Arcanaville

Unfortunately, casinos require Paragon Construction Points, and hookers are a tier 9 VIP reward only.

I21 is introducing parts of the new incremental downloader, but for the moment the system is still in beta and unfortunately the incremental download feature itself is not yet active and the system is downloading *both* sets of files: the incremental download files and the normal files. So the patch is almost twice as big as it would be normally and we aren't getting the full benefit of the staged incremental download yet.

Once the incremental download feature is fully enabled, the game client will download from scratch in three, or probably four stages. Initially it will download enough to launch the client and stick you into the character creator. It will then continue downloading all the files you'd need for the content you'd most likely encounter first: the tutorial and the low level content. Then it will incrementally download the files necessary for higher level content and then ancillary content in later stages. During this process, the game will be playable while the rest of the files download in the background, provided you don't try to do something that requires resources that haven't downloaded yet.

This is just a beta bridge issue with the patches being far larger than normal and probably duplicating some content while the feature is being refined.

My post was in response to this:

Lots of people find the LRSF challenging even today, and even those that find it not so challenging find a MoLRSF to be at least a little challenging. Challenging doesn't require forcing people into situations where they have to overload with force multipliers, which is the point I was trying to make.

Furthermore, I was playing both Lambda and BAF on day one, again on a blaster, when we didn't have whole teams of triple shifted Destiny and Judgment wielders, and I think it was challenging at first, and *still* didn't mandate full leagues of force multipliers.

I'm only suggesting Abrams didn't go much farther than the rest of Trek, not that Trek hasn't played fast and loose with Starfleet as a military organization.


There's actually quite a few of them, and they all share a few things in common situationally. They all tend to occur during wartime or similar circumstances, they all involve cases where there is a huge shortage of veteran combat officers but there's lots of people to command, they tend to occur under conditions of sponsorship, and they tend to reflect some unusual situation regarding the individual. Kirk falls into all of those categories.

It would actually be interesting if there was some hint of conflict between Kirk and superior rank officers; if Kirk was, say, Captain of Enterprise but only a commander in permanent rank or something. Supposedly, Richard Winters (Dick Winters of Band of Brothers fame) was promoted so fast (he went from a Lt at the time of the Normandy landing to Captain in a month, and holding the XO position intended for a Major in three months) one problem he faced was being junior in rank to all of his "peers" and having to fight to get things done.

I had a friend headhunted out of college to be the head of an actual research group for a company. Its highly unusual, and easily abused fictionally, and the average person never sees such extraordinary circumstances, but the extraordinary does occasionally happen.

Heck, this dude bluffed his way into convincing people he was a veteran pilot at the age of sixteen. Supposedly he did such a good job of it that when the FBI actually caught him at one point he managed to talk his way out of it by getting a number of airline pilots to vouch for him as being an experienced pilot. This at a time when the average age of a commercial heavy aircraft pilot was over twice his age.

You should also be questioning how a Captain manages to be permanently in charge of a flagship. Both Kirk and Picard hold the permanent rank of Captain, which is not a flag rank. Kirk manages to kick a Commodore off the bridge of the flagship of the Federation, which is a mere Captain ejecting an actual flag officer from the bridge of a flagship.

Also, see: Natanael Green, promoted from private to brigadier general during the revolutionary war. That's like promoting a cadet to rear admiral in one jump. Yeah, that turned out just awful.

The problem is that you can say that about anything the free players don't get. I will concede, however, that teaming has a potential differentiator from most of those other things by being a social connector. But we already bar free players from participating in most of the other social connectors because of the potential for abuse. That's a judgment call.


I think you yourself tripped over an important point here. You say CoH:Freedom "wants to have it both ways" but you really cannot state two different ways that CoH:Freedom *wants* it to be. You're sort of self-maneuvered into saying they want it one way, but it *is* another way. I still don't think you're willing to concede that they way they are doing it now is the one and only way they want to do it. What they *want* is for subscribers to get more game than they are getting now for the same subscription price, and to add an alternative mode of play that involves paying ala carte for what you want. That's the one thing they want.

The "free" play is a necessary evil: a means to an end. Its the degenerate case of an ala carte player that doesn't buy anything. We have subscribers, and we have ala carte players. The special case of ala carte (Premium) players that buy literally nothing are the Free players. The actual target of Freedom are the subscribers and the Premium players. Those are the people we want. Paragon believes that will be more than what we have now, and plenty enough to sustain the game. They want thousands of Premium players. They don't need - or even want - millions of free players. That's not their goal.

I feel the need to repeat this: City of Heroes is not becoming a free to play game that happens to have a subscription plan. Its a subscription game that is adding an ala carte option. Free players are coincidentally ala carte players that haven't bought anything yet. This game is not being built around the free to play model that has as its target getting as many free players as possible and then converting some small fraction of them into microtransaction buyers. Its still centered on subscribers first, and ala carte player second. When you say they "want" a free game anyone can play without paying, I believe if it was possible to execute the Freedom model *without* a free to play option, they would have done it. That's impossible, so we have it as a necessary evil. That is what makes this not a free to play game. A free to play game bases its foundational model on the premise of getting as many free players as possible, knowing some small percentage will buy stuff. Its axiomatic to the game's design. But its here in City of Heroes Freedom only because we need it, not because we want it. We still want the game to be primarily about the subscribers, and secondarily about the ala carte customers that support the game.

It has nothing to do with the average player playing blasters in typical content. It was a reply to someone else that was talking about something completely different. Try to keep up.

Its obviously a weak plot point, but I think people harp on it too much. There's enough latitude for this to be reasonable enough for Star Trek. First of all, even in the era of TOS, and even TNG, there aren't actually all that many people vying for command. Picard gave Data, a Lt. Commander, command of the Sutherland, who was himself replacing a Lt. Starfleet Academy even in TNG times was graduating numbers seemingly only in the hundreds, and not all of them were command officers. At the time of TOS, there seemed to be even less people qualified to command starships, and starship captains seemed to get into more scrapes than the most decorated World War 2 veterans - think Kirk's service record in the episode Court Martial

Then extrapolate backwards even further, to Pike's time, which was the era of the Abrams Trek. Pike seems to have had an even more wild career; Pike's era was the real wild west of Federation history. Remember this quote from The Cage:

"Oh, I should have smelled trouble when I saw the swords and the armour. Instead of that, I let myself get trapped in that deserted fortress and attacked by one of their warriors."

Uh, yeah. Anyway, Pike in Abrams Trek also hints that at this moment in history, starfleet isn't exactly overflowing with cadets: he seems to hint to Kirk that he should join Starfleet because Starfleet *needs* people like him, because it doesn't actually get very many applicants that are as good.

When you combine the facts that Starfleet really *doesn't* have command candidates coming out of their ears at this point in history, and Kirk just saved Earth from annihilation, *and* he might have gotten a good word from the Vulcans, *and* he was recommended for field promotion by possibly the most respected field captain of the age (he was practically revered by the time of TOS), *and* the fact that Spock himself clearly had no ambition for permanent command (at the time of TOS he had been Kirk's first officer for at least a little while since they seemed to know each other and had been Pike's first officer for eleven years), and its not impossible that every cadet that might have been better suited was dead, every live Captain needed to continue to command the crews they were at for continuity's sake, and Pike's recommendation was enough to override shifting another junior officer from another post.

Sure its weak, but its not impossible. John Paul Jones' career was stranger.


Also, he probably does in the Abrams timeline but just to close the thought, we don't actually know that Kirk currently holds the rank of Captain. He currently holds the assignment of Captain of Enterprise. That doesn't mean they promoted him to the actual rank of Captain in Starfleet. And the notion that it was unreasonable for Kirk to serve as Captain of Enterprise is actually itself a weak argument: when Pike made Kirk the first officer of Enterprise (Spock's first officer) and Spock relinquished command, that made Kirk Enterprise's Captain from that point onward. The only question is whether Kirk would *retain* command of Enterprise, not whether its reasonable he ever got it. He had it for half the movie under unimpeachable circumstances.

Did Pike have the authority to relinquish command of Enterprise directly to Spock, and make Kirk the first officer of Enterprise by battlefield order? Hard to say. In the current modern US military, he would not. In earlier times, he would have. And Captains of starships have been shown throughout Trek to have far more authority than any naval captain of any modern navy. In the episode The Doomsday Machine Kirk calls upon his "personal authority as Captain of the Enterprise" to order Spock to relieve Commodore Decker. There is no such personal authority in the modern navy, but there apparently is in Star Trek, or Spock would not have done it. It was questionable, but it was enough of an ambiguity for Spock to act, so the authority exists.


As I said, its weak, but I don't think its weak for Trek. Trek is not an analog for a modern military, its more of a wild west environment, and Trek was never air tight with its dramatic license even at the best of times - in fact, sometimes in the best of times its dramatic license is most stretched. The Doomsday Machine, which I mentioned above, is considered one of the best TOS episodes. Its plot is actually very flimsy when you stare at it too long, but its a great piece of dramatic Trek - if you don't stare at the pieces too long.

I don't treat free players with disdain. I simply state the objective fact that they are not customers. They are, speaking specifically of the City of Heroes model prospective customers: people Paragon Studios wants to become actual customers by actually buying actual service, but who aren't yet.

In some F2P games, there really aren't tiers of customers. All players of the game are prospective customers until the instant they hit the buy button, whereupon they momentarily become paying customers. And then they return to the vast anonymous pool of potential customers. These games treat their free players just as well as their paying customers, which is the same thing as saying they treat their paying customers no better than their free players. None of the players get any special privilege for having paid money in the past. They are all potential buyers, and all treated more or less the same because they are all, in fact, potential buyers.

That's fair, and a legitimate model, if you design the game around it. Zynga makes more money per minute than I do in a year on this model. But this is not the City of Heroes model, as I understand it, as I've discussed it with Paragon, and as they've described it to us. The Paragon model still treats subscribers as paying customers. It treats ala carte players as paying customers to a slightly lesser degree. And it treats free players as prospective customers, but not actual customers. Paragon is not offering a free to play game, they are offering a free to play advertisement for the game, which is now a hybrid subscription/ala carte purchase game. The part that everyone can play for free? That's the part that Paragon Studios has basically printed in magazines and given away like an interactive print ad with sound effects. The free game isn't structured like a subset of City of Heroes missing only optional enhancements that can be sold to those players. The free game is a limited version of the game intended to allow people to test drive City of Heroes in a limited fashion, albeit in a far less limited fashion than trial accounts. People keep pointing to those limits as if it was an error on the part of the devs, when it was a deliberate choice.

So when people talk about how "unfair" it is that "free customers" don't get this, or don't get that; when they talk about how important it is we treat them like paying customers, I believe that usually either they don't understand what the Paragon model actually is, or they don't believe it will work and don't see the need to prove or even acknowledge this belief before immediately presuming that some other model is ultimately the one they will have to pursue. We aren't designing City of Heroes around the premise that we should give the entire game away and make cosmetic enhancements for people to buy. We are usurping the free to play model to make a trial version of the game that we believe will entice people to either play ala carte and/or eventually subscribe.

The devs have even gone so far as to say, point blank, that CoH Freedom is *not* a "F2P conversion" and yet people keep saying that's just semantic games, then complain about all the ways Paragon Studios is "doing it wrong" by not fitting the very model they say Paragon Studios is obviously following. People need to realize the reason Paragon isn't following the F2P model "correctly" is because they aren't following the F2P model at all. They are following their version of the Hybrid model which prioritizes subscribers and subscriptions, and uses the free to play access avenue as interactive advertisement.

Inside ball: the beta server is an internal test server that was repurposed for I18 closed beta testing and continued on as the closed beta server. The hardware itself may have been reallocated from test farms, but "The Beta Server" as we know it has only existed since a bit before I18 closed beta.

At one point a long while back there were multiple shards added to the test farm to test things like markets and global chat things, but Beta is a completely different server farm, capable of running a completely separate game build from the test farm and the live farms.

Except, without that very important qualification, LordKat's example of Farmville does in fact completely blow Extra Credit's point out of the water. Farmville and its ilk sell nothing *but* "power" as their games define power, and are hugely successful at it regardless of the problems EC notes. The reason they succeed is because Farmville doesn't have power balance rules to break. They don't care what you do in the game, they just want you to play it, and play it repetitively. They actually want the fast and monotonous players to advance quickly, and act as peer pressure to get enough of the slower and less monotonous players to pay to catch up with their peers. And Farmville doesn't care how many people get upset over the grind and quit: their game isn't balanced around how many people play the game. Its a social network game: whether they fully appreciate this fact or not it doesn't matter if you or I quit Farmville: what matters is the people who do play it get their friends to play it and form social circles around it. These tight-knit circles of players are far more important to Farmville than they are to a traditional MMO, because the whole point of Farmville is to use those social networks to apply subtle peer pressure to keep playing, and keep up with your peers, either with time or with money.

Farmville is all about selling power. Its *designed* that way. That's the exact opposite of what you would want to do with most traditional MMOs. And the reason isn't random: its objectively due to a simple thing you can easily check on those games: are they designed with balance rules applied to the "power" of the game that the content of the game honors. If the answer is yes, selling power is bad. If the answer is no, selling power is not bad. Its really just that simple, but its a distinction EC completely overlooks.


No, its very obvious that they were trying to convey the notion that you cannot sell in-game power EVER. It was continuously emphasized as a cardinal sin. And that absolute rule is wrong.


I believe an oversimplification can be useful it if presents a core idea disconnected from complicating secondary ideas. But oversimplifications become worthless the moment they cross the line from "true, but only in the simple case" to "wrong." EC's notion that, for example, you can never, ever, ever sell power in an MMO is wrong. Its not generally wrong, but with exceptions. Its just wrong. Its *often* a bad idea, but this is always highly circumstantial and always a qualified rule. The only way EC's rule is true is if you start arbitrarily not counting things as "power" that obviously are, but also obviously violate the rule. Inspirations are power in this game. Even the small ones offer significant power. But they also fall from the sky and are trivial to buy. So selling them (those specific ones) for money would not be problematic. EC's "never sell power, ever" rule trips over its face right out of the gate by having to claim inspirations aren't "really" power, because... because what? Because everyone has them? Because they are easy to get? That has nothing to do with whether they are power or not. It has to do with whether the monetary store offers *more* power than what can easily be obtained. But that gets into cost/opportunity/availability triangles that the oversimplified rule totally misses in its absolutism.

By oversimplifying, EC lost the opportunity to highlight an actual rule that actually works and is just as simple: never sell more power than you can achieve within the game. And they came so close too, they highlighted the notion that MMO developers should not be afraid of allowing players to earn in-game currency that functions identically to currency you purchase with cash. They just needed to connect the dots and realize that the problem isn't power, the problem is selling power you can't otherwise earn in-game. When you sell power you can't get any other way, that's a problem. When you sell power you can earn in-game, you're just selling a time-convenience, just like selling reward accelerators which they also mention is not too problematic.

You purchased Going Rogue based solely on the fact the content had variety, without knowing anything at all about what that variety entailed?

Don't be silly. That's the in-game store temp power icon. All you have to do to gain access to the in-game store is buy that temp power from the in-game store.

Zwillinger said anyone who would be a VIP player at Freedom launch should have access. Someone running on a free month from a boxed edition would be, I'm pretty sure, a VIP subscriber during that month. You are considered a subscriber now for the purposes of things like veteran rewards. If you don't have access, its probably an authentication database bug more than a policy decision thing.

During beta, it was so free floating it used to randomly float around the screen. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature, but it seems to be less floaty these days.

No, I'm not kidding.

I really shouldn't do this, but ok. Here's a sneak peak at the in-game store:



You're welcome.

Its a matter of semantics, because there's no actual rule about "gameplay advantages" with some standard definition of "gameplay advantages" we're all supposed to honor. Its clear that some people believe that there is a difference between allowing for higher combat performance and allowing for higher amounts of rewards for a given activity, and other people believe both are bad. But both are generally covered under the vague term "gameplay advantages."

Why those two are distinct is because some developers design their games under the theory that what you can do is a limiting threshold separate from how fast can you do it. That design philosophy considers absolute performance to be a pseudo-gate to content: fail to meet the minimum performance levels, and you cannot execute the content, requiring you to go back and play other parts of the game until you reach that level of performance. Other games have much softer requirements in this area (like, for example, City of Heroes).

The store uses an in-game interface, and its integrated with the character creator and other parts of the UI (allowing you to buy things you don't have unlocked). Other than that, there's a button to launch it from within the game. Beyond that, you should see for yourself to get an unvarnished first impression.

Well, you'll find out soon enough, but at the moment the beta locks out powersets you are not entitled to use. You can purchase them right from within the character creator screen, but you cannot preview the powers or animations until the powerset is unlocked.


How did you decide whether to buy City of Villains or Going Rogue?

I'm pretty sure that within a minute or two of beta going open and the NDA being lifted there will be a dozen videos available showing all the new powersets. An in-game preview would be nice, but I'm sure that this will always be true for all new powersets past Issue 21: there will be lots of material out there showing what the sets basically looks like soon after release.

Theoretically speaking, although I haven't seen anyone specifically try this yet, the Obliteration Beam is on a timer, but Antimatter's freeze time is keyed (heh) to his health. So just like going for Strong and Pretty, it should be possible I assume to coordinate attacks against Antimatter so he crosses his regen thresholds far away from the times that the Obliteration Beam fires.

The first time I did it, when it was still +4, I was one of two Brutes: I was Dark Armor, and the other was I think Invuln. We did use veng, but no nukes and I think only two players popped Shivans - which died kinda fast. I think there were three corruptors on that team, a mastermind, and either a dominator and a stalker or two dominators: I forget which.

All you needed was smart inspiration use. It helped, back in I7, to have someone on the team that, oh, say, understood something we today call "the defensive soft cap." Once you took out Positron, it was all over.


If you attempted the LRSF during that short window of time, -regen was pretty much essential. But it didn't require six kins. Two rads were plenty. I did the math myself at the time, and I believe our team had two rads, a kin and a dark: more than enough -regen for the job.

I'm pretty sure it was base regen that was increased at the time, by the way, not regen strength. That fact was critical to understanding the effectiveness of -regen debuffs.

Its being opened on the actual Beta server, so the answer is: all of the features that are currently being tested on the Beta server. Which is pretty nearly everything that has been announced as far as I can recall.

I would subscribe to this.