Judgement_Dave

Back in old Blighty we understand sarcasm so well that we don't need the capital letters to signpost it.

You'd actually still be a colony if it wasn't for British sarcasm.

What - you really think we dressed the redcoats as shining red targets because we thought it made for a great uniform? It was misplaced sarcasm thinking you'd never hit a barn door with a banjo and so needed all the help you could get.

Misplaced as I say. It turns out that shooting bright red things moving at a stroll is something you were very good at.

Pre-merge people were asking (repeatedly) on the EU boards for advice on this. I guess if there had been a reply then many of the clashes (caused by one person having both EU and US accounts in the same name) could have been avoided.

Since the boards were meant to be going offline somewhere between 14:00 and 16:00 BST I waited until about 13:55 and changed my US handle.

Laser or no, I'm beginning to suspect that you're not the real JC if you couldn't know edit history on the old boards. It's hardly feeding the 5000...

Waits for the imminent arrival of a laser bolt from the heavens...

Apparently in the Divine Comedy the innermost circle of hell was reserved for people with duplicate names. Although you're one poster (well one of two) who'd know that already.

As I said, I think that most of the CoX devs are still CoX devs.

And lead developer is an important role, but it's still just one member of a team. Whilst not unanimous in any way shape or form, I still recall a lot of posters/players being glad when Posi took over - seeing it as better for the game.

I can't recall exactly when that was, but I'd guess somewhere around mid 2007. I'd say that most of the game we now know has been planned and developed by members of the current team.

And could I draw your attention to the woeful tales of Hellgate: London and Tabula Rasa. Both had some fairly stellar game design/dev talent and both ended up as... well.. somewhat less than stellar performances. Ok - premature release, changes of direction, publishers calling shots etc may have been major factors, but who says similar issues won't plague CO? Only time will tell.

Whatever the reason, one man may fill an important role but they can't guarantee success in a large team effort, especially with many external factors out of their control.

Change to 100 posts a page and we're barely a quarter of the way down page 2. Saves a bit on endlessly loading pages whilst browsing large threads.

You say that, FFM, but you forget that the rest of us had to read your posts twice (or thrice on occasion).

On balance I'd say the rest of us were affected far more, and in much deeper ways.

Do you still have difficulties browsing on your phone with all images disabled?

Stalk yourself?

If you mean 'stalk' as in 'secretly observing and following' then: How are you going to creep up behind yourself without you knowing???

OTOH if you mean 'stalk' as in 'stem or trunk' then...

then..

euuugghhhhh....




I 've got a mindbleach emergency.

Think it's the case that:
The company that makes CO is the same company that made CoX.
But the people who make CO are not the same people who made CoX.

Most of the people who made CoX are still here making CoX and have nothing to do with CO development.

For ideas/vision and fun factor, I'd take people over company name any day.

I've faint memories of that changing in early/mid '80s when the price of a gallon kept crossing £2 (I think it was £2 - it was some whole number of pounds anyway).

Whether it was the official reason or not, it always struck me that the change to litres was a cynical marketing ploy to make the price look more affordable - much as a retailer may sell something for £199.99 rather than £200.

Can tell you've been gone a while - IIRC:

Cryptic sold the IP to NC back in November 2007. Virtually all the CoX devs from Cryptic moved to NC to form a new studio (Paragon Studios).

Jack Emmert/Statesman/Jackalope stayed with Cryptic who are now working on Champions Online (in beta).

AFAIK the core graphics engine for CoX was developed by Cryptic and PS/NC have effectively licensed it.

IIRC the veterans wings were always touted as the first/introductory way to get wings. I don't think it was ever stated that they'd stay exclusively for vets, even though the vets designs are exclusive.


The existing game content shouldn't be made harder - you need to keep the baseline difficulty the same for people who don't have the time/energy/will to spend great amounts of time getting an uber-build.




But you're right that more difficult challenges were needed, though to a great extent that's either been done or is about to be done:

• MA missions allow for much more difficult missions than the existing standard dev-content.
• I16 will see you able to set a wider range of difficulties, and decouples mob level from spawn size.
• GR promises more difficult challenges for 50s, and I'd imagine that we'll be seeing more difficult challenges in non-GR content before too long.

I don't think the devs have a great problem with farming anymore as long as the risk:reward ratio stays within a reasonable range (the devs' idea of reasonable).

Yeah Dreck was 'nerfed' - but that was nearly 3 years ago iirc - a lot happens in 3 years and I think the view changed to an acceptance of some farming/Pling.

The only real problem with MA is the ability to massively skew the risk:reward ratio so that the risk drops to practically zero (e.g. dolls, multiple bubblers and mitos). It's that that's lead to an abundance of farming/PLing as the free meal is sooooo attractive to most people.

On that I think the devs wil get some balance (although I disagree strongly with the methods that the devs tend to react to 'exploits' due to their damaging affect on non-farm story arcs). Balance will take time though and until then the MA does have many potentially damaging side effects.

But regarding not being able to find a non-AE team: I take it you do actively try to create your own teams to do non-AE arcs/TFs?

I was in full agreement with you until the last bit.

I'm sick of these hyper-intelligent chihuahuas coming over here and stealing all our honest-hardworking dog biscuits and expecting government subsidies for walkies. Take a stand - let them throw their own darn sticks to fetch in CoX.

Say NO! to positive discrimination for chihuahuas!

That's because it is the correct spelling of the word.

Actually the CoH/CoV split is possibly a better argument for a rethink than any NA/EU split.

Many players I know tend to be almost exclusively CoH or CoV - I've met enough players who never play redside and others who came to the game because of CoV and never play blueside.

If the beta is still looking for bugs then I'd have hoped that it gets a reasonable mix of people testing from both heroic and villainous viewpoints. Especially true given the actual side-switching element of going rogue.

Of course, the US servers may be very different and staying exclusively to heroes or villains may be virtually unheard of there.

I was undecided whether I'd really try CO but now I'm strangely intrigued... Do you work for their niche-marketing programme?

It all depends at which point the 1st wave of 60+ vets get access. The beta is being run as follows:

• • Tier One: City of Heroes Veterans with 60+ months of paid time.
  • Tier Two: Loyalty Program players
  • Tier Three: Players who Pre-Order Going Rogue (Preorder details to be announced at a later date)

Loyalty Badges will be enabled within one week after the promotional period has ended (ends 15th Nov).

So the 2nd wave could be running anytime from 22nd nov (when the badge is awarded). The 3rd wave (pre-orders) could be very short. Let's face it, the number of people in tier 3 is probably tiny compared to tier 2.

They've been working on GR for a long time, and with more resources than they've had for a while... GR might only hit beta once there's no obvious howlers in it. The 1st wave of 60+ vets might have a good month or two to beat out most problems, and then I expect that the 2nd wave will be the bulk of potential testers. So wave 3 is probably getting an early look-in just as a sort of courtesy and as a minor incentive to pre-order.

I'm guessing that we could be looking at 22nd Nov for wave 2, c. 3-7th Dec for 3rd wave and live 2 weeks before Christmas.

Sorry old chap - having tea at Buck house again. Meeting the monarch really becomes so frightfully dreary after a while.





sotto voce: You think the americans wil buy this?

I know. It's a shame that the migration didn't account for user/board date settings...

I wonder if it treated dates with the day part greater than 12 properly.

I've worked on systems before where, under default date handling, dd/mm/yyyy is treated as mm/dd/yyyy as long as the 1st number is between 1 and 12. As soon as you hit day 13+ the system realises that it can't be the 13+ month and so reverts to a British (European?) format. Gotta love consistency .

Darn straight.

And I need to find out where the formatting/editing options are... grrrrrrr.

Can see this waiting til next week - dxp or work out the new boards... tricky conundrum. Not.