the only Defender-sourced power with a -Resist debuff, so it would have been the only one that would have been affected. But that's likely because they forgot that they would have to separately adjust Tar Patch and Freezing Rain.

[Codewalker]

Yes, FR as well. Defenders did get some more direct -Resist powers later, such as Heat Loss, Corrosive Enzymes, Melt Armor, and Slowed Response, but not in the I5 timeframe.

[pinballdave]

Sonic siphon, disruption field, I think they showed up in I5

[Ankhammon]

I used to think I was reasonably well versed in the game, but...


How the bleep do you people keep straight what issue things were introduced and what strange goings at that time?

[Fireheart]

Paragon Wiki

Be Well!
Fireheart

[Arcana]

Speaking of fond memories of developer changes, I have vague memories (its been nearly 10 years) of nerf that was planned which, when the players complained, resulted in the developers delivering a video of a scrapper taking down something like a +7 level boss in, if not fast order, quickly enough for the developers to feel justified in the announced, coming change.

The players took a look at the video and asked, "Uh, how is the scrapper hitting so reliably?"

Seems that in their testing the developers had forgotten that hitting higher level targets was more difficult than hitting level appropriate or near level appropriate targets and their testing setup had ignores that aspect of the game as actually played.

At least through the time I played, I do not recall the developers ever offering another video of their testing.  ;D

The devs claimed to have conducted the test on a test server that did not have combat modifiers turned on.  I have to be honest in that I've never fully accepted that version of the story, because even on private servers that's not something you can just do.  I suspect the test was done on a private instance on a dev system that had *a lot* of things messed up on it to test all sorts of things related to upcoming stuff, which would explain some of the other anomalies in those tests (in particular, that I caught the fact the test SR build had two more enhancement slots than are possible at the testing level), but it doesn't fully explain why the devs would even test anything on such a compromised test system.

[Arcana]

Early COH the devs lied at times they nerfed Regen build a couple times early and never put it in the change notes. people would notice on the forms DEV's deny deny deny then would have to relent with all the data admitting they stealth nerfed a power.

There were many times the devs failed to put a change in the change notes, but in the early going the change notes were a train wreck; there was no actual system to manage change notes, and they couldn't just release the technical notes for a variety of reasons not the least of which was that often the terminology in them would be misleading to anyone not actually a dev.  As to explicitly *denying* that Regen nerfs occurred, to the best of my knowledge that never happened, at least not on the official forums.  The devs would sometimes disagree about the net effect of a nerf or a characterization of one, but not that the change literally did not occur.  I would need some specific example of that.

We had an issue on test server before the go live the over boost of regen on AV's. The forum post in the test area was long talking about it the data etc etc DEvs ignored went live then the regular forms exploded they had to come out and admit they ignored the post because they had to much work going on and had to do an emergency change.

But that was something completely different.  The devs over buffed AV regen; they didn't deny the change happened.  They did let it go live even though testing strongly suggested they had overbuffed beyond the limit of standard teams to overcome, but we should simply state categorically that until about I5ish, the devs simply did not believe anyone's numbers, not the players, not mine, not even theirs.  They tended to believe that only actual gameplay under actual gameplay conditions should be trusted, and to be fair 90% of the time that was a good call back then.  Testing prior to Real Numbers (which is all the way out at Issue 11) was extremely spotty and hit and miss.   There were a very few actual players whose tests I would accept at face value because everyone else's tests tended to be very shaky.

[LaughingAlex]

I think many of us can +1 a quote about Jacks bad habits.  Hell, with the crap that happened to CO under his belt to, I don't even want to imagine what he'd have done to CoH if he never left, the game would have become known for so many bad things and not even be close to the game we came to know and love.

Edit: Edited this post as Arcana had edited hers, though I left this here more because someone else had also said that very thing.  I should have just quoted the guy who said it directly.

[Arcana]

If the Defender modifier table was indeed reduced, then it would affect any -Resistance power that Defenders have*, not just Enervating Field. Defenders had Sonic Resonance and Sonic Attack in I5; any AT modifier changes certainly would have affected that as well. As Sonic was actually introduced in I5, it seems likely that any modifier changes were intended to balance that set rather than a specific nerf to Radiation.

* Except for Tar Patch. Tar Patch is a bad example, because it's a pseudopet, so it uses Pet modifiers, not Defender modifiers. It only changes when a dev remembers to update it, and they were notoriously bad at remembering to do that.

Between release and about Issue 6 the devs messed around with archetype modifiers often (usually) without patch notes.  However, its overstating the issue to claim the devs "lied" about such things, particularly because it was a pattern of them totally messing up the relationship between modifiers and powers regularly.  Fact is, the devs didn't really think about powers holistically as a rule until about Issue 5-6.  I actually recall the issue with Enervating field; it was one among many such issues, always related to the fact that the developers were not spokespeople and often answered questions technically and not holistically.  Did Enervating Field get changed?  Check power; nope, it has the same definition as before.  Only when you really think more globally do you consider changes far afield that could affect the power.  When you work all day every day on power definitions its not obvious.  Worse: back then *player* understanding of how the game worked was practically nil: around I5 you could count the number of people even vaguely familiar with power mechanics probably on two hands with fingers left over.  So the players didn't always know what the right question to ask was.  Deep into Issue 9 if you asked a dev "how long does this power take to activate" they would quote the activation time, which is the correct technical answer.  It would not be until Issue 10 - when I started looking at it more carefully - that *anyone* would have thought to double check the rooted time, and not until several issues later when anyone would think to ask the actual question they want to ask but didn't know how: how much time after I activate this power will I be able to activate another attack? (which is something else entirely)

The epitome of the devs not fully appreciating archetype mods probably is the Issue 6 Prima Guide.  If anyone out there has a copy, open to the power pool powers.  Notice there are defense and resistance values for those.  Now stop and think about that for a second: that's impossible.  I was told whose fault that was, but its not my place to say.  But I think informed people could probably guess.

[Arcana]

I think many of us can +1 that last sentence.  Hell, with the crap that happened to CO under his belt to, I don't even want to imagine what he'd have done to CoH if he never left, the game would have become known for so many bad things and not even be close to the game we came to know and love.

Whoa.  That was a misquote on my part (and I've edited the original to remove the error).  That was the end of hejtmane's post I forgot to clip.  I wouldn't put it quite that way myself.  I would say that prior to launch City needed Jack: without his discipline we probably wouldn't have had any game at all.  After launch, the game needed to expand beyond its launch state and Jack was a minor impediment to that because he really had no idea how the game functioned.  But by I4-I5 Jack was already neck deep in MUO and not really affecting City of Heroes at all: everything that happened after that increasingly had nothing to do with him at all.  By the time he left, he was already long gone.

As to CO, I'm not sure how much of that we can pin on Jack, ironically because he's not numerically or technically proficient.  Because of that, he can come up with ideas, but implementation has to be other people's fault because not only is he not coding anything, he's not generally even numerically designing anything.  Blaster v1.0 Defiance worked nothing like the article he wrote specifically to document Defiance because, I think, there was a miscommunication between what he thought it was doing and what it was actually designed to do, and he had absolutely no idea how the power was actually constructed.  It would have taken all of about two minutes to check the powers spreadsheet to verify before releasing documentation, and he did have access to those.  But could he actually really *read* them?  I have my doubts, at least back then.

[LaughingAlex]

Whoa.  That was a misquote on my part (and I've edited the original to remove the error).  That was the end of hejtmane's post I forgot to clip.  I wouldn't put it quite that way myself.  I would say that prior to launch City needed Jack: without his discipline we probably wouldn't have had any game at all.  After launch, the game needed to expand beyond its launch state and Jack was a minor impediment to that because he really had no idea how the game functioned.  But by I4-I5 Jack was already neck deep in MUO and not really affecting City of Heroes at all: everything that happened after that increasingly had nothing to do with him at all.  By the time he left, he was already long gone.

As to CO, I'm not sure how much of that we can pin on Jack, ironically because he's not numerically or technically proficient.  Because of that, he can come up with ideas, but implementation has to be other people's fault because not only is he not coding anything, he's not generally even numerically designing anything.  Blaster v1.0 Defiance worked nothing like the article he wrote specifically to document Defiance because, I think, there was a miscommunication between what he thought it was doing and what it was actually designed to do, and he had absolutely no idea how the power was actually constructed.  It would have taken all of about two minutes to check the powers spreadsheet to verify before releasing documentation, and he did have access to those.  But could he actually really *read* them?  I have my doubts, at least back then.

Ahh, I apologize there, I should have realised it was a misquote.

I do agree that, he can make a good game, but I often feel that after he finishes the game he tends to run into numerous problems directing any future it does have.  OR from what I see in what you write is that, he tends to over-delegate to people who are tasked to enforce his vision of things, but there seems like there is always some disconnect between that and what players are enjoying about the game.  In a lot of ways, he's like George Lucas, he doesn't fully see what people want or like about his works.

Those are my thoughts anyways.  CO had a lot of bad things happen in it's early days to, I think it was that he delegated to Bill Roper before release and Bill Roper launched the infamous day-1 launch nerfs, which created CO's first bait and switch accusation.  With more bait/switch to follow much later in it's life, but also in between that very bad balance directions and, save vibora bay, most content being poorly done with even Vibora Bay having pacing problems.

And course, it seems to be repeating the same mistakes everyone tends to know Jack for again :/.

[Arcana]

And mind, the response above is also the third answer for what occurred, starting with (a) nothing changed, going to (b) all powers of that type (even though only one power fits that type) were changed to (c) well, the power wasn't changed, just a global value elsewhere that caps the behavior of that power.

(b) and (c) are the same thing.  In fact, the devs would never have said "all powers of that type" were changed because there's no such thing (as a "type" of power).  My recollection is similar to the post you dug up from Castle, which was around I5ish when he was trying his best to clean things up.  Castle started in I4, and became the powers monkey for a while doing the powers dirty work.  He was also one of the few devs willing to communicate with players (having a red name was not mandatory, and I'm specifically aware of cases going deep into the game where devs turned down red names so they would not be asked to post).

When players first started seeing issues with Enervating field (one of the few powers players could test without Real Numbers effectively, because it direct affects damage numbers) it was after the devs had already took a pass through the set and made some changes (including to EF which used to deal damage).  When the players reported changes to EF they handed that to Castle, still learning how the spreadsheets work, and asked to confirm no recent change to the power happened.  There wasn't one, so the devs basically ignored those reports.  That happened a lot in the fab-15 days.  When problem reports persisted, the devs checked again and this time made an actual public statement that the power's design hadn't changed.  It was about a month or so afterwards I believe that the devs took a third look, and this time Castle realized the Defender modifier used by resistance debuffs had been changed, and that would affect EF and all other resistance debuff powers used by defenders (i.e. Dark debuffs outside of Tar Patch as Codewalker notes). 

Here's the thing: the devs couldn't just say "the Defender ranged resistance modifier was decreased" because at that time virtually no one would have understood what that meant.  Archetype modifiers wouldn't become generally well known for another year or so.  So the devs said basically that a global change had been made that affected all Defender resistance debuff powers.  However, when the players began paraphrasing that as "the devs changed every single defender resistance debuff power and didn't even bother to document that with patch notes" the devs had to explain that they didn't make huge numbers of changes everywhere and simply forgot to mention it: they made a single change to the defender modifier that affects resistance debuffs and didn't document that - because at the time there wasn't a mechanism for including such patch notes in the release notes (it wouldn't be until *after* this incident that the devs formalized how release notes were written up and announced that fact).

I do sympathize with players who say that they don't know and shouldn't care about all of that: the fact is the power's effect was changed and the devs didn't say so.  And I agree that players shouldn't have to know all of the game internals just to parse a dev statement.  But there's a difference between ascribing malice to this when it really was growing pains on the part of the devs.  It is precisely because of incidents like this that I spent so much time working out how the game worked: in part it was because I felt I could be an effective back channel between the players and the devs to try to smooth out things like this.  I even offered at one point to act as an unofficial release notes writer simply to reduce the chances for this kind of thing to happen.  For example, Paragonwiki reminded me that in Issue 5 the devs made their "scrappers and tankers will be able to reach their defense caps more easily" change.  Outside of mechanics experts like myself and Codewalker, the core quants of the game, and probably a few old school PvPers, I doubt if more than a handful of players could even correctly say what that patch note even means.

In spite of the fact that I hammered the devs on errors far more often than I praised or defended them for things I thought they got right, I was often accused of being a dev apologist simply because I would not buy into the narrative that the devs were hostile to the playerbase.  I think they did their best, but I think even they would agree with the statement that none of the devs were hired for their eloquence.  Being able to articulate the consequences of technical changes in community-acceptable vernacular is a skill the devs did not have in spades.  I (and some other players) tried to fill the gap, but Enervating Field happened too early and slightly outside my core area of expertise for me to intervene.  By Issue 7, I would have jumped into the defender discussion; in I4 I was still mostly a spectator.

It did get better, especially as Castle firmly took the reigns and began communicating with the players more - first in CoV beta and then in CoH proper.  Unfortunately, you probably left the game just a few issues before it really began to turn .  Conversely, ED might have driven you away anyway: the more sensitive you were to the precise way your character's builds worked, the more likely you bould have had a hostile reaction to ED.  But if you could make it to Issue 7, communication and testing feedback did get a lot better, particularly going into Issue 9 and the invention system.  Everyone didn't get what they wanted of course, but the invention system was very strongly influenced by player feedback and for such a complex system between the devs and the player guide-writing community the information got out fairly smoothly.  A lot of changes happened most of them fairly well communicated.

[Arcana]

CO had a lot of bad things happen in it's early days to, I think it was that he delegated to Bill Roper before release and Bill Roper launched the infamous day-1 launch nerfs, which created CO's first bait and switch accusation.  With more bait/switch to follow much later in it's life, but also in between that very bad balance directions and, save vibora bay, most content being poorly done with even Vibora Bay having pacing problems.

And course, it seems to be repeating the same mistakes everyone tends to know Jack for again :/.

Here's my take on CO up to launch.  Beta was a disaster, and for a reason that might seem counterintuitive to some, and dead bang obvious to others.  The devs listened to the players too much.  If you were in CO beta, you would have seen like four or five different games iterating around in there.  And it was obvious to me that the devs were in many ways just as numerically deficient in design as the original CoH devs were.  The original defense passives were ridiculous in strength and you could originally have all of them.  Power trees were going to become power frameworks and then became the power shrubs CO has now (and then frameworks sort of eventually arrived after F2P).  The devs kept claiming they had the numbers under control when I could see that was not even remotely true.  Think about the worst moment in CoH game balance, whatever you think that was.  It was *always* worse in CO all the way up to launch, in every iteration of the game.

I think where Jack comes in is that CO launched too early.  Its devs clearly could not make powers any faster than CoH devs could, in some ways they were slower.  Their content people didn't have remotely enough time to make enough content.  But Jack was judging CO based on what CoH looked like at launch and that was a huge mistake in my opinion.  He saw that you could launch a game like CoH and make it successful, but when CoH launched it had almost literally no competition.  I don't think UO and DAOC could really count as competition and WoW was still half a year away from sucking all the oxygen out of the room.  CoH could launch extremely thin and then fill out as it went along.  But I think people might forget just how thin the content for CoH was at launch, all the leveling gaps that existed at the time (particularly the late thirties).  CO launched even thinner and with even larger and more spread out zones.  It had a harsher death penalty that could combine with the thin content to make leveling extremely painful (missions tend to be level-appropriate; "street" sweeping when you run out of those tend to not be, and the risk of death is often far higher).

Jack probably felt just like with CoH it was better to launch and fill than spend time trying to get launch perfect.  And he's right, but here he jumped the gun about six months too early in my opinion.  That six month was critical.  It would have eliminated most of the leveling gaps.  It would have allowed for the global balancing nerf to happen *before* launch.  It would have allowed them to hit the ground running.  I don't know what was going on inside of Cryptic: I don't know if they were running out of money or had some other enforced deadline.  Had CoH spent six more months they would have been launching into the head wind that was WoW - those six months were important for CoH to get out there before WoW.  But in  CO's case, the opposite was true: these six months hurt the game in my opinion.  Same Jack, same thinking, different circumstances.

Plus, there's something about Cryptic that suppresses the part of the brain that does long division.  I don't know what it is: Castle is a pretty intelligent guy, and so are most of the other devs I've talked to.  I have to believe Cryptic had a similar set of developers, most veterans of the (terminated) MUO implementation.  And yet if Cryptic was a person, it wouldn't be able to make change at a grocery store.  Oh my god the numbers were so bad in CO.  So very, very, very bad.  Some people say numbers aren't everything, but in a computer MMO, actually numbers are everything.  The numbers dictate the experience you will have in combat, the rewards you'll get, the way you'll advance, and everything that isn't cosmetic in appearance.  Whenever someone says numbers aren't everything and then ask the devs to change a number they disprove their own thesis.  You have to get the numbers right, and why this isn't something that is considered absolutely critical is something I'll never understand.

As to the post-launch nerf, to this day I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but as I said above I think it was something in the works for a while, but didn't have enough time to get in there before launch.  I think a sane person delays launch to put a gigantic powers-altering change that affects almost everyone into the game, but that's just me.  But then again, I would have just worked faster to make sure the changes got in before release no matter how little time I had, so that's also me.

[darkgob]

The epitome of the devs not fully appreciating archetype mods probably is the Issue 6 Prima Guide.  If anyone out there has a copy, open to the power pool powers.  Notice there are defense and resistance values for those.  Now stop and think about that for a second: that's impossible.  I was told whose fault that was, but its not my place to say.  But I think informed people could probably guess.

Prima Guides are notoriously terrible anyway.

[Arcana]

Prima Guides are notoriously terrible anyway.

Prima Guides get a lot of things wrong because they often write their guides based on pre-release information that gets changed before launch, and is thus woefully wrong.  However, CoH had *two* Prima Guides, a release guide and an updated guide for CoV/Issue 6.  It was the latter that actually contained powers effects information, and there was less excuses for getting it so horribly wrong.

We also have the Prima CoV guide to thank for having our first taste of insider information.  The spreadsheets that were given to Prima as background material to write the guide leaked, and got into a few players hands.  One of them being Iakona.  I still have the copy Iakona gave to me, when he decided to leave the game.  Those formed the basis of some of the numerical inside information I had until I10 when I wrote my own pigg processor, and then I11 when Real Numbers came out.

Real Numbers was important to pigg divers because prior to I11 the client only contained information about "powers" but not "attribmods" - meaning it contained information about the base features of a power like recharge and endurance costs, but *none* of the information about how the power affected targets.  No damage, mez, buff, debuff, or any of that stuff.  No pigg diver could get that information prior to I11, because it was blanked out of the client.  After I11, the client needed it to properly display Real Numbers, and from that point on the game contained pretty much all of the powers information about the game if you knew where and how to look.

[Arcana]

I used to think I was reasonably well versed in the game, but...


How the bleep do you people keep straight what issue things were introduced and what strange goings at that time?

Paragonwiki helps refresh my memory, but I'm probably a special case for a number of reasons.  My memory is better than average (not perfect, but pretty good).  I was directly involved with a lot of this stuff, so I'm not just trying to recall something that I heard about: from about I2 onward you'd be hard pressed to find a game mechanical discussion that lasted more than four posts that I wasn't somehow involved with.  And I tend to be dispassionate about engineering problems, and game design issues are basically engineering problems.  I don't recall them through the prism of what I liked or disliked, but rather what I recall the resolution to the problem was, whatever that was.

The part of me that gets mad about game implementation is something I try to keep off to the side when playing, or discussing the games I play.  For example, I'm mostly playing STO these days (when I'm playing anything) and it really drives me crazy mad that in a game set in the world of Star Trek where transporter technology is taken completely for granted, where even the game relies on being able to transport to anywhere anytime the plot requires, where transwarp transportation can get you a thousand light years in eight seconds, the Voth ground battlezone is explicitly designed to make you jog around for extended periods of time just to get anywhere.  Because MMO raids just have to have a lot of making players run from place to place, its the law.

I take that and put it in a little box and I just play the game.  If you ask me to comment on that issue from a game design perspective, I can analyze that situation within the context of the history of MMO gaming and the design prejudices of mainstream MMO game developers relative to competing design philosophies. If you ask me how I *feel* about it...

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=l1.yimg.com%2Fbt%2Fapi%2Fres%2F1.2%2Fm.PjmH9cGLBQ9IjZE33kmg--%2FYXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTM3NztweG9mZj01MDtweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz02NzA-%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fmedia.zenfs.com%2Fen%2Fhomerun%2Fdisney_975%2F133f9a45c6d938dd9205a69a3da7f8a3

[blacksly]

That gif needs a sound effect associated with it

[darkgob]

Prima Guides get a lot of things wrong because they often write their guides based on pre-release information that gets changed before launch, and is thus woefully wrong.  However, CoH had *two* Prima Guides, a release guide and an updated guide for CoV/Issue 6.  It was the latter that actually contained powers effects information, and there was less excuses for getting it so horribly wrong.

I wish I could remember the specific examples that put me off Prima guides (we're talking N64 era, I'm sure I still have the guides but lord knows where), but I think they were less "wrong but plausibly accurate for some pre-release version of the game" and more "not even wrong".  I'm positive one of them was the Super Mario 64 guide, I want to say the Star Fox 64 guide had something off too?