New efforts!

[srmalloy]

No, commenting is separate from KISS. In fact, with some languages (C as a nasty example), you can write a relatively short and direct command, or you can write three lines that do the same thing. But you WANT to write those three lines, plus perhaps another 1-3 lines to comment what you're doing, because reading those 3 commented lines two years later is a LOT simpler than trying to parse a complicated function reference that can be fit on one line.

And this is driven by the 'jumble' time of a language -- the amount of time you can be away from a piece of code before its functioning becomes a meaningless jumble. Programs written in BASIC you can come back to in a year or so and be able to puzzle out what they do fairly quickly. Programs written in C can become gibberish in less than six months. Programs written in FORTH, you can step out to get a cup of coffee and not be able to figure out what you were doing.

Clever programming tricks have their uses. At work, I finally used the indirection capability of MUMPS to produce a routine that read from three different arrays to determine which lab test IENs to look for results under, based on the first letter of the subscript of the lab result (clinical chemistry, microbiology, etc.). I've been writing MUMPS code for more than fifteen years, and this is the first time I used that feature. And I only did it because that was a single-use routine to produce a specific dataset in response to a request; if it was something that I would have to maintain, it would have been written as a cascading 'IF' statement to select the array to use, because that's easier to figure out when I come back to it. Documenting the code is good, but not making your code hard to come back to is more important with something you may have to fix or update at some nebulous time in the future.

[srmalloy]

... and Incarnate powers tended to obey the design rule that Incarnate damage isn't generally affected by damage buffs.  This was to make sure Brutes wouldn't be one-shotting all of Crey's Folly with a Judgment blast.

Unlike the second bugged version of 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage' on the test server, which was effectively 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot', which did an absurd amount of damage when it proc'ed. After having received the recipe while it was in its first bugged state (in which it did a negative amount of damage to your target when it went off, healing it), and discovering its new abilities, I went off to Crey's Folly and one-shotted Jurassik -- my first attack triggered the proc, and I discovered that CoH damage numbers would automatically roll over into scientific notation when they got too big to represent as an integer. (I think it was something close to 6 x 10^14 points of damage; I don't remember clearly)

[srmalloy]

I had an AR/Eng Blaster slotted up like that too.  Lots o fun.

When boost range was active, Sniper Shot had a range that was so long, the target would just be a little dot in the distance.

.....And boom Headshot :)

Range Boosted Full Auto was just way too enjoyable, I'd giggle like a little kid every time.

My first character was an AR/Eng blaster -- and the one I was playing, down in the pit on the Rikti mothership, at shutdown. Building her out as a 'See that dot?' sniper made some things hilarious. Between Boost Range, Snipe slotted to extend range, LRM with Dmg/Rng HOs, she could hit targets with Snipe past 250 meters, and drop an LRM on a spawn to 273. I used to amuse myself by hovering around Peregrine Island up outside normal snipe range one-shotting Nemesis minions, just to see how many of them in a spawn I needed to drop before the spawn panicked and took off running. And the trio of Power Up, Boost Range, and Full Auto was one of the most fun combinations I found; you could drop nuke-grade damage in an AoE at snipe ranges, and then just move to your next attack instead of being stuck at 0 End or with no End recovery.

[srmalloy]

Many's a player that thought they were all that in ITFs when normally teamed because they were the last one standing and never seemed to need help and blah blah and tried to solo the entire thing only to discover there's a huge difference between not needing obvious help and not needing any help.  Particularly when you were in parts of the ITF that had a lot of shield stacking.  You could find yourself surrounded by targets who had stacked their defenses practically to the ceiling and were essentially all eluded, and on top of that were stacking enormous defense debuffs on you stripping most of your protection away.

I had a Mind/Eng Blaster that I loved using for ITFs, because when the Cimerorans popped their defenses, she would just laugh and keep blasting, because mental attacks ignored all the physical defenses. That said, there was no way she could even think about soloing an ITF, because even with her advantage against the defense-boosted mobs, she didn't have the ability to either survive the damage they put out, or drop their damage until it was survivable. Basically, her role was to sit back and be the heavy artillery that shredded the mobs the rest of the team were keeping off her back. You have to know your limitations.

[Auroxis]

So, yeah, Brutes and Stalkers rule the WOOOOOO story arc. But the squishies beat them badly in DPS (especially considering that Demon/Storm is probably higher than any Controller in single-target DPS, and that many Controllers were ahead of any of the melee ATs).

The challenge wasn't just a DPS challenge, it was a survivability challenge as well (so a fire/elec blaster doing good DPS didn't matter if he died to a pylon). As for the controllers, many of them got good times due to -regen debuffs and/or lore pets IIRC, not just their own DPS.

[Arcana]

The challenge wasn't just a DPS challenge, it was a survivability challenge as well (so a fire/elec blaster doing good DPS didn't matter if he died to a pylon). As for the controllers, many of them got good times due to -regen debuffs and/or lore pets IIRC, not just their own DPS.

Quite so.  The pylon challenge was considered interesting because it was a test of DPS factoring in the need to balance the build.  You needed enough mitigation just to survive, and you also needed a build that crafted not just for DPS but also for DPE, because otherwise you'd run out of endurance trying to take the pylon down.  Most controllers couldn't do it at all, and anyone claiming a fast time with an unoptimized controller build was just plain lying.

The effects of -regen were also acknowledged in the pylon thread; it wasn't something the pylon ladder was unaware of.

I posted a while back a video I made of my Ill/Rad taking down a pylon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajQrTjVC1ow.  What's interesting to note is the video demonstrates something Illusion controllers have always known: the phantasm is the most suicidal pet in all of City of Heroes.  Just look at him.  I should point out that the Phantasm has no melee attacks whatsoever.  Its shortest range attack is torrent, which is a 40 foot range attack.  At one point, the Phantasm doesn't just run right up to the pylon, but in a move I can't even explain by any programming of the pet AI it actually moves from one side of the pylon to the other side where the PA is standing as if trying to deliberately stand in the pylon's AoE.  There's literally no other reason why a pet standing right next to its target decides to move to the other side of the target, not even getting any closer.

Point being, the Phantasm isn't the toughest pet in the world, but the average controller can't just expect their pets to get a free shot at the pylon without getting hit hard.  It takes more than just showing up to have enough support to keep your pets alive against a pylon.  My Ill/Rad has four indestructible pets banging on the pylon (the spectral terror is slotted with a damage proc), and is a purpled out monster when it comes to single hard targets, and its still not a walk in the park, even though I do post a really good time. 

So yeah, debuffing controllers and defenders could post really good pylon times, but anyone claiming they just casually strolled up to one with an unoptimized build and proceeded to wreck the top melee times was just plain lying.  It just wasn't possible.

[brothermutant]

If I were on my Fire/Dark corruptor I can debuff, tank, DPS, heal, rez, slow, stun and all those glorious orange numbers when I drop my fire rain onto the tar.

I didn't say Empath is bad. I said it was not as good in most circumstances as other power sets. I prefer to mitigate rather than react. In an all defender ITF - I tanked all the missions and AV's with a Dark/Sonic Def. This includes pulling both AV's and the computer all at once in that mission.

Try an Ice/Dark corr sometime instead, better soft controls, couple of good holds between the two of the powersets, and the Blizzard NUKE can be used to great effect on the Tar Patch if you use Aim+PBU+ the ice storm too. GREAT troller feel to it and really made fighting things solo so easy.

[Arcana]

I had a Mind/Eng Blaster that I loved using for ITFs, because when the Cimerorans popped their defenses, she would just laugh and keep blasting, because mental attacks ignored all the physical defenses. That said, there was no way she could even think about soloing an ITF, because even with her advantage against the defense-boosted mobs, she didn't have the ability to either survive the damage they put out, or drop their damage until it was survivable. Basically, her role was to sit back and be the heavy artillery that shredded the mobs the rest of the team were keeping off her back. You have to know your limitations.

I assume you mean Psi/Eng blaster.  Actually, psi blast attacks were not positionally untyped: they were typed ranged.  The attacks typed psionic only and not psionic plus a positional type were primarily the true Mind Control attacks from the Mind Control set explicitly (controllers and dominators) and Blind from Illusion control.  Psi Blast for blasters, defenders, and corruptors did not have this property, nor did psionic assault for dominators.

[Arcana]

Try an Ice/Dark corr sometime instead, better soft controls, couple of good holds between the two of the powersets, and the Blizzard NUKE can be used to great effect on the Tar Patch if you use Aim+PBU+ the ice storm too. GREAT troller feel to it and really made fighting things solo so easy.

True story: the most I have ever been cursed out in-game occurred during CoV beta, specifically during PvP test number two.  For some reason, a lot of players decided that Stone brutes were going to be really powerful in PvP.  I happened to be playing an Ice/Cold corruptor a lot at that particular time and sent her out into the PvP test.

It went exactly like you might expect.  Ice/Cold flat out assassinates melee because of things like Snow Storm and Benumb.  Nullify their ability to move and then deactivate their defenses, and a Stone brute becomes destructible landscape.  Snow Storm, Benumb, pew pew, move on.  After a while, I started to get cursed in broadcast with language that would just get pancaked out of existence here.  I actually started to feel sorry for them a bit until someone called me a particularly nasty four letter word, whereupon I decided to just keep killing him on sight hard enough to make him reroll.

Ice/Cold corruptor became the second alt I rolled in CoV during head start (after my Ninjitsu stalker).  Not the most powerful character I ever made, but after CoV beta I always felt like the NPCs were cursing my existence just before keeling over when I spammed all that Ice and Cold debuffs on them, and that seemed to make up for the fact it was a somewhat slower soloer than average.

[Tubbius]

I had several years to work on the devs before we reached Omega.  In any case, Matt is speaking a truism: there's no such thing as the last anything in an MMO: the short answer to what to do when you run out of something is to make more something.  That's MMO dev 101. 

So, to quote Ian McKellen from the 2009 remake of The Prisoner:

"Breathe in!  Breathe out!  More Village!"

[Arcana]

Unlike the second bugged version of 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage' on the test server, which was effectively 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot', which did an absurd amount of damage when it proc'ed. After having received the recipe while it was in its first bugged state (in which it did a negative amount of damage to your target when it went off, healing it), and discovering its new abilities, I went off to Crey's Folly and one-shotted Jurassik -- my first attack triggered the proc, and I discovered that CoH damage numbers would automatically roll over into scientific notation when they got too big to represent as an integer. (I think it was something close to 6 x 10^14 points of damage; I don't remember clearly)

I didn't get a chance to test the bugged version, but it sounded to me like a Cur vs Abs typo.  Basically, instead of coding the proc to deal a fixed amount of damage in points to the target, it was coded to reduce the health of the target by a very large percentage, like ten thousand percent or something (in other words, many times the amount of damage necessary to reduce health to zero).

That's actually how the exploding buildings in Steel Canyon guaranteed they killed you.  They dealt a multiple of your own health several times, guaranteeing it did plenty enough damage to kill you and bypass the one-shot code (by hitting you three times).  In an instance of demonstrating just how completely nuts City of Heroes players were, there was a perennial discussion about what the most amount of damage you could deal in the game was, separate from bugs.  During one of those threads I mentioned that I thought the highest amount of "working as intended" damage that existed in the game was the exploding buildings in Steel Canyon.  They were coded to deal, if I remember correctly, about 120x your health in three separate unresistable damage ticks.  This means the higher your health, the more damage the building blast did.  And the highest possible health bar the building could see, I conjectured, was the Kronos Titan.  So I said the highest damage you could possibly see the game deal to a single target would be if the Kronos Titan happened to be wandering around Steel Canyon and happened to find himself caught in a building blast, whereupon the building would deal something like 25 million points of damage to it in one attack.

So of course some maniacs on one of the servers decided to do just that.  They spawned Kronos in Steel, pulled him onto a burning building, and waited until it exploded.  And because someone demorecorded it, I have video evidence of this lunacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTAcSMg6gp0

Unfortunately, there's no floating numbers above Kronos, but you can get an idea of how powerful the blast is by seeing the floating damage for what I assume is a tanker doing the recording: he gets three ticks of 225,788 points of damage (which by the way is 120.48 x 1874, base tanker health at level 50, which confirmed the theory).  But if you watch that video, you are probably witnessing the largest amount of working-as-intended damage the game ever generated against a single target: by my calculations at the time about 25,546,290 points of total damage in a single attack.  I don't think the game ever before recorded that much damage by a single attack against a single target that wasn't a bug.  And I don't think anyone else was ever crazy enough to attempt that stunt again, which means it probably kept the record right up to shutdown.

Incidentally, all of this was probably because of a bug no one ever bothered to fix.  I believe what the original dev intended was to make sure that no matter what the game circumstances the building definitely killed the player.  To do that, he decided to have the building basically do a reverse Dull Pain, and reduce the player's health bar by 100%.  But due to timing issues and actual powers like Dull Pain, it was theoretically possible for 100% damage to be "not enough" because the player sneaks in a point of healing or health somewhere.  So the dev decided to hit the player for three separate -100% health damage ticks just to be sure.  But then instead of making attribmods that did that, they accidentally coded the effects to use the Melee_Damage table rather than the Ones table.  The Ones table would have made the "1.0" in the effect equal to literally 1.0, which is 100%.  Instead, it made the 1.0 equal to 1.0 times the melee damage table of the critter.  Buildings were basically level 50 minions in terms of class, so at level 50 they dealt 120.48 damage at scale 1.0.  So the 1.0 became 120.48, which became 12048%, or 120.48 times the target's health.

That's horrific overkill, but since the net effect is the same - the target is dead, dead, dead - there was no incentive to fix the typo.  And that's why Steel Canyon buildings deal over three hundred fifty times more damage than they need to.

And as I previously mentioned, City of Heroes players are batshit crazy.

[brothermutant]

Ice/Cold corruptor became the second alt I rolled in CoV during head start (after my Ninjitsu stalker).  Not the most powerful character I ever made, but after CoV beta I always felt like the NPCs were cursing my existence just before keeling over when I spammed all that Ice and Cold debuffs on them, and that seemed to make up for the fact it was a somewhat slower soloer than average.

I had a Street Justice/Nin stalker that rocked. But I was looking at Mids and thinking I may make him a SJ/Willpower stalker next time. I can get his def near 45%+ when stealthed and have ok Res and regen. Only thing I would miss from Nin would be the def debuff res (did it have a self heal too?), the placate powder move and the Caltrops. GREAT move for getting the hell outta dodge when your fight turns south. Click and slap on the floor below your feet and book it outta there.  8)

[Ultimate15]

...*sigh*

Are we there yet? ;( No updates? Nothing, huh? BAH.

Missing it like crazy today.

[blacksly]

So yeah, debuffing controllers and defenders could post really good pylon times, but anyone claiming they just casually strolled up to one with an unoptimized build and proceeded to wreck the top melee times was just plain lying.  It just wasn't possible.

I imagine anyone who did it, DID have an optimized build. Just not necessarily one that had been optimized specifically for pylons, after several runs, etc. In other words, someone with a purpled-out and well-built Controller, but not one who specifically built to handle pylons. I would not imagine that someone with a normal Controller build, even Ill/Rad, without good sets and experience soloing AVs, would go up to the pylon and even survive, much less beat top times.

But there were several who, if not lying, did post up "I will try it", and then "I did it, got X time", without coming back to adjust their builds. Clearly, they were good players with good builds, if they were on the boards posting in a thread for a difficult challenge, but they did beat times of Brutes and Scrappers who had tried multiple times, after multiple build tweaks. No Stalkers, I think, as I believe the thread pretty much played out before the Stalker updates.

[Reaper]

So of course some maniacs on one of the servers decided to do just that.  They spawned Kronos in Steel, pulled him onto a burning building, and waited until it exploded.  And because someone demorecorded it, I have video evidence of this lunacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTAcSMg6gp0

And as I previously mentioned, City of Heroes players are batshit crazy.

LOL That was sick!

[Auroxis]

But there were several who, if not lying, did post up "I will try it", and then "I did it, got X time", without coming back to adjust their builds. Clearly, they were good players with good builds, if they were on the boards posting in a thread for a difficult challenge, but they did beat times of Brutes and Scrappers who had tried multiple times, after multiple build tweaks. No Stalkers, I think, as I believe the thread pretty much played out before the Stalker updates.

The thread was alive and well up until the game's last days. Stalkers posted some remarkable times after the updates and ATO's, me being one of them.

[Solitaire]

...*sigh*

Are we there yet? ;( No updates? Nothing, huh? BAH.

Missing it like crazy today.

I feel your pain... :'(

[Ironwolf]

I think that the fundamental problem is that NCsoft is, at its core, a Korean company, and as such only pays such lip service to the practices of other cultures as they're forced into, and as long as they're in the power position they don't care that other cultures aren't going to react the same way Koreans do. Given some of the things I've read about Korean business practices, I wonder how much of the shutdown was CoH underperforming and how much was Paragon Studios taking the wrong approach to trying to buy themselves away from NCsoft and the NCsoft management finally getting tired of the Paragon Studios negotiators not being able to recognize that they'd been told 'no' in a way that any Korean negotiator would have recognized, but kept coming back again and again trying to work out a deal that was never going to happen, until NCsoft ordered the studio shut down because the PS management didn't know their place.

This is correct in what I could find out about what happened except it wasn't a this OR that problem but rather and this AND that one.

NCSoft wasn't fixed on a single issue with CoH that caused the close. It was multiple issues.

1. Performance - Paragon Studios was given leave to hire more people and improve the game, they did so but also started to make at least 2 other projects that may or may not have been approved prior to the work being done. Having all of the people hired and not seeing the huge flow of cash coming in - during a time they were trying to cut a deal with Nexon sealed the games fate.

2. The ill advised buyout was done very poorly (the first Paragon one before the game was announced as closing). This buyout ticked some people at NCSoft off. The same anger bled over to the TF Hail Mary deal. It was close but personality issues blew everything up and NCSoft decided we won't sell the game to you. It always baffled me that after that attempt they said - let's find someone else NCSoft will sell to since they won't sell to us. I just sat and gathered all the information I could find and said - why won't they sell it to you?  Some of the folks angered NCSoft enough they said we will never sell it to you. This became - we will never sell the game in some people's eyes.

3. Current deal they are Tapping the Deal now. They are just stringing it along not to waste time but because the guy selling it is afraid Nexon will fire him if they win the struggle for the company control. If you do even a little research the reason Nexon gives for trying to takeover NCSoft is some of the older software. What I see while not on the inside is the tapping to keep a little life in the deal and the possibility still in place but no intent to close and finish the deal at this time, due mainly to Nexon and its efforts.

[Ryo Kinsaru]

Forgive me if I make any incorrect assumptions or statements, or ask any inappropriate questions.

So, the guy is holding on to the game because it might be one of the titles that Nexon is after. He doesn't want to possibly put himself in a position to have to answer to his new bosses why they didn't get one of the pieces of software that was the reason for their takeover in the first place. What use could Nexon have for CoX other than a revamp/rerelease in the first place? Is there something in the game that could be of use otherwise? Is the general consensus among us that Nexon should go take a leap or do we wish for them to succeed in case they would be interested in a relaunch? I'm just trying to keep my head screwed on straight, as I've forgotten or misinterpreted more of the information that I've gleaned from this forum than I've retained and understood. Yes, present company makes me feel mentally inferior. Sad panda.

[Thunder Glove]

3. Current deal they are Tapping the Deal now. They are just stringing it along not to waste time but because the guy selling it is afraid Nexon will fire him if they win the struggle for the company control. If you do even a little research the reason Nexon gives for trying to takeover NCSoft is some of the older software. What I see while not on the inside is the tapping to keep a little life in the deal and the possibility still in place but no intent to close and finish the deal at this time, due mainly to Nexon and its efforts.

... if that's the case, it makes me angry all over again.  We've been tip-toeing around for over a year, trying not to make NCSoft mad, because - oh no, it may sour the deal!

As far as I'm concerned, "stringing it along" with "no intent to close and finish the deal at this time" is as good as a straight-up "no".  We can stop tip-toeing.  We can stop trying to spare NCSoft's feelings.  There is no deal to sour.