Arcanaville

Well, I play on Triumph, so my opinion is more valid than yours. That's just how we roll out there in pantsless drunkville.

Triumph has its own brand of drama, but I don't think it has more drama. Only connoisseurs that can taste the nutty smoked oak of a fine red could possibly tell the difference between Triumph drama and anything else drama.


On the subject of the OP:

1. Leveling is going to be slower than DCUO, and faster than most other MMOs you've played. Its pretty fast in the early levels, slows down to just fairly fast in the mid levels, and then slows to a not bad pace in the late levesl (40+).

2. The game is alt-friendly. You have quite a few character slots per server, and you can buy more if you want to load up characters on a single server. And if you switch between alts, you'll get increased benefit from Patrol XP: for each day you are logged out, you will gain a benefit of double-speed progress on that character for one "bar" of XP (10% of a level) up to a maximum of one level of acceleration. Conversely, you can actually turn off XP if you want to slow down and run more content in your level range without outleveling it.

3. Gear is not as big a deal here, as others have pointed out. I will say that gear, in the form of invention enhancements mostly, will allow you to theoretically create far stronger character than the baseline, but that level of strength is only important in corner cases: if you are a performance hound, then you can do amazing things with gear in this game. But the game isn't balanced around it: a team of decent players playing a mix of character types with nothing but standard enhancements can do basically any group content in the game.

Of course, massively invention-slotted players can often *solo* most of the group content in the game, so its up to you which way you roll. PS: the Scrapper forum is the unofficial min/max forum, for historical reasons, although every forum for every archetype in the game tends to have very knowledgable players that can help you make the most of your character.

4. Virtually everything can solo. Some things better than others, but nothing needs to team to progress in the game. Everything can, with enough effort, level by soloing or level by teaming or both.

5. As others have mentioned, this game is heavily instanced. Shared zones can look emptier than other MMOs. Echoing other's recommendations, join the global channels for the server you are on. City of Heroes' community building is through chat channels, not random encounters in the street.

6. Also as others have mentioned, this game now has an end game system that is just now being developed and deployed. It revolves around more difficult and more raid-focused content, and a new powers progressional system called the Incarnate system. You may find a lot of heated debate over it on the forums now, given that its new, however overall I think the system as a whole is a pretty good one, and one that will be interesting for the majority of players to explore once they reach the standard level cap in this game (level 50).


Also, given what you said about frame rates, I'm going to guess that you started in Praetoria. If you're at max settings, Praetoria's outdoor zones can bring even fast video cards down to mere mortal frame rates, and those rate rates tend to then bounce into the stratosphere within instanced missions. Praetoria is the most recent area added to the game, and it was designed explicitly to show off the latest enhancements to the updated game client rendering engine, called "Ultra Mode." Dialing down your settings from maximum may help frame rates substantially if you are seeing slow downs specifically in the outdoor areas of Praetoria.

In the same way that heroes can thwart villains and return the game to the status quo, villains can thwart heroes and return the game to the status quo. Its a little trickier to write, but not impossible.

Well, its nice to know I'm only being mentioned specifically because ... I'm first in alphabetical order?

Also, I could have sworn my first post in the thread was about my experiences in zone PvP during CoV beta, and I can't find it now. So my one post that was precisely dead on topic seems to have been either deleted or somehow eaten by the forums. That's ironic.

Aid self accounts for about 15 seconds of additional time in the above calculations, PB about 6 seconds, Hasten about 4 seconds. That's 25 seconds of delay in the calculations. Build up is tricky because it depends on how you calculate around it, but in the above example Build Up accounted for over 16 seconds of time you were not dealing damage. That's 36 seconds of time with no damage.

That plus the 95% tohit chance can theoretically account for about 17 dps of the 25 dps discrepancy, depending on how the calculations for Build Up were incorporated. The difference is just 8 dps, which is often accountable by the occasional lag glitch and by not queuing attacks with perfect mechanical consistency.

I don't recall that happening to me, but now I'm going to go see if I can *make* it happen.

That would fail to satisfy my statement "regardless of slotting." Its trivial to make powers recharge in half the time assuming no slotting or external buffs.

I don't know how to cut the recharge of a power in half given non-zero recharge buffs, and this is not a trivial hypothetical. During a balance discussion I had with the devs once, the question came up as to whether it was possible to do this. No one could think of a way without resorting to very exotic means outside the current capability of the game engine.

No "trick" in #2: as I said, I have no idea if this is even possible given game engine constraints without tampering with the actual mechanics of recharge.

I'm curious to know if there is such a person as the head of the security team at NCSoft, or if some random Joe got assigned the job of implementing a FACTA policy or something.

If your name is on the credit card that was used to pay for everything, that might be very helpful to your cause. As far as I'm concerned, the person that pays is the person that owns.

It was after they changed MoG, and the thing they eventually did was the one thing you didn't suggest to my recollection: turn it into a very short term defensive buff with no crash.

If I remember correctly, over the years you suggested changing it into a burst +regen, keeping the +Def but losing the +Res/-Health, keeping the -Health but allowing heals, reducing the recharge to I2 levels, adding +health, giving it an offensive buff, and turning it into IH and changing IH into something else. Also, after Willpower came out, turning it into an SoW variant.

Also, MA's not actually fixed yet. They need to fix the crit proc in Eagle's Claw because it suffers a timing problem. And I'm still not completely happy about the status effects in the set. It still lags a lot in that area, which really should not be because its intended to excel in that area.

Well there's your problem right there.


Just say he's dead or kidnapped by aliens.


Ok, I'm not actually advocating lying. I'm just saying if it was my master account locked out, I'd find a way to get it unlocked somehow given all available options open to me.

Oh, I've been ******** about this stuff since day four of the beta. I was the one begging on my hands and knees not to release the AE with custom critters basically forced to be extreme in all cases, because there was no lower setting originally. You haven't seen sad until you've seen a granite tanker vaporized by just a bunch of minions packing Rage and Energy Transfer because there's no way to turn either power off.

The scariest thing you could have seen while testing an AE mission in beta: a room that looked completely empty, and as you walked in you suddenly heard a screeching sound coming from all around you in every direction. That was a mission that someone decided to use Ninjitsu in, and you were hearing thirty stalkers pop build up before hitting your team with triple strength uninterruptible assassin's strikes from stealth.

One of the things I would have done is separate the act of "uploading" an arc which would have made it playable by others, and "publishing" the arc which would have made it listed and searchable.

I suspect if you don't care about "random strangers" you're not one of those people writing to be played by random strangers: you're writing for yourself, or maybe friends. I would have allowed such players as yourself (assuming I'm correctly pegging you here) to upload an arc and allow you to give people the arc id so they could play it by invitation. Only if you wanted your arc to be considered by the larger playerbase would you click a "publish" button which would add it to the lists of possible arcs players see when they search the system.

If, on the other hand, you want to write for random strangers but don't want to hear from them at all, I believe you are probably in the very small minority.

Try PMing the community reps that are posting in this thread: Avatea and Beastyle. They might be able to put you in touch with someone that can help you.

I don't speak hypothetically either, unless I explicitly say I am. Its worth noting that saying "I would prefer the devs not spend time working on a solo path, I would rather they prioritize other things" is not intrinsicly inflammatory: its just a personal opinion. It is *no different* than saying you'd rather they *did* prioritize a solo path to the detriment of everything else they could be working on.

Its only when someone says all other personal preferences are intrinsicly wrong that there is a problem in my opinion.

I trust also you can see that suggesting my view is "idealized" implying yours is more closely aligned with the truth is an example of the kinds of implicit attack I've been talking about. What I said happens "generally" "often" or "most of the time" I'd be prepared to prove statistically if I was asked to, to the limits of what the forums would allow.

The great irony being, in the past I *used* to actually do that, to my detriment. Its surprisingly easy to dismiss an argument on the forums by accusing someone of clearly spending too much time constructing it. That charge has, in the past, been saved almost *exclusively* for me, beyond just TL;DR.


Statistically speaking, I think it would be even easier to demonstrate that while what you say happens pro forma, not much effort is placed beyond saying by fiat that those options wouldn't cause problems. Its *said* problems wouldn't occur, but not why. If "many" people do what you describe, it would be easy to find "one" that did. While I cannot say no one ever did, I cannot recall one recently. If you can, please provide a link.


Honestly, I don't browse S&I as much as I used to, but I agree suggestions have always been dismissed far more casually than they should have been. I used to try to combat that, but I was literally a drop in the ocean.

That is no excuse for propagating that fight into every other discussion of an issue.


Nor should you. Complaints require no knowledge of how to resolve them. On the other hand, direct comments *about* the development process do call into question a poster's knowledge and credibility to make statements about that particular field.

Once again: from direct experience. People complain about how certain things work all the time and suggest changing it. Quite often, the problem is that their actual understanding of the thing itself is faulty. Its not enough that they say they want X to be fixed or changed. They feel confident in saying *how* it should be fixed, or dismissing suggestions the problem is a little more complex than they are giving credit for, because they just know it should be easy. If I was willing to out players, the list here would be extremely long and encompass years.

If you don't know the mechanics of the game, don't complain about specific mechanics you don't know. Describe your problem in terms you can actually back up. If you don't know how MMOs are written, coded, designed, or implemented, don't address those topics. If you do, your ignorance is fair game. If you stick to your observational complaints, I have no problem with that. I'm not saying others won't, but they'd be wrong.


I'm going to prove that virtually no player has clue one what is and is not hard in this game. Which of these things is harder than the other:

1. Make all players unrooted in PvP.

2. Make all player powers recharge twice as fast in PvP, regardless of slotting.

Answer: I know how to do #1. Step by step, change by change, I can do that if the devs asked me how. Trust me: if you think this is technically impossible even if you are a red name you're probably wrong**. On the other hand, I have no idea if #2 is doable at all given the limits of the game engine, even with large amounts of development time short of rewriting the way recharge works.


** BaB bet against me on power animation customization, and he ultimately lost, obviously.

It doesn't matter in the sense that public opinion on dev motives is not controllable. The problem for me is that ironically the AE is not a comsumption-focused tool. It actually focuses on authors too much, and worries too much about the concerns of authors and not enough about the concerns of content consumers. If the AE focused architecturally on ensuring that the players have the best possible chance to play the best possible arcs, good writers would flock to it and bad writers would be weeded out, and for me that's the best of all possible circumstances.

Instead, the focus was on making sure *everyone* could be an author *without any work or thought* and the players had to deal with them all. That was a foundational mistake: the authors should have been given the best authoring tools possible but that's it. They should have not been protected from a playerbase that might not want to play their arcs.

Dev's Choice and the star system are both symptoms of that foundational mistake. And it seems like no writer at Paragon stood up and said "you get tickets when other people play your arc, but its really hard to read feedback and comments. That's backwards. Players want rewards for everything they do, but as an author I believe authors most want to know what people like and dislike about their writing."

I don't think I'm misrepresenting the desire of most authors in general too badly there.

What you're saying is that it doesn't matter what do, if they don't do what's on your list they've "given up supporting."

Also for something they are ignoring completely, they seem to be breaking a lot.

I note how you phrase it: "it will be interpreted as." I honestly don't care how people interpret dev actions and intents for the most part. Its not like public opinion on this is ever correct more often than random chance would dictate, and usually actually far worse than random chance would dictate. I can agree with you completely that the Dev Choice thing has been mostly a disaster, that the devs fail to provide the proper non-mechanical support to the AE, that they seem totally unable to use it as a community building tool when that is actually supposed to be part of its intended purpose. They've never used it the way it would have the best benefit. You don't score points with me by exaggerating the problem to say they stopped supporting it, which will only prompt me to correct a blatant falsehood that isn't even necessary to illustrate the intended point.

Why contaminate a powerful objection with a trivially easy to disprove error? I'm not so much asking you personally, as I'm wondering aloud.

Actually, what I said was that you have a weird tendency of getting what you want without the devs ever actually implementing anything you ask for.

I wouldn't say that. They can only work on so many things at once, and end game is taking up a lot of the mechanical attention of the devs. Working on end game *and* standard content *and* major advances to the AE would be a bit much, and even if they managed to stretch themselves out that far someone would just complain about something else they "no longer support."

The last major game mechanical change they added not related to side switching or the end game was the XP adjustments for custom critters and the AE ally code. *And* they did go back and adjust custom critters specifically to deal with the melee underscoring players were concerned about a month later. Support is now just adding new maps and critters and things, but that's what time currently allows for. They clearly haven't abandoned it completely.

I wouldn't describe it that way. I don't think the Patron choice itself is an error at all. There's nothing wrong with making the player make a choice, and that choice irrevocably alters the course of their content. Some content like that is fine.

It *was* a mistake to lock Patron power pools to that choice, because it created a major imbalance between the hero side and the villain side. The hero side had options for respec of epic pools, so that players could alter changes in decision about those. Villains could not. That was an important distinction. If villains could reselect a patron and run that arc to open the other patron pools, that would not be so bad - it would be a more advanced version of running arcs to unlock hero-side 30ish stores. But that made the two elements have incompatible requirements: Patron pools require the ability to redo, Patron arcs wanted a single choice. Linking two game elements with opposing game design requirements was a third, meta mistake.

The Lore pets are a completely different error in my opinion. They are taking something very fundamental to a specific kind of gameplay - pets - and making them a fundamental part of the Incarnate primary abilities. They have to know that many players pick archetypes other than controllers or dominators specifically *because* they don't want to be the Beastmaster. That's true to a degree its not for any other kind of power. To me, that's an error in judgment.

Its compounded by another error: providing one and only one possible origin for the source of this power. In effect, Incarnates are overriding all origins and all backstories. However we became what we are, how we become Incarnates is being written by the devs, and only the devs. We have absolutely no choice in the matter. That is a *cosmic* error for a game that sells itself on its open character creation capabilities. That's almost as bad as making it so that when you unlock Alpha and slot a power, your costume changed into an Incarnate uniform, because all Incarnates have special uniforms in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. No matter how brilliant a story teller you are and how amazingly you justify that in-game, your brilliant writing destroyed a core critical element of this game: visual customization of characters.

On a far lesser scale, no matter how brilliant the writers think they justified Lore, and frankly I believe I'm extending a lot of benefit of the doubt there, it doesn't matter if it takes away something critical to the game, which is at least *some* control over our characters intrinsic nature. If Venture doesn't want to be a necromancer, the Lore pets need to give him an out. Given that they figured out a workable way to do that with the combat pets (my energy blaster takes the glowing blue ball and calls it a day, no matter what the thing thinks it is, its a glowing blue ball following a girl that shoots energy out of her hands: that's workable), I would think it was worth the extra time to figure out how to do that with the Lore pets.

Keep in mind: this is coming from me. I generally defend the devs when it comes to story telling latitude, and when it comes to the game lore having a say over the mechanics of the game. *Some* of that is important to immersion: there have to be rules, and the story rules and the game rules should align. But in my opinion the Lore pets cross a line that shouldn't be crossed without sufficient justification that I can currently see.

All I'll say about that is that you started off by saying you don't think its as one-sided as I claimed it was (when I didn't actually say it was one-sided in the way you mean), then concluded by saying you know most of the instigators are actually on the other side. That's the sort of thing writers tend to not notice, but (emotionally invested) readers do.

What I said was that when it comes to indirectly attacking players by commenting on the devs its far more likely to come from the side that opposes the devs first, simply because its far easier to indirectly attack players by attacking the devs than it is to indirectly attack players by praising the devs.

People on both sides of issues directly attack each other all the time, but that wasn't what I was commenting about. I was talking about the case where people who don't intend to add fuel to the fire do so sometimes without fully appreciating it.

"The devs would have to be complete morons to abandoned the end game, because its completely stupid to have the game just stop and given level 50 characters no way to continue advancing. What sort of retard would develop an MMO that way?" Have I just insulted Positron, or you? *That's* the problem I was trying to illustrate. If I say "Sam's a marginal nut for not playing MMOs the way God intended" there's no confusion about what my intent is. You know I'm directly attacking a player, and I know it, and there's no opportunity for me to mulligan that one. I can't say "you started it: you're the one that had to go be nuts, I'm just observing." But a lot of threads polarize when the dev-opposed side attacks the devs for doing something a lot of other people like, in a way that denigrates those players for liking it, and then thinks the counterattack is a first strike, when its not.


That too is a vast oversimplification. If someone says "I would like more options" only die-hard trolls would attack that, and they tend to get called out on it. The problem I observe is that many (not all) people who ask for more options believe its impossible for adding more options to ever be problematic so long as the resources to add it are theoretically available. In other words, they believe its self-evident that the only reason not to add an option is that there's no one available to add it to the game. Other than that, its a cosmic law that adding options - any options - is axiomatically always good. So when someone says there might be a problem, *that* is perceived as an irrational objection by definition. It *has* to be an irrational objection, because no matter how smooth sounding it is, adding options cannot be wrong. So its just irrational, and there's no need to prove that. I get that one all the time. What's striking to me is not that I get that all the time, but that the very objections I often make end up being perceived as nonsensical right up to the point when they actually happen. Having called bullseyes on that repeatedly, I'm not really given very much slack the next time. I'm just accused of being opposed to anything the devs haven't already done.

The Lore pets specifically have complex entanglements people are glossing over. Personally, I *hate* the backstory of the Lore pets. I don't want to be, as Venture put it, an Incarnate necromancer. However, that's besides the point. *If* the Lore pets are what they are because of a backstory element that is entangled with the future storyline, and that future storyline itself dictates downstream content, then changing it isn't trivial. Even *adding* to it isn't trivial, because it can cause ripple effects in downstream content if the backstory has to be changed. This isn't always easy to spackle over. It might have been a mistake to even *have* this kind of dependency in the first place, but now that its here its not self-evident that we can just look the other way and do whatever we want and ignore the downstream glitches that occur.

I used to say this about BaB, but I think its equally relevant here. Players think there's two possible motivations for the devs: do what makes sense, or do what the players want whether it makes sense or not. However, the players are ignoring a rather inconvenient fact. The people who believe the former tend to become game developers. The people who believe the latter tend not to. If you don't have strong convictions about how things should be, you're far less likely to choose game design as a career. And if you don't have a sense of professional integrity that says there are things you will do and things you won't do, you're far less likely to be *hired* as a game designer.

BaB used to take flak for saying "I could do that, but it would be ugly" and players would say they didn't care. But BaB cared, and anyone who becomes a professional game animator is likely to care. People who don't care what stuff looks like at a visceral level aren't likely to be animators. Similarly, we can tell the devs to just reverse course and cut out of the game this horrible error, and if that causes problems elsewhere so be it: the problem is too unpalatable to care about that. But the most of the designers there will care. The writers will care. We may disagree violently with the way they are taking the story, but while we can try to convince them to see why its going the wrong way, we cannot ask them to not care. We can ask Positron to place a higher priority on design elements of the Incarnate system we think are more important, but it seems he thinks is less important. But we cannot ask him not to care about resulting collateral damage if changes are made.

People often say the customer is always right, and even people who purport to be professionals and business executives say this. I don't doubt they believe it. However, the customer is not the most important thing to a customer support professional. I cannot speak for Paragon Studios, or anyone else for that matter, but I can say that for myself, the most important thing about being a customer support professional is not the customer, its about being a professional. The one thing I will not sacrifice for my customers is professional integrity. Lots of people *would* sacrifice professional integrity for customers. That's why big accounting firms no longer have consulting arms, and why there are a lot less big accounting firms period.

The devs will try to do what they think we want, but they won't do what they think is nonsensical, even if we think its perfectly acceptable. And we cannot ask them to not care about that problem. *If* the problems created by rewriting the backstory of the Lore pets doesn't have these kinds of entanglements, *then* I'm all for changing them. I'm even all for changing them if there *are* these entanglements. But I acknowledge that *if* these entanglements exist, changing them may not be a trivial process. It may delay Lore indefinitely. And that means asking for "more options" isn't free from substantial collateral damage. In asking for more options, we can be in effect asking to take away the option to have it at all from many players for a very long time.

I don't ask for such things lightly, and neither should anyone else.

No commercial antivirus software is perfect when it comes to malware. Especially web-injected malware. And unless you're using a rootkit-specific scanner, if rootkit malware slips by one day, you're AV isn't going to find it once its infected.

I'm unlikely to be hacked: even if I was, even my personal computer is behind an enterprise class firewall with non-stop logging of all the traffic in and out of the system. I can theoretically be infected by a keystroke logger, but it can't possibly talk to anything with me knowing it. But I don't think all of my defenses combined are perfectly impenetrable. That's actually *why* I log all traffic that leaves my system: I have to assume eventually something will get through.

Yes they did, and I did, and that was the challenge question I was asked. Interestingly, it was also a dog question. However, that was not universal, and the system did not recommend creating an obscure question to my recollection. It was, however, better than the current system which forces you to pick one of their questions.

Modern systems that honor best practices these days present a variation of this prompt:

* Please enter a special passphrase that can be used to authenticate your account. Please pick a passphrase that cannot be easily guessed.
* Please enter a reminder phrase that we will send to you to ask you for your secret passphrase.


The infrequent use creates a separate problem: namely that for people who's IP addresses change on any kind of frequency, the odds are good that they will have to authenticate *every* access. That's a problem because the authentication system is not supposed to be used that frequently. If it is, its no better than a password. Its supposed to be something used only rarely and when necessary, but if its essentially used every time you authenticate, its equally exposed as your password. That's a problematic design because it violates the intent of an authenticator challenge.

If you don't have professional experience working with and designing these systems, you make mistakes. Obvious mistakes to a professional and vulnerable to attackers. Anything that can break your password will likely break your challenge phrase when both are always used in conjunction. Ergo, this is a system design error.

I cannot stress enough how extremely hazardous it is to design and implement systems like this without professional guidance. I could have told them this would blow up in their face. And I could have told them that for the cost of inconvenience, the added security would be relatively small. And I could have told them better ways to do it that wouldn't suffer either problem. And so could any other competent security professional. This is not normal forum debate fodder. This is not really a matter of debate at all. This was either non-professional overreach, or professional malpractice. There are literally no other possibilities.

I'm guessing no one at Paragon had anything to do with this, and I'm guessing no one in Community had any involvement in this except to be told to handle damage control. My guess is that my assessment here isn't likely reaching the eyes of anyone that did this thing. There's no one here to beat up over it. Still, its annoying: someone out there thinks they can do this better than a qualified professional, or a presumably qualified professional needs to retire. Both equally annoying to me personally.

Maybe Laurell K. Hamilton stealth plays.

I've only been a security professional for about seventeen years now, so its possible the developers of Aion know something I don't, but I'm having difficulty with the concept of evading a keystroke logger by making the player type more keys. Seriously: that's going on a slide on my next presentation as an ice-breaker joke.

If you want to thwart keystroke loggers, there are ways to do that. In fact, there are keypad entry systems that exist today for high security environments in which the keys don't have printed numbers: they have LEDs behind them that randomly move the numbers around so that the keypad is different every time you use it. Why? So that its not possible to guess someone's PIN by either looking over their shoulder or by looking for fingerprint smudges on the buttons.

Similarly, if you want to thwart a keystroke logger, just make the player type different keys every time they want to log in by making them do something that requires different keys. Something as simple as asking them to click on one picture on a screen out of many different pictures that are randomly displayed would thwart all keystroke loggers I'm aware of. Only a video session recorder would beat that, and if someone has hijacked your computer and is video capturing your session and relaying that over the internet without your knowledge, just send them all your money now and save them the trouble. Whatever you did to piss off that guy, you're screwed.

So yeah, one way for even City of Heroes to evade keystroke loggers, assuming any large hacking group is even targeting City of Heroes, is to change the login screen so that it has name, password, and a bunch of pictures of different critters: Malta, CoT, Carnies, Family, Nemesis, etc. To log in, type name, type password, click on your favorite critter, and in you go. Keystroke logger defeated. Make sure X wrong guesses locks the account out so they cannot just keep guessing pictures randomly. Not secure enough: make players click two. Do the same thing for master account login on the web site, and you're done. Or use the other technique: print letters on the pictures, and make the user type the letter(s) of their favorite critters in a third blank.

This would take me all of an afternoon to code (for the web: for the game, it shouldn't take more than a day or two, SCR or no SCR), and poof: no more keystroke logger problem. And it would be actually more secure than what was actually implemented. Because I'll bet the security questions are easier to guess the answers to collectively across the entire playerbase than these visual captchas would be to crack.


By the way, I have no personal ax to grind here. I got home, authenticated my computer, remembered the original answer I gave to the security question provided, and passed the captcha. So I'm not saying this entire thing is questionable from a security stand point because I'm pissed off I'm locked out of something. I'm fine. I still think this is not kosher.

I'm afraid the NDA prevents me from specifically commenting on where the Rikti monkeys shoot out of.