Arcanaville

When TOR launches, I'm going to be Darth Bob. My backstory will be that I saw a late night television ad for a Galactic trade school, and it was either blaster repair or Sithing.

That force will be anchored to a point and not distributed across an entire surface. Because of this, you will induce torque about the center of mass of the object, unless your tow rope's line just happens to pass through the object's center of mass. Which would then be yet another contrived example. Furthermore, the object being towed is not constrained in the matter described in the original problem statement.

What's sad is that I conjured up the basic backstory before I knew practically anything about the CoH lore, when I first started playing. And now, I realize that probably 20% of the citizens of Paragon City have a stranger family history.

Actually, you're right: my diagram is 90 degrees off.

However, the answer is still the same because of a little bit of basic vector analysis, or static physics.

We start here:

We end here:

Everything else is irrelevant. The sum of all the forces total acting through the object must be the vector sum of all the forces applied to it. So if we have a force pushing upward in the positive y direction, all forces exiting the object must sum up to that. Since the input has no x component, there must be no net x component leaving the object. QED.

Since the object cannot move in the y direction, at best all that force will act to squish the object flat, pushing itself outward along the x-axis in both directions. The vector sum of those forces should still be zero along the x-axis though, meaning you'd see an equal push to the left and to the right.

I'm increasingly convinced the problem as stated is not the problem as it exists.

In that case, you are not applying a force through a non-perpendicular surface in the context being described. The problem as stated specified that the force you apply is along a particular axis, but is being directed through a surface that is tilted relative to that axis. You're applying a force parallel to a tow rope which is obvious and simple. Imagine standing behind a box and pushing straight ahead. Now imagine the box isn't perpendicular to the direction you're pushing, but set at an angle. Now try to push through that angled surface in the same direction as before without applying any other forces to the box. That's not trivial.

The redside/blueside situation was a moving target. Three years ago I said I was opposed to a merge because it eliminated an opportunity for the red side to create their own independent market. Two years ago I said I had mostly withdrawn that objection because there wasn't enough liquidity on the redside to legitimately call it a "market" in that sense.

The devs had other reasons to be concerned in the past, some good and some not so good. But the ultimate reason we have merged markets now is because they were looking down the barrel of Going Rogue introducing "information" and having to decide if that was going to be a third independent currency, and if as a consequence Praetoria was eventually going to have its own markets. And separate from that, how would the influence/information/infamy currency flows possibly be controlled regardless; would we be able to take currency across factions when side-switching for example.

GR beta testers may recall the devs were looking at this problem right up to a particular moment, then ceased discussion. That would be the moment when they decided the pros of a merge outweighed the potential cons. The merge isn't just the matter of a cross faction market. There are more fundamental changes that happened people don't always realize, like the fact that at that moment influence/infamy/information became synonyms of a universal currency, rather than three separate currencies with an interchange mechanism. That's not a trivial or semantic distinction.

I understand most are crime-fighting their way through college.


Of course, my main is a magical copy of an interdimensional clone of a genetic experiment. So superhero stripper doesn't even score a 3 on my weird-o-meter.

Its generally been close to 30% of all hero archetypes, but not of course of all archetypes period once that number expanded. If I implied otherwise that was an error.

Actually, no in both cases. In the first case, the devs said basically that they didn't want to, and that it would take more resources than available to ensure it happened smoothly. In the second case, they barely said anything at all except that they didn't want them to become too low.

The markets in particular I'm specifically aware of the exact moment they decided to merge them, and the exact rationale for why at the time. Basically, the magnitude of the effort involved in keeping them separate was becoming competitive with the effort involved in merging them. We came very close to having three independent currencies and markets before the decision was made to merge.

Does that mean you're name is worth more in Canada, or you're worth less in the US?

For the City of Heroes player community, the existence of human females hasn't been a controversial subject since late 2006.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned it at the time, but the ~35% number was a measurement done soon after launch, when there were only five choices to select from.

I had a guy tell me in-game they were absolutely certain I was a girl because I typed in complete sentences.

I have no joke for that, I just like pointing it out occasionally. I think it speaks for itself.


Ouch.

I swoop in and use a well placed torrent and then a well placed explosive blast and then a well placed torrent again, because my energy blaster has +160% global recharge and just doesn't give a !@#%.

I don't seem to get any flak from this, although this may be because my team mates are just glad there's no friendly fire in this game outside of confuse.

Indeed. There's absolutely no question that tank tops and scoop necks are thermodynamically smaller conductive barriers to heat energy transfer than T-shirts with high necklines. Anyone who thinks different is going to answer to my homey Lord Kelvin who's just waiting to bust a cap in someone's pantaloons.

Of course, he was troubled by illness late in life, and his ability to revoke his estimation of it turned out to be finite.

It must have been weird living on Cheron, waking up every single day and seeing your most hated enemy in the mirror.

The core content is very casual-friendly and very solo-friendly for an MMO.



Also, the red names are completely insane. I would stay away from them and anyone else with a post count higher than 2. Which means you should ignore your own third question, which is bound to be about something weird.

I have never met a player in-game that thought they had nothing left to learn, that didn't have an awful lot to learn. Certainly you could drop me into a random build of a random archetype and drop me into a random team and I would make a decent go of it immediately. I've been playing the game for years, and my experience across archetypes is extremely wide. But I would be a lot better in a year than when I started, and anyone who says otherwise is saying more about their ability to learn the game than about the actual game.


On the general subject of powerset respecs, Positron's statement is far more damning than I think some people really fully appreciate. "I see no point to it" is not a weak statement. For something of that magnitude to happen, there must be lots of good reasons for doing it, and no good reasons not to. I'm pretty sure Positron is aware of all of the arguments for doing it that are kicked around the forums. Knowing all of that, saying there's no point to it is saying every single one of those reasons given for wanting it have no positive value. That's far worse than Positron saying "I think its highly unlikely" or even "it would be game-breaking." He's saying none of the reasons given for doing it generate a positive result in his opinion. That's a "No" with a capital N, and a caveat that anyone who wants to argue in favor of it should come up with something original, because all the previous arguments are failures before they leave the gate.


As to why there's no point to allowing powerset respec, its really no more complex than this game is designed around the premise that archetype and powersets are individually designed with different playstyle variations and flavors of play, and they are intended to be experienced as a progression as the powerset levels up. Can you bypass that in theory? Of course: no matter what the devs do they cannot stop you from paying some dude in China to level your character to 50 and hand it to you. So all MMOs without biometric scanners upon login are vulnerable to some variation of a pay-to-level exploit. But just because that exploit, and many others exist, that doesn't mean the devs have to throw up their hands and allow everything. They balance the effort behind enforcing the game's design intent and hoping the majority of the playerbase follows that design intent reasonably well. That design intent includes the rule that characters have singular identities, and they cannot be trivially replicated or shuffled.


And as to why the devs have that goal at all, that gets into complex psychological aspects of game design. But its something you tamper with at your own risk, and the risks are very very high.

I wish I knew what those uber must have IOs were going to be. So far, haven't seen them yet.

Gifting will be a locked feature at launch and you won't be able to purchase the feature in the store. The only way to unlock it will be to have someone gift it to you for 600 points.

Actually, you could argue that the teaming tools are sufficiently good for this game, most of the people who want to team at any given time already are.

I think all the participants were critics of some or all the elements of the Freedom details. The developers were challenged on many aspects of Freedom, including but not limited to what was included in the base subscription, what things should be off-limits to the ala carte store, how much content should VIP subscribers expect, how much access should Premium and Free players get, how the new veteran reward system worked, elements of the new tutorial and low level experience, and the obliteration of Galaxy City itself. In fact, I would say 90% or more of all the negative or cautionary feedback elements I've read on the forums were echoed in at least some fashion by the focus group participants that I observed.

I can also say this: while I won't out a focus group member unless they definitively do so first (and I reiterate my recommendation they don't do so unless they are really insane) I did recognize a few high post count forum participants and these people tended, on average, to be slightly more critical of various elements of Freedom, not less critical. I can only assume the reason is simply that as people used to expressing themselves, they were disinclined to lose the opportunity to make their constructive criticism heard for something as large as this.

Actually, I was told that while some of the people invited to the early focus group were heavy forum posters, not all were. And I believe it was actually the community people that put together the list, so Positron might not even be first-hand familiar with the precise way they were selected. I know there was an attempt to invite a cross-section of players, though.

The largest statistical bias I detected was the obvious fact that most of the participants clearly lived within a short distance from Paragon's Mountain View offices for obvious reasons.