GadgetDon

Except the argument of the thread is "why do people only run the low level trials (the ones without this challenge)".

I don't play platformer games, and the video games I play, are almost always on the easiest level or maybe one level up. "hey spot the circle and stay out of it" is completely unfun to me. "Watch for a message saying you're under some effect, and if so, run away or bad things happen" is also unfun to me. The Underground trial has a bit of it, but enough "hey come whale on the big bad with others" to make it, on the whole, fun. The one time I did Keyes, hated it all, will never do another one even if the rewards were increased to "complete it and you'll unlock all your incarnate slots in one go". If the rewards on the others are so low that nobody will do them or the rewards for the new solo/small group is so low it's meaningless, I probably won't do that, there are always other games to look at.

Now, all of that is true for me. From talks I've had with others, it's true for some others, and completely untrue for others. Keep doing some hard challenge trials, provide fun for those who love that sort of a challenge. But please don't try to force those who don't find it fun to do it, either because there are no alternatives or the alternatives have so little rewards it's not worth doing once you've got the badge.

I guess I'm the kind of player you're calling Little Timmy. I play games to have fun, to relax and kick back. I can do it solo, love doing it with other players. But I am not and never have been a hardcore player. My reflexes weren't great when I was 18, and that was a long time ago.

I've done a Keyes once, never again, because I don't find I fun, too gimmicky, too filled with the sort of twists that have turned me off from other games. Don't play platformers outside of CoH, don't want to play them within it. This doesn't make me weak or stupid or childish, I just means I like other things than you.

There SHOULD be some trials that match your preferred style of play. I just don't want them all to be so. I want new interesting and yes rewarding content that matches my preferred play style just like there's yours.

Actually, here's my wild speculation. Wade killed Miss Liberty because, as States daughter, he thinks he can inherit States incarnate power by linking himself to his lineage. Statesman will die (for now at least) but through in part our meddling, Ms Liberty gets it. New costume, new name in her new incarnation (Stateswoman). If you go to Atlas Park after playing arc, trainer is Stateswoman, and the contact in IP becomes Stateswoman.

Actually, I'd strongly recommend "Romancing the Stone". One of the first great adventure comedies.

BTW, has anyone mentioned "The Rocketeer"? One of the best superhero movies. Flopped in the theaters, but got a following afterwards.

It may not be WAI, but should be WAD. To be specific - if the limitations on chat are to keep the spammers at bay, /r is not usable by spammers, and can only be used if someone sends a tell like "lft?" Improves the free player experience to the point of "hey, I want more into this" without "why would I spend any money"

The only reason for blocking it would be if some interaction or misuse of a slash command (directly or through another account) can set the "lastperson" and thus be used for originating tells.

I can accept that transitions to the new system are messy. But this needs to be fixed. I'm not saying has to happen in October or November or even December, but I sure hope the plan is to eventually have all three hit on the same day - server transfer, points, and paragon reward token.

My understanding was that Premium Players without access to the Invention system, the IOs were completely non-functional, like having no enhancement slotted (which I believed was a Very Bad experience). If they are acting like normal enhancements with the special abilities, I think that's a Reasonable Experience.

But Mac issues are often different from PC issues, so it will create confusion about "wait, is the person talking about issues on the Mac or on the PC"? Also, it's been fairly clean of the platform flame wars that are endemic on the Internet, but sometimes we saw hints of that in the beta forums.

*Edit* Just saw the suggestion to move it into development. That makes sense to me.

If it's a PPC machine, it can't run CoH anyway. CoH is only playable on Macs with Intel processors, and I've got one of the very first intel Macs released and have no trouble with Snow Leopard.

I'm currently running Snow Leopard in 32 bit (by necessity, don't have a 64 bit processor). And in theory, the OS can shift for apps between 32 bit and 64 bit apis based on a setting in the app's info.plist

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Actually, I've thought it over, and the answer doesn't really make sense for me. I've spent most of my professional life writing programs for Apple computers, starting with the Apple II in 1977, the initial Mac release in 1984, up through Snow Leopard in 2009 when I shifted careers. So why doesn't this work for me?

(1) In all those years, no developer I ever knew expected Apple to fix a prior version of the OS. In theory, if you found a huge crashing bug that could destroy someone's hard disk, might be worth reporting and if it's soon after the release of new version they might do an upgrade. And recently, some security fixes would get done for back versions. But every developer knew that if there was a call not working right in an older version, the choices were work your way around that call, or tell the customers "You need to update to current".

(2) While Apple's online documentation has generally been good (barring a few periods where they dropped the ball), direct support from Apple as a developer unless you worked for Microsoft, Adobe, or a couple others has always been pretty spotty and lacking. There have been forums where developers help each other, developers would make friends with people at Apple to go around the system. But even under the paid system, the number of "support events" were very limited and rarely helpful.

So, Apple's decision that they won't be supporting Leopard any more is pretty much a non-issue, because the difference in support to developers between Leopard and Snow Leopard is vanishingly small. Yes, that decision has an implication for consumers - you may run into security issues that don't get fixed, any official Apple software may not run on Leopard any more (like iTunes). But when I switched to web stuff, most developers would support Tiger on Intel machines (which was only the standard for a few months), and many would also support the PPC macs and older OSes back to Jaguar (10.2).

Now, there are reasons to cut off older support. Because Paragon relies so heavily on Transgaming, Transgaming may have declared they won't support Leopard anymore. It is a pain developing for three different versions of the OS and a major pain to support that many. Also, Snow Leopard included a number of backend changes, introducing some nice new powerful APIs and providing cleaner and more functional replacements for old calls. It's possible to write code that checks the OS and run different code based on which OS you're on, but that's painful, results in unclean code harder to debug, and so one tends to use the oldest API in most cases even if there's a better call in the newer one. That's why a company will cut off older support, or say "Download this version for Snow Leopard/Lion, download that older version for Leopard and earlier" - and in a constantly updated system like CoH that approach won't fly. So Paragon or Transgaming may have made the call of "we're done with Leopard support"

But those are decisions you make over time. Giving you time to give people a heads up, and either upgrade or at least not dumping money into microtransaction costs just before you lose access. And those decisions aren't made because "Apple isn't supporting Leopard any more"

Actually, I suspect most Mac users aren't aware of Apple discontinuing official support for 10.5.

Ending support for 10.5 isn't unreasonable, so long as you don't arbitrarily block ability to use it - every Intel Mac (only ones that run CoH) can run Snow Leopard, the cost isn't excessive. But the way this was handled stinks.

#1 - Announced during the maintenance where it ends support? Bad form. From your statement above, it seems like you knew you weren't getting support any more, so could have explained earlier.

#2 - If you can explain just what that means, would be good. Is it just "Hey, I'm getting odd crashes on my Mac with 10.5.x" means you get no answer? Or will you be blocking access to the game for those using 10.5.x? If it's the latter, completely unacceptable without a lot of notice.

The bigger issue, of course, is what about the future. I have a Mac that is incapable of running 10.7 (Lion) and a PC that, if it can run Windows 7, won't run it well. Will I someday hear "As of today, no more gaming for XP/Snow Leopard players"?

Considering all the kinds of damage my characters have taken to be defeated without the Medicom failing to kick in, that's a very low risk. If I can activate a self destruct mechanism and be blown into smoke and still use the Medicom, the risk has to be pretty low.

In part it's hoorb, but also...

A hero's goals are pretty straight forward. Stop the bad guys, don't let the bad stuff happen. Whether it's because you're an illegal alien taught by foster parents in Kansas to be the ultimate Boy Scout or the brooding obsession of trying to deal with seeing your Mom and Dad shot down as a boy, the goal is pretty much the same. Yes, I want to help shut down the skulls in Kings row, they're bad guys doing bad stuff. I've just come from Galaxy City, of course I want to stop that from happening again. The dialog may not be quite right for an individual character, maybe some heroes may not be as understanding as the dialog suggests to the quirks and mistakes of some of the NPCs or need more encouragement to join with this group, but it's about stopping bad things from happening. Of all the heroes I've run through the arcs, on beta and live, none made me think "Wait, my character wouldn't do that".

Villains, however, have a myriad of different motivations. There's those who want to get rich without the tedium of things like earning it, there's those who are certain that with their superiority it is required they rule, there are those seeking revenge against the whole world, there are those whose ego is based on being the biggest bad *** in the block, and there are those who just want to see the world burn. It's been one issue with the villain content since CoV launched, and it shows up here. I don't play a lot of villains, haven't in a long time, but none of my characters would be particularly tempted by a desire to win a competition to prove I'm the baddest villain of them all.

The Muppet Show has always played at two levels - funny animals and slapstick for the kids, language with double, triple, and quadruple entendres and obscure references for the adults.