Arcanaville

Gears I believe were particularly effective projectiles.

The game isn't real? I really wish I knew what I took back in 2004 that I could still be tripping an entire MMO eight years later.

Yes, they are realistically attempting to convince people, through the medium of the internet, they should dismiss an emotional investment as being trivial because of their say-so.

One group of people is hoping for a miracle. The other thinks there's a system for winning the lottery.

I don't think the problem was how much inf was in circulation, the problem was its distribution. That's why influence sinks didn't have the effect you'd expect them to have. The only players they could work on, had more influence than the sinks could make any dent into.

It also required a systematic view of the economy and how every reward earning activity worked, something I don't believe ever really existed up to this point. It was not something that could be adjusted with averages. If anything tackling the economy with averages I think was doomed because of the way influence and drops were distributed by player and by activity.

Forgery is a colloquial term: the letter was deliberately mischaracterized as being written by Garriott when it was not. Although Garriott signed off on it as a press release, he contended it misrepresented the reason for his leaving as a deliberate ploy to defraud him of his stock options. As Garriott has prevailed in court and on appeal, its reasonable to state that as a matter of law, that letter is in fact a fraud.

I did find it interesting when rereading the order that on appeal NCSoft argued that Richard Garriott's resignation should be considered voluntary because demanding his resignation or face termination is considered a voluntary resignation under Korean law as long as intimidation or coercion is used. I find it interested because a) its interesting to me that "resign or be fired" isn't considered coercion by NCSoft, and b) the appellate court found that Korean law doesn't even say that.

Actually, I also find it interesting that the arguments put forth by the NCSoft legal team sound a lot like arguments I hear all the time on the internet, and they impressed the Fifth Circuit about as much as they impressed me.

I don't think the physics engine cares about the difference between not stacking and replace stacking. Replace stacking replaces one attribmod with another attribmod on the target, but it does not alter the KB attribute. I believe there is a fundamental difference between hitting a target with a zero duration KB and 0.5 seconds later hitting it with another KB, and hitting a target with a 0.75 second duration KB, replacing it with another 0.75 second duration KB, and then letting it expire. I think the difference is the difference between two invocations of the physics engine and one, although I can't prove it. I did once discuss the issue of KB stacking with pohsyb, and I believe we both thought the KB stacking window was likely around ~0.25 seconds, suggesting that KB pulses of 0.5 seconds would be distinguishable by the game as two separate effects.

And yes, it does seems that power goes out of its way to avoid creating an Abs with a Dur, suggesting once again that may be impossible or ill-defined.

In the case of blasters no one did that and no one needed to do that. The developers in particular considered the quantitative performance issues one small piece of the much larger picture that *all* pointed to justifying Blaster buffs. The case I made and the case the developers agreed with was that there was no valid reason not to buff them, and tons of reasons to buff them. More specifically, buffing wasn't the issue: the issue was evolving Blasters to the modern game like every other archetype has been over time.

I can and will point to a bunch of numbers and say "you're wrong" to anyone who tries to claim that Blasters were doing just fine. But those numbers alone aren't proof Blasters needed a buff, nor are they the reason they were getting buffs in I24. They are proof that one of the long-standing excuses for why Blasters have never been properly revisited is and has always been false.

Repulsion field has a fast tick rate (0.5 seconds). If its KB did not have a duration, my guess is that its fast KB pulses would be able to hit a target multiple times before the target was knocked out of its radius. By giving it a duration, those pulses could be set to not stack from same caster, which means once a target was hit with a KB pulse they could not be hit by another one for a period of time. Maybe 0.5 seconds was too close together, but 1.0 seconds was long enough to prevent multiple pulses from hitting the same target (since the duration is 0.75 seconds, the next pulse that could hit you would arrive 1.0 seconds after the initial one).

What if I just made him a zombie like in Serpent and the Rainbow?

Sure. And by your definition, you're one of the people repeating that rumor.

False. One person mentioned it, one person suggested it was possible, everyone else correctly stated that if nothing else the number was wildly unlikely.

Are you talking about the real world, or an episode of Columbo?

I find it difficult to believe NCSoft could have been shopping the game and the studio around without even the general manager knowing, and I can't believe anyone would want to take over the game without studio support. If this was all a surprise to Paragon, and I have multiple inside reports it was, they were not being shopped prior to the announcement.

There are multiple reports that representatives from Paragon were talking to NCSoft, but I have read nothing publicly nor has anyone told me anything privately about the specific content of those talks or the specific details of how they proceeded, only that they were happening and there was a decent chance of them succeeding. As far as I know, there has never been an *explicit* report about talks "going well" or anything like that. Just that talks were happening. My suspicion is that prior to being approached by the Paragon team, NCSoft had no plans for CoH or any of the other Paragon assets at all.

You're talking about two different things: legal liability and insurance. In terms of insurance, I would assume initially that computer control would be handled identically to cruise control. The choice to use it is up to you, but you're still responsible for what it does from an insurance perspective. In terms of legal liability, the question for the courts will be whether there exists a reasonable expectation the computer systems will perform adequately. If they don't, manufacturers may be liable just as they are now for any other system in the car. If they do and an unpredictable failure occurs, that would probably be no different than any other such failure. If computer control accidentally runs someone over, that will probably be no different legally than if your brakes fail and you run over someone. The questions will revolve around whether you maintained them reasonably well and there were any other contributing factors.

When you play an NCSoft game, you get attached.
When you get attached, they cancel the game.
When they cancel the game, you get angry.
When you get angry, you want to fight injustice.
When you want to fight injustice, you dress like Blue Steel.
When you dress like Blue Steel, Chuck Norris tests your skills.
And when Chuck Norris tests your skills, you end up in a wheelchair with one bad wheel.

Don't end up in a wheelchair with one bad wheel. Get rid of NCSoft and upgrade to anything else.

In general, making the critters smarter would take a lot of horsepower. But making them *look* like they were smarter is not the same thing. I'm speaking from a small amount of practical experience.

Sustain was going to go live if I had to kill Arbiter Hawk and push him around the office in his chair like Weekend at Bernie's.


Actually, to be honest I think I24 was actually Arbiter Hawk being a little conservative. Other things were going to get their turn after I24 but I'm pretty certain that was not going to be the end of Blaster improvements coming from Hawkster.

Yeah. Wait, what?

I would imagine that even if the technology was both reliable and cheap, it would still take twenty years or more for the old cars to be replaced with the new ones through attrition alone.

Computerized drivers in my lifetime? Absolutely. 90% penetration of the technology in my lifetime? 50/50.

The land's only worth $100k if someone's willing to buy it for that. But I find it so astronomically unlikely that NCSoft could make more on accelerated depreciation than any remotely possible offer that I find the entire analogy completely unrealistic.

If the land was actually worth $100k its impossible no one would offer you more than $30k. If you can't get more than $30k, its probably because your ability to estimate the value of land is egregiously bad.

Oh sure, blame us.

Essentially all melee defensive knockback protection offers 10000% KB resistance. I've always suspected the reason why is that at the beginning of time a designer decided to set KB resistance to "100" thinking "100%" when "1.0" means 100%, and everyone else since that time has copied that. In other words, its the Last Decimal Point Error from the original game that persists to this day because its indistinguishable from what's supposed to happen anyway.

Unless the negotiations were formalized, I doubt they are covered by confidentiality clauses. However, its likely all of the participants are unlikely to discuss sensitive negotiations held in confidence and off the record anyway. Doing so would damage your own personal reputation in that area.

Now, if one party were to publicly lie about the content of those negotiations, all bets would be off.

I doubt they would send that message in the clear, so to speak. That's the sort of thing that happens in other far more opaque and deniable ways.

This sounds more like a "suitable time" message to me.