Arcanaville

If you're looking for an F2P game, look elsewhere. City of Heroes is not becoming an F2P game.

The traditional F2P model's primary shift from the standard subscription model is that the focus is not on trying to generate a threshold of content that causes people to decide the overall value proposition is enough to subscribe essentially buying access to everything, its to try to get as many people as possible to play and placing enough purchasable options in front of them that some small subset of those players will pay and a large enough economy of scale will generate enough income to power the process.

In other words, the traditional F2P game's philosophy focuses on numbers, and the free player population, and extracting small amounts of money from many people. In such a game there is a presumption that the free gameplay must be enough, all on its own, to sustain long term play. Because its that long term play that keeps as many potential impulse purchase customers in front of your store as possible.

If that is what you're looking for, look elsewhere. This game is not becoming that. This game is, for lack of a simpler way of putting it, appropriating elements of the F2P model to in effect make a tiered customer game in which subscribers are still the primary and most important target audience for the game, Free players are in effect playing extended trials, and Premium players are playing ala carte subsets of the game.

Right now, if someone logs in and plays a trial or borrows some time from a friend's account, and decides its fun but they don't want to pay for the game, they don't become subscribers and to be blunt NCSoft doesn't want them: this is a subscription game and those who do not want to subscribe are not our target audience. That's just the way it is. When Freedom launches, that's not going to change to be "we want everyone on Earth to play for free." NCSoft still doesn't. We want people to try the game, and *if* they enjoy it enough we hope to entice them to become subscribers, or failing that Premium customers. If they want to be subscribers, they can subscribe. If they don't want to be subscribers but are willing to play a smaller subset of the game for less money, they can become Premium players. If they want to play for free but need more game than what they get for free, they can leave and NCSoft doesn't want them, just like in the past seven years when the players that didn't want to pay left and NCSoft didn't want them either. Not enough to give the game away for free, anyway.

Now I'm sure at least someone is thinking, if not typing, that they aren't asking for *everything*. Just the stuff they want and don't want to pay for. That distinction is irrelevant. This is not a game that hopes to have lots and lots of free players playing for free indefinitely. You can if you want to, but the game isn't going out of its way to serve you. This game hopes to get people to convert to paying customers, and more than that subscribers. If you think the free game is not sufficiently enticing, don't play the free game.

To put it another way, City of Heroes is a members-only amusement park that has decided to offer free limited access passes to the public. It is not a members-only amusement park that has decided to stop charging admission. It still intends to support itself in large part by membership fees, its not looking to survive primarily on hotdog stands.

The dominator version of Fire Mastery is a cut and paste version of the controller version that is then tweaked a bit. As a result, the Dominator version of Fireball actually has containment damage within its definition, but Dominators don't get the containment damage because the power definition is coded to check to ensure an actual controller is using it. Mids is currently not compensating for that automatically.

There was a lot more politics to it, but in general the Romans followed whoever appeared to have the strongest hand and didn't piss them off too much. Caesar effectively took control of the Roman Empire with a lot less firepower than a MEU would have. I think its clear a MEU could have won essentially any decisive battle fought in the history of the Roman Empire but of course we have to presume the MEU was in a position to secure control of the empire from a willing populace. Otherwise, the MEU might never lose, but it wouldn't be able to win either given the enormous size of the empire at the time. They would constantly be under threat from rebellions started hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

The frequency of logouts definitely kicked upwards some time over the weekend to today. In fact, Saturday night was the first time in days I got logged out at all after putting in my etc/hosts entries earlier in the week. Which suggests either that the problem "rotates around" affecting different people at different times for some reason, or something changed over the weekend to increase the disruption rate.

The NCSoft forum techs better hope I figure out how to solve this problem with a sniffer, before I move up to hammer. And I don't intend on using a hammer on a defenseless computer, either.

No. Because its not hyperbole.


My response is simply to quote, again, the post I responded to:

So explain to me exactly what you meant by observing that specific, individual devs on the ustreams seem unable to recall suggestions made on the forums and being either surprised or disappointed that they do not seem aware of these things. For you to have the reasonable expectation they would be aware of most or all of the common suggestions made on the forums would either require the presumption that every dev, or at least the ones on the ustream, read the forums to a high enough degree to remember those suggestions, or you believe the devs should collectively know those suggestions through some collective forum presence, and what one knows they all should know.


Its also possible that occasionally the devs are just plain jerking your chain. I know when I say "wow, I never thought of that before" the one thing you can be certain of is that I am not, in fact, amazed I had never thought of that before.

Since the Phantasm has no melee attacks, I've wondered about this myself. I have to conclude that Phantasms miss being recharge buffed so much they have become suicidal.

Pet attacks should be totally unaffected by any recharge alteration, plus or minus.


What they said was that the change was made to adjust for an AI bug, and that in the few cases where they affected a pet which did not experience the bug when they made the change across all pets the damage being done by those pets was higher than intended when speed buffed anyway, so a special case exemption was not necessary.

Having said that, its very likely the case that the *current* reason for the recharge exemption is primarily to prevent speed boosts from radically increasing pet damage beyond their design intent, because the original AI bug the change was designed to fix is actually probably gone. If pets still react (or rather would react) badly to attack power recharge boosts, it would have to be a different problem that originally plagued pets back then.

10 out of 10. Seems to be a tricky one. The distinguishing characteristic of a steam engine relative to a gasoline engine or a diesel engine would be the lack of a spark plug or igniter for the fuel charge. With just a piston and a valve and no source of ignition that has to be a steam engine.

The wording of the last question almost threw me. I think its supposed to read "What is used to bring the melting point of Aluminum Oxide down to an economical temperature for making Aluminum. I honestly got that one by process of elimination: carbon isn't typically used in aluminum refining at all and bauxite is essentially aluminum oxide itself.


As to restarting "civilization" assuming there was no language barrier and an essentially unlimited and willing workforce, civilization starts with agriculture. That's probably my weak suit: I'm not a farmer or a horticulturist. But I suppose I could get it up and running soon enough.

I'm presuming I don't have to figure out how to live for the few thousand years it would take to domesticate animals.

Starting from, say, near-bronze age technology, I could probably eventually get to iron age and steel manufacture, although that would take years, possibly decades to gear up on an industrial scale. And part of the problem is knowing how to find the materials, not just knowing how to process them: I'm not a field geologist either.

Put me at the time of, say, Archimedes, and I could probably get to steam technology in my lifetime. Drop me into Leonardo Da Vinci's lab, and I have a shot at getting to the 1950's if I live long enough.


As others have pointed out, though, generating the technological trappings of civilization is not the same thing as reproducing a functional culture around those tools.

I have eventually been logged out, so it has not completely fixed the issue. I seem to get logged out *less* but the problem has definitely not gone away completely. I'll keep looking at it: perhaps looking at the behavior while connected to a single server only may shed some additional light on what's going on.

Off and on, I've been working on one for the devs, but its been on the back burner while I've been working on some other stuff for a while. Honestly, I think if I make such a list the first thing the devs are going to try to do is change at least most of them to be consistent.

Some people will. Other people, like the people who named the Mac SE/30, clearly won't.

Clarification: you always use the highest applicable defense, whether that is typed or positional. *Which* type applies is not literally the same thing as the damage the power does. Its *usually* so, but not always. Every attack has attack typing associated with it, and it is *that* which is checked against defense.

Fireball is an AoE that does Fire and Smashing damage. Its actual attack types are Fire and AoE. Notice that its *not* typed Smashing_Attack even though it does smashing damage. This kind of thing is unusual, but does happen. On the other hand, Fire Sword does lethal and fire damage, and it is typed Fire_Attack, Lethal_Attack, Melee_Attack. In this case, you get to use the best of all three: whichever is higher, fire, lethal, or melee defense will be the one you use.

So the first week of September is gone, but all my guesses are still alive in the pool.

This is a marine expeditionary unit we're talking about, right? They would do neither. An MEU is a quick-response integrated combat unit. If they were *ordered* to take out the Roman legions, they would use their superior firepower and maneuverability to completely destroy any Roman army fielded against them. They would not become a static target for a hostile force to attack.

The enormous advantage the MEU would have that the Romans would not have that BeornAgain and others mentions is that the MEU would know what sort of tactics the Romans would try to use against them, and they would know how other armies in the past neutralized those strategies. The Roman legions would learn eventually, but historically it took years for them to figure out how to regroup and respond to new threats. They aren't going to have years against an MEU focused on destroying them.

It comes down to the MEU commander. If the MEU has Normal Schwarzkopf commanding it, a student of military history and excellent modern strategic planner, the MEU wins even if Hannibal Smith is commanding the legions and BA Baracus was his lieutenant. If its commanded by someone that is not a good combat field commander, the MEU might do something stupid and end up on someone's trophy wall.

I would still place my money firmly on the MEU commanded by any reasonably competent Marine combat commander.

The damage ratio goes both ways: it takes a lot less effort to stay alive in a level 52 fire farm than in a level 1/2 CEBR, because not only do you do more damage relative to critter health, they do more damage to you relative to your health. I've been playing around with CEBR myself to create some test alts in testing accounts prior to Freedom launch (and, I will admit, racking up a ton of prestige for a villain-side personal base), and I've found that while its very fast, it does take a lot more concentration (in my experience) to keep a CEBR running than a level 52 Farm. That might be more moving parts than many people find fun.

There's nothing wrong with asking, I just responded because I know in this case you're not going to hear that directly from them. They just don't do that. Ultimately, some *one*, like Positron say, will simply take overall responsibility for the decision, and not expose the decision making process of the overall team to the public in that manner.

But if you don't want an explanation, you want an explanation directly from the devs specifically, you should PM them instead. They still might not respond, but the odds improve substantially.

Unless you're supporting something ancient, I don't think many people teach RPG-II anymore: RPG-IV is substantially different from RPG-II (so I've heard: I've never written anything in RPG-IV).

Another side track on RPG: it used to promote (but not mandate) what it called the master program cycle, or cyclic programming. Most procedural people hated it. This concept re-emerged as the event driven model which drove both the Win16 system and the Mac OS from birth to OS9. This oddly created a circumstance where many RPG programmers could jump directly to Win16 programming easier than many C programmers could initially.

But those are all skills directly related to their actual field: "necessarily included skills" you might call them.

Now, an animator who studied dance, medicine, psychology, building codes - things that might have only a passing connection to their primary field but that they could synthesize into their work would be more of the kind of generalist related to what we normally call polymaths, albeit at a lesser level than a Leonardo.

My primary professional field is information systems and security, but over the years to best serve my clients I've had to learn their businesses, jobs, fields, and skills. I've become proficient or at least knowledgeable in everything from medical billing to architecture to nuclear power plant operations. It is an extremely difficult and uncommon skill to find and to be frank 95% of the people who claim it don't have it in a practical sense, especially because (in my opinion) one of the things we don't teach children is the general skill of learning. We hope its something they pick up while we're teaching them other things. 99.99% of them don't. One day we should get around to fixing that.

I'm not an *expert* in all the things I'm familiar with, so I'm not claiming to be a literal polymath as the term is normally used. I'm less Leonardo and more MacGyver: I learn about a wide range of things just because I want to know, but I often find myself in situations where that knowledge then becomes useful in unexpected ways. One of the earliest instances of this was a summer job I had long ago. I was only supposed to print reports and hand them to people. However, these were chemical analysis reports, and I could read the chemistry symbols and understood what much of the terminology was, chemistry being one of my interests at the time. So even though I was nothing but a clerical assistant, my knowledge of chemistry allowed me to do that particular job much more efficiently than previous people because I did not need any spin up time to learn what went where. A small thing, but these things tend to add up.

In my case, I was doing that so efficiently they decided to take a chance letting me *write* some those reports. Which required me to learn this language called RPG (RPG-II, in fact). Five years later I was working at a job that needed someone to help support a very old inventory system written in, that's right, RPG. Which forced me to learn inventory systems. Which would not become useful to me again for a decade.

That's sort of how these things work for generalists. Everything is an opportunity to learn something which might, just maybe, become useful later. But we don't learn them because we think they will be useful later. We just try to learn *everything*, knowing that *something* will eventually be useful later, but never knowing specifically what - or caring, actually (I know how to program an HP 2100. The odds are already pretty low I will ever be able to leverage that experience again, even though these things very stubbornly refuse to die).

In fairness to you, Zwill's typo was big enough to jeopardize our T for Teen rating.

What makes you think the clipping problems with temp jetpacks aren't a problem? Maybe the art and animation people *always* thought it was a problem, but in the case of temp jetpacks specifically that objection was overridden by the design need to have temporary jetpacks.

That's what I mean by compromise. Compromise presumes that the problems always exist, but sometimes those problems are set aside when other higher priorities supercede them, and sometimes they are set aside as part of a general compromise to sometimes set them aside and sometimes not set them aside to balance that consideration with other considerations equally important.

Part of the problem with coming up with an explanation other than "because" is that it probably involved multiple people with different and possibly opposing viewpoints that were mediated. But the devs are never going to say "John didn't want to give them to you, but Mary fought for at least these two, but then Frank said those would be the only two exceptions." They rarely expose such internal processes publicly. But without that context, it can seem like one individual person making randomly conflicting decisions.

This is assuming a Hive-mind again. There are no "the-devs." Each individual developer reads some percentage of the forums which is different for each dev, up to and including zero. Separate from that, each individual dev might only *remember* some segment of what they read, and that's factoring in the fact they work on this game every day and it might be harder for them to remember every single idea brought up on the forums when they themselves have to try to remember every single idea brought up *internally* that they might actually have to work on.

I once made a suggestion on the forums and had Castle *respond* to it, only to have him tell me six months later he didn't remember it. The devs see and hear so many ideas about the game every day that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. For that matter, most players don't either: if "the forums" can continue to think the devs said power customization was "impossible" when no dev ever said that, ever, I think we can cut the devs a little slack for every single individual dev not reading and retaining all the information that gets kicked around on the forums.

Its also possible, by the way, that a dev might hear an idea, think about it, decide its not worth pursuring, and then a year later hear the same idea again, and this time think it is worth pursuing, but not remember the first time they rejected it. Again: they are exposed to a lot of ideas, and separate from not remembering all of them they might not even remember passing one over in the past or precisely why. Having a photographic memory is not a prerequisite of working at Paragon Studios.

One last thing: my memory is very good, but why do I remember all the times inherent stamina was discussed, all the debates about rooting, all the suggestions to change knockback, the I Love My Blaster threads, the 100 uses for MoG threads, the change from power rating to brawl rating to DPA - why do I remember all of those things going back seven years? Not just because I read them, but because I *participated* in those discussions. Its far easier for me to remember discussions I actually participated in, than ones I only read. That's just how memory works. Now consider the devs do not participate often in suggestion threads.

You're not really likely to get a satisfactory detailed explanation because there isn't likely to be one. The explanation is that life's a compromise: much of what we get is a compromise between the devs' professional desire to do it right or not at all, and the devs' practical motivation to give us something rather than nothing. Those two tend to operate in opposite directions much of the time, and its up to designers and producers to find a balance point between those two. That balance point will be based solely upon their best judgment, and tends to be decided on a case by case basis.

This *should* be enough of an explanation, but I don't think it will be for many people, because of the way players tend to view the responsibilities of the developers.

If you only read the first sentence of the post you'll get a somewhat different impression.