Chase_Arcanum

They've said roughly this in many of their posts.

Yes, it's a goal, and not a guarantee. It is likely that they have "frontloaded" enough content that this goal will be met for at least the first few months after release. After that, it will likely depend on their success at generating new revenue. If they do, then they can continue to be generous to what VIP's get for free. If they don't, then we'd probably see things increasingly move to the market to help them remain in the black.

Correct. That's what they were talking about at the time, and it has the look and feel of the many older-design looney bins I've been in... err... visited.

I don't see this needing "balancing out." They give the VIP'ers a stipend for the store. Some new things will be part of the store, bought with the stipend, some will be free to VIP's. As long as the "free to VIP's" plus what I can buy with the 400/mo stipend is roughly equivalent to what I'd have expected under the old payment model, I'm being treated rather fairly.

agreed

Perez, Boomtown, Dark Astoria, Eden, and Crey's Folly aren't as much "broken" as they are "outdated." They existed as they did solely to accomodate the "pack-hunter" MMO players- people that would just band together and sweep through zones, killing whatever they encountered. They didn't want to be slowed by quest-givers or mission locations. It was "gather a large team and smash stuff."

Problem is, that was appealing (in part) because it was great XP. In CoH, you often get better XP off of missions (which have mission rewards and will (almsot) always scale to your level and team size. They spent a lot giving this player-behavior several playgrounds, as they saw that conduct so frequently in other MMO's of the time .... then made it extinct by their other innovations.

They do need a revamp... but I think they all DO need a total revamp. Pasting a few story arcs atop a zone designed for an extinct style of play isn't going to make the zones a whole lot better- its just going to bring more people in to see zones that have outlived their designed purpose.

Well, look at Dark Astoria.

1) Coming up with zone contacts there will mean creating a story in the zone that people could follow. It stands to reason that this story could best be reflected in some shifting changes in the the zone's appearance to support that story. Doesn't have to be major- maybe you want a scene using the zombies from the apocalypse crawling out of the ground.... its still new tech to add to the zone.

2) A full zone revamp that JUST applies to heroside content is bound to make some villainside folk unhappy, so either equitable resources need developed over there OR you need to make the zone somehow both hero/villain.

3) More than the "we don't have the assets to redo this" is more of a "we don't have the resources"-- meaning, the people.... not without pulling them from other stories they've decided to advance.

So it doesn't have to be about 'assets being missing" when you hear they 'don't have the assets' for that at this time. Sometimes its all about managing what you have for the biggest bang for the buck.

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Bases:

Ok, first you have to decide what a base's purpose is intended to be. If it's for raiding, then you need to make sure that all the tricks base decorators use to "wall up" things and use assets for unintended ways are closed off (or just turn a base into "raid-prohibited." If its for decorating, then you've got to come up with tools that make it so decorators don't have to jump through hoops to suspend item x exactly where they need it to be, then you need to get rid of the "raid" artifacts that impair base building. Until you get a consensus on that, though, you have very little direction to go forward.

Then you really need to determine demand. I LOVE building up my base... once... but the idea of re-doing it and removing the twenty bajillion desks that give me extra floors just so I can use their new-improved "floor tiles" ... well, it doesn't interest me much, no matter how nifty they are... I don't want to go through that again. Other base builders may feel similarly- meaning you have to attract new neurotic to make that niche big enough to justify the development effort.

Then there's the expectation of what we might get. Notice that many of the lighting and office pieces were probably not developed in-house. They're from a licensed library of models, from what I can tell (I was on a project that had many nearly-identical pieces and recognized em from the base builder). They didn't spend the time developing all those assets-- many of them were licensed... so any "expansion" of assets that was purely in-house would likely be much fewer than what we as players would come to expect.

Agreed.

Then again, take a 10+ inch tablet, give it a screen mount with a corresponding keyboard and mouse. Stick it on the desktop of your average office worker or (non-gamer) home user. That will be capable of doing a good bit of what these users have come to expect from their computer-- particularly when a MS OS gets into the fray. They get all that PLUS the ability to "grab and go" to undock from that mound and take the tablet with them to the office meetings or offsite work. That, for roughly the cost of what the next round of PC upgrades is going to cost.

It won't be EVERYWHERE, but if enough people say 'this meets our needs' and spend their money there rather than a better PC then you have a market shift that WILL impact whether a developer decides to spend $60m on a new game that will cater to the shrinking demographic of PC users with capable PC's... or cut the budget to $30m.... or keep it at $60m, but design it in a way that the lower-end systems can still access...

Very true.

My concern with the cloud is also bandwidth.

• Local ISP's are already choking on the surge of Netflix use.
• My company's corporate connection to the 'net is already choked enough with people illicitly streaming music throughout the day.
• I'm dealing with school districts that are fretting over their monthly bandwidth costs because they use a special network shared by their respective states that hasn't adapted to the surge in educational web video.

So, yes, let's chromebook up those clients so every document, every image, and every video is sent over that narrow pipe. Let's all start using "cloud gaming" where everything is pre-rendered on a server and then streamed to your screen like a friggin video 1000x (at least) more bandwidth intensive than the worst current client-server games. Let's increase bandwidth another hundredfold and then stand in stunned disbelief when ISP's announce the end of "unlimited" bandwidth and tiered pricing so they can afford to upgrade their infrastructure.

As you've said, though, it's much time-effective to just recreate from scratch rather than waste resources on conversion. It isn't surprising- parts of CoH date back a decade, given their production schedule. There've been several different versions of 3dS Max out there since then, and they haven't always given much thought to full reverse compatibility.

Not only that, but the entire tech behind resource tracking FOR reuse really wasn't that mature 10 years ago. At that time, there were relatively few MMOs. Relatively few game artists had experience with MMO's-- they'd often developed for "fire and forget" games where an asset is used once in one game and then was more or less discarded. Availability for reuse wasn't a big deal, so tracking resources and source files was relatively lax. "New" artists likewise hadn't learned the importance.

Now, the industry's more mature- in resource tracking, version control, and in developer practices... but 10 years ago? A LOT was still rather amorphous back then.

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It isn't just the developer tools, either. There was something a dev alluded to pre-Cryptic-departure that some "older" missions couldn't even be edited by the newer mission-editing tools. They'd been made when the editors were still very raw and they had some elements manually coded in- things that worked differently in the newer tools. Not only couldn't they safely update those with the newer tools, they couldn't even easily identify which ones would be problematic.
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I expect CoH to have a world of these problems. When they wanted to build out the city, they found that none of the current commercial engines covered the area they wanted to cover, so they opted to build their own. The costume creator required more of an "interchangeable pieces" system than a regular model, so their animation rigging had some nuances to it that were outside the norm. All these tweaks- elements that can make a game stand out from its competitors so well- add new upgrade, compatibility, and versioning issues that, given the game's age, HAVE to make upgrades and updates particularly problematic.



Personally, I'd really be questioning the value in updating assets here, where other aging parts of the system are bound to just give another barrier later, vs spending those resources on building a CoH2.0 with entirely new assets and a matured development process that'll better allow for another decade of updates.

You have to take it from a different perspective, though.

If you want a broad enough market to make your game profitable... and more people are getting tablets rather than upgrading old machines... then the market for high-end-games contracts. If you're producing a game right now-- one that'll be released in 3-4 years from now, you REALLY have to wonder what the market will be like. Even before tablet PC's came out, the percentage of PC's sold with dedicated video cards was smaller than it has ever been and was en route to keep declining. If people just keep their old PC as-is for a few more years and buy a tablet for side-stuff, then we have even more aging hardware out there and less high-end systems.

Do you go "big" and risk having to attract MORE of a very marginal market of enthusiasts or do you develop broadly for the low-end systems, allowing you to capture less of a percentage of a much larger potential market for the same profit? How low-end do you go, if you go that route? Remember, one reason the 800-lb gorrilla in the MMO world did so well was because it ran very well on even integrated graphics chips- it extended its market to beyond traditional gaming hardware.

One of my suggestions ages ago for a Zone revamp made Galaxy City into a hero AND villain starting zone. (It'd be two separate instances, with villains encountering costumed NPC heroes, and heroes encountering costumed NPC villains rather than PvP).

The idea was that some of the Arachnos flyers from the tutorial crash land in Galaxy. Villain missions focus on avoiding capture, holding off the enemy, and profiting a bit from the all-around chaos. Hero missions involve containing the damage, arresting as many as possible, and pursuing escapees. Heroes, obviously, complete the zone by containing the damage, whereas villains eventually make their way to an underground submarine chamber to head off to Port Oakes.

Not saying they'd take that path, but I'd LOVE to see Galaxy city become a sort of hero-and-villain alternate starting zone.

This committee obviously doesn't play on Virtue server.

Now chance encounters are more rare and gathering points have changed.

Newer content generally has less travel time and crosszone travel. The tips, for example, often use a small cluster of doors that don't require much travel between. Leveling is faster so you spend less time in any one zone, and you have things like AE that mean you never have to travel through a zone much at all. The availability of ninja and beast runs mean people can get to points a and b faster, encountering fewer people. Rogues and vigilantes can spread out over all the villain zones and all the hero zones, and the cooperative zones have good reason for everyone to visit (ITF & LGTF are very popular, as are the trials which launch from there). All this spreads people out more and shifts the level 50 social spot from Grandville to there.

Recluse's statue never had much going for it, to be honest. It was a place to dump level 50s. Out-of-character, it seemed rather dull just hanging out under a statue- it didn't contribute much more than just using Global chat for socializing... and global channels let you do whatever you want wherever you want while socializing. In-character, it seemed even less sensible.

To be fair, some of this is me playing devil's advocate. I'm not rabidly against a name purge of some sorts... I just understand where it can be a questionable business decision, so I defer to the people that have more actual measurable data than I do (the devs) and rationalize their position.

Same way with the alternate naming system "name@global". I absolutely HATED NCSoft's technique in one if its games -- it used the "last name" as the global name, so my asian-styled character shared my scotsman's last name. Heck, I wasn't a big fan of globals in this game when they came out, and only accepted them grudgingly because they were supposed to be private-- inaccessible to others without your permission. Somewhere along the line, that was lost and I gave up on caring about it.

Absolutely-unique names have their value and their place, but they're much easier to come across for fantasy worlds where any random assortment of letters can really form a name. Further, a change isn't something to easily apply to nearly decade-old code. I'd advocate against the current system for CoH2, but I don't expect changes for CoH.

The name@global system grew on me. I hated the default (of both showing) and hated that there was no global hide (I like my online private time and seem to attract people that cannot accept that, instead taking great personal offense that I may not want to chat with them tonight). It was more tolerable when the default was changed to hide globals, and while I still hated being seen anytime I was online, I was pleasantly surprised to see that few of the predictions people made came to pass. Most of what I post here is to dispel some of the fear about those same predictions, ignoring how things actually unfolded (or ignorant on how they did). I am not pushing for such a system. I just want people to make choices based on facts-- not fear, speculation, derision toward other failed parts of another game, or downright inaccurate info.

Me? I have a lot of pen-n-paper characters I'd love to recreate online, but the character name is strongly tied to their story and how they see themselves- often with double-meaning that would be lost if changed. They just will never see their stories unfold in the CoH universe. I'm somewhat disappointed, but OK with that. Still, for that reason, a naming system that offered me the same breadth and flexibility as our costume creator would be my ideal.

Note that I specifically mentioned "at launch"-- where they had the main city zone (and many of the lower zones) numbering up to the high seventies. Each with 50-100 concurrent users. Just counting the main city zone at the lowest level (70 instances x 50 users) and you're at what the devs were reporting as one of our servers' maximum concurrent capacities. Now add the other zones.

So, yes. The had-- at launch-- more concurrent users on their *one* shardless server than we'd have on any one of our server shards. THAT WAS ALL THAT WAS CLAIMED, and it is hardly an outrageous claim nor a negative point- it just countered the ignorance of the "that game sux- they only have 1 server" when it was DESIGNED THAT WAY.


Note also that you seem to misunderstand the whole purpose of that comparison- it wasn't comparing POPULARITY (as I did note that they 'didn't keep em') but was pointing out that a single server with a population LARGER THAN OURS allowed multiple users to use the same name and it did not cause the problems that people anticipate by a non-unique-name system.

- People weren't stumbling over one another in zone or in chat.
- People didn't get mistells and confusion
- Not even people with OBVIOUS names stumbled over one another. Heck, I made a CATGIRL named TABBY of all things and not once did I encounter someone matching that name. You'd think SOMEONE else would have done that--- especially with all the friggin catgirls everywhere.

Note that you are correct in that they did severely decline and now that they're F2P, comparing numbers is kinda irrelevant.

To be clear, the one in question had more people on that one server (it was designed as a single-server/multi-instance system from the start) and at launch, it had FAR more concurrent users on that one server than any single CoH server can support.

It just didn't keep that many going for too long.

From what I hear, though, since its resurgence, peak times still do have several dozen instances of common zones... enough to suggest that the number of players that are using their naming system with little issue exceeds the number of people we have on any single server here.... where (some) people ARE grousing about name availability.

I agree that in text-based chat, the name is the sole identity and that duplicates can lead to confusion (without the global appending) when it comes up. In my real-life example of multiple Daves, we all came up with our own aliases for them (Dave J, Dave, the owner, Dave the audio specialist, etc.) In chat, we don't have that, but the optional hidden "@global" has a somewhat proven track record for working.

In game though, as per this:

Well think of it this way- yes, they have a superhero registry that in-game lore suggests would require a unique ID. I guess its internationally regulated and recognized... not a stretch, really, when you have guys in tights flying around. But why the HELL would villains respect such a registry?

Heck, I could see a more likely case being that masked crusaders DO choose overlapping identities, DO get into conflicts with others stealing their name and besmirching their reputations, and DO find that, or... no matter how badly they want to be known as "Atomic Angel", everyone calls the OTHER heroine "Atomic Angel" and just refers to you as "AA."

.... And don't we have cross-dimensional evil/good versions (and nemesis clones) of you ALREADY damaging your reputation as part of the actual lore of the game? Why is it a stretch to think that someone else that's NOT a dimension-crossing-alternative-version-of-you / clone-of-you / automaton-so-good-that-can-reproduce-your-powers might choose the same name as you?

In lore context THAT's the jumbled mess we have, so... again, why not?

In the real world, we call this REALITY.


My name is not common, but there are six in my state with the same name. There are 100+ in the US that have listed phone numbers. Should I call the police and have them arrested?

edit: scratch that idea. Just realized that one of them is my dad... and I'm pretty sure he was here first.