Chase_Arcanum

I suggest they just ANNOUNCE it for release in April and then not deliver it... also would be very appropriate :P

Sadly, wave effects are some of the more challenging things to bring to the game and render dynamically with any sort of not-looking-like-crap results.

My "fantasy-concept MMO" that I'd joked about developing was a kind of "hard fantasy" low-magic world that was more 'world' than your typical mmo. Some of it worked like a sim-- hunting food for your village let the village population grow, resources helped it develop a better trade base, etc... it would have demand change over very visibly-changing seasons (each season a month long) and different critters active in the day, night, and dusk/dawn cycles. It'd have weather that mattered much as we're talking here, with buffs and debuffs and techniques to mitigate their effects and spawns that vary by weather and time of day (for example, its best to attack from the east around sunrise, as the sun at your back will make aiming at you difficult for the defenders).

If I ever win the lottery, I'll make it. Only then though, because as cool as these details are--- as much as I'd want them--- I don't have much faith in the general player public to appreciate it enough to pay off the effort needed to develop it. It'll be my money pit... but I'll love every moment of it. The devs here could very well have the same passion for those kinds of ideas, but they're working with someone else's money, so I forgive them for being more careful with how its spent.

... I'm not too surprised at the party-pack's poor reception, overall, but I am amazed, since I can recall several times in the past where people have said they wanted new dance emotes so badly that they'd gladly pay for them. Guess they were a great example of a very vocal minority...

(I haven't bought the party pack either... but at half price, I'd consider it.)

Figures- just bought 3 boosters last week.

ah well, might get the Going Rogue collector's edition pack....

Beat me to it.

But we're both wrong, too... on Virtue, isn't EVERY day a Cyber day.

You're reading more between the lines than what's there. He "secretly finances a society known as Wyvern."
- financing doesn't mean you lead operations or gives orders.
- a "society" indicates a looser entity than a corporate hierarchy with a single head.
- their "official" organizational structure has no association with Manticore.

If you read the paragonwiki entries, which compile information in the game, you see that Wyvern is considered a paramilitary security company staffed by people whose "lives have been shattered at the hands of evil." They focus on "extraditing criminals back to Paragon City and targeting villains early in their career"-- no word on absolute killing, though they obviously will trend toward that if they think there's no other way.

Everything there suggests that Manticore doesn't try to say much about the day-to-day operations of Wyvern. He finds people whose lives were shattered by evil, like his, and gives them the resources and training to fight back in the same way he does.

Do they cross the line? Yes. That's one of the challenges with Wyvern- so many scarred people skirting so close to evil to battle evil that some will eventually go too far. Makes for good story hooks.

This brings us back to the original question:

Does he keep it secret from Sister Psyche?
NO.

Does she care about it enough to break up their relationship?
No.

The source of this evidence?
Their wedding vows.

Manticore: Psyche:

Ok, will start here.

1) WEATHER ISN'T A SIMPLE ADDITION- or more accurately, doing weather well isn't a simple addition. People generally think of it as atmospheric effects... but atmospheric effects by themselves make for a very lame experience. Does the sidewalk shine "wet" with the rain? Does snow accumulate? Do NPC's REACT to the weather by wearing things differently or saying different things?

When you envision a weather state (let's use winter)-- to get a realistic weather effect for winter in new England, you'd have to consider...

- Atmospheric snow
- wind (does it affect flyers? can the engine support it?)
- snow accumulation on the ground (essentially means different models and textures for the zones
- trees- not just snow in the trees, but the removal of leaves in the winter. Some of our tree models are pretty spartan if they were bare. Yes, speedtree supports season states now. Speedtree licenses also vary in license costs.
- NPC Dialogues, triggered by weather
- NPC Behaviors/animations triggered by weather (winter activities)
- NPC appearances (bundled up, no shortsleeve shirts)

Do all that, and you're likely increasing the effort that's needed to build any one zone by 25% for each weather / season state you want to support (it's often more cost-effective to just make a single "cold zone" and another "hot zone" etc, instead of making every zone have every weather effect)

Rain sounds simpler, but giving surfaces a "wet" look like EQ2 did was a massive engine undertaking. It still doesn't address NPC behavior patterns, appearances, etc. It still doesn't get us water flowing down the street gutters or splashing out of the storm sewers. It doesn't give trees a weighed-down wet look.

None of your gameplay hooks are really that news-- they're GOOD ideas-- I like em, but you're not really adding more weight to the argument supporting weather. Yes, there are weather-related events and states that you can trigger, but many of these themselves are NEW tech that requires NEW coding that only increases the level of effort needed to implement weather. They add as much (if not more) to the COST of implementing weather as they do to the BENEFIT.

What we need are ways that minimally increase the BENEFIT while minimally increasing the COST.

Other features you offer aren't new, but can have unintended consequences that require more rethinking, more reworking, and a greater degree of planning before they're implemented. It may not be hard to set up tech-wise, but it can be a bear to work out all the details:

Weather-related spawns-
You mentioned spawns that change with the weather. Good effect, but to what point? We already have spawns that change on the night/day cycle, so the idea of different spawn states wouldn't be too new-tech-ish...

... but street hunting is rather minimal now. Will people have quests that encourage them to hunt these guys? If not, is it just a matter of adding variety to a zone? What about zone level ranges? Do we need to make foul-weather-foes for every range just to accommodate this, or is this a level-scaling-like event like RWZ?

... What about the spawns these special spawns replace? Am I going to have a harder time tracking down Tsoo to defeat for my second costume slot because its raining out? This was a common frustration for the day/night spawns in other games... and one reason why MMO's have opted for very fast day/night cycles (so you don't have to wait so #$^$#$ long to hunt those night dwellers.)

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Buffs/Debuffs

Now there are some things that can be done with minimal tech effort- applying buffs/debuffs for example. Maybe even buffs/debuffs to a specific powerset (ice buffed in winter, fire debuffed in rain, etc) but this brings another issue up-- games that have added debuffs before have just found that weather just made people log off or stop doing anything related to the gameplay affected.

I think that a weather debuff should include an XP buff, since the person's fighting more challenging encounters... but if the ice blaster gets a buff in the snowstorm, would players agree to a corresponding XP reduction?


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Don't get me wrong-- I'd LOVE to see developers take things like weather more seriously-- things that we consider mundane. MMO's are HORRIBLE at taking things that can lead to real challenges and making them so damn mundane its ridiculous. When a quest has my half-elf swimming miles in full chainmail to get to a secluded island, it bugs me. Imagine instead if you'd used that water barrier as a way to make me rethink my tactics...-- with less armor and only a few items available to rely on... with spell components too wet to use, etc.

Weather's the same way- there's so much potential there... and so much work to get it going. We see weather as a triviality because WE can avoid it by going inside our comfy homes, offices, and cars. When thats not an option for any length of time, weather can be a SUBSTANTIAL challenge to overcome-- and challenges can make for exciting gameplay. You can't justify the effort it takes for just a novelty, though and you can't justify the effort if you can introduce similar gameplay variations through ways that are less demanding.

I think you're misreading there. He's not saying to walk away from the game, just that there's a "walk" emote for people who find the new fitness-default speed run too excessive. The "you're in the wrong game" reference is more about the fact that we ARE playing exceptional characters, so being exceptional runners and jumpers by default isn't THAT bad of a leap. Let's face it-- our movement capabilities even before Fitness would make us a city of olympic-medalists.

I doubt that part very much. More likely they took a strong look at the game's strengths when compared to other MMO's-- When I fight in many MMO's, my melee characters feel like their feet are glued in one place, swinging away at the foes. There's very little dynamic about them.

Compare that to reviewer who point out the feeling of ACTION he experienced while running and jumping around with their dual-pistols character. That's not an isolated experience-- CoH does a great job of giving a sense of action in the battles... which makes all the endurance-recovery pauses stand out even more. The pauses are too short to serve the game as a socializing catalyst (rest periods in early MMO's were often used to encourage team chatter, building the social bonds in the game) but they are too long to keep the feeling of action continuous. That's fine when its the industry norm, but when you're a 6-year old game trying to remain fresh against newer market entries, breaking from the norm in subtle (non-NGE-level) ways can help keep the sense of exciting pacing going.

True, but if you're running in a team, those numbers aren't in a vaccuum. There are many defender/controller/corruptor sets that have team endurance recovery techniques that would be available to you at the same time. Leadership, which might not be cost-effective solo, then becomes a situational team power-- they buff your endurance, you buff everyones' stats. Nice tradeoff.

At the very least, Defenders should consider any Leadership they haven't already taken-- they get some of the better bonuses, IIRC, and their inherent means they'll likely be getting more endurance to spend on the larger teams.

Correct, but then this would create "shared experience" issues. *I* may see a clearing in the traffic, while others see me run right into where there's a car, for example.

The middle ground is to define predefined paths-- "tracks" that the models follow at a preset speed. Then you only need to send an update when the model started on the path and possibly when it hits certain waypoints, to keep things in sync.

They already do that to get as far as they do, though-- ever wonder why an NPC pushes you out of the way?

Actually, they're a BIT more complex, I think. They DO respond when they encounter an NPC (that panic run) so at that point they seem to go from minimal-update "walking paths" to probably more update-intensive "panic run" patterns of some sort. Kinda like how cars swerve at/away from you.

Point is that they're already doing some pretty heavy tricks to keep the updates minimal while making the city as lively as possible. I wouldn't mind seeing more of this flavor, but I can see how the technical limitations can tally up fast.

We're talking about a different sort of bottleneck. Tracking objects' coordinates and facing frequent enough to keep everyone in sync is more a communication bottlenext, less a rendering one. There's just a whole lot of data to share if everything needed updates frequently.

There are shortcuts that are already in use to keep what we already have in track, but the more variations you add, the more these shortcuts start reaching their limits.

From a technical point of view, tracking even MORE moving objects means sending more data to the user's PC to keep things synced up-- the more that's tracked... and the more frequently they can change, the more bandwidth spent... and the sooner you hit bottlenecks in performance. You also have an engine that's designed to handle only X number of moveable objects at a time. Things that aren't shared/tracked, like leaves and ammo brass, don't count to that limit, but something that must be shared- like the locations of cars moving on the street- would. Getting anywhere near real-city traffic levels

From a gameplay point of view, the roads represent a large chunk of the landscape available for fighting... filling them with moveable objects takes away a lot of the cityscape for battle.

From a lore point of view, the roads were once very crowded, but the war wall gates and security checkpoints have significantly restricted motorized traffic- now only necessary deliveries or vehicles on official business really use the streets.

That's about what Arcanaville means when warning not to "overthink" it.

EDIT: That wasn't intended to sound as nibby as it comes out, but anytime a game company shows a side that's more "company" and less "game" those fears arise. It's a natural response. As hard as it is to talk about layoffs and the people that are affected, I'm grateful to actually HEAR about this-- not like the near-dissolution of the CoV dev team that happened after that launch but was never really made public.

Budgets are tight, business decisions have to be made. Sometimes situations that we can't be made aware of make results that we find puzzling from the outside. Sometimes really "corporate-looking" companies have really REALLY fun work environments for their employees, and sometimes the most freewheeling "fun-looking" places to work are filled with the most backbiting intrigue imaginable. From our vantage point on the outside, we really can't judge very well, and all the hypothesizing we do won't change that.

I haven't really made any sort of lineup of characters to be respecced. I'm happy with most of my characters as they are and can't really see the point in wasting time JUST doing respecs- my time online's limited as it is.

For many of them, I've got a standard few situational powers that'll work single-slotted if I ever do a respec and need to come up with a quick few fillers.... virtually any of my heroes could opt to be stealthy after all.... or apply basic first aid... or have another aspect of their travel power for certain situations. None of those will really hurt my character concepts, none will be part of my basic lineup, but all of them could have situations where they're useful.

Slam those corpuskie bangwiches. Babs chomped mighty dazzle stars. His hole in ones were right outta the park- his rainbow skittles were the curly fries of the franchise.

Now the king's catch gets fumbled and the fanorama's in a jibber--- feelin the piston punch to the pantaloons well past the passing. No wonder they wanna stamp some wisdom n punch some flowers. You read my subtitles?

Right, but something of that magnitude isn't just something you can apply easily to an existing game. That's an entire version 2.0 there.

Not that I wouldn't mind seeing it happen...

Babs is gainfully employed now. We don't know the nature of his-- or the others- departure, but he was picked up quickly, as it appears some of the others were, too.

Losing 8 IS 8 too many, but as most MMO's cut back after an expansion, it's a good sign that we've only publicly see that many depart.... Much better than after CoV, for example. As for "not many"-- IIRC, this snapshot of the paragon team should help put it in perspective. And IIRC, they were still hiring when they posted that pic...

And there are other places where he's posted that he IS gainfully employed, thankfully.

This defect arose back when they first applied the new look-n-feel to the forums, then seemed to die down until just before Going Rogue launched.

I can't say for sure, and it's been a bit since I worked with PHP, but it seems VERY similar to what I used to encounter when running PHP load-balanced across several servers. While the state data is supposed to be shared between servers to give a "seamless" user experience, it's sometimes dropped or delayed, particularly when one server's settings get misaligned from the others. Some code is more tolerant of this than others-- for example, checking for the data and requesting it when it's missing, rather than just blindly executing, expecting the data to be there.

It's just a blind guess, as I don't know their environment, but with the added traffic that the expansion brought, its possible that an underused auxiliary server's now getting more load sent its way, and our 'logouts' are being caused by being switched to these, along with the dropped state/session data.

Nicely done. Stellar work, really.

Just disappointed you didn't cover anything. I didn't see one mention of Firefly auras anywhere.

/em facepalm



It must be Thurdsay.... I never quite got the hang of Thursdays.

Hmm... I'm wary of making this prediction... mostly because anything I say guarantees it'll never happen... but...

From the Incarnates Lore
/em wildtheories

Equate "parallel worlds" with servers.

Consolidated NOC ---> Better interserver behavior ---> more potential cross server support--->not just combined server lists, but crossworld teaming through Ouroboros.

It'd solve some of the issues with getting enough incarnates to do the larger-team incarnate stuff on some of the less active servers...

I'm of the opposite camp. When I come up with my characters' stories of their adventures, the battles rarely include any bearing with the battle. Heck, if you tried to turn a combat log of any game, particular mmo's into a narrative, it'd be one of the dullest stories ever created. I never take them as literal incidents.

Take, for example, a Kronos titan- my natural scrapper's part in the battle was whittling it down by constantly kicking its left foot? No, she managed to get on the leg, hold on for dear life, and reach into the crevices under armor, tearing any any wires or hoses she could, hopefully damaging the joint over time. Maybe the munitions blaster tosses her a few charges to place...

Circle of Thorns? Same natural scrapper's needs to invade a Circle library. There are no "dozens of teams" in the halls that she has to fight wave after wave. She's using stealth, agility, and very quick suppression attacks to take out the more human Circle members in the places she needs to go. She's not prepared for the ghosts, though- not even aware of them-- they're in their intangible form... watching, warning their colleagues, and planning a trap-- and that trap will be more than wave after wave of assailants charging her. When it comes, guile, smart footwork, a strategic strike or two, and a little luck will be all that let her escape with what she came in for.

---

The incarnate stuff?
Well, the alpha slot is easy enough to just ignore the story background, just as I ignore my character's presence in Ouroboros-- she never time traveled. Future slots may prove more different-- I heard one is an aura-like attack? Well, unless there are options for an aura of fear or a passive buff (inspiring teammates) I don't see how its something I could fit with her...

“…More like a nightmare,” the beer whispered back… in a slightly muffled feminine voice.

A sudden fit of coughing sends the beer’s froth spraying over Zack, revealing the two-inch-tall Lady Lilliput treading in the remaining amber liquid.

“I mean... I requested a pilsner.”


With that, LL lifts herself onto the rim of the mug until she’s seated on the edge, toes dangling in the brew. She casually wipes off the froth covering her form-fitting one-piece and smiles sheepishly at Zack.

“Sorry about that- it’s a ‘cheap drunk’ trick I learned from another broke college student. Shrink, drink, get buzzed, and grow. All the joys of getting as blasted as you can get… but at the cost of only one drink— less if you can get someone else to buy it for you… and damn, once I dry out, my hair will have INCREDIBLE body.”

Still seated, balancing on the edge of the glass, the diminutive brunette wrings out her hair and studies the contents of the mug before kicking one bare foot into view, “By the way, I, umm… lost a shoe. Strappy broke, I think. Any chance you might’ve swallowed it?”

For the first time, the lass’s face shows any sign concern for the strange situation, “I mean, that’d be terrible—my costume grows with me as I change size and well...” She kicks up her other foot to show the gold stiletto-heeled sandal, “…I’d hate to be the person trying to pass one of these.”

It was a lie. Well, not that she’d hate to be the person trying to pass her uncomfortable strappy stiletto torture-device worn in the name of fashion. That was true… she really would hate to be that person… and it’s true that the shoes always remained constant in proportion to her… no, the lie was that she didn’t change in size at all. Born a “universal constant” she always remained the same size, mass, and density—her powers instead instantly resized the rest of the universe to match her needs. It was Lady Lilliput’s darkest secret… and one that she dreaded would someday be discovered and used as a weapon against all of existence.

“I’m sorry if you did… ya, know… chug it down… but I’m not going pill-sized and going in after it. I just picked up this Serge original from Icon today and it’s not warrantied for stomach acid. He was quite clear about that after that whole Vahzilok Cadaver incident…”

Scanning the crowd in pocket D, her eyes widen as she sees the succubi that Graxus had summoned. Forgetting the missing shoe, she leaps from the mug’s rim, springing to full size in midair, and in a squeal that masks Zack’s “oof” of sudden intestinal discomfort, she calls out, “Lucy! Lilly! I didn’t expect to see you here! Isn’t this pledge week?”