Chase_Arcanum

I'm not anti-steam (I make absolutely no use of their community, have everything I can have in it set to private, never look at the achievements, and occasionally curse at it when I want to play an offline game during a stormy evening when the 'internet becomes unreliable, but I don't have any objection to it on principle).

Steam just has no reason to list F2P in its store unless they take a cut somewhere. They're not a charity. They're not a mysterious patron of the arts. They exist to make money.

Since a F2P doesn't make money in initial sales, they've got little incentive to list a title. They may be taking a cut of each transaction or get paid up-front in "finders' fees" or perhaps they get a monthly "advertising" payment to list the product.

They might use all these different revenue methods among their titles, for all we know.


Whatever it is, it costs Paragon/NCSoft money- either up front or in a share of unrealized revenue from microstransaction sales. If steam's benefits really justified this, I think we'd see CoH return to steam at some point.

As I understood it, there are two different elements here:
- the steam API (steamworks), which would allow users to add a game to their steam library, community, achievements, and overlay. This essentially gives the user steam features, doesn't require giving Steam a cut, but also doesn't give the developer any of the steam features like listings in the steam storefront, advertising, etc... the stuff that might help promote the title.

- Steam's distribution agreement, which gives the game a steam listing, results in steam searches & promotion space... the stuff many people think of when they say "on steam." (IIRC) steam's servers hosting the downloads & updates. For these, steam relies on actual product sales, or (in the case of F2P) microtransaction sales through their Steam store (so they get their cut).

If... if that's true... didn't the resistance destroyed the Enriche plant?

:freezes, with a shocked look on his face as the gravity of the situation becomes apparent.
/em grief
You Maniacs! You blew it up!
Damn you!
God damn you all to hell!

...and, just like the Praetorian "utopia", many are willing to ignore the facts and just... believe the dream.

- One where there is no Providence, RI.
- And where the 5th column brought WWII to our shores.
- And where Washington, DC was occupied by an enemy force
- And where the Rikti invasion notably scarred up major population centers around the world without ever telling you how widespread the damage is or how it may have changed things.
- And the United Nations as a bit more firepower at its disposal in Vanguard-- (how has that changed global politics? Is there any correlation to the notable lack of US Military Presence?)
- It was once stated that Paragon City supplanted NYC as a cultural and civic hub- even had NYC referred to as 'Empire City' once... then again, the UN HQ in NYC WAS hit during the rikti invasion, so the city rebounded to some degree.

Ages ago, this change was alluded to by Jack (can't find the link) as a resulting from a kind of "butterfly effect" - on Primal earth, oil discoveries in western PA came later, meaning whaling oil remained in very high demand, shifting influence to the whaling New England states at the cost of development along the industrialized rust belt. Not a HUGE change, but it came at a critical point that let Paragon nudge out NYC.

If that's the case, what other differences are there through the areas that would have developed over this time?
Yeah, its generally safe to say that you won't get forced into a BIG retcon. We don't know if the Bronx had a Boomtown-like event during the Rikti invasion or not (right now) so having family living there seems safe enough to fit into your story. Then again, the next issue could change that.

Praetoria is MORE different, so there are fewer common references to go by.

This isn't too different than other games where you have to discover the lore as you play. Sure, you can pretend to be a 200-year-old generic Tolkien elf in Everquest 2's world, but until you play the game, you won't know much about what you'd encountered over the 200 years of cataclysmic events the world's supposed to have gone through. You learned the specifics of lore as you played.



Who says "all"?

All are supposed to be seers, sure, but then you have all the psychics in the syndicate that haven't joined the seers. Obviously, there's wiggle room for the "all"

There is a whole syndicate of them....

No, but the devs did provide a bunch of background information in the form of the Going Rogue website. That sets the tone. The rest is kept broad for a reason- so anything you create has a reasonable chance of fitting in there without specifically clashing.

Well, that doesn't change the 'gambling' one bit.

That's an argument about "exclusivity"-- totally unrelated. Drop the "gambling" distraction and focus on the nature of exclusive, non-transferable content, if that's the issue.

as others have said in the thread, there will be 2 versions of "surface." both will have roughly the same form factor, but vastly different performance:

- one follows the "oversized phone" approach of the iPad and will not play PC games. Mobile OS, Mobile processor, mobile capabilities.
- one follows the "undersized PC" approach of the UMPC (anyone remember project origami?) and might just have the capability. I met a guy with a first-gen UMPC at an airport playing WOW somewhat effectively several years back, so it isn't outside the realm of possibility.

Origami's stated goal was always to make a PC that could fit in a cargo pocket and cost under $600. The iPad just proved that the tech was more ready to up-size a phone instead of down-size a PC. The two "surface" versions are basically showing that you can do either, now.

Its also possible that a number of other vendors will produce their own via windows 8, and some of them may be targeting PC gamers with high-performance "undersized PC" models. I don't expect much in that realm, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

... perhaps. I've found the game painfully easy on 'default' difficulty for some time.

I'm not sure if I'd call the newer content "harder" or just "incredibly uneven."

I make it through 4 of 5 strories in an arc with barely a scratch, then encounter an arc that's ridiculously uneven... and I am supposed to accept that because its the "climax" of the story and they warn me that its harder? No. I want 5 arcs that reasonably challenge me the way I'm inclined to be challenged... not 4 that make me want to leave, increase difficulty, and try again and 1 that makes me do the same in the opposite direction (plus extra cursing).

Could this tactic make me buy a power boost?
No, it's the kind of thing that would make me reconsider giving them my money altogether. (but I do see how others could buy into it)

...and making note of which fans he should grant early alpha/beta access to whateverhesworkingon?

hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Just gotta make sure you get em all at once.
Otherwise the personal-injury lawyers will have a field day on that one.

As much as this old-schooler agrees with you in sentiment, there is a big difference now. Skyway was designed with the thinking of traditional MMO travel and exploration, of what constitutes an "achievement" in finding your way around and learning all the zone's nooks and crannies. It was before they realized the full impact travel powers would have in changing the perception of the zone, navigational challenges, and the nature of "traveling between mission doors." I think they really intended us to have to experience the zone, fighting our way through mobs and trying to figure out how to get to places. Travel- paticularly flight- trivialized all that to a great extent.

Newer zones were designed differently. Rather than emphasize challenging locations for exploration, things became more bland. The feedback they got seemed to be that "flying was fun because flyers could go anywhere easily." whereas superspeeders constantly ran into barriers. The newer zones tried to offer less barriers to the ground-pounder as not to marginalize them and in doing so, made much of exploration a lot more simplified.

CoV zone count was hindered not just by the shorter development time, but an effort to streamline based on feedback in CoH. Players didn't like that most of their steel canyon contacts sent them to skyway (and vice-versa) so zones were more self-contained. An alternate-start zone was out in part because CoH showed that many people chose one "preferred" path and avoided the other one. (and they had the 'destined ones" meta-story to introduce, etc). Hazard zones were omitted because the model had moved from classic MMO 'group street sweeps' to instanced missions automatically adjusted to your group's size and challenge.

Again, I'm more with you in the preference for more world variety, but I can see why the design philosophies moved in another direction.

Hush you.

I missed that in the content. I figured MoT wasn't tied to the well at all.

Also, note that "gods" are a human attribution here, something that people perceive. Cultures have called a very mortal king a god in the past, so some gods may have just been powerful incarnates, some may have been ascended, and some may have been demons, spirits, or mere mortals with a very good PR team...

I was thinking of it as this:

-Our "collective potential" is just that- a civilization's collective capacity to achieve.
-A benevolent "ascended"... no longer tied to the well but remaining among the people... is perceived as a God. He protects these people and he even uses his power to care for his people. The problem is, though, that they rely on this ascended one- one that is no longer part of their collective potential- rather than do things themselves. Their collective potential diminishes.
-A malicious "ascended" crushes others under his will and power, similarly reducing their collective potential.
-In the end, the only thing that can allow the collective potential to develop and allow humanity to reach its full potential is for the ascended to step away or be driven away.

Are you crying?


ARE YOU CRYING?

There is no crying! THERE IS NO CRYING REDSIDE!

Westin Phipps was my contact, and he made me do all sorts of nasty things-- and that was when my parents had come online all the way from Michigan just to team up with me. And did I cry?

NO.

And do you know why?

Because there's no crying in the Rogue Isles. THERE IS NO CRYING REDSIDE!

No crying!

... and here I am making a point of adding enough +def to my pistol blaster to almost be a pistols scrapper... Closing in is part of the fun!

Heh... differences in style.

I do not want to change a darn thing about blaster secondaries. I love that blasters are "intended to be damage incarnate, with both melee and ranged" and do not want to lose a single melee power. Period.

To me, the +end means I may be able to shave a slot off stamina with no ill effect. I may be able to sustain another toggle power or slot a high-end-cost attack better (note that hitting your snipe more often will already do this)

The +regen gives you less survivability than a heal from major issues but still grants the ability to recover from a hit faster and recoup between encounters faster. The intent here is to keep the blaster's distinctive "paper cannon" playstyle. Adding too much survivability just makes a "ranged brute" that loses some of that distinctive feel.

Adding +regen shouldn't be shoo-shooed away. Sure, it won't help the blaster dumb enough to take the alpha strike of a new mob, but it will mean that he'll recover faster and have less downtime between encounters than he otherwise would.

T9 attacks... I could care less about that, to be honest. I admit I have fun with the pistol & archery sets. Its the "nova"-like powers most are complaining about, IIRC, and yes, you could swap them out for something more-frequently used. That'll just mean I gotta take slots away from something else, though, whereas as "situational" powers, even a 1-slotted one works OK enough when that situation arises.


EDIT: also, don't forget the "defiance" benefit of adding "snipe" into your regular attack chain. I'll let others run the numbers, but that may also add more of a benefit than just "adding another extreme damage attack into the attack chain" would suggest....

Well, running these numbers, my wife's fire/fire blaster can have permafastsnipe while duo'ing with my main (ill/kin controller), so it doesn't take TOO much. Granted, she's already damage incarnate after a good fulcrum shift, so I never really felt she needed a buff....

Even without perma, though, fitting it in-battle with a buildup or inspire chomp won't be too tough either.