Arcanaville

Except its not *only* a rare drop: if you complete the task force you can simply buy the costume option if you do not get the rare drop. The option is only scarce for characters that do not perform the trial and thus cannot simply buy the unlock.

Are you saying you would rather the drop not exist at all, then be rare? You said you understood the devs motivation in the part being gated to actually defeating Maelstrom in the iTrial. They *added* an additional way for players to get the feature than simply buying the unlock after completing the trial: a way that the player could theoretically gift (or sell) to another character or player. Are you saying that if its going to be rare, you would rather it not exist at all?

The only real reason to run the trial repeatedly and earn the recipe drop is to earn the pistols for someone else or some other character: to enable someone or some other character that isn't performing the proscribed task that unlocks the reward to get the reward anyway. Are you saying its objectionable for someone trying to earn the option for someone else or sell the option to someone else to have to run the trial repeatedly? That someone that wants to sell the option or allow some other character to bypass the gate must have a way to do that quickly?

Again: players do not have to run the trial repeatedly to earn the pistols for themselves. They just have to run the trial once, then buy them for themselves. Its only if they do not want to run the trial that specifically gates the pistols that there is any issue with repetitive running of the trial.

No, when you pay a subscription, its exactly a deal between you and the gaming company to allow you to use both the hardware and the software that comprise the game, and to access and use the data within that game. Its spelled out in the EULA, and also obvious to most game players.

At least, that is what a subscription *used* to entitle me to. Under City of Heroes Freedom, a subscription specifically entitles me to access a certain set of assets and content of the game above and beyond what a non-subscriber has access to by default, and grants me a certain number of Paragon Points which I can use to unlock additional in-game options.

That's no different from the micro-transactions in the game. When I buy Paragon Points with cash, I'm paying for an in-game currency that I can use to unlock access to certain game features while the game exists. I'm not buying the dog in any sense of there existing some bits somewhere that I actually own. I'm just unlocking the dog for use by my characters so long as the game is running. That is no different from a subscription that allows me to access other game elements. I pay for access, and when the game is gone my access will disappear with it. I don't own a dog that will be taken away from me when the game shuts down. I have access to a dog that I will lose access to when the game shuts down.

I know what I'm spending my money on, and I'm fully aware of the impermanence of it all.

Technologically possible. Not especially likely. However, the longer the game lasts, the more likely it is that most of the technological assets within it will be sufficiently out of date compared to the current state of the art that when the game finally does shut down there's at least the minute possibility of convincing NCSoft to open the source to the game and release it to the community so the game could continue to run somewhere.

But that's probably a thousand to one shot.

Ok, then lets do this step by step. Step one first: you've said "The reason I don't want costumes to be loot is... Well, I hate loot as a concept, but beyond that... The reason is you end up putting weight on a costume piece that it doesn't really deserve." And you've extended this all the way to the signature appearance of a named NPC's unique weapons. To my mind, that's tantamount to saying "never" because if *any* costume gating is acceptable, then signature appearance of named NPCs would be the far extreme end. If that's not acceptable, nothing is.

Correct me if I'm wrong: where besides here is costume gating acceptable? Or is it, as I've interpreted your position, always unacceptable.

Along with all the stuff I spent time acquiring, and my time is worth more to me than a couple of bucks. But that's the nature of playing an online game. One day it will all be gone, and I won't be able to take it with me when they go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVZDH15TRro

I think its one thing to gate a bunch of random costume options behind high empyrean merits costs that have nothing to do with the trials at all. But its another thing to gate Maelstrom's pistols behind the iTrial that focuses on defeating him specifically. I would have been totally fine with the devs creating *only* the empyrean merit unlock after successful completion. Adding the recipe adds something more than what needs to be there: its not a "punishment."

Pretty much every reward that has any value attached to the trials can be interpreted as a way to force the players to grind them. But that extreme viewpoint is not interesting, because it offers no practical game design guidance. "Just don't gate anything unless I consider it trivial and make all rewards accessible by running content once and then let players decide what to run based purely on the fun of it with no structural incentive system" is not practical game design guidance.

Most MMOs with microtransactions don't so completely lose their minds that they forget to make backups of their game systems. Conversely, game developers not distracted by supporting microtransactions seem to make the same mistake: the linked article mentions another game where a similar lack of backups (and other dumb errors) set the game back substantially.

Curiously, that game sounded oddly familiar.

The amazing thing is that people figured out your pet was named spot so quickly.

Loot is "progress by another name" but not "level progress by another name." The incarnate system is a hybrid of different things, but one component of it is a linear progression system with gating: you have to unlock a slot to fill it with a power, very analogous to how additional levels grant powers and slots in the normal conventional game. Level shifting adds an additional dimension to that sense of linear progress: higher level content contains NPCs that themselves possess level shifting and creates an additional sense of intrinsic level and level progress.

The invention system on its own doesn't really have any sense of linear progress or gating, so it doesn't have an aspect to it that is analogous to leveling progress. Whether that makes the incarnate system more or less "optional" is a completely different matter, but its not true from a game design perspective that anything that allows you to become more powerful is all just different versions of the same kind of progress. If that were true, then the whole concept of "leveled" vs "level-less" gaming would be a distinction without a difference, but that is actually an astronomical difference in gaming.

Its not a decimal place error. At least, not in any sense any player could possibly mean. No player, including myself, knows enough about the physics engine to make that assertion, and the physics engine is the most likely place the bug exists. Its not in the powers system, because knockback scale, magnitude, and modifier tables all remain at the correct values. Being in the physics engine would explain a lot, because a bug that had this effect in the powers system would be something our devs could easily address. The physics system is a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.

Never guess about the implementation of the game. All guesses are always wrong. One day someone might guess right without foundational knowledge purely by chance, but so far no one has come even close.

True story: I saw basically the entire set of Vess artwork for Spiderman: Spirits of the Earth before it was lettered at a Comicon and before the book was released (1992 I think).

Then I bought the book and saw how they lettered it and ... and ... and I don't remember anything after that. I'm pretty sure I made it home from the comic store, but its pretty hazy.

> It is pitch black. Your character is likely to be eaten by a grue.

You say that like its a bad thing.

I don't think the attitude that comics are just for kids exists anymore. But I think the attitude may have actually gone too far the other way: that comics and associated media are for everyone. I don't think comic books and in particular the style and metaphor of 80s-90s comic books are ever going to be 100% mainstream. They'll be acceptable to a point when translated well enough, as anything will be. But times and tastes change. Think about how many successful cinematic musicals that aren't Disney animations there are between Grease (1978) and Mulan Rouge (2001). I can name more successful cinematic musicals from before I was born than after. Is that because musicals are now just for kids? Of course not: musical productions still do just fine, just not on the big screen.

Does age have anything to do with it? Some, I think. Although the "comics are not just for kids" era began basically in the mid 80s, its still the case that it was the people who grew up during that era, moreso than the adults that were already reading comics within that era, that represent the bulk of the "comics are not just for kids" generation. The 40 year olds today are the 30 year olds in 2000 when X-Men came out that might have been the first generation to have grown up thinking that art style was totally mainstream. It would have been a fairly substantial gamble in 1999 to guess there were enough of us to sustain a yellow spandex X-Men movie.

One more thing about comic books: it can be an expensive habit, like smoking. Older people often give up comic books not because they outgrow them, but simply because life throws more things to buy than they have the money to comfortably spend. And once you're disconnected from it, for a lot of people tastes shift. Ironically, I think a lot of the people going to see Captain America and Thor today are the people who once bought those comics or at least knew of them back in the day, gave it all up to pay the mortgage, and now appreciate the movies at least in part due to the nostalgia factor. The irony is that it might be only now, when enough people have been away from comics for long enough, that that art style can *be* nostalgic and resonate with an audience in a strong way.


Anyway, back to the artwork.

If you don't run trial content exclusively, I find using shards for Alpha and thread-based salvage for the rest of the slots tends to be more efficient over time. Notices are a lot easier to get than rare components (but more time gated) and the actual number of shards you need to craft shard-based components is extremely small. I wouldn't burn threads to craft a tier 1 alpha when 12 shards would do it from scratch (and you get one for completing Mender Ramiel right off the bat) and even tier 3 (for the Alpha level shift) isn't hard to get with shards.

Actually, the fundamental truth that very few people seem to grasp is that there are a lot of us, and even when the devs incorporate a hundred player ideas and suggestions into a build, that means 99.9% of all players think they are being ignored. The fundamental truth is that the playerbase has a significant impact on the game, but no particular player is likely to have their individual feedback directly influence the game design at any particular moment.

Possibly, but that would be an expense, not sales revenue. And I don't think they are paying Cryptic royalties for CoH, since I thought at the time NCSoft bought out Cryptic's stake in the game completely.

I soloed the thing for the badges. While an exemped 50 is certainly more powerful than a native low level character, its not like I had any incarnate powers or tons of invention set bonuses. Fundamentally the primary advantage I had was a very large inspiration tray. I'm pretty sure if I can solo it on a blaster, two players with native level characters can duo it.

The sales numbers definitely count subscription revenue, and almost certainly count all in-game sales since the consolidated report noted increased costs for soft promotions of in-game item sales. They can't be counting the costs to sell in-game items and not count the revenue from that same activity at the same time. Since the total Q3 sales number on that page (147,603 MKW) matches the total for sales by region on the breakdown page (also 147,603 MKW) and since the sales by region matches the sales by game number factoring out royalties (as they mention) all those numbers must factor in in-game item sales.

The only question is what are "royalties" and whether City of Heroes is entitled to any. I don't think so, but NCSoft seems generally reluctant to answer questions regarding how they compute royalties publicly.

The forums should expire your session, not log you out. Logging you out erases your "Remember Me" setting, making "Remember Me" worthless. If whatever hack they put into the boards to integrate with our authentication servers actually require a "logout" for some reason, remove the code that sets bbuserid and bbpassword to "deleted" or null and sets the expiry date into the past.

Jeez if they actually think they need to log people out, I guess I should make it a higher priority to write that proxy filter to axe those cookie deletes. Who knows what the forums are going to be sen next.

Or I could rewrite it as a breadth first search with heuristic compacting of the tree. But that would be *really* crazy.

And also a hundred times faster.

You don't count, Iggy. If we balanced the game around your builds Unstoppable would offer 3.75% resistance.

The tanker health cap is at about +88.6% Max Health.

Also, your calculations are for the case of 10% for the first foe, and 4% for each foe, not each additional.