Arcanaville

I don't think Castle was supposed to mention the UI team. You're not really cleared for that information. In fact, I know people in production, in QA, in programming, in design - heck, I probably know people you've never heard of whose primary job only involves communicating with other people you've never heard of. But not only have I never talked to someone who would admit they were on the UI team, I've only heard the UI team referred to as "them" as in "its up to them" or "we'll need to pass this on to them" or "I wouldn't stick your hand in the cage too close to them." I haven't even ever had a dev say "you'll have to take it up with them" probably because NCSoft's workplace liability insurance only covers full time employees.

I once asked a red name if it was possible to change the design of a UI panel. All I was told was "it was them." We then spent the next several PMs trying to figure out if we could change the entire game to match the panel instead. Drugging Positron and making him give orders while unconscious sort of like Weekend at Bernies came up as a legitimate possibility. I think it has something to do with being at the crossroads between art and programming. Its an extremely turbulent interface that attracts dark and powerful forces.


I tend to think of them as a cross between Wolverine and Jabba the Hut. They are the best at what they do but what they do isn't always pretty. And if I told you half the things I've heard about them, you'd probably short circuit.

This is a test, right? I mean, if he stops listening to the players and does whatever he thinks he's right, there's someone already waiting to complain that he listened to you, right?

I'm on to this game.


This why I keep telling Castle that what he should do is take his priorities from the lead designer, allocate resources and schedule time with the producers, listen to feedback from the players, discuss the plan with the powers team, and then just do whatever I say. Its simple, and its consistent.

Good luck with that.

When critters shoot me, I would like to be prompted to accept the damage.

Ah, that seemed to me to be a post-production effect, because if nothing else I think its otherwise missing frames of animation. The landing especially seems like an abrupt transition at the end.

But what would be the point of taking time to put floating triangles on something in a video where the floating triangles don't actually mean anything.

My guess is that the devs were shooting video of themselves with test characters they made that had some special powers added or turned on to make filming easier, like some AV's resistance power that was strong enough to make them basically immune to most mez and damage. Someone forgot they had it on when they shot that sequence.

Or they could have even *used* an AV when shooting the scenes, demorecorded them, and then replaced the model for the final video, which replaced the character model but forgot to replace any lingering power effects, which caused the purple triangles to continue to appear. Potentially useful if you're shooting video with the Kronos Titan or Dr. Vahzilok in it.

In part two of the Prelude to Going Rogue series, the devs will touch on how City of Heroes is a quantum leap in entertainment rivaling the invention of the written word and Bejeweled, cures erectile dysfunction, is the best hope for peace in the Middle East, and is Chicken Soup for the Gamer Soul.


Also, Eagle's Claw. Just, Eagle's Claw:


Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!

Its gear, but I didn't say the game didn't have gear, just that it wasn't as focused on gear being critical to progression. And with the invention system, you can basically opt out of the gear rate race by the 30s if you want to, because you'll have non-expiring gear that is no worse than level 50 SOs by then for very little actual cash. Especially if you frankenslot stuff few people want: I was playing around with some low level alts over the weekend and finding that there are a lot of inventions you can get even in the teens that are relatively inexpensive and would serve nearly as well as a full complement of SOs would (level 20 dual aspect IOs give an aggregate 32% bonus: 16% to each of the two aspects assuming Schedule A attributes).

The great irony of the invention system is that its better for *both* gear fanatics and people who don't like gear. For those that do, there's plenty of pursuit items in there. For those that don't, there's plenty of non-expiring non-breakable superior-to-the-standard-stuff enhancements in there that let you exit the gear hamster cage fairly early in the game. I've found builds that just slot whatever you come across or happen to buy as you go along, that end up at level 50 with a hodgepodge mix of level 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 inventions play perfectly fine compared to pre-invention SO days. Better, in many cases, in fact, and for about the same or less total expenditure overall (including basic selling of drops).

Player pet powers are, in fact, flagged to ignore recharge "buffs." Specifically they are flagged to ignore recharge strength of any kind, which means both buffs and debuffs should have no effect on those powers. Which means the pet is essentially immune to recharge buffs or debuffs of any kind (even unresistable ones).

Fiddling with the caps has issues. For one thing, players are not the only things that summon "pets" and changing the caps on pet-type critters would make all such critters immune to all recharge debuffs. That might have unintended side effects.

The game engine has no knowledge of the difference between a "buff" and a "debuff." Its just all strength changes. In fact, what we call a "mez protection buff" is actually a power that reduces our mez state to a negative number. We only call that a buff because we would prefer the number to be low than high (mez states above zero mean you're mezzed). We don't normally say that illusionists "buff our hold protection."

From a technical perspective, I think Eve Online does an excellent job in communicating complex game implementation issues to their game community: better IMO than Paragon Studios does. However, the CSM is, I believe, a special case scenario. First, I don't think its necessarily all that much better in terms of communication than just PMing the devs here or seeing them in person at a Herocon, something *every* player can theoretically do either of as opposed to going through representatives. Eve Online is a larger game, though, with more complex game mechanics in certain respects, making such one to one communication more difficult than for City of Heroes.

And I think representative councils are extremely dangerous things to contemplate. Even though Atari bungled their first attempt, I think no matter what they did they would have gotten significant blowback from players asking why they had to go through intermediaries just to "make their voice heard." I think a similar problem could happen here if PS tried to make a player council. Eve has a player community that is socially primed to accept structures like that, given that the game is heavily focused on such player organizations. The stellar council is just a social extrapolation of other Eve player social structures. There's no such similar template in City of Heroes for that sort of thing, and it isn't therefore necessarily going to be as accepted.


I'm not that familiar with the CSM's operations, but I suspect we have more access to Paragon Studios than the CSM does with CCP.

Actually, I think the devs strike a far better balance between listening to their players without being overly reactionary towards them than I've seen in most other MMOs.

Listening is not synonymous with obeying.


Actually, I do agree with this one at least in general terms, but that doesn't really in any way contradict the quote.


But its an MMO that has in many ways (for good or bad depending on who you talk to) discarded many MMO tropes that were considered canonical when the game was first released in favor of ones that are more consistent with its overall game concept. Its far more solo-friendly and far more solo-centric than is considered even healthy by many MMO observers, for example. That is something that is far more consistent with the comic book genre than the standard MMO playbook. The game is far less focused on gear for progression than most MMOs are (not unique to CoH, but you can almost completely dispense with gear in any form and still get to 50: SOs would put you generally well within the standard difficulty level of the game). It is still the standard bearer for player-driven as opposed to performance-driven appearance customization (functional and representational gear and outfits as opposed to "costumes").

It could do a lot more, but I don't think its fair to ignore how much CoH has bent the classic MMO rules to get to where it is now. Its something easy to take for granted.

I have to admit it did cross my mind as well. Of course, we don't actually know what that other guy said to him when he reached that group.

More importantly: when is BaB going to make that one-handed "eat pancakes while axe is drawn" emote.

So: Paragon City is evil, then.

I consider myself a highly ethical person, and if I was in the room when this offer was proposed I would have voted for it in a second and not lost a moment's sleep over it.

I would have warned everyone in the room that this sort of backlash was possible and even likely, then voted for it anyway. And not because I would be looking to grab every last dollar of cash I could find, because I don't get a percentage of NCSoft's sales numbers, but because I think it would be best for the game.

Someone is probably thinking "is it best for the game to piss off its players?" Frankly: some of them yes. You can't please everyone: anything you do will piss off someone. So the mere fact that someone somewhere will get mad is an unavoidable fact. I believe the number of people that this angers is more than compensated by the marketing opportunity to build interest in this game. I don't relish the thought of angering existing customers, but I would have still made the same call they did.


Suppose Microsoft came to NCSoft and offered to make a Going Rogue edition of Windows 7 that would come with the game preinstalled and put it in every store that carries Windows on its shelves. But what they wanted in return was to give to their customers a special power that would allow them to kill me in game no matter what account I was on and what character I was playing. The Kill Arcana Special Edition. I would think they were completely retarded if they *didn't* do it. By comparison, giving GameStop customers a few mid-level enhancements is a trivial advantage over my own gameplay.

I just hope BaB makes me some nice death emotes if that ever happens. Which of course everyone else would get to have in the Arcana DeathPack for only $9.95.

Not only have I never witnessed a civilian starving to death, some of my heroes haven't had a bite to eat in years. With all of the superadyne in the water, cosmic radiation in the air, and mystic auras flowing through the city, I'm not even certain the sun going supernova can kill the population of Paragon City, much less have anyone be killed by something trivial like not eating for a year.

There really isn't a server tick that is 0.132 seconds long: its really the weird interaction between two different ticks (ticking at about 30/sec and 8/sec) that create that illusion. But its a little white lie that will work for the purposes of doing ArcanaTime calculations.

In theory yes. In practice since nearly all rooted animations are less than 0.3 seconds longer than their power's cast time, that's unlikely.

Hail of Bullets roots for 4.37 seconds and has been set to zero cast time for certain technical reasons. But its impossible to get its recharge time down from 120 seconds to less than 4.37 seconds. I am currently unaware of a power that could actually recharge fast enough to be castable immediately after its animation concluded that didn't have zero recharge time to begin with (i.e. travel toggles and things like combat jumping).

"Bacon is Meat Candy."

The good news is that one of the Incarnate abilities is a power that will allow the caster to permanently steal everyone else's powers in a blast wave of mutagenic radiation that will sweep across the planet incinerating everyone in its path as it rips the power from their bodies and leaves whithered husks in its wake.

The bad news for you is that I'm getting it first. Personally though I think that is a small price to pay for having a truly awesome effect in the game.

Will you defend the red names in the future when the players demand answers and the red names either stay silent or say that they don't know or cannot say?

Clearly, I'm overdue to make a new alt on live.

There are plans to take up the topic again in October.

There's this other subject of discussion called "the internet" and one of the most heavily debated topics in it is "can you ever please those lunatics?"

It was probably one of the most heavily analyzed topics of the late eighties and early nineties.