Chase_Arcanum

and you're surprised by this?
This is not just an online forum. It's an online GAMING forum.

Well, technically... he chose the gun-toting western lass over the catgirls, so I think we can say that, while he considers catgirl-attraction a "pro," Cowgirl > furry

Now we just need to find out where ninjas & pirates fall in his metric.

12. Three bottles of Tequila. Start drinking. Next thing you know its 3-4 days in the future. Note that this method of time travel is unidirectional and it somehow doesn't seem to affect your wallet*, which is never with you when regain your temporal grasp.


*Sometimes pants aren't affected either.

I had a chance to talk to an SOE developer a few times and he suggested that some things, like this, are "awesome features that players will never see again" because of the behind-the-scenes lessons learned from them.

Some of them were preventable:
1) people started making things, from buffs to weapons to armor, that was far above anything the devs expected possible. They (incorrectly) balanced the system so that the ingredient quality during any given time wouldn't make "uberitems" but they didn't expect people to hoard the best ingredients from previous cycles to mix with the best ingredients of future cycles. Remember the faction armor in the game? That was supposed to be some of the best possible armor in the game.

Craftable armor regularly exceeded that with double the resist and half the encumbrance. Not that encumberance mattered- similar issues with buffs meant that people had stat buffs that made any "balance" armor penalties useless. Heck, many of the game's most fundamental balance complaints that led to the "NGE" can be directly traced to how the game's mechanics didn't stand up to the realities of the items users were crafting.

The takeaway could have been "use different calculations to keep craftable stats within game-balance parameters" but instead it was mostly "use pre-defined item stats that can NEVER go above what will balance within the mechanics."


2) Reinforcing that takeway was the issue that custom items brought to game performance. In an MMO:
- the less data a server needs to calculate an activity, the more activity (users) that same server can support.
- database calls take time. The more you can do with data already cached on the server, the better your response rates will be.

If everyone logged in to the game uses "gun number 3" then the game only needs to cache the performance characteristics for "gun number 3" once and refer to it every time.

If everyone is using a unique gun with a unique serial number and its own stats, then either we have to allocate a LOT more memory on the server for tracking all these items OR we need to track the serial number and look up each record in the database every time its needed (requiring more time).

You can sometimes address these issues by throwing more money at the servers, but you reach a point of diminishing returns not to mention that increased monthly operations costs mean leaner profits from monthly subscriptions.

It didn't help that the game was drowning on its database issues. One rather candid statement from said developer was that their database didn't scale to even 1/10 of the transactions the vendor said it would... and that lack of scalability didn't get detected until launch.

---

So, yeah, obviously the game had issues, but while the crafting system was awesome, it was also a HUGE contributor to the problems that plagued the game in general.

Many aspiring MMO developers look at this and declare "... but these issues can be contained. they can be managed. You can learn off those failures and MAKE IT WORK" (insert mad scientist laugh here).

Veteran MMO devs that have suffered through a launch or two are more reluctant. "Things are insane enough leading up to launch, imagine what it'd be like if something THIS complex had issues on top of it all..." Then, despite the Post Launch Stress Disorder, they think about how awesome it'd be if it DIDN'T have issues... and they can't stifle a nervous mad scientist laugh as they start to scribble down their ideas....


Someday it'll be done again. It'll be glorious. It'll be spectacular. It'll be Awe-inspiring...

...and even if it blows up, it'll be spectacularly glorious awe-inspiring explosion that'll leave yet another generation of developers laughing like mad scientists.

So... the more she dies, the more she levels up?

hmm...
... I think I've got a friend that plays the game using that same mindset. It would explain so much....

Yes, but you can tell the story many ways.

There's no reason why the end of Praetoria couldn't have included self-contained story arcs that give other views of the war. You can tell hundreds of different stories set within WWII, some epic large-scale battles and some much more personal encounters. Each of these stories can stand alone by themselves, or they may even hint toward the events that occurred in other stories elsewhere without making them interdependent.

In fact, that's pretty much how we handled the previous dimensional war's storytelling (RWZ). While the Task Force & MSR kinda cap off the story arcs from a leveling-perspective, participation in only one of these playstyles provides a relatively self-contained story and a different window into the events that comprise the event.

I'd take this as a hopeful sign that it might be available sooner, but then I noted the lack of any "hint in meme form" accompanying this post....

The wording was a reference to Zwillinger's "Soon" scale... by Snow Globe.

So, not this week, 2-4 weeks out. 2 more Tuesdays in March, making this likely an April release.



EDIT: Apparently Clockwork01 needs his own "Soon" scale... or needs to fact-check with Snow Globe before posting....

I don't know.

A task force would be OK, but I don't think it should be to "set up for" the DD Itrial.

All three- the arcs, the task force, and the trials- should be entirely self-contained stories that don't lead into one another. They can reflect different facets in the battle against Mot, but when you make one lead into the other, you leave a lot of people feeling, " if you want to finish it, you gotta do something you don't like to do."

I'll suffer through the occasional large group event or task force when I'm in the mood for it (and when my schedule permits it) but if I'm doing story arcs solo, its either because I want to experience the story or because I want to be solo. To get to a part in the story where I have to either leave a story unfinished or do something I'm not in the mood for, I tune the whole game out and go do something else.

I'm not that discouraged by the pace of the rewards... granted, I've never raced to 50 so my expectation on leveling rate differs from many. I just hope they continue to add to the story that's available to the non-trial-player*... maybe even go back and look at the Praetoria arcs again. I can easily see an incarnate story arc that could accompany each trial "framing" that trial in more context while remaining independent of it.



*I prefer not to use the phrase "solo player"- I team with my wife and a few friends. I just don't have any interest in spending my time in the large-team events, where I've always felt the game's strengths start to fall apart and its limitations start to become more apparent.

Agreed. Realistically, you can make a character that's anything you want if your in-character interaction with others is low.

I don't get to roleplay much, but I tend to approach an MMO as if it was a form of collaborative storytelling. We're all bringing something of our own creation to this world and, at its best, we're reading and reacting to others' stories while continuing our own. This is essentially the crux of roleplaying, and while I don't get to participate often, I create each character as if the potential to roleplay may appear in any encounter. I want them RP-ready even if I don't ever get a chance to.

Interesting.

Many of my characters have existed in some form or another outside of City of Heroes-- in GURPS worlds, in Champions Pen & Paper, in a homebrew rpg made with friends, and even in some old MUDS. Some of them never were anything more than NPC notes in my GM notebook that seemed interesting at the time. Even the "totally new" characters often end up carrying elements of these precursors.

When I decide to use them, I try to re-imagine the character to fit the current game's lore and at least tangentially tie them in to that lore at some point. I don't care so much about playing MY Fenore as first envisioned, I care about creating Fenore as she'd be if in the City of Heroes universe. None of mine really are critically tied to the universe as a "THE" within the lore, but they all are different than they'd appear elsewhere because of the lore.

--
In another sign of our differences, I generally avoid any reference to cross-dimensions, time travel, or alternate realities in my characters' stories... even if the game world supports such concepts like CoH. I don't judge others that do, but these mechanics tend to tune me out more than trigger my interest.

What?

It was a very dirty & nasty-looking container....

Yeah, the "big red ball" has been a long LONG running request. This fits quite nicely.

And it does open up a lot of possibilities, too:
- like the "give a christmas present" gift before it, this advances the tech for letting 1 player grant another player a tray-based temp power (not just an automatic buff).

• They could, theoretically, made a "animal control" secondary set for masterminds that would let him bestow guardians on his teammates (give a dog whistle to a teammate, they can call out a dog pet at any time). Same goes for "robot guardian," undead guardian, etc...
• They could come up with a "1 man armory" power that, when used, grants weapon-based temp powers to all teammates. Imagine your gun-totin merc hero passing out his killing toys to all his teammates.
• You could have incarnate powers that, rather than buffing yourself, lets you bestow a power on others. (If we're becoming more godlike, its rather common for gods to bestow gifts on the mortals loyal to them).
• You could see a trial that has a "keep away" element to it- whoever has item X has lotsa aggro from nastybadass x. If he kills you, he gets it and gains a buff, so pass it to a teammate before that happens.

Any such "bestowing a power" tech has the potential for exploits and holes in the tech that do bad things, so trying out the concept in more limited and less exploitable form (gifts, flying discs, etc.) to see how it pans out, how it is received, and what else needs done to shore it up.

You keep on informing the misinformed.

As their numbers dwindle, I lose a valuable source of comedic enjoyment.

Please stop.

crap! I did forget about the eight and a half barrels of monkeys!

Has anyone seen them? Has anyone been feeding them?!?!






... Did anyone remember to poke some airholes in those barrels?




umm...




... how about I throw in thirty seven gophers and a hairdryer and we just forget about the monkeys.

6 camels, 14 pies, 4 oxen, 11 rai stones and a buttercup. Give or take an american shorthair or two.

Keep in mind that in one of the episodes, the "skull of Tommy Arcanus" was taken. It was stated there that the Obelisk wouldn't absorb Numina's powers since they're inherited. This was implied to be a disappointing dead-end, but maybe Mr. Wade just wasn't forthcoming to Malaise in what he REALLY wanted to learn from that encounter...