GhostRaptor_EU

Hi all,

It's a fresh new year, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot going on!

To kick us off, The "What's On?" threads stickied to the top of each server forum are now open for business . If you've got an event you think might be of interest to others, or you are looking for something to do beyond just that next mission on your list, you might want to take a look at the following threads:

Villainous Union - What's On?
Heroic Union - What's On?
Villainous Defiant - What's On?
Heroic Defiant - What's On?

Vet Rewards page: http://eu.cityofheroes.com/en/commun...teran_rewards/

Link from PlayNC doesn't work currently as it has apparently not been updated. I'll poke them again .

Please review the Rules and Guidelines thread in the Announcements forum.

Should you notice any post, or contents of a post, that are questionable under these forum rules and guidelines you should always use the forum tool to report this post to us and not respond to that post.

Some clarifications for 2009:

Linking to External Sites
Any linking from these forums that leads to an undesirable or unexpected outcome for the person clicking the link will be considered a breach of the forum rules and guidelines. Especially do not include links in your posts or signatures if that link to pages that hi-jack a browser.

Leaving Threads
We'll be keeping a very close eye on these this year, as we've been seeing a lot of them and some have been questionable. Any that are questionable will be removed at our discretion, while others will generally be locked after a few days.

Support Enquiries
We consider all correspondence with support to be confidential. As such we do not reveal details of our correspondence with any of our customers. You may discuss your experiences with support in a general fashion here, however we would like to ask that you do not cut&paste the contents of any correspondence without prior permission. Any specific concerns can be directed to myself, via email (ghostraptor@ncsoft.com), so that we can investigate immediately.

Participating in, or commenting on, flame wars
Please note that should you ignore the advice above re: reporting posts and not responding to them, any participation of yours in a flame war or other discussion that comes under moderation will result in your own posts being included in the investigation as well, and warnings may result if warranted. Becoming involved in extending a heated discussion better left to moderation is something to be avoided: all you do is create further moderation work for us.

NB: This is by no means meant to say that you are not allowed to participate in discussions with strongly held opposing viewpoints / opinions. By all means, you are welcome to disagree with each other and debate the finer points of why you disagree. There is a line that should not be crossed, however, and when someone crosses that line it does not mean that everyone else can as well.


Any questions, please do not hesitate to email or PM me.

[ QUOTE ]
It seems to me that the casual players, those that *might* pvp occasionally for fun are put off by

1: Those with certain pvp powersets
2: Those with uber builds
3: Those with lots of practice

Dominating the zones.

I13 was trying to level out the playing field, which imho went horribly wrong.

[/ QUOTE ]

To be precise, the goal of the changes in I13 was to de-emphasise the first two of those items listed.

The third, assuming that practise brings skill, isn't as huge an issue. Anyone with a genuine interest in PvP (that includes 'casual' PvPers) should not be scared off by being beaten by player skill. Being beaten by a specialised niche build that saps fun (eg getting perma-dommed and being unable to do much of anything until you die) is far more likely to cause a prospective PvP player to not play.

I'm still on holiday until Monday, as are many of the other staff. It's not a good time of year for an issue such as this to crop up, unfortunately.

I will make sure that this is investigated with a high priority ASAP.

Edit:

A quick request while I'm here: While what I've seen in this thread is of concern, and worthy of investigation, I do not feel that everyone jumping in making negative comments about support is at all helpful.

Who let the Trolls out of Skyway?

Cripes. Please, it makes my job a whole lot easier if you just report the bad posts and do not reply to them.

[ QUOTE ]
grrr ... it got pruned. We'll need to reconstruct it.

If anyone's interested in helping do that, please go ahead and post suggestions for what to include in a new thread here.

Thanks!

[/ QUOTE ]

Ha! Why didn't I think of this yesterday? Thread has been rescued by going to our internal testing copy of the new forums and grabbing it from there.

Note: If there are any otehr important threads that you feel are missing from the forums after the prune that occurred, please don't hesitate to let me know.

The purpose of the Suggestions board is to give our players a place to let us know what changes they'd like to see made to City of Heroes and/or City of Villains by posting their ideas.

However, there are a few things that do tend to come up fairly often. In an effort to help us all focus on the new and original ideas, the following is a list of suggestions that have already been made many times.

Please take the time to scan this list before posting to the Suggestions board. Unless you feel you have a new or interesting take on one of these ideas, you can rest assured that the idea has already been suggested several times. I've also included brief comments about each one.

Please note: The comments about each suggestion are based on my understanding of the game. They are intended as guidelines only:

<ul type="square">[*]Vehicles - player-owned and/or controlled vehicles.
(Bridger's comment: My feeling is that controllable vehicles - cars you can actually drive around and the like - are unlikely.)

[*]Wall-crawling/running/climbing - the ability to walk, run or crawl on vertical surfaces.
(Bridger's comment: Cryptic (note: now NCNC, however comments were made under the Cryptic banner) has confirmed several times that these abilities are technically tricky to achieve in the current game engine, and would probably require a very large amount of animation time to introduce even if the technical problems are cracked.)

[*]Swinging - the ability to move around the city via swing-lines, webs, grappel guns or some similar means.
(Bridger's comment: Cryptic (note: now NCNC, however comments were made under the Cryptic banner) has mentioned that there are both technical and gameplay problems with this form of travel power.)

[*]Weapon/Power customisation - the ability to alter the appearance (and/or sound effects) of your character's weapons or powers.
GhostRaptor comment: weapon customisation is now available, however power customisation is still technically very difficult to achieve.)

[*]Influence transfer - the ability to move large sums of Influence from one character to another, and/or between alts on a single account.
(Bridger's comment: Not really sure how likely this is.)

[*]Character slots - requests for more character slots.
(GhostRaptor's comment: The ability to purchase additional character slots was added during 2008.)

[*]Secret identities - requests for 'secret identity' modes or options.
(GhostRaptor's comment: The Issue 13 feature 'Day Jobs' takes a small step in this direction.)

[*]Weather effects - requests for weather in Paragon City and/or the Rogue Isles.
(Bridger's comment: Given the amount of work this would be and the potential impact on people's frame rates, I'm guessing that this is unlikely any time soon.)
[*]Server Mergers - the merging of EU servers either with each other or into the US server lists.
(GhostRaptor's comment: There are no current plans for any changes in server structure.)[/list]
If you can think of any other suggestions that keep coming up, please send GhostRaptor a Private Message (PM) with the details and I'll add it to this list.

grrr ... it got pruned. We'll need to reconstruct it.

If anyone's interested in helping do that, please go ahead and post suggestions for what to include in a new thread here.

Thanks!

[ QUOTE ]
As in the US forums.
.
Quote from Ex Libris:
.
We are receiving reports that some people are not receiving their Rewards when doing the holiday missions.
.
Please respond to this thread with the following information so we can help narrow down the issue:
.
Server:
Character Name:
Character Level:
Character Archetype:
Character Origin:
Are you Grouped:
Are you Sidekicked or Lackeyed:
Are you Exemplared or Malefactored:
Are you in a pact:
Any other details that you think might be related:
.
.
We are aware that this is occuring but we have not yet been able to isolate the specific steps for reproduction. Posting your information here will help us to identify the related patterns.
.
Thank you for your cooperation, we would like to get this issue addressed as soon as possible.


[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for bringing this thread here as well. I've forwarded a link to Ex Libris so any data collected here can be added to the US data. I've also added a line for entering whether you were Exemplared or Malefactored.

DevCornerUK-ML-1289457-ML-

I'll see what I can find out. Unfortunately it's likely to be a fairly low priority item, however.

Thread is being locked. You may open a new thread to continue discussion, however the personal attacks should be left here.

We had issues with a peer outside of our network that was part of the routing for a good portion of our player base this weekend. We've removed this peer from our routing options until they restore stability within their network.

I'm not using it, but if I was to use it I'd be on 1024*600 (native for the Acer Aspire One).

Since this is turning into a meta-discussion about the original discussion, and I don't like the way it's becoming personal, I'm going to go ahead and close this thread.

Sorry all, I haven't had much time for judging since nominations closed.

For this month I have chosen The_Jediand's The Scarlet Widow.

Congratulations! I'll send you a PM shortly.

Just to let you all know, due the holidays the next nomination period will open January 5th and encompass November and December. Two winners will be chosen.

[ QUOTE ]
You have over 10,000 PMs?

This doesn't affect us does it? Or are we getting migrated further down the line?

[/ QUOTE ]

The EU forums will be migrated to the new forums as well, and as FFM guessed we'll probably do this in-line with the US migration.

I've already been working on an internal-only version of the new EU forums getting them prepared.

Please consider Ex Libris' post to be valid for the EU as well, as well as any future posts on forum migration. Unless, of course, I let you know to ignore it!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Please resume hunting for bargains .

[/ QUOTE ]

Clearly, you haven't been shopping in there lately...

[/ QUOTE ]

I have, actually

Costine me a fortune getting these inventions badges!

It's up this morning.

Hi all,

The Consignment Houses have been restored following this morning's maintenance.

Please resume hunting for bargains .

[ QUOTE ]
Given the time that was posted, it's probably just a case of needing to get the announcement translated before they post it up...

[/ QUOTE ]

This is exactly the case. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the issue, the Consignment Houses needed to be brought down with little notice. We weren't aware of this in the EU until this morning, and the messages are currently being localised for addition to an MotD.

The services should be back online by this evening. There should be no losses as a result of this temporary closure of the service, with all items put up for sale or storage, or received from purchase, still present when the service resumes.

[ QUOTE ]
I agree with others, Posi is basically saying "OK we did it wrong but I can't admit it so I'll ignore it and introduce this so we can make it pre-I13" which in my mind says "So, Posi, why didn't you look over the changes you made?"

[/ QUOTE ]

This announcement is only possible now because the Dev team knew in advance that some of our PvP community would not like the changes, and would choose not to adapt to them. When you make changes on this scale there are always going to be existing players who are unhappy, and it simply makes sense to give them the option to continue playing the game they enjoy if that is possible.

The team are committed to making PvP in City of Heroes appeal to a larger audience, and they're committed to making improvements to Zone, Arena and Base PvP. The pre-Issue 13 PvP system isn't viable for the feature revamps on the way. Making pre-issue 13 PvP available via the Arena is a relatively simple thing to do, and makes sense for those who enjoyed that form of PvP.

[ QUOTE ]
This is all well and good, but zone PvP isn't getting dealt with.

[/ QUOTE ]

Zone PvP will be addressed, it's already been mentioned that they have plans for a revamp.

[ QUOTE ]
My point was if they don't think they had enough people helping state side then there's plenty over here. Also telling the players about what they went testing would also help..... Something they'll do next time apparently

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you've missed the most important part of what Ex Libris was saying in that post. The lack of testers was referring to early betas (one of which we did try including EU community in). For Issue 13 they brought in a significant number of PvP'ers: they knew they'd need them. What happened is that the feedback they received from the majority was effectively unusable and got in the way of being able to iterate changes.

I've seen from these forums that many of the changes made during beta were received positively. Many of those changes were sourced from the community members who took the time to provide high quality feedback. If all of the PvP community invited to I13 Closed Beta had taken that approach, then the number of iterations and improvements to the new system would quite probably have been higher.

It wasn't a lack of numbers that was the problem. It was a lack of testers willing to work with the dev team instead of throwing insults and demands. It is precisely the sort of things that I have removed from this thread (and some that I haven't but instead chosen to respond to) that hampered the development process for the Issue 13 PvP Revamp, and will continue to hamper the ongoing process of improving PvP in CoH.

The dev team want to communicate with the PvP community. Effective communication is a two way street, however: the PvP community needs to step up as well, and show that they're willing to communicate with the devs in a mature and reasonable manner. Throwing insults and responding to the dev team giving an option to play pre-Issue 13 PvP by making accusations like those in this thread does this community no good at all.

The folks at NCNC are stepping up on PvP and they're committing to improving PvP and bringing it to a larger audience. They're committing to revamping existing features and giving everyone a better PvP experience. It will take some time, but they're willing to work with you. The question is: will the PvP community step up as well, and work with the devs? Insults and accusations get you nothing. Communicating effectively just might get you a whole lot.

Edit to add: The community taking the initiative to put together a Test ladder and work together on testing and communicating is a grand start.

If you have access to the internet, you could add the game time to your account on the 30th/31st. It's the card itself that expires and not the time.

I'm forwarding this issue to our billing people, hopefully I'll know more soon.

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the code GR now I'm sure I'm just being thick. But how do you apply the code i assumed you just added it as a upgrade but every time i try i get "Invalid Serial Code" am i sticking it in the wrong bit or could it be because the account i want to apply it to is currently Inactive?

[/ QUOTE ]

Might be the account being inactive. Could be that I transcribed it wrong (all the codes I have are on fancy little bits of cardboard).

Assuming you're trying to enter it in the "Upgrade Account" bit from within PlayNC?