Arcanaville

If you want to know if you bought access to something specific, stop subscribing and see if you still have access. If you do, you did. If not, you didn't.

We purchased unlocks for many things. We never purchased on-going access itself for anything. Of all the things I thought were going to be mangled up by the playerbase upon the announcement of City of Heroes Freedom - and I thought a lot of them would be - I really didn't give this one enough credit. I always assumed it was fairly obvious that we buy things, but we rent access.

It makes you wonder: if Cryptic launched the hybrid model soon after the release of CoV, would people be saying that the devs could lock Peregrine Island if they wanted to because that came with Issue 1 and we didn't buy that, but the whole entirety of the villain content was something we bought with that one red box, and therefore we should be entitled to all of that content everywhere because we now owned it.

That's rhetorical. I don't actually believe I need to guess.

Perhaps their target is to make more reasonable people happy: people who don't expect the worst for example.

VIPs will certainly get free powersets like they have gotten in the past. They will also sometimes have to pay for powersets like they have had to in the past. I can say both things with absolute certainty. But short of analyzing developer timesheets there will be no absolute way to prove we are getting more free content with our subscription than we have gotten in the past, and no way at all to disprove the unfalsifiable assertion that we would have gotten more if the switch to the Hybrid model didn't occur. At some point the people who want to believe that over the strong but inconclusive evidence otherwise will simply have to settle for being voluntarily unhappy. I do not want the devs to waste a lot of time trying to make them happy when that is impossible, or too difficult relative to making many more other people happy with a lot less effort.

Its not mechanically true in the current system, but its close enough to the truth that believing it to be true generates the correct results. Its close enough to make decisions around, in other words.

It is indeed a sophisticated form of psychological warfare that is specifically designed to extract more money out of an existing group of people and as a mere side effect increases the amount of people they end up extracting it from. It would be far easier to attempt to increase the number of people you're making money off of and hope to have the side effect of the existing ones paying more voluntarily, but Paragon Studios has never done things the easy way.

As I am a student of such activity, I intend to be taking lots of notes. If they succeed, its a skill I intend to replicate.


Incidentally, how do we know you have the best interests of the game at heart. Maybe you're specifically attempting to sabotage the game enough to reduce its subscriber base and increase your proportional influence over the future development in the game. Shouldn't everyone else presume that this is a zero-sum game and whatever is in your best interests is by definition not in theirs? Whatever you want us to think and believe, we should believe the opposite.

Unless you know we're going to think that, and that is what you want us to believe. Now are you the sort of man that would tell us what you want us to think, or tell us what you don't want us to think. A clever man would tell us what he doesn't want us to think because...

Same as it is now. Just don't expect to get back any change.

Also, it is Yang worship word.

- Cloud William: Chief, Son of Chief, speaker of the holy words, farmer of architect missions, tea bagger of noobs.

The way I understand it, buying a slot intrinsically unlocks it. If you buy a character slot from the store and use that to add a slot to a server, that slot becomes usable when it is added. You will not need to use a different resource to unlock it at that moment in time. That is true now, and will be true in Freedom.

Basically, if you hold them until I21, when you use them you will be adding a slot to a server, and unlocking that slot at the same time for use in Freedom. If you use them now when you use them you will be adding a slot to a server and unlocking that slot at the same time for use also. But when Freedom launches if you stop subscribing the game will then lock that slot, and then hand you a global unlock token you can use to go right back and unlock it. Why do that dance when the game could just keep the slot unlocked? Because its likely the total number of slots you have rights to under Freedom as Premium will be less than if you were a VIP subscriber. So rather than guess which ones you want, the game locks them all and hands you tokens and basically tells you to pick the ones you want yourself. Every slot you buy and allocate today will translate to one more unlock token later, so you will not lose that benefit. What you might be able to do is *reallocate* that benefit from the new slot to an old one you'd rather unlock first.

I know the rings have this ability in the comics, but I was specifically pointing out the in-movie justification.

As to the low number of Lanterns, it made somewhat more sense when they were the Guardians of the Galaxy. A few thousand Lanterns for the Milky Way would be spread thin, but if you assume cosmic crimes don't happen often its not too bad. You end up with each Lantern patrolling a volume maybe 1500x1500x1500 light years. That's somewhat better than every Lantern having a couple billion light year cube all to themselves.

Maybe the Guardians of the Universe exaggerate, because the Guardians of the Local Group just doesn't impress ladies.

VIP subscribers have access to things as part of their VIP subscription that they *lose* access to if they stop subscribing. If they stop subscribing they will have to unlock those things to gain access back as a premium subscriber. Once unlocked, something is unlocked forever whether you flip back and forth between VIP and Premium. But it is important to note that just because a VIP player has access to something, doesn't mean they "unlocked" it. It means they have access while they are a VIP. To unlock something, you essentially have to pay for it or earn it in some other way directly.


This is a technical question I am not allowed to address the specifics of, but I can say that if it was up to me, I would not allow someone to accidentally buy something they already had access to. Either the store would not allow them to buy that thing at all, or there would be strong safeguards to prevent that from happening that would make buying things you already have access to inconvenient.

But the solution to that problem is to look at all the stuff you want to buy, figure out how much Paragon Points it would take to buy it all, and then just buy the points. Once you have all those points in your account, they will be there waiting for you if you decide to drop from VIP to Premium, and you can use them to buy whatever you want. But since you haven't actually spent them, if at the moment you decide to drop down to premium you've changed your mind as to what you want and do not want, you can still make the decision at that time.

1. I'm pretty sure as many as you want to buy, up to the hard limits of the servers.

2. If you mean what I think you mean, no.

3. No. Free accounts start off with two slots they can use on any of the servers. That's two total, not two per server. After that, as far as I know there's no limit on the number you can buy. The only difference between the number of slots a premium player can buy and a VIP player is technically speaking the VIP player has access to the VIP server, and as a result they can technically buy 36 more character slots (which would fill it) than a premium player. But so far I have not heard of a maximum limit to the number of character slots a premium player will be allowed to purchase and unlock.


A point of clarification I would like to make here. Free players are by definition (in Freedom) players that have never bought anything, ever. So by definition free players cannot really buy anything: the moment they do they become premium players. Premium players are the ala carte non-subscribers in the CoH: Freedom model.

I didn't quote the other question because I'm not at liberty to discuss cookie-related questions about the in-game store.

I don't really have to convince you. You have to convince the devs. Good luck with that. If it happens, it will have to be essentially insignificant. And insignificant is basically pointless.

Also, I rather doubt its likely you've played this MMO significantly longer than I have. You might have played more F2P ones than I have, although I have played all the major western ones that have converted to F2P including the Turbine ones since their early betas.

If your point is that there has to be a level of Paragon Point award that is so low it cannot possibly be balance-significant, if you like I can ask the devs if they would be willing to give you 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 Paragon Points for every successful completion of Dr. Quarterfield.

I can't imagine why this would be remotely a good idea. And I know other games do it. But I'll be 100% frank here: our idea of "balance" in City of Heroes would be laughable bordering on embarrassing everywhere else in the industry. We allow performance ranges that would get people fired and games terminated, because we feel its the price to pay to have the levels of power we want to be able to represent in a superhero game.

Allowing people to earn the functional equivalent of money in this game for doing content would mean, no question, no option, and no discussion, levels of game rebalancing that would be draconian to players familiar with this game. As far as I'm concerned, debating this point is like debating the color of the sky.

Unless the in-game store allows you to actually buy points specifically with a credit card, it does not have to be PCI compliant. Only the part that touches credit cards needs to be PCI compliant and if they have a brain in their heads if they do it at all they will tunnel card transactions through the in-game store and to a stand alone processor, and only make it look seamless. This isolates PCI compliance requirements.


I cannot say anything about anything I might know about the mechanics of the in-game store, but hypothetically speaking I might point out that adding that functionality directly to the game client would not be the most efficient and logical way to do it. Given that much of what the store would be selling would require external communication to systems outside the core game systems, it would make more sense to make a system external to the game servers and clients that had access to all the systems that are necessary to process such orders, and to make that system somehow accessible from within the game client via an embedded access system of some kind. This would allow rapid development of the store systems and functionality without having to push updates to the game client.


I'd say more about the DSS, but I'm afraid there's a tiny chance there are PCI auditors out there, and I wouldn't want to make them cry.

I can't really properly address all the limitations of the regional stores (because I don't have the problem) nor can I specifically state how points will specifically be purchased (because I don't actually know the specifics), but I can say that the intent of the Freedom in-game store is that you will somehow buy points, and only points, with your money. Once you have points, you spend points in the in-game store and I believe the *intent* is for *everyone* to see the exact same store because its internal to the game itself (that's a colloquial statement, not a technical one).

Given that, I believe the problems with regional stores selling only a limited number of things goes away in Freedom: the only thing your regional store has to sell, assuming you are even using the regional store when Freedom launches, is points. Once you have points, your points are no different than my points and should be able to buy the same things without restriction. I can say I know the devs are aware of this issue and have every intent to address it with the new systems in Freedom.

I finally got around to seeing the movie this weekend, and personally I thought it was not as bad as the reviewers have been saying. I don't think it was poor quality so much as it was much more shallow than the bar has been set for comic book movies. Even Thor seemed slightly deeper, and I think it had stronger performances overall. But still, given where you have to start, with a guy with a magic green ring given to him by blue aliens, it was I thought appropriate for the material.

I am puzzled by why there is any remotely controversial discussion about this particular point mentioned above, though. First of all, the ring was established in the movie to be able to communicate information to the wearer that it thought was important. It communicated the oath to him, and on Oa it communicated background information about the Green Lantern Corps without specifically being asked.

Why tell Hal about mini-Paralax? Because whatever he told the Corp, the ring chose him to be the lantern of that sector, and the ring was therefore alerting Hal to a threat to that sector that was high enough to be significant to the Corp. It would not alert him to every cat stuck in a tree, but someone wielding Paralax's power on Earth might have registered as a more serious threat. The ring isn't omniscient, so it can't just automatically finger Hammond until Hammond either uses enough power all at once or transforms enough for the ring to classify him as a threat.

And why did Hal respond? Probably the same reason he responded at the party. The ring probably didn't "talk" to him so much as communicate on a more visceral level. Hal got the sense that people were in danger, and Hal is one of those people that responds to that feeling on instinct. When given time to think, when his self confidence is challenged as on Oa, he tends to run away. But when the ring said "fire" Hal ran towards the fire instead of away, which is his nature.

None of this seems to remotely strain reasonable logic. Now, how 3600 Lanterns can patrol the entire universe, good luck with that one.

Someone would be bound to get shocked, although I would be betting on the one on the opposite end from my taser.

If I understand what you're saying, yes. Or they could, you know, buff your damage cap.

Theoretically, they could actually. I'm unaware of one, just to be clear, but its not theoretically impossible.

I may have missed that if they can't invite at all.

Although this brings up an interesting question. Many of the boxed sets have a month subscription (all of them I think). Does that mean all those cheapo old boxes of City of Heroes floating around technically contain a month of VIP? If so, you could buy one of those and have a second VIP account for a month. You could set up a personal SG in that month, and after it expires perhaps there will be a way to unlock invite privileges for premium accounts down the road.

I wonder how they plan on dealing with that. But I think I'm going to start stocking up on dollar CoH boxes.

And even if it costs the same, will I be charged more or not. And even if I'm charged the same amount, will I have to pay the same amount. And even if I pay the same amount, will that cost me the same amount. And even if it costs the same... wait...

They can't do that because they need to keep Tankers ungated so they can sell damage boosters to everyone who plays Tankers.

City of Heroes Freedom has made je_saist speechless and Johnny_Butane an optimist. Excuse me while I go check and see if I can still do long division.

I have other questions.