Arcanaville

One day BaB told me he was Tic-Toc on the forums.

And that's the short and long version of how I found out who BaB was on the forums.

Of course he knows who I really am so we're even there.


Sigh. Devs.

Riddle: you have two coins that add up to thirty cents, and one of them is not a quarter. What are they?

Answer: a nickel and a quarter. One of them is not a quarter. The other one is.

Sigh. Devs.

You do know you're not supposed to put City of Heroes events into your resume, right? It sounds impressive to say you reprogrammed a security system to help end an alien invasion of the planet, but that only works if they don't check references.

Just to amplify, running under an administrator is not the same thing as running as an administrative elevated role. Even accounts with administrative rights can run processes with and without elevated permissions.

Oww. Quit it.

The truth is many interview questions are Kobayashi Maru questions: there is no correct answer they are a test of character.

Here's some serious advice. There's a simple trick not everyone learns. You will often be asked questions for which there is no answer, or for which there is no possible way you can know the answer. The interviewer is looking to see what happens when you are presented with such a situation, because its going to happen in your actual job.

You can pretend to know the correct answer and spew BS. Wrong.

You can shrug and give up. Wrong.

The "correct" answer is to say "I don't know. But: here's what I think."

That's what they hope you do on the job. Admit you don't know, but don't give up.

Why should you hire me instead of those three guys? I don't know. But: here's why I think you should hire me.

Or, as Liquid put it in a different context:

They are looking to see how you think, and what your attitude is. And most important, are you comfortable exposing your thought process to others; probably the most important skill in any collaborative design environment.

Oh my god you're sleeping in an alley on a bed of Paragon Studios' flat screens? Do you need me to send you some packing peanuts or something?

Oww. Quit it.

Mmmm... Brownies...

I never said it was. Although I'll bet a year's salary its more important than someone that feels its appropriate to call themselves HI IM A UNICORN


The game isn't made up. I suppose I have to be the one to explain this to you, but City of Heroes was a real game. We didn't all make it up. There was actual code and everything. Its still functioning if you need evidence it actually existed.

There are a lot of people whom I know but I have never met in person. My only interaction with them has been through email and text messages. They are not made-up ASCII people, they are real people. The people who played this game are real people, with real interests. Those interests include a real game, in the real world.

I have no need or desire to explain my professional responsibilities to you. You're nobody that I care enough about to do so. However, if you believe that the sunset of the game provides you an opportunity to take pot shots at people, find an easier target. Because I have no problem taking your little bit of attitude and shoving it so far up your little bit of *** that it finds itself embedded in your little bit of brain.

That's exactly the sort of compliment BaB loves to hear.


True story: shortly after they launched, some guy started a thread on the CO forums basically slamming me, and specifically quoting BaB as saying, in-game, that he thought I was completely full of crap. I didn't think much of it really, but I forwarded a link to the thread to BaB saying basically "hey, did you say in-game that I was full of crap, or did you just say I was full of carp and they misquoted you?"

At the time BaB and I were conversing a lot about the game and game design in general, and BaB said the exact opposite was true, and he had no idea why anyone would say that. He said I could post there and quote him saying they were completely full of sh*t.

I decided it wasn't worth it, so I dropped it. But he was completely serious about me dropping him name, along with the f-bomb of my choice if I wanted to. It wasn't so much defending my honor, boy did BaB hate being misquoted.

"Power customization is impossible."

What I always found amusing is that the settings in CO didn't remind me at all of comic books. They actually made me feel like I was playing Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the MMO.

Only, you know, with superpowers and without Gil Gerard and Erin Gray.

So now they all shot first.

You probably killed them all.

Freudian slip or inside joke?

Or, you know, just another Friday for the NCSoft infrastructure team.

Oww, stop it.

Random is random.

Oww, stop it.

In-game Positron seems to have more redundancies.


Bwah?


You heard it here first: Radiation/Radiation/Invuln archetype in I25.

Keith was delivering the food?

From a gameplay perspective, its a matter of personal preference as to whether you like the idea of blocking or not. But from a design perspective, I think it was one of the best design decisions they made. For one thing, it turned mez from a rather binary un-gameplay mechanic here into a meta-game effect there. And it softened the difficulty level of critters substantially, giving the developers more freedom in that area. The irony is that with everyone basically having scrapper defenses, that latitude was less necessary. But in CoH, where Blasters aren't given defenses, it would have been a very interesting way to give them defense without defense.

No sweat, and that was probably it. I know pohsyb went off to MUO, then came back.

I thought we were keeping that a secret They were the PvP IOs so I could test them, back before the devs started flooding the beta markets with stuff and you couldn't merit buy them.

For a brief time I was running around on beta with a PvP build basically full of PvPIOs.

And then the base they were stored in got wiped, sigh.

As long as we're telling, I think it was around that time that I hit Ghost Falcon with the suggestion to revert the PvP changes to arena only, and make the arena cross server so the PvPers could decide whether to use all those changes or not, and so beta tests didn't keep pre-empting test matches.

I won't disclose what you said, but I will say I got the feeling your eyes were bugging out of your head and you were screaming at the monitor "do you think I'm made of money? Do You?!"

Neither, exactly. I discovered the phenomenon, and then invented the calculations that generate the best estimate for attack power rooted time. I called it "best estimate for attack power rooted time." Werner decided to start calling it "Arcanatime" and pretty soon everyone decided Arcanatime was better than "best estimate for attack power rooted time" or my other catchy name for it "server side clock-induced lag."

I discovered that it happened, invented a way to estimate it, and Werner then named it.

Well, technically speaking I don't speak Korean.


Really, I don't have any spare time at all. Every second I spent either playing the game or analyzing it was time taken from something else. I just thought it was worth it.

A lot of people who loved this game really wanted to know, and enjoyed knowing how it worked. Even some people who didn't min/max and didn't want to deal with the numbers liked reading about them and knowing what was happening: I have the PMs to prove that.

What it might suggest to some people is that I have a job where I mostly sit around and do nothing. But actually, all it means is I spend more of my time these days doing design work and less doing work work. And I have multiple monitors and computers on my desk. The forums actually run continuously in a VM on my desktop isolated from all my work. Although when I had work work, I tended to disappear or greatly reduce my posting.

As is generally the case when someone claims to be being realistic before wildly guessing, this is just another case where being realistic means extrapolating a small degree of ignorance into a much larger one.

Oh, that reminds me. I have to go add that to my resume. Invented Arcanatime on MMO axed by Koreans.

Yeah, about that:

Once I got in late to beta because Castle thought pohsyb or another dev submitted me and pohsyb assumed one of the powers people did.

Twice I got in late to beta because I was apparently submitted but never got the email.

Once I got in late to beta because some of the devs thought I was on some recurring list, and apparently I wasn't because there was no such list.

Once I got in late to beta because somehow I got onto a second wave list.

Once I got in late to beta because everyone forgot I still technically needed to be officially submitted.

And for bonus points I got in late to Issue 18 beta because I was already activated on the vendor server and no one thought to notify me that the beta actually started.


But I'm feeling muuuuch better now.

Work has been sucking up consecutive weekends for me recently, but if I can I will try to be on for that.