Arcanaville

Performance enhancing drugs would be an example of purposeful scientific inquiry unless those drugs triggered a genuine genetic mutation in the individual.

Quite so; I shouldn't have said that. Scratch that part.

The question of how a player should pick an origin given a circumstance is a matter of opinion. The question of how the game itself treats the science origin for story purposes is not. Where the two can collide is when a player picks a particular origin for reasons contradictory to the game lore, and they get funneled into a storyline that presumes things about the player's origin that are false. In that case, the player needs to decide if overriding the game lore to pick an origin of their own definition is worth it.

Where to hang your six-shooters when you mosey on back to the outhouse?


This is always an interesting topic when it comes up, in terms of how people pick angles to attack it. For me, I think its obvious that there is lots of overt sexism in comic books, as there is in most pop culture. But who exactly is to blame for that, or rather what the solution to that is, always seems to be more complicated than it first seems on the surface. Yes: women are much more sexualized in their dress and appearance than men in comic books. That's a statistical fact. But then I go to the mall and I find that if anything, the under-20 crowd demonstrates an even *stronger* skew towards sexualized dress between males and females, and I'm fairly certain it wasn't male comic book authors that picked those outfits out for all of those girls. A lot of this is not sexual oppression, but actually sexual norms that are accepted on both sides. And that means while we can see trends, its not so easy to see cause and effect directly.


One more thing. The question of "what changed" between the old days and now came up. I think what actually changed wasn't women themselves, but what society was telling the next generation of girls. In the past, society was telling girls to fit in, to be productive members of society, to obey convention. Under those circumstances, ironically female characters that were professionals or other integral members of the workforce actually fit in with the role of females projected by the culture. There could still be an undercurrent of sexism in terms of the limits of competency of women, but they were expected to be competent, if only to be useful.

Today, and for a long time now, the popular culture message to young girls is: be attractive, be sexual, be daring, be enticing. The female character that has to constantly be rescued is not, I believe, intended to portray women as incompetent. Its actually to portray them as something men want to protect: it portrays women as something attractive to men in a fundamental way. And I think in a way, the subject of women being portrayed as "weak" or "strong" sometimes misses the larger point: that often women are portrayed as objects of attention for men to a much greater degree than the reverse.

That's not always true, and its not always overt, but I think if there is a deep undercurrent of sexism in comic books, its there, not in whether the women portrayed are "strong" or not. And that's not something you just "fix" because its a subtle but fundamental part of the culture that isn't just about sexist male authors, but is about all authors and all readers, even many of the ones that otherwise object to overt sexism in the material.

If you're soloing all the way, yeah it is. If you're running task forces, actually not really. I'm splitting time roughly between a scrapper, a blaster, and a controller (at least at level 50: I'm also trying to level two other alts here and there). My scrapper is in the lead having run like only three ITFs and spent the rest of the time running tip missions at 0x8. She has crafted spiritual radial and Nerve Radial (two uncommons) and still has three components and something like 16 shards. I'm pretty sure I'll be slotting at least a rare the day its released. Very rare, maybe, maybe not, but its also clear to me that the jump from uncommon to rare is much more important than the jump from rare to very rare, due primarily to level shift.

My guess is that all three will have rares slotted within 30 days of release, and I'm going to be a slow poke relative to the more aggressive players.

For a 100% soloer, very rare is a long way away, but rare is within striking distance in a reasonable amount of play, factoring in the fact that everything is slower for a dedicated soloing non-damage dealer. And rare is the more important target than very rare. Very rare is icing on the cake for most players I think. Rare is one that matters.

Although what I'm also finding out is that contrary to what many people assumed - that Alpha (minus level shift) was going to have only a minimal effect on well-built invention slotted characters - that I notice the difference of Alpha in *every* character I slot it in. If nothing else, almost everything can notice the benefit of Spiritual Radial's essentially +14% or better global recharge. That's almost two LotG's buff for what is probably a lot less effort than it takes to get two LotGs, and no slotting cost.

Gonna be interesting when my MA/SR has the equivalent of over 130% global recharge without hasten in the build and aid self is healing for almost 600 a pop, before talking about level shift. And my En/En blaster is spending a lot of time flirting with the recharge cap while solo: she's actually beginning to scratch the surface of Infinite Freem (which is intentional: its actually my goal with that build to reproduce the activity level of infinite freem. Not because its optimal, but just because I can, and its ludicrously fun. Also, because at that level of speed you can almost ignore the effects of mez).


One more thing: if you can make it to rare, the level shift will make it a whole lot easier for a soloer to earn the shards necessary to make very rare. No one who actually builds to solo should be having problems taking out -1s regardless of powerset combination. Or, run at minus one and essentially fight -2s.

Good luck with that version of reality. And I wasn't really guessing. I can't imagine anyone would actually think I was guessing in that context in the first place.

Although I stated this before, I'll reiterate: I concede I do not have a strong convincing argument that a purge is more detrimental than the lack of a purge. So if you're debating me, I don't think you can win, but I don't think I can win either.

But that's not the issue. The statement I made was if it were my decision to make the burden of proof would be on the proposal. The status quo is not an alternate proposal to the person making decisions. The status quo is simply what happens when no proposal is acted upon. You do not go to the person in charge with a proposal and when he or she asks "can you prove this is beneficial" you say "can you prove its not." I don't think there's a game development company that is *that* crazy, except maybe Bullfrog back in the day. More importantly, no company is run that way. The proper response to "can you prove its not" is "no, now get the hell out of my office."

Lets recontextualize with a different subject. Suppose I propose to the devs that they give Power Blast twice its current damage. Is it up to me to prove that's a good idea, or is it up to them to prove to me that its a bad idea? Who has the responsibility in this situation? My guess is that its not the devs.

If your goal is to kick the idea around the forums and see if other players will agree with you, that's one thing. If you actually have any thought of making that idea into a suggestion that could actually happen, the burden of proof is on you to convince the people in charge that it is a good idea. And in my experience its a very heavy burden normally. If you think its an impossibly high burden, well, its not. But its not me holding anyone to it, because I have no power to effect that decision. I'm just pointing the burden out, not creating it for anyone to surpass.

With salvage what can happen is that because of active flipping or tape-painting or whatever, there is a surge of activity at 10k (for example). That recalibrates everyone's expectations: they believe they can get that, and start listing at or around that. But that surge eventually disappears and the demand pressure on that salvage returns to normal. People start seeing fluctuations and realize that price isn't mandatory (they start seeing the 100,10000,100... thing I mentioned earlier). Bids collapse to a low level. You now have a ton of very low bids and activity tends to happen around there. But those 10k asks aren't going anywhere, and remain in the system as long as players don't revoke them. Which means the impulse buyers still have to buy from that reservoir of sales. The lower asks tend to get swept up by buyers quickly.

This usually happens with salvage in which demand exceeds supply, but overall volume is moderate to high most of the time. When supply vastly outstrips demand you get 8342 for sale and no takers, and when volume is low you tend to get more wildly fluctuating (and usually higher) prices.

The devs have more latitude to speak in closed beta, where everything is understood to be subject to change without warning or notice. But speaking on the subject of an important and potentially controversial aspect of future unreleased content would require approval from marketing, production, probably business. Not just to speak, but the actual words used. And the complicating factor is that the precise mechanism for earning the other slots may not exist yet.

I understand people want the devs to come out and make all sorts of promises about the future of the game; I'm simply explaining why that's unlikely to happen, at least in the short term. For all I know the devs are discussing a way to craft a statement about this now. Maybe it will be in Second Measure's February address and he's pacing himself. But its not that NCSoft enjoys torturing its customers; its rare that any company will comment on forward-looking aspects of their future development in that manner. It just doesn't happen often anywhere.

This reminds me of the movie Roxanne:

Exemplary: "My Giant Sized Man-Thing is number one."

Dangerous: "I've had my Giant Sized Man-Thing since I was seven."

Perverted: "I like showing off my Giant Sized Man-Thing."

Commercial: "My Giant Sized Man-Thing only cost me $9.95."

Ironic: "My girlfriend finds my Giant Sized Man-Thing boring."

Disgusting: "My parents used to make me put my Giant Sized Man-Thing away when company came over."

Insane: "I used to be so careful with my Giant Sized Man-Thing but these days I just fold it in half when I'm done with it."

Its fortunate City of Heroes wasn't more successful. If it had more active subscribers, we could potentially have an even bigger problem. I believe WoW has about 240 realms and 12 million active subscribers. That's 50k per realm. If that was analogous to us having 240 shards and 12 million CoH subscribers, that would amount to perhaps as much as five times as many subscribers per server fighting over local unique names. Its lucky for us that we don't have that problem, and have a large pool of former players that no longer pay subscriptions that we can consider for name purging.

Since "Myxlindibbly" is a valid WoW name, they have less of a problem either way.

(Then again, I momentarily forgot which server forum I was posting on. I should probably check to make sure "Myxlindibbly" hasn't been taken yet on Virtue before saying that.)

I mentioned this several times in I18 beta and since, but it bears repeating. We don't know (and even I don't know specifically) that the Incarnate tiers are serialized. We don't know that we have to earn them in order, from Alpha to Omega. Maybe Alpha has to come first and Omega has to come last, but its *possible* that the others do not have to be earned in a particular order. And even if they do, there is the other point that you can unlock the slots without maximizing them, which means you could pursue Common Alpha -> Uncommon Alpha -> Rare Alpha -> Very Rare Alpha, or you could theoretically go Common Alpha -> Common Judgment, Uncommon Judgment -> Uncommon Alpha, etc. We have a lot more potential for diversity and alternate "leveling paths" than linear combat levels allow for. You have to level from 41 to 42 to 43 to 44, and with that unlock what each of those levels allows. And you cannot choose an alternate leveling sequence. You cannot go from unlocking Epic 1 at level 41 to unlocking Epic 2 at 42, then go back and earn slots at level 43. But with the Incarnate system, we have *the potential* for a matrix of leveling possibilities. If we don't really care for the capabilities of Judgment, we could focus on Lore instead. Someone else could decide differently. We could have eight people on a team all with about the same amount of Incarnate abilities unlocked, but all totally different ones. There isn't just diversity in the individual Incarnate powers, but potentially in the order we earn them as well.

This will be less interesting initially, as the Incarnate abilities are slowly released and many of us will have a chance to keep up: we will only have one or two new options to pursue at a time. But this will be more interesting later on, when new alts have all the Incarnate slots to choose from in lots of different legal orders (Alpha probably first, but then who knows).

I need to repeat: I have no inside knowledge about what Positron is scheming in this area. But I think he would be crazy to pass up the opportunity that exists here. Its potentially *THE* definitive advantage of the Incarnate system over conventional leveling in the end game.

I never made any attempt to prove the Alpha slot was soloable. I stated as a fact that it was soloable, and therefore your assertion was false on its face. Lets connect the dots:

You:

TrueMetal:

You:

You're wrong. You said the devs have never before forced teaming to level progress. TrueMetal said they still haven't and they still haven't. The Alpha slot is soloable. The devs have not yet created a teaming-locked progression system. Ergo you're wrong, period.

Will they, in a year, or two, or three, or ten? Its theoretically possible, but they've made no statement suggesting that and lots of statements contrary to that: in beta they stated explicitly that the intent was to allow for a solo path to Incarnate power that would be slower and possibly more difficult than the teaming options. This statement has been repeated often since the release of I19 and even before that.

Its worth noting that in I18 beta, there wasn't originally an obvious soloable path to fully pursuing Alpha. This was considered a failing of the system by the beta testers and the devs acknowledged this, adding the shard system to address that point and stating directly that it was their intent moving forward to have a solo option to Incarnates of some kind. However, they cannot and will not make promises of the precise nature or details of future content not yet implemented. Not just for Incarnates, but for anything. Its simply not allowed. So I do not need to be a mind-reader to state that when you say you want a red name to come here and tell you what the future Incarnate systems will look like as to their soloability, beyond that sort of statement which I've already given you they will not, without permission, be able to accomodate you. Not because I have some great insight into your mind, but because I know the rules under which the devs operate.

I read every word of every post in every thread I respond to. Regardless of length. My assertion stands.

The burden of proof is with the proposal. Always. If you want to change that, ironically the burden of proof is with the proposal to change it.

You don't have to convince me, even if you could. You have to convince the people with the power to change it, all of which will place the burden of proof on you to prove the proposal is worth doing. This is not a debate point. This is a fact. So far, I believe the odds you've managed to demonstrate that are vanishingly low.

You seem to believe this is an argument for which you can score points against me. Beating me wins you nothing in this case. It leaves you still with the burden of proof to demonstrate a purge would be in the best interests of the game. A burden you're free to deny having, but you have all the same.

Understand, I'm not trying to prove to you that your proposal is bad. I'm here to tell you your proposal has no chance of happening without a much better argument that justifies it. That's a subject upon which I have specific expertise.

You're ignoring what I said. I'm saying if I was making the business decision, I have no burden of proof to prove the purge is negative. I'm saying the advocate for the purge has all the burden of proof to prove its positive. In the event of a tie, the purge loses. That is the normal way to deal with any situation with known but unquantified risk, and no proof of positive gain. And that's why the automatic presumption is that the act has no positive gain unless it can be proved. The person proposing a purge doesn't get to assume it has a positive gain without proof.

Again: if you're saying we can go back and forth, the purge loses by your own statement, if it was my decision to make. Its not, and I'm not saying I can prove the purge is less beneficial than the lack of a purge. I'm saying I would have no need to if I were making the decision. This isn't tort where the 51% position wins. This is not a game that has to be made fair. This is risk management where the person without the airtight argument loses, and proposals must be justified, they don't have to be countered.

If you don't like decisions being made in this way, fortunately for you I make no business decisions for NCSoft. However, my experience tells me that my way of doing it is not uncommon.

In theory yes, but in practice the priority was to rescue Star Trek from its death bed, and the 2009 movie did that. If you rolled the dice and made something that the Trek fans would think was intelligent and more "Star Trek" and no one went to see it, the game would be over. You wouldn't get another shot for a decade. You might have also done permanent damage to the franchise. So while its easy to say "it should have been just as enjoyable to the movie going audience, but better" the question is specifically how? Can you be certain that any change you would propose would not have turned off movie goers?

Of all the possibilities that could have happened with the 2009 movie, most of them, the vast majority of them I believe, don't involve a 2012 movie. In that respect the 2009 movie beat the odds.


Here's a related thought. The 2004 BSG was, in almost all respects, a better show than the original. It was better scripted, it had better production quality, it had a better story, it had stronger performances in general, and it had more depth. There is only one area in which the 2004 BSG fails to supercede the original. It has no charm. No one is going to be reminiscing about the remake in thirty years. No one is going to be thinking about remaking BSG2k4 in thirty years. I'll bet its more likely someone will want to remake BSG1979 in thirty years. I would much rather have the original Apollo and Starbuck flying CAP over my house than those two flakes that replaced them: I'd probably shoot them down myself.

I still have warm memories of Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain. I think Michelle Forbes did a good job of portraying Admiral Cain. But I don't have the same iconic memory of Helena Cain as I do Commander Cain. Helena Cain is a morality lesson. Commander Cain is larger than life mythology.

Many fans refused to watch BSG2k4 for exactly that reason. It wasn't the original. It made no attempt to come anywhere near the original in any but superficial ways. Its not my place to tell people what to watch, but in my opinion that was a mistake for two reasons. First, the show was just better, if you gave it a chance. Second: its easy to say "why couldn't you make the show have the same production values, better writing, etc etc, and *also* retain the charm of the original. Why not choose that option. Its not impossible."

Yes: its not impossible. But its asking a lot. More than I think is fair.


Both, and I mentioned many of them upstream for other movies, including specifically WoK.

I can also tell the difference between things that specifically bother me, and things that bother me for more general reasons. Its the same skill I use when on jury duty and when switching between training students on software and beta testing the same software.

Its not like I pattern my training classes after this guy:



On the other hand, when I'm evaluating software and talking to vendors...

I don't think they got characterization badly wrong. I think they nailed Spock. I think they went overboard with Kirk, but not critically so. They got McCoy ok, insofar as he isn't central to the story. But I think they did do something subtly right with McCoy in that unlike Kirk or even Spock McCoy is sort of already an "adult" at the time of the 2009 movie: while we are seeing Kirk at a time before be grew into being James T. Kirk and we're seeing a Spock before he became Spock (if you consider The Cage/The Menagerie proper canon, Spock matured into the more "Vulcan" Spock of TOS over time), McCoy is portrayed more or less as he is in TOS, which makes sense. He's not still in his formative years.

The other characters are much harder to have an objective debate about characterization, because they are by necessity far extrapolations given the lack of strong background material to go on in TOS.


I think TVH and the 2009 movie are much closer together than you're portraying them. But the point isn't that my view is more accurate than yours, but rather that at the time TVH was seen in a similar negative light as the 2009 movie was, with similar complaints by a similar number of percentage of viewers, which decayed over time in a similar way. There's no reason to believe "the fans" were wrong in their subjective opinion then, but correct now.

Archery at ten paces has a difficult to take seriously mental image.

I'm also reminding Nate why he took so long to get a red name. As a producer, every time he says hi, people are going to ask "what do you mean by that?" and then launch into a fifty page thread about why NCSoft wants him to tell us hi, wondering it that's a hint we're getting more hand wave emotes, arguing about whether we're going to have to pay for them in a perk pack, debating the nature of free to play MMOs, deducing that the next issue must be late as a result, grumbling about the fact that the time spent making hand wave emotes could be used to fix PvP, wondering where Positron is and whether NCSoft fired him yet, and something something about the markets. And then I'm going to post something about derivatives or something.

And Nate's going to stare at his keyboard, and cry.


Oh, and since no one has said it yet, I'm guessing "Second Measure" is a reference to the carpenter's rule: Measure Twice, Cut Once. Am I right?

If he did, he's the worlds greatest salesman. Considering that before the 2009 movie Star Trek basically had no future, Abrams got an incredibly good price for it.

Star Trek has changed course and speed so many times that you could say that everyone sold the future of Star Trek for their own personal vision of it. Only TNG can at least lay claim to having Roddenberry's initial approval. DS9 sold the future of Star Trek to promote its gritty scifi vision of the future. Voyager sold the future of Star Trek for a ton of Seven of Nine posters. Enterprise sold the future of Star Trek for a 20-piece chicken McNuggets value meal. Judging as harshly as some Trek fans do of the 2009 movie, very few Trek moves (sic: moves, not movies) didn't cost them in the long run, as directly evidenced by the fact that the long run came to a (predictable) end.

Bottom line: Abrams cannot be blamed for costing Trek a future it was never going to have.


And as I mentioned previously, I believe that to be a matter of highly subjective opinion. Reasonably intelligent movie goers have come to the opposite conclusion. Its not just the "stupid masses" that like the 2009 movie. I had to "turn my brain off" for every single Trek movie, from TMP to Nemesis, including WoK. And WoK itself is a standard no other Trek movie before Abrams has been forced to attempt to equal, because none do. Take TVH, which is often considered the next best Trek besides WoK. What grand moral questions of the future does that present to the viewer? Save the Whales? Its a fun adventure movie, but it doesn't struggle with any big moral dilemmas. Although it too was nit-picked at the time, it wasn't punished for it for as long as some people continue to flog the 2009 movie.

And as I also mentioned, like TVH, the criticisms surrounding the 2009 movie are not growing over time. It comes down to the 2012 movie. If that also does well, and it uses the launchpad afforded by the 2009 movie to tell a deeper story, the trajectory of the two movies combined will I believe silence all but the most hardcore detractors of the Abrams Trek movies. If it doesn't, I'll be the first to criticize the 2012 movie for going in the wrong direction.

Oh: you're right in any case where you're right. Forgot for a second who I was talking to. Carry on.

We need four arms or prehensile feet for my Dual Archery powerset.

You cannot prove the opposite, and I didn't introduce any of "my maths" to the issue. I was pretty direct in saying that without specific numbers that would predict the consequences of this action one way or another, which may not even exist, what facts I do have are enough to make a decision based solely on what will events happen without knowing the magnitudes. The default action when you cannot prove an action will be beneficial is to not do it. If you can prove that the default action when you cannot prove an action will not be beneficial is to do it, you've just proven that the devs should do *everything* that cannot be proven to be detrimental.

People make business decisions based on incomplete information all the time. I do it every day. Its as simple as this: the purge has a chance to cost us future customers. You can't prove it will gain or retain more customers. But I can prove that the purge will not solve the direct problem of people wanting names they cannot have: with very reasonable assumptions you have to conclude that the odds of someone that would have quit if they cannot get a certain set of names actually getting them after a purge (as opposed to another player that also wants those names and may or may not care as much) are low. Ergo, the burden of proof is on the people advocating the purge. Its not on me, were it my decision to make, to fully justify not approving it. From a business decision, the sequence above adequately justifies requiring evidence its actually a good idea.


You're ignoring direct evidence that people who return and find their names purged don't like it. That's not a theory: that's a fact. The only thing that is theoretical is whether that would deter someone from resubscribing, and whether they would mention this fact to other players. And I think there is as much evidence for that as there is for players explicitly unsubscribing due to being unable to find names and mentioning this fact to others.

Both of these seem fairly obvious.


In any case, its not my decision to make so my opinion on the matter means no more or less than any other players. I was simply stating the specific process by which I would make that decision were it my decision to make, in response to the notion that I wasn't taking the proper facts and circumstances into account. I took my personal preferences out of the equation and framed it as a business decision, which in this case I believe it is. And that's how I would make the business decision. In the situation where a decision needs to be made that does not have game design entanglements, you do not need to prove something is bad to avoid doing it. The threshold of evidence to advise caution is low. A reasonable theory that suggests its bad is good enough to stop the process in my opinion. In the face of such a theory, the burden of proof shifts to proving beyond reasonable doubt that either that theory is false, or that the net overall effect of the action is to have a net benefit that outweighs the costs. That hasn't been demonstrated in the case of a name purge.

The term "lowest common denominator" is actually a mathematical term: it means the lowest number that contains all of the factors of a set of numbers. In other words, given a group of numbers, it is the lowest number that still contains all of them as factors. It has come to be used as an English idiom that means the exact opposite of that. Its used to mean the thing everyone has in common. But the thing everyone has in common would be the greatest common factor: the mathematical term that means, given a group of numbers, its the largest number that all of those numbers contains.

In other words, given the numbers 6, 9, and 15, the greatest common factor is 3 (all the numbers are divisible by 3) and the lowest common denominator is 90 (90 is the smallest number divisible by 6, 9, and 15). When people say they are the least common denominator, they are usually trying to imply something like "my skills are so low, everyone can do what I can do." In other words, everyone contains my skills. That would be a common factor, perhaps the greatest common factor, but not the least common denominator. The phrase "least common denominator" has probably come to be used because it contains the word "least" in it.

Basically, the greatest common factor is something that everything else contains. The least common denominator is something that contains everything else. But the phrases aren't used that way: they are colloquially used in exactly the opposite way. And its a personal pet peeve of mine that that is wrong. But if English is not your first language, then you're using the idiom in the same way all other English speakers do. Incorrectly, but identically.


Its interesting how many people assume certain terms are universal when they are not. Years ago I was in a situation where the phrases "in-band" and "out of band" were being used, and more than half of people for whom English was not their native language had no idea what those phrases were intended to mean. Its not that they didn't understand the words, but their languages did not use those phrases to mean what they mean in English: they used completely different terms that even when translated to English to me made equally little sense.