Jack_NoMind

Insurance exists to cover liability, and the "ownership" of this liability will be decided in part by a financial battle between insurance providers and service providers. I expect the courts to find all inhabitants of a robotic vehicle to be "passengers," and the vehicle itself to be the liability... the question is whether or not the owner (who could have failed to maintain the vehicle) or the manufacturer (who could have failed to provide adequate safeguards or sufficient indication of an impending failure) to be responsible for this liability.

Historically in the US I believe the pressure of class action suits has pushed the liability on to product manufacturers, who cover this cost (self-insure) by increasing prices for the consumer. Am I really that mistaken?

Edit : Ah. I jumped ahead a few decades on you. I'm already imagining cars without steering wheels. ;p

Conservative.

Unless you mean you're 50/50 on living to 2050.

Also, I really want to make a 45% joke, but I can't quite think of one today.

Edit : Granted, Americans are pretty odd. I wouldn't have predicted the death of the trolley system before it happened and I would have predicted a much higher penetration of metric standardization by now. But I think the social factors are lining up on this one.

They don't, and I imagine will mostly be used for relatively predictable driving conditions initially (eg, highways). But the safety offered by the technology is of principal benefit when it's employed more-or-less universally and without the option for a driver to override it -- the latter of which is much more reliably ensured by a combination of technology and legislature than by either alone. Once the technology is proven, it's likely that user-driven vehicles will become (largely) a thing of the past. A risky, quaint and barbaric custom enjoyed by hobbyists in private, like horsemanship or steam engine operation.

Which I don't mind, honestly. I just want it to take long enough that by the time I can't choose to drive myself publicly I would have been rubbish at it anyway.

But nearly no one's going to read it. And you know this from experience. You're taking a course of action designed to justify to yourself an oppositional mindset.

People have already started to and are are going to continue expressing how they feel pretty vehemently all over you.

You've already expressed your opinion of how other people feel, as well.

I'll just leave these here so you can think about what you've done.

I think what Zwillinger said was more to the effect of, "it can't really *hurt* to make noise.*

And I think that was kind of an accident. Besides, NCSoft has shut down Paragon Studios. It is almost certainly not going to change that decision; the window for "oops, our bad" was basically Sept 1st. The best we can hope for is for it to be cut free.

Tenacious? Bored? Business as usual?

Ah, and door number three wins again.

I'd just like to point out, PPC, that you have at this point passed arguing about the argument, and are now arguing about the argument that was about the argument.

Welcome to the forums. Ever play a Scrapper?

They did ask. They asked us to follow them on Twitter, to retweet their comments and drive up traffic, to increase their visibility on Twitch, to invite our friends to play. They asked very nicely and gave us stuff for doing this (although I never actually did get my month for referring a friend here).

If people weren't doing (enough of) this with incentives, why do you think that asking louder would have helped? A post like, "Guys, we're in dire straits" -- even if they'd known that to be true -- would have been firstly forbidden by NCSoft as a bad PR move and secondly a huge risk for almost certainly less effort than we're putting out now. I think it could have been pulled off if it had been paired with a public move like shutting down a couple servers, but on some level that would've been a dick thing to do (because shutting down two or four or even half the servers would've screwed with thousands of people but not really saved much cost-wise -- it would have simply been to convince people they were serious).

People are rising to the challenge because they see a dire situation. No dire situation -- no heroic effort. Folks just don't work that way. And frankly it's hard. I've been after my friends to play CoH for months, but other than the points I literally bought myself for one friend and a month's sub for another, I couldn't get them into the game. They were always after the newest thing. One of them finally caved and brought his Scrapper back now that it's shuttering.

I think that Dark_Respite deserves a freakin' medal for her work with CoH, though. I regret not joining every gaming community I could've to spam her videos... and all of the other great videos created by our players, for that matter.

Oh, and Black Pebble, if you have any way to manage this at all, Leandro deserves at least VIP status 'till shutdown for that crowd tech video and the Paragon "hero crowd" logo. (I'm assuming you can't get him a new car.) I tried to give him a game code (GR:CC) a week and a half ago, but he already had it.

I've been trying to stay away from the funeral metaphor. Besides, this isn't really a funeral yet -- it's more like a deathwatch.

Absolutely. I think Arcanaville's right about demorecord being one of our biggest untapped potentials; I also think that recovering or otherwise revitalizing the SG base system was another huge thing that kept getting pushed to the side because of the enormity of the task. Integrating player content into a whole framework -- player-created cutscenes in missions using demorecord scripting, as a small example -- would have been a major coup, even if we didn't see the benefits right away.

And base raids. Man, I was never really into PvP either pre- or post- i13, but it could have been glorious. That's another thing like ED where they really should have rolled out the changes more or less right alongside the new tech.

Heh. Yeah, there were a few times I really wanted to send Posi or somebody a copy of Designing Virtual Worlds with careful highlighting. But... it's always been a question of finite person-hours.

Eh. Everyone's within their rights to their opinion no matter what they've said; whether it was BT15 posting to a farewell thread or Tony posting to this one. More to the point is the issue of consideration; this isn't the time or the place to be especially critical of the game, the staff, or even the players. We might not have any of them for much longer. Now's the time to focus on the good things we remember. I wish BrickstownThug15 had spent more time on that in his OP.

The anger that Tony and others have shown might be mis-directed, but it's part of what's still binding us all together. Many of us, myself included, are very angry that someone wants to take Paragon City away, and it might be easy to see anyone who thinks that's a good idea as part of "those people" who are doing this. Even though they really aren't.

I don't agree with Tony about everything, but I do think it's important that we centralize our efforts. He's volunteered his "home" (Titan Network) to help with that. If you really feel like he's just a demagogue, I understand, but I think we can accomplish far more together than we can in small groups. This unfortunately means compromise... heh, a lot of compromise, maybe. But it's our best shot.

I find myself often going back to this.