Arcanaville

Actually, your memory is playing tricks on you. The "is Cole evil" discussion basically starts with this post (I've tried to quote in a way that will allow you to link back to the posts):

It sort of kicked up a bit with this post:

That's only six posts later in the thread, and while je_saist ultimately claims Cole is evil, already we have a poster suggesting things are not completely black and white.

The first mention of the Resistance in any real form is:

but that doesn't specifically state an opinion of whether they are the good to Cole's evil. The first actual mention of the resistance by a poster commenting on their moral position?

The first mention of the resistance's morality by a player specifically was that they were potentially just as bad. Isolated incident? The very next mention of the resistance's morality in this thread by a player:

And the very next after that:

And the next:


These are all *in a row* (in terms of resistance mentions). There aren't any mentions of the "good guy resistance" before or in between these. Since the discussion has been focused on Cole himself, that's not surprising. What's surprising to me is that you seem to remember a lot of people expressing the notion that the Resistance is good when few posters have mentioned the Resistance *at all*. Quite a few players have expressed the notion that the Resistance has just as much blood on their hands as the Loyalists do, and are just as questionable as Cole is, and I believe you're trivializing their positions when you imply this point of view hasn't been expressed in the thread, when its been expressed repeatedly and by multiple posters.

Actually, the cave wasn't destroyed, it was the mansion itself that was destroyed. And the hint is dropped at the end of Begins that when its rebuilt the cave would see a significant upgrade.

I honestly believe the fully formed world's greatest detective Batman works better in the DCAU, and the man who becomes Batman works better on the big screen. So many superhero and similar movies fail because they get caught up too much in telling the backstory of the actual story they want to tell. They get caught up in telling a boring origin before getting to the interesting part, and its clear the film makers see the origin story as a necessary evil. Nolan's trilogy seems to be one giant origin story where the origin of Batman *is* the point: there's no "ultimate Batman" he had any intention of getting to: for Nolan how Wayne becomes Batman is itself the worthy story to tell. And I think that comes across better on screen. The DCAU Batman is smug, arrogant, somewhat cold, and just a little too perfect for live action. But given the environment he gets to play off of in an animated setting, he's perfect as the straight man in his own stories, at least in my opinion.

Its possible someone else could pick up Nolan and run with it, and I'm sure someone will try, but it will be a very tricky thing to do. Schumacher, with strong encouragement from the studio, thought he could camp up Batman to make it more accessible and less dark than Burton's Batman. And maybe Schumacher's Batman would have been fine *without* Burton's Batman on the screen. But once Burton's Batman was out there, Schumacher's Batman was doomed to be compared unfavorably. Someone trying to take Nolan's Batman and amp up the Bat-things is similarly on dangerously thin ice. A really good script and director can certainly do it, but the margin for error is extremely low.

Promises promises.

Whether an opinion is informed or not is also not a matter of opinion. If you have no experience in those specific matters, your opinion is uninformed.

If you're thinking about something like VMware, I can tell you it plays, but very slowly under workstation 7. Too slow to be really playable, at least on my hardware (which is fairly zippy). I'm going to start putting 8 through its paces starting tomorrow, and I'll certainly do a CoH test at some point soon. Perhaps 8 has better Opengl performance.

Promises, promises.

I think its using an ajax based toolkit.

It looks like it was coded by people who've never seen a web page before, I grant. But I'm saying that's not likely to stop people from spending money in it. The biggest problem with the UI is that its not scalable to larger numbers of items. Its clumsy now, it will be unusuable eventually. But I can't state that as a fatal flaw unless and until the devs demonstrate that they are incapable of making the requisite interface changes to improve scalability.

You're assuming most of our playerbase are people that are grudgingly asking the devs to prove to them that their in-game store *deserves* their cash. I suspect the reverse is true: the playerbase is looking for ways to give them cash to get in-game stuff, and the store is only a speed bump to that.

I'm concerned about the UI, but here I think there's an advantage over my prior gripes with UI issues with the game in general. If a UI problem can be proven not just to be ugly but cost them money I think there will be far greater leverage to force whoever is responsible to fix it. We now have a definite cost/revenue metric in the development loop for the in-game store, and that is supposed to mean something to any development team.

More likely, the code to award those tokens themselves was actually pretty straight forward, but they discovered during implementation that it created an unacceptable side effect they could not eliminate before launch. While troubleshooting such problems, it is usually difficult if not impossible to generate an estimate for the amount of time they will take to fix. Problems that take only a couple of hours to fix can look on the surface no different than problems that take weeks to fix, because the end game isn't obvious from the symptoms.

I have never seen entertainment be so grudgingly contemplated.

You do realize that means exactly nothing, right? At least, professional programmers would realize that. Knowing the language and understanding the situational issues that come up in large scale software development are as far apart as being a veterinarian and subscribing to the Animal Planet channel.

Pop quiz: a commercial application has a bug in it where if the Windows administrator password starts with a capital S, the program doesn't work. This bug affects no other password starting with any other letter including lower case S, and also doesn't itself *use* the administrative password for any specific purpose.

What part of your Visual Basic class would assist you in explaining how such a bug could possibly be introduced into a system?

(The commercial application in question was Citrix Metaframe: this was a real bug from about ten years ago)

Stuff like this happens all the time, and until you've been in the real world for a while doing real work, you tend to have an oversimplified view of the scope of the kinds of things complex systems can do.

I suspect you're wrong there. I'm not saying some of the prices aren't a bit high, but I would bet more cash than necessary to buy everything in the store that the store won't suffer from lack of use.

Its possible, but not likely in my opinion. The two rationale I presented above were not chosen randomly: it was specifically stated that two advantages of the points system was lower processing and reducing the problems with dealing with errant fraud alarms. I find it difficult to believe Paragon would implement a feature that would cost them money and generate fraud alarms that both they and their customers would have to deal with the ramifications of.

I suspect there is a further reason beyond the "stability" one you mention above, and that is credit card processing takes more time and resources than burning points which are entirely internal to the store. So minimizing the number of credit card transactions also reduces backend processing load.

I always make note of when someone tosses that one in there, particularly when its irrelevant. It tells me you're scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel.

My understanding is exactly the opposite: rather than looking at XP/min directly, MARTy looks at it indirectly through other metrics (for the most part). I suspect its probably looking at "bars/min" more closely than "XP/min" based on some of the testing results that have been discussed to date. Which makes sense because XP/min increases so fast with level that there is no way to make a sensible throttle looking at the direct numbers. Anything reasonable for level 10 would be absurd for level 49.

And whenever I say "MARTy looks at" you should presume I mean "MARTy *also* looks at" because there's zero doubt in my mind MARTy looks at multiple metrics over multiple windows of time.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no circumstances in which under Freedom any player has any chance of permanently losing anything anywhere during any conversion from one type of player to another. The only things that happen during changes from VIP to Premium is that things entitled to subscribers and not to Premium players will be locked unless a specific unlock was purchased or otherwise earned for that thing.

So if you downgrade from VIP to Premium:

1. Characters on Exalted get locked and you can't play them until you resub. But they are still there.

2. Inventions slotted in characters stop working, but they are still there and will reactivate if you resub, or buy a temporary invention license.

3. Characters created with archetypes Premium players do not get automatically will be locked and unplayable until those archetypes are unlocked, or you resub. But the characters remain intact until then, just locked.

4. Incarnate powers disable until you resub. But they remain there.

5. I believe even things like alignment merits remain if you downshift, its just that you cannot spend them (unless you buy the alignment system unlock).

And so on. If you make something as a subscriber, then downshift to premium, those things may be locked, but in no case whatsoever am I aware of the game either deleting, or altering your characters to fit your subscription. If that does happen at any time, I believe it to be a bug, and not Freedom policy.

The answer is no, it operates exclusively on paragon points. Is there a specific reason you would not want to buy points with your credit card and then use them. If nothing else, you do realize you get Paragon Reward Tokens for purchasing points ($15 = 1 reward token).

Among the reasons for using points is that NCSoft doesn't have to process lots of tiny card transactions for individual items which can contribute to fraud alerts and also increases the cost of processing.

Except for the whole "reviving the character's cinema presence from the grave and making movies loved by 95% of the human race" thing, which I suppose depends on your definition of "verge."

Say what?

I tried the same thing when I was locked out, and it took about 10-15 minutes before the forums would let me log in after the change as well.

If you think that's the first example of people recognizing that Praetoria has always been a choice between the lesser of two evils, your exposing a gap in your understanding of the discussion. Only a few people are claiming the resistance is "good" just because Cole is "evil." However, in Praetoria you get to make that choice between being on the resistance or serving Cole. In Primal Earth your choice is between opposing Cole or not. Whether you choose to serve the resistance or not is a completely separate question, and it has nothing to do with whether you judge Cole's actions morally justified.

If I was a superpowered citizen of Primal Earth, the choice is simple. I would kick Cole's *** first, and philosophize with him while he was behind bars. That's a trivial decision for me, because tyranny, mind control, and violent suppression without any accountability are not consistent with my sense of right and wrong.

You can continue to question whether or not that decision has a basis in some Aristotelian cave shadow, but it still comes down to the fact that, within the fictional game world, if you choose to support Cole, you'd be the bad guy to me and I would act accordingly. All human beings must make that same choice under imperfect conditions and there is no practical benefit from arguing that in a greater sense we cannot know what good and evil are, and what right and wrong are. People must still make their choice.

I hope you drop a PvPIO.


Side track: in the Earth-X series Banner makes what I consider to be an incredibly clever observation to Scott Summers. In questioning whether Xavier was really in the right, he asks Scott to consider why Magneto called his brotherhood "the brotherhood of EVIL mutants." It seems like such a strange thing to call yourself. But according to Banner, the reason was obvious: Magneto knew a war was coming, and knew mutants had to be rallied to the cause. By calling himself "evil" he basically *forced* Xavier to be "good" and manipulated Xavier into acting like the moral guardians of all mutant kind. In doing so, he guaranteed that some would rally to Xavier, and others who opposed Xavier's moral inflexibility would rally to Magneto. Magneto didn't create an army of mutants, he created two. And by forcing Xavier to consider himself the "good" one, Magneto would always have an advantage over Xavier.

(Within the Earth-X storyline) it seems to have never occurred to Scott that the only reason the X-Men considered themselves the good guys was because they were fighting Magneto, the bad guy. It never occurred to them to look at the greater picture of whether they were actually always doing the right thing for mutant kind and humanity in general.

Universal global cooldown is something that, having played City of Heroes, I now believe is counter-productive to "fun" in other MMOs - albeit it makes them a whole lot easier to balance. But cross-power cooldown is something I've wondered if the tech would help a game like CoH. For example, suppose Nova didn't crash, but instead put explosive blast and torrent on a global cooldown. So if I use my tier 9 blast, I'm locked out of AoE for a while. But all my single target attacks are still usable. Something like that might make sense in limited targeted situations, when we want to couple (combined) a few powers together and limit their ability to be chained together.

Another effect I wish we had the tech for, but it requires both engine tech and UI tech *and* retraining players to think about it and use it, is the ability to "charge" AoE powers. Suppose that when you fire an AoE, it takes X seconds to "recharge." But that just allows the power to be used again. Its damage would be only some small base value. If you allowed it to continue to "charge" its damage would increase if you didn't use it. So frequent use = small damage per use, infrequent use = larger damage per use.

I think I have a trick that could make that actually happen in an effect sense. But the UI feedback would be not as good as I would like, specifically in the power tray itself. I've often thought about if that would help AoE balance, though.

I understand precisely what my legal rights are, and moreover precisely what rights I had the first day I loaded this game compared to now, because I actually do in fact read the EULAs of all software I load, if for no other reason than professional interest. For that reason specifically, I recognize that pretty much 99.9% of the worry is hyperbole, insofar as the rights being spelled out by the current EULA are not significant extensions of the original EULA. For example, the notion that they can "monitor" what you say on other boards. *I* can do that, and I don't need you to agree to an EULA to do it. I can do it because your public speech on another board is just that: public. The notion that they could theoretically ban me or terminate my access for something I say on another venue is a right they *always* had: they can terminate me for any reason, or for no reason. They had that right from the start.

As to monitoring my computer, the law has always been vague on how far a company can go in that regard, but randomly snooping on people's computers with or without the EULA is extremely hazardous these days. No good can come from it and public sympathies are not with the companies doing the snooping. So while they could theoretically do such things, it would be bordering on suicidal to do so. I'm not especially worried about it when Apple gets hauled before Congress to explain why the iPhone keeps track of just geographic data.

Having spoken on the subjects of identity theft, personal information protection, and general information protection, I'm as informed about the issue as I think anyone not actually an EULA specialist can be. I'm not suggesting my own evaluation substitute for anyone else's: I think people should make up their own minds on something of this nature. However, I'm also disinclined to accept anyone's pity for not giving the matter more emotional energy.

If the EULA causes people to decide not to play the game, that's entirely their prerogative. However, I presume they are opting out of the entire MMO genre, and all online gaming in general. They all have the rights most people are objecting to here, whether that is explicitly stated in their EULAs or not, to within the limits of local governing laws.

Memento, check your tattoos. This is the "Crashless Nukes *Might* Happen" thread. Not the "How Another_Fan would fix blasters" thread.