Arcanaville

I'm thinking I get paid to estimate design effort for large software implementations and I know more about how the CoH game engine works than anyone alive outside the actual programmers who worked on it and maybe a few of the power designers.

Seriously, I don't know what to do with this statement. On the one hand I don't want to burst your bubble if you're thinking of contributing to a community reverse engineering effort. On the other hand, you didn't even try to post numbers that could be passed off as reasonable unless you live on Neptune and a weekend is eight thousand hours long.

The swords made the pouches inexplicable, and therefore I thought more characteristically Liefeldian.

If I was still in college and judgment-proof, I'd be all over it.

I think my idea to make a Mybrute-like simulacrum of the combat system is something I would one day try to tackle. But my guestimate is 3000 hours of coding just to accomplish that. Two to five man-years of effort is what I figured it would take to recreate the CoH game engine. That's a lot of sustained effort required. Which is not to say a community effort couldn't get pieces of it up in less time: the costume editor for example, or a non-combat fly-around map server. But our combat system is a complex tangle, and if you try to reimplement it that's a major undertaking and if you don't you have a good chance of being unable to directly use all the powers data we have for players and critters. That would be a tough call.

Selfishly, perhaps, I thought the same thing. I would have no problem answering questions and making limited contributions to an attempt to recreate the engine, especially if there were no objections from Paragon, but actually reimplementing an MMO engine is such an enormous undertaking that if I had the time and resources I'd probably go make an actual game. Even with toolkits, it seems a daunting task. And toolkits are not likely to be able to reproduce City of Heroes' gameplay with fidelity, given our rather unique design.

If it is a true checksum, its trivially vulnerable to both linear and differential attacks. Obviously, Sentinel is vulnerable to most forms of chosen plaintext attacks.

But if you knew how those worked you could also have trivially checked to see if the verification data was vulnerable to them instead of guessing.

Another thing about cryptographic hashes: they are very important for unstructured binary data, especially encrypted data, because the presumption is an attacker can pad cleartext freely. For very small structured datafiles like the Sentinel+ exports, that freedom is far more limited, making practical attacks against smaller size hashes far less likely. Especially something like a hash of hashes, which sounds tailor made for a rainbow table attack.

Guy's not an idiot, so I didn't even bother to check to see if the verification data was a true checksum. When I have more time, for fun I'll try to see if I can reverse-engineer it. But I suspect Guy hardened it against most trivial attacks, so I would probably go straight to the big guns and not waste a lot of time on the stupid stuff.

Those powers are, to the extent that they existed at all, just data. A community attempt to recreate a CoH engine would not specifically need to target a particular build, because frankly no one involved would have significant access to the original source code in all likelihood, so what the community would be targeting is our understanding of how the game engine worked which is, to a large degree, build-blind.

And I also think such an effort is a long-shot at best. The effort required is enormous, and I say that as someone that has gone through the mental exercise of figuring out what it would take to recreate the game engine itself to a very high degree of detail.

No it just means that sometimes you just can't ignore getting panned by your readers.

That sounds like it would push even our character creator to the limit. Small head, large hands, big feet, inflated chest, covered in pouches and buckles.



That's unfortunately the best I can do with the current set of tools. Some things might be beyond even our costume editor.

If I had any sort of artistic fabrication skill whatsoever, I might as well. I don't, so I'm forced to have robot slaves do all the work for me.

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Uninstall the launcher if you want, but I'm keeping City of Heroes on my computer forever and ever and ever.

Its the only way to replay demorecords. Plus I have 9 terabytes of disk.

1. I'm saying that's the case here.

2. People also love to think their voice represents something important.A little bit of that is present in everyone who posts anything public (like, for example, this post) but when the best you can come up with is an amirite? post asking people to discuss your negative viewpoint of other people, that's just sad.

3. Its a blog that recently averages 400 page views per article. On Earth. I could get more people to read a blog if it was open to family only.

Here's my response to the article, which I will do here rather than there for the benefit of readers not wanting to go there:

This be the article in question, not me channeling the voice of guacamole bean dip: /jranger

You are probably referring to these two clauses:

I'm curious to know what legal theory Perfect World's lawyers believed allows them to circumvent US Copyright Law:

Especially since in my non-legal professional opinion, they screwed up here:

San Mateo falls within the US district court for the Northern District of California. They seem to be a "statute of frauds" jurisdiction with regard to interpreting 17.204a. Not the smartest example of jurisdiction-shopping.

For one of the later ones I specifically rolled an Ice/Cold corruptor designed explicitly to go after all the Stone brutes I knew would be around, and just debuffed them and smoked them from the air.

I didn't know there were that many synonyms for some body parts. But if you were on a Stone brute and an Ice/Cold was snow storming you and then debuffing all your defense away and sniping you from the air, pretty sure it was me.

Cascade failure was still constantly on my mind back then and I knew defense was what was making Stone brutes strong, not resistance. Also, the tactics hadn't been invented yet to deal with an aggressive flying debuffer except to mez them from long range. Did I mention I slotted everything *with* range? I didn't need heavy damage slotting if I was going to slow someone to a stand still and plink them to death from outside their range.

My work there is done.

It can't be unplayable and yet more playable than DCUO. That would make DCUO something less playable than impossible to play. Obviously, those are not literal statements, those are colloquial judgments. Calling something unplayable isn't, therefore, meant to be an accurate objective judgment, its meant to be an insult. Because there's no such thing as exaggeration for the purposes of accuracy.

I have no specific (or general) animosity towards Golden Girl, but she does tend to express her opinion of gaming in an exclusive us vs them context that I neither need, or desire. Before she could possibly have known what CO was going to be - because none of us knew at that point in beta - she was already offering her opinion over how valueless that game was going to be. I can understand that, its like supporting your college football team. You don't have to know anything about any other team to know they are no good. Which is fine when you've decided your opinion is going to be permanently framed in terms of pom poms and face paint.

Personally, I prefer the gameplay in CoH to the gameplay in CO, at least at the moment. But that's not the same thing as saying the game is unplayable in general, or even that the game is bad. I'm definitely not moving to Eve Online. As you put it, that game feels too much like work to me personally. But I wouldn't call a game that has multiples of the number of players we have "unplayable." I make the distinction between games I don't like and games I think are broken, and I think that's an important distinction to make.

If I preferred the gameplay of CO to CoH I would be playing it now. If I preferred the community of CO to CoH I would be there now. I think my community support credentials are in order. But vanilla doesn't have to be either evil or indigestible for me to prefer chocolate. Its ok to simply like something better.

I'm pretty sure they would. And one day, in the distant future, when human beings evolve into a higher life form that understands complex concepts like "the future" that realization might actually be materially meaningful.


I'm kidding of course. Its going to be the bees that make that leap, not humans.

If ED caused us to have 200k subscribers, they would have done it twice.

That's a spectacularly far off estimate; I can't imagine how it could even be generated from the published numbers.

I got a larger number than that when I looked, but then the power literally went out in my office and took the calculations with it, and I had no intention of recalculating.

Maybe I'll do it again before the end.

You can do it!

What else is there? Basically, my bio and my gameplay actions in the game. My gameplay actions - logs of what I did, my character build, etc - all seem to be entirely reasonable for NCSoft to assert perpetual license to use, and I certainly can't really use them at all. My bio is the only other genuinely creative contribution I've made to the character within the game itself that NCSoft could claim license to, and that's something you would have difficulty arguing that you had to fill in just to "try the game."

Everything else about the character, what I've discussed on the forums, what I've dreamed up, what I've sketched on paper, none of that are things NCSoft can assert ownership of or license to (or rather, they can, but if the law had anything to do with English they wouldn't have the right to do).

If you don't want NCSoft to be able to use it, just don't put it in the actual game. There's no specific reason to do so.

Well, can NCSoft legally burn my house down in order to revoke my access to their game materials? Colloquially I would say that's obviously illegal. Legally, I'd say you should consult with an attorney before the smoke stops rising from your shoes.

I've heard many lawyers use the term "black letter law" colloquially, but not technically. In much the same way that information systems professionals use the word "delete" colloquially, but only in far more limited fashion technically.

For example: what does pushing the red x button and entering your character name in the blank do? It deletes your character of course. Does that actually delete your character? Almost certainly not. That sequence of answers makes perfect sense to me.


I would. I'm not sure I would trust anyone extending that bet to play fair, though.

I'm going to miss you also. My aim doesn't extend all the way to Chicago.

I remember discussing the mechanic of ablative armor at the same time as the "rolling with the punches" mechanic all the way back in 2004. I don't remember who first suggested it, it was probably one of those things that always comes up when brainstorming new defensive mechanics: others included the "deflect attacks back at the attacker" mechanic, the "reactive heal" mechanic, the "saving throw" second chance defensive mechanic, and the "you're dead, but not quite dead" mechanic that's similar to (among other things) what GW2 has, and also what some PnP games have.

It came up again on or around when CO launched, because CO implements a form of the mechanic for force fields.

My favorite part of that picture: "Just Say No to Superadine."

As a matter of law, you can't assert claims that are illegal. You can't absolve yourself of legal responsibilities that the state places upon you that no citizen can exempt you from. You have a legal responsibility to not murder me. That's not a responsibility I hold you to that I could thus exempt you from. That's a responsibility to the state I have no say over. Murder is actually a crime against the state, not against me. That's why would be the State of Hawaii vs Obitus, not Arcanaville vs Obitus by proxy.

Legal liability works that way all the time. Contracts that alter or waive liability can be found to attempt to relieve one party from legal liabilities the other party can't waive the rights to.

However, the rights NCSoft asks for in the highlighted passage are rights the player legally controls and can legally grant through a contract like an EULA. NCSoft is asking for something the player can legally give. Therefore the question of whether its "unfair" for them to ask for it is on extremely shaky ground.

There's only one real legal opportunity I can think of and that's an attempt to create a new legal right players currently don't have. Copyright law has changed over the years to give authors more rights because of a perception that the system is rigged against creators who are often negotiating in extremely disadvantaged positions. That's why, as I mentioned above, NCSoft can't just say "we own everything you make." US Copyright law *forbids* such transfer of ownership rights except for work-for-hire situations. That's not just an interpretation of the law, the law actually says "you can't do that, really, except for a few exceptions which we'll list explicitly." Work for hire being the biggest exception. Superhero MMOs are not listed.

But if the courts decide that MMO players are in some serious, legally disadvantaged negotiating position comparable to the situation creators were seen in when copyright law was last significantly modified, the case could be made that signing away non-exclusive, perpetual use licenses was equally burdensome as giving away actual ownership and attempt to act accordingly. But I think that's incredibly unlikely given the author still retains full ownership to use their works, and it sounds like the kind of thing that doesn't survive appeal for long unless it hits the Supreme Court on casual Mai Tai Friday.

Also, I'm not a lawyer so I can offer legal opinions without restriction. See above.