Arcanaville

There is no way I'm aware of to prove an attack chain is optimal without resorting to exhaustive search. However, there is a quick way to determine what the upper bound is on an attack chain: in other words, you can calculate the limit for how high the DPS of all possible chains could possibly be. That doesn't mean the optimal chain will reach it: its possible no chain reaches it. But you could have an estimate for how close you could be to the optimal chain, because if you're really close to the upper bound, the best possible chain can be no farther away than that.

Its actually a variation of my PeakDR methodology, for those who remember what that was. The basic principle is this:

1. Take all of the attacks, and sort them in descending DPA order, factoring in Arcanatime.

2. For each attack, list its damage, cast time, arcanatime, and recharge time (with the level of recharge factored in).

3. For each attack, calculate the ratio of arcanatime to cycle time. For our purposes, cycle time will be defined as cast time plus recharge time. There are complications, but that is close enough for now. This value is what I call E, the efficiency of the power. Its the percentage of total time you'd spend firing this attack if you fired it as fast as possible.

4. Starting at the top of the list and working downward, sum up E. Note at what point you exceed 1.0.

5. Find the maximum summation of E that *does not* exceed 1.0. Calculate the Gap between 1.0 and that value; i.e. 1 - Sum(E).

6. Calculate for all attacks the product E * DPA.

7. Sum up this product for all attacks from the top to the attack found in step 5.

8. For the attack found in step 4, which is the attack immediately below the attack found in step 5, calculate E * DPA * Gap.

9. Add step 8 to step 7.

That is the absolute ceiling for DPS for those attacks. No attack chain can exceed that value, and the optimal one will generally come close to it. What's going on is this: the assumption is that the optimal chain will attempt to pack the highest DPA attacks into the time you have available, packing as many of the highest DPA attacks as possible, then filling in the gaps with the next highest, and so on. This cannot always be done efficiently, so optimal chains often fail to reach the calculated estimate.

Steps one through four find the best DPA attacks and how much time they take up when used as a percentage of their cycle time. Step five figures out what the DPS would be if you somehow managed to use your best attack as often as possible, your second best attack as often as possible, your third best attack as often as possible, without any conflicts. This is theoretically possible until you are spending more than 100% of your time attacking, which is obviously impossible. Steps five through eight attempt to prorate the last attack to fill in the fractional amount of time remaining.


This only works when there are no dependencies between the powers, such as dual blades combos, follow up, or Eagle's claw crit boosts. Those kinds of effects add significant complexity to this type of analysis.


My near-optimal algorithm is basically this: always use the highest DPA attack that is recharged. Its a simple rule that generates reasonably good results, and it has the advantage of being an easy rule to follow even when circumstances change. If you memorize an optimal chain, that optimal chain may cease to be optimal if you are subject to recharge debuffs - or buffs. But the "always use the best DPA attack" is something that you can easily figure out ahead of time by figuring out the DPA of your attacks and memorizing that, or just ordering your attacks in descending order in your tray, and that rule is invariant to recharge strength changes.

The devs are meeting to discuss server merges in the year 2013. However, Zwillinger is prevented from discussing that meeting per the Temporal Nondisclosure Extension to his work contract which all community representatives were required to sign on August 14, 2012.

Alpha's requirements for participation are so low for an MMO, they barely qualify as being requirements. The requirements for the other announced slots don't even require to succeed in the content that gates them.

The only way the end game could be more accessible to casual players would be if incarnate slots were unlocked as a day job.

The highest levels of the system have higher requirements if you have extreme restrictions on gameplay: you don't team, you can't participate in any task forces, you can only play for a minimal amount of time, and your characters cannot solo at higher difficulty settings. Under those circumstances, its *still* possible to get a very rare Alpha, it will just take an extremely long time to do so but you could still make progress towards that goal in increments.

I think it is at least a legitimate question to ask if the time requirements for soloing into the Incarnate system are properly balanced (and I'm not saying they are or are not). But to say the system is not casual friendly is a different matter. It is as accessible as accessible gets without giving it away for free. If the end game is not casual friendly, casual friendly doesn't exist.

Note: this doesn't mean its necessarily appealing to all casual players. It is just accessible to them. Whether it is appealing to all casual players is a matter of taste, not of "friendliness."


You are correct in that the end game is not designed for casual players directly. Neither is the rest of the game. The game, including the end game, is designed for players period, and efforts are made to make it accessible to casual players. This is not a major change in design philosophy. Its a "new path" only in the sense that all game additions are new paths. Adding Kheldians was a new path. Adding inventions was a new path. The end game is a new path in an analogous way. Its as dramatic a change to the game as inventions were, but conversely it wasn't a radical departure from the game's focus and goals. The end game is different than inventions, but kheldians were different from inventions also. That difference is not relevant to the point.


Its important to note the time horizons involved here. They've been working on end game implementation since 2009. They must have had it conceptualized and approved since 2008. They were probably thinking about it when the NC buyout occurred in 2007. Its entirely possible that the core fundamental ideas were being brainstormed before the buyout, as it was reported when the buyout occurred Cryptic ne Paragon Studios already had a list of things they wanted to do if the resources became available. So the notion of an end game probably similar to what we have in broad terms if not in specifics came from the minds of circa 2006-2007 developers. If the devs "changed their minds" about the direction the game was going to go by adding an end game past level 50 that was going to be gated, they changed their minds so long ago virtually the entire game as we know it today comes from that mentality.

If we are on a new path, its really a path we've been on since I9 and the introduction of the invention system. That system introduced both complex gear and a player economy, two changes with far greater impact on casual players than the end game has had to date.

Its the alternate reward for players under level 50 who will not get a Notice of the Well for running the WST the first time. Its not specifically intended to "rocket more toons to 50" although that is a side effect for people who use it in that manner. Personally, I've run 30ish and low 40ish characters in WSTs not to specifically rocket them to 50, but just to give them a couple level boost before returning to normal leveling.

So far, you haven't said anything that would convince me that my assumption was in error. You've all but stated directly that the fact that someone feels something in a game exists out of their comfort zone should not in any way deter a game designer from incorporating that feature. That's close enough for me.

My game design philosophy is this: people have a wide variety of interests and comfort zones. You cannot specifically target or even a large percentage of them with all of your content for this reason.

So you have three choices: choose to make all of your content as minimally objectionable to the widest possible audience; choose to make content narrowly targeted at a small subset of all possible players; or choose to make a wide range of content knowing none of your players will find all of it objectionable.

Additionally, there is a related design decision that isn't binary, but must still be fixed: to what degree, or by what ratio, should player decisions map to gameplay consequences.

The latter probably requires some explanation. Suppose I create two in-game rewards, A and B. To achieve these rewards the player must take some action. The first choice I have to make is how many options there will be to get each reward. There might be only one way to get A, or there might be ten different ways. The second choice I have to make is how much overlap there is between the ways to get A and the ways to get B. There might be only one way to get A and only one way to get B, and it might be the same activity. In that case, A and B are not mutually exclusive pursuit goals. The act of pursuing A is the same as the act of pursuing B. On the other hand, there might be ten ways to get A and ten ways to get B, but there is no overlap between them. So while there are lots of ways to get A, and lots of ways to get B, you can't pursue them simultaneously.

When it comes to "choice" as it pertains to MMOs, these two elements represent different aspects of choice. Having lots of different ways to get something means you have lots of degrees of choice when pursuing a specific reward. Having lots of overlap between activities means you have lots of degrees of choice when performing a specific activity when it comes to gaining rewards. Why I'm bothering to articulate this is that I do not believe its universally true that having more of either kind of choice is automatically a good thing.

If you have too many ways to acquire everything, and every activity leads to nearly all rewards, it eliminates the sense that gameplay choices are important: no choice has any different consequences than any other, so all are essentially meaningless. In my opinion, that's not the sort of choice I would want to be emphasized in a game: the ability to choose whatever you want because all choices have the same effect.

There has to be a balance between what I call lattitude - the ability for players to make "free choices" that have minimal consequences - and determination - the ability for players to make decisions that have unique consequences relative to all other decisions. In other words, I would make six activities: three would grant A and three would grant B and none would grant both. Players have *some* latitude to pick how they get those rewards, but they also determine what their reward will be by their actions.


All of that is to say this: since I believe games should balance latitude and determination, and because I believe games should target widely rather than narrowly, it is logically inevitable that my game design philosophy mandates that game designers recognize that some of their content will fall outside their target audiences comfort zone, some of that content will likely be mandatory to make certain kinds of progress in the game, and therefore the game will inevitably present an uncomfortable choice to some subset of the players. And that means the mere fact that some players assert the game is presenting uncomfortable situations isn't a priori proof of a game flaw. In fact, if *no* players believe this occurs, it would suggest to me that I had likely watered my choices down too much, and most players believed the consequences of their actions was far more trivial than I had intended.

In other words, if no one believed any choice I had put into a game I had designed was an uncomfortable one, I would conclude that either I was the greatest game designer on Earth, or my choices sucked. Before I started writing my acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in MMOs, I would review my game design choices first.

That is not to say that everyone or even a majority of everyone has to feel uncomfortable about a game choice in a well designed game. It only says that people are sufficiently different that if *no one* feels that way, I almost certainly would have failed to hit the target I was aiming at.

Its like trying to make spicy food. If everyone complains its too hot to eat, its probably a failure as food. If not one complains its too hot to eat, its probably a failure at being spicy.

It tells me some devs think there might be some positive aspects to allowing it, but most probably think its not currently a good idea.

Pro-tip: if the devs say they are discussing it, the one thing you can be absolutely certain about is that they are not actually contemplating doing it yet. Because the moment they start seriously investigating the details of hypothetically doing it, whether they've made the final decision or not, they immediately shut up about it. My guess is that its more of a water cooler topic than a serious investigation yet. But that is a guess.

There's been a lot of turn over and shuffling in the last two years: War Witch is now the head honcho on overall design, Positron is more active in specific design, Castle is gone and Black Scorpion is now in charge of powers, critters, and lots of other stuff. Ideas like powerset respec would almost certainly get kicked around every time new people have input or decision making authority over the process. With every shuffling, the odds change as to whether they might consider doing it. I still don't think its likely at this point. Its also worth noting that of the three people that the article said was on the panel, only Nate Birkholz would really likely be in a position to know how seriously the devs were contemplating such a move, and none of them would be actually involved with the details of such a change. If Tim or Matt or Melissa were there and acknowledged it strongly, I might be inclined to think differently.


There's only one thing that has happened to change my opinion on how likely something like powerset respec is likely to occur under any circumstances in the last few years, and that is the Incarnate system. I used to think that if it were to happen at all, it would be something that would be earned like at leevl 15-20, and you would have to execute it before some maximum level, around 20ish. You wouldn't be allowed to level to 50 and then switch to a whole new 50. But I now believe that the other possibility is to make powerset respec (within an archetype) a potential future reward of the Incarnate system. Basically, if you get to the point where your character is a full Incarnate and has most of the Incarnate slots unlocked, a significant fraction of that character's net ability will be in the Incarnate powers. Changing primary or secondary might not be the same thing for such a character as changing powersets would be for a leveling character or even a level 50 character, because the net change in the character is lower.

You could even argue, to a limited degree, that when you become an Incarnate its really the Incarnate tree that becomes your "primary" and your original primary becomes more of a secondary set that might be more acceptable to respec. That analogy only goes so far, but it might go far enough to create the design cover to allow the change.

I'd still say that the odds are less than 10% of that sort of thing happening at the moment. But if I were Positron, I might be contemplating whether whatever plans I had for Omega might not include unlocking an alternate primary or secondary. Most players assume that Omega has to be one hellaciously powerful power. But there's lots of things Incarnates could be allowed to do that aren't just generating big floating numbers. Limited switching of powersets could conceivably be one of them. Its not *exactly* powerset respec, though: its a related concept.

Certain ones are. Powerset respec is not one of them. I'm not just a blanket nay-sayer, and moreover I've never claimed something was impossible or fundamentally unlikely that has *ever* subsequently happened except when so much time passed that I myself changed my mind about the likelihood of it happening. I've never been caught off guard before in that respect. It is within that context that I say powerset respec is fundamentally unlikely.

With one exception. I thought it incredibly unlikely the devs would ever release a feature like Real Numbers until the day I found out they were actually working on Real Numbers. And the reason why is that I didn't think Castle would approve, and in fact Castle was never crazy about Real Numbers, but unbeknownst to me Castle did not have veto power over Real Numbers. I've never been wrong before or since about the technical or philosophical feasibility of a game change.

Long before the devs would ever allow powerset respec, they would give a sign that such an idea was even on the table. Not in overt obvious ways, but in ways I'm reasonably sure I would detect, unless they just stopped talking publicly altogether.

Actually, it was originally designed to mimic most of the conventional rules of MMOs of the day. Cryptic got incredibly lucky in that they missed almost all of their goals and ended up with a game that was casual friendly by sheer coincidence and that turned out not to be the disaster most MMO designers thought it would be at the time.

It has never deliberately *aimed* at "casual players" directly, from birth to two minutes ago. What it has tried to do is to be "casual friendly" which means the game isn't designed to appeal to them first and foremost, but is designed with the intent to give casual players as much access to as much of the game as is possible without compromising its design. Purple recipes, for example, are not casual friendly in and of themselves. But the invention system is, at least as I define casual-friendly. The fact that it contains elements that are not casual friendly is evidence of this game's design intent: it tries to give casual players access to most of the game, but there will always be things outside their reach, deliberately, because there will always be things for non-casual or hardcore players to pursue as well. One group isn't preeminent over the other.

The end game is very casual friendly to this point. Its not as accessible as the rest of the game, but that's not fundamentally different from saying level 45-50 is less accessible to a casual player than levels 25-30. The deeper the progress becomes, the higher the performance levels reach, the less relatively accessible to casual players the game will likely become. That is inevitable. But right now a casual player that teams can max out Alpha with less effort than it takes the average MMO player in other MMOs to find the end game much less progress in it.

If you don't team, it can be less accessible. If you spend very little time playing, it can also be less accessible. But anyone who thinks this game was specifically targeted at soloing players with heavy time constraints is not being realistic. I have sympathy for players in that situation, but I do not extend that sympathy to accepting the notion that this game's current design is predicated on the assumption that time constrained soloers are required to have access to all in-game rewards and progressional paths at rapid earning rates. This game tries to be solo-friendly. It tries to be casual friendly. It does not and in my opinion should not be bounded by the reward earning rates of the slowest possible players that can possibly exist by virtue of eliminating all but the slowest possible earning paths and then playing them for the minimum amount of credible playtime.

The operative phrase is: code is written in blood. It means the rules engineers follow that dictate the standard way of doing things all represent rules created after people died when we didn't follow those rules. Something goes wrong, we figure out what that was, we make a rule that ensures that one specific thing doesn't happen again, and that becomes the new standard. You usually hear it most often in structural engineering: building codes are written in blood. High rises have sprinkler systems not because someone thought it would be a good idea, but because one too many people were incinerated in building fires. This is also a principle well known at the National Transportation Safety Board as it pertains to FAA regulations. A lot of those are also written in blood.

Is it because engineers are just too dumb to anticipate these things before someone dies? Not really. The dirty secret of engineering is almost *all* engineering-related deaths are trivially preventable. The problem isn't that we don't know where the problems are, but that we don't know *precisely* where they are. When we know there is a problem, but we cannot state with certainty the *precise* parameters of that problem, we have to overestimate a solution. Translation: spend more money.

The notion that you can't design a safe nuclear reactor, or safe building or car or toothpick, is ludicrous. The problem is that the design provably safe will probably cost a lot. So engineers start getting asked the stupid, stupid question: "would it hurt if we cut back here?" And the answer is: we don't know for certain. We know this is safe. We know that is not safe. Everything in the middle is beyond our ability to be certain about. So we guess. When we guess wrong, people die. And then we guess something else.

Every time someone tells you an engineering disaster was the result of "human error" or "unforseen circumstances" they are blowing the smoke all engineers know is part of the game. A game in which the only proof people will accept that the rules cut too deeply into safety margins are that it kills people.

The fact that nuclear power plants are in a potential tsunami inundation zone is not in and of itself stupid. The fact that they knew the power plants were in a tsunami inundation zone and didn't plan for the need for portable generators to replace backup electrical power that was at high risk of being damaged by a tsunami is honestly both an idiotic mistake and probably one done because no one could prove it was necessary to justify the cost. When you have to prove you need it rather than prove you don't need it, you're basically saying its ok to kill people to figure out if you were right or wrong. And engineers do it every day. And to be honest, the nuclear power industry has killed far less people in the pursuit of writing their engineering codes than most industries. The infant toy industry has more blood on its hands than the entire nuclear industry even if you count the effects of nuclear weapons.


There is some evidence to suggest they were paying attention, but considered the fuel pools to be a lower priority problem until they actually became a high priority problem. There's also evidence to suggest that the people in charge are as worried about doing something that will make matters worse as they are about failing to do enough. That too is human nature, but completely inappropriate human nature under these specific circumstances. There's another saying in emergency situations like these: doing nothing is choosing to do something: usually the worst possible thing.

"Abandoned" has an implication of permanence, whereas I understand workers were sent back to the plant once radiation levels dropped after the spike.

CNN is reporting that they are using helicopter water drops to try to cool the reactors at Dai-ichi. They also briefly mention attempting to restore electrical power to the plant. Since the accident electrical crews have been trying to restore electrical power to the plant, which would give them access to more cooling and control systems than they currently have available. I didn't think they could restore those that quickly, but they seem to be in a position to begin the process of integrating the electrical systems on site with an emergency power line that was run out to the Dai-ichi site. Hopefully, restoring emergency electrical power will help them get the reactors under more control.

It isn't. Technical difficulty has never been a significant reason why the devs have failed to offer this option. They don't do it because they really, really, really don't want to, and they are not obligated to prove a feature is technically infeasible to say "no."

Its worth noting that in both cases neither was done because it was finally suggested often enough, but because the devs independently changed their minds or the circumstances changed. The devs already know some players want powerset respec, so asking for it again is unlikely to alter the situation any. If powerset respec happens, it will happen because something will happen to cause the devs to radically change their minds about some fundamental design assumptions about this game. That will happen whether powerset respec is suggested a thousand times in the next year, or zero times in the next year.

People have been asking for ED to be repealed for almost as long as they've been asking for powerset respec and probably more total times than powerset respec. Do you believe that the fact that inherent fitness was added says if only enough people ask enough times for a long enough period of time, the devs will repeal ED?

Some things are amenable to that kind of persuasion, some things are not. I don't think powerset respec is one of those things that are.

In what way does a game's lasting future effects relate to whether or not a game can make you uncomfortable at the time you are playing it, or create a situation you avoid because you believe it would make you uncomfortable if you decided to enter it? That seems to be a non-sequitor by any definition of "comfort zone" except for Dr. Manhattan.

Also, you didn't use the specific words "I don't care" but you did specifically state and emphasize that nothing in this game matters at all. I believe its a natural extrapolation to assume that things that don't matter are things people don't care about. If people care about them, they have to matter at least a little to them. That's embedded in the definition of what it means to care about something.


As did I, but with a critical difference. I used a reasonably expansive definition intended to apply to the largest possible number of people, and inferred the question as to whether games should impinge on other players' personal definitions of comfort zone as they saw it themselves using my own definition only as a rough guide for analysis purposes. You picked one and suggested everyone else's definitions, if they were not consistent with yours, was wrong and irrelevant to the question. That is, as I said, cheating because it dodges the question's intent by defining it away. It merely alters the question to this one: should games present situations intended to be considered uncomfortable by players other than EvilGeko? I think eliminating one person out of six billion from the context of the question does not critically harm its relevance.

Remember that we're not discussing whether people should allow games to make them uncomfortable. If you believe that to be false, that's your opinion. But that is not relevant to whether they *do* feel uncomfortable, and whether game designers should acknowledge that fact and avoid such situations or ignore that fact and not care if such situations occur. You said your answer to that question was that the game designers *should* care and avoid those situations, because you said your answer to the question of whether games should present situations that make you uncomfortable was "no."

I'm beginning to think you're misinterpreting the question based on the subject line and not the content of the OP. It sounds like you've interpreted the question to ask "should we allow games to make us uncomfortable" when the question seems to be the converse "should game designers care if a game makes its players uncomfortable." Those are two different questions, and it sounds like you're responding to the first one when I think Sam is asking the latter one, and that's why there's an inconsistency between what you say your position is and what you claim your answer to the question is. I still think you have them backwards.

Whether Sam is making another indictment on MMOs is not relevant to the larger issue, which I believe to be a valid MMO design question independent of Sam's likes or dislikes, which I'm fairly well familiar with, because I believe the question is interesting as a matter of degree, not of absolutes.

I can see a reason, and its the reason I would advise the devs not to implement this type of respec if they asked my opinion on the matter, although I suspect they already know this. It sets the precedent that power respec is not "game breaking" and the technology to execute it no longer has additional costs associated with it, so that therefore the devs must justify to the players why they cannot have it under more extensive circumstances.

It creates downstream problems I would recommend avoiding if full powerset respec was not a valid option. There's far too much evidence that far too many people believe "why not" is a valid reason for doing something to make the implementation of a slippery slope in this case worth any possible benefit generated from it.

If people are going to continue to pick on this semantical nit, they should at least do it accurately.

The change specified by the op affects the lowest number of users, so the statement made by Avatea is accurate in all respects. It does not say they determined that changing EU names affects less players than changing NA names. It says the number of users affected by the change is the lowest number of all possible numbers. That is not in any way inaccurate. That is not in any way ambiguous. It is misleading only for people choosing to be misled.

It is not the case that there were only two options: change NA users or change EU users. Many players are actually suggesting a third option in this very thread that affects *more* users:

Tyger:
When Avatea says the number of players affected by the announced merger process affects the least number of players, that's not merely an idle statement: there are alternate options, many of which are being promoted as more fair options, that potentially affect twice as many players. The question presented is whether the best solution is to deliberately affect more players than necessary, to effect a solution some players will find more equitable. I'm sure everyone has an opinion on that matter, but I'm hoping most reasonable people realize there's no singular answer that is obviously correct.

I find it highly unlikely that all or a majority of EU global handles would be affected by the merge. It probably is the case that the path of least resistance was chosen, but only because no other path affects less people. If there was a less efficient path that affected less players, I'm reasonably sure that would have been the option taken.

Deliberately going out of their way to affect *more* players than the minimum number has issues, as does expending more work to affect the *same* number of players. No proposal affects *less* players. At best, they affect *different* players. Its entirely in the eye of the beholder as to whether that is an intrinsicly better solution.

Whoever is affected will likely not like it. I'm not comfortable stating who is more and less "deserving" of keeping their global handles, except in the specific case of trial accounts not upgraded to full accounts, so I'm less inclined to give such arguments the same weight others are.

Nope.

The quoted post was a post BaB felt compelled to post because people kept misquoting him as saying power customization was "impossible" when he said no such thing. Anyone who remembers him saying that is wrong, because I read all the dev postings at the time, and I have contemporary PMs to and from BaB talking to him about the fact that people kept saying that when he never said it.

In fact, BaB once suggested that the time to make the game engine changes required would be too hard, which was not true. But BaB is not a programmer, and his estimates for programming time are thus suspect. He even said so in a later post. His estimates for the artwork changes were fairly spot on: they were and are very time consuming.

If BaB is still lurking, I'll remind him that the way animation customization works is the way I first suggested to him that it could work, which he called "gibberish" (of course, it was gibberish because I didn't have the language to express the thought correctly at that time).

Months of development time? Probably not. But the devs have a slightly different problem than you are facing in your job. They are probably not using standard databases: they've said in the past that the databases in the game were written from the ground up. That probably includes the authentication databases. The hardware and architecture of the system doesn't seem to make it easy to perform quick bulk operations: bulk operations in the past have sometimes taken significantly longer than one might have guestimated.

Probably the thing the devs face that you don't is that at least two, possibly three completely different independent groups of people will be involved. You're writing and running a conversion script, checking the results, and modifying it. In City of Heroes, the developers would have to write the account merge script. But they would be handing it to the system operators to run and execute the merge: the developers do not have direct access to and operational control of the game systems, remember. Its not like Castle used to log in as root and update the powers databases. This separate group of people will not necessarily know if the script does something incorrectly and will not be in a position to tweak things on the fly. They may also not run it correctly or on precisely the way the developers who wrote it intended. Then a separate third group of people in customer support will deal with the fall out of the script's changes, and they have neither access to the systems or the conversion script *or* the developers directly. I could probably pick up the phone, call Paragon Studios' offices, and get to Matt Stults almost as fast as NCSoft customer support can. And by me I mean anyone off the street.

In fact, miscommunications of that nature caused some pretty nasty errors in the mass bans and character reversions that occurred surrounding AE exploits after I14 release. Positron took a lot of heat for making decisions he really didn't actually make. I'm quite certain Positron felt there was nothing to be gained by pointing fingers at that time, but I'm also fairly sure that Paragon Studios as a whole is now unlikely to implement such changes with more complexity than is absolutely necessary.


Even something simple like testing the script against the live account database to make sure it takes care of all the corner cases is a much more tricky thing in this kind of environment than in the typical corporate one. The devs have test systems they could test against of course, but they don't have live data. They could get the live data to test on, but they can't just ask for backups of the systems because then a programmer at Paragon Studios would basically be asking for all of the login information for every player that currently, or has ever subscribed to City of Heroes. I would imagine this is not something the developers are necessarily even allowed to have, or even *want* to have. Testing would need to be performed on special extracts of the data, or staged in the live environment, which would be a lot more complex and tricky. Even the test servers seem to use the same authentication servers, meaning its not even as easy as testing all new server code which can be done by simply wiping out and loading on a test server cluster. Without knowing all of the specifics, its very difficult to estimate the scope and complexity of an operation like this. Even I don't claim to know all of the architectural and operational details, and the few I do know suggest its not as easy a task as it scripts out on paper.

I'm afraid that is called "cheating." You say your answer to the question "should games take us out of our comfort zones" is no, but the only reason you can say that is by admitting you don't believe people should have comfort zones that games can impinge on in the first place. But you don't get to decide what people's comfort zones are.

And if nothing in this game mattered to me, I wouldn't play it. Frankly, to me its bizarre to play a game that doesn't matter to the player at all. I cannot imagine performing any task that I literally couldn't care less about. It actually sounds like a form of psychosis.

I think that's completely irrelevant to the issue of server merges. I think its more likely that CoX goes cross-server than it would shut down servers and collapse the populations. There's no reason to shut down servers: this game is heavily instanced and there's no benefit to collapsing servers that cross-server teaming wouldn't provide equally well. It is, in fact, a superior solution to server merges because servers can maintain their communities while players can cross team with essentially anyone in their global channels. Global channels (and things like friends and supergroup channels before them) have always been the backbone of CoX's commuities anyway, and not shared zones or servers.

They are independent problems so I don't think they are really conflicting. I was trying to imply that the account name change is the one that NCSoft seems to think is the more critical one because it could directly cost them customers that literally couldn't log into their accounts. If we the customers concede that point, it would be a better use of effort to focus attention on ways to alleviate the global name change issues specifically, rather than diffusing attention to both changes.

I would rather they didn't. Frankly, I've never understood how people could be so angry over the prospect of maybe having to change a global name with having all of their character names dictated by a mandatory algorithm.

There are more ways to solve that problem than there are to solve the global collision problem, all of them better than that one.

Suppose someone were to be uncomfortable playing a game where significant amounts of rewards and or content were gated behind objectionable gates. Such a player would be uncomfortable whether they elected to play those gates or not. So the game would be presenting this hypothetical player with a situation in which they were unavoidably removed from their comfort zone.

Which means the question of whether games should remove players from their comfort zone depends greatly on which comfort zone boundaries you're willing to honor.