Chase_Arcanum

:: Pauses, looks at historically top-selling comic book titles:
- X-Men (any, multiple titles)
- Superman (any, multiple titles)
- Spider Man (any, multiple titles)
- Avengers (any, multiple titles)
- Batman (any, multiple titles)
- Fantastic Four
- Hulk
- Thor
- Wonder Woman

:: Realizes that probably 3/4 of all the comics for all those titles are nothing BUT contrived plots with improbable returns of defeated characters.
:: /em lightbulb




So... you're saying that to BE a successful comic, you need BOTH?


::Starts re-writing several dozen scripts.



...Damn, knew I was missing something....

Come on. I mean, I know this is a superhero fantasy MMO, and anything's possible, but I'll suspend disbelief in things like invulnerable and practically immortal space aliens that look just like us LONG before I'll harbor any fantastic idea that it might be at all possible to CONTROL CATS.

Its not different tastes, its totally alternating tastes and arguments that run counter to other statements, sometimes in the same post.

Not entirely.

1) Lifetime subscriptions are good for a game at launch because there are excessive launch investments (server infrastructure) that must be made before the revenue starts streaming in. That is usually paid via business credit and gradually paid back over the life of the subscription (plus interest). Games have found that pre-launch Lifetime sales help reduce or eliminate this need for launch credit... saving them significant interest costs.

2) As you mentioned, Lifetime subscriptions do help them hedge their bets-- they get more revenue upfront than they would if the game isn't well received.

3) During the credit crunch through the Great Recession, businesses that frequently use lines of credit (to develop an expansion, launch a game, or just get through a lull period) found that they'd lost access to ANY line of credit through no fault of their own. Offering a lifetime sub plan gave them cash-on-hand to address whatever project that would have been paid via a credit system.

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As for CoH, I'd buy one, but I don't think they'd ever offer one. They managed Going Rogue- their biggest surge in expenses- without resorting to one (though they did offer sweet yearly plan deals & preorder promotions that may have served this purpose to a lesser extent). They don't publicly acknowledge any project that would be at a point requiring a large cash infusion, and they do have a tried and tested loyal long-term playerbase...

The animation department does much more than JUST powers. We don't know how much time was allotted for this or how much priority, but we do know that these examples came out just a few weeks after Noble Savage solicited ideas, and THIS WAS A REGULAR AND RECURRING REQUEST-- NOT flashier animations, just animations that let our powers originate from a consistent location.

I can see this as something that was bandied about, that someone put together as a proof-of-concept, and that was then decided it DID indeed add some more variety for the attacks.

Will we get more? For blasts? I dunno- we have a LOT of sets that don't have any options, after all, and you have to keep the animations' timing consistent with the original animations, so that limits some of the possible variations- but time and testing will tell. I personally expect more of the same-- finding powers whose timings are similar, where one animation can be applied broadly to as many sets as possible-- and giving at least SOME animation variety to as many places as possible. Once that's done, perhaps round 2 will be more set-specific and unique.

Aw, c'mon, give me something CHALLENGING.

Good ideas, all, but grossly misstating the level of effort involved.

Think of it like this:

If you want
simple atmospheric visuals... probably a little time and a little effort.
simple gameplay effects where everyone gets buff X or debuff y (regardless of powerset) depending on the weather.... a little more effort than the above. This is probably the most common (and least effective) weather system in MMO's... and datamining indicates that people just avoid the zone debuffs rather than actually trying to adapt gameplay to work with the debuffs. Still, its there, its easy, its possibly within budget possibilities.
simple weather zone spawns/events I'd wager that the tech that allows zombie apocalypse, Rikti raids, etc could have spawns of storm mavens or new elemental critters spawning- even minigame events- without taxing the current engine too much... again, likely not too unreasonable development effort.

Now, the problem is that people are proposing things that, while neat and novel... and they show that weather can have meaning... they'd be a MUCH bigger burden to roll out.

complex gameplay effects Weather triggering environmental changes (buildings collapsing) or giving buffs/debuffs only to specific powersets-- that brings substantial challenges in both balance, presentation, and new tech.

changes to the zone map something as "simple" as snowdrifts on the ground, grass and leaves drying out during heatwaves, wet surfaces, puddles in the roads, water flowing down gutters, winds blowing hard enough to move trees and scatter debris, gargoyles that shoot out water, etc, NPC's with weather-appropriate action and statements... well, that's significantly more work. First you've gotta create the tech to switch out zone assets based on weather state, then you gotta actually place all those assets- essentially modifying the entire zone for each of the weather states you'd encounter.

That kind of stuff is NOT a little investment... even if it was just applied to the newer zones.... and THAT is probably what fuelled WW's initial concerns-- its' not just about offering compelling gameplay or not-- it's about offering compelling gameplay with a reasonable investment (and understanding what that investment could have produced if spent elsewhere...)

To be fair, it is on my "to buy" list. I didn't think a buck an emote was that bad, given how much trouble emotes can be to produce.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're about 5 years behind the curve, if not more. Game developers have been tracking and investigating this stuff for well over a half decade-- and the techniques you mention were old and limited even back then. RMT has grown into a multimillion- HUNDREDS of millions by some accounts- despite that.

1) There are ways to launder things-- to obfuscate the source and to even make you think it came from somewhere else. Tracing isn't easy. All the limits put on the trial accounts is simply an effort to eliminate the biggest and easiest ways to address the issue.

2) The same thing that makes them able to prohibit RMT is the same thing that makes them unable to "Just Buy Inf"- those sites have their own TOS, and entering into an agreement with them (by buying inf) when they had no intent to honor it opens them up to fraud complaints too.

3) Investigation takes time and money. Let's set up a sting operation, buy inf, go online, meet the guy. Trace the logs back to where he got the money... through all the already-deleted accounts, market transactions (a favorite thing to do is to list an item on the market and then buy it, so there's no direct "transfer." Sell some legit stuff too, and it makes it even harder to trace), double-depth transactions (never have your 50's automatically transfer to the bag-man- do it through multiple fronts).

Pretend that you go through this and you've got maybe 4 names that you're 75% sure are farmers. Odds are one is an innocent caught up in the racket. You talk to legal, you get peer review, you decide to ban all 4 and deal with the fallout, then you deal with the CSR calls as you try to make things right for the one innocent. How many man-hours do you think that wasted? At what pay scale?

It adds up fast.

4) What makes you think there are level 50's behind this. We have wentworths. With a little patience, I've had multiple alts easily making 150mil/day EACH-- just buying and reselling & following some of Nethergoat's informative market guides. Did that for about a week before I got bored, but someone doing this as a job doesn't need to run a single mission.

That also means that when one of THOSE accounts are banned, they have less downtime getting set up again. There's less time lost leveling.

Wrong.

Well, at least that's not what it originally meant. Retailers have tried to redefine the term after failing to get people to stop using it altogether. As Wikipedia references rather well, "The earliest known reference to "Black Friday" in this sense was made by Bonnie Taylor-Blake of the American Dialect Society, in a 1966 publication on the day's significance in Philadelphia:
JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing."

It wasn't until 1980's that people tried to justify it away by referring to the accounting process of "red ink" turning "black" for the year on that day. There's some truth to that-- the Christmas quarter does pose the biggest sales numbers, and while big chains like Walmart and Target may report profits every quarter, some stores are in the red for most of the year... but even then, there's no metric that says that BLACK FRIDAY itself is the point they usually go in the black... many go black earlier in the quarter, many not until very late December.

Don't forget Periwinkle Wednesday.

Locking my doors, changing my keys, and getting the attack cats nipped up well in advance of cyber Monday.

That? That's a New England SUMMER!

See, just doing that would bug me. I could even accept no other visual elements (like shiny surfaces or water puddling in places) but the NPC reactions-- casually walking along, waving, like nothing's different-- THAT kind of visual stimulus would break it for me-- it'd be no different than no weather at all.... adding nothing to my sense that the City's experiencing anything different at all. (Winter's worse... where's the winter coats, the shivering, the warming of hands, etc?)

All of it.


- They pre-holiday sales increases long before that Monday. Monday neither shows a peak or a particular surge that makes it any special.

- There are no signs of surges of people seeking online specials for the items they couldn't find on Black Friday or Black Friday weekend.

- Retailers don't usually withold sales for that day (or didn't before the media started to try to turn it into something special to report). The click-and-mortar stores try to offer the same Black Friday sales online that they do in-store ON Black Friday, and the online-only stores are in direct competition with those retailers so they don't intentionally delay sales just to pick up stragglers that couldn't get it. They want to be the primary source of purchase too.

This is particularly true with the growing numbers that report that they "refuse" to go out on Black Friday, due to the sheer madness. They're a market to be tapped-- and tapped on THAT DAY... when they're at home, flooded with sale ads, and thankful they can get the deal without the nightmarish trip out the door...



-Online stores generally don't profit from "surges" of sales like Black Friday gives retail stores. Surges mean more resources are needed to prevent service denials. Those resources cost money, and online, your surge generates none of the "crowdthink" or "herd mentality" that retail stores bank on-- just the frustration of spotty service. Studies show "brick" stores benefit heavily on these days from purchases of hype- people deciding to buy things because they witness other people rushing to buy things. It drives sales revenue much higher than the cost of opening at 4am with heavy discounts. Online, you don't see the other shoppers' activity, so you really don't generate surge mindset in the users on your site. You certainly don't get the spillover of the 'crowdthinkers' Monday morning-- the impulsive 'me too' purchase urge doesn't keep strong over time in most people... 3-4 hours away from the stimulus, it falls to within the margins of error.... making it STILL better to list your online sales on the same day as the brick-n-mortar sales start.

(There IS one benefit for click-and-mortars to not start their BF sales that day-- they NEED that critical mass of hysterical buyers crowding the stores to trigger herd-buying in others. Unfortunately for them, the big online-only retailers will still be undercutting their online sales, so they've found it tougher and tougher to do).

...And a bogus totally media-made myth with not a single one of the explanations given for it standing up to any scrutiny. Of course, that virtually guarantees that it'll catch on in America as bible truth.

And killing the joker can be done by the legal authority that reserves the right for itself... which Batman does when he hands him over. If Batman was imprisoning the Joker himself... if he denied the legal authority the right to make the decision... then I'd see it.

And yes, the Joker is insane, but no, that wouldn't mean that he'd be treated by the judicial system like that. In most real-world jurisdictions, his madness wouldn't matter one whit-- it's the wrong kind of "insanity" for use as a legal defense. He could still be found guilty and sentenced to die, if the jurisdiction had the death penalty.

Given the media circus surrounding all that, shouldn't you be more surprised if he hadn't?

Yeah, that was from their wedding live event... which I recorded for posterity in the screenshot comic. I can understand why some wouldn't look there for OFFICIAL CoH lore, but that's straight from the devs. I can understand people wouldn't remember even if they read it, or were there-- people skim over large blocks of text. I, on the other hand, mulled over those vows for an insane amount of time:

"How the HELL am I gonna fit all that into the Comic Book Creator word balloons? Why the HECK is it leaving so much %#*(*(@#$ whitespace for? Whaddaya you mean my save from last night is corrupted? THE CAT JUST HIT THE DELETE BUTTON.... AGAIN!" and finally "wait- we need more room because the German translation text is 30% LONGER?"

So... yeah, I kinda know those vows a little bit more than your average - sane- fan.

And on the plus side, since the sale is only one day, the cost of lost potential revenue in this venture is pretty low for the devs. I mean, the NCSoft store usually crashes when hits.. what... 50 transactions a day?