Arcanaville

No.

I'm not oblivious to how it can be read. However, I know the difference between how its likely to be read by someone primarily looking to get the point, and by someone looking for something to argue with. In the PvP forums specifically, my target audience is only the former, not the latter.

I have literally no idea what you're trying to say. I think you're trying to say the forum ops worked really hard just to make the forums work at all, but vBB prevents them from randomly expiring sessions. I think.

If you have actual first hand knowledge of the problem, by all means enlighten me. It will obviate the need to perform a failure mode analysis on the vBB code, which I plan to do this weekend. I will have a better idea of what might be going on, and I will also probably be cranky that I'm spending my weekend doing someone else's job.

What are we baiting them with, and what are we switching it for? This accusation is getting old: we are "baiting" previous subscribers with an offer to return to the game without paying anything at all, and get limited access to the game. And what we switch it with is limited access to the game. You show me where Paragon or NCSoft ANYWHERE so much as HINTS that previous subscribers can return to the game and get their original gameplay experience back unchanged for no cost and I will personally ask Paragon Studios to apologize for that error.

So long as what Paragon Studios is trying to do is different than what your analysis assumes it is trying to do, your analysis will not be applicable to City of Heroes Freedom. The important thing is not the terms, and I will prove it by eliminating the terms:

City of Heroes is not attempting to convert their business model into a model based on the priority of attempting to get as many players as possible playing the game with the lowest barrier to entry as possible, and then target them with ala carte sales of opportunity. Anyone who thinks this is Paragon Studios goal, or makes the automatic assumption that this is their intent, is simply wrong. All other deductions based on that incorrect assumption will be flawed. City of Heroes is continuing to make a game in which the primary goal is to make a game which has sufficient value proposition to encourage players to pay a regular amount to access most or all of that core gameplay. To increase the amount of players that make the decision to purchase such gameplay, City of Heroes is adding to its existing core regular payment model an additional restricted access path whereby prospective players can play certain limited parts of the game without charge, and can additionally add elements of gameplay for an ala carte fee if they choose. The requirements of these additional avenues are overridden by the requirements of maintaining the maximum value proposition to customers that have chosen to pay regularly for the entire package of core gameplay.

"F2P" and "Hybrid" are just terms, and we can expect human beings with brains to realize that a full and complete explanation for how the business model works would take more space than is normally available to describe it, and that those terms are industry buzz words intended to hint at, but not define the games they are applied to. And to the extent that some people fail to recognize that, that is the price of doing business on a planet of morons.


No, you don't say PS *should* forget their loyal playerbase but you claim they *do*:

Its obvious the primary target for the new model is the VIP subscribers, with the free and premium ala carte options as additions to that core group. You claim, here, to be unaware of that fact. Instead, you first assume something that isn't true:

And then analyze the failures of the model to satisfy that demographic. Now that you know this assumption is in fact false, I hope you revise your analysis accordingly.

Your theory is correct. The decision to implement a merge was made somewhere around the end of May 2010. The deciding factor seems to be that while the devs always understood there were QoL and other benefits to a merge, the amount of work it would have taken and some other disadvantages of merging made it not a sufficiently attractive proposition. With Going Rogue, the work to maintain the market walls would increase, the complexity exposed to the players would increase, and QoL barriers would increase, while over time the disadvantages of a merge continued to decrease. That made the decision go in favor of the market merge.

As to the whole "Paragon being controlled by Korea" thing, I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently ignorant of how the devs work to comment on that intelligently. No, that's not a typo.

We're obviously here to protect the Celestial egg.

Actually, many natives did fight - on the Spanish side. Cortez didn't take over the whole country single handed. The Aztecs were conquers, and Cortez managed to make a lot of allies with the native tribes the Aztecs ruled over, figuring the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The notion that Cortez was seen as a god is a bit controversial, specifically because the only source for that bit of information seems to be Cortez. But it does not appear to have been a determining factor in any case.

The Romans were both polytheistic and polypantheonic, but they were also far more practical in their religious practice and far less philosophical. In fact, their practice of religion was so ritualistic in many cases the average person wasn't even aware of the foundational purpose of the rituals.

I do not see where you get from multiple pantheons to "look, its an evil god; lets kill it." The Romans were polypantheonic because their philosophy was "worship whatever you want so long as you don't offend the traditions of Rome." But that's completely different from how the average centurion would react if they perceived high technology to be supernatural. Hannibal got armies to freak out at their first sight of elephants, and those are just big animals people didn't see before.

The average roman soldier wouldn't necessarily perceive high technology as "god-like" but they would pee their uniform all the same. People do not spend lots of time classifying the unknown while they are running from it and watching it vaporize their comrades. "look, its an evil god; lets kill it" is seven words longer than the maximum limit of conceptualization under those circumstances.

I just decided to use bigger words to make my point. Admittedly, that's not the usual way I employ bigger words, but I think its still effective.

If you have to ask, then no, I wasn't. But I will say that specifically looking for and finding offense with that analogy represents the other problem with PvP that exists on the opposite side of the user interface from the one I've been talking about here.

The forums are not managed or supported by either the Paragon Studios devs or community management directly. They are managed by NCSoft datacenter people. Its unclear to me if they even *read* our forums. I've been regularly communicating with Zwill as to what I'm doing, what I'm testing, what I'm seeing, and asking him to pass that information along. I suspect that Zwill is doing the community thing and censoring out the parts where I question the datacenter IT staff's parentage, genetic make up, and mating habits. But I'm assuming they know there is an actual problem.

In the meantime, I would recommend people catch up with Chip.

And every Granite Tanker has probably done it at least once. For those that don't play Stone, protip: when the game says Granite is "exclusive" of powers like the other Stone armors or travel powers, that doesn't mean you cannot use them while Granite is up. What that means is if you activate any of those toggles Granite will turn off.

The instinct to turn on sprint when you're moving around in a mission and you're slow can be overpowering, and it only takes a moment of forgetfulness to make life suddenly very interesting.


As to the Nova one, when the very first Winter event happened and the lakes froze, I invented a goofy stunt I posted onto the forums where I would superspeed towards a group of hydra in perez, jump over them, and as I passed overhead I would activate Nova. I would land, keep on going, and as I turned to look behind if I timed it right the hydra would explode behind me apparently from nothing.

I didn't say there wasn't. I don't fault the players that "figured out" the system and enjoyed playing within it. I'm just saying no one was ever supposed to be dealt that hand.

PvP in City of Heroes was like when you buy your one year old niece an expensive present that you forgot to buy batteries for, but its ok because all she wants to do is play with the box it came in anyway. On the one hand, buying a gift that doesn't work is dumb. On the other hand, yanking the box away from her is cruel. The devs (like all MMO devs, it seems) fundamentally, at a deep level, believe in the MMO rule: you can always fix it later. I believe in the second chances rule: you don't always get them. Sometimes you leave yourself with a problem with no good solutions.

There's a difference between forgetting to put in a cap, and putting in a power that immediately hits the cap. The devs claimed back then that they didn't think players could readily hit the cap. However credible or not credible that sounds (and it is credible when you think about other mistakes they made, like actually forgetting what hold resistance even does**) that's different than putting in a power that would immediately make a player impossible to hit in PvP short of astronomical tohit buffs, and that would make all accuracy slotting worthless.


** The devs gave the original Hamidon 100% hold resistance. Because they didn't want us to be able to hold Hamidon. I rest my case.

This game is not attempting to execute the conventional F2P model.


That makes this observation about as relevant as saying a successful barbeque attempts to infuse smoke into the meat.

In the conventional F2P model, it doesn't matter how much stuff you give away, all that matters is how much stuff you intend to entice people to buy. As long as you have a pipeline of stuff on a sufficiently deep treadmill, its completely irrelevant what you give away. Its a numbers game of trying to get as many players as possible under circumstances where a sufficiently high percentage will buy something, and that percentage can be low.

But in a hybrid model with VIP subscribers, it *does* matter how much stuff you give away, and what stuff it is, because the more you give away and the higher a percentage of the core stuff you give away, the more you devalue subscriptions relative to ala carte purchases and freemium play. That's why no on subscribes to Farmville.

People can debate whether this is or is not a free to play game based on silly semantics, but this isn't about labels. This is about whether this game intends to focus first on its subscriber base, and then create a free/ala carte game from a subset of the subscriber game that is not an identically complete experience so that VIP subscribers always have an advantage in their breadth and quality of gameplay.

If you're a VIP player, City of Heroes Freedom is as much about you as the current game is now. If you are an ala carte Premium player the game is offering you the ability to play less game for less money, where you get to choose what you want to get and what you can afford to give up. If you are a completely free player, then this game is offering you a look around. Have fun, but don't complain about what you get for free. Or complain, but know that you're complaining about what you get for free, and make note of the fact we don't allow you to complain somewhere the rest of the players have to see.

Oh, and just in case I wasn't clear the first time:

This game is not attempting to execute the conventional F2P model.


You'd think this was both obvious, given how many people manage to successfully *prove* Paragon Studios isn't actually doing what you'd expect if they were attempting to execute the conventional F2P model.

The above shouldn't be construed as my saying the devs are all bad, or bad at all. Its simply a fact that whatever other statements they made, they were either totally unaware, or unwilling, to take the steps necessary to prepare the game for PvP. Its not like any dev has ever denied that to me.

Its no secret that by MMO standards this game is *horribly* unbalanced. Ironically, that creates a rather unique environment for the PvE game that is, by many players' reckoning, appropriate to the genre so long as they keep it at least minimally under control. But that doesn't fly in PvP: its one thing for all of us players collectively to embarrassingly dominate a bunch of pixels, its quite another to create a game where one group of humans can embarrassingly dominate another bunch of humans in odd or broken ways. That presented a uniquely non-trivial problem for the devs: a majority of players got used to the wild unbalanced powers system prior to I4 and wouldn't accept strict rebalancing for PvP, but without it PvP quickly became a meta-game of best exploiting the broken aspects of the powers system, which is not something to be especially proud of.

Which actually points to the *fundamental* problem with PvP in CoH. You can't (or should not) retrofit PvP to an existing game because PvP is as much about expectations and social acceptance of PvP as it is about numbers and mechanics, and if people aren't innoculated to your PvP from the start its very hard to get them to fully accept it later on, especially when you have to start changing the game to make it work.

Under the best of circumstances the devs left themselves a problem I'm not sure *any* dev team on Earth could have dug themselves out of easily.

I don't think the release version of the game is simply suboptimal for PvP. I'm saying I believe I can prove a pattern of behavior where they did things that by their own reckoning they had to either undo or work around to implement PvP, and in some cases they *never* fully figured out how to work around them, but they did not need to be told they were problems.

Its one thing to say the devs were implementing the game while saying "one day there will be PvP, one day there will be PvP." However, I do not believe the devs *ever*, even at the doorstep to introducing PvP, asked themselves "given PvP is coming, should we do X?" I never said, nor cannot prove, that the devs were *ignorant* of the fact that PvP was coming. I'm saying that even knowing that fact, they took zero steps to prepare for it even knowing it.

Here's two statements from the devs from the Issue 4 era:

1. Player defenses are balanced around critters having base 50% tohit.

2. Players have 75% base to hit in PvP.

And yet, they had to be *convinced* to change player base tohit in PvP, when by their own reckoning their own powers system design is broken under that base tohit.


Question: when PvP was first introduced, if a target (player) had a lot of defense, what two things could help you hit that target?

If you answered "Tohit buffs and Accuracy" I apologize, you've tripped over a trick question. Initially, until it was patched with a stealth patch, if your target had more defense than you had overall tohit, the only *one* thing that could help you was tohit buffs. Accuracy would actually make things (unnoticably due to the 5% floor) *worse* due to a bug in tohit mechanics, if target defense was higher than attacker overall tohit.


The devs said, back then, they had thought carefully about how things like endurance drain would affect players in PvP. If you were designing PvP for CoH and were thinking about things like how endurance drain might become problematic, would you take a break, eat some lunch, and then invent the power Elude?


So you know PvP is coming, and you're working on a new pet for the Gravity control powerset called a Singularity. Knowing PvP is coming, do you make all of its attacks completely untyped so no defense works on them? And by the way, they are still all untyped to this day.


So you're a dev, and your actual on-paper design doc for tankers indicates they are designed to take on more aggro, and therefore more damage than any other archetype in existence. Did whoever write that down know PvP was coming and just punt the problem to you, or did they literally just not know that might be an issue? And lets not get into taunt, and whether that even originally worked in PvP.


Its not like this list is short. I can keep typing until the forums truncate my post. I don't think the original designers thought PvP actually *had* any actual design or implementation requirements. Just playtest and tweak it, and as they say in Hollywood we'll just fix it in post. And as a result, they did things that they wouldn't have done if they actually thought they had to be careful, and didn't do things they would have done if they thought PvP had actual requirements they should try to meet before the last minute.


Anybody can say "I intend to X." The devs can say they intended the game to have PvP from the beginning just like I can say I intend to rule the world. What steps have I done to accomplish that task today? None, but I still intend to. The devs took no steps to accomplish their task of adding PvP to the game until they were actually literally adding PvP to the game for I4, and more importantly they took no steps to *prevent* trivially preventable things that became problematic to PvP later.

As a duly designated representative of the City, Province, and Empire of Rome, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin, or to the next convenient parallel dimension. And take your flying steel dragons and armored riding beasts with you.

If you're saying even if we put in a feature to allow players to buy back unlocks for their characters even if they don't subscribe that's just not enough for some players, then those players will unfortunately be among the players we won't win back. I'm comfortable with that.

PvP may have been a design intent of the alpha version of City of Heroes, but there is not even a hint of a trace of anyone involved in either the game mechanics or the powers system design thinking about PvP for even one millisecond in the release version of the game. Not only is there no evidence of someone designing things knowing they would one day have to deal with PvP, there is direct evidence all over the place of people doing things that even by extremely generous standards no one in their right minds would do if they knew PvP was coming - and I say that grading on a curve for what the devs were doing with the powers system that early.

They may have thought it was coming, but the devs acted, in the implementation of the game, like they were not obligated to avoid doing things that could severely impact it. So not only did they not design the game with PvP in mind, they actually designed it in a way to explicitly make PvP more difficult to implement.

I firmly believe that the game will be different tomorrow than it is today. However, that does not mean that how the game is today was wasted effort. The presumption is sometimes that if the devs change things, it was wrong before and right now. But its part of the natural evolution of MMOs to introduce new things, and change old things given the new context they exist in.

That, and over time new technology (i.e. code) will be added that will give the devs better options to deal with things like free player chat and teaming, or other issues involving changes to game mechanics. I'm also hopeful that some things aren't available to premium players simply because they've frozen the store for launch, and things like IO licenses to unlock the use of previously slotted IOs in legacy characters are likely to arrive after launch, although it would have been my preference for the devs to address that sort of problem before launch.

But the fundamental philosophy that the free game be limited and by definition the limits will actually have to limit players, and not in trivial ways, is not likely to change nor do I want it to change. The devs have decided to implement a new business model that retains focus on the subscribers while allowing for ala carte limited play (up to the degenerate case of zero purchases) and I for one would like to see where that goes before trying to change it to a more F2P-based model.

I've studied steam engines so I could easily reproduce their basic designs. However, even during the age of steam they did have a tendency to explode on occasion, so I would probably build them rather far away from my workshop most of the time.

I've thought about this some more, and I think one thing worth considering is that its probably inefficient to reproduce either the path or the current state of technology. With the benefit of hindsight, there are paths to higher technology that leapfrog certain problems and incur other problems that would be more annoying today or in our history, but might be easier to overcome back then.

For example, I could probably design and build a hydroelectric dam easier than reinventing the entire industrial revolution to get to electricity. I bet I could probably reinvent the radio by jumping straight to bulk physics than reinventing the vacuum tube (it would be huge, though). I wonder what the minimum steps are required to reinvent the microprocessor. Photolithography, advanced chemistry, high temperature foundry. Not sure about reinventing wafer saws and polishers. That's probably my weak link there.

Say what?