Arcanaville

Bruce Harlick was a producer at Paragon, and I believe his last act was to have a project of mine assigned to him, whereupon he realized he would have to deal with me and fled to Zynga. I believe there's still an outline of him in the drywall where he headed straight for the parking lot without bothering to take detours to use doors.

So there was just no getting that moon base ever, was there.


We didn't get a chance to talk much, but I want to thank you and the rest of the team for supporting this game we all love. And you should know that during the Freedom Focus group thing, my brain was so stuck on processing Freedom, it locked up completely when we met and the only thing that came out was thoughts about the incarnate system which I knew you worked on. At dinner, the only thought running through my brain was "I had a chance to talk about anything at all with Positron, and I wasted it on incarnate trial exploits." Shoot me an email; I'd love to have a real conversation with you where more than 30% of my brain cells are functioning.

A couple of other confessions. I know now you forwarded many of the PMs I sent you to other devs to look over, but at one point I asked Castle if there was some secret to getting you to respond to a PM, and he suggested limiting the PMs to 100 words and no more than two numbers. If you wanted to know if a serious brain injury caused my PMs to drop radically in complexity, blame him.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity, however briefly and however limited in scope, to work with the developers at Paragon Studios. Even though there was a point where I thought I was cursed (Bruce, Art - you can see where I'm going there) it was fun and educational, and I enjoyed being able to contribute something back to the game. Also, I can pad my resume with that. But mostly, fun and educational.

Also, another confession: I finished the initial spreadsheet calculations in two afternoons and spent the rest of the time trying to use the project to fix other problems, like the critter firing algorithm. I swear it was a legitimate fix that made the calculations more accurate (and there was a lot of iterative feedback to incorporate beyond that), but it was also creative interpretation of scope. The calculations matched the critters very well, because I got Television to change the critters to match the calculations. Sorry, but I cheat. I'm sure Arbiter Hawk wishes he had thought of it first. I don't know how you kept control of him: he's a total maniac. As fantastic as I'm sure your future plans were, I'm equally sure I could easily have gotten him to surprise you also. We were plotting on getting Nukes to fire while mezzed when you weren't looking, just so you know.

We probably didn't, and don't, see eye to eye on the best way to design a game in all respects, but you and War Witch and Brian and the rest of the design and production leads ran the best superhero MMO out there, and in many respects the best MMO period, and for that I thank all of you. While I was telling you all everything you were doing wrong, I was also learning a lot about what makes a great game, and a great game development team. Which I will be able to apply to absolutely nothing unless I decide to found a game design company, but hey, learning is learning. No matter where I go and what games I play in the future, City of Heroes and Paragon Studios will always be the benchmark by which they all will be judged.

Except when it comes to decimal points of course. On entertainment value, design flexibility, creative passion, community support. Just not the whole Arabic arithmetic thing.


Also, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart Matt, words cannot express just how much I would like to say that seven point two is nowhere near ten. Its not even close.

But seriously, drop me an email when you get the chance. Where ever you end up, I will be there. Complaining, but playing.

Hmm.

Here's basically a full Magisterium trial, but held in the Negative Zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGLP_o_5Vdc

Strangest bug: the "my face is on the side of my head" bug.

Most rating-threatening bug: the "all my clothes disappear underwater" bug.

Most exploitive bug not involving item duping: the "mission complete, here's your reward; zone; mission complete, here's your reward; zone; mission complete, here's your reward" infinite loop bug.

The bug that made regen scrappers cry: Castle's Cur!=Abs bug for Widow VEATs, that made them recover 10% health eight times per second when Indominable Will was toggled on:



The bug no one ever told me was ever fixed: the "critter spawns invincible" bug that I showed to Castle, he saw in the logs, and never figured out how it happened.

The bug that sealed my domination over all things Defense: the "lucks and insights have been mislabeled since beta, and no one noticed" bug.

The most humorously juvenile typo, ever:


(Yeah, you'd probably fall down as well.)

The most W-T-F map bug ever:



The best captcha encountered on NCSoft's website:



The strangest NPC I ever had to escort out of a mission:


(video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4c5AeD_4c)

The best exploit attempt by the critters: The Malta Stealth Titan


(video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkB9OAoPQCg)

TheNet: do you like Gladiator movies?

I just want to say thanks for being a really great community manager; I enjoyed meeting you when I was up in Mountain View; send me an email so we can keep in touch; and holy crap clean the inside of your car. I told Black Pebble I felt privileged to share it with your top one hundred favorite gum wrappers and mountain dew bottles.

It has been all kinds of fun. And I mean that literally: some of the kinds of fun can't be easily described in English.

I remember saying it should really have been Forum Coven, since that term predated Forum Cartel by a couple weeks, and has much more evocative visual imagery.

Also, the nude dancing by moonlight thing.

Ironic, given the "give Statesman an appropriate package" thread led to all sorts of completely different strange places.

Because that is incredibly unlikely. If NCSoft was being hit by those, they would be a matter of public record. If they were just being threatened by them, what are the odds that the appropriate parties have been threatening such suits for years and only now cause NCSoft to fold the tents? What are the odds that the appropriate parties decided out of the blue to only revisit this issue again now, after it had been litigated already in the past.

Its a shame we didn't get a chance to correct that error in the advertised damage.

I HAVE NO IDEA

Carpe Diem:



Au revoir Venture. We rarely completely agreed, we rarely completely disagreed, but mostly we rarely completely agreed. But you were always inciteful. Oh, wait, insightful is what I'm sure I meant. I never felt like some of my brain cells ran away after reading your posts, and you were never boring. I can't say that about just anyone.

However etymologically incorrect, no matter what happens a part of me will always think of you when I see this:



And then I will see if there's anyone on my lawn I can chase away with a stick.

Given the playerbase's collective history with the costume editor, I'll settle for Strong.


I didn't interact with (i.e. complain, cajole, taunt, belittle, provoke, bemoan, distract, harass) the art team like I did the powers team, but that was not because I did not appreciate that side of the house. Its because I felt I could contribute more to the discussion on the mechanical side of the game, and because of the restraining order Matt imposed.

However, first and foremost my love of this game started with being able to jump in, and fly around, swoop down, and energy blast a bunch of thugs. What I could see, what I could hear, the visceral sensory impact of the game has always been my first love. I appreciate the contributions of the artists that made the game something I wanted to play year after year.

The numbers and the mechanics are important, but they are just numbers on a spreadsheet without the animations, the sound effects, and the visual effects that make those numbers sing.

I believe I speak for most of the quants of this game when I say that you and the rest of the artists that created the look of the game were just as important, if not more important, to our love of the game. For that, I thank you and all the rest of the artists of Paragon Studios.

And don't worry about the ones I don't speak for, because I can squish their spreadsheets like a bug.

That was post-Paragon, pre-Strike Team.

Its not as bad as it sounds because at the time Castle was the powers team lead, and there were a couple of different ... ok, it was that bad.

Me? No. I was focused on the geometry for 3D printing only. But if there are 3D modellers out there that can figure that out, I'd love to hear about it myself. I could probably figure it out eventually, but its not within my specific skill sets.

Your ability to temporarily drop the aura of wit and infallibility to assume your alter ego always impressed me.

Mostly, that was because it cost too much to provide psychological counseling to the developers not already familiar with our playerbase.

The first time I saw an internal email message from "Christian Bales" I immediately sent an email to Art Min saying "oh my god Batman works here?" like I was the first person to ever come up with that one and then I giggled to myself uncontrollably before my internal filter could cut that off.

Black Pebble is what happens when someone is born with a genetic defect that disables that filter.

Adam King is just before you? You're Arcanaville?? I would have never guessed.

Its *not* uncommented out in my current config file, but I recall long ago it once helped. I'm still checking, but I wanted to post images of what I was getting so everyone knows there is a way to make it work well enough, its just been so long since I first configured it that I don't know if I did something to my system to make it work that I then forgot to document. Hopefully I'll have that straightened out soon.

I'm sorry we didn't have enough time for me to get you to spill the beans on Project-X. It sounded like you guys were having fun on that side of the fence, and of course kept all the fun to yourselves and left me out here twisting in the wind with the rest of the riff-raff wondering if you were making a Chutes and Ladders MMO or a first-person Spy vs Spy.

Drop me an email sometimes, and my offer from the Freedom Focus group is still there if you find yourself in Hawaii, my door is always open. Oh, wait, I have an alarm system now. Don't actually try to open the door or the police will incarcerate you. My door is always available to be knocked on. I'm usually home by 6:30.



PS: I still think always hitting is not the best idea.

Good luck with that: