Arcanaville

Technically true, but this presumes the intent of the 87 month reward is to get the one month subscriber to keep subscribing. Its the 3 and 6 month reward that is the incentive for the one month subscriber to keep subscribing, just as its the 27 and 30 month reward that is the incentive to keep the two year player subscribing, and the 87 month reward is there to keep the seven year vet subscribing.

Its true those rewards become increasingly unreachable and more importantly focused on a smaller number of players which is suboptimal, but its not problematic simply because its not reachable by brand new players: its strictly speaking not intended to be. Rather, its problematic because the pyramiding player population addressed by each higher layer creates problems when it comes to creating appropriate rewards.

We're never done testing. I'm still testing trick arrow from the I5 beta.

Not so fast Zoidbergilinger. That's the head start. Looks like head start will last at least until September 22. If that's the case, and launch happens the following week, then I'm still within the margin for error for launch which I predicted to be between the last week of September and the first week of October.

Anything that takes away 80% of my health and can't even guarantee taking away 80% of an Lts health is being a bit generous with the "nuke" moniker.

If you're going to take away 80% of my health I expect to be taking away 120% of my target's health, even if my target is Jurassik.

I don't consider that an unjustified ad hominem attack demanding a response. Actually, I am somewhat strange.

I think, though, this assertion is quickly becoming meaningless. If I asked for returning players to get everything VIP players get except the tier 9 VIP rewards and access to the VIP server, I could also make the case that I never asserted that returning players should get the entire game for nothing.

The more salient point is that many people believe if some hypothetical person would be unsatisfied with what premium or free play offers, that is a problem that should be remedied. In fact, that's deliberate by design: the free and premium tiers exist deliberately lacking things that VIP subscribers get, things that players would actually want more than casually.

The model that tries to make everyone comfortable playing without subscription forever and tries to make money off of them through casual accessory purchases is the Free to Play model. Which we are not.

What I think you believe is that Premium players should get everything they would be upset over not having or at least something close to that. That is close enough to everything to be essentially everything in this context, because everything else are the non-essential casual purchase items that exist, but are not the core revenue generating elements of Freedom.

Someone once challenged me with this statement "you're deluded if you think this game will be around for ten years" back around the beginning of 2005. Whether they meant "in total" or just from that moment, either way the odds seem pretty good their statement will end up being unjustifiably certain in its outlook.

I think there are better ways to do it in the long run than the way City of Heroes does it, which is to say they literally do nothing about it (you don't specifically code critters to "do nothing much"), but that's a matter of debate. What I think isn't a matter of debate is that the set of all game designers in a position to make MMOs doesn't contain enough people that think this is a good idea to make it likely they will ever all find themselves in the same room designing one. If you rebooted City of Heroes with *this* team I doubt there would be enough, and you can tell that Cryptic itself felt strongly this was an error given their very next released game took specific steps to eliminate this situation (and they mostly succeeded). Fun or not, game designers do not want to have to balance MMOs around some people hitting one target and others hitting sixteen constantly.

The only way I can see this happening again is if an MMO launches that doesn't actually reward kills, or devalues them substantially. Star Trek Online actually does that to a degree: you get most of your rewards from completing tasks, not destroying ships or critters on the way to completing those tasks, so the game doesn't have to care a lot about whether ship to ship combat or person to person combat is precisely balanced (fortunate, 'cause its not). If mowing down dozens of minions was a thing to do in City of Heroes, but not the primary means of advancement, that might be a future escape hatch to allowing this sort of thing. Otherwise, I honestly cannot see it happening again.

That doesn't seem to be the case in practice; specifically getting PS to buff FE on a regular basis by enough to generate a large overall benefit.

Did you just say that whether or not your point is baseless is irrelevant to your point?

As near as I can tell, you started off by asking why powerset respec didn't exist, and then made a roundabout comment that you would like to have it, can't prove it would actually be beneficial to the game, aren't even asserting it would be beneficial to the game, but we should factor in the fact no one can prove it wouldn't be beneficial to the game, and the fact that at least one element of this game has made it unsuccessful.

Yes, I too expect folks, especially those that have been here a while, but also large portions of everyone else, to lodge a range of objections.

Exactly the same as on scrappers.

Technically, they should be at least nominally responsive to our community people. This would be comparable to the NCSoft server ops saying "oh, there goes those Paragon people again, always whining when we turn off their game servers."

A win's a win.

That's because they've seen the alternative, and think its actually a good idea. There's no reversing that in this game. In any new game, you'd have no choice in the matter because there would be no exceptions.

Everyone who likes it had better spend as much money as possible on City of Heroes, though, because I doubt you'll ever see it again in your lifetime in quite the same way, because it isn't, actually, a good idea, and we're the poster children that proves it. It has fun aspects, sure, but it ties the developers hands in so many myriad ways most players don't even realize, and will probably never really know.

As MMOs continue to get more sophisticated, enemies will never be this dumb again except deliberately, and no one is going to do this deliberately and have to deal with game-breaking AoE.

I was going to say that once again this is not an F2P game, but I think that whether it is or not the limitations on the social interaction elements of the game for free players are based on the presumption of protecting the subscribers (and to a certain extent the premium players) from conduct that cannot be reasonably controlled with banning. Thus, I think its fair to say that while free players should be restricted in how they *initiate* contact, they should be less restricted in how they *respond* to contact. I think its fair to say that restrictions on initiation are restrictions on the free account, but restrictions on responses are actually unintentional backfiring restrictions on the non-free players.

To be honest, I'm not sure how the guiding principle of "I must win all arguments" alone explains this thread. Near as I can tell, Koreans have taken over Paragon Studios and forced the devs to change their minds and merge the villain market with the hero market so they can overcharge them for email. I'm not sure I can declare a winner there.

In other words, you don't actually know what you're talking about. The current problem is unlikely to have anything to do with anything you're saying, because the problem seems to have three separate components (at least) that have nothing to do with that.

First, evidence is mounting that there is a synchronization issue between the two servers that are being used to load balance the servers. Locking a browser to just one of them has reduced logout glitches in my tests by more than 50% (approaching 80%, actually) and while it hasn't fixed the problem, and hasn't even been shown to help everyone by any amount, anecdotal evidence suggests it is having an impact on at least some of the people that are testing it.

Second, even if vBB was having issues with the integration piece of their session validation code, that would not explain why our copy of vBB was sending cookie deletes for the Remember Me information - namely userid and password. That is separate from session management: bbsessions expire all the time and do not normally affect that information. Furthermore, testing shows that you can corrupt bbsession information and the forum does correctly recover from that by assuming the current session id is invalid and regenerating a new session id and restoring session information.

Third, only an idiot would add session validation code that checked with the authentication servers in real time, because subscriptions themselves are not altered in real time short of being banned. And being banned can be done on the forums themselves without having to validate game account banning. So if the forum ops did that, the error is theirs from the start. So whatever the problem is, at least one component of it has a temporal aspect of it which is illogical for the requirements of the system.


Over and above all of that relating these problems to Freedom is bizarre, because its been occurring for over a year fairly consistently. Which implies you don't even know what specific problem we're even discussing, much less its details.


So when I say "I have literally no idea what you're trying to say" its because I assumed no one would say "the forum logout issue got fixed" when they had absolutely no idea what any of the specifics were about what they were talking about, and also absolutely no clue about the subject matter itself of what they were talking about.

It does make me wonder however, with those two qualifications, if you're one of the forum ops. Either way, if you want to offer the entertaining distraction of parading your wit and ignorance around as target practice, you'll find I'm really not kidding around when I say this particular bug is really pissing me off.

You could also modify the crash in various ways: see Burnout.

I honestly think, though, that in a game that allows Elude and Unstoppable, the tier 9s could do a lot more for blasters. But to do more, without breaking the unspoken rule that blaster offense cannot be allowed to be too powerful, irrespective of how powerful anything else already is, and without altering the powers in a way that would take enjoyment away from the people currently using them, would require some innovative design trickery.


For example, take Nova. Suppose I were to say that I had a way, without adding any code at all, to redefine Nova so that the longer you don't use it, the stronger it gets. So lets say you log in, and use Nova (just to make the discussion simple). Nova takes 360 seconds to recharge without recharge buffs: lets go with that number for now. After 360 seconds, Nova is fully recharged and can be used again. But suppose 360 seconds later, if you don't use it, Nova becomes twice as strong. And suppose 360 seconds later, Nova became three times as strong. The less you use it, the stronger it gets. If you try to use it too often, though, like as a farming tool, it doesn't hit as hard.

In all other respects Nova would work the same, so people who like Nova now would like the new Nova in all likelihood: it would work the same but occasionally hit harder. Those using it as a panic button and not a normal offensive weapon would get better panic button performance.

That sort of thing is actually doable, I believe, within the current game engine. I think ultimately it will take some radical outside the box thinking to make the crashing nukes worthwhile without detracting too much from their current usage for existing players.

I strongly recommended that the Paragon Rewards system be described in nominal detail when Freedom was first announced. I recognize that part of the problem with that was that the rewards system wasn't finalized at that point, but I felt then and feel now that the player tiers and the reward system were intimately linked in terms of understanding how Freedom worked.

Unfortunately, I don't make decisions around here, I only explain them.

Having said that, it would be reasonable to state that the original information was partially confusing by omission. It is not reasonable to state that the original information was incomplete, and so I made up a bunch of stuff to fill in the blanks and now I'm pissed the game doesn't match my fantasy.

I have to concur with others that point out whatever people's general opinions on tanker SR, being second to Granite (which is what I'm assuming you mean by second to Stone) is not just outside the margin for error of my evaluation of Tanker SR, but practically numerically impossible.

SR/Dark is probably a very good combo, just as Dark/SR is, but while SR very quickly gets to very high levels of defense, making its intermediate performance extremely good for a tanker (it may in fact be the best midrange tanker period from level 20 to 35, and that's not hyberbole) it has nowhere to go once it matures into a soft-capped tank. No slottable resistance (without tough), no heal (without Siphon Life or Aid Self), no +health. Only the scaling resistances supplement soft cap defenses. And once you get to the later game, where things like Granite itself start to mature, and then to the end game, sets like Invuln and Willpower continue to have paths to higher performance that SR lacks.

With just SOs, SR will be at least competitive with Invuln and Willpower, and will excel in high order debuffing situations. Its going to have its head handed to it in high tohit situations. But since lots of things can soft-cap defense with a lot of effort, and multiple things can at least soft cap in some areas with only moderate effort, SR's primary trick which is getting there *easily* will be diluted at the high levels.

The best level 30 tanker? Maybe. Second only to Granite? At level 34 maybe. At level 50? I don't think that's possible, much less likely.

Which is not to say it won't be a perfectly workable tanker set. But the situations that are likely to expose its brittleness, like if a quartz decides to appear anywhere in a DE mission or more than two Nemesis Lts decide to die at the same time, appear to me to be not very uncommon.

We'll see, but I'm betting tanker SR gets +health added somewhere within a year of release.

Actually, the fact that free players show "purchasable" means by definition "limited" in that context must mean at least that. It suggests that Premium players have additional options, and they do: they can also earn access to the invention system through the paragon rewards system, for example. Free players by definition cannot.

Limited isn't limited to only what I happen to type in this post. But it does mean, among other things, that you can purchase invention enhancements. Far from the free listing excluding that meaning, by definition all options available to free players are necessarily included options of Premium players.

Are you prepared, then to withdraw your statements that:

and

(emphasis mine)

Because if not, I stand by my original statement.

The more appropriate question is "what would you let others do to you to ensure the survival of humanity?"

We're not in Cole's position, and not being given his options. We as players are being given the option to let him succeed, or try to get him to fail. The moral question is, how far would you let someone go to save humanity.