Kitsune Knight

That's how mez protection works in every case. If you've got your mez toggle on, and you've got a mez active on you, and then you disable the mez toggle... you're now mezed! Mez resistance is the only thing that impacts the mez itself.

Everybody likes a good dead horse! Change is scary!

I wasn't attempting to claim it was CoH Titan, though, does host several programs that it would be hard to claim don't cross the line of being a read only mod (it's modifying what information you can extract- to say nothing of the development of it).

Just because Paragon has included such functionality doesn't make it not a mod. The data folder is also undocumented, so it's not like this is something that was intended for use by the players. To me, making the argument that vidiotmaps isn't a mod is a bit like claiming the mods for games like the elder scrolls games aren't mods. You might not be modifying the client itself by tweaking the bits, but you are overwriting the files from the clients point of view, as it overlays the DATA/ tree over it's internal filesystem of piggs.


But really, that's all moot. It doesn't matter whether it's a mod or not, because the Devs quite obviously aren't bothered by it (like I said, they linked to vidiotmaps in the past, and currently link to cohtitan which has far more intrusive- if read only- programs). Vidiotmaps, all the cohtitan programs, the icon 'fixes', the sound 'fixes' are all regularly discussed on the official forums (i.e. the forums you're reading right now ), and I don't believe I've ever once seen any thread get modsmacked talking about using/recommending them (at least for reasons related to them). NC's lawyers are probably the only reason they're as quiet as they are about the topic generally (knowing my luck, a redname will post either right before, or right after I post this!).


There's a variety of ways to massively improve the reliability of the infrastructure (primarily by things like DNSSEC and other DNS enhancements). It's a shame that so many IT companies really just don't give a damn... hopefully out of laziness, and not out of coercion from the US government.

"Foes that get close to the user will have their own recharge rate reduced."

Entropic Aura does debuff now (although the "real numbers" doesn't appear to show that... it claims there's two recharge components, both impacting self!), so, while technically the taunt attribute isn't what categorizes an aura as offensive, it's still offensive

You're new here, aren't you?


The correct response is "Can I have your stuff?"

I doubt they'll be any smarter than anyone else on Freedom, so they'll likely spend 1-50 there just as well as all of you low life, power leveling, ganking, rare duping scumbags



Why yes, I am a Freedom native!

You could start the game, set your graphics and such, close the game (do not open the market!) and then make a copy of that file. After you open the market from then on, on exit overwrite your user.reg with the backed up, working one (you can also edit out the various Qt sections, since that's what the Launcher borks on).

At some point, giving free players "a little more" will kill this game, because it'll become impossible to make it profitable. Exactly what that point is, is quite debatable, and any debates over that point will be full of mostly just supposition, with little real numbers backing up said facts. The only ones really in a decent position to know where that line would be are going to be Paragon/NC- but only after Freedom launches and they can gather data.

Blindly saying it can't hurt is a much easier position to take than saying 'hold your horses', because it's easy to make an emotional appeal and ignore any potential long-term ramifications.


I really don't think no access to IOs is a huge deal. PvP is not a major draw of this game, so exactly how powerful your character is in comparison to another is much less of a big deal. Since SOs are generally more than enough to be able to solo anything in the game (sans team-only content), it's also not a big deal from that point of view... and for team content, no one is going to really notice the difference between someone using SOs and someone using IOs (I've been on high levels teams with no enhancements and no one had a clue... even as melee characters!).

Might giving free/purchasable perma access to IOs be a good idea? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. It's easier for them to make that an option later than to take it away in the future if it turns out it was a mistake.

You're not required to "buy" the Knowledgeable badge to complete the tutorial anymore. Not sure exactly how it works anymore, but, at least previously you could close the conversation with the NPC and reopen it and just say you'll do it later.

Yes, they were pretty much (worded differently, but mods weren't allowed). I found a copy of the EULA from 2006 and it expressly forbid "modification" to the client. VidiotMaps has been linked officially by NC/Cryptic years ago as a top fan site or something another... also, one of the loading screen tips says that 'wiki.cohtitan.com is something something excellent resource'. While paragonwiki isn't a mod, I doubt they'd link to any part of CoH Titan in-game if they were concerned about any of the software on the site.

We'd have at least two days of them as a vig before they go full blown evil, so we'd have a warning when they start taking a heavy hand towards justice.

How do you think they're going to figure out if you're cheating? Like I said, by doing the exact monitoring that the EULA lets NC do. They could sell any information about your actions to third parties under the guise determining if you're "cheating" just as easily as NC could, if that's what you're worried about.

The wording is different, but the power is really the same.


Quite frankly, how are you envisioning them abusing this ability? What specifically concerns you? You probably don't want to say, because we'll more likely than not point out craptons of software that gives the developers/publishers the exact same rights.

Yes it does.

The Tier 9 VIP items also change out quarterly, so, if you never buy any PP (thus all your reward tokens are from time subscribed), you'll get a new set of VIP tier slots each time you complete the three (assuming it stays at 3 / quarter). The repeatables are only really nice if you've got extra tokens to spare (such as from buying PPs, or having been subscribed for an extremely long time already)/don't care about one of the Tier 9 VIP items.

Some of the other Tier 9 items aren't bad, either. Not amazing, but certainly not bad.

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I think the real question the OP is asking is, since for subscriptions you get your reward tokens at the start, when you pay for the subscription... how's it going to work in this transitional time? Say today I just bought a 12 month subscription... do I not get any reward tokens, since Vet Rewards are based on time played? Or, if I bought the 12 month subscription back before June, do I get jipped (if they transitioned behind the scenes in June)?


(I'm atm on a 1 month subscription, and coming up for a renewal right after Freedom goes live, so this won't really impact me )

Minor nitpick, but Google tracked you with your full and express consent. Turning on the Google Location Services (that'd "track" you) would bring up a notification (each time) explicitly telling you so.


Oh, and as for Steam, this portion pretty much lets them do the exact same things: Steam and the Software may include functionality designed to identify software or hardware processes or functionality that may give a player an unfair competitive advantage when playing multiplayer versions of any Software, other Valve products, or modifications thereof ("Cheats").

(how do you think they would identify software or hardware? that's right, by monitoring "communications and communications interfaces, storage devices, random access memory or CPU processes related to hardware you use with the game"!)

Different wording, same exact power and results. Quite frankly, you have no idea what Steam or any other DRM mechanism is doing on your system. Most of them install some service or driver that runs with maximum privileges (such as Punkbuster) anyways. Obfuscation will make it absurdly hard to know for sure what it's actually doing.

And, again, I point you to the most popular MMO in history that has actively been monitoring the players, including sending information about the processes running on your system.

Unless CoX has an explosion in popularity, NCSoft is unlikely to blow the resources on such systems- they've got more important uses of their resources (like making the Mac client launchable after visiting the market once!).

He didn't lie- at least not until Tuesday arrives. Don't jump to any conclusions yet, even if it looks likely to be the case.


And if the Devs didn't care at all, I doubt they'd take the effort to lie to us.

Of course it will- it's flat out impossible to fully trust software running on someone else's computer (hence why you never trust its input). That hasn't stopped countless companies and developers from trying (ever heard of Warden? you know, the anti-cheat software used by the most popular MMO ever created?) and most of which are fairly successful (the circumventer has to be right every time, the enforcer only once).

And I'm pretty sure Paragon has no intention of taking advantage of that clause (at most, I could see them doing something equivalent of the steam hardware survey... just get an impression of what systems the game is running on). If this game actually had a popular PvP community, that'd be one thing... but there's very little competitive nature. Things like the market are things that are far easier to secure on the server side (plus, ran by a third party AFAIK).


This actually reminds me of something from several years ago... I was visiting one of Bentley System's offices, the makers of the CAD program MicroStation, and during the presentation of how wonderful and advanced MicroStation was, the person started talking about how they used 'spyware technology' to enhance the product, by knowing what features the user uses so on and so forth. I thought it was quite amusing (and whoever opted to refer to it as that should be fired).

It's quite possible some new guy was just given some relatively easy task to just get him acquainted with the various systems in the game, and not a massive undertaking by the Devs. Or, maybe one of the Devs just needed a break from something larger, and thought 'hey, that'd be nice!' and did it in their spare time.

IMO, it's a nice addition. If I'm feeling like adjusting my costume, I hate the fact that I'd have to do a decent chunk of traveling to one of the crappy Icon/Facemaker stores (which always seem to be horribly out of the way). Being able to just go to the nearest trainer is a very nice addition, especially in AP. I've many times needed to modify a costume (or just save it if I forgot to), but was annoyed at having to slowly meander to either a far off zone, or the RWZ.

And RWZ is only really an option for hero side: Mercy Island doesn't have the luxury of easy access to a tailer. You'd have to zone and do a fair bit of running to get to any tailor!

(yes, people do play Villains)

No, obviously not: They just added one to AP. They wouldn't add one if they were planning on removing them.


It's just a nice QoL change. That's it. I like it. Only funny thing is the addition of an Icon to AP... but that might have been added earlier in the i21 dev cycle (they'd been working the AP revamp for a year!).

The browser in the client is using WebKit- specifically the cross-platform QtWebKit front end (which can be moderately easily be setup to render to an OpenGL surface). Qt also supports using third-party event loops, making it a bit easier to integrate into the CoX codebase.

The market itself is being served by webservers (owned by PlaySpan, I believe) over an SSL connection (if they weren't using SSL, they'd be insane). It uses standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript AFAICT.


If you're wanting your store to just be a standard website, WebKit is the only sane option. Mozilla's Gecko is such a nightmare that even Mozilla has abandoned the embedded Gecko project (they don't even pretend to have a stable ABI/API). Embedding IE's engine (like the old updater used to do) would make a native port to OSX all the harder, plus I'm not sure how complicated it'd be to get it to spit out to something that could be embedded in the game.

The irony of this question is the fact that the entire store is just a web site.


The real question is why didn't they just let us access it from outside CoH? They could have avoided quite a bit of the issues around the store, and then the launcher crapping its pants would have been pretty much the only issue... and, if they had disabled the internal store for the OSX version, that could have been avoided as well!

You mean the "THIRD PARTY TECHNOLOGY" section? That would be referring to, specifically, their usage of Cider (for OSX support), Qt (for the market's HTML rendering engine), and OpenSSL (for, you know, SSL).