Chase_Arcanum

Wow, I never woulda guessed that I'm MY company's analogue to Black Scorpion. I do the exact same things.


... which REALLY confuses the people here that have no clue what Kheldians are....

Eh, the comment was more directed on how odd it is to focus on one body element when others are so out of proportion...

I can't quite make out the knee in the screenshot provided but:

- The length of the foot is often cited as 1/6 to 1/7 the height of the body.
- From below the foot to below the knee is 1/4 an average person's height.

Generally speaking, this would suggest that two foot-lengths should exceed the distance from the bottom of the foot to the knee. Virtually all feet in CoH would actually fit two below the knee, so the larger feet are closer to that particular proportion than the smaller ones.

I still find the witch (and the bridal) feet to be my least favorite....

Of course, if you go by normal human proportions, the ration of the length of the foot to the length of the leg is probably MORE correct in the witch's boot than in the others, but we've been so conditioned for the game's rather long-legged style that it throws us off.

I dunno, they all look like they'd be rather painful to walk in, let alone fight.

... as is your right.

Exactly right.

Some facebook games are closing and people are preparing lawsuits trying to reclaim the cash value of all those virtual goods they bought using the logic:

---------
The developers said we owned the stuff we bought.
That makes them our property.
They reside within the game, meaning our property is entrusted to the game's care.
The developers are closing down the game.
That destroys our property.
The devs thus destroyed our property- the property with real dollar value.
The developers need to compensate us for that property loss.
---------

Now, as silly as that may sound to some people, in the REAL LIFE:
-A farmer sells you a horse.
-You keep the horse at the farmer's place.
-You pay the farmer for the horse's upkeep.
-The farmer goes nuts, sets the barn on fire.
-The horse dies.
-The farmer owes you a new horse (or its monetary equivalent) *

*unless said horse-care contract (EULA) says otherwise.

---------


There are several reasons to argue that EULA's may be unenforceable--
- they're not often readable until after purchase (not true for F2P games)
- they're contracts written by one side with MUCH more resources than the other party, in a position to leverage that advantage unfairly (so are most cell phone contracts, and most are upheld).
- they're easily bypassed, to the point that the 'checkmark' for having read the EULA practically encourages them to be not-read.

But there are serveral reasons why EULA's will NEVER be totally made unenforcable:
- if you remove them, then ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL for multiplayer online game services disappears. If developers can't protect themselves against being sued by idiots that got banned and therefore lost access to stuff they paid for, the developers can't manage the game. If they have to REFUND people for everything ever spent in the game when they decide to close it, they have no financial motive (refunding the last 30/60/90 days' investment is offered in many cases, but the old horse analogy above would obligate a dev to more). If developers are held as custodians of all the resources of all the players, the liability insurance alone would mean tripling or quadrupling of subscription fees. Heck, even a nerf that "devalues an item" could be seen as intentional property defacement! If developers can't have unconditional license to distribute your "creations" then they can't transmit your character's likeness to others in the world without constantly getting your express consent. The system falls apart.


So, like SlickRiptide says, if you just shrug off the EULA as totally unenforceable, you miss the point that some of it HAS to be enforceable for businesses to keep offering the service... and then you have to start asking what parts fall in which category.

I just hope this isn't REALLY Westley's farewell post.

I've argued with him, disagreed with him more than a few times, and even gotten pissed at him, but I've always seen him as something of a kindred spirit.

He's a little like I was....



... before my first round of electroshock therapy treatment.



... yeah, well before that.



... but AFTER my first dose of LSD.



... definitely after the LSD


... don't judge me- it was the 60's! everyone was doing it.



... er... or was it the 90's? One or the other-- Same basic shape, really. it's all just a matter of looking at it.







*No, no LSD, no electroshock treatment. No drugs. Despite what people think, it only took good ol'fashion army brainwashing, WAY too much caffeine, a few 100-hour work weeks, and toxic dose of video games to get me this way..

Good point.

The devs have a long history of supporting the player community and encouraging us to extend our experience beyond what they provide. They should probably identify such permissible software and set policies where player-developers can submit their creations for addition to that list.

If you leave it open to question, then some people aren't going to see the difference between Sentinel and BotManager3003.

1) Conspiracy is still a crime
2) The offending action- conspiring to disrupt the game service- is still real.

3) We're not talking about a crime or "punishment" -- we're talking about a contractual relationship.

4) We're talking about a company that has a duty to provide a service to a wide range of people... hearing that some are planning to disrupt/damage that service and deciding to act to prevent said disruption. If the conspiracy was done under their jurisdiction (in the game or on the boards) nobody would really be surprised to be banned for such activity. The devs are just putting you on notice that even if you do it elsewhere, if they catch wind and can coorelate accounts, they may take action.

5) And note that this doesn't necessarily mean "banning." As Zwill notes, they wouldn't ban based on what they saw on another boards... but they may flag those users for more scrutiny when they're online, based on what they saw. That's still 'taking action' based on what they discover outside their domain.

People who read this as "clearly suggesting" anything are reading too much into this. They write the EULA to give them the broadest possible arsenal of options available to them to combat certain behavior. It doesn't necessarily suggest that they'll ever execute them on a broad scale.

Being a "big brother" costs money and resources. History has proven that broadly-applied monitoring tools tend to catch more innocents than the guilty. They're not going to be reading your email or logging in everything you type. They're not going to be profiling you and selling the gameplay data to gamestop. The industry's done these things in the past and the costs- including the public relations costs- proved there's a better way.

Just because you have a nuclear option doesn't mean you intend to use the nuke. Having it available-- just in case its absolutely necessary-- is handy. So is the public awareness that you have it available: many botters argue "how could they ever tell I'm using a botting program? Its sophisticated enough with enough variation that you can't be 100% sure by looking at the activity data logged by the server! "- knowing that they can check for the bot in active memory means the devs have ways to know with certainty.

--
So, yes, they *might* have something that looks at active programs for known exploit applications or security risks. If they had known names, file fingerprints, install locations, registry keys, etc, then those could all quickly be scanned without doing blanket checks for everything on your hard disk. They'd still need the range of consent already given in the EULA.

They could also assume a more targeted approach:
Imagine that they're cracking down on a major exploit. Through their datamining, they have about 50 certain offenders and 2500 "maybe" offenders. Enabling their "client hardware usage reporting" on those 50, they see all of them were running a particular program that enabled the exploit. They run it on the 2500 other potential offenders and find it on another 500. Said app lets them correctly not-ban 2000 accounts.

This is fairly common. I can think back to a multibillion credit exploit in another game where, from server side apps, they could find only about 25 clear offenders and 250+ that were "questionable" they banned them all & let the people appeal to clear their name. There were another 5,000 marginal accounts that they decided to err on the side of tolerance.


--

Note also that the EULA doesn't specifically say you consent to such searches-- it says you acknowledge that they may take such action. It means that you can't argue that they did so without ever warning you of the possibility.

It may sound like I'm splitting hairs, but this is a key legal difference. The acknowledgement does mean that a judge isn't going to give much consideration to your "but I didn't know..." argument if you sued to get a refund on the $500 worth of microtransaction loot your banning took from you, but it is also sets the how and why that NCSoft may use for these pursuits. Should they step outside of the purposes they define here or misuse that data, you haven't given up the right to sue their butts off.

You play CoH, you post a lot on one of the hacking boards out there, and while there you conspire to some hack/crack/griefing action with other members. Private investigators with contracts for many/most of the big titles there tip off NCSoft, who ban/block your account before you ever do anything on THEIR turf.



You use an unmoderated "third party" MMO that the devs frequent to talk about a new exploit that you've been messing with. The devs use that knowledge to datamine your account, suspend it, remove all ill-gotten gain, and give it back.


Those are the kinds of things that clause is for.

I'm kinda the opposite. I'm fine with them just expanding the options in the current incarnate powers... really. Too much power already, not enough variety. Give more variants in each, and give us adventures that encourage us to switch out to the variants.

Actually, perhaps my vote shouldn't count. I'm more fine with them focusing on non-incarnate stuff. I think I might have 1 character with 1 or 2 tier 4's. I'd much rather play lowbies than this high-level stuff.

True, but the extent of that recoil is going to be based on the mass and speed of the item (and any recoil-reducing elements inside the device).

Of course, it also doesn't have to caused by the projectile. A laser that superheated the air immediately in front of the muzzle when fired would cause a very rapid expansion of the air which will cause a push-back that could theoretically feel similar to a relatively light-recoil weapon.

Honestly, its growing on me.

The more strict they make the backstory, the more limiting you make the player's options. If Dark Astoria fell recently, I may be able to make a character that "grew up" in the area. If it fell in the 50's... notsomuch. If the game world is this semifragmented amalgamation of alternate realities that have crashed into one another over decades of cosmic reality-shifting battles so that, depending on who you ask, the history changes.... well, then you can do virtually anything.

Remember, in those stories, most of the "world around you" is blind to the changes caused by reality-tampering. Only a select few (usually the heroes that had a part IN it) know of how things once were... or could have been.... or... will wasn't happenest... (for non-time-travelers, thats the "future perfect sidreal-shift doubleloop-with-a-twist" tense, for when you're talking about an event that you will undo in the past sometime in your future after a mirror-universe version of yourself initially caused said event during a previous journey). What we have here, with those contradictory momuments and lore elements, are the artifacts left by those that knew the otherways.



And no, that does contradict my last post that says I loathe such cosmic level stuff. It can exist all it wants. I and my characters will remain blind to it, satisfied with knowing the world as we see and encounter it.


Better that than rewriting a past in a way that makes someone feel obligated to retcon to fit.

To be honest, I so loathe the "cosmic-level-of-power" superhero tales that I ignore the Incarnate system as a story. I'll occasionally do a trial, but even haven't tried that since the last one came out.

I play it like this: I know how my characters got their powers, regardless of what the devs say. Very few of them will ever have time travel as part of their canon but that hasn't prevented me from using Ouroboros. Many of them have spent a great deal of time in Mission Architect, but they don't play VR games while the city's under siege (heck, I consider more of the MA arcs closer to character-canon than official arcs). Similarly, I'll sample the occasional Incarnate trial and equip incarnate powers that have no real bearing to my characters stories.

I mean, realistically, how many of the other-superhero-MMO players actually pretend their characters were mundanes that recently gained their powers through nanite-infected dna transplants from a time-traveling ex-villain? Or buy their powers from a "store" that uses a giant rotating gear as its teleportation entrance.... The Well practically SHINES in comparison.

... I remember commenting that in-game to a friend, who pointed out my character was a now-homeless Alderaanian and that, essentially, made me one of the "family killed by Imperials" crowd even if I never brought it up. I hadn't even noticed I'd done that-- it just seemed a natural way to explain a dead-broke character with barely the clothes on his back struggling to start anew. It also fit well with how I only dabbled in the game, never earning enough to get past the "dead broke" feeling :P .

Its also a question of existing tech. When CoH was being designed, most of the MMO's had combat where the characters' movement during attacks was severely limited. This wasn't done because it looked good... it was done because the ability to reliably track movement and communicate it with other players in a timely manner was rather limited. Back then, these games were designed to handle relatively long intervals between getting mapserver updates. The faster and more frequently you can move, the more challenge the path-prediction models had in keeping things looking good.

The lockdown-during-attacks and similar behavior masked this rather well... and even gave them time to nudge things back to accurate representation.

Fast travel, on the other hand, complicated matters because there was a much larger range of possibilities as you moved faster (and in 3 dimensions). By discouraging combat activity while moving this fast, though, you hid the fact that positioning as seen by the server, the player, and the other players may be grossly different. You can see that artifacting even today- Flight (generally used for noncombat activity) seems to be communicated at a broader margin of error than hover. When I have my character fly past my wife's character close enough to collide with her on my screen, I'm often not anywhere near her on her screen... and vice versa.

That was one of the real problems with PvP jousting. It wasn't just that you came into my screen from so far away and then left before I had a chance to react, it was that my game client often didn't even RENDER you as close enough to be a threat until after you attacked and were moving away.

Ditto.

If Issue 21 is at all late we're going to blame you for coming to work sick and getting the rest of Paragon Studios ill.

(its scheduled for release next week, right?)

Hmm... but imagine that character's Praetorian counterpart.

If it recently used Dr Aeon's time travel device to return with dire warnings from the future. We'd have a future-version of a mirror-universe reflection of the magical copy of an interdimensional clone of a genetic experiment!