Arcanaville

I suppose one indirect way of handling this would be to buy your buddy 1200 Paragon Points. That will cost $15 and will automatically bump him to level 2 by earning a Reward Token. He wouldn't have to spend the points immediately, he could bank them and spend them on whatever whenever.

Another possibility: the $2 sale going on now *might* work to bump his account to one additional month of subscription if he is not currently subscribed. However, I only know it works to create new accounts and upgrade trial accounts. I do not know if it will reactivate a canceled account. If it does work, you could add it to his account *now* and when Freedom rolls around he should have three months and one vet badge, and therefore one reward token which would also bring him to tier 2.

I'm not in a position to test that particular theory though.

Just to be complete, what I did to test this was to buy one of the codes, then when it asked to use it I logged into my master account, it showed a list of all valid accounts I could use it on which were my trial accounts, and I picked one of them. It applied the code and then asked me to put in my subscription options. I picked one month subscription, then immediately turned around and canceled it. I ended up with a trial account upgraded to subscriber status for one month, within my own primary master NCSoft account.

I presume you could also just make a brand new account under your master account and apply the code to that.

I also bought *another* code and when it got to the point where it asked me to apply it to something, I just said "keep shopping" and bailed out. My master account now has one of those account codes hanging, ready to apply but currently unused.

So:

1. You can buy the code today and use it to upgrade a trial account that is already in your master account. Directly tested.

2. I presume but haven't explicitly tested that you can create a new game account within your master NCSoft account with the code.

3. You cannot apply it to a game account that is currently subscribed: it did not even give me the option.

4. You can buy the code today and bank it for a future date. Directly tested. However, while I believe you will be able to use the code after August 29 if Freedom hasn't launched I have no idea if this code will still work the same way *after* Freedom launches, and I don't think its safe to make such presumptions. It *probably* will, but I won't assert it will. So its safe to bank so you can jockey to get about a free month under Freedom by using it the day before Freedom launches, but I would want dev confirmation it will work the day after Freedom launches.

Or buys an unlock for it if they ever sell one. Part of their attempt to eliminate options from totally free accounts (accounts that have no prior veteran subscription status and have never spent any money) that are exploitable for either griefing or RMT activity.


I'm going to go out on a limb and say that when the devs say:

"1 token if you've ever used a code from a physical box. 1 total, not one per boxed set."

They are really talking about the codes, not the boxes. So if you've bought a boxed edition code, even if you didn't actually buy the literal physical box, that will count. If that is not true, the devs can correct me and then explain that one themselves.

I believe almost everything they were discussing above are things VIP players get automatically that Premium players normally have to pay for, but will eventually earn if they progress high enough in reward tier. I think the only exception to that statement is their noting that tier 8 VIP players get an additional +150PP a month and the obvious statement about tier 9 VIP-specific awards.

They repeated several times that what they were discussing were things VIP players get that Premium players have to earn, either by buying to unlock or eventually by gaining a high enough veteran tier.

Based on the numbers provided, assuming you bought at least one boxed edition, it will take exactly six years nine months of subscription time to reach 34 reward tokens (4 + 1 per full year x 6 years, 3 for nine months, 1 for owning at least one boxed set). 34 reward tokens completes the tier 8 path (although you could have repeatables in there) and allows you to start picking tier 9 rewards. Every month after that will be awarding reward tokens you can redeem for tier 9 rewards and you'll be officially a tier 9/reward level 9 subscriber.

Its a tiny bit unclear if you get all of the tier 9 rewards when you complete tier 8 or when you select your first tier 9 reward. But either way, that happens at basically the seven year mark.

I don't think the code is only good until August 29, I think its on sale until the 29th. There's no reason you can't buy the code now and use it later. At the moment, there's no reason for me to believe you won't be able to use the code after the 29th if Freedom hasn't launched yet.

Well, mind/ is a special case, because in my missions one foe is a statue, another foe is beating up on the statue, the third foe is bouncing off the ceiling over and over, and I'm doing my nails.

If I was playing a blaster, the fight would have been over in half the time. But I wouldn't necessarily have been the winner every time.

You know, I was thinking about this and I decided to go looking for -1000% regen debuffs. The first place I looked was on Malta Hercs because I remember when they actually got -regen. Do they still have it? 'Cause I'm not sure they do now.

In fact, the only place I can find -1000% regen debuff at the moment outside of trials is on Rikti Heavies and the few mobs that possess a variant of EMP. I haven't done a complete analysis of all -regen everywhere, but I can't find very many instances of -1000% specifically. In fact, less than I even thought there were. I think -regen could have been toned down in the last couple of years without corresponding patch notes.

I think I'm going to be spending some time this weekend in the architect updating my own knowledge of what even has -regen debuffs and at what strength.

I recently rolled a mind/psi specifically to use a costume I had created. Its been a while since I've leveled a dominator from level one. Is the offense lower than a blaster, or even a brute or scrapper? Yes. Is she weak? Hard to tell so far because nothing is ever shooting at her. For all I know two shots will put her down, but no one has gotten two shots at her yet.

Its kind of like playing a blaster, if I took out all my damage enhancements and was able to attack while in PFF all the time. And all the while I'm actually thinking to myself this is as bad as it gets for dominators.

At the moment, I can confirm it does.

Technically MA didn't get buffed: the changes only affect Tankers, who didn't have MA in the first place.

Also worth noting: MA did not have any damage removed from it, because the effects that were removed (in SK and EC) were critical chance-related, which Tankers were never going to get regardless. They removed features that Tankers would not benefit from, and added new ones Tankers would benefit from, as part of proliferating MA to Tankers.

As to SR, except for the mez protection gap in PB SR tankers are going to be pretty good in the lower levels. My concern is mainly in the upper levels where burst damage could be problematic given SR has no +health, no heal, no resistances (except the scaling ones), and no -DMG. It will thus experience the highest damage spikes of any tanker.

Another potential problem will be getting past soft-cap. Tanker SR is going to be trivially easy to soft cap, so it will get to that level of performance early and easily. But to take the next step beyond gets harder; Aid Self is a logical addition to SR but tankers might have a harder time getting Aid Self off without interruption even with interrupt slotting: they are going to be getting hit potentially more often even with soft-capped defenses.

And then there are the places where SR just plain falls down. I don't know how SR tankers will fare tanking for teams in Nemesis missions where a lot of vengeance goes off. My SR scrapper just plain bails out if the vengeance buffs get too high: that option isn't really a legitimate one for a tanker. And the first time an SR tanker tries to tank a really crowded DE mission and an LT drops a quartz in a difficult to see spot the SR tanker will suddenly become basically a blaster with some extra health, because even soft-capped defenses mean nothing when the critters are being buffed to +100% or even +200% tohit.

Outside of the weak spots, SR will probably be very strong. But the weak spots are very weak and that concerns me some.

Is that like the absolute worst singer at Paragon Studios, or just someone who kills anyone at Paragon Studios that sings?

Just walk away. Leave the laws, codes, regulations, and your whole morality behind and I'll spare your lives.

The Cryptic model is a lot more ala carte focused than ours is, and places a lower value on subscribing or being a VIP. The Turbine model is a virtual twin of ours in terms of the overall program's structure. I'm pretty certain the Turbine system was the reference model for Freedom.

However, both have VIP subscriptions, and both have ala carte systems. The "strange double dipping" you keep complaining about exists everywhere else in Hybrid models, whether you are able to recognize that fact or not.

He's probably specifically referring to builds that get to soft cap in manners discussed previously, by leveraging MoG, shadow meld, and doing a lot of clicking.

Although, for a soft-capped SR to match the performance of a soft-capped regen, the SR will probably be doing a lot of Aid Self clicking as well, and that might force as much idle time on the SR as the soft-capped regen is stuck in rooted animations.

Well, no soft-capped SR gets there on its own: a significant part of the defensive strength alone comes from power pools and invention bonuses. On top of that, most of the strength of a solid soft-capped SR comes from outside the set between defensive bonuses and regeneration, +health, and heals (from aid self).

The more I think about them, the less in general I like the idea of time-window licenses for Premium players. I think they only make sense in certain specific circumstances. Unlocking the use of crafting tables, maybe. Accessing the markets, maybe. Things that are, or more correctly can be treated as tangential excursions. AE access for sure. But activating IOs in your build that way seems wrong, because as a general rule those things become part of the character not easy to swap or remove, explicitly by design. And while I have no problem unlocking access to the incarnate trials on a time-limited basis, I'm much more conflicted about turning off what you earn in those trials once you earn them. If it was me, I would probably say you can unlock the trials for a month for a fee, but if you earn an Incarnate power during that month its yours to keep forever. I recognize that can be a gameable policy so its not clear cut, but that's probably where I would fall. As a general principle, I would say that things the players earn in-game through actual gameplay should be permanently usable in *most* cases. There are obvious exceptions for sanity sake. If the reward for running mission X is that it unlocks mission Y, but both X and Y are part of mission content in an unlockable part of the game, then obviously if you temporarily unlock that part of the game when it runs out you might be unable to do Y even after doing X. But progressional rewards in general seem more important to treat as "if the player earns them, they get to keep them" things.

I missed that, and continue to miss that. Only by sematical twisting is it possible to make that statement. As far as all information currently provided states, VIP subscribers will get more actual content for the same subscription price than they were getting before. The only way to state otherwise is to say that we used to get "all" and now we're getting less than "all" which is, on top of being factually inaccurate, silly besides. "All" is not a quantity, and ever since they decided to sell booster packs and boxed expansions, we've never had "all" for our subscription.

That's not ruling that EULA's are illegal, that's ruling on the circumstances surrounding the acceptance of an EULA. But in every country I'm aware of that has an actual functioning legal system, its still the case that while you can opt out of an EULA that has such restrictions, you cannot make up your own terms of service and continue to use the service. In the absence of a valid EULA, declaring the one you're presented with to be invalid only means they can't enforce its terms, and you can't legally use the service.

I never said *everyone* was more powerful back then, I said most teams were, because circumstances conspired to create both higher levels of force multiplication then than now, and because the average team was bound to have enough of the right thing to make them into high powered steamrollers. Today, the lows are far less low, and the highs generally slightly less high, making the overall level of power that everyone wields far more closer together than in the past.

If you played back then, you would have seen unbelievable swings and changes in power level. I saw it first hand by playing both Ill/Rad and MA/SR from basically release. MA/SR was one of the worst *anything* you could make at release, and then MA was buffed to "not ridiculously bad" in I1, and SR was buffed to "monster" in I2. Since then, MA/SR has never quite been as powerful. A similar story can be said about Ill/Rad. I remember when the first Fire/Kins really burst onto the scene: if Fire/Kin is borderline broken now, it was ludicrous back then.

If you were an Invuln in I1 - an invuln anything, scrapper or tanker - you were basically indestructible with both perma-unstoppable and double-stacking multityped invincibility. In I2, the thing to be was perma-Elude or Regen. But if you were Dark, you were screwed until the devs a) reduced the end costs of Dark Regen to "high" from "wtf?" and b) allowed your armors to stack. If you were a Fire controller you probably had up to a dozen imps flying around. If you were Illusion, you were golden after the tweaks to PA and terrorize. If you were any other controller, your offense was not really competitive and if you were a mind controller god help you before they changed the confuse rules, when you were basically kill-stealing your own team.

The *best* you could do was a lot better in the early days than now. But the worst you could do was also really, really bad back then. If you didn't play blasters before the first round of buffs minus broken smoke grenade, if you didn't play pre-stacking Dark Armor or pre-Elude SR, if you didn't play pre-Singularity Gravity or kill-stealing Mind, you simply don't know what the range in ability was in the "good ol' days."

There will always be standouts, then and now: people playing several standard deviations from the norm. But overall, if you look at scrappers, if you look at controllers, if you look at tankers, we're all much closer together than we have ever been, and we can all be much more powerful on average than we could be then. In that sense the overall trend has been to democratize power. Its also true that the difference between the moderate invention build and high end builds is not as dramatic as the difference between someone with a couple HOs and someone fully decked out in them. But its also true that nothing we can do today is extreme compared to what the strongest of the strong could do back then. We can sometimes equal the best we could do back then, and maybe arguably exceed what we could do back then in small ways, but we have yet to move the goal posts very far from where they were in those days.

This is one of those interesting legal myths, like the one that says income taxes are illegal and have been defeated in a court of law.

Hmm, I'll try that when I get home, also when I correct the few modifiers that are different now. I tried actually downloading the spreadsheet and discovered upon downloading all the pulldowns and such disappear from the exported copy, even though they imported fine. It didn't occur to me to try to copy to another gdoc spreadsheet instead.

That is a contradiction. If the trials are "punishing" and only allowing people with very high end builds to succeed in them, you can't turn around and say we had "people" soloing the collection phases. That would be only the top tiny percentage of the top tiny percentage of players by your assertions. When I talk about teams blasting through +5s back in the day, I'm not talking about the top tiny percentage of all teams. I'm talking about any full team with a couple buffers over the mid 30s in level. If you were not there, you really don't know what it was like.

About once a year there's a discussion about whether we even own our own creations. Legally, we own the copyright to our creations as a matter of US copyright law. However, we do not own anything our creations are entangled with, meaning NCSoft intellectual property. That includes the copyrightable portions of the story content (i.e. the villain groups and their descriptions), the artwork (i.e. the 3D models and textures in the character creator) and the powers data (i.e. the specifics of powersets and abilities). That would make the tiny sliver of content you do own impossible to actually use anywhere (without intense scrubbing of intellectual property entanglements) without NCSoft permission. Furthermore, NCSoft has no legal obligation to grant to you any access to any system that might host that content, because in the EULA you granted to them a license to use that content as they see fit and you accepted the fact that you do not own or have any intrinsic right to any of the physical systems that host all game content except as allowed by the service contract.

Variations have been tried repeatedly, all fail for a variety of reasons. And there is a trump card underlying all of this that is essentially an automatic lose for you no matter what sort of legal trickery you attempt. If, as you argue, the EULA and the service terms are legally inconsistent, that doesn't mean NCSoft has actually broken the law, it means there does not exist a valid contract anyone can agree to in order to use the service. If you believe the terms of the service are "illegal" you have an obligation under US contract law to deem the service contract invalid, understand you now have no valid terms under which to use the service, and discontinue using the service. Failing to do so for the length of time you appear to have done so would be considered tacit agreement with the spirit of the contract, and the best you could hope to have happen is to have the contract declared void, and for NCSoft to terminate service until a different contract could be constructed that contains legal terms. Your ability to attempt to recover any of the money you paid would be considered in light of the fact you continued to accept service, and would be considered also invalid.

It is a foundational principle of US contract law that contracts, by definition, cannot contain impossible or illegal terms on either party. Such contracts are not "illegal" they legally do not exist. To the extent that NCSoft might be in violation of US contract law you would be as well, as a voluntary party to a contract that was void in the US. Your status as a "victim" as the plaintiff of such a lawsuit would be essentially nil. This is the *best* case achievable under US contract law. The worst case is that your lawyer has sanctions applied for promoting a frivolous lawsuit and for NCSoft to request and be granted recovery of legal fees as a frivolous lawsuit.