Arcanaville

Actually, all he said was that you should do what you find fun; he did not say what that was supposed to be or implied that would be the same thing for everyone.

And in that respect, he is in fact exactly correct.

I can understand the issue with drive-by one-stars, but to say that the system is flawed because its difficult to retain a perfect score is sort of missing the point of a ratings system. The system isn't "weighted" towards lower scores; it takes just as few 5-stars to undo a ton of 1-stars as it does 1-stars to undo a ton of 5-stars.

The problem, ultimately, is that no human being has the time to play, or even peruse, a hundred thousand arcs. No matter what rating system we put in, 95% will go mostly unseen. The fundamental problem was the devs kidding themselves into thinking we could service the needs of thousands of arc authors. We can't. We can service the needs of hundreds of arc authors, but not thousands. Someone has to decide by what standard we pick the 5% that will get the most attention. The other 95% are simply out of luck unless they can advocate attention by some means, and every time one of them succeeds someone else will in a relative sense fall.

Quite the opposite: Shield Defense has AAO (Against All Odds) which is a power that buffs your damage by a certain amount for each foe that is standing near you (up to ten).

I've done the constructions necessary to build the system in another context for which a subset had a specific practical application.

Historically, I believe the reason is simply that it devalues leveling and devalues characters. If your character just becomes a name that can contain any powersets, and those powersets themselves are mutable with little restriction, you break some of the psychological attachment players in general make with their characters. That ultimately costs you players.

You could get away with this if you have so much content that you still have massive replay value in characters being respeced and then running completely different content appropriate specifically to that new configuration. Neither City of Heroes today nor CO at any time in its existence has had enough content to do this effectively.

True only if somehow the level 1-49 game is analogous to a glass of water, and the level 50 game is analogous to everything else that exists as a buffet: if the level 50 game was, in some sense, dozens or hundreds of times larger and/or more significant.

To me, its more like going to an all you can eat buffet and not actually literally eating everything. Not everyone can, or wants to do that. That doesn't mean they can't enjoy buffets.

You seem remarkably certain for someone I don't think is actually aware of the design evolution of CO or MUO.

Besides contradicting what I know of both games, my understanding is that your scenario would be illegal, since they were not allowed to reuse that work for another project. That's the sort of thing that gets you sued.

Highly unlikely. The MMO they were working on at the time was MUO, not CO, and my understanding of MUO is that it was even more different than CO was, and CO as it is does not share much if any under the hood mechanics with CoH. I don't think there is any stolen technology from CoH in CO.

They were also years away from launching MUO, and they needed the revenue from CoH to fund that development. Doing anything to jeopardize CoH's success at that moment in time would have been tantamount to an act of suicide.

Up until the end of 2007 when NCSoft bought the rights to City of Heroes, it was in Cryptic's best interests to make City of Heroes as successful as possible, because their existence depended on it. There is no reason to cast the aspersion that Cryptic deliberately attempted to sabotage City of Heroes. Its clear their attention was split between two different projects, which was a difficult conflict of interest to manage. But the bottom line is they needed the money from City of Heroes being successful. I'm sure they were presuming that the marketing juggernaut that would have surrounded an MUO launch would have been more than sufficient to make that title a success without having to strangle one of their own children.

At least one thing looks potentially promising. If its still working tomorrow, I'll release the details. I'd rather not do that until I have a better idea it might work (and it might not work for everyone) because I don't want to pollute the forum environment with strange configuration settings on top of crappy forum software.

That's not exactly true. There are times when I'm playing hidden from search, which means I will not show up in most counts of server population, but I will respond to requests for certain kinds of teaming in global channels.

They are unavailable for person to person direct invites to team, but that's not the only way teams are organized, and hasn't been for a very long time in City of Heroes.

In terms of the time period from Issue 7 to Issue 18, after the critter accuracy change and before the introduction of the Praetorian class critters, the soft cap was spoken of as 45% defense, but it was also explicitly stated (by people in the know) that this was a "soft target" - thus the term "soft cap" - because even if you ignore tohit buffs which are uncommon, defense debuffs are extremely common and only SR scrappers can really ignore them for the most part - and not even they can if their defense is literally 45%. The defense to shoot for was 45% plus a buffer for defense debuffs, but that buffer was both situational and a matter of personal preference. So all we could say is the soft-cap was 45%, shoot for something at or higher depending on how much buffer you wanted.

Will we also be getting a "Pirates of the Rogue Isles" event next year?



Look, you want me to remove the aggro cap? Fine, I'll remove the aggro cap.

- Positron, hard at work updating zone event mechanics.

I'm working on a couple of potential workarounds for that which normal human beings could theoretically implement, but they will take several days to test.

Well, you asked about reaction time, so that's my opinion of minimum reaction time. Reaction time represents the amount of time the game allocates for the player to recognize a condition that requires a reaction, deciding to react, and initiating the reaction. It does not include the time it takes to execute the actions involved in the reaction.

The logic, so to speak, is that the *fastest* activity rate the game's design incorporates is the execution of the full attack chain. Generally speaking, all other activities are slower than that. The attack chain sets the "tempo" of player activity, and also enforces a certain amount of time during which the players cannot take additional actions. It is this window of time and this tempo that represent the minimum reaction time the game should expect from its players under most circumstances. The floor, if you will, not necessarily the target.

I know more about defense in this game than anyone dead or alive in or out of Paragon Studios. It is within that specific context that I am providing my evaluation of this particular situation. My conclusion, based on very careful analysis, is that the dude was a jerk wad.

Only one of my Incarnates is soft-capped (my SR scrapper, obviously), and None are incarnate soft-capped (which are two different things: the soft cap is at about 45% defense, the incarnate soft cap is at about 59% defense due to the fact that some kinds of praetorians in the trials have higher base tohit).

My main - a blaster by the way - is a Master of Apex, Master of Tin Mage, Master of Lambda, Master of BAF, and one badge away from being a Master of Keyes. She would have to take a taxi to reach the same zip code as the soft cap. So welcome to the noobs without high defense club. What we lack in evasion we tend to make up in kicking *** and ripping badges from the cold dead hands of Praetorians.

Besides, every single trial has a hospital inside it with a contact that sells inspirations. Even if high defense was necessary, and its not although it can be useful, even the lowliest blaster can fill their tray with lucks in the hospital if they die and be basically Eluded for a high percentage of the trial (even if your defense is zero, using five at a time would place you at the incarnate soft cap and you can do that for four straight minutes: one death and you can stock up again and be Eluded for another four minutes even if you get no insp drops at all, and you'll likely get some; the trials tend to last less than twenty).

And even if you die who cares (unless you're going for a badge that requires not dying) because you have to be level 50 to participate in the trials anyway. Its not like it will low your progress to 51 by much: you die, you go to hospital, you stock up on insps, you come back out, you shoot stuff in the face again. Its like the worst the Praetorians can do to you is Teleport Foe you to the hospital. Big deal: that doesn't even break a nail.

Oh, and welcome back.

Anything is worth investigating at this point, however, this is unlikely to be the entire story. I've been doing some rather focused testing in the last week specifically, and tampering with the vbb session ids doesn't automatically log you out. It forces vbb to create a new session id with the original state data, and send you a new bbsessionid.

Somehow, the problem isn't just the session identifiers being lost, but *all* state information about the session being lost. What's more, as I mentioned in the other thread, if you save that information and reinject it into the browser, vbb is fully capable of accepting it and putting you back more or less where you were (with manual hacking, I can get everything back except for a lost post in mid-post).

I'm sort of half-seriously considering writing a special proxy server in python that I can use to add special response filters to the coh boards session. If I can eliminate all Set-Cookie: value=deleted headers on half the cookie values and leave everything else intact, that might actually fix the system. Although I'm using the word "fix" here in a highly non-standard way.

I have a PM from God. It seems God is designing a new circle of hell and would like to discuss a licensing agreement with you.

There was no season based on it. They interwove the idea into the series, but there are very few episodes that mention it specifically. All the things you are counting as part of the temporal cold war are thing that are only a part of it incidentally. The entire Xindi War, for example, cannot be counted as a set of nothing but temporal cold war episodes because nearly all of them would work without the temporal cold war: the only small change necessary to separate the Xindi war from the TCW is an alternate causal explanation for the Sphere builders motivations.

In fact, all it would take would be to include one novel into canon and *all* time travel in Star Trek would be part of the temporal cold war. That's how easy it is to interweave an overarching backstory into events that otherwise do not specifically need it. But removing the temporal cold war doesn't remove Star Trek First Contact from Trek history, even though according to that novel without the TCW the Borg would not have had the technology to go back into the past in the first place.

In any event, what you believe is contradicted by what the first party players have specifically stated over the years.

They did come up with it but it was forced upon them to come up with it in the first place.

What two ways am *I* trying to have it? I'm trying to have it one way, the way most fans of the show wanted to have it, the way the writers and cast members say it was. The temporal cold war was a dumb idea that was first forced upon them, it was something they did grudgingly, and they dispensed with it immediately upon being told to get rid of it because no one except apparently one guy out there liked it.

That is the one way I want it.

You would lose that bet. But before I prove that you would lose that bet, please make a bet.

Which, incidentally, was technically a violation of the Prime Directive. At least, as Janeway herself interpreted the Prime Directive, based on the fact she later quotes it as applying to the Kazon not that long afterward.

I was really rooting for Janeway as the first featured female captain in starfleet. But it became clear in the first season that were I a member of the crew of Voyager I would have smothered her in her sleep. The most offensive thing Janeway was ever scripted to have done was what she told Harry at the end of the episode "Flashback" where Tuvok's memories of serving on board the Excelsior were explored:

"It's not surprising they had to bend the rules a little. They were a little slower to invoke the Prime Directive, and a little quicker to pull their phasers. Of course, the whole bunch of them would be booted out of Starfleet today. But I have to admit: I would have loved to ride shotgun at least once with a group of officers like that."

Considering that Janeway throughout Voyager basically made up the rules as she went along, and not just in terms of viewer perspective but the character herself *admits* that she's the captain and she'll damn well do whatever she wants, this was perhaps disproportionately offensive to me. It was almost as if the writers speaking through Janeway were saying that we the viewers were supposed to recognize just how much more enlightened and wise Janeway and the current characters were. That might not have been intentional on the part of the writers, but it is the impression I got.

And you can only get away with that sort of thing if the character of Janeway was in fact enlightened and wise. Picard was enlightened and wise, compared to Kirk's gunslinger personality, but both were portrayed as highly competent captains. Janeway wasn't. She was actually portrayed as the worst example of a martinet with an elitist complex in charge of military vessel. And she's the only Trek captain I would classify as a Mary Sue, insofar as everyone seemed to love and respect her for apparently no actual demonstrated reason.

Maybe. Clearly the Abrams Trek proves there's a demand for stories in the Trek universe, but its also possible that as a space adventure it works best on the big screen. I can't imagine a James Bond tv series working, so its possible people will pay big money once every two years that might not tune in once a week. I honestly don't have a good answer to that one.

That's the part that fits not at all. There is nothing that happens at level 50 that puts all of the rest of the game into a different context. The competition in a sporting event is usually explicitly intended to drive to a conclusion. However, every single player that has not even leveled to 50 much less played the end game hasn't in some sense missed a part of the game that would have given the rest of their play additional meaning.

You mean if I removed the temporal cold war then the show would be different? Oh my god I take it all back: if I have to change the level of stupid in the show to remove most of the stupid in the show then forget it.

In that case I wish they never did Enterprise to begin with, and did another show that just happened to be called Enterprise that had all of the elements of the show Enterprise except the temporal cold war stupid stuff.

Actually, I take that back as well. What I meant to say was:




Oh, I just gotta respond to this one though:

Not even the writers thought it was done especially well. Its extremely well known that the whole "Temporal Cold War" backstory was the result of executive meddling, and there was no actual plan for it beyond tossing it in from time to time. The studio wanted a "futuristic" element to the show which was otherwise set in Trek's past, so Brannon Braga dug up the temporal cold war idea which was he was actually playing around with for a completely different show concept. Then the studio decided the theme was an actual drag on the show and ordered them to wrap it up immediately, which is why it disappears suddenly.


Now, if you actually want to debate either time travel from a physics standpoint or time travel as depicted in Star Trek, I'm more than happy to do so. However, that particular discussion is leaving the bounds of colloquiality.