Alissara

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Anything but the standard cape (that is, the cape that introduced way back in Issue 2) all vanish when they are submerged underwater.

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Can I ask you to take it on faith that this is not a "Jay can fix it" type of problem. Based on 4 years or so working on Open GL drivers, I happen to have a very good idea of what the cause is, and it'll take a programmer to change some source to fix this.

That said, I spoke with one of the programmers at the meet and greet, and offered a suggestion that MAY (I do repeat MAY) result in a fix for this. Time alone will tell if it does. Simply because the idea behind the fix is trivial, but I cannot tell if it is easy to implement in practice. Only the devs can answer that.

Also, the nature of the beast is such that it is impossible to remove all graphic anomalies. Really and truly impossible. All my idea does is trade the current set of anomalies for a less intrusive set. In places where this happens (some capes and some skirts underwater), instead of losing the cape or skirt, there would be certain cases where small patches of water would mysteriously vanish.

It's a bear of a problem.

Trying to keep my post on topic ...

Now that I have finally recovered from exposure to Jay's incredible sexiness at the meet and greet, I have one minor request that has bugged me ever since I created Alissara in Beta, oh so long ago.

Please make the zippers on the front of both the patent leather chest selection and the patent leather legs selection look the same. Right now there is a very visible difference between the two.

Clicky

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I wanted to follow up on this announcement to say that I'm sorry it is a tease of what is to come. At this time I don't have more clarification of how these settings will be used.

Also, we understand that the "Enabled/Disabled" option settings are not as intuitive as they could be. For these, and other, settings "Yes/No" options would likely work better.

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In my extremely humble opinion, it would make a lot more sense if you were to replace the four instances of the word "Hide" with the word "Show", and then use the "enabled/disabled" selections that you currently have (with the sense reversed, obviously).

That would make it the most intuitive, at least it would for me.

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We'll be happy to prove you wrong. I'd like to reiterate the statement, found in a couple places in the announcements: "We are now in a position to make a major reinvestment in the City of Heroes product line.

We're aren't staffing up to sit around and do nothing

Everyone here is very excited with the prospects and plans for the future!

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Which raises an interesting question, Lighthouse. What sort of timeframe is NCSoft looking at for this ramp up and transition? If there wasn't too much hiring going on, you'd have the luxury of taking your time, since the CoX team could continue to work at Cryptic's offices in Los Gatos. For a month or two perhaps.

However the fact that you're hiring in order to expand the team implies that the hiring can't happen until the Mountain View office is operational. Is there a known ETA for when that happens, and if so are you allowed to tell us?

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What would a CoH 2 bring that couldn't be done with expanding the original?

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Here's two things:
[*] A newer, more up to date graphics engine.[*] Built-in handles to take care of Power Customisation, and I mean full power customisation, not just Weapons.

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While you're at it, for the love of all that is good and true in Paragon City, make the game's resource loader asynchronous. Or find some other way to stop the main thread from blocking while loading is going on.

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1. Why would Cryptic let go of possibly dozens of talented developers? Were they not so talented? Not so wanted? Was Cryptic that bad a place to work? Seems odd.


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It makes perfect business sense to both companies. The engineers "transferring" were paid from the income that Cryptic received from NCSoft as part of the CoX deal - they are the CoX team. Since Cryptic will no longer be getting that money, they'd have no way to pay those engineers, meaning layoffs or some brutally hard belt-tightening somewhere.

Meanwhile NCSoft has just taken over the development of CoX, so they have a massive demand for engineers. Who better to fill that role than the potential layoff victims at Cryptic, who just happen to have the most experience with the codebase in question anywhere.

Talk about a win-win situation.

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2. There is talk of a transition period. If just about every single person has jumped ship to NCSoft, what is there to transition? NCSoft was already part of every decision, so what is transitioning? I get the feeling that the real transition is yet to come. Where lots of new hires come in, get trained and up to speed, then one by one the old cryptic crowd stealths their way back to their old jobs/company.

I just don't get the whole EVERYBODY jumped ship. Maybe Cryptic would no longer have work for them? Get laid off or take the new job?

I find it hard to believe that Cryptic was so bad a place to work or that these employees were of so little consequence that they could jump ship or be let go en masse.

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Everyone on the CoX team transitioned. However the MUO team at Cryptic is alive and well, still in Los Gatos, and still being paid out of Microsoft's pocketbook.

It's not that Cryptic is (or ever was) a bad place to work. It's simply that it makes the most sense for everyone: Cryptic, NCSoft and the programmers themselves, for them to transfer to NCSoft's new office.

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As promised, feedback on one question: who would I like to see there?

Since it's not explicitly listed, I hit Other, because I would also like to see "Other players irrespective of server"

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New Inventions: Issue 11 brings with it new invention sets including “Very Rare” Purple sets, as well as brand new invention sets for Taunt, Buff and Debuff powers, among others.

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If you are going to insist on doing this, please make sure to add the following two features.

1. MAKE /GIGNORE ACTUALLY WORK RIGHT! Meaning if I /gignore a global, I don't EVER want to hear from that account again. No global tells. No character tells. No email. No trade invites. No team invites. NOTHING.

2. A "local" spam filter. If I say "/filter string" then all tells (global or character) sent to me that contain "string" are killed. This can be done clientside, so it's no additional load of the servers.

My reason for asking for these two features is that the addition of rare IO's is likely to cause a major increase in the amount of farming that goes on. Both of these are tools that allow the players to combat RMT spam on their own.

BTW, it may not come as a complete surprise that I think "very rare" IO's are a grotesquely bad idea. Not unless it is the long term plan at Cryptic to have this game slide into the loot based morass where WoW is currently lurking.

Let's do a real life flashback to mid 2003. One of my coworkers went to E3, and came back telling of this MMO that was like nothing else available. "How's that?"" I asked him. "It doesn't have any loot" he replied. "Weird," I replied "I wonder what they'll find to make it interesting.

Well guys, on April 28, 2004, you "Made it interesting" in a big way.

Do you really intend to throw it all away, a little at a time?

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I wanted to put in the suggestion for somewhere in the East Bay, since the parking issue is somewhat alleviated and puts an average distance between San Francisco and San Jose, so that no one driving from either city would have to drive as far. That's all I've got, though, since I'm at a loss as to specifically where in the East Bay would be good.

Of course, I say this partially because I'd like to be able to take BART to wherever this is.

[/ QUOTE ]Unless the traffic situation is drastically different than I think it is, the only place in the East Bay that might fit that criteria is the Hayward area. I can't help but think, however, that if a neutral area between SF and SJ with a BART station is the priority, then perhaps Millbrae should be looked at? Besides the BART connection with SF and the East Bay, Millbrae Intermodal Station serves as a CalTrain station, providing public transportation from SJ. It's also close to SFO.

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Hadn't thought of that area. I'd open it up to Hayward and surrounding areas, going as far south as the north end of Fremont - Mowry and that area. That'd include Union City, and maybe over the hill into Castro Valley. With the new bart extension, there's a bart stop there now.

The only problem is that I'm drawing a total blank for places we could use, there's nothing I can think of that's big enough and has decent catering. There's plenty that are big enough, plenty with good catering, but none that I can think of with both.

How many people are we anticipating?

Just two thoughts.

In my extremely humble opinion, San Jose is slightly preferable to San Francisco due to easier parking. This is based on living in the City for four years or so, in the early 1990's.

I'll admit this is a pretty obvious "Duh", but an internet cafe with BYOC WiFi might be a good idea. Not sure what the rates are, but you may be able to get a block of systems for a few hours for a discount rate. Maybe someone more familiar with the various Internet Cafe's could chime in on their relative merits.

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… I just can’t be led by a guy named Floyd.

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Hey - Floyd is one hip dude!

-- Edit -- fixed the link.

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... image snipped ...

Bringing some candid J Love!

He didn't even see me!

We make him take his uber cool cape off when he comes to work, otherwise his super strength and super sexy factor would blow us all away.

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Makes popcorn, settles down to watch the fireworks erupt in Jay's costume request thread when this pic gets found ...

BTW, Ex, how did you photograph that über hunk of sexiness without swooning?

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She's over at the TR beta forum attempting to contain the riot from unhappy beta testers.

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Hmm... I heard the game was just "meh", what's the source of the discontent?

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The hype I fear.

Richard Garriott's newest title promises to break the MMO mold and chart a new direction for the future of gaming!

It's a game. There is some new stuff but honestly, I don't think the tech exists yet to do what the hype promised.

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Makes sense. Personally, I've never even understood the hype. What the hell good is a MMO without elves? Even CoX allows you to make elves.

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There are no smeggin' elves in EvE. How the *** would you fit them in a pod with those damned long pointy ears?

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Most of my family is from Texas. Does that count for

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All my exes live in Texas.

Does that count for anything?

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Only if you hang your hat in Tennessee.

-- Edit --

Damn - McBoo beat me to the punch.

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There's something obviously up when someone's been playing for 3 years and has no veteran awards...


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Huh? I'm confused. What's stopping BaB the player from having a normal account?

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PURE SPECULATION now.

I suspect that they do have "normal" accounts. I also suspect that Vet rewards are handed out based on billing information. I further suspect that these accounts are free and have no billing information.

I therefore draw the conclusion out of thin air that the above set of hypothetical conditions causes the normal characters on dev accounts to never receive vet rewards.

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While I soundly agree with zero tolerance for spammers, I want to ask if anything is being done to track down and stop the people actually doing the farming in the first place?


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While your post brought up a legitimate point, it's going to be nearly impossible for them to find and punish people farming things to sell for RMT and actual players doing it for badges, salvage, inf, etc. I certainly don't want them punishing me because I was out farming for arcane salvage the other day and I don't want them to make getting a Hamidon Goo any harder than it already is. How do you propose they tell the difference? If they can do it without making things harder on legitimate players, that would be terrific and I'd fully support it.

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One technique that has been used elsewhere is to do the following.

You start the "sting" by actually having a CS representative buy ingame currency via RMT. You now know a player that has "farmed" money. You check the server trade logs to trace it back to the original source. You then go to work banning accounts.

If the game needs "in game" help to transfer currency between alts (as we do), then some additional care is needed to make sure that you don't ban an innocent helper, but in all cases, study of chat logs can avoid banning an innocent. It may let one of the launderers escape, but you still get the final handoff account and the farmers.

Around 10:40 AM PDT, 7/30.

Clicky

Go lick your wounds, alien scum.

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A complaint about one of the missions in the RWZ:
Please revisit the mission where you need to rescue diplomats and negotiators in the cave. You end up getting a Rikti Mind dude and a human General (General Arkins?) that join you in the fight... however, if either of them DIE during the fight- FAILURE.

No big deal except that they apparently have a death wish. The Rikti is manageable, but the General is a complete moron. He has no powers except a pistol... but for some reason, REALLY has to get right up into the faces of his foes to shoot at them. Even with his would be killers taunted, he dies thanks to the massive AoEs from the Nemesis.

No fun.

Who made this man a general if he doesn't understand the basic concept behind ranged weaponry?

Suggestions:
1- drop the idea of failing if they die. they are stupid NPCs, and having a base human with no powers and beserker mentatlity will only lead to frustration.
2- Beef up the hostages to actually be able to take a few punches (99% resist to AoE?)
3- eliminate melee from their option list. make them stay back at range.
4- drop the idea of them following you, like all the other people you rescue in the mission and let them FLEE!
5- allow non healing classes to give these fools inspirations

It was real frustrating to do this mission carefully KNOWING that it is easily failable, getting all the way to the very end with 1 Fake Nem at half health left, and his last AoE shot drops General Stupid. We had a moderate healer too and he just could not keep up (rad corruptor.) But if ol' Blodd n Guts General there would have just stayed BACK and shot his gun, he would have likely lived.

Or new suggestion:
Have the NPC dialogs for these types of missions with crazy beserker mentality say the following: "Hey man, thanks for rescueing me from unlikely doom. But now I'm afraid I'm going to make your trip a waste and spoil your reward, SEE YA!" As he runs off into an entire 8 man spawn... ALONE. WITH A PISTOL. AND A CIGAR.

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Agreed 100%. The AI in this mission is pretty ghastly.

The workaround that I've found works best is to simply ignore those two until everything else is dead.

Then rescue the Rikti first, and finally Aarons (the pistol wielding idiot).

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Random thoughts on lag.

One thing that is not immediately obvious is that the server's upstream bandwidth load is an order n-squared quantity.

Meaning if you double the number of people in an area, you quadruple the server's upstream bandwidth requirement.

This is why, for example, reducing the maximum headcount in the hive to 50 had such a dramatic effect. Dropping from 200 to 50 doesn't reduce the bandwidth needed by a factor of four, it reduces it by a factor of sixteen.

What this means is that the huge crowds of people that can collect in an invasion zone around a heavy Rikti spawn (*) can have a serious effect.

(*) note that due to the way that Rikti chose where to port down, cause and effect are very hard to distinguish in these cases.

All of the above said, props to the devs for looking into this. The invasion is tremendous fun, and if this patch makes it run smoother, so much the better.

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Added kill volumes inside Universities to prevent hostile critters from getting inside. Bad critters!


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What precisely is a kill volume?

And yeah, I'm asking this beacuse I want to make a case that depending on what they are, the game could possibly use a few more of them.

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Peregrine_Falcon wrote:

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This can't be anymore of a problem than creating the content yourself. In fact if anything it'd be much less manpower intensive.

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No offense, but I love it when someone not intimately involved in the project tells someone who is that it =must= be simple or it =can't= be that hard.

And some people wonder why the devs don't post as much any more.

--NT

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It's the filtering problem. As is generally agreed, 99% of player generated content is garbage. Sad, harsh, but true.

"Can you give me a quick number crunch on that?"

170,000 active subscribers.

Say just 2% of them decide to create modules. That's 3,400 people.

Say they each create a module a week. That's 3,400 modules per week to audit.

Assuming just five minutes to look at a module, an auditor can look at 480 modules in a 40 hour work week. At that rate, they'd need to hire 7 full time staff just to audit modules.

Now do you begin to get a grasp as to the scope of this?

Ryzom has a prayer of pulling this off because they have a much smaller subscriber base: single digits of thousands are what I've heard. Combine that with their initial audit by the players, and they have a manageable problem.

But without some way to get a first pass at eliminating most of the 99% garbage before Cryptic people see stuff, there's not a lot of hope for this.

-- Edit --

P.S. Nuclear, if it's not abundantly clear from my post, I'm agreeing with you.

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Not liking the zone-specific-to-your-level thing. As a 50 I'm getting bored with Peregrine Island and PI-only scanner mission mobs. What's wrong with scanner missions in ANY zone? Level 50+ Hellions just might be what we need. Or Skulls, or Freakshow. Why punish us for being higher-level? Doesn't seem like much of a reward to me.

- Captain Amazing

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Many many moons ago, the devs went on record as stating that they can't generate arbitrarily leveled versions of mobs in game.

IIRC, mobs are table driven, and if a given villain group only has a table that runs from (say) level 1 to level 25, they can't generate level 26 versions of that group. Period.

That said, there are a few obvious oversights. I may be unlucky, but I don't remember ever encountering Nemesis in a L50 PB mission. Additionally Freaks are available at high level, since there's a mission north of 40 in an alternate dimension that involves Freaks. Ditto Council, etc.

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1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There's no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn't a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can't even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

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This is the big one right here, I'm guessing. From a programming standpoint, I can see two ways to change this, and both of them would open the door to Bug City. It couldn't possibly be as bad as the Invention system, but this'd be another one that would demand at least a month of beta testing.


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Agreed.

Colorizing a "baked on" power is theoretically possible. Not easy, not at all, but theoretically possible. However it's no use at all if you can't make use of it. I take BAB's comment as meaning that by the time the particle system gets round to rendering a power effect, it has no idea who started it and so has no idea how to color it, or if it should even be colored at all.

Yes, they could attempt to retrofit something in, but a change of that sort is not something you do lightly. As noted, it's just way too easy to break things in subtle ways that are mind-bendingly difficult to debug.

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That said, I think you'll find a large portion of the player base would be very happy if you devoted an entire issue to just power customization. This would be no small game feature, and pretty much everybody would be enjoying this new content. Devoting a whole issue to just that would also solve the problem of needing every department involved.

Custom animations would be a bigger draw for me than custom coloration, but one step at a time. -_o

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This is the old "convincing the devs it's worth it" problem. It represents a huge investment of their time. The fact that it keeps coming up here on the forums, over and over says there is a desire for it. Custom colored powers seems so natural as a L40 reward to follow capes and auras at L20 and L30.

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You guys should do it in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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Ex Libris wrote:

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We are going to be at Comicon, Gencon, and PAX this summer. The event we are talking about is more about creating a COH/COV player oriented gathering.


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Gencon, Indy 4TW!

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We are going to be at Comicon, Gencon, and PAX this summer. The event we are talking about is more about creating a COH/COV player oriented gathering.

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Having been to a couple of these in the past (Earth and Beyond, anyone), I just have a couple of minor thoughts to throw into the ring.

The presence of devs / designers / customer service / qa / etc. makes an incredible difference.

That said, the programming team probably want to keep a fairly low profile, since they work in an area that many people don't grok. It's a little hard to discuss xyz feature of a game when a dev starts breaking it down into classes, inheritance and the like.

Keeping that in mind, designers can provide a massively useful interaction, being as they can explain why things are the way that they are.

Likewise, CS reps (from NCSoft) should be considered a very important part of the team. Even so far as to say that retired people that we know and love *cough* *cough* CuppaJo *cough* *cough* should have an option to be present. I'd be surprised if anyone here would dissent with the statement that Cuppa had a big hand in forming the player/NCSoft relationship that currently exists.

Finally, doing it at an Internet cafe type location is close to mandatory. What's the point in being there if we can't play? And make certain that free / cheap 802.11 access is available for those of us that want to bring laptops.

And as an adjunct to that, make sure a day or two ahead of time that the location is good to go. Those that attended the E&B birthday party at certain locations may remember a sense of DOOM when we found that the machines at the cafe weren't even set up to play the game.

P.S. you're missing an option in the poll. In the "Would you attend an event of this sort" question, you don't have a HELL, YEAH! option.

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I want a (0 debt) pvp zone when the devs are ALLOWED to throw whatever they want at the players.

THAT would be some fun pve/pvp

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While it would need to be extremely rare, lemme tell you a couple of tales about a couple of other MMO's.

1. Jumpgate. For all it's other faults, it had a dev / player rapport on a par with what we have here. It was also a LOT smaller: only one "shard", and not a ton of players. That said, the gm/dev crew would occasionally spawn gm/dev controlled mobs and get into a major scrap with the players - exactly the "us vs them" that TacRedLine is suggesting. And lemme tell you, it was a blast.

2. Ryzom. Slightly less of the all out warfare, but that game had fairly regular gm/dev controlled events. Usually a bit more storyish, but still very popular.

Bottom line. We've got a number of shards, so it becomes a <bleep> of a nightmare for many reasons, but just once in a while doing something like this REALLY helps to cement a good solid gm/dev to player relationship.

When Ghost Widow showed at the winter party on Virtue, it was a major event, especially the bidding for a slot on a team with her. I couldn't afford it, but it must have been a blast for the folks that got to go along.