BellaStrega

But in my experience, the dev's choice arcs I've tried have been fairly good. I actually named two above.

I agree.

Two or three days ago, I saw someone use another poster's early registration date to claim that said person didn't actually play CoH until this year. What?

So far I'm working through the dev's choice arcs - I've found Phantom of the Abyss and Saul Rubenstein's Discount Task Force to be fun - there are others, but I'd have to log in and look at my souvenirs to check them.

There is an MA subforum under player help, too, and there's a thread for people to suggest arcs for dev's choice inclusion.

I've played a few other arcs that aren't HoF or DC, but are still good - but those fall under the "Have to check the souvenirs."

I've mostly been playing the official CoV missions, with occasional MA breaks.

Not more mine than theirs, but I do think it's utterly ridiculous that posting about WoW somehow makes me an outsider here. You're reading too much into what I said.

I'd feel the same if this were said to any other poster, although I might have different reasons for many. I'll just say that when someone is telling anyone who's made contributions to this community that they don't belong here that it's a ****** up thing to say.

I also think you misunderstood the point of stating that post counts are irrelevant - multiple posters tried to deflect and derail actual discussions by making said discussions about the number of posts the person they were arguing with had made, and not the content of any particular post. The entire point of arguing that post count and registration date don't matter was to get people to stop the personal attacks and actually deal with the substance of the arguments they were trying to attack.

The premise is broken because history does matter - there's a reason people generally don't agree with Johnny Butane's balance suggestions, why they pay attention to Arcanaville's math, and why they read Fulmen's posts about the market. But if someone who hates the market sees Fulmens' posts and asks "16,000 posts? Do you even have a life?" in response to Fulmen's detailed breakdown of Frankenslotting IOs, how does pointing out that this is irrelevant ad hominem also extend to his history and reputation as an informative and helpful poster? The whole point of bringing up his post count is to negate his history and reputation.

I already explained this.

It sounds like you're taking issue with the arguments in the past that post counts don't matter in order to make a false analogy that "if post count doesn't matter, then neither should reputation." This is a meta argument I'm not going to have with you. The premise is not just flawed, but utterly broken.

Post counts are irrelevant, as are registration dates. On the other hand, poster reputation shouldn't be.

However, being as I'm partly responsible for what happens to your title when you hit 10k posts, I kinda think that someone telling me to get out of their forum is more than a bit hysterical.

Not that it's my forum, either, but you know, at least I left my mark.

Does no one remember their history?

I don't care a lot about rep - it's really another forum game. Unfortunately, one in which people will take out their passive aggressive shots, but still). I think that the negative rep is a bad idea, although people will still throw insults and invective into positive rep if they have no other option. You should've seen what one guy did to Brad Wardell's rep on his own (Galactic Civilizations) forum.

This I agree with.

And this!

I did some math, and I didn't come to the same conclusions you did. Also, you might notice that royalties are tracked separately from revenue for the games themselves, and you can also find the actual sales numbers so you can see how much revenue for each game comes from sales.

It looks pretty likely to me that there's still over 100,000 active subscriptions, and I think you're simply inflating this other stuff because it's more important to you to be right than it is to be accurate.

Sure it is. And Wikipedia self-corrects because other people flag and re-edit the more biased entries, and citations are added so you can follow up and learn something. Except of course when you disagree with it, then it becomes "You used wikipedia? IT'S ALWAYS WRONG." It's not that wikipedia's unreliable - it's not. It's that it's inconvenient to your goals.

This is only a sidetrack because you're wrong about the subscription numbers, and of course you can only offer further assumptions to support your initial assumptions, and the real numbers are not friendly to either.

It seems like all the anecdotes so far involve people logged in from the same IP address.

Wikipedia is not a disreputable source, and the actual number was easily confirmed by checking NCSoft's reports (linked from the citation on the wikipedia page).

This isn't a university classroom. No one here is writing a doctoral thesis. Since Wikipedia's number happens to be accurate, referring to it should be good enough - but because people have this inane idea that since Wikipedia is user-maintained, everything on it is automatically wrong (rather than potentially unreliable), this canard gets trotted out to derail the discussion.

You seem to be biasing the income heavily toward box sales and microtransactions - to the point of assigning nearly 47% of CoH's quarterly income toward income that doesn't actually increase subscription time. What you're proposing is that subscribers are spending (and still spending now) an average of $14-15/month on microtransactions. While I do think people are buying the costume packs (1 time fees), character slots (repeatable), and story arc slots (up to 8, so max $25 if you buy them one at a time), I'm not sure that people are buying them - on average - at quite that rate.

Also, a lot of box sales go to existing players, who buy them for the bonus items + additional month, as it's cheaper than buying both separately...and extends their subscription time.

The spike in Q1 also coincides with the "subscribe for 14 months for the price of 12" offer last December.

I don't believe there's any concrete evidence that CoH subscriptions have dropped below 100,000, let alone that far.

Yeah, I never say this stuff if I haven't done my homework. There's a reason I produced specific numbers - it's because they're available.

Per NCSoft's Q3 2008 financial report, there were just under 125,000 subscribers in September, 2008. Per Positron, subscription numbers experienced a "significant uptick" after the addition of the mission architect.

In August 2004, NCSoft announced over 180,000 subscribers.

Also, every press release or other announcement from a publisher about subscription numbers explicitly excludes trial and inactive accounts.

It's not hard to find these numbers. Google is not an arcane technology hidden away for only the elite to use. Just look up "city of heroes" "subscriber numbers" or "population" and you'll find the number of subscribers at various points in the past five yearsdocumented.

Edited to point to the NCsoft quarterly reports, rather than wikipedia. Stupid clipboard.

From the Q3 2008 report, monthly access:

Sept 2006: 172,420
Sept 2007: 139,313
Sept 2008: 124,939

Going earlier, I can find December 2005 at 194,000 - notable as the first report after City of Villains was launched.

I notice you identify the problem as "scaling to infinity" but you try to sell the idea that threat management scaling to infinity was not itself a problem.

What you're saying is that tankers should have better control tools than controllers. After all, if controllers can only lock down 16 mobs (and even then not 100% of the time after the controller changes at the same time), and tankers can hold aggro on as many mobs as necessary, you still have a problem.

I find it interesting that you think that a fireball only hitting 16 people is more realistic than mobs being more likely to spread their attacks out among multiple targets. Also, a common complaint about threat control is how it artificially forces mobs to attack one person.

I don't believe you. Maybe you believe you, but I've seen what this playerbase does. Give them a tool and they'll find a way to push it as far as it will go. Herding, AE farms, burn patches, you name it. If you give back unlimited aggro control, tankers might not pull entire maps, but they would pull huge fractions of those maps and then have blizzards, rain of fire, and tar patches ready to go because pet-spawned things don't fall under the aoe target limit.

I guess a second tanker might have helped...

Seriously, though, while I won't say it's necessarily impossible to have different aggro caps for different ATs, I strongly suspect it's not designed to bend that way.

This isn't the fix that will make everyone love tankers more.

I just gave y'all the opportunity. You have to seize it!

Mocking my post count is so 2005.

Besides, my year and a half away from the game gave everyone else a chance to catch up.

If they use it and they're transgender, that's their business and choice. I don't think it's reasonable for you to tokenize them like this in this discussion ("I have transgender friends and they think it's okay!"), because we only have your word for what they might think. I also presume you and the OP probably aren't transgender. Your joke simply reinforces the idea that transgender people are undesirable sex partners, or maybe punchlines who drive heterosexual men to anything from disgust to murder upon discovery.

I'm not sure what relevance your comment about "which way the transformation was going" is supposed to have. I don't think it changes the context of your joke.

And seriously, I realize you're trying to offer helpful advice to Lucretia and that you're probably a decent guy, which is why I'm offering you some advice and trying to treat you like one.

A), B) Whatever you make your character look like, it's not your fault if another player comes on to you in a creepy, sexually harassing way. No one should be forced to limit their characters' appearance options because of creepy jerks.

C), D) Since creepyguy has already crossed reasonable boundaries, I think it's kind of funny that you'd suggest only politely asking him to stop or simply not talking to him at all...