Dr_Occult

Someone above hit the point, which one would hope NCsoft will see as well:

Rapid advancement (be it Farming, or Double XP or whatever) increases subscriptions, which increases revenue. ED and other experience-decreasing measures shrink subscriptions, and therefor revenues.

The sticking point is that no one has told us where the line between "optimized play" and "exploit" is, since many people (and some devs?) seem to consider min/maxing the available environment to be equal to finding a bug and exploiting it.

Being banned or not may end up entirely hinging on whether the GM whose ticket queue you end up in had a bad evening, or a fight with his girlfriend the night before.

Imagine how great history would have played out if people quit trying to improve things after the first attempt.

Or, if NCNC was doing QA properly, it would be caught in testing. I imagine it would be trivial to import the top 50 or 100 arcs into their internal testing enviroment, and simply check to see if they are unplayable with the new patch. I don't mean play through each one, but simply try to enter each arc. If there is a broken map or mob under the new patch in an arc that is working on Live, then you know there's a problem and you can track it down.

[ QUOTE ]
That's funny... I lose them.

[/ QUOTE ]

I nominate this as Insightful Post of the Day.

Oh good. I wanted to try it with some of my poor, dormant red toons, since it's more of an evil-themed arc.

I thought they replaced them with some other type of prisoner.

Man, you think Rikti Comm Officers were exploitable, you should have seen the original Zig prisoners, just piled up in Brickstown.

Johnny Sonata, the #1 Dev Choice arc, was broken last night when I tried to run it with my spider.

Is Doc Delilah hiding anywhere in MA? I was wanting to use her as a hostage/ally when setting up a map last night, and could NOT remember her name.

Even the Johnny Sonata arc, which is #1 in the list, was broken last night.

Well, we don't know if the curtailment of the description fields were an error or not, only the result. Same for the maps. Because no one has said anything on the matter.

oy. Thanks for the research.

I was so hoping we would have check-boxes in each powerset so we could chose exactly which powers our mobs get, or just copy over sets from existing-in-the-game minions, Lts, bosses, etc.

I guess it's a good thing I haven't built that story with all the ambushes containing katana/SR Lieutenants + bosses then.

Ah, role playing a deaf mute then?

I know exactly what it means. You, however, seem oblivious to the distinction between "head of a customer-oriented company" and "angry customer who has been threatened by the staff."

I'm sorry, have you been tracking the global names of everyone that ran an Architect mission that you can levy such accusations, or just everyone that isn't some sort of intolerant Internet Puritan on the forums? And you obviously have read Matt Miller's mind, since you know what he considers abuse and no one else does.

He has called many, many things "farming", yet has never threatened to retroactively destroy the characters of people who went on demon farms, or TV farms or any other mission at all. So where's the line?

Where.

Is.

The.

Line?

You don't prance around threatening a "death penalty" to your customers based on unknown and unwritten criteria. You either put down in writing for the customer base to see what is and isn't acceptable and DEFINE YOUR TERMS, or you [censored] with the virtual "death threats" until you have those terms down.

To do otherwise is to be a playground bully and the height of unprofessional behavior. I would not be surprised to find out that Miller has disappeared because he's been called onto the carpet by his bosses.

Most (All?) the Dev created heroes have the same problem.

You did your job, (and I thank you for it- been a beta tester more time than I can count), but it comes down to the paid QA and the lead of said department, and ultimately to Miller for not checking that industry-standard procedures are followed.

One of the jewelry shop maps may work as a department store.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mission_...ct_Unique_Maps

Nope, and no notice of the dev-supplied default descriptions now breaking all arcs you put a signature hero in as well.

There seem to be a number of maps that have disappeared.

Now there's a question I keep meaning to ask, and forgetting to:

If you unsub, do your arcs get unpublished?

How did QA NOT catch that the DEFAULT descriptions of dev-supplied content was breaking arcs? Extremely shoddy.

Maybe it got renamed?

[ QUOTE ]
Warnings against exploits are always vague. They have to be, since an exploit is, almost by definition, something the devs didn't think of when they were creating the system. What would you consider acceptable language for Positron to use here? I mean, could you actually demonstrate what you want Positron to spell out? (Not trying to troll, I'm honestly curious.)

[/ QUOTE ]

This is not a warning. This is "We're going back to before this statement and not only taking characters away from you, using a criteria that was not only not know at the time of your actions, but is STILL not known. Oh, and the characters so sentenced will still take up a character slot, since they will be "inaccessible" not "deleted." "

That is the very height of unprofessional and immature behaviour, especially for the head of a studio. What a professional person would have said was:

"Ok, you guys have abused the system to the point we can't ignore it. Going forward, here are the boundaries: You cannot make more than X levels/total xp in a 24 hour period from AE missions. If your character hits the cap, it will be subject to the same diminishing returns code that is on TFs."

Or, once you make over X experience in AE, you're locked out of AE for 24 hours. The point is, you don't punish your customer for activity that was not a punishable offence when the activity occurred. Since Miller has never given a criteria for this severe punishment, and still hasn't, if he goes through with his immature threat, it will severely damage NCsoft's investment as well as his own career.

When the head office sees the huge jump in subscriptions for April, then sees the drop in subscriptions should he follow this ill-thought out idea, along with the attendant bad press on the eve of a competing product's launch, it will be too late to repair the damage. Look at Star Wars Galaxies as an object lesson. There are thousands of customers out there that will never go near anything the developers responsible for NGE are involved in.

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think the OP was worried about idea theft, but rather about having a favorite name taken by the time they were ready to use it.

[/ QUOTE ]

winnah.