And the mask comes off.

[Arcana]

The one thing I noticed was that using temp powers in my chain messed up the streak breaker because of the lower accuracy of those attacks. Don't know if that was a "real" thing or not.

Moonlighter~

That was a real thing.  The way the streakbreaker worked was basically this: for every entity capable of using powers, the game kept a counter of all the times anything they did which required a tohit roll missed.  So at any moment in time, the game knew how many misses in a row that particular entity - including player characters - had seen in a row.  On every hit, that counter reset to zero.  What's more, the game *also* kept a second value, and that value was the *worst* tohit required you had experienced up to that point.

Its that second value that most players either didn't know about or kept forgetting about.  What it meant was this: if you started missing, switching to a more accurate attack would not automatically reset the streakbreaker.  Say you're using nothing but attacks that have a net overall chance tohit of 95%, and you keep hitting.  The streakbreaker counter would read zero, and the streakbreaker tohit value would be probably also be zero (or possibly 1.0, but that's an implementation thing not important here).  At some point though, you whip out some crappy unslotted attack that has a 75% chance to hit the target, and you miss.

At that moment, the streakbreaker would record a 1 in the counter and 0.75 in the tohit value.  Now, if you keep swinging with that attack because the streakbreaker is programmed to allow a maximum of 3 misses at 75%, the streakbreaker won't do anything until the counter reads three.  When it reads three, on the next swing the streakbreaker will kick in and automatically force a hit.

But what if, after that first miss, you switch to a more accurate attack?  Many players believed that since their current swing has a 95% chance tohit and the streakbreaker kicks in on one miss for 95%, that next swing would be forced to hit by the streakbreaker.  Nope.  The streakbreaker does not use the tohit required of the current attack.  It uses the *lower* of the current attack or the streakbreaker tohit value.  That value sits at 75%, so the streakbreaker will remain stuck at allowing 3 misses.  It will continue to do so until you hit normally or you reach 3 and the streakbreaker forces a hit.

What's more, if you miss three times and think the next attack is guaranteed and so you whip out an even crappier attack, something that has an overall chance to hit of, say, 35%, then the streakbreaker will use that value, since its lower than the current value of 75%, and that value allows for up to 6 misses.  Moreover, the streakbreaker value will reset downward to 35%, and stay there until you generate a hit or reach 6 misses.

The streakbreaker "trigger" is the worst net tohit you experienced during your current miss streak.  You cannot game the system by tossing in a more accurate attack to reset it.  Remember the streakbreaker is giving away free hits you shouldn't get normally.  It will only do so under the specific circumstance of the player using attacks with a certain tohit or better experiencing a certain amount of misses in a row.  If you use a crappy attack and it misses, you're committed to the streakbreaker trigger for that attack, unless you use something even worse.  But you can only buy yourself out of that trigger by actually hitting something, or reaching the trigger.

[Arcana]

I had an idea that my random number "seed" or whatever was twisted, but how do you prove it.

You take the Visual C++ clilb rand, write a program that generates random numbers with it, prove its streaky, and write a paper on it.  You could probably make enough money doing that to buy the wings outright just on the publicity alone.  In fact, if any player was right about this and it didn't turn out to be a broken rand like the mission reward one that was discovered, *I* would write that paper and get rich and famous.  Mostly famous, but still.

I'm not exaggerating when I say if it was possible to prove, there was a huge incentive to do so.

[Arcana]

I'm just going by experience of things I remember actually HAPPENING IN THE GAME.  What part of that don't you understand?

Anyone who remembers what I had to deal with in this regard while the game was running knows I understand quite well.  If you ever find any sort of log or evidence to support your recollection, let me know, I would be interested to analyze it.  That data may contain evidence of some problem related to your observations which might be useful to future players of the game.  Otherwise, I have no useful observations to make beyond the general admonishment to neutral observers that the stated behavior was mechanically impossible for the game engine.

[Arcana]

What do you call it when you, the expert in question, are dismissed and told to go get the real answers from yourself, elsewhere? A mix of pride and exasperation? Prideration? Exasperide?

Hilarity.  I have a copy of a PM from a CO player somewhere, sent to me after CO launched, thanking me for the work I did testing CO defensive secondaries.  It goes on to state that he was thankful CO had players like me, rather than that despicable Arcanaville he disliked in City of Heroes for being a know-it-all.

You know, I did post under a different pseudonym there, but I made no effort to disguise my writing style.  When someone materializes in CO and immediately starts talking about game design and testing defensive powers, I assumed I would be outed in days.  It never happened.  And its not like there were lots of other players doing that.  Or any, really, to the degree I was, at that time.  Sometimes I was posting about the exact same topic on both forums at the same time.  I mean that should have been a dead giveaway for someone that was actually paying attention to my posts in both places, as apparently some people were (invariably, people who were not my greatest fans it seems).

The closest I came to outing myself came when someone on the CO forums began talking about how all the devs in CoH actually hated me and talked about me behind my back.  BaB, in particular, was singled out for claiming I was a nuisance on a beta server chat channel.  At that exact moment, I was working with BaB on a project he requested I look at, so I asked him about it.  He said he had no idea why anyone would think that, but he said he was willing to post there personally to correct the record.  The fact that he was willing to do that demonstrated to me it was all nonsense, and I told him not to bother.  I decided it was better to just let it go.

[Aggelakis]

I'm just going by experience of things I remember actually HAPPENING IN THE GAME.  What part of that don't you understand?  ...

I'm going by, again, what happened to ME when I played the game.

Please note: what you are talking about is your observations, not mechanics. Read up on 'observational bias' and 'selective memory'.

What Arcana is talking about is how the game actually operates.

(note my emphasis in the quote)

[Shadowe]

Hilarity.  I have a copy of a PM from a CO player somewhere, sent to me after CO launched, thanking me for the work I did testing CO defensive secondaries.  It goes on to state that he was thankful CO had players like me, rather than that despicable Arcanaville he disliked in City of Heroes for being a know-it-all.

You know, I did post under a different pseudonym there, but I made no effort to disguise my writing style.  When someone materializes in CO and immediately starts talking about game design and testing defensive powers, I assumed I would be outed in days.  It never happened.  And its not like there were lots of other players doing that.  Or any, really, to the degree I was, at that time.  Sometimes I was posting about the exact same topic on both forums at the same time.  I mean that should have been a dead giveaway for someone that was actually paying attention to my posts in both places, as apparently some people were (invariably, people who were not my greatest fans it seems).

The closest I came to outing myself came when someone on the CO forums began talking about how all the devs in CoH actually hated me and talked about me behind my back.  BaB, in particular, was singled out for claiming I was a nuisance on a beta server chat channel.  At that exact moment, I was working with BaB on a project he requested I look at, so I asked him about it.  He said he had no idea why anyone would think that, but he said he was willing to post there personally to correct the record.  The fact that he was willing to do that demonstrated to me it was all nonsense, and I told him not to bother.  I decided it was better to just let it go.

*snigger*

As someone who uses the grand total of 2 online pseudonyms, this tickles me. Particularly since your language and technical writing style are fairly distinctive.

The first case sounds like an interesting case of denial - he considered "Arcanaville" to be an insufferable knowitall, and couldn't conceive that you would not use your "name" status in a different forum, so you simply had to be someone else.

The second one just sounds like an internet-brave idiot.

Edit: woot! Post 100!

[LaughingAlex]

Anyone who remembers what I had to deal with in this regard while the game was running knows I understand quite well.  If you ever find any sort of log or evidence to support your recollection, let me know, I would be interested to analyze it.  That data may contain evidence of some problem related to your observations which might be useful to future players of the game.  Otherwise, I have no useful observations to make beyond the general admonishment to neutral observers that the stated behavior was mechanically impossible for the game engine.

Honestly it's something I'll do so should the game come back.  I think though and was thinking about it that the new team may want to check into things on the server side.  Because the to hit rolls themselves were server side, we could only see so much.

Thing is I am not sure we'll know exactly whats going on.  See I asked said instructor back in the day about this as I said earlier, and he did mention that there are multiple random number generators, a more predictable one usually is attached to some kind of clock somewhere.

It shouldn't just be mechanically impossible but statistically impossible but what I mentioned happened to me, well, did :/.  I was left surprised and it's the whole reason I asked the guy I asked.

[Shadowe]

Humans are pattern seekers. We are also fundamentally awful at dealing with probabilities. And the answer could be as simple as "that set of random numbers came up", with exactly the same probability as any other set of random numbers.

Would you care if the results had been 20, 66, 15, 40, 12, 03, 10, 65, 18?

[Arcana]

Honestly it's something I'll do so should the game come back.  I think though and was thinking about it that the new team may want to check into things on the server side.  Because the to hit rolls themselves were server side, we could only see so much.

Pretty much every tohit roll generated for any power was displayed in Real Numbers.  I myself specifically asked pohsyb to add that channel of data so I could see what was happening when testing things, and also to help confirm other aspects of Real Numbers was working correctly.  That code was put deep in the actual tohit system; it was not something grafted onto the individual powers and could send wrong numbers to the console.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

See... To make sure Revival plays like CoH... I'm just going to ask Arcana to beta test.

[Aggelakis]

It shouldn't just be mechanically impossible but statistically impossible but what I mentioned happened to me, well, did :/.  I was left surprised and it's the whole reason I asked the guy I asked.

Please. Read up on 'observational bias' and 'selective memory'. It is, in fact, impossible for the game to behave like that. At this point, the mechanics are well-documented, and so thoroughly tested as to be pretty much zero on the 'mystery' scale.

[AnElfCalledMack]

swtor has problems with their implementation of the rng... things like a 20% of reverse engineering an item, rolling 142 times and not getting it. thats not that uncommon in swtor. a rng will explain variances in a lot of things and outcomes that just suck, but there are points that you have to question the code that applies the rng. it is always possible you made an oops. I never appreciated how accessable COX devs were to discuss the game they made.

Hmm... 142 trials, 80% chance of failure...

0.8^142 = 1.7x10^-14. Less than one in fifty-seven trillion. Pretty phenomenally unlikely, even with millions of players and hundreds of items to roll on.
I'd suggest that the "20% chance" may not actually be 20%. At a 5% chance of success per roll, you'd get 0.95^142 = 6.87x10^-4, or one in 1456 (and a bit). With several million players, this sort of thing being "not uncommon" would be entirely reasonable. But these sorts of errors are far more likely to be developer error - the tooltip has an old value that they lowered in alpha testing, or they accidentally set the success chance to 0.02 instead of 0.2, or something like that - than real faults in the random number generator. The RNG itself is a pretty standard piece of code most developers don't mess with, and the effects of a flawed or streaky RNG don't discriminate by player. Arcana can tell you what a bad RNG looks like, and it doesn't look like some "cursed" players never getting thing X after lots of tries. It's not the devs saying "screw you in particular". It's randomness being random over a large population, which means a few individuals getting unlikely results.

[ukaserex]

Please note: what you are talking about is your observations, not mechanics. Read up on 'observational bias' and 'selective memory'.

What Arcana is talking about is how the game actually operates.

(note my emphasis in the quote)

I remember the issues about accuracy, streakbreaker, toHit coming up in the CoH forums. I also remember (vaguely) someone suggesting we track our misses in game so that we'd have something to show, to demonstrate that it wasn't just our perceptions. Pretty sure the game's combat logs made it clear if we hit or missed a target. With that advice, I actually did what was suggested - and you know what? It was the craziest thing.

I stopped missing all the time.

I was going to close the combat log window to see if I started missing again, but I decided against it and kept it open.

[blacksly]

all the devs in CoH actually hated me and talked about me behind my back.  BaB, in particular, was singled out for claiming I was a nuisance on a beta server chat channel.

I shouldn't bring up chat logs where everyone on the team complains about that know-it-all Arcanaville on the forums who keeps dissing their favorite ATs or powersets, claiming that it sucks? And worse, using numbers? Man, we spent many farming hours trading Arcanajokes and remembering past Arcanaposts. It was almost like Hermione's first year at Hogwarts, only on the internets.

True story, almost.

[blacksly]

I remember the issues about accuracy, streakbreaker, toHit coming up in the CoH forums. I also remember (vaguely) someone suggesting we track our misses in game so that we'd have something to show, to demonstrate that it wasn't just our perceptions. Pretty sure the game's combat logs made it clear if we hit or missed a target. With that advice, I actually did what was suggested - and you know what? It was the craziest thing.

I stopped missing all the time.

I was going to close the combat log window to see if I started missing again, but I decided against it and kept it open.

Everyone knows that the combat log windows grants an unenhanceable +33% ToHit bonus.

[ivanhedgehog]

Hmm... 142 trials, 80% chance of failure...

0.8^142 = 1.7x10^-14. Less than one in fifty-seven trillion. Pretty phenomenally unlikely, even with millions of players and hundreds of items to roll on.
I'd suggest that the "20% chance" may not actually be 20%. At a 5% chance of success per roll, you'd get 0.95^142 = 6.87x10^-4, or one in 1456 (and a bit). With several million players, this sort of thing being "not uncommon" would be entirely reasonable. But these sorts of errors are far more likely to be developer error - the tooltip has an old value that they lowered in alpha testing, or they accidentally set the success chance to 0.02 instead of 0.2, or something like that - than real faults in the random number generator. The RNG itself is a pretty standard piece of code most developers don't mess with, and the effects of a flawed or streaky RNG don't discriminate by player. Arcana can tell you what a bad RNG looks like, and it doesn't look like some "cursed" players never getting thing X after lots of tries. It's not the devs saying "screw you in particular". It's randomness being random over a large population, which means a few individuals getting unlikely results.

20% is thge stated chance. if its different.....they either arent telling the truth or are really bad with numbers. and swtor devs went over 3 months with a nightmare boss for a 16 man raid that could be solod by standing behind a pillar and using ranged attacks. after multiple patches, they ended up adding a mechanic to the fight to stop it. putting up an invisible wall there should have worked.

[duane]

I feel awful.  I paid  little attention to the math and spent more time having fun.
Not saying you guys didn't have fun playing either....

[Rejolt]

I feel awful.  I paid  little attention to the math and spent more time having fun.
Not saying you guys didn't have fun playing either....

Getting into Metamath (great, now I have another toon to Mids out...) was the endgame for years pre-Inventions. And there's something about min/maxing numbers that speaks to the innergeek in you when you love a particular power combo.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

A part of me wonders if Champions itself was the cause of the devs believing that the mathematics for designing a game like City of Heroes was not very difficult, and could be copied pretty much right from a PnP game.

It can't; there are complex mathematical reasons why this is a horrible idea that basically come down to three things:

1.  In PnP games human GMs moderate the extremes.  In fact, in many editions of Champions there are explicit warnings in the rulebooks strongly suggesting to human GMs that they either consider not even allowing the power or making sure its not abused by the players.  Human GMs can look at a Fire/Fire tank that wants to run a mission with nothing but flammable villains and say "yeah, no."  A computer will happily go along with that.  If you want your character weakness in Champions to be lactose intolerance, fine, I'll let it go.  Then I'll drown you with the Milk Monster.

2.  PnP games are designed for a specific combat pace where coarser numbers generate controllable and manageable combat for the human beings.  Computer games are designed for a far faster pace where small numerical issues can quickly snowball.  If you were twice as powerful as the enemies in D&D, that still didn't mean you could blast through the game.  That advantage was muted by the framework of the gameplay.  In City of Heroes, if you were twice as powerful as the PvE critters, you could herd up a bunch and rapidly accelerate your kill rate.  Combining #1 with #2 could obliterate whole zones.

3.  In PnP games, the numerical combat is only a small fraction of everything that goes on.  In most MMOs, its 90% of what goes on.  You can't make up for loose combat with other activities.  Champions was *horribly* unbalanced.  It was *balanced enough* for humans to play it.  But numerically speaking, the designers didn't do all that great a job with it, in spite of what many players think.  And what's more, the designers knew it: they knew that the system allowed for ridiculous extremes and presumed human GMs would leverage that when possible and control it when necessary.

The really short version is that what makes a good PnP system is to have the expressive power to allow the GM and the players to have the latitude to create a good playing environment.  What makes a good MMO system is that its mechanically predictable, and does what the designers intended when they aren't around to dictate what happens.  Those two goals are largely incompatible.

I tried to explain this on the Champions Online beta boards, and boy was I hammered there (one helpful individual, because I was posting anonymously there, suggested that before I make such outrageous claims I go find Arcanaville on the CoH boards so that person could set me straight).

Absolutely agreed. Champions, and the Hero System in general, absolutely requires a human GM with an understanding of how the game works to be at all balanced. The most degenerate situation is one where the GM is inexperienced with the system and some or all of the players are experienced. Even without trying to aggressively min/max it's easy to come up with overpowered characters. Any MMO that tries to duplicate the character creation flexibility will run into the same issues without having an experienced GM monitoring all the characters, which no current MMO system can do without human assistance. Jack's insistence on hiding real numbers was an absurd attempt at keeping the players equally "inexperienced", which was ludicrous on several levels. It worked about as well as security through obscurity ever has.

Some unpredictability makes for more interesting games, but I do see what you mean there.  The sad thing is CO would behave even less consistently then any other game I played to be honest, in that there were so many bugs that people found ways to become invincible, or pull off 10,000 damage hits from attacks that should have only done at the most a tenth of that.  Go figure.

Which was actually a pretty good recreation of playing pnp Champions with a newbie GM. i had a Martial Artist character in one friend's game who was a *bit* overpowered. Not because of any single power being OP by itself, but because of how the various offensive and defensive abilities i had taken stacked together to make a character who was extremely hard to stop or defend against without employing fairly exotic/tailored attacks and defenses. This wasn't really deliberate, it's just the GM used pretty straightforward and simplistic NPC designs. That and the borderline absurd amount of active points in Dex. In my defense i hadn't played in a while and he hadn't set an active point limit on characteristics. 

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I feel awful.  I paid  little attention to the math and spent more time having fun.
Not saying you guys didn't have fun playing either....

i rarely paid close attention to the math while actually playing even though it was always something i was always aware of at the back of my mind, so to speak. It mostly came to the fore when i wasn't actively in combat. Awareness of the underlying math has always enhanced my enjoyment of any activity.