Jack_NoMind

Actually, you brought up three.

If they want to edit their local character, that's fine. There's no necessary reason they can change their gear on live servers any more easily than they can now -- the only way they'd be able to is if the server trusted them for some reason. (Actually, I don't think that would even happen in Arcana's original model, only in corinna's modification, which I personally like.)

Sort of. This works really well for the CoH gear model because there's not much in the way of really 'special' gear. The ideal for a CoH system would be that you do have to participate in Incarnate-level content, but that you'd just unlock your crafted slots as though you were getting an optimal drop each time you did the mission (remember, the local template of your build is accessible to the server, so the server 'knows' what you 'need').

And that's only if the two servers don't trust each other. For two premium (yeah, in a sec) servers, that probably wouldn't be an issue.

Premium servers with regular content publication, microtransactions to unlock costumes and other cosmetic equipment, probably an a-la-carte powerset purchase system. It would be a lot more like League of Legends in some ways, which stumbled onto a fantastic mt model.

December 1st...

"We're not done yet." - Me.

I'm going to be saying that whether or not there's a server up to log into.

So be nice.

I have affection for the troll, and I'd rather be weighted accordingly than not. I don't know what exactly got her banned, but nothing I've seen from her was worse than garden-variety awkward.

So you're expecting... vampires and scarecrows?

Hearing that CoH might be wound down or was suffering some layoffs wouldn't have been surprising. Hearing that the entire studio was canned while the publisher was still advertising the next content patch on their website was pretty darn surprising, Mr. June of 2012.

She is.

You've never once seen a badge-hunter complain that they can only get one of the Patron badges?

That isn't the achiever mindset. If you can do x to get badge A(1), and y to get badge A(2), the achiever wants A{1...n}. Telling them that "they've already done it," when they obviously haven't -- someone else has a different achievement with a different title or name or color or subatomic spin -- will at best merely appease the competitive aspect of achievement. But for the personal aspect, they will want the opportunity (and the possibility of reward) for everything.

Again, this flow-style mechanic seems intuitively obvious, but Hawkwood's example proves its untruth; in World of Warcraft, people will rep grind despite very vocally hating it (despite in many cases not actually needing the unlocked rewards) simply to be able to say they did. Whether or not this is actually some sort of masochistic pleasure function is beyond the scope of what I would want to seriously consider as a designer without compelling evidence.

I don't care much about the discussion either way, but this is a great opportunity for me to launch into my favorite rant.

Occam's Razor doesn't mean the most intuitively simple explanation is the most likely correct; if that were the case, we would throw it out immediately because the most intuitively simple explanation is almost always a teleological one -- something like eg, "Because God wills it so." That's nonsense.

In actuality, Occam's Razor means that the case with the fewest (novel) components is the one that is easiest to demonstrate. So when we ask why it rains, we could say "Because God wills it so." But we are then responsible for demonstrating the truth of the proposition, "God's will," which also makes us responsible for demonstrating the truth of the proposition "God."

The physicalist explanation for rain involves dozens or hundreds of aspects, depending on the desired complexity of modelling "why it is raining," but each individual one of them relies on few or no unproven or unprovable propositions. Thus we find the physicalist explanation the most parsimonious (another name for Occam's Razor is 'lex parsimoniae') in terms of new propositions to be examined -- and thus the most likely to be demonstrably true.

So next time someone cites Occam's Razor as favorable towards some ridiculous but easily-summarized hogwash, elucidate them! Together we can eradicate this misconception entirely.