Judgement_Dave

This is my take on it as well. Have things where they make sense.

Heck - I'd seriously question Crey's planning if, for a TF-scale threat, they had all their metaphorical eggs so close together that they could be in one basket.

If they did that their whole plan could be ruined by a single attack/disaster... and don't think that couldn't happen.

IIRC Large scale disasters/attacks have previously happened to Siren's Call, Boomtown, Rikti Crash Site, Crey's Folly, the Hollows and Faultline. Was Eden another?

I trust that, knowing this, Crey have spread out to minimise business disruption...
Actually, unless it changed this last issue, there's a talk to Miss Liberty (or maybe Azuria, in Atlas anyway) before you rescue councilman Birch.

So at least one person has to go from Brixton to Atlas, and at least one from Brixton to Kings Row.

I see you're taking a similar approach with the letters in that last sentence...

OWULD... no...
DOLUW... no...
WOLDU... not likely...

Is it 'WOLUD'???

It may be CRYPTIC (got that one.. I think) but would a Pgaroan play such mischievous games with us?

Yikes and zowie!

I thought that was the obvious, no-need-to-state reason that fatal got the PM.

It's:
1 - disappointing that some might have thought that the devs are now communicating by unsolicited PM-lottery (though that may work better than using twitter all the darn time IMHO).
2 - a reminder that, for all PS/NC's faults, we do get better access to the devs now that we're a single forum.

That argument would seem to suggest no form of list merger for years if ever... Even if GR was an unprecedented success, why would the devs want the over-simplified headlines to read and suggest otherwise?

You saved that quickly with the edit!

It would have been odd to suggest that Avatea posted on the German board but not the French section given that, iirc, she is of French (or at least native French speaking) background...

Looking at her recent post history though, it would appear that virtually all her posts (except the European Lounge ones) are the standard official ones: patch notes, maintenance announcements, event announcements etc

So it's a little unfair to claim that any language/section has more of her time... with the possible exception of the European Lounge. Ironic?

That from a PM? If so: when?

And never forget how the French and German speaking players who aren't proficient in English must feel paying the same and only getting a single server for their language.



I've often thought that the 3 biggest, most obvious design errors the devs made and probably regret could be:

• hard-baking colours into power animations
• baking languages into the server
• splitting the user base geographically

They finally bit the bullet on the first (though CO probably helped spur that on, though it was on the cards before CO) but know how painful it was to do for something that much of the playerbase would benefit from.

The non-english-speaking-and-located-in-NA playerbase probably isn't big enough for them to do much about the last two.

Of course, if CoX2 comes, then it's a fair bet that they won't make those mistakes again...

Do chicks make good pets? Or weren't those two items related?

My pet rabbit never once allowed a jellyfish near it and lived to a ripe old age. Mrs JD's parents used to breed rabbits and they never ate jellyfish either.

With Blue's testimony the evidence is overwhelming: Rabbits are wise in the ways of gellatinous sea-beasties.

Yup - darn poor idea to take up Customer Support time for this type of thing.

How much strain would it place on the system, if the common belief that the EU server population is low is correct?

And is the alternative better?

Is not doing a passport or bulk transfer just a way to slowly wind down the EU as many players leave (either from CoX entirely or from the EU to start up new accounts on the NA servers).

And if the passport system couldn't cope with individual moves, well... I'm pretty sure that databases, and both logical and physical servers do get moved from time to time.

Undoubtedly - or they would have done something by now.

I suspect that the nearest we'll get may be some form of cross-server teaming that the devs seem to be having some progress with (following from EU birthday pocket D event on 28th April 2010, times in GMT+1):

17:33:46 Night Hornet: as it seems we cant hope for a EU population increase on the back or GR, some reference was made to global teaming instances, any news on this?
17:34:23 War Witch: Nothing specific, but it'll definitely make getting together with people for content easier.

I don't think WW would have said anything if the devs hadn't already been designing (and possibly testing) this. And I'd hope that she'd have replied that it was off if it wasn't looking like it'd be implemented.

So, whilst nothing promised, I'd say it looks likely that some form of cross-server teaming was being developed and hadn't met any major problems by 28th April 2010... Whether that'll ever come and whether it'll be limited to server list are different matters however.

Though cross-server teaming limited by server-list would pretty much be a waste of time, given that the devs have given away server transfers a few times, allowing within server-list character movement.

Avatea's assertion that "our server technology doesn't support the merging of any kind of server list" makes it sound like there are hard and fast limitations stopping an effective-merge. But it's only really saying that the servers aren't currently built to make a server-list merge easy.

We're talking moving/manipulating bits and bytes, not physical entities.

That is possible.

It may be difficult. It may need parts of the client/server code to be rewritten. It would need some level of data manipulation/remapping.

All this may not be practical. It may have been considered and failed cost-benefit analysis. But it is possible.

If the will is there. It is possible.

You're in real trouble when the aliens from V turn up.

I fear it's worse - it's that time of between dev-content releases already.

We'll get these regularly until GR and then they'll abate for 2-4 weeks until we get hit by the doom about GR failing to meet someones expectations of 500k concurrent connections per server.

Tis the way of the MMO.

As I posted earlier, the dev response at the EU anniversary event would suggest that it's not coming in the next 2 or 3 issues:

On the Coming but not yet Storm...
17:56:11 Judgement Dave: BTW are we going to see anything of that Coming Storm in the next 2 or 3 issues... or was the long range forecast as reliable as Michael Fish??
17:56:39 Ellie Mintal: The 'Experiecing Some Delays' Storm.
17:56:58 War Witch: Dangit, Ellie, you took my line.
17:57:05 Boudicea: A Compaies idea of 'soon' and a real persons are very different. i've learned that much in various jobs
17:57:27 War Witch: So true, Boudicea....

Funnily enough, no-one commented on that when I first posted it and I guess it'll be ignored again if it possibly answers the OP question...

Doubt it's the Coming Storm that lead the devs to state that we'll need the increased power at the EU pocket D event. Doubt it as the coming storm isn't coming soon...

These excerpts from my chatlog of the 6th-anniversary EU event (28th April 2010 pocket D on EU test, times GMT+1):

On the Coming but not yet Storm...
17:56:11 Judgement Dave: BTW are we going to see anything of that Coming Storm in the next 2 or 3 issues... or was the long range forecast as reliable as Michael Fish??
17:56:39 Ellie Mintal: The 'Experiecing Some Delays' Storm.
17:56:58 War Witch: Dangit, Ellie, you took my line.
17:57:05 Boudicea: A Compaies idea of 'soon' and a real persons are very different. i've learned that much in various jobs
17:57:27 War Witch: So true, Boudicea....

If it was noted that I'd asked about the next 2 or 3 issues then th ereply would seem to suggest that it's going to be a while longer til we see the storm arrive... Maybe we need to throw some more squids on the fire.

On becoming MOAR powerful...
18:10:52 Positron: I19 is all about making your level 50 moar powerful
18:11:35 Castle: You'll NEED to be more powerful, too, by the way.

18:12:41 Sanguine Rose: Aye, Incarnates, are they like the Ancilleries crossed with patrons or somesuch?
18:13:21 Castle: Sanguine Rose: We can't talk much about Incarnates, but it is a completely new system.
18:13:36 Positron: Cant give too much detail on Incarnate... you will be moar powerful, and you will NEED to be moar powerful to get even moar moar powerful.

Part of the problem is that they looked like they might be diamonds when you saw them get flushed from 50 feet away...

If you knew they were diamonds you could manage to search but knowing that they may just be glass or paste makes the expected payoff less worthwhile.

Surely better to state that in x days (maybe x=90) all arcs that haven't been republished between now and then get wiped... and allow devs choice (or similarly locked missions) to be edited for the purposes of meeting current AE rules that may currently invalidate them.

The arcs people care about could be refreshed and suffer no interruption of service. The many farms that don't deliver anymore, tests and throwaway arcs would presumably be left un-republished and so be deleted.

At any rate everything would end up being legit by current AE publishing rules.

Wasn't the AE originally designed as a dev content-creation tool that was then expanded into a player tool? I seem to recall that that was the case.

If so is it not possible that it is actually being used to mock-up/develop dev-created missions/arcs/TFs and that some of the additional work being done on the AE is primarily for the devs (with player use being a secondary consideration)?

And doubling or even trebling the number of badges available is probably fairly minor compared to practically any other dev activity...

Heck they could probably run through all the defeat X of mob Y badges and create corresponding badges for defeat 2X of mob Y and defeat 10X of mob Y with little more effort than coming up with new badge titles and maybe needing to keep counters counting...

Which even if it takes days would still be a lot less work than adding a new mission objective type to AE or the smallest of rebalancing tasks for PvP or adding a PvP scenario or creating a new arc or... or... or....

I like this

I went with Operative Word and Operative Phrase, and a widow called Twanky (do non-Brits get panto?).

Looks like Praetoria has it's bloodbowl team blockers kitted out already.

Given that part of the problem that can lead to CoX feeling stale is overfamiliarity with spawn points it'll be interesting to see if GR brings something new and less predicatble.

You need to think bigger.

I'm expecting Egyptian dinosaurs on the moon complete with zombie space nazi riders and frikkin' laser beams.