Arcanaville

If EU records are being imported into US authentication servers, its entirely possible that the amount of work to convert EU account names is vastly lower, which means if you're only choosing between changing all US collisions or changing all EU collisions, the EU change is the preferred one on the tiebreaker of amount of work.

Doing it case by case would require someone to come up with a bunch of rules designed to handle all of the special cases, and that would increase the number of people who would object to one part of the system or another.

If you define impact as "hurting the people with the least amount of subscription time" then its possible to further reduce impact by focusing on those players. On the other hand, targeting the very players you just recently attracted to the game is not an obviously more logical idea than targeting the customers in the best position and with the most experience to deal with a disruption.

You can make a solution that is obviously better to you. You cannot make one that will be obviously better to everyone else.

Changing mine to US_Arcanaville would be doing no favors to the EU Arcanaville, if one exists. But I believe that only account login names are getting the prefix, and globals are being changed to the first character you log in after the change, with letters being dropped from globals to make them unique. I can imagine all sorts of potentially weird occurrences from dropping a letter from the end off of the right name.

I'm not in favor of deliberately making life difficult for the game developers (steals time from game development), but I also believe programmers should properly handle edge cases. I wonder what would happen if a EU player signed up for a bunch of trial accounts setting their global name to be one letter progressively removed from their global handle or one of their character's names and then logged that in. The collision algorithm would progressively knock them down to nothing. I wonder what you get set to then? @GiveMeAFrickinBreak would have been my choice.

That's silly. Everyone knows user records aren't stored in SQL rows, they are stored in LISP objects.

I'm long aware of Sam's general viewpoint on this subject, but I think when it translates to the general question: should games take us out of our comfort zone I think Sam is talking about the idea generally applied to all players, and not just himself personally. Its unclear if Sam is asking the question "should games be occasionally uncomfortable" or "should games be occasionally challenging" and its not clear if Sam's definition of "challenge" itself includes the notion that to be challenging something must be at least a little uncomfortable. Not everyone agrees with or is even aware of that particular definition of challenge.

So there is the potential for a semantic blurring here. If Sam is asking whether games should take us out of our comfort zone as individual players define their comfort zone for themselves that's one question. If Sam is asking whether games should do what it does when it happens to remove Sam himself out of his comfort zone, that's a different question, but not the question I think Sam is ultimately asking.


Also, asking "should games take Samuel_Tow out of his comfort zone" is a much stranger question to put up for discussion. Although EvilGeko would probably say "yes."

I think the best response I have to this is to point out that you're conflating "challenge" with "discomfort" when that's not universally true. For example, I don't mind being challenged. Game challenges do not make me uncomfortable, and thus they do not by themselves throw me "out of my comfort zone." My comfort zone doesn't require a lack of challenge. In fact, the total lack of challenge can be itself slightly uncomfortable, because it makes gameplay perceptually more tedious.

Because players like and dislike different things, "comfort zones" aren't bounded by difficulty levels precisely. They are in some cases, where players define their comfort zones by levels of difficulty. But I think most players do not do so strictly.

Should games deliberately remove people from their comfort zones? Well, if they signal up front that they are that kind of game, sure. Just like there are movies that pretty much signal right up front that they are intended to make the audience squirm. That's legitimate when its honest. But it is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Its a thing, like choosing superheroes or orcs, instancing or shared zones, gear or no gear, leveled or levelless combat. Its just another decision to make in terms of the kind of game you want to make.

However, there is a caveat. There are some things that a good game should do, if it aspires to be a game and not just a past time. *Some* gameplay challenge is embedded in the very definition of a "game." When that coincidentally violates some players' comfort zones, that's unfortunate but also should not impede the progress of the game development. There is a balance between what the players want and what the game developers want to make. If this game decides to be a superhero game and not a fantasy orc and elves game, that's not up to a vote. Similarly, if this game chooses to pick a spot between Sandbox and Fear Factor and decides that's the appropriate challenge spot for the game, then while that is partially negotiable I think at some point the developers of the game have to make a decision and stick with it. Waffling is penalized far more harshly in the long run than almost any disagreeable decision alone.

Although I have no knowledge to say this is happening, I am assuming that the server list merge is, besides a logistical simplification, intended to ensure any game-wide feature is propagated to the entire player population. The fact that EU players will no longer have to have separate dedicated test and preview systems is of course one such effect of the merge, but I would not be surprised at all if cross-server activities were already on the whiteboard being kicked around for some future update.

Again: no backstage knowledge of this, but it is the logical deduction I'm making.

Never assume you know the technical details of a game change. People are almost always wrong, usually in ways they did not expect, but that's the point.

And when I say "almost" I mean "always." If I bet against every player asserting a statement like the above, I would own the game now.

Incidentally, almost certainly what is happening is the EU accounts are being migrated into the existing NA authentication servers, so it is in fact a merge of EU data into the NA databases. Its not, as you put it, an abstract merge into some new list, because the devs are not likely creating all new authentication systems for the merged systems.

That's neither here nor there in terms of what should be done to correct collisions, except a warning not to venture into areas you lack first hand knowledge of, because it cannot in any way help express your opinion on this issue.


That wasn't what was being discussed at that point. What was being discussed was the number of players being affected per Zombie Man's comment, quoting and reacting specifically to this statement in the OP: "We determined that this was the lowest number of users that would be affected by this account name change." with the reply "Wow. Major math/logic fail. If there are one hundred EU players in conflict with NA players, then there are one hundred NA players in conflict with EU players. Your 'determination' reached a false conclusion."

Zombie Man assumed that the only options being considered were change NA account names or change EU account names, and either way the same number of players would be affected. However, a third possibility is that the devs considered an option presented in this thread, namely to change *both* account names involved in a collision to be fair. But that affects twice as many players.

The link is a rolling update page: the status of Daini at the time was already confirmed to be basically stable, although its good news that they achieved a cold shutdown the reactor was already known to be shutdown with a functioning residual cooler.

For those not aware, the difference between "shutdown" and "cold shutdown" has to do with the way a nuclear reactor works. The primary fuel is uranium or plutonium, and it reacts by radioactive decay to produce heat. When the reactor is shutdown, moderators are used to absorb the neutrons emitted by the fuel, preventing them from producing chain reactions. The fuel stops chain reacting and producing heat, and the reaction shuts down. However, when the fuel radioactively decays, the decay products themselves are generally highly radioactive themselves, and they also decay (break down) to lighter elements releasing heat. When a nuclear reactor is shutdown, it takes hours or days for the left over decay elements naturally produced by the fuel when it is reacting to break down sufficiently so that they stop producing heat themselves. During that time, the reactor is no longer producing energy, but must still be cooled because the secondary heat can still be strong enough to damage the reactor if its not removed. When that heat is no longer being generated in quantities high enough to need additional cooling, the reactor is said to be "cold shutdown."

For all the reactors in question, this is the state they are trying to get them into. However, once they are shutdown, have no significant meltdown issues, no longer have steam overpressure issues, no longer have risks of hydrogen explosions due to uncovered cores, and have auxiliary residual cooling systems functioning correctly, that reactor is effectively no longer a threat. Its just a matter of waiting the few hours or a day or two for the reactor to cool.


Daiichi is going to be problematic because they had exposed reactor cores for long periods of time and may have partially melted down. When fuel melts down, it can separate from control moderators and continue to "burn" through nuclear reactions, generating excess heat and thwarting efforts to bring the reactor core under control. This exposure and resultant heat also the cause of the hydrogen explosions: when the reactor elements are not cooled by water they can superheat and oxidize with the steam taking up oxygen and generating free hydrogen gas. That's the source of the hydrogen in the hydrogen explosions at the nuclear power plants in Japan.

Maybe it just refers to the fact that the devs feel like they've been working on it forever.

When Reflexes, Invuln, and Regen were first introduced to that game in the beta, they were just regular old powers. That you could take like any of the attacks. Meaning you could take all three. Its kind of hard to put this into perspective, because the two game systems have differences in the relative strengths of critters, and typing is totally different. My best estimate for the combined strength of those three at the time was imagine if there was a power pool available to blasters in City of Heroes, and one power offered 75% resistance, one offered 40% defense, and one offered 1000% regen, and they were all passives. How many blasters would you expect to take anything other than all three?

This is why that game now has a passive slot: to force you to take one and only one. I had only one comment at the time: don't bother testing that, because there's no way we're getting it. Just have fun with it until they overhaul it. I still don't know how that got off the drawing board. Then again, I don't know how Gigabolt got off the drawing board either, and that made it all the way to live and beyond.

Schismatrix posted the same IAEA update above.

Inactive trial accounts I would tend to agree. Inactive conventional accounts are another matter. I'm inclined to agree that it is a problem if returning players find they cannot log into their accounts, and aren't around now to know exactly what happened. I just called NCSoft's security circus a bunch of monkeys for violating a rule I'm not going to hypocritically look the other way on, and that is you can't arbitrarily state that if the player isn't active now, they are the best people to shift the burden of account name changes to.

Of course, having thought about the problem a bit this afternoon, it occurs to me that this is significant:

This suggests to me that you will still need to *know* if your account is an NA or EU account, even after the merge. And that suggests to me that this could have been solved by prepending NA and EU to everyone's account name invisibly. If everyone checked a radio button on the game client that said "EU or NA account" the game client could have prepended the correct prefix for you. This would be something you would only have to set once unless you have multiple accounts both ways: the game client would remember this setting in between authentications. And everyone has to be able to answer this question, particularly the EU players because even after the merge if they somehow forget they have an EU account they won't be able to apply codes correctly.

This doesn't solve the problem of global handle collisions, but it does solve the specific problem of people potentially being put into a position of being unable to log into their accounts. The system would ask EU or NA, and then ask for a log in. Somehow I doubt European players will suddenly forget what continent they live on, and even if they do, they second guess will be the right one. The prompt to identify yourself as NA or EU would in effect be a permanent reminder in the game client to returning players that you now have to specify this. It would in effect be asking everyone to prepend the appropriate prefix without actually having to tell people to prepend the appropriate prefix, and returning players are highly unlikely to be confused by the new question. The issue of global name collisions is an issue of losing access to a chat handle, not being unable to even log in at all, and is a lower priority item to attempt to preserve in my opinion from a customer support perspective. It directly addresses the issue Zwillinger identifies as the critical issue from NCSoft's perspective.

Power. CO has damage mitigation passive powers, not powersets. I believe they adapted some of the mechanics from the HERO system, although they were not allowed to actually use the HERO system directly (they didn't buy it or license it, they just bought the conceptual IP).

Damage mitigation mechanics in CO is incredibly rich, and the powers that use them are balanced incredibly badly.

Incidentally, CO Invuln was bugged at release. It was supposed to mitigate a fixed amount of damage per attack, then a fraction of the rest. Instead it mitigated a fraction of the damage, and a fixed amount of the rest. That little mistake made Invuln, oh, about three times stronger than it was supposed to be vs all content except for Archvillains and Cosmics.

Someone pointed out that little mistake, but never got an acknowledgement about it, *or* the PFF blocking balance error, *or* the Defiance r^2 balance error, *or* the Regen strength calculation error. I can't imagine who would go to all the trouble to test damage mitigation powers like that with exactly zero feedback on whether their tests were even matching the power's design requirements. Sounds kinda stupid if you ask me. Now.

Right now they are deducing a water leak because they seem to be losing liquid water faster than they are pumping it in. But its possible the rate they are pumping water in is lower than they are estimating because of high pressures in the reactor. If the containment vessel is leaking, and there has been a partial meltdown of nuclear fuel, the leaking water could be contaminated with radioactive material which would be a far more serious problem than the relatively small amount of radiation being released with the steam venting. They would then have to attempt to take steps to see that radioactive fuel particles do not escape the reactor building or premises. A combination of a fuel-laddened water leak combined with a hydrogen/steam explosion like they have been experiencing would become a serious radioactivity hazard for the entire area.

Still not Chernobyl, though. Keep in mind Chernobyl didn't just explode, it blew out its reactor exposing the core, which then caught fire sending radioactive smoke plumes high into the sky to contaminate huge areas downwind from the reactor. It would be locally very bad for the surrounding areas, but probably not a global or long range radiation problem. A containment vessel leak would make this a much more serious problem than Three Mile Island, though.

I don't know if this is possible right now, but if I were in charge of this system I would have instituted a policy whereby new global handles could not be created if they conflicted with either side, and that policy would have been effective as of the first of this month before the merge became known to eliminate that possibility specifically. I wouldn't have initiated the merge before technology to make that restriction possible was created.

The quote you're quoting and then responding to was my response to Zombie Man asking this question:

I'm not sure how what you're saying above is relevant to why I posted the quoted passage. My response was the logical factual response to Zombie Man's question.


Once again, leaving aside what would be the most fair, if you're asking me the direct question of whether I would be angry if the situation was reversed, then I would be forced to disappoint you: if the situation was reversed, I would be advocating for the lower population systems that were being merged into the higher population systems to take the primary renaming effect, including myself. Because I am not in that situation, I'm not advocating for a minority group to accept an effect I myself would not be subject to: it would not be fair by my definition of fair. However, if I *were* actually playing on the EU servers at this moment, I would feel perfectly free to advocate for the EU global handles to be renamed specifically *because* it would then be affecting me directly, eliminating any potential conflict of interest.

And its not like I'm just saying that either: I've voted that way more than once over the years. I'm always more comfortable advocating a sacrifice when I'm explicitly in the group of players being asked to make it.

I'm not sure what specifically you're responding to here, because I did not specifically state otherwise.

The mechanics of Invulnerability in Champions Online works this way. Invuln blocks a fixed number of *points* of damage per attack, and then a certain percentage of the rest.

This means, and I think this is clever but tricky to balance, that a large number of things plinking weak attacks at you are far less dangerous than one strong target shooting a few really high damage attacks at you, which is a gameplay feature we don't currently have in CoX. It means defensive super reflexes is characteristically different than resistive Invulnerability in a way even average calculations cannot encapsulate. And I actually like it when things cannot be easily quantified and compared, forcing people to pick what they want, not what other people tell them is mathematically optimal.

As a general rule the game tends to steer away from functional costume pieces except where necessary. There are legacy ones such as granite armor, and special cases like Shields. But the devs would rather, most of the time, make power armor costumes and powersets with different unique effects that distinguish them significantly from other existing powersets and let players mix and match to the best extent possible.

Right now, there is no actual power armor powerset, but we have armor-like costumes and there are conceptual justifications for mimicing the (defensive) abilities with Super Reflexes (defense, recharge, movement speed), Invuln (resistance to physical damage, defense, enhanced health), or Shield (if you can incorporate an actual shield into the design of the character). Even Willpower might be a potentially valid choice.

If none of those really match your concept for an armored set, you should consider tackling the question of why none of the other options appear suitable, think about what *abilities* you want powered armor to have, make sure tat list is sufficiently different from all other mitigation sets, and propose that. That way, other players could take that powerset and realize other concepts besides powered armor, and in general that's a better way to provide options to the rest of the players.

Actually, see my post above. The "fair" solution as proposed by Tyger affects more players. Tyger's proposal is a perfectly valid one, but it affects more players. The announced one has an air of unfairness in targeting just one set of players, but it does affect less players which makes the statement above valid. Of course, renaming all the NA accounts rather than the EU accounts affects an equal number of accounts, which is the minimal number.


Once you start discussing "fairness" absolute rules start to get fuzzy. Should a veteran account with six years of history that went inactive just a short while ago because of the recent problem with the master account validation system lose their global to someone who signs up in a month, to use your example above? There's a lot of special cases that are easy to propose and challenge any renaming system.


"The European players that are affected by the chat handle collision will receive a global name change. This name change will only be offered to the players affected by the automatic name change."

Leaving the issue of fairness aside for a moment, I'm not sure what you mean by this. The only difference between the currently announced system and your suggestion is that in the current system if there is a global name collision the EU global name is renamed, whereas in your suggestion both are renamed. In neither case is support staff directly involved with global or account renaming, and in both cases players would have to rename if they chose to. The only difference is that NA players may need to rename as well to remove the NA prefix, and if the EU player chooses to exercise a rename there exists a possibility they could reacquire their original global handle if they perform the rename before the NA player. In all other respects, players still get "lumbered" with renaming. Its just that with your suggestion, an equal number of NA and EU players get affected, but also more players are affected by definition.

Alternatively, maybe at least some players that thought this game was explicitly designed for and targeted at their specific personal preferences were wrong. Maybe, as I've been saying for years now, this game was always and obviously designed to be something for everyone, not everything for someone.

I'm more or less fine with the end game as a whole, and I don't particularly feel like I only like the game by coincidence: that I'm not a part of its target audience. I think I'm a small part of its larger market. I also think none of the people who are currently unhappy with the end game are any larger, more central, or more important part of that market than I am.

The side that is unhappy is not the side that the game was intended to make happy, or promised to make happy, or focused on making happy. The side that is unhappy is the side that is unhappy. That's all.

You're conflating non-linear progress with reward options. If I earn 10000 influence and I spend it at in-game stores, there are lots of potential things I could buy, in lots of combinations. But that is not non-linear progress, because the progress part was the part where I earned the 10000 inf, not the part where I spent it. We progress in levels by earning XP, not by picking powers. Its the difference between the one option we have to unlock capes, and the multitude of capes we can choose to use.

The progressional parts of Alpha itself are the components we earn to craft Alpha abilities. Its not the actual abilities themselves: those are rewards for progress. Because the shard system is blurring the distinction, its easy to overlook the fact that different activities generate different progress even in the Alpha slot: different task forces earn different components which are useful in different Alpha trees. The Notice of the Well is linear: at the moment there is only one way to earn it, and there's only one kind of it. But the components (many of them) are tied to activities, and that means different sets of activity generate different progress in different Alpha trees. In I20, this will extend to a limited degree to the other slots: different activities generate different progress in different slots. This is not something that exists with the current progressional system, because all activities that generate progress generate the same progress towards the same goal of earning the next level. Because there is only one flavor of XP, there can be by definition only one kind of progress in the standard game.

And that's what generates the need for differing currencies. The need for differing progress from differing activities. And that is completely different from any set of options we currently have in the standard game or the enhancement system. We can choose different powers or different enhancements, but all roads lead to the same choices. And its not the number of choices that makes progress non-linear, but rather the number of different ways to progress itself.