Arcanaville

DONT LOOK AT ME: THIS WAS NOT MY IDEA

That's a limitation of the incremental release model of MMOs, and I addressed it in my response to Techbot Alpha. It might have been better to release the incarnate system only when there was a critical mass of incarnate-dedicated content for it, but then you'd be waiting for a year or more for it. Some players say sure, if it doesn't have enough content to satisfy then, then make everyone wait. But other players say no, release what you can when you can, and if people don't want to play it when it doesn't have enough content then *they* can wait until that content exists. Usually, these two player philosophies do not come into direct conflict because rarely are players aware of delays: they can't miss what they don't know they are missing. But these two philosophies went head to head without resolution in I18 when the delay became visible, when the devs announced their intention to pull back the Alpha slot.

Even though Alpha would have *no* content associated with it, and *no* way to do anything but grind kills or standard task forces to unlock and slot it, many players preferred to have it anyway: people who didn't like grinding could simply wait for other content to arrive. Other players felt releasing it that way would give Alpha a bad name by directly connecting it with kill-grinding if there was literally no new content associated with it. I was actually one of those players.

The problem in my opinion was releasing two trials and four slots. I don't know who decided to do that, but that was very, very wrong. In fact, Alpha was released in two parts: tier 1/2 first, and tier 3/4 second. The highest cost Alpha component wasn't dangled in front of the players initially, although everyone knew they were coming. That's another reason Alpha didn't cause instant sticker shock like the other slots did.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to compound one mistake with another and try to fix the lack of incarnate content by shoving the standard content into the incarnate reward system. That would be trying to fix a stupid hole by digging deeper with a stupid shovel.

They are not making a special ustream just to announce the go-live date for Issue 20.5, and they are not announcing City of Heroes 2. As far as I'm aware, there is no City of Heroes 2 to announce.

I'm sure someone somewhere will be mentioning it.

I just keep forgetting to type Up. It should be Round Up, not round to nearest.

0.75. 0.67 if you want it to remain KD against -1s without any KB (negative) resistance like some clockwork.

The notion of cloud computing being nothing more than essentially hosted services is probably about as far off the mark as saying smartphones when they were invented were just crappy computers that could make phonecalls.

You're starting to see more evolution in the area where the public cloud interacts with private cloud services, in areas where you want a combination of localized control and distributed services.

Honestly, I think the two biggest long-term benefits of cloud computing won't be the literal cloud services: it will be the long term commoditization of distributed computing and storage, and the infrastructure standards that are just starting to form.

The IBM PC was not the computer we all eventually owned. It was the computer that created the ecosystem 90% of us live in today. The cloud ecosystem is going to be the bigger win in the longer run. And by the time its matured, it will probably also become invisible.

Another thing to consider is that the average company's idea of security and fault tolerance is Norton antivirus and a UPS. For many people, cloud hosting is a huge step up. For the companies for which its potentially a step down, there are ways to leverage the services while still maintaining the security and integrity of the system if you know what you are doing.

Honestly, the biggest tripping point that tends to become problematic in real enterprise class cloud computing is an often under-appreciated or poorly understood requirement many organizations have to obey: geolocation of information. Many organizations have restrictions on precisely *where* they can store their data. Government agencies, the military, financial institutions, all have restrictions on where they can put data. Cloud vendors don't often have enforced storage boundaries. And that disqualifies them right off the bat.

I used to say that cloud computing was just a marketing fluff term, and it was. It was really a convergence of technologies: virtualized and commoditized computing, massive distributed storage, and large content distribution networks. No one really knew what that would become besides launchpads for services like gmail. But I think we're getting a better idea collectively now.

Part of the problem was, I believe, that Castle was looking for a way to turn KB completely off, which is tricky. Converting all KB into KD has a different issue: its easier, but it would then be a balance-significant change that would have to be vetted by the rest of the powers team, the lead designer, QA, and a bunch of other people. Since some powers are explicitly *balanced* around combining push back and knock mitigation, turning one off while leaving the other at full strength triggers far more review of the change.

You're probably going to love Carrion Creepers.

I don't have any problems per se with having Tin Mage and Apex drop empyrean merits: they are scaled to difficulty levels comparable to the trials even if they are scaled for smaller sized leagues (i.e. a single team). But that doesn't really address the issue, because the issue isn't between having fewer content and more content that gates the higher parts of the incarnate system, its whether standard content should be allowed to generate rewards directly into the higher parts of the incarnate system beyond the current shard system. And I think that would be dangerous without very strict gating. TM and Apex are most certainly not standard difficulty content.

Although, since I've proposed several ways to leverage *some* standard content with very strict gates**, I'm also not opposed to the idea. But even that side-steps the problem: the standard content gates would have to be balanced around the existence of and the reward earning rates of the trials themselves, and could not replace them.


** Extremely strict: for example awarding empyrean merits for completing certain story arcs, but only for the mission holder and only for the first time completion, whether through the original contact or through Ouroboros.

Of course it has: its essentially giving away a free lunch: far less people complain about free lunches than higher difficulty even if the higher difficulty makes more sense and the free lunch is game breaking. That doesn't mean the Alpha model was sustainable.

But the criticism of Alpha is two-fold: first, like any new system it draws complaints from people that don't like different aspects of what is new: it relies on task force content more, the solo path is much less rewarding, being both solo *and* at low difficulty can make progress exceedingly slow. But the other criticism of Alpha is that, especially in combination with the other slots but even before they were released, it markedly trivializes standard content. Level shift is so game-breaking to allow in standard content I'm actually surprised the devs did it. It borders on a geko decimal place error. This criticism is far more insidious because it points to the sort of thing that can cause irreparable damage to the game in a way adding grindy trials cannot. You can always avoid the trials. But fundamentally speaking, you cannot hand players far more power than they need and tell them not to use it. That's game design suicide. And most people affected by this problem won't complain about it. They'll just get bored and quit. And yes, people who propel themselves into obsessing over the trials can quit in frustration as well, but that's a far smaller percentage of the players.


You're touching on a dichotomy that caused a significant amount of tension in I18 and still exists to a certain extent to this day. The reason why the Alpha preview was pulled basically came down to this very thing: some players made the argument that if Alpha was supposed to be connected to incarnate content and it wasn't, and the shard system itself was half-baked, releasing it early was nonsensical. It would only frustrate players like yourself that don't like things released piece-meal like that, especially when the devs are limited in what they can discuss about downstream content.

A *lot* of other players were angry by the delay, because their argument was this: delaying it means taking away the opportunity to play the system incomplete from those willing to play an incomplete system, just to placate people who would get annoyed by a system that they refused - voluntarily - to play.

The devs have to pick an arbitrary balance point between these two perspectives because they are irreconcilable. MMO development by its very nature has some piecemeal incremental aspect to it, and you will not get to see the entire system all at once and you will not be privy to the devs complete roadmaps. That's not just non-negotiable, that's an absolute. What you do get might not be enough: probably won't be enough for some players. Conversely, other players will tire of waiting too long for things to release: in batching things up and trying to make bundles of content that work together, they will lose players that would rather have things released as soon as possible, as often as possible.


Trust me: by the time Issue 21 comes around, some of your concerns will be addressed and you'll have all new even bigger concerns. I think, given the trajectory of the devs actually going all the way back to the NCSoft buyout, but especially more recently, that's going to become the norm.

The question asked was why is Alpha different. The answer is that its contrary to the intent of the end game. The question you're asking and answering yourself is "why was the end game mandated" and the answer is "it wasn't:" its addition was mostly voluntary on the part of the devs to address the lack of an end game which some players wanted. The fact that not everyone would like it or need it is a fact that is true for everything they add to the game and isn't an automatic disqualifier for any addition.


You should stop using logic: you're going to hurt yourself if you keep holding the pointy end.

Implausible, at least as being discussed. The devs have said the Praetorian story line has a scripted ending, and have also said for the current foreseeable future they are planning on expanding the current slots and not releasing the rest of the slots. Put two and two together and you get that the final battle with Tyrant will likely occur while we still have the same five slots. Therefore, its unlikely we'll *need* more level shift. Actually, its possible we could *get* level shift to deal with him, but mostly in inspirations or temp powers within the content that deals with him itself. But not in the additional slots.

I would actually be surprised if we saw the devs release the next batch of slots before the end of the year. Its 50/50 to me that we see any new slots within the next twelve months.

Asked and answered many times. The intent of the incarnate system and the end game was to add power progression on top of the standard game. They could have added combat levels above level 50 but that is problematic for a lot of reasons and they simply were not going to do it. But adding progression with power to level 50 meant the standard content, which is balanced around a different level of power, would become too easily trivialized. The end game was going to revolve around a package of power that could be unlocked and content designed to a higher power standard that players could meaningfully build power to match.

Its the Alpha slot itself that is the anomaly, not the rest of the end game. Originally, it was going to be like the rest of the slots. It was in I18 during the aborted sneak peak that the devs realized providing a sneak peak of a slot that was connected primarily to content not part of the sneak peak itself wasn't going to work (although just saying it out loud makes me wonder, as it did then). The devs decided to repurpose Alpha into a "bridge slot" that would straddle the boundary between the standard content and the end game content: you would be able to unlock and progress in Alpha completely in standard content, and that would be the entree into the Incarnate system proper.

Why not just make *all* the slots that way? Fundamentally speaking, that's just not an option. If you're just going to add more standard content, there's no point to the incarnate system. Its just stupidly broken power added to the standard content. Its bordering on stupidly broken power when its used in the standard content. Just like we would never have gotten an invention system with ED, no matter how people try to twist an argument that suggests we could have, we would have never gotten an incarnate system without it being tied to incarnate content. Its just that simple.

Why add it at all? Same reason the invention system was added. Its for the people that want it. The people that don't want it are free to ignore it. Frankly, I think the real fear some players have is not that most players hate the incarnate system and the trials, but rather that its becoming clear more players *like* the incarnate system and the trials. The invention system was optional not just by dev fiat and not just because the standard content wasn't balanced around it, but because most players simply do not min/max around the invention system, so the average benefit from it is small. Someone who chooses to ignore the invention system isn't at a huge power disadvantage to the average player, because the average player doesn't have a lot of invention strength either. But the worry is that completely ignoring the Incarnate system won't be that way, because far more players are availing themselves of it, and perfectly willing run the trials to get it.

In any event, Alpha is a compromise. The incarnate system was always going to be connected to incarnate-class content: that is precisely what the devs mean when they talk about this game having an end game at all. Its not an accident that Alpha is connected to the standard content with the shard system and the rest of the slots are connected to the incarnate content with the thread system. It is as far as the devs are willing to go, and frankly as far as they should go in connecting standard content to the entirety of the incarnate system.

Couldn't you just cycle through the teams and check the incarnate buff icons by right clicking? Technically you'd need to know the names, but you just have to remember shift is in Destiny and Lore, and Total/Partial Core/Radial are the tier 3s (the tier 4s have some variety but are even more obvious)? Not the fastest way, but league leaders usually have a fair amount of time to check out characters as the league is assembled.

You're actually talking about the average randomly assembled league for a trial that just happens to have no experienced players, no players with incarnate abilities yet including alpha, nothing but SOs, isn't good at coordinating themselves into a team, and isn't willing to learn the content to get better at it. *This* "average PUG" is unlikely to be successful.

This average PUG also probably couldn't collect all the day job badges without a few team wipes.

I should also point out I've never seen this average PUG attempt the trials before, conversely I've seen this average team completely fail normal task forces before. For this average team, the entire game is one big gate and they don't have the key.

Technically speaking, if Neo went commando in that specific style of cassock, Reloaded would have had a completely different movie rating.

I don't recall Castle ever saying that publicly, but if anyone has a link to it post that puppy: that's a keeper.

While he was here, my relationship with Castle was very much one where he would graciously take time to teach me the parts of the game system I had questions with, and I would return the favor by pointing out every mistake he ever made, plus every mistake everyone else ever made, given the rules he just taught me.

That ended up working much better than it sounds like it would for almost six years.

I had my share of eureka moments and lucky guesses, of course, but that's not the same thing as schooling Castle. Although if someone can find that quote, I'm still using it.

And also the last.

The devs have failed to deliver on almost all of the promises made by the players.

I'm pretty sure something's hitting something next week, but its hard to say if that has anything to do with the Gamasutra interview, which seemed to be more of a general piece than one focusing at all on I20.5. It was actually interesting that they didn't even mention the Galaxy City/Meteor thingy, which means its something marketing didn't want them to hype much. I guess that means whatever it is will be something that has more relevance for the existing players than something non-players will care all that much about.

Only for characters in the moon zone.

I feel like I should sue for copyright infringement.