Circuit_Boy

I'm gonna miss you guys.

This is all merely theoretical, though. Unless you're as rich as Croesus, you're more or less judgment-proof anyway, and that presumes NCSoft would bother to spend the effort (and risk the even-further ill-will) to track down former customers who continue their characters in some other MMO, or spend the money or in-house attorney effort filing copyright lawsuits with dubious chances of success to begin with. I'm not even certain that clause of the EULA would stand scrutiny, since there's no consideration given to us (the players) for what is clearly our own creations (there is no contract without consideration). NCSoft basically boiler-plated a clause they use for employees (this happens in academia, too, so I'm familiar with it) that basically says the employee's work product is the intellectual property of the company (in my case, college/university). That kind of clause holds up because the employees are being explicitly paid for it (and I've had to sign that specific contract for my teaching gig over and over and over). As players, we're not being paid for our intellectual property--there's no consideration for it. It'd certainly be arguable in a court, so it wouldn't be a slam-dunk for NCSoft.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is an intellectual property license that lasts in perpetuity different from an outright sale of that intellectual property? As I posted above, I've got more than a passing familiarity with how licensing works in an academic setting, and I can't say I've ever run across such a beast.

Not necessarily.

A lifetime ago, I was an acquisitions librarian for a major state university library, and although I wasn't directly involved in any way, shape, or form in our university library's licensing contracts, my boss--who was--showed our department what went into them. Most of her job involved negotiating and rewriting renewal contracts.

The dirty little secret of academic libraries is that their budgets are squeezed by two factors: serials costs, and licensing costs (particularly major search engines and serials databases, like EBSCOHost). These are licensed annually, and the private companies involved (EBSCO, Elsevier, etc). are cut-throat. If your college or university library can't pay, too bad. At the time, site-licenses were a particular nightmare, and still are for some smaller colleges and universities: "Well, we can sell you a discount license, which will allow you to have the internet database, but only two users can use it at the same time." The college I teach at now lost the Opposing Viewpoints database license (which was one of these discount two-user-only site licenses) about three years ago, in part due to budget cuts and in part because OV jacked their annual price up substantially. Furthermore, the amounts these licenses rise far exceeds the rate of inflation. When I was in acquisitions, the average serials and database licensing rose 12% annually. We were always on the lookout for journals we could cancel. Again, when I was in ACQ, regional university and college libraries were starting to band together (basically unionizing) to try force the publishers to lower their rates ("If you charge x, none of us will buy your database, then") or to sidestep the process entirely (which gave birth to JSTOR).

In any event, my point is that I know, with absolute certainty, that license renewal contracts with open-ended renewal options not only occur, but are standard in academic publishing and in academic database/IP/search engine softwares. I certainly wouldn't presume to say that's true across the entire private sector, but I'd hazard a guess that it is not unheard of (and, in my opinion, probably standard, as it is within the academic sector).

[Edit: Regarding the overall premise of the OP, it makes a lot more sense to me than "the CEO is crazy/irrational". I don't like explanations that require entities to be behaving irrational in order to work. Ultimately, they don't fit Occam's Razor. I know that business doesn't always--or even often--operate rationally, but I also don't like premising explanations on the insanity of the actors involved.]

For what it's worth, I already asked for a refund. Blurry-eyed, but coherent enough to think about financial matters.

I got the following reply:

I know I haven't posted much in the last several years, but for a while there at the beginning, I was all over this section of the board.

I never quit playing. Always loved CoH. Even when I wandered off to a different game, I always came back.

To the people I pissed off... well, I'm sorry for that. To the people I helped play Electric^3 better, I'm glad.

Even though I haven't had much to say in years here, I'm still going to miss this forum, and the people in this section of the forum.

Electric's fine. It's been fine for a while. It ain't Fire--but what is?

The only tweak I'd make would be to Voltaic Sentinel--it should last 2 to 4 minutes. Maybe give it Short Circuit, too. Most other pets--even semi-pets like Dark Control's Haunts--get two attacks.

I know the lack of a Tier 3 seems to freak some people out. *shrug* I've got a nice, steady Zapp -> Lightning Bolt -> Charged Bolts -> Shocking Bolt -> repeat pattern set up for what ChrisMoses called "hard targets". It hasn't been a problem--at all--on most iTrials if you're not a total moron about positioning. With Volty out (and I've given mine his own Build-Up proc--it works), my single-target damage is certainly on par with any other blaster's, easily.

Most people discount Short Circuit as an AOE power, but it is, and it gives Electric two viable non-nuke AOEs. Furthermore, both Ball Lightning and Short Circuit hit a maximum of 16 foes, and require no repositioning the way cones do if you stand in the middle of the foes you intend to hit. This is no small advantage on iTrials--throw Ball Lightning at a foe in the center, then Short Circuit. Two 16-target AOEs in a row. That's a lot of actual damage, if you add up the amount of damage done to every single foe--and you should, since that's now no longer damage someone else has to do. [Edit: I saw some folks say that the fact that these are Damage-Over-Time makes them useless in the high-end game. BS. Yeah, sure, a lot of people have Judgment... but that really does about 50% damage to the endless hordes of Boss-level foes that populate iTrials. I wind up using Ball Lightning--and watching its entire DOT complete--all the time on iTrials between Judgment cooldowns. All the freakin' time.]

As for Endurance Drain--you can pry that out of my cold, dead hands. I solo'd the Dark Astoria Story Arc Reichsman (Elite Boss version) earlier tonight. End Drain kept him on the ropes throughout the entire fight. He was a helpless kitten from the moment Short Circuit triggered. No inspiration use--just me and my basic powers. Let's see Fire do that.

[Edit: One other thing. Electric is all-Energy, all the time. I've played all kinds of characters up to 50 at this point, and this is a HUGE advantage. Psi? Robots. Zombies. Basically anything without a mind, and it's nickel-and-dime damage time. Smashing/Lethal damage? Again, those robots--and, damn, there seem to be a lot of them--are a serious annoyance, as is virtually everything else. Energy and Negative Energy--really, in that order--are the least resisted, and that means Electric has a built-in advantage because it's not suffering a 10-20% damage loss from the get-go. Granted, Radiation Blast is right up there with it on that front, and Radiation Blast has a lot of other advantages, too, like a ranged stun and lots of good single-target and AOE damage options. I'd say it trades that off for a rather unimpressive secondary effect--in today's game, does anyone really need -Defense Debuffs?]

I'm having an issue with an arc I'm working on where the Captives'/Allies' "unaware" dialogue is triggering upon entering the mission. It's supposed to trigger when the captive / ally sees the players, but it's doing it on mission entry.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?

JLane, this is the very first time, and they refuse to budge. I had taken a break from that game back in May; supposedly, the theft occurred in June. They claim they don't have records that go back that far, although they managed to accurately restore about 26 items, supposedly without any record at all of what I had, and they appear to have enough of a record to tell me what month my items were stolen.

I only play from my desktop at home, and I'm the only one with my password. I have Kaspersky's PURE on my machine, and have had it solidly for more than four years now. There are no keyloggers or trojans on my computer and haven't been since long before I rebuilt it from scratch over a year ago.

Unless someone broke into my condo and ONLY stole my character's stuff while I was out at work or put a physical keylogger in my tower, the only reasonable explanation is someone brute-forced the password. I suspect that's the way the majority of their hacks actually are (unless they're inside jobs, and given how often they happen, I wouldn't rule it out).

They could take a couple measures to prevent these hacks. The first would be to send an email notification to the player whenever someone logs in from a new computer (or IP address), the way Facebook does. That would mean people like me--who took an extended break from the game (and that's the reason I'm being given they can't give me my stuff back)--would be notified that someone's logged on to the account. The second would be to lock the account out for a period of time after a certain number of botched tries to frustrate the brute-force password scripts. Even better, a bulletin board system software I used in the early 1990s would let people attempt the password thirty times, but only the first three counted. Even if the right one came up in the next twenty-seven, it wouldn't log you in. It's a good foil to the brute-force password scripts.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank NCSoft's Developers and their Customer Service and Support people.

After a long hiatus, I logged back in to another-12-million-player-game-that-shall-remain-nameless only to find my account had been hacked and all my stuff had been stolen.

The worst part? The Customer Service of that company--let's call them "Snowstorm"--refused to restore more than 25% of my stuff, and less than 3% of my in-game cash.

I've never had this kind of tear-your-hair-out kind of experience with City of Heroes' friendly Customer Service people, so I'm giving them props.

Who's talking about "melee cones"? There are plenty of true AOE cones available. In trials, I routinely use Static Discharge and hit the maximum number of foes with it without doing anything to line it up.

Also, where do you get your "1/3 of the time" bit? Pulled out of the air?

Furthermore, finding the "breakpoint" between when the AOE pet drops below the "Headsplitter" pet is pretty easy. Trivial, in fact. In my scenario above, it's at 5 foes. If the AOE pet only hits 1-5 foes, the "Headsplitter" pet is ahead. If the AOE pet hits 6-16 foes, the AOE pet is ahead and, in some cases, wildly ahead.

Since Lore Pets use Mastermind controls, rather than the more dumb pet AI of Controller pets, it's trivial for the user to manipulate them to maximize that potential. Anyone who's played a Mastermind for any period of time should know how to do this.

To turn your own logic against you, Pets also don't know when it's better to use a low-damage attack versus a high-damage one. The "Headsplitter" pet of my above scenario may very well cycle it's extreme damage attack against a foe that's got 1 hp left. The extra damage doesn't "spill-over" onto other foes; rather, it's just wasted. Furthermore, this phenomenon is not something the user can control, unlike lining up AOE shots.

And, honestly, if you don't think those AOE attacks actually get used, you haven't actually been on a BAF. There are plenty of foes around all the time throughout the entire encounter. 9CUs and Victoria Mk VIs spam the board.

Mostly, my rationale was that this is the forum where the master channel list is stickied at the top, and it seemed the best fit of a number of somewhat bad fits. I suppose the "General" forum might have been better.

I realize it's a little late (last day of the month), but since, at least for 24 more hours, it's Pride Month, I'd just like to remind people that City of Heroes / City of Villains has a global LGBTQ chat channel: Pride

Just type "/chanjoin pride" to join it, and edit your chat window so you can see the channel (or create a new chat window for it).

It's an open channel, so nobody needs an invitation to join.

So, just how geeky are you?

Steam Wars!

There's nothing wrong with E^3 as a ranged concept. It's not Ice Blast, but it holds its own if you know what you're doing and don't follow the (often-wrong) "conventional wisdom" touted on these boards.