Arcanaville

The fundamental difference is that if someone tries to rob a bank and use that as the excuse, they've committed a federal crime that would be prosecuted by the government. When someone says "I didn't know NCSoft could terminate my account for that reason" and sues, NCSoft has to defend itself at its own cost. Especially with all the armchair lawyers out there with interesting legal theories and lawyers wishing to test the limits of the law.

Adding specific language to the EULA increases the odds of getting a dismissal very early in the legal process rather than having to argue the finer points of the law in an actual tort trial.

The EULA lets them do it because it requires you to grant to them an unlimited non-exclusive license to use any creative work you create in the game, not because they own it. At least in the US, copyright ownership cannot be transferred that way, and the exception clause is triggered in that case.

As to the legal theory that the EULA is "unenforceable" in most Western countries the EULA is quite enforceable in two ways. First, most of the terms of the EULA spell out grounds for termination, and without the EULA you'd be terminated anyway. The notion that if the EULA was "illegal" means you can do whatever you want is something a lot of people seem to believe, and is false. Without the EULA, you have *no* contract to use the service, and attempting to use it when you yourself *believe* the EULA is illegal would be unauthorized use of the service. You don't get to substitute the EULA for one you make up.

Second, separate from the EULA NCSoft can terminate your access to the service under the same grounds any business can choose not to do business with you, so if you challenge the EULA win or lose NCSoft could still terminate your access and be done with you.

They are probably trying to fix that, but the web site keeps logging them out.

Oddly, it looks like Statesman has been partaking from the superhero silicone stash as well.

Think what you want. You didn't buy Incarnates with Going Rogue, and you're not getting them for free when they grant everyone Going Rogue access with Freedom. That was explicitly stated many times. Going Rogue was *always* said to not include the Incarnate system proper, because it was always stated that Going Rogue was going to get a sneak peak at the Incarnate system that was coming later. That's why you had to own GR to access the Incarnate system: it was originally intended to unlock the Alpha sneak peak.

But you don't say that something includes a feature *and* a sneak peak at the same feature. That's nonsensical. We all knew Incarnates were coming later, we all knew GR originally intended to have just a sneak peak at it which was later withdrawn, and anything else is revisionist history on a level of "the devs said powerset customization was impossible." Repeat the lie often enough, and people start to remember it as the truth, even when it never happened.


Because Going Rogue was supposed to offer the first glimpse of the system, the information was organized there originally. However, the overview for Issue 19, the issue released after Going Rogue, specifically states "Issue 19 unveils the long-awaited Alpha Slot*, the first part of the new Incarnate* system that gives high-level characters access to new powers and challenges." The asterisk, by the way, refers to this note: "* Requires the City of Heroes Going Rogue expansion." Because GR was a prerequisite for the Incarnate system, but the system itself was not a part of GR. Prerequisites for things are not the same thing as the things themselves. The overview for Issue 20 has the same structure: it describes the additional four Incarnate slots but has pointers to the GR site, because the information was originally gathered there.

And incidentally, if you go to the Going Rogue site today, you'll see under "featured content" City of Heroes Freedom. Are you going to object next that Freedom is part of Going Rogue as well?

Depends on your definition of "special synergy." What I said was:

and all that means is that Power Siphon is likely to do better than a power that was up all the time and buffed PS's average, because the bursts were likely to coincide with FE's uptime slightly more often than the random average would suggest. Anything more than *exact average* would be "special synergy" relative to the averages.

I try to use them both as often as possible, but two factors conspire to make the overlap period better than you would think a 2:3 recharge ratio would make it:

1. Synchronizing in between spawns. You never trigger either while moving in between spawns, so you generally gain a few seconds here and there.

2. Concentrated Strike breaks up the 2:3 ratio by periodically insta-recharging Power Siphon.

The net result is you get a lot more overlap than it might appear, and when you do overlap you are overlapping at levels of up to +156% damage buff.

I'm not sure how that specifically addresses the AoE disparity. Keep in mind that many of the top AoE performers are also very good single target performers (for example, Fire Blast). Its not true that the things good at AoE are completely bad at single target: most things are decent at single target, and some things have good AoE on top of that.

You know, a lot of people are rereading this, and wondering what spin you're talking about, or what thing they are supposed to be questioning, even with the highlighting you're hoping is helpful.

This isn't a unique observation of your posts, but I often wonder if you don't know that you're crazy, or just enjoy looking crazy, or if this is a cry for help. Unfortunately, psychosis is not a diagnostic specialty of mine, so I would recommend crying for help from someone else.

I'm sort of beginning to see you as being evil. From my particular moral perspective, someone saying that fascist dictatorships are morally ambiguous is not standing in a grey area. The moral question is whether freedom is intrinsically worth anything. Cole's morality sees it as being worth nearly nothing and therefore expendable. You seem to value it in a similarly low sense: based on what you've said so far, you believe to save a few, its morally ambiguous to permanently remove the freedom from everyone. Its morally ambiguous to eliminate crime by eliminating the capacity to commit crime. All these things are only morally ambiguous if you believe its morally reasonable to appoint yourself as judge of the world.

Do you grant me that moral authority over you, so long as I have the ability to enforce it? Remember that once I do, you're not going to be in a position to quibble over whether I'm executing that authority in a just manner. Because I will be the only judge of that.

I intend to stay a subscriber, and that will be enough winning for me.

Having read the entire thread myself, I would recommend against this course of action. I do not believe this will be as helpful as you're envisioning, unless you are also planning on hitting your forehead repeatedly with a hammer during the process.

You always needed to subscribe to access the incarnate system.

Then you've somehow managed to be somehow involved in this subject without reading any of the literally hundreds of posts I've made about it in a significant fraction of every thread about it. What I've said repeatedly, and since day one of the announcement, is specifically what are model actually is, and therefore what its actual objectives are, and specifically why comparisons to other models have to be made extremely carefully and without making unwarranted extrapolations due to terminology. Many posters, you included, seem to be making the logical leap that says this game has a mode of play that doesn't require paying, therefore its a free to play game, therefore it should have all the trappings of a free to play game. CommunistPenguin seems absolutely in love with this logical sequence. Its unfortunately false. Or rather, for most of the players of this game, its fortunately false.

All MMOs have the shortcoming that many people refuse to pay for them or play them. That's understood as a truism. The question is how much bribery should be consider reasonable to win back players who are recalcitrant. Personally, I think that with a few exceptions they are doing more than what's reasonable.

It isn't CommunistPenguin's job to sell the game (unless he volunteers to evangelize it), but contrawise if he's suggesting Freedom has more features for free than it actually does, the failure to meet expectations is not Paragon's failure. Its not his fault if his friends decide the value proposition is not worth it. Its only his fault if he isn't accurate about describing that value proposition, and frankly again with extremely few exceptions the value proposition has been explained by the devs in sufficient detail so as to make current misunderstandings impossible to avoid with reasonable explanation.

No, I'm not missing the point. The ratings system is not unfairly unbalanced towards low ratings, period, as I said. The fact that plays themselves are skewed upward towards the five star rated arcs is a function of the fact that there are simply too many arcs relative to players: if you figure out a way to get more arcs rated five, that just means more five star arcs won't get played. It won't mean players will suddenly start playing more AE arcs. Also as I said.

Figure out a way to "fix" the ratings system to make it "unbiased" towards low ratings and you will have accomplished exactly nothing. You're not just going to add your arc to the five star roster, but thousands of others as well. All chasing the exact same number of players at best. At worst, the increase in five star arcs devalues the five star rating even more than now decreasing the number of people who bother to play them.

Complaining the ratings system is biased towards low ratings is like standing in the middle of a forest fire and complaining your sunglasses aren't blocking enough of the glare.

I really think this notion that the ratings system is "unbalanced" is misplaced. Lets look at the reverse. Suppose an arc really, really sucks and I want to rate it a one. But the arc writer has a friend who rates it a 5. How many ones does it take to bring that 5 down? The same number. Even after seven people rate it a one, that single five makes the total average rating 1.5, which rounds to two.

The ratings system doesn't do some weird mathematical jump rope to generate the rating. It just averages. Averages work that way. Averages are not skewed to favor bad ratings any more than they are skewed to favor good ratings.

The real problem is too many arcs chasing too few players to play them, so people think any rating under 5 is an unfair rating, so they expect the ratings system to somehow figure out who deserves to be rated a 5. The only way to do that with the current system would be to eliminate all ratings under 4, which would be actually quite ludicrous.

Did you tell him that the free game was going to be deliberately limited in scope and he could buy additional access without subscribing for an ala carte fee? If not, you may have set a very high expectation this game cannot meet.

You level with missions? When did those start giving out enough XP to level anything?

I wonder if I'm going to miss these posts, like the hundred uses for MoG posts or whatever Mieux would have been belittling me over at this point in time.

If you play the Loyalist path to the end in Praetoria, you get a chance to meet Cole face to face. In that meeting Cole admits both that he "has blood on his hands" and more specifically he has no intention of ever allowing humanity to make significant choices for themselves as to their destiny, and will destroy (as in "kill") anyone who opposes him. Not just anyone who is a proven threat to him, because as far as Cole is concerned all humanity cannot be trusted: either people follow him and are safe to remain alive, or they oppose him in which case they are too dangerous to live.

To implement, or to use?

I'm afraid I already gave out the Unintentionally Ironic award for September.

When you put it that way, it almost sounds like long-term subscribers aren't being completely screwed. Unfortunately, my annual renewal date is in April.

From a game balance perspective, it does temper damage getting out of hand. But then you'd then lose much of your feeling of being mighty by defeating lots of foes relatively quickly.