GadgetDon

I hope you're right - but my biggest concern about Freedom is how limited the Free players are in terms of participating in the community, or even realizing that the community is around them. The one channel they get is /help, which means /help is going to be utterly useless for actual help when it becomes the lft/general bull channel.

Even Premium users will be hugely limited, cut off from much of the fun and interaction.

I tried the competition, speaking cryptically, and the reason I didn't stick with it was that they never got the importance of community. I tried it when they went Free, and it wasn't any better - but wasn't any worse. If there's anything that will kill this, it's the complete and utter crippling of this game's great community features.

Except it's still a badge that, unless you can play within this one narrow block of time, play in exactly the way you want to, play with whoever you can run into there instead of your normal people, play with whatever character you happen to have on Freedom or one you create instead of your main, you will NEVER earn this badge.

Any chance that "stuff" includes fixing the incredible messup that was the "security" update?

Because a large number of people found themselves unable to log in after this ill-concieved idiotic lame brained and completely ineffective for the purposes intended change, and the only resolution is a phone call to a toll number with ridiculous wait times or email with inconsistent response time, and in most cases a large amount of info required that many people may not have kept.

It's not while playing. It's logging into the account on plaync.com (or whatever the URL de jour is) where you can change email, buy stuff, set payment options, etc.

Yes. Guilty until proven innocent. The claim of "discrimination" throws the burden of proof on its head. The accusation is the proof that the accused acted with evil intent to harm others.

I take them at their word that they've seriously discussed it. Part of the discussion, though, is going to be "OK, we've got code that is written, works great on our test bench and all we have to do is give the order to do it. And talking to the programmer, he says we'll need to do a lot more testing if we're not only adding the EU records but also modifying the NA records as we go - concerns about race conditions and such."

Yes, discrimination is a word. It applies to all sorts of situations, many highly justified. Indeed, the solution that's generally been preferred by the posters in this thread calls for discriminating against newer or less active players and in favor of longer-active players. Yes, that is just as much "discrimination" as "in a conflict, the EU player loses out". In a vacuum, most people in the thread consider shafting newer/less active players more just (or less unjust) than shafting EU players. Add the costs and time and safety concerns of simpler existing codes, the balance will change for some.

The reason I object to the term discrimination in this case is twofold. First, it was raised in conjunction with a law with the suggestion that what NC was doing was illegal, which is silly. Second, even with that out of the way, when people use the word "discrimination" they usually mean it in a perjorative way, the decision is being made for emotional mean reasons, a.k.a. as "the devs hate us" (or in this case, it's the suits doing the hating). Which I would also describe as silly.

I don't think the people making the decisions gave sufficient consideration to the importance of the social aspects (particularly with global names). I believe they made a mistake because they didn't think through all the ramifications, and are making a mistake in not taking the hit to deal with those ramifications. But they aren't doing it because they're stupid, or because they hate EU customers.

On the contrary, discrimination happens all the time. Access to City of Heroes at all is discriminatory based on those who are willing and able to pay. The ability to play is discriminatory to the computer you have (official support is only given to Intel Macs and PCs with Windows XP or above - Linux users have a hack but it's not officially supported. Windows 98, BeOS, and PPC Mac users are out in the cold).

While numbers have never been released, my presumption is that the number of City of Heroes NA accounts is huge, and the number of City of Heroes EU accounts is pretty big too (this includes all inactive/trial accounts). Given that the NA database is significantly larger (I doubt anyone will argue against that), I'm sure the code they've written uses the NA database and adds records from the EU database. Their scheme, then, is simple. Is there a conflict on the new account name for the record being added? Change it before adding. Is there a conflict in the global? Clear it before adding. Simpler code, far less chance of bugs introduced that could corrupt the database, perhaps even running faster. These are three justifiable reasons for adopting this system. (And I suspect they've got this code written and probably tested on copies of the database and known to be working, which is another advantage - always hard to pull code out of the "frozen" status.)

Now, as I've said, I believe that the negative effects on the EU customers are more important than the these reasons, particularly for global name. I think the advantages in making EU customers happy outweigh the downsides of having to make these changes. But that's a judgement call.

Which is very different from race or sex or ethnic origin, where the only reason for that discrimination is "I don't like those people". And equating discrimination for "I don't like them" with "we've got working code that is simpler and less likely to have bugs" is, to use a word, silly. And arguing that they are the same, threatening "you're breaking the law", stating "you MUST do this because we're in the EU" is not only silly, it's counter productive.

Again, to make it very clear - I think the current proposal, even with the reactivation to try to change old accounts and even if they can clear inactive globals, is the wrong decision. Global names are important in a social game, the social aspects and community are what The Second Superhero MMO complete messed up, and the benefits to NC Soft in supporting these social connections (and avoiding the cost to NC Soft of angering loyal customers who pay every month) outweigh the time, security, and cost benefits of going with what they have now. But it's a question of "what's the better thing to do", not "what do they have a duty to do" and definitely not "what are they legally required to do."

It's not racial or ethnic origin. It's that you had one type of account (EU CoH) as opposed to another (NA CoH). Living in Europe isn't a race or ethnic origin, both the U.S. and Europe have a wide variety in this area.

I fully stand with those who are unhappy about the potential loss of long-used global names to inactive/trial/recently set up names (and am sort of half-crouched with those unhappy about the change in login name), but let's not be silly about this.

I think this is the reasonable approach, particularly for globals. Having your global name revoked doesn't make it harder to log on (a stated concern) so there's no downside in favoring the most loyal customer, it's just clearing the global name so no issue of "what do we add". Yes, it makes the merge routine a touch more complex, but just a touch, you're clearly reading both records from the database. And it would be hard to argue against the justice of "most loyal member gets the global". Oh, and I presume whoever loses the globalname gets the flag set so they can do a global name change.

As for the login name, my advice for those affected on the other side of the pond is to grumble a little and accept this. Nobody will see it, it's a minor annoyance on your end. I would recommend to NCSoft that, when someone logs in, if the username/password fails, check if "EU".username/password would have worked. If so, pop up a dialog box, explain what may have happened, and ask if they want to log in as EUusername.

And a further word of advice - please look for some way to merge accounts. Make it "has to have been what was an NA and EU account", require the user to log into both master accounts to approve the change (assuming the issues with the "security" changes get resolved), and a reasonable fee could be assessed.

The potential issue highlighted by the recent Play NC security updates and now this is - NC Soft seems to think the players are peons who can be treated as NC Soft wants and they'll just shut up, sit down, and take it. And that clearly there's no need to discuss anything with those peons about how they'd like it, because, well, they're just peons. It's not like there's any competition out there where these peons can take their money.

OK, here's a suggestion that will be summary ignored, probably get this post deleted and maybe get my account suspended, but here goes.

TALK TO US. BEFORE IT'S A FAIT ACCOMPLI. In spite of what sometimes seems the best efforts of those setting policy, you've got a highly loyal membership, many of which are very smart, have a variety of expertise in areas such as consumer handling, management, security, and more. All the feedback you've gotten on the security change and this way of combining NA & EU and most of the feedback on the launcher could have been gotten in time to do something.

I'm not saying give the "community voice" a veto (particularly since the community rarely speaks with one voice), just collect the feedback early enough that it's possible to incorporate it and seriously consider the feedback. Worst case - you'll figure out what the objections are to your plan and be prepared with explanations about why you did what you did and be prepped for dealing with the side effects. Best case - you get ideas you hadn't consider and are able to make your customers happier. And if nothing else,

Yes, this won't be possible for everything. Creative decisions clearly need the view of the creator, you don't want to take a poll on whether the coming storm is the work of Nemesis, Fifth Column, whoever it is that really hates Kheldans, or Yet Another Marcus Cole. Some responses to the competition need to be private, announcing that you're considering Free Play or negotiating a license with Marvel to use their characters storyline would clearly be wrong. And an emergency security issue that needs handling now can't wait.

But just like you use customers as free testing and consider that feedback as you tweak what you do there, use us to improve the way the company deals with us. It seems that, in every interview, you talk about the incredible community you've got. If you believe it, use it.

Yes, the potential of phishing clearly means a 45 minute call to a toll number is a superior solution.

Right, so all it needs is the link to reset the security questions.

More leeway always and forever, that's arguably a reasonable step to take forward though I'd still say it's wrong.

More leeway during a transition period where suddenly information entered seven or more years ago and never had to look at since becomes the block to entering the site AND you must get the caps exactly right - absolutely required. I gave one proposed solution, here's my revised proposed solution:

A failed attempt to enter the security questions causes an email to be sent to the address on record, warning you of the failed attempt and a link to reset the security questions. All automated, no need for support intervention (which will save NCSoft money), minor hassle for the user, the only "hole" is if the email address has also been hacked. This solution will require minimal programming time (they already have the ability to send a link to reset the security questions used by the support staff) and make everyone a lot happier.

If they want to be strict about it, only allow this method of getting in to be used once. If they want to be completely paranoid, only make it available to accounts that have neither updated their security questions since the new system went into effect or the security questions have been successfully answered.

But here's why the whole thing is completely misguided even if more notice had been provided and thus we all had time to know what our answers would be, why "no leeway" is the wrong attitude.

(1) We're not dealing with military secrets here, we're not dealing with social security numbers or bank accounts or credit cards. For some people, the concern about their characters may be as high as their social security numbers or bank accounts or credit cards, and an option to require high security to enter the master account is. For most people, though, it's just an additional senseless hassle. And so the question is, when does the hassle become more than the value of what we're getting?

(2) It's still simple text. Vulnerable to phishing attempts, vulnerable to keyloggers, potentially vulnerable to traffic watching. Worse, it's presented as "real world information" for which the right answer could be determined through facebook/twitter/other sources. Yes, really security conscious people could provide false answers, but most people AREN'T really security conscious.

(3) You're dealing with humans. Humans really, really, really hate passwords, which is why most passwords are pretty simple and pretty breakable. They have pretty bad memories, and this system is particular finicky (Was it Boston, Boston Parkway, Boston Pkwy, Boston Pkwy.? Did I use caps or not). Barring the minority of people with superior memories, humans respond by writing down passwords giving a single source of failure. One person had them stored in gmail - which doesn't have this level of security.

So they're putting paying customers through a lot of hassle that, in the end, will offer little extra security but probably future hassle. There's a term for that. "Bad choice". Particularly since there's always other things people could be doing with their money.